Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 390: A Buddhist Recipe for Handling Turmoil | Kaira Jewel Lingo

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

We all know that change is inevitable and impermanence is non-negotiable. But somehow it can feel surprising, maybe even wrong, when we personally hit turbulence. The Buddha had a lot to say about this, and so does our guest. Kaira Jewel Lingo has come back to the show to talk about her new book, We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons on Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption. This episode explores a few of those strategies including: waking up to what’s happening right now; trusting the unknown; a Buddhist list called the Five Remembrances; how gratitude helps us in times of disruption; and accepting what is (and why this is different from resignation or passivity). Kaira herself is no stranger to impermanence: she spent 15 years as a Buddhist nun, and then decided to leave, which caused no small amount of disruption. Please note: There are brief mentions of domestic violence, abuse, the suffering of refugees, and war in this episode.To help you find your way during times of upheaval, loss, and transition, Kaira Jewel has recorded a series of meditations in the Ten Percent Happier app. Check it out by downloading the Ten Percent Happier app wherever you get your apps, tapping on the Singles tab, and searching for the topic called "Made for These Hard Times." Or, you can just click here.And while you’re there, be sure to listen to our new podcast, Twenty Percent Happier, available exclusively in the Ten Percent Happier app. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/kaira-jewel-lingo-390See 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, hey, today it's a Buddhist recipe for handling turmoil. Of course, we all know, at least intellectually, that change is inevitable, impermanence is non-negotiable, but somehow it can feel surprising, maybe even unnatural or wrong, when we personally hit turbulence. The Buddha had a lot to say about this, so does our guest.

Kyra Jule Lingo was on the show a few months ago. We liked her so much. We asked her to come back when her new book came out, and it's now out. The book is called, We Were Made For These Times 10 Lessons on Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption. In this conversation, we talk about some of those 10 strategies, including waking up to what's happening right now, trusting the unknown, easier said than done, a Buddhist list called the Five Remembrances,

how gratitude helps in times of disruption, and accepting what is and why this is different from resignation or passivity. We start, start though with a personal story about an earthquake in Kyra Jewel's own life. She spent 15 years as a Buddhist nun and then decided to leave, which as you will hear, caused no small amount of disruption. A few technical notes. You're going to hear some bird sounds and an occasional lawnmower, or what we think was a lawnmower in the background here, the perils of making a podcast in a pandemic. Heads up.

There are also a few brief mentions here of domestic violence abuse, the suffering of refugees and war. Again, just a little heads up there. Also one big promotional item before we dive in. I need to warn you about a new upstart meditation teacher who's closing in on my gig. His name is Matthew Hepburn, and he's been a friend and colleague for many years. Last week, he launched his own podcast.

It's called 20% Happier, and it's available exclusively in the 10% Happier app. On the 20% Happier podcast, Matthew speaks with a different guest. Every episode, each guest is a layperson who meditates and they come on the show because they have a struggle and need help understanding how the practice of meditation can help them with that struggle.

I'm a huge fan of Matthew. I think you're gonna get a lot out of listening to him work and that's really what this is. I keep calling it mindful, eavesdropping. You get to listen in on a rarely heard and I think poorly understood process between meditation teacher and student. Math is also very funny.

To listen to 20% happier, download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps, open it up and tap on the Podcasts tab. Okay, we'll get started with chirogeal 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 McGonicle 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. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer.

I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Parajul Lingo, welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much, Dan. Really good to be back. I agree. I was taking that an alternate title for your book could be, you know, for when the poop hits the fan. And I don't want to, I don't want to artificially narrow the audience for you because the poop is always hitting the fan given the non-negotiable love and permanence everything's changing all the time.

