Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 478: Why You Keep Repeating Painful Patterns | Radhule Weininger

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

We all have long-standing painful patterns of behavior or inner storylines that can cause us to react disproportionately or inappropriately to everyday events.  Today's guest, Dr. Radhule Weininger, has a term for this. She calls them longstanding recurrent painful patterns or LRPPs. Weininger is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and teacher of Buddhist meditation and Buddhist psychology. She has a new book, Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom—at Last In this episode we talk about:How to recognize a problematic pattern or when you’ve been “lrpp-ed”Why Dr. Weininger believes that Buddhism and western psychology, when practiced together, can help us deal with these recurring patternsUnpacking the word traumaThe psychological term “mismatch” and how it relates to childhood trauma or hurtHow to practice meditation in order to tolerate discomfortFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/radhule-weininger-478See 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, everybody. We all have longstanding, painful patterns of behavior, long running inner storylines, ancient mental habits that can cause us to react disproportionately or inappropriately, as they sometimes say in psychological circles, if it's hysterical, it's historical. My guest today has a term for this.

She calls it longstanding recurring painful patterns, or LRPPs, or she calls them in a word that's not very malifluis, but it's kind of funny. Lurps. Dr. Radley-Waninger is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and a teacher of Buddhist meditation and Buddhist psychology. She has a new book called Heart Medicine, How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom at Last. In this conversation, we talked about how to recognize a problematic pattern or when you've been lirped. Why Dr. Waninger believes that Buddhism and Western psychology, when practiced together,

can help us deal with these recurring patterns. Unpacking the oft-used word these days, trauma, the psychological term mismatch and how it relates to childhood trauma or hurt, and how to practice meditation in order to tolerate discomfort. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that

will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer.

I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. 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. Dr. Roddly Wantinger, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. All right, let's start here. What is a LERP? LERP is a longstanding recurrent painful pattern. And this term came out of a discussion with my mentor, Jack Cornfield. We actually talked about it for probably two decades.

And we talked about complexes, some scurvas, clashes, those patterns that are there in our psyche and that get triggered, but that lead back way into our childhood or maybe even further. And Jack asked me one day, could you find a new word for it? Because complexes are kind of old fashioned. He thought nobody knows anymore what a complex is. And so I came up with long standing, with current painful patterns. And then he said, oh, this is quite long.

And then I said, how about lurp? And because it's like an unomar to pay, it feels like it sounds, you get lurped, you get slimed. You know, it's something that glitches over you. And I noticed with my students and clients that they really love the lurp, you know, they started using it. Even some of my colleagues are now using that word. So I thought, hmm, maybe that's good. And then my Shambhala editor liked it. So I stuck with it. Yeah, it sounds like a bad person from a kid's movie. Just to double back for a second, you used some Buddhist terms there when you were talking about complexes. You also mentioned

some Buddhist words. Can you define those Buddhist terms just so people don't get lost? terms just so people don't get lost. I think I used the word samskara or shankara, which is pali and which are patterns that are in our mind stream. Buddhist belief that there is something before and after we are born like a mind essence, you might say, what does it do from our life that goes from lifetime to lifetime. And so, even though Jung and Freud thought that these patterns are from our childhood, Buddha think, well, they're even way older. They might have gone through lifetimes. And whoever knows, I just think we all just know that they're very old. So, to be clear, I don't need to believe in rebirth in order to know that I've got some lurps lurking.

Not at all. They lurk anyhow. I think it does help though to know that they are old. Because you know, if you just stay in the present moment, like we do when we talk about mindfulness, moment by moment, non-judgmental attention, which is John Kabat's definition, we could say, well, why not just deal with those triggers in the present moment? But it seems many of us don't feel quite understood by that. You know, oh, there is something deeper going on than just the moment by moment dealing with it. And even though

the moment by moment dealing, noticing, the arising, the falling away, is very, very important and that's how we work with them in the present moment. It is helpful to notice, oh, I have this pattern here. For example, I might have a pattern for my childhood around abandonment or rejection. And so when something like that happens in the present moment, I often feel like more than I should trigger it. My emotions are bigger, my body sensations are bigger, and I wonder why am I so out of source? Why does this last four days and sit in my body? So then it actually does help me at least

to not follow in the past, you know, not start a cycle analysis, but to kind of tag it, oh, that's that one. No wonder I feel that way. And then we can feel a sense of compassion for this lookness in ourselves. You raised an interesting point there, I think there's sometimes, perhaps, attention between the mindfulness slash Buddhist approach to difficult stuff in our minds. And a psychoanalytical approach, the former, the Buddhist slash mindfulness approach really

focuses on what's happening right now. Right. And the psychoanalytical or psychological approach would be looking, you know, for example, at your childhood. And so it sounds like you're trying to marry the two. Mm-hmm. And you know, I don't think I'm the only one. You know, you might have noticed that at least he and spirit walk.

