Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 415: Why Self-Hatred Makes No Sense | Matthew Brensilver

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

This episode, with Matthew Brensilver, explores a compelling Buddhist question: does self-hatred, or self-love, make sense if the self is an illusion? Matthew Brensilver, PhD, is a clinical social worker and experienced teacher of meditation retreats. He also worked at an organization called Mindful Schools, which teaches teachers how to teach meditation. This episode also explores: how and why to view your anger with skepticism; the relationship between self-love and personal ethics; what to do if you think you’re a good person but have no interest in changing your behavior to get better; how to handle a nagging sense of moral un-justifiability; and how Matthew has arrived at a place of relative peace with his own mortality.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/matthew-brensilver-415 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, today, a compelling Buddhist question. Does self-hatred or self-love, for that matter, make any sense if the self is an illusion? I'm going to be chewing over that and other meaty issues with Matthew Brenn, silver PhD, who is a clinical social worker and a very experienced teacher of meditation retreats. We're also going to cover how and why to view your anger with skepticism.

The relationship between self love and personal ethics, what to do if you think you're a good person but have no interest in changing your behavior. How to handle a nagging sense of moral unjustifiability vis-a-vis your life the way you live it. And how Matthew has arrived at a place of relative peace with his own mortality. A little bit more about Matthew before we dive in here. Aside from teaching retreats at places like Spirit Rock, he's worked at an organization called Mindful Schools, which teaches teachers how to teach meditation. And as a social worker, he has worked with both adults and adolescents

with pretty severe mental health diagnoses and conditions. He's an utterly fascinating guy, and I got a lot out of this conversation. We will get started with Matthew Brenn silver right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral?

Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.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, 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.

What's up, what's up, what's up, what's up, what's up? Matthew Rensselver, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Glad to have you. So, as I understand it, you have an interest in concepts such as self-love and its opposite self-hatred. And I'm just curious, how do you think about self-love or self-hatred within the context of a tradition where it is argued that the self is an illusion in the first place.

Yeah, well, sometimes I think about the terminology. There may be a better alternative to teachings on, quote, not self. It might be that the phrase is something like not ownership or something like this. And there's a lot of confusion that seems to happen. And so rather than thinking of a kind of tension between the teachings on the illusory nature of self, the empty nature of self, and self love, I can strew it more as a kind of spectrum of the density of self.

And on one end of the spectrum, at the far end, is self-hatred, and it's kind of flip side of grandiosity and arrogance and the kind of melodrama of all of that. And that's where the sense of self is very fixated and very solid and oppressive in a way. And the movement towards not self, like includes a movement towards self-love, which is actually a much more fluid, flexible way of relating to the self. And for me, self-love is actually an expression of a certain kind of non-clinging. It's not like the some tight ideas about my greatness or something like that. That's just another expression of a kind of more dense mode of self. Self-love

is more akin to a deep understanding of oneself and a deep forgiveness for oneself, and a deep appreciation acceptance of our own limitations. And so the movement from self-hatred into self-love actually gets us closer to understanding the emptiness of self, the self that is hated is much more difficult to forget than the self that is loved. Yes, self hatred is kind of preoccupation and fixation and the self that is loved, it's so easy to forget because it's not bound up with a certain kind of vigilance and defensiveness.

And so this moves us in the direction of like to use language from the Zen tradition, forgetting the self, that famous line from Togun. So I'll see if I can recapitulate a little bit of that and you'll fact check me. Love is not the same thing as not self or not ownership of self or emptiness of self, but it is a step in that direction, in that loving yourself and your conception of love here isn't kissing the mirror or standing there hugging yourself, telling yourself how great you are and you're better than everybody else. Self-love in this sort of more capacious understanding of the word love gets you towards seeing that the self is not as real as you thought in the first place. Yeah, that's great. That's what I meant. In a way, maybe we could think of it as a kind of spectrum of how deeply we are accepting the arising of the phenomena that comprises self, you know, and

at the that far end of arrogance or self-harseness there is an incredible amount of friction and an incredible amount of resistance. And as we move towards self-love, we're really unclenching the hand of grasping, and it is closer to something like acceptance of what we perceive when we look inwards. And we continue along that same spectrum continue along that same spectrum to appreciate the more subtle aspects of the sense of I amness. One of my teachers, Shins and Young, talked about the coagulation of the sense of I amness. And as we pass through these realms of self-acceptance, of self self love, we begin to fold the elements of I amness into awareness and those two become empty. And then that realization, the kind of

