Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 484: Do You Want to Be Happier or Not? | Mushim Patricia Ikeda

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Oftentimes Buddhism can take a tough love, no nonsense approach to happiness by saying, if you want to be happier, sometimes you need to face hard truths. In today's episode we’re going to talk about a Buddhist list called The Three Characteristics. These are the three non-negotiable truths about reality, which you have to see and understand in order to be happy. Granted, when looked at from a certain angle, these truths, or characteristics of reality can suck at times. But do you want to see the truth of things or not? Do you want to be happier or not?Our guide through these three characteristics is the mighty Mushim Patricia Ikeda. Mushim has a background in both monastic and lay Buddhist practice and is a core teacher and community director at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. This is her second appearance on the show. Content Warning: This episode briefly mentions child loss.In this episode we talk about: The three characteristics, alternatively known as the three Dharma sealsOur conflicted relationship to change Our brain’s tendency to focus on the negativePractices that can help with handling change more effectivelyHow not taking your thoughts so personally can build your resilienceAnd why Mushim believes that universal non-discriminating love is synonymous with NirvanaFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/mushim-patricia-ikeda-484See 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 gang, one of the things that has always attracted me to Buddhism is that it takes a tough love, no nonsense approach. As I understand their message, the Buddhists, I should say my fellow Buddhists, are not saying you can solve all of your problems through the power of positive thinking. They're also not promising salvation through some death denying dogma.

Again, as I understand it, what they're saying is that if you wanna be happier, you first need to face some hard truths. To be clear by happiness, I slash we are not talking about jumping up in the air because you just won the lottery or you got a lot of likes on your most recent Instagram post. Let's not confuse excitement for happiness here. In my opinion, happiness properly understood is something like living a well-adjusted, flourishing, meaningful, useful life in the world as it really is. And step one is understanding the world as it really is, which brings us to today's

episode. We're going to talk about a Buddhist list called the Three Characteristics. If you listen to the show, you know, the Buddha made a lot of lists and we like to build episodes, sometimes entire series of episodes around the Buddha's various lists, which are all designed to help us do life better. Anyway, the three characteristics are the three non-negotiable truths about reality, which you have to see and understand in order to be happy. Again, I'm using the word happy in the most profound sense. I should say, when looked at from a certain angle, these truths or characteristics

of reality can suck at times, but ask yourself this, do you want to see the truth of things or not? Do you want to be happier or not? Our guide through these three characteristics will be the mighty Mushim Patrisha Ikeda. Mushim has a background in both monastic and lay Buddhist practice and is a core teacher and community director at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, a phenomenal organization worth checking out and supporting. This is Mushim's second appearance on the show. In this conversation, we talk about the three characteristics, alternately known as the three Dharma seals.

We also talk about our conflicted relationship to change, our brains tendency to focus on the negative practices that can help us handle change more effectively, how not taking your thoughts and emotions so personally can build up your resilience. And we talk about, and this is a biggie, and a bit of a mind-bender, why machine believes that universal non-discriminating love is synonymous with Nirvana. 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. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Skigi Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Machine Patricia Iketa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Dan. So let me start with the, I hope not impermanent.

That was a funny slip of the tongue. I hope not impermanent question, because everything's impermanent as we will discuss, but here it is. What are the three characteristics alternatively known as the three Dharma seals and so what? Why should we care? That's a big question. That is fairly impertinent and I do I like I like I like friendly impertinence. So thank you very much. What are the three Dharma characteristics, alternately known as the three Dharma seals? Okay, we'll do that first and then why should we care?

That is the S word should. So I will respond to that. The three Dharma characteristics, the three characteristics as I understand it, come from what human existence, the first being a word that's translated as impermanence. Then these are words from the ancient Buddhist language of Pali, P-A-L-I, the second characteristic being the very badly translated into English. Sometimes it said, no self, non-self. I don't like those words. I say no permanent, unchanging self. And the third characteristic being duke, which has no satisfactory translation into English. And it's often translated as suffering. However, it's better translated

as unsatisfactoryness. The quality of things never being as the rolling stones and Mick Jagger said, I can't get no satisfaction. And I've tried that that marks human life. Now, I come from the Mahayana, or Northern School of Buddhism, which in the teachings of Tiktok Han, which have greatly influenced me, change that third characteristic from Dukha, or unsatisfactoryness or suffering, it flips it to the other side and says

that the third seal of Dharma, which guarantees that it's the true Dharma teaching, is Nirvana or Nibbana, which means freedom from suffering or freedom, liberation from Dukha. So that's all very technical. And you ask, why should we care? I don't know. I you ask, why should we care? I don't know. I don't know why anyone should care about that. I don't think anyone should have to care about anything they don't care about. So let me state that upfront categorically.