A lot of the teachers are also psychologists or marriage family therapists or have quite a bit of psychological training. So I think we have weisened up here in the West that we need both. I think in the past when I started 1980, there was this big deep gouch between the two camps. I remember I started therapy gosh yeah well 1982, I started therapy and meditation basically at the same time. And so it was like one hand didn't know what the other one was doing.

And I for myself felt no they belong together, belong together. You know, we need both. I need to know what happened, talk about it, feel it, understand it, which more the psychodynamic or many other psychological approaches would do. And also, there is this process that we need to just see for what it is. It is a process of arising and passing through. And in a way that was missed by the psychodynamic folks who thought, well, if we just talk enough again and again and again about what our mother's did or father's or whoever,

what happened then somehow this makes unconscious conscious and we can move on in our merry ways. But that didn't see that there was like an habitual pattern of behaving that had developed. And that we actually also need this process approach of mindfulness to work with these patterns and these strong feelings when they come up. Does that make sense to you? It makes a lot of sense. And let me just pick up on your mention of these patterns. Do all of us have lurps and what causes them?

Well, you know, I don't know each and every person, but I might say I haven't seen anybody without a lurch. They might be hiding somewhere, but I haven't met them yet. So I suspect that most people have some lurchs and some of them are smaller and some of them are bigger. And some of them are smaller and some of them are bigger. And at least from a psychological lens, they do a rise in our childhood. And that doesn't mean they are not also there in a past life or in whatever there is beforehand. And so we don't know, you know,

I think I'm a little bit agnostic there. My mind can't wrap around what exactly is happening there, can only have assumptions. But I think, for example, if we were treated a certain way as children, if there's a pattern of fear or anger of being left out, of being not seen, of being treated badly, that then often repeats itself. That often is very frustrating for people. It's a sense of deja vu. Why am I here again? Why do I have these old feelings again? And why do these old feelings really throw me, of course, one of my actually psychoanalysts friends said it's if we hit a complex or a lurb, it's like if we put our finger into an electric outlet, you know, we get this shock.

And you know, there are different gradations of being shocked. So I think at the core of a Lurb is trauma. And so whether this trauma is in this life or in another life, we don't know, probably in both. If there was something in a past life, it probably will reappear in our childhoods. But that's just a guess. Let me pick up on your mention of the word trauma because this is a word that my team and I talk about a lot because I sometimes worry that of course the word trauma is going to be deeply, unfortunately, resonant for many, many people. But for me personally, it's not. And I don't think I'm alone in this. And so when I was reading up on you and I saw that your argument was that

lurps are based in trauma, I was wondering, well, huh, I don't believe I had any childhood trauma, at least as I understand that term, which, let me just leave the door open for me misunderstanding the term because there's plenty of precedent for that. So I'm just curious, are these lurps always based in trauma? And what do you mean by trauma? Right. And I think, you know, the understanding of trauma has changed over time, and you are very right to say that maybe the term is overused. It's like every person who feels

somebody else looks at them the wrong way, feel traumatized, you know. So definitely one has to be careful with that. Maybe we should rather say a heart, a deep heart to the heart or the soul. And many people do have that. And it doesn't have to be just that you had a parent die or you were physically or sexually abused or there are parents, for example, of not being recognized for who we are in our family. So maybe our parents just had a certain idea of what kind of child they wanted and didn't see who we were.

And if we were sensitive little critters, then that can be painful. And I don't know if that would qualify as trauma, but it's definitely hurtful. Does that make sense? Yeah, it absolutely does. Just to add an example, and let me see if providing this example proves that I've understood or the opposite. I was once in the couples counseling with my wife and this incredible couples counselor we're working with. By the way, his name is Michael Vincent Miller, fantastic human. Was asking us both about our childhoods in one of the early sessions. And let me step back and say that one of the reasons why he was probing my childhood is we were trying to figure out to get to the

root of one of my weak spots, which is that I can be a little, as it's been called, emotionally guarded. And he was trying to figure out, like, what were my parents like? And my parents were ex-hippies, super warm, always encouraging me to voice my opinions and talk about my feelings. And I was sort of musing aloud about how I can,

I don't think it was at home. And then I realized, actually, you know, when I went to junior high, I encountered a kind of masculinity that was very harsh. There was a lot of bullying. And I think I shut down around that period. And it lasted for a long, long time. And so to me, that's, I don't know if I would call it a trauma,

but it was a kind of wound or hurt or a tricky experience that ramified throughout the years. Well, just to take that example, I could also imagine two things. One thing is I had quite a few clients whose parents were hippies or ex-hippies, and sometimes those circumstances felt a little chaotic. And then they, as a reaction became more uptight or they felt that their parents kind of touchy-feeliness wasn't preparing them, let's say, for the roughness of junior high school.

So, you know, sometimes it's just what we call it. It's actually a beautiful word and psychology and mismatch. You know, it's not that something really was done wrong. There was something mismatched. And, you know, sometimes we just have children who seem oddly matched with their parents. And it's nobody's fault, really. They just don't get each other. We don't necessarily have to have somebody to blame. There is just a mismatch. The key doesn't fit into the hole.

