Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 412: The Zen of Therapy | Mark Epstein

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Epstein, discusses his new book The Zen of Therapy, in which he explores how his decades of studying and practicing Buddhism has influenced his work as a therapist. In this episode, Dan and Mark discuss: the immense value of developing a clear and warm relationship to your own dysfunction; anger; how much people can actually change; how Buddhism has influenced Mark's practice as a psychotherapist; and Mark’s formative relationship with the legendary spiritual teacher and ex-academic Ram Dass.This interview was recorded live as part of an online benefit for New York Insight Meditation Center and Cambridge Insight Meditation Center – two great institutions, both worth checking out and supporting. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/mark-epstein-412See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello party people. At the beginning of a new year, many of us want little hacks for getting happier and healthier. You are not going to get that in this episode, however. But I guess today argues that the best route to getting unstuck is to first get familiar and cozy with and even laugh at your own ugliness.

He doesn't pretend that this is easy. He simply argues it is necessary. Dr. Mark Epstein is one of the most important figures in my own personal development. Back in 2009, I believe, when I was a super skeptical, although meditation curious, TV news anchor, I read a few of Mark's excellent books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. Actually, my wife gave me those books and turned me on to Mark. I then called Mark up and asked him if he would have a drink with me and we have been friends

ever since. Mark has written many, many books. I read all of them. They're all excellent. But perhaps my favorite is his new one, which is called the Zen of Therapy. In it, he puts you in his chair, in his mind, as he does therapy, using his mix of psychiatric training and decades of studying and practicing Buddhism. In this conversation, we talk about the immense value of developing a clear and warm relationship

to your own dysfunction. We talk about anger, how much people can actually change, how Buddhism has influenced Mark's practice as a psychotherapist, and we talk about what was an extremely important, a formative relationship for Mark with the legendary spiritual teacher and ex-academic, Ram Das, who wrote the seminal book, Be Here Now and died a few years ago. One little note here, this conversation was actually recorded live as part of an online benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center and the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center

to great institutions, both worth checking out and supporting. Before we dive in, some big news about a development in the TPH world. We are launching a new podcast. We've actually launched it already. One of the most intense, important and astonishingly difficult things that has ever happened in my life is having a child. I think this is true for many of us who have kids. Parenting can be one of, if not the most transformative events of a lifetime. And while there are all sorts of resources out there for helping you do a better job as a parent,

there aren't many shows about how to take care of yourself as a parent. We here at 10% happier have now made that show. It's called Child Proof, and it's available now. It's hosted by an amazing person named Yasmeen Khan, a recovering news reporter and mom of two young children on the show she tackles big questions, such as how do parents take care of ourselves

while taking care of our kids? How do we not lose our crap with our children? How do we give ourselves a break? How do we properly mourn the loss of our old lives? How do we not pass on our own various forms of dysfunction to our kids? Childproof is available now for free wherever you listen to your podcasts, including Apple podcasts, Spotify, and for 10% happier app subscribers inside the app. Add free. Check it out today.

Okay, we'll get started with Mark Epstein 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 Kelli 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%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Like, it's only fans only bad where the 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. Hi, Mark.

Damn, what a treat. Congratulations on your new book. It's amazing. I've read it. I loved it. So again, congratulations. Thank you. You're about, I think, one of only three people beyond the editors who have read it already. So I'm like a little nervous to hear what you have to say.

I think it's among your best and what I like about it is you've had books, including going on being among others that had a memoir aspect to it, but you're revealing more and more of yourself. And I don't know what actually I'd be curious to hear from you. Why are you, as you get a little older, you're revealing more and more about yourself in your books, and this book is the most revealing. Yeah, that was, I think the urge behind it was to say a little more about what it's actually

like to be a shrink, to be a therapist in a day-to-day way. And I remember when I first started to think about writing down a year's worth of psychotherapy sessions, which is what the heart of the book is. I didn't know it was going to be a book when I first started writing down the sessions, but I was at a loss for what to do during my writing time. And I was sick of writing the same book over and over again, so I was like, I'm not going to do that. So for about, for a year, really, but it took nine months of that time.

I didn't know that it was going to be a book. I decided that I would going to be a book. I decided that I would try to record the details as much as I could remember after the session of at least one therapy session a week, where I thought that something of my Buddhist background or upbringing or whatever you want to call it, something of my Buddhist leanings filtered into the session. And so I wrote the session down, trying to grasp what that might have been,

not necessarily the teaching of mindfulness, sometimes that, but more how it infused, if it did, the interaction. After a year of doing that, I showed it to my editor and thought, maybe it was the nucleus of a book. And I was a little nervous about it because it was all patient stuff. So there was a lot to go through around that. But that was the motivating force, at least at the beginning for this book.

Just to say more about the motivating force, you write in the book that you set out to answer. And this is a quote, a vexing question. How does my involvement with Buddhism affect my work as a therapist? Why did you not already know that? Well, that's the question that everybody always asked me. You know, like I've written all these books, which I always thought of as trying to translate Buddhism or Buddhist psychology, Buddhist philosophy

into the Western, you know, psychodynamic language that we all speak, even if we're not Freudian, that's sort of infiltrated our way of thinking about the mind. So I wanted to talk about Buddhism in that way to make it more accessible to the mental health field and therapists and lay people, et cetera. And then people would always come back with the question,

well, okay, okay, that's interesting, but how do you actually use Buddhism in your practice as a therapist? And I was like, I don't know, I'm just like being a therapist. And, you know, the Buddhist thing is part of me, but I'm not proselytizing when I'm doing therapy, I'm just doing therapy, but yet I know that it's infiltrated somehow. But I was reluctant to try to put a stamp on it and say, I'm doing

this, I'm doing that, you know, because I didn't really know what I was doing except, I mean, that's the thing about being a therapist. It's very improvisational, and you have to learn with each person, it's different with each. And you have to learn with each person, it's different with each person. So I managed in all of those previous books to more or less evade the question of, how do I actually put it to use? And then I thought when I was writing down these sessions,

I thought, oh, I'm like in my middle to late 60s now, no one's ever going to really know what I've been doing all these years. Like I'm just going to sort of like disappear sooner or later. There was an ego thing in the initial writing, I think, of like, okay, at least I'll show my hand, you know, this is what it's actually like. And so then I was curious, right, picking out the session, like what session is interesting this week? I didn't follow given patients throughout the year.

