Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 507: An Episode for Overthinkers | Tuere Sala

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

Thoughts are not your enemy in meditation. If you’re getting distracted while you meditate, that’s not necessarily a problem. Thoughts are natural. They’re always going to come. The point is not to clear the mind and to magically eradicate all thinking, the point is to have a different relationship to your thoughts. When we’re not mindful of our thoughts, they march into the room, tell us what to do, and we act them out, reflexively, habitually and automatically— like puppets on a string. Our guest today, Dharma teacher Tuere Sala, is going to talk about how to cut the strings of what can often be a malevolent puppeteer.Sala is a Guiding Teacher at Seattle Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Retreat Center. She’s a former prosecutor who has practiced Vipassana meditation for over 30 years and is especially focused on bringing the dharma to nontraditional places. She is a strong advocate for practitioners living with high stress, past trauma and difficulties sitting still. In this episode we talk about: Why we get caught in our thinkingUnderstanding that our thoughts are not who we areHow to direct our attention away from negative thoughtsHow the idea of permanency causes sufferingUsing thinking itself as the object of our meditationNoticing mind statesRelative reality vs. ultimate realityThe eight states of mind and their felt sense in the bodyAnd Sala’s definition of true liberationFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/tuere-sala-507See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, everybody. I am about to say something that I have said many, many, many times. However, it is the kind of thing you actually need to hear many, many, many times because we seem to be programmed to forget it. Here it is. Thoughts are not your enemy in meditation. If you get distracted when you meditate, that is not necessarily

a problem. Thoughts are natural. They're always going to come. The point is not to clear your mind to magically eradicate all thinking that's impossible, although I guess it might happen for some of us in rarefied states of meditation, but for most of us mortals, the point is not to stop thinking it's to have a different relationship to the thinking. The great meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has a fantastic rap about how we usually relate to our thoughts when we're in our normal mindless state. They're like tiny dictators, he says, when we're not mindful of our thoughts, they march into the room, tell us what to do, and we act out the thoughts reflexively, habitually, automatically. We're like puppets on a string. Today, we're going to talk about how to

cut the strings of what can often be a malevolent puppeteer. My guest is Twery Salah. She's a guiding teacher at Seattle Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Retreat Center. She's a former prosecutor who has practiced Vipassana meditation for more than 30 years and is especially focused on bringing the practice to non-traditional spaces. She's a strong advocate for practitioners who live in high-stress situations or have who have passed trauma or who simply have difficulty sitting still. In this conversation, we talk about why we get caught in our thinking. Understanding that our thoughts are not who we are,

how to direct our attention away from negative thoughts, how the idea of permanency can cause suffering, using thinking itself as the object of our meditation, noticing our mind states, relative reality versus ultimate reality. Those are some Buddhist terms of art that are massively helpful once we can grok them. The eight states of mind and their felt sense in the body, I'll let her explain what that's all about, and we talk about Twery's definition of those grandiose words we sometimes hear in meditation circles.

True liberation. Heady stuff will get started with Twerry Salah right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical,

and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10percent.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is 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. To Erie Selah, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here, Dan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. to talk about three ways of practicing with thoughts. Before we go into the three ways, let me just ask you, why is this subject of interest to you? Well, I mean, I was a lawyer for so long and thinking is the only way I saw life. I just didn't even know. In fact, I think it took forever for me to even realize I was thinking.

That's the biggest problem is that I didn't know when I was thinking, when I wasn't thinking, I didn't know what thinking was, and when I entered practice, I thought the whole point is to just stop thinking. And if I could stop thinking, then I could get to some peaceful state. And it's not really like that. That's not really what peace doesn't come from not thinking. It comes from putting thinking in a proper relationship with the other sense doors. And so that's what I had to learn.

That's why this subject is so important to me. Sense doors is a bit of a meditation term of art. So when you say it's about having it in its proper relationship to the other sense doors, what do you mean by that? So thinking is like seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching. It's in the same category. It's just a way for data to come into the body. So, oftentimes we are seeing constantly, we're hearing constantly, we touch and sense things constantly, but we don't obsess over it. But for some reason, with thinking, we get caught in obsessing over it. And so, it's learning how to have thoughts happening and not be caught in obsession over it. And so it's learning how to have thoughts happening and not be caught in obsession over it. And you can also learn that you can change your attention from thinking to seeing, change

your attention from thinking to tasting and not necessarily just be about thinking all the time. Your meditation teachers, so you probably hear this even more often than I do, but people come to me all the time when they find out that I'm in the meditation game and say, oh, yeah, I wish I could do that, but I can't stop thinking. How do you answer that question? I tell people it's not that you need to stop thinking. You have to know your thinking. It's a weird, it sounds weird, but oftentimes we're seeing,

and we don't know we're seeing. We are hearing it, we don't know we're hearing. And likewise, we're thinking, and we don't know we're thinking. So we are kind of trapped in a thinking process, and we think we have to somehow get out of that trap. And I started working on understanding thought and thinking for what it is. We never think, I wish I could stop seeing.