It doesn't connect. And that can be a chronically alienating experience. So you are right. We shouldn't overuse the word trauma and maybe hurt us a better word. Well, I don't want to dwell too long on being personality about language, nor do I want to dwell too long on my own personal story, other than to say that my house was not, I wish it was a more chaotic, my parents pretty strict. They went from being hippies to being academic physicians,

so they were pretty buttoned up. Anyway, so let's get to the core contention of your book, which is that to use your term here, freedom is possible. And you outline 12 steps. So if you're cool that I would love to take a spin through these steps one by one, how does that sound? That sounds really good. Okay, so step number one will be familiar to anybody who knows anything about the 12 steps, which is recognizing what's going

on, recognizing your lurch. Can you say a little bit about how we could go about seeing our patterns? Often when we get lurched, slimed, however we might imagine it, we feel out of control, you know, it just feels what is going on. And so when we can put a name to it, without self-pity, just as recognizing that feels often like a relief. Oh, that's what it is. You know, somebody disinvites me from a birthday party and my older band-in-run fears come up. I can say, yeah, you know, I understand that I reacted that way because that is actually an old thing for me to be excluded or something like that. But how to recognize, or something like that. But how to recognize? First, I think we recognize often in our bodies.

You know, I think everybody is a little different, but most people I would say recognize in their body that something is off. You know, there's a tightness in the chest. There's a little bit like a fist in the stomach. There might be, you know, our jaw suddenly becomes rigid, we feel hot or cold, we feel like a lot of energy or too much energy when we get really angry. There is something happening in the body and the more we can just be with the felt sense of what is. There's already a little bit of groundedness in that. And the next one would be stronger motions. Like again, the disinviting from a birthday party to notice, oh yeah, anger.

There is again, like in mindfulness, anger rising, anger falling away. There it is. But also, oh, it's a big anger. And it's an anger, maybe that seems like a little bit too much. Or we get spooked, afraid, maybe a little bit more than we would expect. Or we get really down, there is this mood, often there is this mood that just comes over a person and that just doesn't leave for a while. That mood is often a really good sign that we have gotten lurbed. And also rumination when our mind goes in circles and we wake up at three in the morning, our

mind is churning and all the worst thoughts are coming up again and again. And you know that we are different. You know, some people tend to more to ruminate, others feel things very strongly in their bodies, others get very quickly emotional or all of the above. Then there are certain what we call PTSD symptoms, trauma symptoms, like a bit of dissociation, feeling suddenly removed, or a bit of tunnel vision. So that might be a sign or a generalisation. Maybe one thing is going wrong, you know, our car breaks down and we feel the world is going apart. That often happens. Or one person is mean to us and then we think all people are mean. And I think this can happen especially nowadays,

where the background field of the world is a bit inflamed. We have gone through COVID, there's a war in the background, this climate change, looming with a quite uncertain future. So I think that often brings up those lurbs that people have, around like of safety, unpredictability, and so it can much easier happen that people are less resilient, that they bounce back a lot less fast. And that's something I have been seeing a lot recently and amongst my clients and students. Does that make it clear though to you?

It does, and I think I really resonate with this kind of satisfaction that one can feel when one sees a pattern clearly. And all of those techniques that you just referenced from mindfulness to noticing that you're generalizing, for example, or the more trauma-based symptoms like the tunnel vision, those are all really helpful. But I could imagine noticing all of that, but not actually being able to pinpoint what was it in my past that set all of this in motion. I'm 50 and only now I'm my seeing certain things about my various problematic patterns. So it's not necessarily easy to do.

Yeah, it's not easy to do, but I think especially if we go through the body, where does this feeling of nausea in the tummy or that feeling of feeling like a monkey sitting in our back, or the sense of tightness around our head, like a tight metal bend, or something like that? And if we go back to where do we know that from? I find many people can relate to that. Maybe not everybody, but maybe we do need to be encouraged to look back, because I think often we are kind of wanting to be practical and get it

over with. Maybe I should just move on, turn the TV on, look at my devices, get my glass of whiskey, whatever we are doing, right? To distract ourselves when we feel the sense of discomfort. But then often if we are used to, at that point, distracting ourselves. And I think, do you remember that Buddha's cycle of life, the cycle of becoming? And I think it is at Vedana, at the feeling tone, pleasant, unpleasant neutral, that there is a chance to change once karma, you might say. When we realize, oh yeah, really uncomfortable. And so then you can just say, oh, okay, just deal with it mindfully And so then you can just say, okay, just deal with it mindfully or distract ourselves, which many more people do, or we can put a hand on our heart and say, well, let's see what's really going on.

