Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 399: How to Get Out of Your Head | Willa Blythe Baker

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

It is a common desire to get out of our heads, to escape the internal noise, the chatter, the Sturm und Drang, the sound and fury, etc. You hear about it in pop songs and poetry, this urge to be blown away, to transcend. But how do you actually do it?Willa Blythe Baker can help answer this question and is a font of practical advice. She is the Founder and Spiritual Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, MA and its retreat center Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, NH. She was authorized as a dharma teacher and lineage holder in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism after twelve years of monastic training and two consecutive three-year retreats. She has a doctorate from Harvard University and is the author of the new book, The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom.This episode talks about Willa’s new book and explores: what somatic mindfulness is; the four levels of your body; specific exercises for getting out of your head; and how to meditate without all the effort. This rangy conversation goes on all sorts of fascinating, esoteric digressions, but always comes back to the practical stuff.Subscribe by December 1 to get 40% off a Ten Percent Happier subscription! Click here for your discount.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/willa-blythe-baker-399See 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, it is a common desire. Many of us have this urge to get out of our heads, to escape the internal noise, the chatter, the sermon drawing, the sound and fury, et cetera, et cetera. You hear about it in pop songs and poetry. This urge to be blown away to transcend. But how do you actually do it? My guest today is a font of practical advice. Her name is Willa Blight Baker. She is the founder and spiritual director of natural Dharma fellowship in Boston,

Massachusetts, and its retreat center, the Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in Springfield, New Hampshire. She was authorized as a Dharma teacher and lineage holder in the Kagu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism after 12 years of monastic training and two consecutive three-year retreats, as if that's not enough. She also has a doctorate from Harvard and she is the author of a brand new book called The Wakeful Body, Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom. In this conversation, we talk about what somatic mindfulness actually is, the three levels of your body, earth, subtle, and awareness,

specific exercises for getting out of your head, and crucially how to meditate without all of the effort. This is a ranger conversation. We go on all sorts of fascinating esoteric digressions, but we'll always guide us back to the practical stuff. Before that, one quick item of business. If you're a regular listener to this podcast,

you may have noticed that we've had a lot going on. Over on the 10% happier app this fall from meditation challenges to the brand new 20% happier podcast. There's never been a better time to join our community of meditators on the app to make sure you have a chance to try it out. We're offering 10% happier subscriptions at a 40% discount until December 1st. We don't do discounts of this size all the time. And of course, nothing is permanent.

So get this deal before it ends by going to 10% dot com slash 40. That's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription. We'll dive in with Willa Blythe Baker 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 10percent.com. 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,'s your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my 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.

Will a Blight fake or welcome to the show? Thank you, Dan. I'm glad to be here. Nice to meet you. Likewise. Likewise. Okay, I have a definitional question to start. What is somatic mindfulness?

Somatic mindfulness is a kind of mindfulness that is already happening. And what I mean by that is our mind is not very mindful. Our mind is running into the past, ruminating on what happened yesterday, turning over that conversation that we had and trying to rewrite it, or it's running into the future and worrying about what's going to happen tomorrow, but it isn't really present with what is happening right now.

But there is also something else happening, which is our body. Our body is also happening in the present moment. We're not often paying attention to the body, but the body is happening and experiencing and tasting and smelling and feeling. Somatic mindfulness is what's happening now in your body. Even right now is wrapping this conversation, like your feet are on the ground, and your feet are feeling the ground. That's happening right now.

So your body is mindful. Your mind isn't very mindful, but your body is mindful, or maybe the word would be bodyful. Your body is aware right now. That's what somatic mindfulness is. It's the body's present moment attention to what's happening. And in your book, you sort of divide this up as I understand it into three levels, the earth body, the subtle body, the awareness body. And it might be interesting to pick those apart and get you to hold forth on each one of them.