I wish I could stop hearing. We just shift our attention from something, we get tired of looking at something, we just shift our attention to something else. And it's learning how to do that. It's really what establishing mindfulness is. Mindfulness around thought. You are learning how to understand thinking

and understand what thought is so that you don't have that idea that I got to stop thinking. Not truly what we're learning. I mean, for me, this was one of the biggest early insights as I was starting to get interested in meditation, which was this incredibly obvious fact, which is that we have minds and are thinking pretty much all the time. And when you are unaware of that, the thinking, much of which is stupid, owns you completely.

You just act it out. You're so right. That's it. You just follow it. And we don't follow what we see. You know, if we see something, if I see a tree, I don't think I'm that tree. I just see a tree. Or if I hear a sound, I don't think I'm that sound. I don't think I am the construction noise that I hear. But when it comes to thinking, because of the nature of mind, I think, we get

caught in believing whatever we hear in our mind, rather than knowing it as just thinking. And like you say, it's crazy making. Who knows what we're thinking? Why we're thinking it or it could be anything. It could be you see something, you see some color prism, and the mind remembers something from when you were seven.

And all of a sudden it starts processing that as if that's what's happening right now so this is more about learning to see thought as thought thinking as thinking and then begin to not be so trapped by it. That's how we are not trapped by it because we know what it is. And we're not, we don't think it's us anymore. You can view this from a practical standpoint in that, you know, when you're not trapped by your thoughts, you're making better decisions, you know, just act out every neurotic impulse that flits through the mind.

You can also compute this as kind of trippy, which is if you're not your thoughts, well then who are you? Yeah, that's right. I think when we think in our ordinary way of looking at life, we think we are our thoughts. But actually, when you begin to come into the present moment, you begin to realize something. A lot of my thoughts of who I thought I was were old worn out thoughts of who I was back when I was in high school or thoughts of who I was when I was in college or whatever, but as my life changed and as experience changes who I am changes also. That's really it's not that there's no me here. There's definitely a

tuéri here, but I'm not the same tuéri. I don't have the same thinking processes. I don't believe the same things. My body doesn't even feel the same way at, you know, 60 as it did when I was 22. Everything is very much different as life goes on. And so our thoughts tend to get very permanent and it begins to form this kind of concretized way of seeing ourselves. And we don't get to change with the times. And so that's what I think when you start beginning to practice more with thinking and thought, you can begin to see, I am not the same. I change. I'm not the same as I was last year. I mean, having lived through

a pandemic, we are not the same. Things we believe strongly in in 2019, we don't believe none of that now in 2022. And so that comes from the fact that life changes and because life changes are thoughts change and the whole process change. And so really what you're learning to do is come into the more realistic relationship with who you are now. That's what I think is so important about

practicing with thinking and thoughts. We're gonna get pretty granular on the practicing aspect here, but let me just ask you one last big picture question. This is something my brother once asked me, which is, okay, Dan, he said, you're saying, I'm not my thoughts, but I do feel like I can direct my thinking. I can decide to think about X and then do that for a while. That's right. And this is the gift of seeing, thinking, thoughts as a synth store, because we can direct what we look at.

We can direct, this is what concentration is. You can stay at work and you can direct your attention at your computer screen and get the project done, get whatever you need to do. We can do whatever. We can listen to music and stay right there with that music for as long as the song goes and play it again. I have music I listen to, over and over and over and over. And every time I listen to it, it's sort of like the first time I'm listening to it.