I picked more randomly, whatever seemed like something interesting happened. And then in actually writing the sessions out, and then showing what I had written to the patients because I needed their permission and changing whatever needed to be changed. I started to see, oh, maybe I am channeling something that perhaps I've learned on all those retreats, like what am I doing? So the book is like a chronicle of trying to answer that question. And then I think where I come out, I could have known from the beginning, like what am I, you know, but the process of investigation, I've found interesting. So I'm hoping that

it works in the book. I can assure you it does work. Sorry, were you going to say something I, I I realized I might have just making noises. Okay, speaking of the noises you make while in therapy. A talk a lot. Yeah. And one of the goals of that talking by your own mission is disruption. That's the word you're using.

You're kind of trying to disrupt the thinking of your patient. What do you mean by that? That's interesting. You picked out that phrase, disrupting systems. One of my patients is a therapist also. And her session, or his or her session, whatever she turned out to be in the book, her session is disguised. But she actually said to me after reading over what I had written, oh, what you're doing is disrupting systems, like that's where you've helped me. And I was like, oh, that's a good phrase.

I couldn't have thought of that myself. So what is that getting at? I think often when people come to therapy, they're coming with explanations about who they are or what's wrong with them or how they see the world, or how they see their partners, or their children, or their parents, or their past experience. They're coming with formulations that can never be totally true, because I think any

individual's history or reality, it can never be totally captured. There's always more to the story than our minds can conceive, but our minds are always trying to conceive it, you know, and lock it down. So I think one of the interesting things about being a therapist is that once the Once the relationship is unsolid ground and the person trusts me enough that they will confide their systems, you know, or their explanations to me, then I can play with that a little bit. I can sometimes poke holes in it or lighten it with humor, which I think is something I've learned a lot from some of the best meditation teachers that I've been privy to over the years,

the humor thing, you and I share a fondness for Joseph Goldstein, who's New York Insight, Cambridge Insight, all various Phopassana institutions around the country all inspired by Joseph Sensafumer and Ram Das Sensafumer, who I talk about in the book a lot and the Dalai Lama Sensafumer. So I was always excited by that for myself. And I think that's one of the things as a therapist

that I take chances with, hopefully not making fun of somebody or some situation, but trying to explode it a little bit by changing the perspective on it, you know, humor being one way of doing that. So that's disrupting systems. I think that opens up, oh, like, why am I acting this way? Why did I get angry in this situation? Why am I afraid? Why am I ashamed?

Shame, especially, I think, is a big one where people very quickly, especially when they're young, take responsibility for things that happen to them that really aren't their responsibility, but they internalize it very quickly and then are carrying that in various ways, shame being a big one. So when I can get a hold of that and change the way that we're looking at that kind of thing, that's extremely helpful for people. And I think that that's very psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, but it's also Buddhist.

So it's one of the ways that those worlds can coalesce. That's making me think about the title, the Zen of therapy, because in Zen, there is a, to the extent that I understand Zen at all. There is, I think, an emphasis on spontaneity and to use the word you used several minutes ago in improvisation. And I see that a lot on the page as you're writing about your stance in these sessions. My process of writing the book, maybe it's helpful to talk about that a little bit. My

process of writing the book was the first year just recording the sessions. And then I had like a year just recording the sessions. And then I had like a chief of papers, like a notebook really of 50 or so of these sessions that I wrote up. And I showed them to the editor at Penguin who I've done the last two books with, Anne Gudoff, who's like a dream editor, at least for me. And she looked at it and read it through and said, I think there's something there, but the only through line is you, you know, because you're not following any of the patients. So she said, what you have to do is go through each one of them and write a reflection or a commentary or a consideration or an analysis. She didn't use that word, but we have to know more about what you're thinking. Then COVID hit, I finished the year's worth in, I think, December of 19, and then COVID hit,

so I was like out of my office and up here in Woodstock where I've been for the past, however many months this has been, and I had more reflection time. So it was actually a very good writing time. So then for that next year, I went through each session, trying to write about going back and writing about what I thought was going on. And in doing that, that's when the Zen influence came into the book because somehow it was actually through, this is a long story. Do you want to hear, am I talking too much already in this conversation? And drop me if I'm going bored.

You have no systems I wanted to disrupt at this point. I like long stories. Okay. I feel free. Podcasts are meant to be long and rangy, so go for it. Okay. Well, several years before my wife, who is a sculptor, did a big outdoor sculpture installation in Madison Square Park, which is a park in Lower

Manhattan. And she emptied out a stone fountain that usually has water going and made it into a kind of outdoor theater and put various sculptures around. And then once in the fall and once in the spring, she in the fall, she brought the actor Diane Weist and in the spring, she brought the actor Fiona Shaw. And they both did a series of unannounced performances. So it was just word of mouth for the better part of the week. They performed for like half an hour in the middle of the

day, acting out poetry or etc. And the first day only a few people were there and then by the end of the week there were like big crowds of people because it was incredible. And a friend of mine named Jonathan Cot who some people listening may know, he used to be a major writer for Rolling Stone and did interviews, you would know, did interview John Lennon and Dylan and so on. He came and was sitting next to me. And the whole crowd was like, it was like one experience. People were totally focused on the actor in the center

of the fountain and it was a lovely New York city, weird experience. And he quoted a Zen poem. This is where this story is going. He quoted a Zen poem to me. I think I'll get it right. Under cherry trees, there are no strangers. Or under cherry blossoms, there are no strangers. Because nobody there knew each other,

but we were all having a communal, one cultural experience that was opening everybody's heart basically the same way in the Zen world of the cherry blossoms. People would gather to experience the perfection of the cherry blossoms. So when I started going through the psychotherapy sessions and my reflections on them, each one started to strike me as a kind of haiku moment. You know, like I'm capturing this one moment of therapy. And what's the meaning in

this one little thing that I'm capturing? So I called Jonathan or wrote to Jonathan, and I said, remember you quoted that, high coup to me, that poem to me, where can I find more? And he gave me like seven books to look at, the penguin book of Zen poetry, et cetera. And so I started reading the Zen poems while I was going through the psychotherapy sessions.