Does that make sense as a strategy from here? Sure, yeah, we could go that direction, yeah. And, you know, there's even a fourth layer that I do talk about at the very end of the book, but I don't introduce it in the beginning of the book because it's so hard to explain initially. So you might even see there's four layers. From the perspective of, could say, ancient Buddhist wisdom, this body is a layered entity. And I think in the West, I grew up with this notion of this body

as being kind of a medical model that the body is this chunk of flesh and it's functioning on our behalf, but doesn't have any value on its own other than being this organic animal that is us. So when I encountered Buddhism, I encountered this new perspective on the body that it is this layered entity and it really did help me unlock the sense of connection to my own body intimacy with my own body as something that is of innate value, deep innate value, especially if you're a meditator and you're hoping to develop some concentration or some sense of peace, it all begins with the body. But to your question, the first layer is the physical body. And in my book, I choose to call that the earth body, because it's part of this organism that is grounded and in touch with the earth. In meditation practice, that first layer of the body

becomes this place of rest. And sometimes that place of rest is just bringing our attention all the way down from this sort of frenetic headspace that we inhabit much of the time, all the way down to the base of our body, where our body contacts the earth. And there, in that place, we sense that we are grounded, we are stable, and we feel it. Just that sense of the ground beneath you settles and grounds this flighty mind.

The second layer is referring to the fact that we're not just flesh and blood. We are flesh and blood. We are material. This body is material. But there's also this layer of our experience that is energetic or electric. And that's this vibrant aliveness that we can feel in the body from moment to moment. And we might call that the sense fields plus the sixth sense, proprioception, which is the perception of your body. In Buddhist tradition, the Himalayan Buddhist tradition

to be more specific, that is called the subtle body. That's the literal translation of the Tibetan word. So the subtle body is the feeling body that we're not just a lump of flesh and blood, but we're also constantly in this vibratory place of feeling. We might say that we are a network of neurotransmitters, right? If you're going to use the normal medical explanation of what's going on, but in these Buddhist traditions, in these yogic traditions, it's called the subtle body or the energy body or the prana body,

and it's subtle because you can't see that. You can't see that with the naked eye, but you can feel that. And it's in that body, the energy body that we experience the rising of emotions, often before our conscious mind even knows that an emotion is coming, it's rippling through your body. And then the mind identifies, oh, that's fear, oh, that's anger, oh, that's envy. And that's not often something that we are aware of. And certainly when I was growing up in America, no one ever schooled me in the presence of a subtle body or that was not even a term right there. We learned growing up. But when I did encounter it, it gave me this place of paying attention

to what's going on in my field of experience, that was much more tuned into the subtleties of both my physical wellness or imbalance, but also emotions and how they're arising and how to attend to them. And it's possible to meet them, not in the mind with addressing the thoughts or countering the thoughts, but also meeting them in the body. And as energetic experiences that arise and that will dissolve, if we wait long enough. Let me just stop for one second on the subtle body. Just to make sure I understand it, you talked about how we can sense emotions through the subtle body, but when I noticed my emotions

in my body, I think what I'm feeling it is in what you would call the earth body that I'm getting angry and my chest is buzzing, my head is hot, or am I mixing the two concepts up? You're mixing the concepts up, but you know, there also the fourth body, snake peak, snake preview of the fourth body, is the truth that all of these bodies are inseparable. So the fourth body is actually the inseparability of these three bodies. Just for the purposes of practice and observation and noticing, and these things are broken out of three things, but they are totally in interpenetrating when anger arises.

The endocrine system and the nervous system are doing a certain thing. So we might say that's the physical body. It's influencing our blood pressure and the fluid movement in our body. I mean, things are really happening there in the physical body. Things are also happening in the subtle body,

which is this more energetic layer. And that's the part that you feel this just rising of the energy of rage, for example. It starts in the your belly and it's in a moment that you feel that energetic rush, in fact, into that in the word for anger is loom long law, which means the rising of the winds, the rising of the energies. That's the name for anger, which is the kind of cool, I think. Yes. Because that's what it feels like, right?

A wind, just like a hurricane, boop, coming up in the body. Before we keep going with the list, you said something in there that I think is worth unpacking because I think it will ground people and why this list is so important. Dividing the body up in this way is useful for a number of reasons. One is that you can work with it on a bunch of levels and that can further focus the mind.