Why do you care? Why do I care? Is that actually the real question you're asking? Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think I'm always getting at the practical takeaways for my listeners. What here can help them do their lives better? What here can help our listeners do their lives better.

This is my personal take on it, Dan. I personally think that I've never met a person who has said sincerely, I'm completely happy. I have no suffering in my life. I have nothing to complain about ever. So that's not Buddhist, I don't think. This is a universal statement. I mean, maybe there is someone. I've never met them unusual. Let's put it that way. And improbable. So what we're talking about here that I feel that might be of potential

to help our listeners, as he said, do their lives by which I'm picking up that you mean function, function. I'm a very practical person. In my own experience, there is an incredible amount of suffering and dissatisfaction for me. And I feel for others, I am a Buddhist teacher, I'm also a secular mindfulness teacher, so I talk to a lot of people and I hear their stories. There's a lot of affliction. There's a lot of suffering that comes from an underlying, unconscious assumption that things that we love and like will not change. Even though logically, I think that most people who believe in science and so forth would say, yeah, pretty much everything does change. I mean, really, just think about looking at your own baby pictures or something like that, and then look in the mirror today, there's got to have been a change. And we could go on and list bajillions more examples. However, even though this evidence is staring us right in the face,

right in the face, over and over and over again in multiple ways, I think there is something about our human brain that desires for things that we love and like to be unchanging, to be a constant source of happiness, of satisfaction, of protection, of nourishment, of financial resource, and why not. That is what we want. It's not what we have. Impermanence is real. And I always try to remind people because neuroscience says the human brain does a lot of negative filtering and emphasizes the negative. I always remind people impermanence is a two way street. The bratty little kid we're dealing with today tomorrow takes a developmental leap and becomes a sort of reasonable,

individuated human being that we can talk to about all kinds of things. I've seen that happen in my own journey as a parent. I'm gonna ask another unfair question. Um, just, I can't help it. I know natural selection isn't a, we shouldn't personify evolution, but why on earth do you reckon nature would design us as creatures living in a universe of ceaseless change to be so resistant to said change? To said change That's an untrue statement. We're not resistant to changes. We like

We're not resistant to changes. We like it. It's a true statement Exactly. That's why I say there's a return shift here and our brains need to Hopefully adjust to that like oh, yeah today. I was thinking my Stupid friends my birthday is coming up and no one has recognized that. And then our friends throw us a surprise birthday party with our favorite cake and we're like, Oh, wow. You folks are just the greatest. You're the greatest. That's impermanence too. So maybe the question should be why would natural selection have designed us for such a conflicted relationship to change, given that change is happening all the time?

My take on that, Dan, is that because we have very large brains, probably not big enough, because in many ways human beings are not doing so well on the planet right now. However, that having been said, our basic equipment as it's evolved in my understanding is we have this huge prefrontal cortex. And then we have other parts of the brain, all of which do not communicate with one another in a unified whole. That's my understanding to put it in very crude lay person's terms. And I do read quite a bit about this so that I can understand myself and others better. And I think what it is is that human brains are capable of thinking and processing about all kinds of things, which boosted by technology and all of the tech that we have right now, and all of the data that's just streaming in to the human brain through the mobile phone, through the online connections that we have, that our nervous systems actually weren't designed to be able to process all of that conflicting,

huge data, everything from absolutely traumatic information about climate crisis down to what makeup K-pop stars are using and everything in between. I mean, that is a huge, huge set of everything in between. I mean, that is a huge, huge set of weird data, much of it conflicting and much of it not connecting to other parts of that data set. In the meantime, our physical apparatus, so to speak, I think is basically designed for maybe like a hunter-gatherer or agrarian kind of existence where we be very in touch with the amount of daylight, the weather, the seasons, the sources of food because we would probably be hungry, a great deal of the time, and we would be concerned for protection from immediate physical threats like large carnivorous

animals. So I think in the way that we've evolved, we've got an incredible set of equipment, so to speak, as a human being, it's not all interfacing smoothly. So it's not just that evolution screwed up in terms of creating a highly functioning organism in a world of ceaseless change. It's that we've created

a world that evolution couldn't have envisioned. If you want to put it that way, I don't personify evolution. I think it's just what's happened. Okay, enough of my stupid questions. Let's, well, I'm going to move on to different stupid questions. We've already started on the list with impermanence. Can you say more about the importance of impermanence within the context of this list and Buddhist practice? It's a basis of everything, I think, within the context of this list and Buddhist practice. And mindfulness practice as well, secular mindfulness practice. If we can spend

some time really every day, hopefully check in with it several times a day. And ask ourselves, am I experiencing any points in which I feel stuck, in which I feel like my thoughts keep looping round and round and round again, and those are not helpful thoughts, they're not happy thoughts, they're complaining thoughts. Like, why the heck is this politician such an idiot? And why this and why that and those people and that thing. I'm not talking about constructive critique. I'm talking about what's called in psychology.