So while the book is the Zen of therapy, what the writing of the book was, the therapy sessions actually helped me understand the Zen high crews, you know, because I would open it up at random. And there would be this beautiful little poem that I would never have paid attention to before. I would find one and it would speak to the essence of the therapy session. So that was extremely exciting to me. And it gave me another sort of through line through the book that then I realized, okay, I'm trying to bring out, we can't really talk about essence because we're Buddhist. So there is no essence. But I'm trying to bring out the essence of what makes

a psychotherapy session worthwhile, you know, like some kind of transmission, some kind of exchange is happening that is disruptive in the way that you were asking about before. Going back to the risks you take. Yeah. Any examples from the book that would be worth talking about now of a risk you take in the name of this disruption? Well, I think the, I think one major risk, this is a more general thing, and then I'll give you a specific, a more general risk is that when I feel like it won't be disruptive in the wrong way, I'm quite willing to be real in myself with my patients.

So for instance, until COVID, I always had my office in the in the basement of this five-story loft building that we live in. So patients when they came to my office had to walk into the building where we live and when my kids were little, they would often run into the kids. My wife had her studio next door to the office that shared a bathrooms. Sometimes the patients would even run into my wife, which in classical psychoanalytic treatment, that would be forbidden. But I was like, I'm not going to hide who I am. And for most people, that was okay. For some people, it was not okay. And then within the sessions, and I think some of that comes through in the book, when I feel it will be helpful and not intrusive, and then that's a judgment call, I'm willing to use my own life and my own experience in the service of trying to make a difference

for somebody. And I think some people appreciate that. I know when I was in therapy, I was fortunate enough to have first one and then another therapist who both worked in that way. So that was I was looking for a real relationship as well as a therapeutic, whatever the hierarchy of the thing would be. So I think that thread is there throughout. But in terms of taking a risk, a specific case, I think there's one in the book where one of my patients comes, who, they're actually a couple of cases like this, who have suffered a devastating loss and they're putting on a

fairly convincing expression of grief, but something in the expression of the grief struck me as, I don't know how to say it right, not complete, I think, there was something missing. That's what it is. There was something missing in the in the relating of the grief. So I'm like, what's missing? What's missing? What's missing? And I went for that, you know, like you say you're grieving, but you don't really, somehow it's not coming through. And that turned out to be productive. I was able to get at, I think, in one case, an underlying anger. And in another case, you know, some other conflicting stuff that was in the way. You talk a lot about anger and aggression and sort of inner violence. Why is that so important? Why is that such a big theme in your patients in your work? Two ways to answer that question. When I was going through the years worth of sessions,

in my mind, I was using the classic Vapassana Progressive Insight as the framework or as the scaffolding for the book. And the residue of that is there. I group the sessions according to the four seasons, starting in winter, winter spring, summer and fall. And then the winter ones, I started with clinging as the theme that runs through. And then I went to mindfulness as the next one. And then I went to insight as the next one. And then I wanted the fourth one to be about compassion, because that's where the book was

leading towards a discussion of compassion or of kindness, which is the word I decided I preferred. So when I sent it into my editor, the fourth group was titled compassion, only all the sessions were about anger because, and this is the second way of answering the question, I think to really cultivate kindness or compassion or loving kindness, there's the classic way of cultivating it that we know from going on retreat, and I've taught with Sharon Salzburg over the years, and she's like the expert at teaching compassion meditation, love and kindness meditation. But from a psychodynamic perspective, the development of compassion is dependent on one's relationship to one's own inner aggression or inner anger. And that comes out of the child psychoanalyst, Donald Winnecott, who's the big analytic influence on my work, because he was a pediatrician,

turned psychoanalyst who focused for the first time in psychoanalytic history. He focused on the experience of, in those days, mothers with their babies. Now, men are actually involved with their babies, so it's parents and their babies. And he coined the phrase, the good enough mother or the good enough parent, which has been very important to me in my own work, trying to be a good enough person, good enough therapist. But his whole theory on what makes a parent good enough is that they're able to tolerate both their own anger, their own aggression, and their baby or their child's anger or aggression. And he was always extolling the altruistic aspect of parents who are able to despite all the difficulties, the burdens of having children.

And I think this goes to having intimate relationships of all kinds. There's so much anger that's aroused in our intimacies. having children. And I think this goes to having intimate relationships of all kinds. There's so much anger that's aroused in our intimacies. And that if we're defensive about it, if we're uncomfortable with it, we get blocked up. But if we're able to acknowledge it, work with it, tolerate it, forgive it, and come back to the love that binds us all, the kindness that binds us all, then we're actually able to feel compassion for ourselves and for those who are upsetting us. So all those cases in the fourth part of the book turned out to be examples of people coming with various difficulties around anger that I'm trying to bring into consciousness, into awareness. What we've learned from Buddhism, which is that if you bring anything into awareness,

it self-liberates, and that process of self-liberation fills us with a kind of joy, and a sense of our own capacity to forgive. I think is the ultimate achievement if we can talk about achievements coming out of meditation. So I'm trying to channel that into the psychotherapy world. So anyway, after the editor read through that and said, you know, you're saying compassion, but really, it seems to be all about anger. I retitle the fourth section as aggression, and then wrote a final chapter that is meant to bring everything to a head that's actually about kindness. Much more of my conversation with Dr. Mark Epstein right after this.