And I'm curious, why did you get interested in this subject personally? I really appreciated this message from Clarissa Pinkola Estes that when things get really tough and things don't feel like they're supposed to be happening the way they they should be, that's exactly where we need to be, that we're actually right in the place that we need to be. And we have what we need to be in that place. And so that was the inspiration for the title of the book. But I really was drawn to address how do we be with really tough times, because it's something I felt I actually knew I could say something about that

because I've experienced going through some pretty tight spaces of kind of birth canal. I don't know if I'm going to make it, you know, particularly this transition from being a nun to being a lay person to leaving the robes. That was a pretty harrowing few years of my life where I really didn't know what was going to happen to me. And so to be on the other side of that and to be able to look back and see, well, what was it that helped me move through such a really tough time? It was what I thought, well, I actually have personal experience of this. I can stand behind this and say, this is what helped.

This is where I found sustenance and stability. I'd love to hear more about that experience. If memory serves from reading a little bit about you, you actually grew up in a sort of Christian semi-monastic or monastic style community that your parents raised you in went off to Stanford. And then you were looking around for your own spiritual teacher and found Tick-N-Ton who has a the plum village monastery in southern France and you were a nun for 15 years. And what provoked you to leave and why was that so wrenching?

Well, it's good to go back to how I grew up because, you know, basically pretty much my whole life until 40. I was in some kind of community. So I grew up in this residential community where my parents were living. It was a family religious order based on a monastic Christian structure where you wasn't a consumer lifestyle. You don't have a car, you don't have your private bank account. You're not looking after your own family and your own self, you're whatever you earn, you give to the community

and everyone would get a little stipend. And we got, you know, hand me down clothes, we very occasionally got to go out to eat and we'd sign up on the community's car to get the car. You know, is that kind of super simple in terms of material living and, you know, in service to the poor and to, you know, urban communities, rural communities, slums, building wells and community centers and schools and different places around the world. So I had this really communal experience.

Then in college, I went right to the most communal living situations I could find, which were Poops on Stamford's campus you know where we all took turns cooking and cleaning. So those were the places I gravitated toward and as soon as I got out of Stanford it was where can I find a spiritual teacher a spiritual community. So basically what was so huge about leaving the monastery at age 40 was I realized as I looked back, I had spent pretty much my whole life in community. And, you know, to give great credit

to my monastic community in the Plum Village tradition, nobody slammed me or judged me or kind of tried to guilt trip me about leaving when I really got clear that I needed to take a break and check it out from outside the monastery, what my path was going to be. But everybody was sad and really had a strong preference of what they would have preferred me to do.

So that was also what made that moment so kind of intense was it was like I'd always done things that were sort of supported by the people around me or the people I respected. And this was the first time I was stepping off the ledge without any real guaranteed place that I was come to land. A massive life change. Why did you want to do it?

I think there was something I needed to complete and to break through that I could only do outside of the monastery. And it was this like, you know, like a piece of sand starts to irritate the inside of an oyster. There was something that was just, had gotten inside of me that was irritating and irritating and growing and growing. This, like, something has to give here. I think there really was a sense that I couldn't quite, you know, I couldn't see the whole picture, but there was just little pieces that I could see at a time

that were telling me, this isn't where you need to be anymore, not because it's not a beautiful life and not because it hasn't been a really wonderful life for me, you know, every moment. It was a really precious experience, but I had to let it go because something else needed to come. And just on one level, like the fact

that I'd always been in community, there was this sense that I needed to individuate in some way and just, you know, meet the challenge of being in the world as me, like without the protective skin of the community, like go through what it's like to, you know, start to pay taxes for the first time and learn how to Text and use the cell phone and like clean up my own apartment

regularly shop for myself cook for myself and I had lived my life being held in a certain way On many different levels and so to have that come apart, that was its own kind of initiation into, okay, this is what I've been teaching lay people all these years, but I haven't known the challenges of making it work and the loneliness of like coming back to my apartment and eating alone, like I had never eaten alone. As a regular feature of my life growing up in community we always ate with other people, living in co-ops on campus we ate together in the monastery. I mean this beautiful practice