And I think, as I understand it, that one of the goals of Buddhism writ large is to have a more and more refined microscope of all of the sensorium so that we don't see it as hours anymore. Not taking it personally when it's no longer some sort of juggernaut. It's actually disentangled and we are not so caught up in the suffering of this is mine, this is me. Yes, that's a good point, Dan. Yeah, I think these layers also point to a kind of connection to our animal humanity, side by side with all of these teachings on training and taming the mind that we're not trying to become something different or transcend the human condition. We're trying to find balance and self-compassion

and compassion for others within our human condition. Sometimes I try to imagine life with no emotions and including the negative emotions, a life with no negative emotions. Where would the empathy come from? Where would the compassion arise from if we didn't know what it felt like to feel pain, to feel fear, to feel anger? How would we connect to other beings that we're feeling fear and anger? So I think these teachings on the body are a way of accepting that we are organic and we are animals and that these things that we call the quote unquote disturbing emotions. Yes, they can cause trouble, but they're also human and they have a positive side.

Every emotion has a positive side. Okay, so you said something different from what I was saying, but I probably more useful than what I was saying. But if I understand what you just said, which was that getting in touch with the body can put you in a more creaturely mode and allows you to see emotions for what they really are, the good and the bad. Yes, see them for what they really are and then learn to meet them where they are. And I think it's appropriate that we're turning towards emotions because this is very much the work of the subtle body, the second layer, that we can tend, our strategies tend

towards suppression, avoidance, escape from what we're feeling when it's uncomfortable. And we have an alternative, which is to turn towards what is uncomfortable and to learn how to make a holding environment for what is uncomfortable and to even love what is uncomfortable instead of avoiding, avoiding is just another form of aversion. Suppression as another form of aversion we're just increasing the cycle of reactivity. But when we turn towards what's difficult, and this happens in our body,

feeling what's difficult in the body, turning towards it and embracing it is an alternative. And it does create a new relationship to those negative emotions that they can be held with kindness. And that allows them to free themselves. We don't have to free them. We don't have to make them be free. Much more of my conversation with Willa Blythe Baker right after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable.

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of turning toward emotions rather than fighting or fleeing or numbing out our habitual responses. But you said we can learn to love our difficult emotions. So like how does one love hatred or greed? I think when we start to back our emotions, it turns into hatred. When we have become really caught in the objectification, it turns into hatred. And I don't know that we want to love our objectifications. So we want to love our hatred. I was on the phone the other day calling an office in the city of Boston and waited online for three hours for a clerk to come and address my question. And I could feel even before my mind was

thinking, I'm impatient or I'm frustrated or I'm really feeling a lot of aversion to this situation. It was registering in my body and I think that's because there are these unconscious thoughts, habitually suppressing any anger, any impatience, any feelings of discomfort that they simmer and they start to show up as tension. And I could, I noticed it first as this tension in my shoulders and kind of this not in my stomach and this contraction in my heart. And then I realized, oh, I'm really feeling impatient. I'm really frustrated and I was able to label it afterwards. But there was something about that moment of just acknowledging this impatience is I'm feeling it in my body, I'm struggling and inviting kind awareness or attention to embrace that part of myself that is

suppressing and feeling these feelings of discomfort in and underneath that, you know, feelings of I'm insignificant. I'm not important enough for them to take my call and you know, these eyes statements, I, I, so here's the thing, Dan, you asked like, how do we loving as another thing, right? There's something really profound that happens when, at least for me, when I turn towards that feeling of frustration and I don't even call it a negative emotion, I just call it an energy event, a prana event, a subtle body ripple. And when I call it that, it's no longer anger, it's no longer aversion.

I have aversion to aversion. I have aversion to anger, I have a version to a version. I have a version to anger. I have a version to impatience. But I don't have that much a version to a subtle body ripple. I don't have that much a version to like a natural wave in the ocean of my experience. If I frame it in that way, then I can really love this feeling. I can come around it with some kindness, embrace, and say, yeah, this is your human thing, this is your animal thing, and it's okay.