Life is 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 here 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 ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondering app. The self-liberating awareness of our inner anger or whatever Awareness of our inner anger or whatever, Michigan's maybe inside or is inside for sure inside. What's the mechanism by which awareness leads to a self liberation? Unpack that, if you would. I mean, I think maybe that's something that we have to take on faith.

But when I'm saying that, that's totally coming out of my Vapassana experiences. That's totally coming out of listening to Joseph and Jack Cornfield, Sharon, Bob Thurman, Ramdas, you know, but my own experiences on retreat, like what's mindfulness actually teaching us to do? It's to open ourselves as much as we can to what John Capitziin calls the full catastrophe, right? Or in my book, I quote, the psychoanalyst Michael Aigen quoting the British analyst Wilford Beon as psychoanalysis opening us to the full horror of ourselves, you know, to the great destruction, the ability to outlast the great destruction, you know, that awareness is there behind everything, so that whatever we bring into awareness, even our most embarrassing or shame-filled or guilty failures,

whatever we can actually bring into the field of awareness and not judge. And I use in the book, I use the musician and composer John Cage, his approach to making music out of non-musical sounds, being open to everything. I try to use that as a way of talking about being open to the music of our emotions. The experience on retreat of actually doing that is that, and you know this, I think maybe better than I do now, because you've been sitting a lot,

but that whatever we take to be most solid, most embarrassing, whatever we take to be most solid, most embarrassing, most, you know, et cetera. Once it comes up in the field of awareness, once you put the cloak of mindfulness around it, it doesn't last. And it's either just a feeling or just an emotion or just a thought or just a memory. And it flashes and it's not that it might not come again or that we don't identify with it or cling to it, but even the identification with it we can start to see as a construction. So the self liberation of whatever it is that arises is it dissolves into emptiness. You know, that's the classic Buddhist psychology of it. You know, what do we mean by emptiness. That's the classic Buddhist psychology of it.

What do we mean by emptiness? That's been debated for thousands of years. But the self-liberation of our identities happens by allowing emptiness to take the foreground. So we sit in meditation. We watch the full catastrophe, the horror, the destruction, you know, or it's Tick-Not-Hon talks about if you sit and watch your own mind long enough, you'll see Hitler, you know, all of this embarrassing, sometimes hilarious, sometimes

totally shocking and horrifying. Content comes up and just by dent of being with it from a certain open non-judgmental, even warm angle, we see that it lacks essence, it lacks substance, and in that is the liberation. Yeah, well, the language that we have to use to talk about that has this visual metaphor running through it. We sit and observe, we see where everything that comes up. And I think that that might remove us a little bit too much towards the head, towards the mind.

There's this idea that I talk about the mind object that when as children were prematurely challenged by emotional experience, that's too overwhelming. We retreat to the mind and create what Winnicott called a caretaker self or a fall self to manage the intrusive or abandoning environment that we find ourselves in. And so I think meditation sometimes can be recruited into that. That's a slightly detached or slightly defensive stance, but I think we're also prisoners of our language, because when you're doing intensive meditation and this stuff comes up, from my experience anyway, when I'm really with it, it's not so much

that I'm just observing it, but it's that it's, I'm completely filled by it. Like, oh, did I really do that thing that I'm ashamed of? The memory is there, all the feelings associated with it are there. And then also my attachment to, we would say, or my identification with being that person is there. that's a deeply felt something. So even to have that, I think it's that that ends up coming into a relationship with emptiness. When that deeply felt identification with whatever it is that we are assuming about ourselves, you know, when the holding environment of the mind that comes

from shamata that comes from concentration, from one point of this, when the holding environment is strong enough so that that deeply felt identification, that ordinarily is operating behind the scenes when we can be with it in that non-judgmental way that you were just talking about. With some understanding of emptiness, that I think that's when we start to divest ourselves of it, or be a little bit freed from an exclusive identification with the kind of person we think we are.

So that's what I'm shooting for. And can that happen in therapy? I think that's the big question in the book. Can that only happen in the, in the that's the big question in the book. Can that only happen in the at the forest refuge, you know, after two weeks, after a month, you know, after three months, or can that happen in a sacred psychotherapy space? Can we get a hint of that? What's the answer? One for a while. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. I hope so. I'm, I'm spending a lot of time trying.

It's happened for, I think when I was in therapy, I had experiences like that, you know, where I was lucky enough to find a Vapassana when I was 20 years old. I did a lot of retreats in my 20s and had my first really good therapy sort of laid in my 20s. So I could see how, I could feel how similar things were happening and the therapy could get at certain aspects of myself that hadn't come into awareness on retreat. The interpersonal aspect of the therapy could get at certain aspects of myself that hadn't come into awareness on retreat. The interpersonal aspect of the therapy brought out, stuff I wasn't aware of about how I held myself,

how my anxiety was operating subliminally and affecting the way I spoke, the way I sat, the way I moved, the muscles in my face, all that stuff. So then I could sort of put it together that I could then start to feel it in the meditation also. That has absolutely been my experience too, that both modalities are incredibly helpful

and can feed upon one another in a positive way. I do wanna ask a question that came up in my mind as I was listening to you talk about this self-liberation that can either happen on the cushion or on the couch in the chair, whatever furniture you're sitting on, this self-liberation can allegedly happen. And even for somebody listening to this, I imagine a question might be coming up in some minds, certainly came up in my mind of, okay, yeah, I've had some moments in meditation or in therapy or just free range living where I do see through or to stay with your language tweak. I do sort of feel some pattern, maybe my anger, let's say. And I can get a sense of its insubstantiality.