So we can direct our attention towards our synths doors. And when you begin to realize thought, as a synths door, you can direct your attention even in your thinking, which also means you can direct your attention even in your thinking, which also means you can direct your attention away from some of these very negative, obsessive, kind of harmful thoughts as well. But it takes time to get used to seeing thought as thought and understanding what it is. And then, yes, you can begin to direct your thoughts away from unwholesome. And when I say unwholesome, I mean away from

unskillful things that are just going to cause you more harm and towards more skillful thinking that's going to lead to more capacity and opportunity. That's all really important. Just to clarify, I think what my brother was saying is, if you're saying there is no self, which is the argument, often misunderstood argument that the Buddhists make, they're not saying you don't exist. They're saying at a fundamental, ultimate level that you can't find some core nugget of you. But my brother was arguing was you're saying, I don't exist, but and that my thoughts aren't me, but who's if I can decide to think about pineapples and then go ahead and do it, that makes me feel like there's a me in there who's making

some executive decisions. This is the conundrum. This is what this is the whole difficulty. And the best way I can say it is, there is a you. There is a me here. I am Twerre. I am here sitting here directing my life. I chose to come onto this program. I put myself in this position. I did this. I'm having this conversation with you. We are having a conversation together. But the difficulty with thought has to do with habit. This idea of self-being has more to do with habit.

And once we have a mind that sort of moves in habit so maybe I can explain it like this. It moves at a habit, meaning that when we were just learning how to tie our shoes, before we learned how to tie our shoes, our parents could get us dressed and get them dressed and get out of the house in like 20 minutes, everybody's out of the house. But then we decided we want to learn how to tie our shoes.

And it slows the whole getting ready down for like another hour while we learn how to turn the loops and get the loops together and tie the shoes. It takes a long time to learn something. But once our minds learn how to do it, so they learn how to tie shoes, now we can get our shoes tied and we can get out of the house in 10 minutes. We can tie our shoes while we're running to get to the door, whatever. We don't need to think about tying our shoes. And for many of the things that we do in life, that habitual way of maneuvering through is perfect. So learning how to drive, you don't want to relearn how to drive every time you get behind the car.

We need a habit mind that can process through things. But when it comes to harm, when it comes to knowing what's the appropriate thing to do in a particular moment in time, emotional things or decisions that we have to make that can have lasting effects on our lives, moving in those ways out of habit can create more difficulty and more, I guess, challenges as more of what it is. You want to make these kinds of decisions based on who and what's happening right now. So this is what I would tell your brother. More that we want our thinking process

to be related to what's actually happening in the present moment and not somehow tied to some habit of the way that we always thought. Because our lives change and new information comes in, how you thought when you were in college free to do whatever is very different than how you're going to think when you have children or how you're going to think when you have children or how you're going to think when say you're, you know, you have some illness you have to deal with. And so that need to know the difference between habit behavior, habit thinking, and thinking in relation to what's appropriate right now. That's the difference that we need to learn. And the self, when Buddhist or teachers talk about

self-being, we're talking about that habit way of being without paying any attention to what's happening right now. And so we're trying to learn how do I just be me, but be the me that's actually sitting right here, the be the me that's actually participating in this sort of program interview. And not the me that I think I ought to be based on how I think I should show up from the last time you and I were talking. And just instead, just be who I am right now.

Let me see if I can say a bunch of words to build on that and then you can go back and correct me where I've gone astray. But so people struggle with this idea that the self is an illusion, but the way to think about it, it's often explained, but people in your position is, we're not saying, as I conceded earlier, we're not saying the Buddhists that you don't exist. Obviously, you can look at your face in the mirror and you have a driver's license. If you drive and you need to show up for your appointments, et cetera, et cetera, there is a you. On the relative level, on the level of shared reality, consensual reality, day-to-day reality, you exist for sure, inarguable. But if you go deeper to the, what's called the ultimate reality, or the absolute level, it's a little bit like putting a high-powered microscope on a chair.

It's revealed not to have some essence of chairness to it. It's all at the ultimate level. It's spinning subatomic particles, maybe even more that we haven't discovered yet. So it's not, everything is not as it appears on the ultimate level. And it's important to know this when you're thinking about yourself, because if you think that you are some calcified nugget of you that never changes and is separate from the rest of the fluxing universe.

Well, that can be a source of a lot of suffering because you're stuck in the stories about who you think you are or who you think you should be, how you're going to respond to X, Y, and Z. Instead of being right here right now spontaneously reacting to what is needed. And so it is the thinking on that level of what's happening right now instead of the level of being stuck in your own head and constantly self-evaluating or judging other people or thinking about what kind of person you are or what other people think you might be blah, blah, blah. That's the important level.

I said a lot there, but does any of that make any sense? Yes, all of that makes sense. I think what you're pointing to is that on this relative level, you know, this understanding where all people, where all existing, there is a chair that I'm sitting on regardless of how non-existence essence it could be. But life is always changing. I mean, we are very different because of this pandemic. We are very different.