of like you have people that you're attentive to as you eat and that was like such a moment in the day of real and ache to just be there with my food by myself. I'm so glad that I had a chance to touch that because otherwise I wouldn't have known what that experience is for so many people. Curious how is it going now? How many years has it been since you left and are you still eating alone? I know you're not because you've been on the show before and you've talked about having a partner so I don't know why I asked that question. How's it going?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I just robed in 2015, so I left the monastic path then, so it's been six years. You know, it's a huge change on one level and it's on another level. I feel like the core or essence of what I'm doing is not that different from when I was a nun in terms of how I feel about my connection to my teacher, Ticknothan and other teachers that I've studied with since leaving in terms of what I do with my day, which is practice, teach, mentor, you know, work with folks one on one, or couples, or groups. Most of what I'm doing throughout the day is supporting myself, supporting other people

to be grounded in the present moment and to live our lives deeply. And that's what I was doing in the monastery. I just had more people around me that were doing the same thing. So I mean what's different now is one thing I really noticed when I left was how much faster life moved after I left the monastery that there really is this buffer around you in the monastery. Things move slower. And when I left, I didn't have that buffer. And so it was me meeting the world crash. And I moved to DC, which

right at the beginning of 2016. So it was the campaign year of Trump and Bernie. So it was a hyper kind of external, this collective consciousness in DC was a very intense energetic field. And so then it was like, oh, I have to be checking email. I have to be creating a website. I have to be teaching, thus learning all the admin around, you know, being basically a self-employed meditation, mindfulness teacher, I'm trying to do online dating,

trying to, you know, take care of my health, you know, connect with my family, and everyone can contact me now. And, you know, and also just like wanting to create new friendships, because that was something that was so wonderful in the monastery, was you had beautiful spiritual friendships with monastics, with laypeople who would come. So, you know, I'm trying to recreate all these parts of my life in a setting that's moving at a very different pace than what I was used to, and with very different values.

Sometimes I felt like Rip Van Winkle or something where I've been gone so much longer than it seems. Or there's all these things that have changed, and there's all these ways I don't understand or just don't have the experiences other people have. Yeah, so how it is now, yeah, I do have a partner who also has a very deep spiritual practice and kind of had some somewhat similar path to me, not with vows, but he was working with homeless youth

and started an organization to care for homeless young people, and was very dedicated to his spiritual practice and has become an episcopal priest, and we really practice together, like we meditate in the mornings. We do have busy times where it's harder to make our schedule stick, but that is our aspiration to really have a daily practice. And we read spiritual books together, Buddhist and Christian, we want to spiritual books together, Buddhist and Christian, we want to have a group that we lead together, Buddhist and Christian contemplative kind of mystical teachings practices. Meeting him was like there was a clarity about how I'm gonna manifest maybe more of what took me out of the monastery, having met someone that shares a similar vision of service and also deep personal practice

that what we do in the world is coming from this place of our own transformation. So it sounds like if I understand it correctly, you learned a lot, you kind of battle tested the Buddhist recipe for handling, change, and disruption during this period of time. And those lessons are now the spine of this book that you're coming out with. And I want to dive into some of the lessons. We probably won't hit all of them, but I think it's worth checking out as many as we can. One of the first is, I think you describe it as coming home, but you might

also just describe it as waking up to whatever's happening right now. How is, you know, to use the cliched phraseology being in the present moment? How is that helpful in a time of tumult? When things are really tough, we tend to lose track of some really important perspectives. We can really get caught in the outer situation and not track what's happening inside of us or what our responses to the external situation are. And that can just feed that situation so that it gets even more out of control, even more overwhelming. So this coming home is really about, there are things happening even in the midst of tumult that we can be aware of and that can support us. That can be a kind of anchor or thread connecting us to what we really know, as we can forget what we really know. And so this being in the present moment is the simple act of taking a breath.

is the simple act of taking a breath. You know, we can get so anxious, right? We can convince ourselves that we can't make it through whatever's happening or about to happen. And just taking a breath in the midst of that, you know, fear or terror or panic, it allows space for more than that feeling to be there. And so feeling our feet, feeling our hands, noticing, holding on our skin. It's bringing more of us online so that we can take in, there's a lot of things happening, not just this strong emotion in this moment.