emptiness of the self, it's like this actually leads us back into a deeper kind of compassion and tenderness for oneself. And so the insight into the emptiness of this self actually dramatizes the pain, the congealing of self. It dramatizes the pain of the predicament of being human. And so it then can kind of feed back into a deeper appreciation of the intensity of the human condition and the drama of being someone. And it's a tendent pain. Let me see if I can ground this in something very concrete just to help people get a toe hold here. And maybe this will work and maybe it won't. I'll talk a little bit about how this has worked for me given that my understanding is

limited and that might be a generous way to describe it. But I would say, I don't know Dan, I don't know. Okay, okay. Right, maybe false modesty is too much self-ing, so there you go. You didn't say that, but it was implied in the okay, Dan. For me, one of the biggest plot twists in my meditation practice was adding in high dosage,

meta or friendliness or loving kindness practice. I realized after doing a long retreat, a long retreat, long, you know, nine-day retreat of nothing but loving kindness practice where you're repeating these phrases, maybe happy, maybe healthy, while envisioning various beings, including yourself. I realized in the course of doing that, that my mindfulness practice, where I was supposedly viewing everything that came up in my mind with some non-judgmental remove actually had a subtle and hitherto unseen aversive flick in it. And that actually when I suffuse the mind with this art of sort of I'm using the word artificial

but it's that maybe that's unfair because you're just uncovering what's already there. But when I suffused the mind with warmth, and I was seeing whatever came up in my mind with really accepting it, that felt to me like what I might describe as self love. It wasn't an acceptance in terms of resignation. It wasn't like great.

I just saw some spasm of bigotry go down. It's more like, oh, well, that's the result of endless causes and conditions, the culture in which I grew up, the conditions in this moment, I don't need to beat myself up for it. And then the next step after seeing whatever comes up in my mind as a function of causes and conditions as the organism as Jack Cornfield likes to say as the organism just trying to protect itself

however unskilledfully the next step was to see that it also is not personal. There isn't nobody here no homunculus of Dan inside my mind, deliberately creating and tossing out these thoughts. I can't find it. It's a mysterious process with no apparent conductor. And so that, to me, is how I went from what I would call self-love of viewing whatever it comes up in my mind with some warmth to actually viewing that real self-love is to see

that there's no self at all because you're not placing any responsibility for all of the inner chaos and cacophony. Anyway, I just said a lot of words there I wasn't planning on doing that, but I did. Does any of that make any sense? Yeah, good words, good words. Yeah, I do think that speaks to what I'm intimating in this

that the insight into not self brings with it a whole raft of self forgiveness. And I like the word sometimes innocence, the kind of innocence of our being. And that comes out of really seeing dependent origination, really seeing the multi-causal nature of our being, of our thoughts, of our feelings, that what feels so intimately like me originates very much outside of anything I could call me. And that creates a certain kind of forgiveness and an understanding and also a courage to do more self-exploration. Because it means that the ego is no longer at stake in the process of seeing.

The hallmark of the ego is certain kind of defensiveness and that short circuits, the kind of defensiveness and that short circuits the kind of wild reckless investigatory nature of the meditative endeavor. And as we come to see a certain kind of innocence or the forgiveness that you describe, the centerlessness of our own being, the poignancy of our condition begins to bear down on us with more and more weight. And the possibilities for love, for self-love, for loving others, these possibilities multiply, but hatred becomes less and less tenable. And so that sense of, yeah, that there's nothing that I might discover about myself that would make self-hatred more tenable. There's nothing I could actually see that would

make a better case for self-hatred. No, I may see a lot of habits. I may see my greed, my aversion, I may see delusion, but none of that actually becomes an argument for more self-harseness. We've talked about self-love quite a bit in this conversation and its ups itself hatred, but how would you define love? Will you stop me dead in my tracks there with that even though I use the word very casually. I don't know, it's almost become a kind of placeholder for everything good in the universe, which is very poor, definitional discipline, but some people don't like that word. It's very hallmarkish or something, or it's too closely associated in some narrow way