I think roominative thought, just circling, circling, circling, causing us to become more and more grumpy, possibly more and more frightened, possibly more and more angry and kind of ruining our day. Can we check in and say, am I experiencing any of these kinds of thoughts? And if so, let me just back off a little bit, just take a moment, take a breath, and ask,

do I have an underlying assumption here that things won't change, that things can't change, or to put it in our vocabulary that impermanence, in fact, is not a fact. Do I really believe in impermanence? And there might be part of us if we're honest, it says, I don't want to. No, of course not. I don't want to believe that the person that I'm in love with today may leave me for another person two years from now.

I don't want to believe that the child that I love so deeply with all my heart might get sick. I'm just going to say it and die before me. Yet, when we look around, when I look around, Yet, when we look around, when I look around, happens all the time. So for me, it's actually a pretty cognitive and rational process with myself. To ask myself, do I really believe in impermanence, or am I just kind of faking it sometimes? So when you ask yourself that question, you can check in on your level of acceptance of impermanence, what kind of answers do you get back? Parts of my brain often scream no no

No, no, no, no, no, no, no I'm pretty in touch with certain parts of my brain. I'm sure not all of them Dan and That's honestly that is what I get. I mean, I gave you the example being a mother, I live with my adult child. I only have one is a big part of my learning and my identity, my spiritual growth. I mean, I just love my kid. And I do know other people who have lost their children. I mean, that does happen. That does happen.

In fact, quite a bit. It could be a drug overdose. It could be an accident. And then the child is in a coma. And then severely disabled. It could be sudden infant death syndrome. So I realize that this might be upsetting to our listeners. And I'm saying it with complete sympathy and empathy as a mother, and as

someone who's worked with a lot of children, someone who cares about children, that this is a fact. And I place a regular amount of attention to examining that resistance and that assumption that I have sometimes, that I will get older, I'm 68, I'll die, I hope peacefully, but then again, that's an assumption. And that my child will be a high functioning adult who will be able to take care of himself. I don't have any God that tells me,

hey, machine, that life script, you've got it. You've got it in the bag. That's exactly how the script will run. There is no life script as far as I know. I'm actually glad you brought this up. I know it's probably upsetting to me, and I'm sure it's upsetting to many listeners, especially listeners who have kids,

but we can universalize this beyond just people with kids. You're essentially asking us to contemplate the most painful possible changes we can imagine and ask ourselves, are we okay with this possibility? Because that possibility is real. Exactly. So, we can widen it to, if we love our job, or maybe we don't love it, but it's providing a very good income. For us, it could be our home, it could be our nation, it could be anything that we cherish. There will be change, sometimes desirable, sometimes undesirable. And so I'm just curious that somebody who's done, you've done a significant amount of Buddhist

practice and continue to do so and teach other people to do so, which is a kind of deep reinforcement of the learnings. How set up do you think you are to handle the most painful variants of change? More impertinent questions, Dan. I can see that that's where we're going. The true answer to that is I do not know. And the other answer to that is, however, I am doing my best. I am doing my level best to prepare. I do believe in preparation. I think that's part of many spiritual traditions and possibly many non-spiritual traditions. For instance, the house that I rent a flat in here in Oakland, California is to my knowledge sitting right on top of the giant hayward fault. And we are, according to seismologists, overdue for the next gigantic earthquake that's going to level possibly large parts of the Bay Area,

and maybe even split off parts of the coast into the ocean. So I'm not perfect. However, I have earthquake preparation, like a backpack and a couple of crowbars and three days supply of water in my stairwell. Things like that. Similarly, I spend quite a bit of time probably every day or very often contemplating how resilient I feel to be able to accept, not like, but to be able to accept and therefore hopefully try to deal with as best I can,

possibly giant, undesirable changes that may affect me and many, many other people. I hardly need to mention we are now in the third year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and that changed everything almost overnight at a speed and a rate that completely bewildered me. I was not prepared for that. I'm kind of sort of prepared for an earthquake because I live in Oakland and that's part of how we live here is with that awareness or we should, I'll use the word should. However, for the pandemic, I was not prepared at all. And now that it has happened and I've had several years to try to adapt as best I can, that's the big wake up bell for me.

Like Moushim, you are not prepared for that at all. You couldn't have been, I'm not reproaching myself. So what if there are other changes that are like that? What if there are other changes that are like that that everything changes within a matter of weeks practically overnight? Am I ready to buckle down and say, I didn't want it, I hate this, and this is what I have. These are the circumstances and the realities that I see now. How can I help myself? How can I help others?