And there's something that liberates when we can love something like that, when we can love our anger, love our impatience, but we do have to reframe what it is, to de-demonize it and rehumanize it. So love is a complicated word. We use that one word to describe our feelings about our romantic partner, our child and chocolate. So in this sense, the loving is just like, if I understand you correctly, is maybe the way we would feel about, you know, a cat who's got a limp or a kid who's crying that you care about it

and you want to help. It's not like you're psyched that this energy ripple is happening. I'm so excited. This is like just like opening up a box of dumbdums at the movie theater. It's more of a, I care about this because it's paint. Part of me is suffering and I care about this because it's pain. Part of me is suffering and I care about it. And or noticing that this impatience, all these negative emotions that are arising is the

organism trying to protect itself unskilledfully. All of this difficult stuff is loving you. I mean, again, it's not love the way we often use the term, but it's trying to protect you. It's, again, it's not love the way we often use the term, but it's trying to protect you. It's trying to help. And I think the first perspective still sounds parental to me. And the parent relationship with our negative emotions is still a little condescending. We're still in charge. And I'm actually talking about a relationship with these emotions that is more like a friend coming alongside another friend and saying, I'll be here with you. Equal, not parental coming to the child that's crying, but actually like a teenager coming

alongside another teenager and holding their hand and saying, I'm here with you. So the double whammy here if I'm understanding it correctly, dual strategy that can be really useful in the face of difficult emotions is having the back of a friend, even though it's a bit skitsoidal because the friend who's back you're having is a part of you, a part of your own experience. And we can talk about how to conceptualize that. So that's one part and the other is also just recognizing, and this is a bit more cognitive that all of this, the whole catastrophe is, as I said before, and I think I stole this term from Jack Cornfield, the organism trying to protect itself. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Am I summing this up with some degree of accuracy? Yeah, I think you're summing it up with accuracy. Yeah, it's like relating to your emotions as beautiful friends, beautiful friends that are part of the rainbow of who you are as a human being. And that those friends, when they feel unacknowledged, when they feel unseen, they act out, and they act out in ways that are really unskilful.

But when they feel seen and acknowledged, they relax. I'm a very judgmental person. This is something I'm working on. But one of the things that's always triggered my judgment is anybody who quotes the poet Roomy. So I'm now going to be the dude who's quoting Roomy. Here's the Roomy quote, learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you, you've been given the door with open. Nice, nice. The me of 15 years ago would be like raging at the me of now quoting Rumi. It's just like, what have you become Harris? Well, we sort of bring ourselves along kicking and screaming on the spiritual path. I said to somebody the other day that like if you're going to do this work of personal growth, you can call it the spiritual path, whatever you want to call it, you're committing

yourself to a life where you are always convinced that you were a complete idiot up until about six weeks ago. Oh, it's a good one. I like that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or it keeps knocking you off your seat, right? Yes. Oh, that's a good one. I like that. Yeah. Or it keeps knocking you off your seat, right? Yes.

Yeah. It keeps knocking you off your seat. So, okay. I've taken us on a long digression here from the list that we started with, which was the three, but actually four levels of the body. We started with the earth body, which is a body that we commonly understand, is our body, it's here connected to our head. The second is the subtle body that is the sensations that arise often in conjunction with the motion. The third is what? The third is the awareness body.

And that is gesturing to the fact that our whole psychophysical experience isn't just physical, and it isn't just energetic, but it is also aware of itself. We might say that this is the layer of being that is conscious, that we're not just an animal, we are conscious that we exist, we are aware of our own existence. And that layer is not up here in the brain. It's not out there somewhere. It is embodied. And when I use that term, the awareness body, I mean that consciousness is something that is pervading our psychophysical experience. And I think as a meditator, that's important to consider

because we can tend to mentalize our practice and to think that this thing that we call the mind is just from the neck up. In fact, we prioritize our prefrontal cortex. We prioritize this thinking part of the self as the most intelligent part of ourself, when in fact it's causing just as much trouble as anything else. I mean, our thinking mind, it has a lot of positives, and it also has gotten us into a lot of trouble. And so the question is, when we say something like mind, is that all we're talking about? The thinking mind. No, we're also talking about awareness. And awareness is this notion of isness. There is a part of the mind that is just conscious and that hasn't generated a thought yet. That part of our mind that is just aware.