with romantic relationship or something like this. But for me, it is a bit of a placeholder for this general softening of the heart. And it includes loving kindness and compassion, but it's not limited to those. The word that comes up for me is poignancy, just the poignancy of the human condition. And I feel that's so acutely in this phase of this moment in time, you know, with a sort of accumulating points of grief in this country. I felt that so acutely with COVID as it unfolded with George Floyd, with the undercurrent of a certain kind of authoritarian strain in American politics and culture, and so much really to grieve. And it's too much without love. It's just too much. We turn towards apathy or numbness or just rage and trying

to control all of the causes and conditions. And so for me, love, even the turn inwards to my breathing, to my body, to the kind of intensity of being human, to do that without love just seems reckless. And so there's a certain kind of convergence in my mind around the insight side of practice and the love side, you can certainly do loving kindness practice as its own discrete path, a beautiful path, as you describe doing nine days of just that. But in some ways, some other forms of love seem indispensable, just in the process of investigation of truly encountering the human condition as a manifest moment by moment. And it's not a very discursive kind of love. It's a kind of softening to the poignancy of the human condition. And that to me feels like, oh, yeah, that sort of underlies so many different aspects of practice. I'm sorry to stop you to tracks, although I guess that's a whole mark of a good question. But getting back to the definition, you said something like, I think of it as a catchphrase for all that's good in the universe. And I'm thinking, well, maybe

that is a fair definition. Maybe love is, and I've been increasingly thinking of it as, you know, anything north of neutral. It can be a common sense, friendliness that you can have for your barista, just we're sharing the same oxygen supply. I hope you're doing all right. All the way up to, you know, the string music kicks in and John Q. Zach is holding a boom box over his head, you know, in a love scene, in a movie or whatever, and everything in between. How you feel about your parents, how you feel about your kid,

how you feel about your cats and dogs, it encompasses civility, generosity, compassion, empathy, all of the, what the science is called, pro-social behavior. Why can't love just be all of that? Thank you for not rejecting my loose definition, Dan. I appreciate it. Yeah, maybe it can be all of it. That's how I think of it. That's how I think of loving kindness as it manifests in the rhythms of one's life. And those are all subtle or sometimes dramatic expressions of a certain kind of care and love and appreciation for the existential condition of ourselves as individuals and of society as a civilization. The more closely we look, the more reason we have to love.

And the more deeply we look, the less ground there is, the less tenable hatred is. And so I'm an aversion type. So if I'm going to suffer, I'm going to suffer around resisting something I don't like. That's my favorite way to suffer. And so love is important for that personality constellation, you know. And so in my own experiences of anger, of aversion potent or quite subtle, there is a kind of reminder that comes up in my mind because I tried to train in this, the reminder of like, oh yeah, that aversion that cannot end well. And it is never the last word, the hatred, the kind of divisiveness, it is never the last word, it always leaves something out. And so there's a certain kind of trust that

if I follow this thread deeper into causality, there will be less and less reason for hatred, more and more reason for love, for forgiveness, for understanding. And so in the anger, the aversion, there may sometimes be a seed of wisdom, but there is always delusion coexisting with it. So there may be a seed of understanding of anger. You know, Ruth King said anger can be initiatory, but not transformative. And what I take to understand from that is that it can signal something important.

There's a seed of wisdom in it, but it cannot be the vehicle we ride forever on. And for me, as an aversion type, I do try to remember in the arising of anger, in the arising of aversion, like, oh, there's delusion here too. Whatever clarity, there may be no clarity. There might be a seed of clarity. But for sure, there's delusion present. And the certainty of that

mind state needs to be undercut by a certain kind of skepticism. And so just to say to myself, ah, I need to look more deeply here. I know there's confusion here. I know the Dalai Lama would not have the same response to this situation that I'm having right now. I know there's more to be seen. And so we just follow that causal thread. And in my experience, just arrive at a deeper sense of love. So if somebody in your life has really pissed you off and you truly sit with it in an investigatory way,

you can get under the hatred and anger to love your saying. No, Dan, not in my life. I'm just recommending it to your listeners. No, yeah, we can do this. We can do this. It may take some time. We may have to sort of innovate in one way or another. And it's about training. It is about training ourselves because in the the mind state of a version, it's such a certain kind of mind state and it admits no ambiguity. And so we can't remember much in those moments, but I have tried to train with very unsuccessful, but I have tried to train to