Coming up, Machine Patricia, Keda talks about how we can help ourselves and others deal with change and why not taking your own thoughts so personally can help with that after this. Like the short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal?

These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly,

the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it?

Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to ad free on the Amazon music or wonder yeah. I'm gonna go back to the practical tip. You've mentioned at least one and maybe two things that we all can do to embrace ourselves for unpleasant change. This practice you have of kind of just touching

in with yourself of gauging how ready you are. I think you've mentioned that twice and I think it's kind of the same practice both times. But what would you recommend to us and maybe there's a little hint of that in the last words you uttered in your last answer around being ready to help others. But what are the impermanence-gurding practices that you recommend to your students. You picked it up. Be prepared to help ourselves and help others. I personally have taken along with millions of other people Buddhist vows which are called the Bodhisattva vows which are accompanied by a set of ethical guidelines called the Bodhisattva precepts. And these guide my everyday life, my everyday actions, I'm certainly far from perfect at fulfilling them. When I teach them, I always say these are impossible vows. So if you're interested in taking these vows, just know they contradict the rule of don't

try to eat anything that's bigger than your head. This is trying to ingest something that's so much bigger than your own head. I mean, it is a kind of a bizarre thing. However, as humans, we do bizarre things all the time. And if we're drawn to these vows, what we commit to doing, and I have committed to doing as has his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as had Ticknott Han as have many many people both known and unknown I've committed to really trying to show up every day and trying to be of help trying to be of help to other people I think think his holiness, the Dalai Lama, said, wherever I go, I try to help whoever I can. And if I can't be of help, at least I try not to harm

something. And that's a very practical way of putting it. In the positive sense, yes, I try to be of help in support to at least one person or one living being every day and in an emergency situation that wouldn't be impermanent. I hope is that I would show up and I would try to be of help to myself and to others. And that could take any form. You notice I'm not saying I have a plan in place. How does helping other people and vowing to continue to do so help you handle non-negotiable change?

Well, first of all, the vow is actually not centered on people. It's on all living beings. The vow to try to help all living beings. And these days, we think of the environment, the earth as a living being. I certainly do. And how that vow helps me to navigate non-negotiable change is to understand that if I can be of help to any living being, which is pretty broad, I mean, hopefully we can do that of any living being, including myself in the moment that's already

produced a change. I hope you would agree with that. If in that moment, I'm able to water a plant that is all dried up but not dead. That's already produced a change. My action has produced the potential for beneficial change. One of my practices that I like to do, one of my co-workers at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland where I teach once, call me the gratitude because it's a very longstanding practice that I try to write or call or email at least one expression of gratitude every day. Like write a thank you card that goes in the postal mail. Certainly in email, I hope that if we had an algorithm

that picked up how many times I've written thank you in emails that it would be thousands and thousands and thousands of times. And verbal thank you as well. Sometimes it's really fun to pick up the phone and call someone that I've been thinking of who my haven't been in touch with for a long time. For instance, my poetry mentor that I had in college every once in a while, I'll pick up the phone and I'll say, David, I've been thinking of you. And then

we have a wonderful conversation. And these expressions of gratitude do have impact. They produce change. So, yes, I think I understand what you're saying there in terms of instead of sitting back and being a helpless recipient of change, you're actually out producing positive change. And I wonder at the same time, whether boosting your own capacity for gratitude, practicing compassion, which we know has all kinds of physiological and psychological benefits, creates a more resilient physiological and psychological benefits create a more resilient machine in the face of whatever might arise.

Absolutely. And in my understanding, that isn't but us at all. I do have a practice of prayer and I do a fair amount of interfaith dialogue and work in my experience. It's maybe universal to what we might call prayer, the activity that we call prayer, is that one former prayer is to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you for what I'm receiving. Thank you for my life. Thank you for even though my life is miserable today. miserable today. I am alive. And so today I have the potential to see an improvement in my depression or for a lessening of my anxiety. Today there is a potential for someone I love who is sick to get better. I do not know what today will bring. Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity to find out. Or there could be expressions of gratitude in prayer of

thank you for I recently got cataract surgery in both my eyes. I wake up every morning Dan and I say thank you for my sight. It's often those kinds of prayers, bring our attention back to things that we might normally take for granted if we're moving with, as the Buddhist teachings say, too much force and speed, too much momentum. Gotta do this, gotta do that. I mean, how long does it take to just pause and stop? I'm so