I don't even, my family is very different. There was a time when my family would get together and it didn't matter what was going on. We all got together. There were no separations, not at all. And since the pandemic, we had to come up with a rule that whoever's house you go over to, they get to decide whether you have a vaccination requirement or not. I mean, just something as simple as that in a family where you'd never think of something like that, but everything had to change. That's what you're talking about.

If you live in this idea that I am who I am, only this, then you never get to change. You never get to change. No one you know gets to change. No situation can ever change. And that kind of permanent kind of solidity is what causes us so much trouble because things are always changing all the time. And if we learn to change with it, then we can kind of grow and flow and

be with it. And you can actually see when things are going wrong, and I need to get in here and do something about it. But oftentimes we live in this kind of permanency, self-in-energy, we don't think anything's ever going to change. And then when it does, it catches the soft guard and causes a lot of difficulty. So this is really about learning, where are you? I guess you could say it like that. Are you in the relative stuck in this, this is me and only me? Or can you open up to this much more ultimate, which allows you to see both the old that was here and the possibility of what could happen

and the present moment, all of it. You can see the whole gamut, you know? I think probably Dan, the biggest thing that I think strikes me about learning to meditate, practicing, in practicing with all the different ways that we practice. As I have always heard when I was growing up that we only use 10% of our brains. And I heard that, and I heard that, and I heard that.

But the more I practice, the more I understand what that means. Because the more I just live at a habit, the more I am trapped in a box that I can only exist one way. Nothing ever can change. I don't want anything to change. I want everything to stay the same. But the more I live in this more

kind of open present moment, let's see what's happening here. The more access I have to qualities and capacities, I didn't even know I had. You would never know that I get petrified about doing these interviews before I do them. I get petrified before giving a double talk. I'm scared to death. And yet, the way that I can do it has more to do with knowing that I'm petrified and knowing that I'm just going to be with whatever comes up. And that just comes with practice more and more. But the more I stay in it in this, what you're talking about, this ultimate reality that just allows you to be with whatever's happening,

the more comfortable you get with it. But you have to practice being with it because I don't think we're very comfortable being with present moment reality just as it is. You have to practice getting used to it. And ultimately, I think the more you practice meditation, the more you start having access to more capacity in the mind. It just has way more capacity than we allow it to have when we live only out of habit or what

we would call self-embearing. Coming up to where you rely on how to recognize and get comfortable with our thoughts, learning to label our thoughts as a first step, and the rewards of being in the present as opposed to being lost in thought. After this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting.

Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown Aller, we will be your resident not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray lego in the middle of the night,

you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. You mentioned practicing. Let's talk about practice. As referenced earlier, we're going to talk about three ways of practicing with thoughts, which many people view with some hostility from a meditation perspective.

So the first way in your list of three here is noting, what do you mean by that? So, this you could think of as the basic general coming to understand that you are thinking, that thinking is happening. And oftentimes we don't know that you are thinking, that thinking is happening. And oftentimes we don't know that we're thinking. So what is needed is an anchor. So something that is in the present moment that's easily for you to identify. It could be you hear a sound happening.

It could be you feel the breath. Many people use the breath. Sometimes the breath can get a little subtle though when you're getting sound happening. It could be you feel the breath. Many people use the breath. Sometimes the breath can get a little subtle though when you're getting very still. So that's not always the best anchor. Sometimes it could just be the physical body, the posture you're in, you're sitting, you're standing, you're lying down, doesn't matter, you know the posture. Whatever it is. But I tell people you could also use smells like a, get a pleasant smell, like a candle or some essential oils and smell that. Or a good friend of mine, Devin Barry used to teach his students to use a sound instrument, one of the instruments in

music. So you listen for the bass line or you listen for the treble line, you just listen for that particular thing. So you get this anchor. This is the thing you're going to come back to. And what you're noting is a general kind of representative label that you could give on the thinking that's going on in the mind. So you know, you're not running from the thinking. You're not trying to not think. You just want to give it a general note of kind of the label. That's probably the best way a label of what that thinking is. It could be rehearsing. You could hear yourself rehearsing something. You're going to say to someone, you're planning out some event, planning out what you're going to do next. You could be complaining about something. That's my go-to. I'm always complaining. so I will just call it as complaining.