remember there's more to be seen. There's more to be seen. And you can kind of sense when you're making your case against the person, yeah, whether that's a member of one's family or anybody, in making the case, one is always leaving out certain premises in the argument. You can kind of sense the mind sort of shuffling through like a sloppy lawyer kind of like shuffling through trying to hide some little bit of evidence as we make our case for the justifiability

of our aversion and you start to be more discerning and sense that like I'm leaving something out. I sort of jumped over from this premise to that premise and I left something out. But if I include that, it weakens the case for my anger. It weakens the justification. And so we just have to be rigorously honest when we see our mind cobbling together its case in that way to pause, look more deeply. And we have many experiences of just seeing the kind of folly of our aversion in the rearview mirror, sometimes only in the rearview mirror. But in the rearview mirror, it's so apparent like, oh, I really left that big piece of data out from that case, you know, and it leads us into something like care, understanding. That doesn't mean that we forget that incident entirely.

That may be important, actually, to honor what's been seen in somebody else's behavior or something like this. But we arrive at a place of deeper love than where we started. Coming up after the break, Matthew explains why you should not take your shortcomings. Some might even say your ugliness personally. And we talk about the relationship between self-love and the Buddhist concept of sila or ethical conduct. That's right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court.

I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support,

it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other, and it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. I just want to double click to use a little corporate speak there on what you said about the rearview mirror and what you said before that about how it may take some time. I don't want to leave people with the impression and I don't think you do either, but please correct me that this is, you know, easy or rapid, you know, the

getting underneath the aversion and hatred, in certain cases, that could take years, if not, lifetimes. Am I wrong about that? No, you are not wrong. And this is one of the very humbling aspects of practice that to see the depth of the kind of roots of these habits, it's humbling, it's humbling. And this is a part of why there's a kind of gradual training in this. We are training in the same way an athlete trains their body and the accumulation of skills, of strength, is often gradual. There may be some moves that we can make in the moment once that suffering

has arisen, but so much of the fruit of our practice is actually a function of this gradual training of not getting backed so deep into the karmic corner where our reactivity just feels so overpowering. And when we do get backed into that corner and it just feels like we are going to suffer, there is not one degree of freedom in this. In those moments, my aspiration is, this is humbling for sure. May it not be humiliating. Yeah. May it not be humiliating. It for sure it's humbling, it's necessary that humbling quality of practice is quite important, but humility is different than humiliation. And the humiliation is really a function of the drama of self in that moment. And so, may I take this pain, this habit, less personally, it is not a commentary on the deepest layer of my being. And in that pain, backed into that corner when nothing works, when all of my mindfulness moves do not work,

work, we're at an important our habits. And in that certain kind of surrender, it actually consolidates our motivation to practice. And it softens rather than heartends our heart. It can do that. Even in that kind of sense of abject defeat. It's just, oh, but there is a kind of opportunity for very deep kind of compassion for ourselves, and then it overflows from the bounds of our own heart to others. I think you've just brought us where I was hoping to go, but you're talking about, if I understand correctly, you know, the how our relationship with our self can impact the way we are with other people.

And that got me to the question I was hoping to ask you, which is what is the connection between the, we're now several paragraphs removed from our discussion of self-love. Again, in the broadest kind of conception of self-love. What is the connection, though, between this self-love that, as you are describing it, and our ethical stance of either world or what the Buddhists might call, Sila, S-I-L-A, which is, well, I'll let you define what that is. So there are a number of connections. My mind is moving in different directions. So one piece of it might be that the movement out of the more congealed modes of self, out of arrogance, out of self-hatred, into a deeper acceptance of self, of understanding the emptiness of self.

This is a movement away from defensiveness. And as I was saying, we could think of one of the hallmarks of ego is defensiveness. It means that we stand guard at the gates of self, kind of patrolling, visitors, VIPs, intruders, everything, yeah? And that is a very fragile way of living. That means that at any time, any person, anywhere can do something destructive to my own inner environment. my own inner environment. And the move away from some of that defensiveness into a certain kind of acceptance, love, deeper understanding, that is actually very important as we evolve ethically. We are being called, I feel, to evolve ethically. And the Buddhist path makes very clear all that we ought not do, all of the seala, the rules of training, the guidelines that lead us away from suffering rather than towards it.