grateful for my eyes if I'm a seeing person. I'm so grateful for my lunch, not everybody gets lunch. We might not even like our lunch to acknowledge not everyone gets to have lunch. It's a big part of my practice. I think that's extremely powerful personally. Before we run out of time, we have a couple of other characteristics or dharma seals to power through here. So I want to just move on to the next one, which is, as you said earlier, often hamphistedly translated as no self or not self. And this is in my experience personally, probably the hardest Buddhist notion to wrap your

head around. So what say you vis-a-vis the contention that the self is an illusion? The self is not an illusion. This is something that comes up over and over and over again with people who come to me as a Buddhist teacher. This is my personal understanding for my own practice and study. The conventional self is not an illusion, and I always say to people who ask, if you're in the United States and it comes time to pay your taxes, and you tell the IRS, I don't owe you anything because there is no I. There's no permanent self here. They're not going

to buy it. If someone comes up unexpectedly and hits me in the face and I scream, Oh, why did you do that? There is something there that is screaming, Oh, there's not some illusion that immediately evaporates and doesn't feel the impact of basically being assaulted. There is a self. Dan, for you, what if I said, forget about no self, forget about non-self. Those are really bad translations in English as far as I'm concerned, really inaccurate. As you said, ham-fisted, what if I said to you, Dan, do you believe about yourself that you have no unchanging self? And that's an open question actually because people who do believe in what might be called an immortal soul do believe in that usually but it's do not. So if I ask you, what is your belief? Is there some Dan Harris essence that is totally unchanging. I don't think so. I have not found it.

And a couple of smart things come to mind, said by other people. One is, what's often translated as no self might be better translated by adding one key consonant, the letter T, not self, meaning that if you sit in meditation or just pay attention to anything happening in your mind right now, you can't point at anything and say, that is me or mine. It is not self, any anger that's arising. Where's the essence of you in it? Any thought you're having? Try to hold that and point to it as yours. That seems like a pretty useful sorting mechanism. The other smart thing that's coming to mind was said apparently by a Tibetan monk who was actually from the

Tibetan tradition, but apparently he was from Mongolia and it was said to Robert Thurman of the Buddhist scholar, and I'm getting this like fourth hand, but he said in this monk did something to the effect of, you think you're real and you are real, but you're not really real. So I think that kind of just described it. Yeah, I have to pay my taxes and put my pants on. But on some fundamental level, if I look for some little hummunculus of me between my ears or behind my eyes, I can't find it.

That's a good way of putting it. And you were kind enough to, before we started ask for the a more accurate pronunciation of my name. Mushim is a Korean, but it's name. I think it's a Zen Korean Zen but it's name. And Mushim is sometimes literally translated as no heart mind or no heart or no mind. It's a pretty, I would say, high class in a certain way, Zen name, because the word machine comes from the heart sutra, which is highly revered in Mahayana Buddhism.

It's very cryptic, and people can spend their whole lives contemplating it. Like, what the heck does that mean? We can't figure it out with our normal discursive thought processes. It needs to be something that comes from spiritual experience and insight and breakthrough. And therefore, in the name that was given to me in Toronto, Canada in 1983, when I took my vows, it holds it up right there every day. It's looking me right in the face. If I'm doing a zoom and I put my Buddhist name into the name field with my name and my pronouns and where I'm located, it's looking at me head on just right in front of me all the time saying that there is in the Buddhist teachings and in my own experience there is no essential self.

There are many other machines. I'm not unique. I'm not an isolated individual who's apart from everything else. The other way of explaining this stand, which I'm'm sure you've heard is to say, I am not isolated as an autonomous, siloed, self-contained unit from everything else in the universe. It's the principle of interconnection, what is called interbeing, and that's not a fancy philosophical concept. The person I call I could not be who I, in quotes, am without everything that I've encountered, everything I've thought about, all of my experiences. Here I am, I'm talking to you. And so this conversation is taking place within a unique relationship at a unique point in time. So I'm showing up here as like some version, some version of me, and you're showing up

as some version of you. And there's definitely something there that we can point to if you acted inconsistent with previous versions of yourself. Lister might say, I don't even think that Stan Harris, or wow, he must be having a strange day. Same thing with me, people who know me on a pretty daily basis could say, yeah, that behavior was characteristic of the machine or the Patricia we know or wow, she seemed to be

totally off base. She was very, very different there. That having been said, can we continue to remind ourselves that within each relationship, within each, I guess it might be called the Gestalt, that there is a slightly to hugely different version of what we call the self that shows up, that functions, and then that changes. We talked quite a bit about the practical benefits of understanding change of understanding impermanence. What are the practical benefits of understanding that we don't have an unchanging nugget of self that we can find? Huge practical benefits, I think, which is to try to have a resilient mindset. And this is something I try to teach and that I try to learn is don't take something personally unless you know 100 percent it is personal.

Mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy, for instance, and related forms of therapy invites us to use mindfulness meditation to be able to catch and isolate specific thoughts that are causing a suffering. A very, very common thought would be, people don't like me. People don't like me in a specific workplace or at my church or parents group, whatever, people don't like me. That is a thought. It may of course cause us to feel terrible, paranoid and sad and angry and depressed. And then those types of therapies ask us to then back off from that, give it a little bit of space and saying

How do I know? What's the actual evidence for that? Have five people from my group come up to me and said, you know what? I totally dislike you or email that to me. Have I actually got direct feedback? What data am I basing this thought on this afflictive thought? Nobody likes me. I don't think people like me. Is that actually true? I'm not ruling out the fact that in fact it might be true. It might be true. In most cases that I know of, it's not true at all. The same person that I'm talking to who one minute is crying and saying, Moushim, I'm so terrible. Nobody likes me. Nobody likes me. And I accept that is a huge form of suffering. And when I say,

and what's your evidence for that? I can't tell you Dan how many times the person has done a 180 degree, not 120, not 60 degrees, 180 degree flip. They're face brightens up, their expression changes, they're showing up in a different part of their brain. And as a different part of their self. And I say, I guess it means you have no friends that same person will say, Oh, no, I have five of the best friends in the world. They would do anything for me. I love my

friends. So we do have different parts of the brain that don't talk to each other and these days we have ways and Mindfulness is very old what we call mindfulness is very old. There are ways and practices that we can stop and pause and Just try to not take it so personally or believe everything that we think and ask ourselves, is this really true? It is a feeling, a feeling is true. If I feel sad, you're not going to tell me, you don't feel sad. I do feel sad. However, if the thought that accompanies the feeling is, oh, everybody hates me. I just know it. These days, imposter syndrome, people think I'm competent, but if they really knew me, I'm faking it. I'm a fake. I hardly know what I'm doing. And I will be exposed at any moment. If we're able to immediately not take it personally in a sense of thinking,

must be true, must be true because I'm thinking it. Then we're able to immediately not take it personally in a sense of thinking must be true It must be true because I'm thinking it Then we're able to usually form a more 360 degree and a more nuanced and usually a more positive Model of reality in which we're able to say you know what I'm pretty good at some things I'm terrible at other things. I'm fair to middling in other things and skills. I am trying my best. And overall, I'm doing pretty well. That's not a sexy thought. That's a more accurate thought. So not taking everything personally is huge. It can be a huge improvement in our lives. Yes, I completely agree. Up next, we're going even deeper. We're going to talk about Nirvana

and why Moussin believes universal non-discriminating love is synonymous with Nirvana. I suspect we'll come back to this, but in the meantime, let me just power on to the third characteristic, word, dharma seal. Although actually this is kind of a 3a in B situation, because in the teravata or old

school Buddhism, the third characteristic is suffering another suboptimal translation you offered before the word unsatisfactoriness. And then in the Mahayana or later stages of Buddhism, we come to the 3B, which is Nirvana or Nibbana, which is the notion of relief from suffering or unsatisfactoryness. So if you wouldn't mind, can you just sort of hold forth on these two related concepts? I'll do my best, and I'll pick up on something

that I don't think I said before. My understanding of the third point in the model called the three Dharma Seals being Nirvana, Nibbana, the potential for liberation from duke, from suffering slash unsatisfactoriness, that the meaning of the word seal and the three Dharma seals is like a stamp of certification or approval, like the way that old documents used to have a seal stamp it with a seal meaning this is genuine or you go to get a document to be notarized. What Tick-N-Hon I believe said is that we can know any teaching to be what we might call Dharma, which in Buddhism has many meanings.

One meaning is universal truth or universal law that we can know this teaching, whatever tradition it comes from or no tradition. We can know this teaching to be true in the widest sense if it is sealed with these three Dharma seals. So it can't be one seal. It has to be one, two, three. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Okay, checks out for me at any rate right now.

And so this is something that in my life, I'm going to feel is one of the big truths. That's the meaning of Dharma seal. It's important for us. And what I said to people when I do Buddhist teaching is to again look at that tendency of the human brain for negative filtering. And also to acknowledge, as I said, unless you're here in my Buddhist class out of idol curiosity, which is possible, usually not probable, because people's

time is precious. So I usually say, unless you're out of idle curiosity, I'm assuming that you are here because you are suffering in some way and very understandably. So a lot of my teaching is focused within and held within the black indigenous people of color community, people with disabilities and chronic illness. And again, the Meditation Center that I'm with here in Oakland is centered on the needs of historically excluded communities, including the LGBTQIA to spirit community, people of color, people with disabilities and chronic pain. And so again, I always say, I assume that you're here because you're in pain and you're seeking, of course, relief from pain.