There is that I'm still alive, that I can breathe, that I can notice the colors in my surroundings. It's taking control of where we put our attention, because yes, that situation is there and it's painful and it needs care, but it needs our attention in a wise way. And knowing that other things are happening alongside that difficult experience is a wise place to put our attention. Because we can convince ourselves, this is the only thing that's happening in this moment. Because we can convince ourselves, this is the only thing that's happening in this moment. Then it becomes, you know, too much. So, all the things that are happening in the present moment are kind of places that can provide us with some refuge, some kind of strength, so that when we need to meet these intense experiences, we meet them with more wisdom, more of what's real.

Much more of my conversation with Kyra Jule Lingo right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. 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 feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney 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 Wondering app. It's interesting because anxiety is, I think, by definition, oriented and I believe your argument is that the best way to take care of the future is to take

care of the present. Yeah and that's from from Tick-Nat-Hon teaching that I really love that you know what is the future made of, but this moment. So if we can care for what's happening right here, then the future is cared for, but we often sacrifice what's happening in the present to try to control or determine the outcome of the future. And that doesn't serve us because we're missing what's happening now. So we'll miss what happens in the future. I mean, I'm sure we've all experienced that what happens when we get into a rush. Like, if we're late and we have to rush, once we get to where we are, it takes a while to come out of that spin.

And we can end up doing a lot of other things, artificially rushed, right? Because of that one experience of, oh my god, I'm late, I got to get to work, I got to make the bus, or whatever. We get to that place, and then we're like, you know, a maniac on our phones, or doing stuff we don't need to do, you know, we can spin out. And so then, how have we, by rushing, by leaning into the future, how have we done ourselves a service? Really? Because when we get to the meeting or whatever it is, we're worked up, we're not our best self. But if we can, you know, be with the stressful experience in the moment and hold it and care for it and, you know, recognize what's going on in ourselves, then for one thing,

we don't have the ability to control what's going to happen in the future. So by actually paying attention to what's here, we realize, oh, well, this is what I do have. Some say over is what's happening in the present. And I can actually relate to that with wisdom by connecting fully to what this is. And that is what becomes the next moment and the next moment and the next.

And so it's actually really important, this kind of classic story of Ty, of Tignot Han teaching a student, he saw this student rushing as he was washing dishes because he wanted to get back to the real stuff happening in the living room, which was conversation with Tignnot Han and the community. And he's like, why are you washing the dishes? This student was like, why am I washing dishes?

He was like, I think I'm caught by this Zen question here. So he answered, I'm washing the dishes to get them clean. Ticknot Han said, no, he washed the dishes to wash the dishes. This student said, this is a lifetime of practice to deeply understand this teaching. But the next thing Ty said was, wash the dishes like you're bathing the baby Buddha, like you're bathing the baby Jesus. So he was saying, really put your full baby Jesus. So he was saying, really put your full care and heart into this moment. That's the purpose of washing dishes. And so anytime I found that I disengage from trying to lean into the future and fully put my attention into whatever I'm doing, whether it's the very mundane, feeding my dog or, you know, sweeping the kitchen or typing an email. Whatever happens next

is much more like the future that I want than if I'm rushing through what I'm doing, because whatever is coming next is more important. And I just had this experience yesterday where I was like, you know, I'm going to pray over my dog's food. And I give her her food. I mean, not pray, but you know, I'm going to make an intention. So as I was giving her her bowl of food, I said, may this food really nourish you to be healthy, to be happy, to be strong, to have a great rest of your day. It was a really different way that I was putting the food down than usual. It made me happy to think, oh, every time I give her food, I can set an intention for how this food might support her. I had a bear then in mind when I groggily feed our four cats first thing in the morning after they've been howling at me to wake up.