The Buddhist tradition articulates what we ought not do, but it is more quiet about the positive duties we have to other people, what we ought to do, what we owe to others. And those are very egoically provocative questions I find. And this kind of sense that as we see, as we look at the country, at the world, as we have a deeper appreciation of history, of the future, of existential risk, of climate, of all of this, there's a sense of being called to grow to evolve ethically as individuals, as a species that are, are well being the well being of the civilization probably at some point will depend deeply on a certain kind of ethical evolution and gesture of love. And what I find is that I want to think of myself as a good person, but I don't really

want to change my behavior. That is a bit of a jam, you know. And we think of our ethical life as we kind of grow up and we find our commitments and then we just enact those commitments for the rest of our life, but our ethical life, we could think of its evolution as kind of wild and unpredictable and full of twists and turns, and part of the meditation practice in dramatizing the intensity of the human condition of witnessing just what it's like to have an itch on our face and want to stay still. Just what it's like to have a peen in our back, just what it's like to have our heart ache in dramatizing this. We become more sensitive to the kind of moral fabric of the universe, that wherever there is suffering,

there ought to be Siva, wherever there is suffering, there ought to be ethical commitments, and there's suffering everywhere. And so we start to perceive this, the poignancy of the human condition, and we're called to grow, to evolve ethically. And for me, I've been struck by this experience of a certain kind of moral incoherence or moral unjustifiability like my life as I live it, I perceive as less so now, but still so morally unjustifiable, the depth to which I privilege trivial pleasures and comforts in my life over the very lives of other beings, often on the

other side of the globe. Like, that induces a certain sense of moral incoherence that actually my life as I'm living it is not quite justifiable. And normally when we sense that we immediately shut down or rationalize it, explain it away. And I remember when I was in college reading in the college library in a comfortable cushy chair, and I was reading a book, Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die, that was illustrating just the degree of inequality of well-being across the globe and my privileging of trivial comforts in the face of the enormity and tractable suffering of the world. And that scrambled me and my heart in a deep way, and I've been living in a certain sense with those questions and with that sense of moral and coherence for a long time. And sometimes I've gone on autopilot around it,

sometimes it's catalyzed more clear, significant action in my life to try to think about the suffering of the world and what I owe. And this ties in with this whole realm of effective altruism, which has been very meaningful to me. And that's really the question I would say of the kind of... Those folks that I feel like they're trying to answer the question, what is the modern bodhisattva? What does compassion look like in a world

where we actually know a lot about suffering, where we know a lot about suffering that is neglected, suffering that is tractable, that can be addressed. And that, to me, kind of hangs over so much of my Buddhist practice and how I think about Sila and how I think about love and how I think about my debts to others. And as my own suffering has been diminished, I still suffer plenty, but it's been diminished in dramatic ways. There's less and less energy that's needed to tend to ones in our life. And so that frees us

up to open our eyes more completely to the world. And we see suffering and we see the absence of suffering. And that I feel leads us deeper into a commitment to meet the conditions of the world more fully. But it entails a measurement of disorientation, tolerating disorientation, because the egoic mechanisms are always scrambling to regain their footing. And so when I say something like, I wanna think of myself as a good person, and I don't wanna change my behavior,

that will tend to induce a sense of a certain kind of dissonance or something, and we'll feel a little disoriented, and to actually tolerate that in this realm of ethical evolution in our own understanding of difference, of racial difference, other forms of difference, the tolerating disorientation feels quite important. And our Dharma practice is indispensable in that, because we actually get more comfortable amidst the free fall, amidst the ego, all the kind of familiar reference points

not being there in the same way. And that will tend to generate a certain kind of panic and scramble to reestablish ground, but no, it's safe to fall. It's safe to take the backward step and fall into a certain disorientation. And so it's one of the threads of connection that occurs to me. You mentioned the effective altruists. This is a group of people, perhaps the most famous proponents. This young man, Will McCaskill is a philosopher, I believe it. Oxford or Cambridge, one of them.

I think so, yeah. Yeah, and he bases much of his work, or at least some of his work on the philosopher, Peter Singer, who quite famously talked about with apologies to everybody involved here. It might be mangling one about to say, but Peter Singer, I believe, talked about how, you know, spending on ourselves to live high while others die is a bit like walking by a pond where there's a drowning child and not wanting to save the child because you don't want to get your suit dirty or something like that. And Will has argued that, you know, since we know $2,500 will save a life in a malaria prone country,

it's very hard if not impossible to justify spending $2,500 on anything beyond your basic needs, given that you're essentially walking by a drowning child. I think I'm restating that view correctly. And so given that, where do you, Matthew, fall in your day-to-day life vis-a-vis something like a latte?