And that can feel liberating in the moment. And yet, when I go back to living, I just say something that ruins the next 48 hours of my marriage, just because I'm overcome with some peak or whatever. I just see the same pattern reasserting itself and I can get into a spiral of, well, all this work you've done is for nothing. I'll say one thing that I mentioned this to a friend recently. And he said something that his therapist said to him when he was making a similar complaint and the therapist had said to him,

okay, well, was it a little bit less bad than the last time it happened? And that was a very comforting thing to him, okay, well, was it a little bit less bad than the last time it happened? And that was a very comforting thing to hear, even if several steps removed. Does any of that make any sense to you? Do you have anything you want to add? I don't really think we change ourselves that much. I think the fact that you see it or feel it and have that moment of liberation from it and then you're back in your life and back in your world and you're yourself again and as vulnerable to everything as you always have been I think that's true for all of us and yet headative seeing of it allows, I like this idea of rupture and repair, like in relationships, but also in terms of one's own

relationship to oneself, that you keep stumbling over yourself and then having to repair it. And that's when Winnecott talks about mothers and their children, he's saying, that's what's happening all the time, rupture and repair, and it's the parent's capacity to keep coming back, even when their feelings are hurt, that creates a sense for the child of,

oh, yeah, the world is a safe place, or emotional life is like not threatening, or intimacy is possible. That's the whole attachment theory idea with intimacy. But I think meditation and also therapy is teaching us how to do that for ourselves. So it's a kind of humbling. When you talk about that, you're very good at talking about that, about how 10% but I'm still an asshole kind of thing. And that's because that's, it's not true that you're still an asshole, but it's true. That's everybody's experience. And one of the things that's been

really, I think, so helpful about the work that you've been doing is that you're not dressing it up and trying to make it be something more than it can be. It's just great to be able to see that my own worst, most intense outrage about the way the world is treating me doesn't have to be the last word, even when I keep feeling that way. And that's, I think, the greatest thing that I learned from teaching a little bit with Robert Thurman. He really understands the Tibetan Buddhist, speaks Sanskrit, speaks Tibetan, translated for the Dalai Lama, doesn't put meditation on a pedestal, but talks about how important the conceptual understanding of all of this stuff is. And he always highlights this idea of injured innocence that in order to understand selflessness, in order to understand

the emptiness of self, we first have to find the self as it actually appears to us in our own inner subjective experience. Like, who do I really think I am? And so he says, one of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings is that the best time to find the self that doesn't exist is when someone who you love accuses you of doing something that you didn't do, of hurting their feelings or being an asshole or whatever. And so you have the feeling of, wait a minute, I didn't do that. How can she

think that about me? So there's the self that doesn't exist is right there in that feeling of injured innocence. And a lot of times people come to therapy with exactly that kind of resentment or hurt. And there's the self. There's the precious self that at its essence, to use that word again, is emptiness. Then that's the self liberation thing. If you can really be with that feeling, oh my God, like where did it go? And Thurman leads the meditation

that I've heard many times of trying to zero in on that self. And he says it's like a dog chasing its own tail. And it makes you a little dizzy. Because you're trying to find the self. You've got the feeling, how could she think that about me? Okay, where's that feeling of me? Can I find it? Oh, I can almost find it, but it's slipping away.

And then it's in the slipping away. Oh, like things aren't weighed. I don't even know who I am anymore. That's the, there's a reparative aspect to that because then we're not so stuck in our feelings, although it will come again. Do any of us really know any liberated beings in the way we imagine a liberated being to be?

So I tried to write about Ramdas in this book. That was the other thing that I found myself circling. So I wrote a couple of introductory chapters and then a final chapter. And my final chapter ends with a visit that I made to Ramdas just the year before he died where he really did achieve. He might have really become a saint, Ramdas, where he really virtually became the person he was always pretending to be because of having to labor under the partial paralysis and

a phase of this stroke for 20 years, which he just ended up being so graceful with. So I tried to write about being with him in a way that could convey what that might feel like to actually be able to not take oneself so seriously all the time. I want to dive more deeply into round-dows in a second, but just I want to go back to something you said a while ago, which was, I don't think people can change that much. I think you said something. Yeah. Something like that.

Yeah, we are who we are. Right, so what's the point of doing this meditation if, you know, the record? There's no point. I've do it for a point. If you do it for a point, you're stuck. That you know this, you know. Do I? You do, stuck. But you know this, you know. Do I?

You do. You do. You know this. You know. What's the point of doing therapy? What's the point of doing anything? Because I actually think there is some change you can make. It's just not as, I mean, obviously you're just described Ramdas, having made some change.

So change is possible. I think. But you know. But he was still himself. He was still himself. Yeah, change is possible. Of course, change is possible. Change is possible, but we're still ourselves. So, so what's changing, you know, I tell this story a lot about how whenever I go on retreat, you're not supposed to read, you're not supposed to write, but I always sneak a little notebook in with me in case I hear something profound

or actually have a revelation that I can use in a book. So it's a little tiny notebook and there's little scribbles in it and every 10 years or so I look through to see if there's anything there I can use. And I find I've written the same thing over and over again because it sounds so profound every time, but then I forget about it and hear it again. And it's always Joseph saying something like,

it's not what you're experiencing that matters, it's not what happens that matters, it's how you relate to it. And the thing that can change is how you relate to whatever. That's what you have control over. And that includes yourself, whoever we take ourselves to be, whoever we find ourselves to be in the world. Like, how much control do I have actually about who I am? Some, but you're a unique person, I'm a unique person. We all come in these incarnations. We come and cat salate it in mind and body with a set of responses.

We have some control, not a whole lot. So the pointlessness, the point is to become familiar with ourselves. Right? Again, I quote from a big inspiration of mine, Michael Aig, and to become partners with the capacities that constitute us. That's from a psychoanalyst. So that's another way of talking about the full catastrophe, I think, to experience the full catastrophe, to become partners with the capacities that constitute us, to inhabit our being fully. What does it mean to inhabit our being fully, to inhabit our being? How much room do we give

ourselves in our lives for the pure being of ourselves? You know, something that's happening in meditation sometimes for sure. It's something that sometimes I think I tried to show how therapy sometimes can encourage that. Much more of my conversation with Dr. Mark Epstein right after this. As I understand it, the core change, with again, with the caveat that we are still who we are, but as I understand it, the core change that you're describing, which really stuck out to me because it's something that I've been writing about a lot in my own book. You get like two or three books done in the period that takes me to write one book.