My thoughts are a little less charitable to yours. Let's go to the second, I think, of the lessons, which I... It's kind of intriguing, maybe hard for people to grok, but it's this notion of trusting the unknown. That seems counter-evolutionary, I think, evolved to really be wary of the unknown. Yeah, so much of the calibration of our nervous system rests on feeling that we can predict and know something, right, about what's coming. It's a profound state of an ease when we don't know. And what I appreciated so much about the Vipassana practice, the silent retreats, as I was learning this practice at IMS, was in the silence, in the many hours of just being attentive to

my own mind without interruption. for weeks, months on end, was this becoming more comfortable with not knowing. I went into the retreat hoping I would come out knowing which way I was going to go with my life, but that didn't happen. It didn't happen any of the retreats I sat. I didn't get an answer about what to do, whether to just robe or stay. But what did happen was this was this beautiful exchange I had with Joseph Goldstein, where I was so upset about not knowing. My life up until then had slowed pretty much according to how I thought. There wasn't long times where I didn't know what I was going to do. Very soon after college, I went to Plum Village and

I knew, ah, I want to be a nun. And while I was a nun, I was like, oh, this is what I want to do. And I could see myself doing it for my whole life. And then suddenly I was in this place where I was like, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. And I came to him in an interview like just so upset that I didn't know what was to come. And he mentioned this book by Alan Watts, the wisdom of insecurity saying, you know, there's so many more possibilities in the unknown. Then there is, you know, when we've decided, this is what it is, what we're going to do,

there's just that one possibility. But when we don't know, there's infinite possibilities. And so he was kind of saying, you can see it as a plus, not a minus. And that was very helpful to realize I really could be okay without knowing what was going to come and that the more I could let go of this need to know which was also the need to control and you know the need to be able to

construct who I am, my identity. That was what was so to construct who I am, my identity. That was what was so disturbing, was I didn't know who I was, or the first time in my life. I really was like, who am I? Who am I gonna be? How am I supposed to relate to people? Because I don't know where I'm headed.

But all of that time, that silence and the teachings and the community were like, I was learning, I mean, it was really a time where you had to take refuge in every moment, moment by moment, because there was so little to go on after that. It was good in that way that I was really like all I have is right now. I don't have anything else. People who are facing terminal illness talk about the power of those kind of diagnoses

making them really take refuge in the present moment like they never had before. So it became this like, well, I have my steps, I have my breath, I have the awareness of what's happening in this moment. That's what I have to rely on. And that's enough. I really learned that's enough.

I can be happy, I can be at peace, not knowing. I mean, we think about all the people in the world, more and more in this very tortured human society that we live in. People in refugee camps, people in boats trying to get to some shore of safety, people in war. That's the experience of a large fraction of our human family is not knowing what the next moment is going to bring. Someone in a domestic violence situation or a situation of abuse. I mean, it's something that we can find a way to rest in that very challenging space of not having security.

When I lived in Sri Lanka, I made friends with someone who had left his country because it wasn't a safe or viable place to live and he left on a fake passport and he got caught and he got put in prison and he was able to get out and apply for asylum. He now has a refugee and it's waiting to be received in the country where his family now lives outside of the country of origin. And I'm still friends with this person and it's amazing every time I talk to him. He never knows when he's going to be resettled. And he is the most graceful and dignified and happy and loving person. He got married in the midst of all this. His beloved came, they married, they had a baby.

She's now raising the child in this country waiting for him to finally be able to come and join her. But they talk every day, I mean, they're managing to sustain a relationship, long distance, to raise a child together, long distance. And he has this inner light of his own practice. He's Catholic. He's translating books into his language from English and to his... I mean, he's like every time I talk to him, he's not down. He's in a totally desperate situation, but he's not taking it as a victim.