This particular path, these particular teachings, these particular practices may not, in fact, be your cup of tea. And I'm not here to force anything on you. What I'm here to do is try to introduce you to these teachings and these practices, hopefully, in a way you can relate to, hopefully in a way that's more accessible to you so that you can try them on and see if they work for you. If they do, fine. If they don't, no problem whatsoever. As I said, I myself have a personal practice of prayer and this includes Christian prayer, which I have received from very dear colleagues of mine who are very strong Christian practitioners. That's part of my own personal practice, and it has relieved me of a lot of suffering. It has worked, and it continues to work. So that third characteristic, that third

dharma seal, hopefully we won't forget. We have things I hope in our lives that are joyful, that are happy, that have absolutely no problem with them right now, that are in a certain way perfect in the moment. Let's not forget those. And we probably wouldn't be showing up for a spiritual path of practice that demands discipline, time, attention. It's not so fun often. We probably wouldn't be showing up for that unless we have what we might call suffering, unless we have problems we can call suffering, unless we have problems we can't solve, unless we're dissatisfied with our lives.

And in that sense, that third characteristic and that third dharma seal is an invitation for each of us if we like to turn our attention to what we can do to transform what we might call suffering into compassion, into insight, into understanding that then brings us greater happiness. And those last words, compassion, greater happiness, understanding insight, that's kind of if I'm picking up what you're putting down here, the 3B, my term of this, it's the flip side of suffering, which in Buddhist circles would be called Nirvana or Nibana. Correct. And to give you an example, we had started out with some very difficult material earlier

on in this conversation. And I wanted to share with our listeners and with you Dan, because I know you're a parent, that when my child, whose middle age now, was little, I realized I was feeling this strong anxiety. I only have one child. What if something happens to him? I live in Oakland. They're drive-by shootings and things that happen all the time. He went through the Oakland public schools. and things that happened all the time. He went through the Oakland public schools. And so I realized I was feeling very frightened. I was feeling really anxious. And it was so pressing that I cleared some time during the day

when the kid was in school. And instead of doing the work in the chores that I needed to do, I sat on my bed. I was so miserable. I was so, so, so miserable. And I sat on my bed. I was so miserable. I was so, so, so miserable. And I sat on my bed, and I did something. I guess he'd call it meditation. I just sank into a place of very deep contemplation. I looked at it in the face, and I said to myself, you can't escape from this. You can't run away from this. This is something that is really affecting your everyday

life because I was felt myself worrying. And so I just sat there and it took about four days. It was a horrible four days. It was a horrible, horrible, excruciatingly painful four days, in which I went through all these levels of resistance and denial and so on and all these changes. And I did come out on the other side of it, Dan. I did. I sweated my way through it because as a Buddhist practitioner, having done quite a bit of Zen meditation, which is usually not fun. It's pretty arduous.

I came out of it on the other side and I experienced this sense of incredible relief and incredible happiness. So if something should happen, I don't know whether it'll be true or not. I might say to you, I was totally wrong. However, it feels true to me and it has now for over 25 years since that experience when I came out on the other side of that four-day period, it was kind of like a self-retreat. And I came out and what I realized was this, that the love that I've experienced for my kid has been so life-transforming, has been so fantastic, has been so incredible, has been so transformative in every way of my life, I am so grateful for it that that will endure.

He may go through the process that we call physical death, but the love that I've experienced for him, I'm convinced that's going to carry through with me for a very long time, possibly forever. And that connects to universal love. It isn't just mine. What do you mean by that? It means that, for instance, in this conversation, although the recording is going to be audio, I'm looking at an image of you and I'm assuming you're someone's child, you didn't pop out of nowhere.

And I don't know what your relationship was to your parents. I'm not probing it all. Wherever there is that kind of relationship, it could be between a guardian and a child. It could be between a grandparent and a child. I'm not saying it has to be a biological parent. It could be an adoptive guardian or parent could be an older sibling and a younger sibling. In those kinds of intimate relationships, what I mean by that is there is the potential, I believe, for each of us to connect to what could be called universal love, universal compassion. Let me see if I can state some of this back in something that resembles a cogent sentence or two.

And I think what I'm hearing is that there is suffering or unsatisfactoriness in life and doing this counterintuitive thing of looking at it squarely, diving into it, has the benefits of A, aligning us with what is to use the word, I use a lot non-negotiably true, and B, orienting us toward understanding and relieving the suffering that we experience and that others experience. And that process kind of elevates us out of the muck, the love that you were referring to. That's been my experience.