Something that I've been writing about a lot, and you describe beautifully in this book, is that as we become more familiar, often in a sort of, and this is a word you use taken from the Dalai Lama and a mocking way with our own catastrophe, where instead of fighting it so much, when that fighting is like a briar patch, we just get more entangled, it's sort of an involution, a downward spiral that gets tighter and tighter, where you're just more and more in yourself, the more you fight these old patterns. If you can be cool with it, if you can be fully who you are without being owned by these patterns, that I think you're arguing unlocks a kindness one might say, love that is always there anyway is obscured by the Mishagas. And that is the hidden kindness and life that you're referencing in your subtitle of your book.

Do I have that right? Yeah, you have that absolutely right. I came to the kindness thing in my pursuit of the Zen analogies for what I was doing. I found this book by, I must be a West Coast therapist and Zen teacher John Terrent, I think his name is called Bring Me the Rhinoceros and Bring Me the Rhinoceros and other Zen co-ons that will save your life. And he lists, I think, seven things about co-ons. Co-ons show you that you can depend on creative moves, which I think is true about therapy.

Cohen's encouraged doubt and curiosity. Cohen's rely on uncertainty as a path to happiness. Cohen's will undermine your reasons and your explanations. Cohen's lead you to see life as funny rather than tragic. Cohen's will change your ideas of who you are and this will require courage. Coons reveal a hidden kindness in life. That was his final one.

So I read that and I was like, oh yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. So unlocking, uncovering, uncovering a hidden kindness. And that goes back to Winnecott. Winnecott's writing about parenting, having children, having babies, like, how is it that we are able to take care of these beings? You know, it's so much work, you know, but that he calls them a maternal aptitude or the primary maternal preoccupation, which I think is present in both men and women, more in women, obviously.

But we're trying to catch up these days. But I think that's a lot what's being taught in meditation. Is that same? You know, our minds are like the unruly children. And when we're adopting the meditative stance, you know, isn't that like being how we have to be as parents, not completely permissive, like seeing things for what they are and challenging when it needs to be challenged, but forgiving, ultimately forgiving and holding, et cetera, et cetera. And so that capacity, we were all babies,

we all had some of that experience or we wouldn't be talking to each other, you know, or trying to meditate. Some of us are parents, but that capacity is there. It's latent in all of us. That's the idea. And it wants to emerge. It wants to emerge. That's the thing we're taking on faith from what the Buddha taught. We just got me right to the question I was going to ask. Is this a taking on faith? Is there any

evidence? And this is a question I've asked many guests. So I apologize to previous listeners who heard me vlog this dead horse before. But is there any evidence for what some would call Buddha nature, the idea that underneath all the noise, the sound and fury, the sermon drung, that there is this pure spontaneity and kindness and love. Is that just a faith claim or can we say there's evidence? I think it's just a faith claim. Really? Yeah. I mean, obviously, there's a whole industry, and I don't mean that as a put down, there's

a whole industry that's devoted to trying to prove that it does exist, that what's been taken on faith for all of these hundreds and thousands of years coming from spiritual teachers of all kind, not just the Buddha, that there's a loving energy that permeates the universe. You know, you know, and I know various neuroscientists who have shown incredible things, you know, that brain changes are possible, do happen through the application of these techniques, etc. But I started out with those people. I even started the book with a whole description of working with Herbert Benson, who was a cardiologist

at Harvard, who did the first work on transcendental meditation, showing that it evokes what he called the relaxation response and could be used to combat stress response and hypertension. He used it to help people lower their blood pressure. And I worked with him for seven years all through medical school and we went to India on a research project spearheaded by an interactions we had with the Dalai Lama to measure the body temperatures of advanced yogis doing

a heat yoga where they could sit outside and they frozen Himalayas and dry wet sheets with the heat of their bodies and we hiked into the wilderness and measured their body temperatures and wrote scientific papers about it, etc. But the art of meditation was always what was more intriguing to me than the science of it. So I'm willing to be inspired by the sutras and by the teachers who, at their best, seem to embody that, oh, yes, this is real, this thing. And for me, when I started to seriously meditate,

meaning do a 10 day or two weeks silent retreat, which is as serious as I've ever gotten with it, things really started to happen. It wasn't just a struggle to meditate. It was actually, there's a whole movie there. Like, it's really deep this thing. So I'm willing to accept on some kind of faith-based something that some of this must be true. Like how do we deal with death? Like do we think we're all operating with the scientific materialistic way of thinking about death that we were brought up with. But I don't have that much trouble reaching for the

idea of something continuing, something personal slash impersonal continuing. Is there any proof of that? Little bits of anecdotal, something of people almost dying or four year olds, almost remembering past lives. Who knows, but what do we choose to believe? Or what do we feel? Are we just making it up? Are we just hoping that some point it becomes very real when it's you that's facing death or people you love? I gone on a little bit of an arc personally with rebirth because it was the type of idea that as was and still kind of is my want. I reflexively dismissed as folklore and over time I don't know why this sort of encode in sappy it suspicion has arisen in my mind from being caught up in the affinity scam of Buddhists who have a similar background to me.

So I feel comfortable in hearing too many Dharma talks or maybe just little glimmers of something in my own meditation. And then also sitting in, I was watching Joseph Goldstein who we've discussed a little bit was staying over recently at our house. And he and I watched some of this Netflix documentary surviving death and there's an episode about this University of Virginia professor who goes and interviews kids who have memories of past lives and he does all these very interesting tests on them and they just pass with at least the video that I saw that really I haven't seen this it's shocking and it's just like I

don't know what to it's very convincing that He's showing the pictures of like three women in front of them. One of them was the mother of the person they claimed that they were in a former life. And they can pick out the mom, even though they've never seen the picture. They can like point out a local playground that they played at. Very, very interesting. Yeah. That's a digression though. On Ramdoss, can you describe who he is?