He's seeing what he can do in that situation to support others, to care for others, to share his love, to lift up others. And so it's just an example that inspires me greatly of people in all kinds of limbo, liminal spaces where they're not quite here, they're not quite there and they have to maybe make that work for years, decades at a time. And they do it. And so it's possible to be okay when we don't know anything about what's going to happen next. I like how that story and that your friend's posture seems to, you know, one of the ways he's surviving and thriving in its ambiguity is to have the posture of, you know, how can

I help other people? And I think there's definitely a lesson in that. I want to move on to some of the other lessons in the book. And this one goes right to the issue of impermanence. The five daily remembrances. We love the various Buddhist lists on this show. So here's one. Can you walk us through what these remembrances are

and why they're useful? Sure. So walk us through what these remembrances are and why they're useful? Sure. So yeah, these are five remembrances that the Buddha suggested we try to remember every day, even more often than every day. And the first one is, I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape growing old. The second is, I am of the nature to get sick.

I cannot escape ill health. The third, I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death. And the fourth, everyone I love, and all that is dear to me are of the nature to change. I cannot escape being separated from them. And the fifth is my actions are my only true belongings. They are the ground on which I stand.

I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. They're helpful because it's a way of sensitization therapy where you bring up what you're afraid of and you learn to be with it so that in actual experience it doesn't take you over the fear. So it's actually like front loading, you know, like let's look at all the things that we want to avoid and want to believe aren't going to happen to us. And let's really face some head on. Let's pronounce them out loud. I am of the nature to die. There is no way I can escape death, like every day. Because it is true that we have this kind of unexamined

belief somewhere that it's not going to happen to us. It's going to happen to everyone else, but or somehow we can just, you know, distract ourselves from really fully taking in that truth. So, seeing in our minds, I, what is it going to look like as I get older, as I lose some of my capacities, really visualizing what will it be like to be sick and not be able to care for myself and visualizing ourselves, taking our last breath. How do we wanna take our last breath?

It's important to think about that ahead of time. Do we wanna be caught off guard? Like, oh no, I'm not ready. Or do we want to really have prepared well? One of the things I think our practice can be so helpful for is preparing to have a good death. And then, you know, seeing that the people we love, if we look back over our lives, we can see that they've changed.

You know, we couldn't avoid being separated from some of the people we were close to in the past. That those, you know, those relationships change and shift and people change and they leave us or we leave them, you know, like really taking that in that the people were who are in our lives today, they won't be around always, we won't be around always. And then this meditating on our actions as the only thing we get to take with us when we leave this this form in this body that there's nothing else that we can accumulate that gets to go with us, that it's it's just what we do in this life. The actions that we take that are the things that we have to stand on, that's what carries over. For me, it kind of, it's a good reason that they're called

the five remembrances, because they're so easy to forget or ignore. It's very convenient to not think about those things. And then we start to get to do things that we regret in terms of the way we treat people or the way we treat ourselves or the way we treat our planet. But if those things are something that we're focused on regularly, then it really makes us ask ourselves, well, if this were the only day I had or the only moment I had, how would I want to live it? And I offer this as a meditation, and I did this for teenagers.

This was an IBMI retreat, and I wasn't sure if it would be for folks of that age. They said, this was hard, but it was really good. They could see how it was good medicine, even if it was bitter, to not take things for granted. For me, it's like, you know, how the in the winter when you go out of your house or apartment, whatever, there's this crispness to the air, it's like, whoa, you know, it kind of hits you. That's the quality of these five remembrances. We can get into this sleepy kind of, oh oh yeah, whatever happens today doesn't matter and I'll have tomorrow I'll have the next day. I'm gonna live to a hundred years old whatever That's that kind of voice in the background telling us this moment doesn't matter

We don't need to be fully alive. We don't need to take full care of this moment And then reading those five remembrances like that hit of like fresh air of like, oh my god, wake up. This is going to go by really fast. And what do I want to have to say about myself at the end of it all? And it matters right now what I do right now. Another lesson, this seems related in a way, at least in my mind, is gratitude. And I'm curious, how does gratitude help us in times of disruption? Yeah, I know how it helps me whenever I have a low mood, if I remember, you know, what is there to be grateful for?