Do you allow yourself any measure of living high? For sure. Not a latte. The effect of altruism, they're always vegans, you know, and the vegans got to me and convinced me. So no lattes, but yes, plenty of indulgences. I think in some ways, the question of where does it stop? What's the threshold?

It's a reasonable question, but we do have the intuitive sense like, oh, more could be done. I can do more. And what does that mean? And so I have tried to live with that sense of moral incoherence and its spurred action for me. You know, I do still have the equivalent of lattes all the time, and not living profoundly renunciate life or something like this. But we know that we can do more. And you mentioned Will, Macas, and some of these folks. And the movement has a very, somebody called like a group of fussy nerds

that was somehow somebody described it. And that's fair enough. There is a lot of kind of rigorous analytic thinking and quantitative kind of efforts. But at the heart of it is love, at the heart of it is love. And for some reason, I was in some kind of random lottery drawing, and I won a session with Will McCaskill, and I was on a Skype with him, and he's a serious philosopher, but just in seeing his face, they're on Skype, I started crying because I could sense

that this is somebody who is asking the question of what it is to be a bodhisattva. He would never put it in that language, I don't think, but to me it is, this is like what is the modern bodhisattva. He would never put it in that language I don't think, but to me it is, this is like what is the modern bodhisattva? And I think that can take a lot of forms, but for me, the most important piece is that it lures the heart into deeper commitment, maybe a little bit more renunciation, a little bit more commitment to caring for the welfare of others. For those who don't know what a bodhisattva is, can you define it? Yeah, well, it's not even language from my tradition of insight meditation, in which I've been trained exactly. But what I take it to me in is the deep abiding, almost relentless commitment to the welfare of others

and to make one's heart and one's practice and one's life of benefit for all that we encounter. And it's really quite a radical commitment. And I've had opportunities to take a bodhisattva vow or something like this. And I haven't because I don't know what that would do to my life exactly. And there's a sense of, I'm not quite ready to give informed consent to that depth of commitment, you know, even though I'm in training, I feel like I'm in training and I'm trying. And what's that? There's that expression Lord make me cased, but just not yet. That's right. Exactly. But it's part of like, okay, if we're

going to take a vow, that is no joke to tie one's heart in that way. It's a kind of, it's a performative utterance. It's words that do something. They actually do something to our heart, to our lives. And when I'm really ready, because I don't know how much that might reconfigure my life. When I'm ready, I'll take it, I'll take it, you know, but in the meantime, let us do what we can. Coming up, I ask Matthew about a quip of his that I really like. He has said, how your meditation practice is going is none of your business.

What does that mean? We're also going to talk about how he has arrived at a point of general okeness with his own mortality. That and more right after this. What's your favorite song? This latte question, I know you were using latte as standard. I love latte, I love latte. Anyway, this latte question is a pretty profound self-love conundrum because on the one

hand, I think you can make a case that's certain amount of harmless, let's say, or quote, unquote, harmless or seemingly harmless indulgence, you know, is part of self-love taking care of yourself so that you can be more available to take care of other people. On the other hand, I think a very enlightened view of self love would see that there's so much joy and flourishing to be had from serving other people that why wouldn't you help yourself to as much of that as possible. So this question of how high do we live while others die? Is this not an easy puzzle? It's not easy. It's not easy. And I want to be careful about being too idealistic. There's a way in which in the Buddhist world, we can get to caught up on certain ideals and that tends to cause the kind of a ratio of certain elements of our own experience. I want to be careful about maintaining fidelity to what it's actually like. We really do want that latte,

you know, and I don't want to minimize that. And I think the point you're making, and it's a refrain from somewhere in the effect of altruism movement, if you passed a burning building today and you just kicked down the door and rescued a couple people and brought people to safety, that would be among the most meaningful or maybe the most meaningful day of your life or certainly your year. And it would be a cardinal event. And we're actually offered that opportunity. Yeah, it's just the mechanisms of empathy and the proximal effects of suffering right here rather than distant