And the thing is, when we do see what's really going on, especially, let's say, resting in the felt sense of it, then there is a certain calming down. Being in the felt sense of the body and resting there, being able to tolerate our feelings without valuing in them. No self-pity, just being with. Then the rumination actually comes down considerably. It's quite amazing. Let me press you on this just gently, because I completely agree and have had the experience many times of noticing I'm freaking out about one thing or another. And instead of reaching for whiskey or Netflix or whatever, sometimes I wise up and just sit with it

for a little while. The turning into it is actually soothing in a surprising way. However, I don't know that that would bring me to an answer about what exactly my Lurp or problematic pattern is and what caused it. exactly my lurper problematic pattern is and what caused it. I guess you said two moves. We don't have to each time we experience something,

come back to the pattern. But so many of us have the sense of deja vu. Why is this happening again? And then if that is the case, then it might be worthwhile to sit down. You know, why am I again feeling left out or excluded or why I'm also ending up in situations where I'm in this dire competition with somebody. Then it might be worthwhile to look because otherwise we can become sitting

ducks to our lurbs. And I guess that's how it happened for me. I felt a bit like a sitting duck to my lurb. I had an experience in my childhood which my mother, who by the way also was a doctor, had me out of wedlock, you know, 1957 in Germany, Bavaria, Catholic family, and so she hit me in this orphanage for two years and then presented me as adopted, which was more face saving, I guess, in post-war Germany. And then my relatives were rather dismissive.

Nobody quite knew where I was from. And so those patterns of not fitting quite in or not being seen or a bit of abandonment and rejection and 25 years of therapy later, I definitely put my time in. But they are still situations, you know, where I feel a bit of rejection or abandonment or you know, left outness or something. And it actually does help me to know, yeah, I have this, let's say vulnerability in my system and to be compassionate with that. I think that's an important one.

Then I can move on. I don't get stuck there. Then I don't fall into the portal, you might say. Or maybe I fall into the portal for a little bit, but I recover quicker. I guess that's what I realized. I'm not perfectly sparkly, unaffected now, but I recover a lot quicker. That's a huge deal. So let's keep moving through these steps. Step one was recognizing your lurch. We may have touched on or you may have touched on step two,

which is being mindful of body thoughts and feelings. But please say more if there's more to be said. Well, these are the basic mindfulness skills to notice. Oh, yeah, thinking. You know, I'm thinking here. And yeah, anger arising, anger falling away. I just love it. How Jack Cornfield always says it was this very sweet voice. Oh, anger, anger, anger arising falling away.

And, you know, in, anger, anger, arising and falling away. And in some ways, it changed my relationship to anger, to just see it as this passing phenomenon. So maybe that's what's important to say about that, and also to know that there's always change. Nothing stays. If we just be with it for a while, then it changes all by itself. And I think that is a really important Buddhist truth. You know, I started in Sri Lanka in 1980. They always said, everything is perishable. I think that's very relieving. Especially so once you get it molecularly, because it's one thing to hear everything changes

and I think intellectually, it's hard to argue with that. But the more we do what you're recommending, which is being mindful of what there is to be mindful of your body, your thoughts, your feelings, you see on a sub-intellectual but powerful level that every, yeah, there's no ground to stand on here. And that can be a source of relief. It is. It's a big relief, you know.

It's like everything changes, even the worst situations. And that's really important. And then that leads, I think, if you look at the cycle there, to compassion, compassion to ourselves and to others, because we all are caught in this human condition. As humans, we are kind of wired in a, you might say, strange way. Sometimes, humans are interesting and strange creatures who create a lot of trouble and hurt for each other as we see in the world just looking at the news. And so having a bit of compassion for this human condition, whether it is in ourselves

or in others, and having a bit of compassion for our lyrdness. And again, it's not self-pity and compassion for others. It's not condoning wrongdoing or whitewashing is just seeing, wow, we are actually just humans and that's quite important. Coming up, Dr. Rwineger talks about the difference between longing and intention. And she talks about the practice of asking yourself a question and then making space and time, maybe in meditation, for an answer to emerge, which has actually sometimes worked quite well for me. So we'll talk about that 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 Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wunderys New Podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud, from the buildup, why it happened, and the 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 Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears when Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship Jamie Lynn's lack of public support angered some fans a lot of them it's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed

to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So you just covered steps three and four, three being seeing your lurch with self-compassion, four being healing complex suffering with compassion for all. And I guess that leads me to the question, well, how do you develop self-compassion and other compassion? I would say there are two ways. There is a teravan in the Mahayana way and I love both. And let me explain that from mindfulness, traditional mindfulness point of view, we cultivate compassion with meta-practices, you know, wishing ourselves well, wishing ourselves to be safe, wishing ourselves to be free. It's very effective and you know,

I've worked for decades with these practices and I love them. However, they still come from our prefrontal cortex. You know, they are still kind of coming from our manager mind that focuses. So as we get more in the Tibetan form practices, where we rest in a wider field of awareness, which has the elements of spaciousness and of knowing and of love you might say, which is quite interesting that that's where we end up when we really go deep into meditation, then also the compassion in a way that's compassion with the great sea can come from that place. Compassion is already there. If we just allow ourselves to touch into it. So there is the compassion that we cultivate. And I think there's both. It's not one or the other. I think it's both really wonderful and necessary. However, the compassion that is still you might say ego-based can lead to burnout.