And then I want to talk about a few of the things he said to you that were so influential in your life and in your therapy? Yeah, well, if you go back far enough in this Buddhist world, you come to Timothy Leary and Richard Albert, who were Harvard psychology professors in the 1960s who were among the first to partake of first psilocybin and then LSD. And they came at it from the place of being serious, at least some are serious psychologists. And curious about, oh my God, what is this thing? What's it telling us about the mind? Could it be useful for the treatment of this or that, you know, prisoners, alcoholics, whatever?

But it was the beginning of the 60s, and the substances were incredibly baguiling, and I think seductive and interesting. And the culture was such that they certainly were not careful if they wanted to keep their academic jobs. And they were giving the psychedelics to students. And anyway, they got in trouble and either encouraged to quit or in Ramdusses

and Richard Albert, Richard Albert was his name. In his case, he was asked to leave. And the chairman of the department in those days who both hired him and then fired him was still teaching by the time I got to Harvard, which was in 1971. So his name was David McClellan. And although he fired Albert in Leora,

he stayed friendly with Albert who, after being let go from Harvard, went on a spiritual expedition to India, hoping to find sages who could tell him something about what the psychedelics were showing him about his mind. So he went in search of spiritual teachers, masters, et cetera, and stumbled upon what sounds like was a true teacher whose name was Nim Kharole Baba, or they called him Maharaji, who only lived for a short time, a couple of

years after Richard Albert found him. Nim Kharole Baba renamed him Ramdas, servant of Ram, servant of God, Das being servant, Ram being a name of a Hindu name of God. And told him not to talk about it at all, not to talk about him or anything, but Ram does couldn't control himself. Came back to America, went on the radio, went to Wesleyan, where he had been a graduate student, went to Harvard, couldn't stop talking about it, and ended up bringing back a whole bunch of other basically young hippie children in those days who flocked to Niem Kharole Babas, Ashram, and had a life-changing experience of something.

Again, long story. One of those early disciples of the guru was a fellow named Daniel Goldman, who many of us still know, who went on to write a book called Emotional Intelligence. He was a graduate student in psychology at Harvard when I got there. So my second year, the graduate student teaching fellow in the psychophysiology class I was taking was Daniel Goldman, who in those days had a whole lot of frizzy hair and was wearing purple bell-bottom pants when I walked into the class. And I knew he knew something that I needed to know. And so I befriended him.

And he already knew Joseph and Sharon and Ramdas, obviously. And so he sort of set me on the path. So that psychology professor who had hired and fired Richard Albert and Timothy Leary, whose name was David McClellan, had a big yellow house on the top of the highest hill in Cambridge, that in his wife who was a wonderful woman, Mary McClellan, a painter, they were both Quakers. They opened their house to all of the young people who had been in India with Albert now Ramdas

and turned it into a kind of traveling way station for people on the spiritual path while I was in college taking his motivation class. So once I met Danny Goldman and went to Naropa and met Joseph and so on, I realized that, oh, my professor was secretly hosting Trumpa and Ramdas and all these people. So I started to hang out at the house

and got to know Ramdas then a little bit myself. He was 20 years older than me, had been at Harvard, had been a psychologist. I think saw in me that I was a generation later and didn't need to make the same choices that he had made. So I was able to straddle the line a little more easily than he was, you know, going on to go to medical school and become a psychiatrist and so on. But he was always very kind to me. And for a couple of years, he taught these like, that wouldn't necessarily call them secret, but they were small meditation classes in the carriage house of David McClellan's, the professor's big house in Cambridge. So I got to know him as his student friend kind of thing. And then as I continued in my life, Rommed us moved to California, I lost track of, we stayed

in touch just a little bit, but I would see him periodically every couple of years. But there was one point where I traveled in Asia with Joseph and Sharon and Jack, and Ramdas joined us for a trip to Jack's monastery in Thailand, where Ajahn Chow was teaching. So we shared a couple of intense experiences. So anyway, I had a relationship with him that extended through 40 years or so, and he was an important mentor figure for me, turned out to be in a lot of different ways. Yeah. He said a few things to you that you write about in the book that really influenced your therapy. I'll read a few of the things he said, and you can just pick whatever ones you want to talk about as it relates to the book or how we can incorporate this wisdom into our lives. Well, one thing he said to you when talking to you about your early therapy practice was, do you see them? Your patient says already free.

A few other things he said to you that really come up throughout the book is one is the notion of loving the thoughts, your own thoughts, and seeing yourself as a soul, which is not a particularly Buddhist thing to say. It's a good thing for the Buddhist. Yeah, it's a good corrective, I think. Multiple choice, or you could do them all, but just pick one or two and just talk a little bit about the influence. Well, when I first met Ramdas, it was when I went out to Naropa, I was like 20 years

old, and Danny Goldman sent me out to Naropa. He said, if you want to learn more about this, go, all my friends are going to be teaching there, so go there. So I went there. And Ramdas was teaching this big extraordinary. It was like, it was like the real woodstock, but it was 1974, and they're still dressed in Indian garb, and all his people on stage playing Indian instruments and chanting, you know, was, and I was besotted with the whole thing. So it was possible to have a one-on-one meeting with him. So I signed up for a one-on-one meeting and I went into his like townhouse that they had given the people there and he was sitting on a cushion and I sat on a cushion opposite him and he didn't say anything just stared at me and we sat silently and this is a thing

Ramdas did it turns out but for me it was you know I felt like I was the only one that was having this experience and he just sat silently looking at me staring at me, it was, you know, I felt like I was the only one that was having this experience. And he just sat silently looking at me, staring at me, probably staring at my third eye, you know, until I broke and finally got so anxious that I had to say something. But right at that breaking point, he said, he actually broke it, I think, and said, are you in there? Meaning, in here, are you in there? I'm in here, and then he said, far out, which is how he would talk. So he was, I think, trying to convey in his slightly affected way in those days, what

I'm trying to convey in the book, in my own affected way, that there's something underlying where we come with our minds, we come with our anxieties, but behind that, there's something more impersonal that links us. So that was actually my first experience of him. Then blah, blah, blah, everything I said already, he had his stroke and it was 20, 25, 23 years later. And I was in my early 40s and married and had children and was, you know, a psychiatrist already. And I went out to California and I went to visit him and he was living in Tiburon. And I think he had the stroke a year before. And he was on the porch of his house.