that makes the example seem different, but at a moral level they're really not different. That said, I do believe it still leaves plenty of room for plenty of room for delighting in one's good fortune and enjoying the kind of pleasures on offer and taking good care of oneself. The main point for me is not going unconscious around the questions and just living with that question. And then you see how does that catalyze changes in one's own behavior? And that just that sense of almost a certain kind of like wonder for the evolution of our own ethical being. Like how might I grow? It's not a static thing where we just follow the precepts or something. It's like, how might my ethical being be transformed

in the same way as that other aspects of myself is transformed by practice? In our remaining time here, I want to digress pretty radically, if not maybe abruptly too, but so with apologies, I want to ask some maybe unrelated questions here every episode somebody prepares for me a, I guess we call it a prep doc or a preparation document. And this one was prepared by our producer DJ Kashmir who has recently gone on a meditation retreat with you, Matthew. And he mentioned in the prep doc,

a few things that you said on that retreat, they were compelling to me that I thought, I would enjoy just hearing you unpack them a little bit. So the first was you were talking to the people on this retreat where DJ was a retreatant. And I think you were talking to people about this tendency that many of us have, I have this in a big way way to play what Joseph Goldstein calls the practice self-assessment

tapes where you were just obsessing on how am I, if I do it right, how am I doing, how far am I getting in my bout to realize Nirvana, whatever. And you said to the group something pretty compassionate, which is how your retreat is going is none of your business, which I love. And I wonder if you could explain it and also explain whether it could apply to our daily meditation practice as well, because a lot of us, a lot of people listening will never actually do a retreat. of our mind keep us so compulsively oriented to past and future and then the present feels like it sandwiched between those two. And we're sort of always trying to gauge the trajectory of this moment.

Where is it going? Where is it going? Is it going towards goodness or away from goodness? Is it going towards what I want or away from what I want? And that is very much bound up in our is a kind of down payment on some future moment. And this moment, the present is almost like a canary in the coal mine of the future. Yeah, so we're just like really vigilant. Is this okay? is everything okay? Like are all the parameters okay here? And that gets recapitulated in practice, right? And so it's like I take one breath, one mindful breath, and then I want to ask myself the question, Matthew, are you more concentrated? ask myself the question, Matthew, are you more concentrated? How's this going, right? And on retreat in the context of retreat,

where there's less friction in the mind, and it can really go in different directions, we get even more compulsive about asking, like, where does this moment point? Yeah, is this working? Am I accruing whatever I'm meant to accrue? Am I doing it right? Is this enough?

And so that kind of notion of just one of my teachers, Michelle McDonald's, at one point, said, it sounds so not meditative. But she said something like, you clock in and you clock out. Yeah. You just do your practice. And sometimes I've thought of the analogy that in lifting weights, if I were lifting weights, doing reps to improve the strength of my bicep, I would not after doing a rep look over to my bicep and have a kind of heart to heart of how it's going. Am I getting stronger?

How was that rep? It would much more be like, well, a certain kind of surrender to just the practice itself, the exercise. I just did that rep. And we so privilege the kind of what is accessible to us in consciousness, the sort of top layer of the mind, and especially the balance of it. Is it pleasant or unpleasant? And we use that as the barometer for the entirety of our practice. for the entirety of our practice. And that is just another one of our weird preoccupations. It's so natural, but it's like, no, let's let us just do our practice. Let us just do it. And then at some point, we sort of have that metacognitive awareness to appreciate what has happened, what has grown, what we've let go of,

what we haven't. And we can do that at a reasonable cadence, but it's definitely not after each breath. Yeah. And so let us just, this gesture of surrendering and it's almost unbelievable. How intense the human condition is. We cannot believe it just to pay attention to the breath and just to see the ways were bombarded by sensory events. It's unbelievable. And so we are always assessing the trajectory of it, but it's actually not so useful at various points and people's practice. And so, yeah, let it be not our business and let us just keep going with our sincerity, with our awareness, with our wisdom. I love that. The other thing you said on this retreat per DJ, I don't know if he's a reliable

historian. So, yeah, I'm't know if he's a reliable historian. So, you know, I'm sure DJ is very reliable, but I'm always afraid when people quote me back because I'm like, what did I say? And maybe I'm going to be totally mortified by what I said in one context or another, but I'm ready, Dan. Go ahead, him. He what did I say? Well, it's interesting you use the term mortified