We see that in many healthcare workers now doing COVID. My husband is a hospice palliative care doctor. You know, it's like what we gave several in-services for the whole hospital because there is just so much burnout. People are just burning out right and left. And so if we make the container a little bigger, we can rest in that. Then compassion is boundless. Then it's just there. And that was an experience I had in Sri Lanka actually, And that was an experience I had in Sri Lanka actually, in this teravatton monastery. Maybe I was just really ready for sitting that after a few weeks or a state a few months,

I just got into this place of deep quiet and being kind of in the field. As I learn now from the more pointing out instructions. And I didn't know what would happen if I go deeper and deeper and deeper into meditation. As opposed to what German I was wondering, is there maybe original terror? What is there? You know, I didn't know what I would find if I would actually become really quiet and really just rest in this field of awareness. And for me, the surprising thing was that there was actually a sense of wellness and ease and fullness. And you might say, love. And I think many people have that experience

after long retreats. Let me see if I can state some of this back to just to make sure I've got it. So the TeraVada approach, TeraVada being old school Buddhism is often taught in the form of the Brahma, Vihara's, the divine ebodes, which sounds a little grandiose, but it's actually quite in my experience, practical and doable and has been studied quite a bit in the labs, where

you envision various people or beings and repeat phrases like, maybe happy or maybe free from suffering. That you describe, if I recall, as a little bit cognitive or ego-based, by comparison, the later schools of Buddhism, including the Tibetan school, would have you get deep into a state of meditation where you see that there's this compassion within us all the time, this love that's within us all the time, no development needed. It's just there, and you can tap into that. And I think you are arguing for a combination of these two approaches. That's right. And I don't think that the teravod and approaches just cognitive. There's

definitely deep feeling, but it still comes from me to you. But I would love to see coming together of those approaches. Is the latter approach available to people who don't have the time or the resources to go on a long retreat? Yes, actually, I find that it's the beautiful aspect of that. I think those Tibetan practices until recently were quite hidden, you know, hard to get. They're still a little bit hard to get and Tibetans put a lot of stipulation, like 250,000 prostrations, or, you know, you had to have a certain teacher, but it seems now, and maybe it's timely for where we are in the world, the cat is kind of crawling out of the bag,

or I would say it has crawled out of the bag. And I studied for six years with Dan Brown, who teaches those pointing out practices. And I think Lock Kelly is also a clinical social worker, but he teaches them in a fairly simple way. and Klokelli is also a clinical social worker, but he teaches them in a fairly simple way. And what I liked about it, and I do both. I'm a both-end kind of a person.

In the past, I felt I had to wait for my 10-day fall retreat and spring retreat, which had it for years, or maybe a four-week retreat, which had it for years, you know, or maybe a four-week retreat, to have the sense of well-being, bliss, luminosity in the end for maybe two, three days, or maybe four days for was really lucky. And then I would have to wait for the fall or the spring to go back. And those pointing out instructions allow us to have those experiences in our morning meditation or maybe through glimpses during the day. And I think there has been a little bit of a worry that those practices which are very powerful could be used as an escape.

You know, goodbye world here. I'm gone, you know, have your messiness by yourself. So I think if you bring all those practices, the teravans, the Mahayana, the Vajrayana, whatever they are, in a secular and easily accessible way, back to help us as humans right now to make our world better. So that as journalists or activists or whatever we are, you know, healthcare providers, mothers, fathers, teenagers that we don't burn out. Because what I see so much is people kind of shutting down. I teach a lot of meditation and in our Monday night group there are a whole bunch of UCSB graduate students. And we talk about meaning, about self-actualization on how to be in this world at this time.

And it's hard for young people. You know, we see that in the increased suicide rate and mental health problem rate. And so I think we need any well working practice we can get to help us hold our vits and our ability to be useful and compassionate in the situation. Let's move on to step five, which is creating mindfully. useful and compassionate in the situation. Let's move on to step five, which is creating mindfully. There's a colon there, creating mindfully colon,

setting clear intention and dedicated motivation. What does that mean? Well, in Buddhist practice, intention always has been important. I remember Jack quoting that phrase, I think it's probably from a wise person to say, intention leads to behaviors, behaviors, create habits. Habits has something to do with the forming of our personality and our personality often leads to our destiny. Yes, there are things happening from the outside, but definitely the inside has something to do with it. And intention setting is really important. And actually, I might even put one thing before intention, which is longing. It comes more from the mystical

Christian background. I think Saint Augustine said, the past to God doesn't come in steps, but in longings. And longing is more from the heart. Intention could be from the heart. Actually, I think the Dalai Lama calls it a heart's intention. Maybe a heart's intention is actually a longing, maybe, you know, it could probably be seen as that. So sometimes we don't have it quite formulated where we want to go, but we have this longing, I think sometimes it's called the holy longing. And to take that serious, to take that longing serious in us and let it formulate as an intention. And that's then something that can

be cast forward. In very practical terms, how would we figure out what our intention is and then make a practice out of setting it as a true North? Mm-hmm. I love that true North. That's often my image because the North Star is the one star that doesn't move. That's always there. And my husband, I recall it, the Buddha cheetah star, because Buddha cheetah, the longing to decrease suffering for all beings, is our true