That pervades our whole embodied experience. not pervades our whole embodied experience. And maybe the way that a neuroscientist might put that is that the brain is everywhere. It extends all the way out to the very tips of our fingers. It is registering signals from every cell in the body. That is all registering, eventually, processed by this brain. So to say that the brain is just above the neckline isn't true anymore. So the subjective experience of awareness

is happening throughout the body. When we sit and meditate, we start to notice that that our fingers are aware and our toes are aware and our feet are aware and our noses are aware, and our feet are aware, and our noses are aware. And so, it's that, that awareness, that intelligence that pervades our entire system, that is this third layer, called the awareness body. So, I use the term the sky body, I use the term awareness body, but actually in Sanskrit, the term is the body of truth. Because in the truth of our experience, the one thing that pervades everything is awareness. Awareness makes our experience possible.

I'll be honest, I'm intrigued and it's hurting my head this concept. Where is your mind, Dan? I have no idea. When you don't find it, what do you do? Ha, ha, ha. Does it drive you crazy that you can't find your mind? No, I think it's fascinating. I'm in the habit regularly of while I'm meditating,

asking, and this I learned from my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who learned it from countless other teachers, asking a simple question, sort of, what is all of these sensations are being known by what? And that just puts you right up against the mystery of consciousness. Like we have no idea what is taking all of this in. We don't even know who's asking the question. Where do you rest when you don't have an answer? We don't even know who's asking the question. Where do you rest when you don't have an answer? Well, there's a kind of, there can be a kind of

vertiginous feeling of confusion that you just, that I am happy to stay with. Nice. That sounds like the awareness body. You start with recognizing that awareness is all over your body, and then you ask who is aware of that, and there is absolutely nothing to say. And it's in that non-answer that we rest. Let me say if I can say a little bit more about my personal experience with this, just so that

listeners who are confused, maybe I can give you guys a toehold here. Just imagine you're meditating and maybe even focusing on your breath for a little while and then you just decided to drop the breath and you're just like aware of whatever is coming up. You could be even noting it, you know, hearing, seeing pressure, whatever. You're doing that for a little bit. And then at some point you just ask yourself, and in the passive tense can be useful per the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein, known by what, who or what is knowing all of this mental phenomena. And you know, sometimes there's nothing happens, but sometimes you may get a sense of, yeah, I can't find, I can't find some locus of the knowing faculty of the mind. It's just there's nothing there. And then you might ask like, who's even asking this question?

And that can feel like you're shouting in an empty room. And yeah, this pushes you right up against the mystery of consciousness, which is an awesome mystery. So I don't know if I've just made people more confused, but that's my experience. And just to add to that reflection, you know, there's something magical that happens when you lose track of the knower and what you're looking for as two separate things. And then there's just this boundless openness, and that's all there is. And that's even fails to describe that not finding. And there is this Zen-Pith instruction not finding is finding.

That when you don't find, that's it. This is the interesting thing about meditation, Dan. I'm sure you are fully aware that when these experiences, like the one you were just trying to describe for all of these wonderful people out here listening to the podcast, it's indescribable. These are indescribable experiences that are beyond language. And language has this tendency to objectify, subject object verb.

You know, there's separation within language and what you're describing is an experience of intimacy that is beyond language and you know, sometimes when people ask me and what is it like to meditate, I say you can't say what it's like to meditate, you have to meditate and then you know what it's like, you know, the classic it's, you know, dancing about architecture. I want to get super practical because we've been in some rarefied air here contemplatively speaking. But before I do that, why don't we do the fourth, you know, the hidden track, the bonus track, the fourth level of body,

and then we can get into some exercises that people can do to really, you know, your exercises that really help people get out of their heads. Okay. All right. The fourth layer, the fourth layer is the inseparability of those three layers that even though we can talk about a physical body, a subtle body or an energy body and awareness, which in some ways is the biggest body. And that in seeing those as inseparable, there is a kind of experience with that that comes along with that.