There is this subtle shift, even if it's not a huge shift, even if whatever I'm upset about or, you know, down about. Even if that doesn't change, there's more space, there's more, there's more lightness that I can embrace that difficulty with. And for me, it's a kind of protection or antidote when we're overcome by whatever difficulties or feeling the pressure or the intensities. The more we've practiced looking for the good, seeing what we're grateful for under regular circumstances, the easier that is to access in those really

difficult moments. And again, kind of like I was saying earlier, there is just this bigger perspective that becomes available when we see, okay, this is really tough. And there's still something that I can connect to that can nourish me right in the midst of this really awful time. I've seen it over and over. I share about it in that chapter, I'm nurturing the good in the book with young people,

with children, that it really works. It shifts the way we feel in our bodies. It shifts our emotions. It shifts what we see is possible. And it's not that those difficult experiences need to be pushed away. It's not about, oh, don't suppress something. That's painful.

But it's like before surgery surgery you have to be strong enough to get surgery. It's like reflecting on what is good is a kind of resourcing, is a way of getting strong enough to look at, to care for, to be with what's painful, what's difficult. Much more of my conversation with Kyra Julelingo right after this. Let's do one more lesson for a close out here. And this is a tricky one because it's easy to misinterpret it, but it's accepting what is.

And the reason why I say it's easy to misinterpret that is I sometimes people can hear this as resignation or passive. So the alternative just doesn't work. When we don't accept what is, it creates tension, it creates stress, it creates frustration, and a difficult situation becomes worse, like calling easy pass, which is notorious for being a frustrating experience. You're on the phone for an hour before they get to you, and then they can't help you and they say, okay, we're going to switch you to someone else and you're on the hold for another 30 minutes. Substitute anything, right? Any kind of call center. I've actually had some good experiences with EasyPass, so not to bad talk them, but, you

know, getting mad and yelling at the person. And this should not be happening attitude. It doesn't doesn't feel that good, right? I mean, maybe there's some sense of like, eyes. I told it to them and they're, you know, but, you know, they're not the ones in the end, usually, who are really responsible for whatever we're upset about and they have families to go back to and they have to take these calls all day long. Anyway, it just, when that's happened to me and it has, when I've gotten really upset, I leave that experience thinking that that was not useful. That's not how I want to be, that's not how I want to show up. Yes, there, you know, whoever this company is is doing something that's very frustrating and shouldn't happen, but my reactivity to it doesn't get things to happen the way I want them to in general.

Like, I found that when I actually listen, when I'm patient, when I say what I need to say, and I can be firm, and I can say, no, you're fault or this shouldn't happen this way, but when I'm patient, when I say what I need to say and I can be firm and I can say, no, you're fault or this shouldn't happen this way. But when I don't let that take me over, but I just, I'm accepting, okay, this is the situation. How can we resolve it? Then my energy goes towards something that's actually useful for me and hopefully for others.

And I leave the situation unscathed. And so not accepting doesn't tend to be a useful strategy for me, accepting what is doesn't mean that we get walked on like a dormat. It doesn't mean anything goes or that we don't stand up for ourselves or for others or for those who are being oppressed. But if we can look deeply to see what's the root of this situation, which is usually not the way we look at things, and we don't usually see that the many complexities

that are there. If we're in opposition to some under something and we look to see, well, why is that happening? Where does this come from? What has brought this about? That's a perspective that allows us to see, I'm connected to this person. Their life matters to me, my life matters to them. And so where we come from in addressing the difficulty, it's coming from a deeper place, and it has more impact, it's more effective

because I'm seeing, okay, this is your full situation, not just the little bit of it that I choose to focus on. So then if I see your full humanity, then how am I gonna engage in this situation that is really difficult for me. So I think this accepting what is is also, it's like acknowledging we don't have all the answers, we don't see what, for instance, one person's trajectory is in their life, the things that they need to do to learn what they need to learn on this journey that they're

on. So it's a bit of humility of saying, okay, this is the way this situation is. This is the way this person is. I would like it to be otherwise, but there may be some bigger logic here that's playing out that actually has a reason, has an importance that I can't see.