And I drove up to see him and nervous because of how much I admired him. And we were sitting on the porch together. He couldn't talk very well. His speech came back a little bit every word. He had to find and it took a long time, but he joked with me right away. He's like, oh, so you're you're a you a Buddhist psychiatrist now He's he said to me. I'm like, yeah, I guess I guess I am Buddhist psychiatrist and then took him a really long time. He said, do you see them as already free?

I was like, what? You know, like I first had to put the words together, you know? Like, do you see them as already free? Do you see them as already? Yeah, yes, yes. I think I do actually, but I could never have articulated it that way, but he did. And when I'm when I was writing the book, I think I actually told that story in an earlier book, but when I was writing the book, I was trying to remember like, like, I spent all that time, did those classes

with Ramdas. Like, What did he ever say that? But I can remember. He said, you're not who you think you are. You would repeat that all the time. You're not who you think you are, which I loved, as someone who had retreated to my mental faculties as coping mechanism to get me through life. You're not who you think you are.

Do you see them as already frayed? So that I have taken as the sort of what's the word, like the light motif. So that I thought was beautiful. And my own first therapist, whose name was Is Michael Vincent Miller, who maybe you have met also. I have definitely met him, yes. He said something that I also quoted in the book.

When he was my therapist, he wasn't deep into Buddhism, but we became friends after he was my therapist, and now he's done a lot of retreats. And I had a conversation with him that I recount in the book about how Buddhism and psychotherapy are the same. And he said, oh, the way that they're the same is that they're both about restoring innocence after experience, reclaiming, refinding, restoring innocence after experience. I think that's almost the same as, do you see them as already free? Because we think we know ourselves through our experience, that experiences everything, you know, but that there's something beyond experience or something before experience that is in hiding, that we're in search of.

And Ramda said one of his other refrains later in life was, we're all walking each other home, which I also like as a therapy, you know, like what are we doing together? We're all walking each other home. So what's the home? Because that makes sense. I can feel the truth of that. And that's even something I felt in meditation and sitting like, oh, I'm so glad I found this.

Oh, the sense of coming home. And a lot of those Zen poems circle that idea too. That's what I liked about writing the book the best, actually, that those poems started to come alive. So for me personally, I think those were the Ramdas things that made the most difference. One of my patients who I talk about in the book, very close to Ramdas.

And knew him better than I did really, went to see him periodically, and then would come back and talk to me in therapy about what his exchange with Ramdas was, and how helpful it was. And he tells the story that I recount in the book of confessing to Ramdas about all his lurid sexual thoughts, objectifying the other sex, and how he couldn't stop, but knew it was wrong or objectionable,

but loved it and needed to keep doing it. And Ramdas's intervention first was love the thoughts, first was love the thoughts, rather than all the complicated thing that he was doing with him. And then he said, but try to see yourself as a soul. So what's he saying there? Because then he said, because then if you can see yourself as a soul, maybe you could start to see them, the women, you know, as souls rather than as simply objects, of desire, et cetera. So what does that mean to see yourself as a soul? I think it connects to innocence after experience and already free and to whatever that is that's in the background of our experience that in meditation,

we're trying to bring to the foreground that I'm hoping therapy can also trying to bring to the foreground that I'm hoping therapy can also help to bring to the foreground. So Ramdas wasn't afraid to use the soul word because he's allowing himself to be influenced by that tradition. Buddhism grew up in an environment where people had reified the idea of the soul, such that they were seeing it in a transcendent way. So the no soul doctrine, which has become the no self doctrine, was trying to counter the way that people had systematized the soul idea.

But I think it's possible to reclaim the word of it, to try to get to whatever that is that is underneath our personalities, you know, that we're trying to access in our practice. So Ram Das is saying through all these expressions that you picked up, the same thing that you're trying to say in the book, which is, can we, as counterintuitive it as it may seem, love all of our unruly, he neuroses all of the stuff because then that puts us in touch with the mystery that underlies all of it. And then that allows us to see that that mystery is living in every other sentient being, and that's where the kindness emerges. Yeah. And going back to our earlier discussion about what changes, what doesn't change,

Rambas was, he was like a stand-up comedian when he could talk. So that was one of the, one of the things when he had a stroke and he lost that charm, you know, that he had one's head. That was part of his own process. But one of the things he said, I think when he could still talk the pants off of you, was first, originally his neuroses were like these big monsters in the room, and after all his therapy in psychedelics and spiritual life and so on,

it's none of them went away, but they became like delightful little shmuz. So that I like, that recalibration. I think I put this in the book. My big revelation, I might look that last visit with Rambdas. We were riding in the car on the way to the beach. He would go swimming once a week and his the people who were taking care of him were driving him to the beach and I was in the backseat. And they put a tape on of Ramdus when he could talk like in the 70s doing his routine. And so we're listening to it. And I said to him, like, was that all scripted or was it improvised? That was my first question. And he said improvised. And then I said, how did you learn how to do that?

And he said, my father raised money for Jewish charities, which, so he could just imagine like, going to the Dallas and having to smooth the audience for, he grew up listening to that. So I thought that was very revelatory. Mark, this has been a pleasure of the light. And thank you for writing the book. It's a great book.

And congratulations on the publication. Thanks. Thanks again to Mark. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kagemere, Justin Davie, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartel, and Jen Poient with audio engineering from our good friends over at Ultraviolet Audio.

We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode about depression, especially how winter can affect depression with Sonia Dimidjian. That's coming up on Wednesday. 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.