The experience of the oneness of the body mind, the oneness of body energy mind. And in Zen tradition and also in Tibetan tradition of these traditions of Buddhism, those terms, the oneness of the body-mind, the inseparability of the body-mind are terms for enlightenment, for Nirvana itself, their descriptive terms. We have this experience of integration, that awareness, body and breath and energy are inseparable. There's a falling away of the

sense of separateness. And in that, we have a kind of a non-duality experience. And that is the fourth layer. Okay, I can ask a million questions about this, but I'm aware that our time is limited. Can you give us some practices that would really allow us to work with these concepts in ways that would be applicable in the muck and mire of our daily life. Sure. I'd say that my core practice for working

with these layers of embodiment is actually a really simple practice. And it could be done in a single sitting. It could be done standing. I'm referring to that practice as ground and it's a namanic g-r-o-u and d. The first the g stands for ground, which means ground in the body. And grounding in the body means coming down from the thinking mind into the feeling body and just noticing what's happening in your feeling body in this moment.

And that's not often a place we dwell as soon as we come down from the thinking mind into the feeling body, we experience stability, connection to the earth. So that's the first, the G, ground. The R is relaxed. So having come down into the body, notice what's happening moving on to the second step, which is to relax. And relaxation is a skill. Noticing where tension is gripping in the back and the stomach in the face and breathing into those parts of the body, exhaling the tension from those parts of the body.

It's a very simple reminder that it's possible to let go of those places where we're grasping, gripping, habitually gripping. So the second is relax. The third in the mnemonic is open. Ground. Relax. Open. Second is relax. The third in the mnemonic is open. Ground relax, open. And open is the opposite of creating this kind of a boundary in our meditation practice between this body and the rest of the world.

That the rest of the world needs to be kept out because those sounds are distracting and the wind is distracting and that music is distracting or whatever is happening around us is distracting. So counterintuitively, we actually open to that, that we can have this sense of an expansion of our awareness into the space around us, accepting whatever is happening around us as part of the field of our meditation practice. Ground relax, open. The fourth is untangle. Untangling is related to the subtle body,

the residue of whatever's been going on in our day lodges in our energy body and follows us to the cushion. So we take a moment to untangle. An untangling means, for example, noticing, paying special attention to how do I actually feel? What kind of mood am I in? What sort of, what happened in the morning, that is still percolating below the surface? And untangling is just coming close to that

and creating a space of potential and compassion for that. So not trying to power through in our meditation, I'm just going to power through this feeling, I'm going to power through my depression, I'm going to power through my anxiety, but instead just, no, acknowledging, hey, you're there.

Why don't you practice with me? So the best way to untangle is to invite. Come and practice with me, anxiety. Come and practice with me. I'm not just doing this to get away from you. I'm doing this to include you. It's very different, right? We can use our meditation practice

as this way of escaping, whatever's actually happening, that residue, but we actually want that residue to come along with us, to be a part of us, to be a part of the practice. So this is the true human move? Yeah, the true human move. There you go. And then the end is nurture.

Nurture is referring to this part of the self that I've been calling here in this podcast awareness. So nurturing the simple, bare, pure attention that is underneath the thinking mind, this part of the self that is just noticing what's happening in this present moment without judging it, without identifying it, nurturing that pure witness. And then, D, the last part of the mnemonic is to dissolve. And for the sake of this explanation, dissolve the separations, dissolve the separation between attention and the body, dissolve the separation between self and world, and rest in that great sense of dissolution of separateness. And that's it. That's the practice. And even if you just do the first three, ground relax open, that's enough. The rest could come later. The rest could be explorations for a later time.

But GRO, and sometimes in my lately, I've been shortening that to GROW because it makes a nice mnemonic. Ground relax, open, wonder. Wonder is being in this state of like when we're in awe, awe of what's happening right now. Ground relax, open, wonder. Wow, what's happening right now is amazing. Whatever it is, there's something very interesting that we discover through practicing meditation that whatever's happening right in this present moment is infinitely fascinating.

I think before I meditated, I think we're just running from distraction to distraction. And meditation opens this place of being able to pause in the present moment and notice that this is a fabulous display. We don't need a lot more to entertain us other than what's happening in the present moment. So, wondering, yeah, that's a shorter numeronic. Isn't there a Tibetan expression, Amaho? Amaho, yeah.