North. I think if we listen to our longing, it's like maybe a longing for meaning. Like many people kind of are stuck in a hamster-real situation, where we just soldier along in our lives and we start to feel kind of maybe burned out or depressed or anxious or dissatisfied and maybe need more and more props to keep it ourselves going. And then to maybe sit under the star,

maybe under the North Star, and to feel what is it really in myself that longs to go somewhere. And I think it's not just where specifically do we want to go, but before then are we allowing ourselves too long? You know, once we allow ourselves too long, then the intention or the division appears. It's like when people walk a labyrinth, you probably have seen those labyrinths. So they already decided, oh, I want to ask a question. I think that's already a really important point.

You know, yeah, I actually have a question. And then when we do this labyrinth or the meditation or whatever it is, then quite readily what is important appears. So it's more like giving it space, making the decision to give it space. You can ask the question, like, what do I actually care about? And if you see that question in your mind and let it germinate, maybe you're doing some meditation during this period of time, if you're listening in the right way, and answer maverage. Right, there is this practice, which I actually learned

when I first came to the States in 1985. It was kind of a bit of a new age practice, but it was so useful that I kind of dug it out and reformulated for us here, which is that sometimes it's important to know where we are. Let's say my husband now, you know, he's working for 40 years as a hospice palliative care physician. As much as he loves his job, he realizes he's coming to a place where he would love to

do less, maybe of medication prescribing and more of the teaching he really love to do less, maybe of medication, prescribing, and more of the teaching he really wants to do. And so then it might be important to really describe where we are. So it's not an ungrounded wish or affirmation, but it's grounded. Here I am, I'm going every day, eight hours, and do this very hard work, which I'm now doing for 40 years. And I just feel it's too much right now. It's becoming too much.

It doesn't feel right anymore. It's too exhausting. And then to say, where do I want to be? I want to be somewhere where I do something maybe less hours that is more essential. You know, the parts of what I do every day that really speak to my talent. And I don't know quite what that is exactly, but I know how it would feel like if I was there. That would be more of a sense of lightness and maybe more of a sense of connection to be away from the bureaucracy of the hospital to hold those two poles, you know, where we

are and where we want to be. And it's a bit like an archer with an arrow, you know, the zen of archery. If we hold that bow and arrow and we, in a way, we define the tragic gap as a creative gap. Because often we say, oh, here I am, poor me, here I am stuck, and oh, that's where I would like to be. And then often what we do is we say I don't really want this anyhow, maybe I'm okay working another 10 years or until I'm 80, you know, something like that. So we decrease the tension by saying either what we have isn't so bad or we don't really want what we want. But if we can hold both and say, well, this could actually create a creative tension, a structural tension. Mindfully, and just hold this, then usually it moves over and it becomes

clear what it is, what the next step is. I just have tried this now for gosh, 37 years, and it's working really well. So you're looking at the chasm between where you are and where you wanna be, and instead of looking at that as a problem, you're looking at that as a potential source of creativity. Right. And that's not easy because we are so used to fall into, I think, Parker Paramab

calls it the tragic gap. And in a way, we have to, maybe with our mindfulness skills, they are very helpful here, remind ourselves to see it also as a structural tension, as a creative tension, and then allow something new to happen. And so that's one way of working with it. And another way is just to give it some time to look what your heart's intention is. And that is the intention that's not just practical from your thinking mind, but that actually feels congruent with your values. And they are, again, the true North, the Buddha-chita star, good for the well-being of all, including ourselves.

Coming up, Dr. Weinigerenger says there's no magic forgiveness button but there is a sensible place to start. She'll tell us what that is plus what to do when we hit a wall in our meditation practice right after this. Looking at the clock I realized we're never going to make it through all 12 steps and that's on me because I'm asking you too many follow up questions. But let me skip forward to step nine, which is forgiveness, which is a tricky one for a lot of people, especially if I would imagine the case for many people. Our alert has been created by some mistreatment at the hands of others.

Right. Yes, forgiveness is a really tough one. I myself had actually a big problem with forgiveness. I think one as opposed to a German who can ever forgive us for what happened in Germany in World War II. And then also I saw forgiveness sometimes being misused by churches. If you're a good question, you forgive. It's sometimes used in a self-serving way and in a flippant way and kind of a bit of a moral bullying. And so it was really Jack Kwonfield from whom I learned that forgiveness is really very much

about us. When we hold this burden of resentment, this burden of holding a grudge, then it's kind of like becoming toxic for us. I think the big insight was that forgiveness is something that's important, not just for the other, but for me. Jack Cornfield says, the person who hurt you is probably sitting in the Bahamas and drinking a Mai Tai.