It's not true all the time. I have plenty of bad days. And my own struggles with hatred and aversion. However, as I said before, it has really been my experience as a mother, which was not a planned experience, by the way. It was very unexpected. It has been my experience of being a mother and working with a lot of kids to understand

that it is, I think, also hardwired into us as human beings, the potential for connection, for relationship, for nurturing relationship, and for collective relationships that really nourish people's well-being within collectives and with communities. That that is absolutely part of who we are as human beings. So that potential is there and a lot of my life work is dedicated to trying to support whatever processes are there and whatever tools and skills are there that we can build as communities to take better care of each other, to take better care of our elders, to take better care of our children, and a lot to take better care of our environment. It's all about relationship.

Is that care relationship love? Is that synonymous with Nirvana? Absolutely. And love can be interpreted as a very sentimental or romantic word in English. We're talking here about universal non-discriminating love, which is a pretty tall order. Again, I'm not saying that I've got it all down. I absolutely have not. However, I've had glimpses, I've had insights, I have a direction and a trajectory for my practice. And I think that it absolutely is Nirvana. It is Nibbana. It is liberation from dissatisfaction, because I personally believe that there is always the potential in any situation for there to be even in a brief flash,

a loving and caring connection that creates a sense of home, of safety, of belonging, of joy for at least one living being. That's my faith. We started with the impertinent question of so what, who cares, why should we care, although should became a word that needed some mild litigation. But let me just circle back to that. Now that we've talked about the list in a fuller way, I just like to come back to that question of the relevance of it all.

The relevance of it all is simple to me is, do we want to become happier or not? Look at the title of your organization, 10% happier. I just love that because on one hand it uses the word happier. It doesn't say more enlightened or something that sounds like a bunch of BS. It's like, uh, happier. That's a subjective experience. And it also says 10%. I particularly like that. It's not even 25%.

Can we become 10% happier? It's my personal belief. And the Buddhist teachings say, all beings want to live and be happy. Maybe we live and we're surviving. It doesn't necessarily mean we're thriving or we're happier. We could be living as many people are in a terrible war zone. We could be living as many, many people are without access to basic decent medical care

and food and clean air to breathe. And that's not just human beings. I mean, look at our animal companions, dogs and cats. They suffer tremendously if they break their leg or have a kidney disease or something like that. We all want to live and we all want to be happy. And I personally believe that by unpacking and having these kinds of conversations and inquiries that we've just been doing, I personally believe there's a potential there for people to become a lot happier, or at least 10%. I pretty obviously agree with that, and these conversations are happening a lot at the place where

you work East Bay meditation center. One of the reasons why we had wanted to have you on the show because I wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit about EBMC and ways that people are listening to the show can benefit from what you're putting out into the world and support it as well. So I give you back the mic to share some thoughts on that. Thank you so much where I primarily teach though I teach at many places my spiritual home and many people's spiritual home right now is called East Bay Meditation Center. It's located in downtown Oakland, California in the United States. We call it EDMC and of course the physical site has been closed down during the pandemic.

We're just preparing to try to have our first hybrid class. We'll see how that goes. And we might be able to switch to more hybrid classes. East Bay Meditation Center, I think we're now well into our 16th, maybe 17th year where we've had our doors open. And we're an urban meditation center based in Buddhist teachings and our communities are rooted in what we call diversity and radical inclusivity. We are a very, very diverse meditation community now with people from all over the world who

participate online as well as people who are able to travel to the physical site and we are intentionally created that way and our whole purpose for being is to provide access to wisdom teachings and practices that may be of help to people. Again, they may not, they can freely come and go because we're offering everything on what we call a gift economics or donation only basis so that there are no financial barriers. And this is a dream that we've been able to realize with a lot of help and a lot of brilliant, incredible, very creative, activist, artist type people who've come together to create this community that we call East Bay Meditation Center. And if we want to learn more,

how do we do that? If you want to learn more, please come to our website, which is www.EastBeyMeditation.org. And we also have quite a few Dharma teachings up on our YouTube channel. And for instance, we have a very active by-pock or people of color, Sangha or spiritual community that has a YouTube channel with really wonderful talks that are accessible by everyone. We'll put those links up in our show notes if people want to dive more deeply into this. In the meantime, Mushaim, thank you very much for coming on. Just to check, is there anything that I should have asked, but didn't? Absolutely not. This has been very thorough for a conversation, Dan, and I'm interested in your interest and very

grateful for it. So thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you again for coming on and best of luck to you and to EBMC. I'm a supporter personally. We're very grateful. Thanks again to machine Patricia, Ekaida, and please go check out the East Bay Meditation Center. 10% happier is produced by DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davy and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimmy Regler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation.

Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.