because I'm going to ask about death. Per DJ, you made some comment that was in the neighborhood of you're having after all of these years of practice, a significantly reduced fear of death. Would that be an accurate restatement of what you allegedly said on this retreat? I think, yeah, death has become much less imposing. There's still fear for sure. And we don't really know how afraid we are until it's happening. But I do feel like practice has engendered a certain sense of completion in my life,

that my life has been complete. And do I want more? Absolutely. Do I want to die now? Absolutely not. But there is a sense of whatever else comes is gravy, you know, and that it was enough. And that's a reasonable question to ask, like, what makes life feel like enough? And otherwise we kind of wind up just wanting, always wanting more, but even 500 or a thousand years wouldn't feel like enough, actually. And so what creates a certain sense of completion in our life. And death has a very hallowed position in the kind of pantheon of Buddhist practice and reflections. And for me, just my own experience, family conditioning, I really feel like in ways I've been feeling conscious for a long time, feeling like I was dying from very young, yeah. Like not in a kind of anxious way, but just the sense of the weight of mortality, of my own, of everyone I love, that was a very acute sense from quite early on. And a sense that

probably in some ways I got into practice and got it hooked into my heart because I had the intuitive sense that I was utterly unprepared to die and to lose people I love. That the enormity of that was such that it was almost unimaginable that that could be absorbed in a heart, not destroy my heart. And as a result, I feel in some ways, we don't know why we get into practice or why we keep going exactly, but at some level, it was and is an attempt

to address the truth of mortality and to prepare for that and to live in such a way that life feels whole, that it feels complete. Yeah, that's what's arising in me now. What is the mechanism of practice that would allow you to feel like the rest of your life is gravy, you're playing with the house's money, life feels complete? I think it's about exploring the many chambers of the mind. And I think it's about love. I think it's about some sense of having deeply explored the human condition, the possibilities for well-being, for like very deep peace. It's about love.

It's about, you know, when I volunteered in hospice some years ago, and so few things matter at the end of one's life, but the legacy of love. It's about the only thing that matters from what I could see. And if it wasn't there, there was nothing I could do actually often to support it, to support a better death. And there was a kind of sort of haunting realization of like, oh, I better love the well. You know, I better be real careful with how I live, because that kind of legacy is going to be what is most salient in the mind at that time of death if I'm conscious. So loving ourselves deeply, just a deep appreciation for all of our strength and goodness and all our foibles and limitations, loving others in sustained

relationships of growing and being nourished by the love of others, and then loving widely, you know, very broadly, radically, for those who will never meet, meet actually to know the boundlessness, the measurelessness of love, which I take to mean that there's nothing on the other side of it. There's nothing outside the threshold of it. It's like that radical. And we can know these experiences in our own practice. We can know the sense of nothing but love, just the mind pervaded by it. Not this kind of amalgamated state. It's just there's nothing but love. And that leaves a kind of impression on our heart, even amidst the intensities of daily life amidst the aversion, amidst the anger, amidst frustration, that serves as a kind of north star, that sort of radical, expansive love is our birthright,

that is possible even for a very ordinary person, like myself, that's possible to know that. And this makes life feel more complete and more ready to let go for that final time, more ready to let go for that final time, all the training in letting go of unclenching, the fist of grasping. As I think Steve Armstrong used that phrase, like unclenching that fist, we've practiced that a million times, just sitting or in our life, and then I imagine the end of our life is the kind of grand surrender of control, of ownership.

So I don't practice with it in a very explicit way of contemplating it very actively in a rigorous technique oriented way, but it's just everywhere in practice too. That's pretty rousing send off here. I think you give all of us, especially those of us, which I have suspicion it's most of us who haven't tasted what you've described. It's a good motivating sentiment to get us to keep putting our butts on the cushion. Before I let you go, can I get you to plug if you're comfortable, you know, any resources that you've put out into the world where people can learn more about you

if not maybe even contact you? I have a website that just MatthewBren dot org my full name dot org and that has recordings and links to dharma seed and audio dharma places where there are talks that are freely available. So people are welcome to that of course. Thank you, Matthew. It's a pleasure to meet you and thanks for coming on. Thanks so much. Yeah. Big thanks to Matthew Brinselver. Thank you as well to all the folks who work incredibly hard

to make this show a reality. They include Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davie, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Plant. We also get our audio engineering from the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus guided meditation with Diana Winston. Hey, hey prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today,

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