Even if you hold your gwatch against them, they are probably gone. They are over the mountains. They might not even care anymore. But we are stuck with this feeling of resentment, this feeling of a grudge with this burden that we carry. And so it's helpful to us to forgive the others. Often it's also about forgiving ourselves. Sometimes we need to forgive ourselves that we were in the wrong time, in the wrong place. So we can blame ourselves endlessly. And so that's important. What is also important is that we

can't just press the forgiveness button, say, okay, I forgive now. That's not very natural. But what we need to do sometimes is go a half step, which is hold the intention to forgive. I had once, I think it's already 20 years ago, I was teaching at a local retreat center and there was a gentleman there who told us the story, he said, somebody really hurt me very badly. And I just couldn't forgive him. And so what I did is I decided to forgive him in 10 years, that I would give myself 10 years to forgive him. And once I made this decision,

actually I was able to give much easier and much quicker. And so I find this half-step of holding the intention to forgive, really important. I was just going to ask you actually before that last section of your answer, forgiveness sounds nice, but how do we actually do it? But I think that's an answer at the very least, which is you can set the intention, we've talked about intention, to forgive, but how do we actually do it? But I think that's an answer at the very least, which is you can set the intention, we've talked about intention to forgive, but give yourself a break in the process and know there's no magic button. Let me see if I can sneak in a few more steps here. Step 11 is letting in the mystery. What does that mean? Well, I think sometimes we just can't get there with our diligent mindfulness practice and

compassion practice and watching our thoughts, our body, our feelings. And the more diligently we practice, it's just we hit a wall sometimes. Sometimes the doors are still closed. And what is helpful to me is sometimes to, you might say, ask for help. And there's this beautiful little book by Titna Tahan, the energy of prayer. And he said, sometimes it's important to pray even though we don't know exactly what we are praying to. And it's more about opening up and kind of surrendering. It's a movement of surrendering.

We are not trying to control this. We are just opening up to whatever the great mystery is. And there may be a comeback also to musical practices, whether they are Christian or Kabbalah or Muslim or maybe just whatever you made up yourself or Tibetan practices, where we think there is a greater context to life. And it might not be a person, it might just be a sense, a depending, cool, rising sense of awareness that is already there. And if we can let ourselves touch that actually quite experientially, I feel especially that Tibetan pointing out instructions are allowing us to touch into that quite experientially.

Then we are in this wider context and then sometimes a door will open from there. And I just remember that Jack Cornfield said, if we put a spoonful of salt into a glass of water, it's very salty. And if we put a spoonful of salt into a glass of water, it's very salty. And if we put a spoonful of salt into a lake, then it's not salty at all. So if you make the container bigger

or the non-container, the space bigger, if we can tap into something, that is already there. That's gonna be, I I suspect hard for some people to grok this notion of maybe not, but this container or non-container you're referring to. If I had to put it in as simple as possible terms, the idea is you can see that you're angry or you can see that anger is playing out against a completely mysterious backdrop of consciousness. Who even knows that you're angry? Like, who's the you that knows you're angry and who's even asking that question?

And so then you throw yourself out of our day to day seemingly solid movie of life and into a usefully weirder space. That's right. In a way way that's what we are doing. I just have seen actually my older son go through this because he's in the end of medical school and a year and a half ago he asked me, can you teach me meditation because he was stressed out. And so at first I started with mindfulness instructions as we know them. And then I thought, well, let me try these pointing out instructions. And he's very much the young scientist, you know, who doesn't believe anything that's in any way weird or strange. And so in a way,

he actually has quite an aptitude to experience it, almost like against his cognitive world, you might say. And so he just decided to go with the experience and not follow the urge to define it. And so sometimes we just have to allow ourselves to follow the direct experience. And you know, we humans are limited in our understanding. And I don't think that is so hard to understand. No, I agree. You've referenced pointing out instructions a few times. What are those instructions? Those are instructions that come from the Sokchen Mahamudwar tradition. And they are instructions that help us have this experience of a wider awareness,

not just as moment and moment, but in awareness that has a field quality that's already there. That's everywhere and suffuses everything. You might say a pantheistic without a view and that can be experienced. And quite frankly, I think in the mindfulness tradition is experienced as well. In the end of retreats, just it's more low-balled and people don't really talk about it. But it's nevertheless there. And so those pointing out instructions help us quite clearly to come to this place of experiencing this or having glimpses of this. I think that's the new term for this in a more easy way.

And the thing is it's actually not that difficult. I think there was just this big mythology around it that made it seem so difficult, but it's not. And I think many mystical traditions have caught on to that. Unfortunately, you have to often be a card-carrying member of one of those traditions to get that knowledge, how to get there. But I think this is the time and place in history

where it should be more democratically available. So you kind of told us what the instructions were pointing at, but if we wanted to get one of these aforementioned glimpses, what could we do to get a sense of this awareness that is suffused through everything, which can sound grandiose or hard to grok, but it's actually tasteable. So how do we get there? Right. There are different ways.