Amaho is this word that means how wondrous and it's referring to the feeling of joy that we get when we're just present and it's all this vast display of our own mind is unfolding in front of us, and we're just like, whoa, man, Aimo, this is amazing. It kind of goes back in my mind to this discussion we were having a while ago, where I sort of mentioned that it can feel a little

skitsoidal sending a sense of love to another part of your own mind, like who's sending it, who's receiving it, and yet it can happen. And so that's Aimo or part of Aimo. Yeah, that is Aimo, right, isn't it? That you can actually befriend parts of yourself and not be schizophrenic, right? Sounds a little schizophrenic, but it's not, actually.

But even the fact that you can have relationships to different parts of your mind and wonder, like, who's the person having the relationship? And then also, at the same time, you could be hearing bird noises and they're occupying as much prominence in the mind as anything else, as your old patterns, as the you that's sending well wishes to your old patterns, but the bird noises is coming from something that's quote unquote outside of you entirely. That all seems like we're in the realm of dissolve, which also feels like Aemaho. Am I rambling? Does this make any sense?

Oh, no, this makes total sense. Yeah, yeah. I think Aemaho is, there's some expression there of marveling at the wholeness that these things that we thought were out there, or things that we thought were in here are neither out there nor in here. They are both and neither. They are interdependent in a way that is whole. Much more of my conversation with Willa Blythe Baker right after this. One of the things you talk about in your book is effortlessness. That we, particularly in the West, type A folks can get pretty tangled up in the effort

of meditation. It's a chore. It's another thing on our to-do list. We're fighting against all of our thoughts, and you wanna direct us toward effortlessness, which sounds very attractive, but maybe you can explain how we actually do that, or not do it as a case maybe.

We've been so trained in our culture to believe that effort is the primary skill that we need to succeed. And actually in doing that, we are conditioning ourselves to be strivers. And in being a striver, you are always a little bit leaning into the future when your effort is going to pay off or the striving is going to pay off. But actually, you're developing this habit, which is an endless habit of seeing a better future and striving, striving, striving, striving for that future. But an equally

valuable skill is the skill of learning to drop effort and to be satisfied with the present moment and with what is here now. And that is not a skill that generally we are conditioned to in the West because that would be seen as laziness or as letting things slide. But in the East, and certainly in contemplative traditions, meditative traditions of the East, the whole key to success is to not try, is to like go of the striving and to be radically satisfied with what is happening in the present, that what we are is enough and what we're experiencing is enough. So to get there, we have to learn how to drop completely the striving mind, the efforting mind, and to be in this place of deep surrender and giving up the agenda of striving. So yeah, the key to meditation practice is to release effort. How do you do that? Because I've tried many times, it always comes rushing back in.

It's like, I think I've described it as sweeping a floor filled with cockroaches. It's just like, you can get a clean patch for a minute, but the bugs came rushing back in. Well, certainly, mindfulness practice is a way to start because the mindfulness practice slows us down, which has to happen before anything else can happen, before effortlessness can happen, slowing down and discovering a space in the self that isn't the thinking space, because striving is very connected to thinking and effortlessness is connected to non-conceptual resting. So how does one do that? I think maybe the quickest way to do that is to come down into some

sensation in the body. As the body is not striving, the body is teaching us how to be effortless, actually. It is self-regulating, but it's not thinking about it's self-regulating. It's just in balance, and so it's a model for what we can do with the mind. We can relax it and let it self-regulate. The body, I think, holds that answer, too. How to be effortless. The body's not trying. The body's not striving. The body's not living in the future. The body is present. It's teaching us how to be present. I think it's possible that some people listening to this might feel like you can be striving for effortlessness. You know, I need to get myself into perpetual effortlessness or else I'm failing

at Will's meditation recipe, which in my experience, there are two things that have been helped for me. Actually, I'm going to say three things. One is noticing when I'm caught up in striving, dropping into a some sensation in the body, either some specific sensation or just whatever the body is producing at any given moment. But then knowing that the cockroaches are going to come rushing back in again, that it's not going to be perpetual, it's momentary, and then the goal is to start again. The second thing that's been helpful for me is just occasionally to drop into my mind as a mantra, the word effort list, because that I notice, oh yeah, all the things that

I'm knowing right now, the feeling of my breath, the thoughts flitting through, it takes no effort to know them. I'm adding the effort. The ego, the thinking mind, the self-concept is adding the effort. And so again, I can drop the word effortless in and it just puts me in touch with, oh yeah, this is all just happening without me interfering in any way. And then it doesn't last forever, but it can be a nice little signpost. And then the third thing is something I picked up from a teacher named Alexis Santos who got it from a teacher named Saida Utesania, Great Bermese Master, and Strux meditators to ask themselves occasionally, what's the attitude in my mind right now, or what's the

attitude in the mind right now? And often that's a little bit like taking a black light to a hotel sheet. It's like you just see all of this junk. And much of what you see is, in my case, is a striving. I'm trying to create something, trying to get somewhere. And then you can stop. And again, it's not going to be permanent. Don't think that you need to be effortless forever. That's just another kind of effort.