Then can I let go and still advocate for what's important for me and live the way I need to live and stand up in the ways I need to stand up, but at the same time give space for the mystery that I can't conceive of that's also operating in this situation. I mean there's so many amazing stories I'm sure many of us know in our world of enemies reconciling where there was this ability to see much deeper than they could see in the beginning. I saw a film recently, I really love this film, it's called The Best of Enemies. It's really a good film, but it's, you know, the ability to see beyond the surface, to see the humanity of someone who we're diametrically opposed to

on all levels of our being and seeing that humanity and acting from that place of acknowledging the humanity of our enemy creates enormous possibilities that weren't there before. But that only happens because we're accepting the situation as it is. Then we can do this deeper work of, it's actually it's a kind of Po-on or paradox that by accepting what is we actually can alter it in ways that we can't when we resist what is. There's this Jedi move of softening into this, what we don't understand, what we can't know. And then that shifts us, that shifts the situation. And then these

things become possible that weren't possible when we were stuck in an idea of how it should be and resisting how it is. Just in closing here, I want to loop back all the way to the beginning of this conversation when you politely laughed at my alternate title for your book about the poop hitting the fan and the actual title is, we were made for these times. Can you just bring us home here by talking a little bit more about what you mean by that title.

Sure. If taking care of this moment is the best way to take care of the future, then we have what we need right now. We don't have to wait for something to come in the future. And that's one of the characteristics of the Dharma. It's outside of time. This Akali-ko is the word that these teachings, you don't have to practice them for years and years for them to have an effect. They can have an effect immediately. There are stories of in the Buddha's time, someone listened to a teaching and was immediately enlightened, not having practiced a second before hearing that teaching. So it's not bound by time. So whatever we think we have to do to become who we need to be,

it's not the case, that who we need to be is somewhere in the future. A Master Lin Chi founder of the Rinzai tradition of Zen, my school of Zen, says we already are what we want to become. So all of these are different ways of saying what this wonderful teaching of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, this profound Latina storyteller and author and changemaker. And this was in a letter she wrote to a young activist. She said, we were made for these times. We were made for this exact plane of engagement. We have everything we need.

All the things we've been doing up until now have prepared us for this moment. So as we look at our world and the extreme challenges we're facing, which no generation of humans has had to face, the climate crisis and the pandemic and the racial and political and economic crises, wealth disparity, each of us has what it takes right now to show up and to be a force of transformation right now. And so I think for me, I chose that title for this book because we can get very intimidated

by what we're facing and feel that this, you know, this isn't going to end well, or we don't have what it takes. But in us is everything that has come before. And all the components that are needed are already here. So this image I use in the book of a caterpillar that dissolves in the chrysalis and reassembles into this butterfly, but how scary that process of dissolving is, all the elements to make a butterfly are already there in the caterpillar. They just reposition and shift and time and space, you know, is a factor too, but all that we need is already here. And so the sense that we don't need to see ourselves as drowning in this very tough situation that our whole species is facing, but that we need to go with this flow. We need to swim. We need to stay

with our heads above the water and move with this, and we can move with this. We can do this. We don't know what it's going to bring, but we can meet what this is. If we can meet this moment right here, right now, if we can care for ourselves, care for each other, right in this moment, then that is what the next moment will be made of. Chirojul, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you for having me, Dan. Thanks again to Chirojul. I was great to talk to her.

And if you want even more of Kyra Jewel, she recorded a series of meditations in the 10% happier app to help you practice finding your way during upheaval, loss, or transition. Check it out by downloading the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps tapping on the singles tab and searching for the topic, which we're calling made for these hard times.

Or you can just click on the link in the show description to play those meditations. The show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy, Kim Baikamom, Maria Wertel, and Jen Poipoi Poyant with Audio Engineering from our friends over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode with Reed Hoffman. Hey, hey Prime members! You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.