I think Ming-Yu, or Sokni Wimpo-Chi, are teaching those kinds of things. Then Dan Brown, who unfortunately died a few weeks ago. He did, and some of his students, like Dustin DePurna, teaches it, then Lockelli teaches the quite accessible. I teach it. I make all my meditations accessible for free, because I have a day job. I'm a clinical psychologist, and so I always think money and spiritual practice is a difficult one.

So I decided to just teach for free. I just think especially when dealing with lurbs, which can be so painful, especially if we have a painful and difficult history, it's very helpful to ground ourselves in this wider field. And maybe I also want to say that mindfulness as we know it is in line with what you're discussing, but Joseph Goldstein, who's I've worked with personally for quite a while, talks about looking at your experience through the passive voice. So you can be sitting, meditating, and maybe once you've got a little bit, you're a few minutes into it, you've got a little bit, you're a few minutes into it,

you've got a little bit of rhythm or continuity and your mindfulness, your concentration's up a little bit, your mind is stable. Might just say, sounds are being known. So you're using the passive voice. And then you add a question, which is known by what? Oh, yeah. And in the asking of that question, you can see that this feeling of you that is always

there is not the one who's knowing the sound of the doorbell or the birds and the trees, that is being known in some wider, unfindable, broad, yawning chasm of pure consciousness or there's no way to talk about this without sounding very stoned. But that simple practice doesn't work for everybody, but it really works for me. And I think it might work for you. Is a way into what Dr. Winninger is talking about. I believe, do you agree, Dr. Winninger? I do, wholeheartedly agree. It reminds me of the emptiness practices,

emptiness of self, emptiness of emotions, which basically is about exactly what you described, looking back at the looker or the seer and seeing that that there isn't really anything there that's a solid entity that is lasting and concrete. You know that we all are these clouds of experiences that come and go, and that that's actually fine. And that awareness is here, not only in our prefrontal cortex, but it's actually there in a much wider way, and that we can rest in that. I love that little practice by Joseph.

And where why this is relevant is that to your topic of Lurps is that you can see that you are not your long standing recurrent painful patterns. And in fact, on some fundamental level, there's no you to have a pattern anyway. And that's the pudding of salt into a lake instead of a glass. It just gives you a wider perspective. Exactly. I think that's very correct.

And it's just making it a little lighter. It's like making us a little bit less dense and a little bit less concrete and heavy. It's almost like bringing a bit more oxygen into the system. So it's not also congested and stuck. So that's very right. And I was wondering, do we have time to talk about the last step? We do. Go for it. Please.

Step 12. Well, which is service? I was telling the story of Jimmy in my book, who is actually a very close friend of Joseph Goldstein, Jimmy who is a person who was homeless many years and lives here now in Santa Barbara, and he is very proud to be mentioned on your show. And he has gone through hell and back as a heron addict, as a orphan, many terrible things happening to him in his life. But what he does, he has a ministry for the dying homeless. And he really helps those that are dying in the streets. He sits with them and he says that helps him,

not to relapse, not to despair, to work with his own moods. And I think all together, we can learn from Jimmy as we open our hearts and we are they are available for others. We are less self preoccupied and I would say self preoccupation is one of our Western foibles if I might, even in our meditation we can become self preoccupied and perfectionistic. And so I think as we open our hearts and we include others in our work, very much like Dr. Ryu in the plague. I don't know if you know this story, you know, this North African town that commuter scribes where people are dying of the plague, but the hero, Dr. Ruiu, is helping

anyhow, not knowing whether what he's doing will actually make a difference or not. It makes a little difference here and there, but he doesn't know the outcome. And so I think that is important in this day and age. And I think the Dalai Lama calls it vice selfish. We are vice selfish in that we help others. I've always loved that expression from the Dalai Lama that we're all selfish, but if you want to do it right, you should be compassionate and generous because that's actually what's going to make you happiest. It's a nice co-opting of our normal tendencies. Dr. Wreninger, I want to thank you for coming on in closing. Can you just remind us of the name of the book and where we can find it? It's called Heart Medicine, How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom at last. And you can get it at Amazon,

Goodread, Bonson Nobles, Indybooks on my website, WattleyWindingerPhD.com. And I also encourage you to look at our website of our nonprofit, Mindful Heart programs. And there we have a meditation calendar and many resources. And otherwise just join us, for example, we have a morning meditation, which is very popular. People just pop in and out. And there's no registration, just a waiting room, no fee. And you can just come and go. I just thought in this time, which is quite difficult for many people, we just try to make it easy. Well, thanks for coming on the show and making my job easy. Thank you. It was really delightful to talk to you. Thanks again to Dr. Weininger. Before I let you go, one important order of business, our team is preparing a special episode

about anxiety, and we would love your help. If you have questions about anxiety that you want answered, please record a voice memo and send it to us via email at listener at 10% dot com. That's listener at 10% all one word spelled out dot com. We might just play and answer your question right here on the show. This show is made by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, Maria Wartell, Samuel Johns, and Jen Point. And we get our audio engineering from the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you right back here on Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

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