All right. Did any of that rambling make sense to you? That made a lot of sense. It's very practical. Dan, you said it very well. And I think, you know, that effortless, like if we can get a taste of that, even just a taste, that's a great success. We've tasted effortlessness. That's good. There's a term that my teacher used to share with me called the great exhaustion. It's a term that comes out of meditation practice that the end of our meditation practice is the exhaustion of all concepts, exhaustion. And I love this because if we want to know how to be effortless, go on a hike, you know, go on a really intense swim, do an intense workout, the way that you feel at the end of that when you lay on the couch.

That's effortless ease. That's actually a great template for what we're trying to do on the cushion. So we actually experience effortlessness when we're exhausted. That's like a hint. We could just be exhausted more often, not in necessarily our body exhausted, but our whole mind. We can let it run its course until we're just like, oh, enough thinking. And then we can find that place of exhaustion on the cushion. One more thing to ask you about before I let you go. You had expressed a desire to

let you go, you had expressed a desire to one of my producers before we conducted this interview to discuss the value of meditating in nature. Can you hold forth on that? Yeah, one of my favorite phrases is from meditation manuals in the Buddhist tradition is this phrase, the natural state, that where we are going to rust in the end of our practice or as part of our practice. Where are we heading in our practice? It's to the native state of our being, our original state is already wakeful. It's already there. It's already there. So, in my own experience, my own practice, where I feel like I can touch that, the natural state, most effectively, is by effectively is by turning my eyes and my breath and my body moving towards the natural world and finding some tree or a park to sit in and something about just that surrounding of my body with the sounds of birds, the feeling of grass, the shade of a tree, the neurotry trunk, that awakens in me this sense of what it means. These meditation manuals mean when they say, rest in the natural state, rest in your natural state. It's the state that we encounter when we re-blend this animal body with the cues

of the natural world. And when those two things come together, meditation becomes effortless. So I just have a great love for that practice of being out in the natural world, whatever that might mean, and whatever environment we're in, even in an urban environment, you can get yourself close to some cue, an organic thing that's living and growing, and be near it, and in being near it, it settles, our nervous system, our being, and I can more easily encounter the heart of meditation practice, the natural state. That's really great. We've kind of just skimmed the surface of your book. There's a lot in it. So in closing here, Will, can you plug the book and also your previous books and anything else you've

put out into the world that people might be able to access? Yeah, my book is The Wakeful Body, people might be able to access. Yeah, my book is the wakeful body, somatic mindfulness as a past of freedom. And it explores these layers of embodiment that we've just been discussing here in the podcast. I think that's the book that I would recommend if someone wants to connect to something that is useful in your meditation practice. My previous books, I think, you know, it's interesting.

I don't know if you've had this experience, Dan, once you've written a book, sometimes once you've burst it, it feels like you've moved to a different place in your own, in your own, what you would want to express in a given moment. So, you know, those books are there. There's, um, everyday Dharma, which is a very sort of initial, if you want to start a meditation practice and you don't know much about meditation, that's one place to start. Natural Dharma Fellowship is my website and that's where my teachings are listed and retreats. And then also, yeah, on Lion's War, you can look up my articles there. Some of them pertain to meditation practice and might be useful for your audience.

Great. Thank you so much for coming on, great job. Thank you, Dan. Thanks again to Willa. This show is made by Samuel John's Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davie Kim, Baikama, Maria Wertel, and Jen Poehlt with audio engineering from the Good folks at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you on Friday for a bonus.

folks at Ultraviolet Audio will see you on Friday for a bonus. 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 ad-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.