It's another one you could do. Judging or uncomparing, you can hear it. You hear the mind talking and you don't get into the content so much, just this label that you could give it. And you label it and try to use your anchor to come back to that. So you're knowing your thinking and you come back to this anchor. The anchor is your present moment, the label is your thinking. This is the first kind of what I would consider the first kind of level of beginning to get

used to or comfortable with thinking. This is thinking as opposed to thoughts. This is just the quality of thinking in general. And knowing the difference, do you even know that you're thinking? And that's what you really are looking for at this first level. Let me repeat the instructions back to you just to make sure I've got it and by extension to make sure listeners have it. You take your meditation position, whatever it may be, sitting lying down, standing, walking, and you pick whatever you're going to make your anchor or object of meditation, could be your breath, could be sounds, could be smells, could be the sensations of your body,

either sitting still or moving, and you commit to that. That's what you're gonna try to focus on with some level of gentle persistence. And then inevitably, the thoughts gonna come bursting through like the cool-aid man and those old commercials. And you'll, at some point, maybe it's five seconds into the thinking, or maybe it's five minutes into it, you'll wake up.

And at that point, you want to just put a label on it. It could be a broad label like thinking, which just allows you to put a kind of a frame around thinking so you understand, oh, that's as the thinking mind feels like, or you could label the type of thinking. So often when I wake up from thinking, I go into self-legilation and I could just put the label of judging on it or I could just notice in an odd judgment the way that I've been planning a homicide and I might put the label anger or planning if I want to be less judgment or whatever it is. There are lots of labels you can put on it

and as you said before gives you a way to familiarize yourself with what it feels like to be thinking as opposed to what it feels like to be awake right now. That's it. This is the first level, this first level of thinking. And that's what you're doing. You're thinking, you want to know your thinking. And I would encourage people not to get too caught in trying to go through these three levels really, really quick. So I can get to the end and I've done it. This is so basic that if you're standing in the grocery store, you can begin to label that knowing that you're thinking so that you can begin

to see the difference between the felt sense of standing in the grocery store and this thinking. They're thinking and they're standing in the grocery store. It takes a while to learn that. Oh, that's thinking. I see what thinking is. Oh, I see. I'm judging.

That's thinking. Because to our mind, to our way of being, standing in the grocery store and judging is present moment. I'm in the present moment. I'm standing in the grocery store. What's the difference? But over time, you can learn that when you're in the judging, when you notice that judging, it does not have the same quality. You actually lose the grocery store. And when you come into the grocery store, you can lose the judgment. So there's a way you can begin to learn

that there's present moment standing in the grocery store and then there is judging. And over time, through these three levels, you can actually learn to hold them both, both the judging and the standing in the grocery store and you don't have to lose one or the other. And that is when the thinking is no longer driving, you can stay present to standing in the grocery store.

That's what we're really going to. We're not trying to stop the judging. We're trying to get to a place where the judging doesn't pull us out of the grocery store into the judgment itself. What really helped me here was to see the reward of it. I mean, part of the brilliance of the Buddha's system is that he really goes through the pleasure centers

of the brain. And so for me, standing online at the grocery store as a perfect one, or it could be just waiting for an elevator, or being in an elevator, and waiting to get to your place, all the kind of in-between moments of your life, which by the way, are still your life, which is finite, and you should probably live it while it's happening. I started to notice that I'm standing online at the grocery store

and I wake up from thinking and realize that what I was thinking was just useless rumination or anxiety or unproductive, unnecessary hostility at the person in front of me, whatever. It felt so much better to just be right there where I was, no matter how humdrum it may be. It felt so much better. It feels so much better every time you wake up that I think that tuning into that incentivizes the mind to wake up. Yes, I think so too. I think when people actually start, I mean, we sit so much in front of a computer. If people actually started being in the flow of what they're doing on the computer, as opposed to working on a computer, but lost thinking about something

else, that life, our life, it's not that it would be so much better. Like, oh, I would finally have this beautiful life. It might be irritating sitting there trying to get this report done on the computer. But the world is so much different. I think I would say it like that. It's different when you're in the present moment than it is when you're lost in the habit way that the mind is thinking. And so writing a report or standing in the grocery store or doing something in the present moment and you know you're there is very different than what it's like to get lost and thought.

That's why I think when people go to retreats and they taste the food, they're like, oh my God, this food is the best. And it's really because they're tasting food rather than reading the newspaper while they're eating breakfast. They're not really tasting the food. So that's what you're really doing.

You're just learning how to come into the present moment and you're using an anchor. You could do it with anything anywhere. You can be sitting or you can just be out and about. You could use driving the car as your anchor. So you can notice when the mind is off doing something now, so come back to driving the car. That's this first level. This is just learning the difference between direct experience. You could think of it like that rather than present moment. It might be easier to say the direct experience of what

you're doing versus thinking lost in thought. Coming up to where we salon, what happens when we get rid of outdated thought patterns and how to train ourselves not to run away from thinking right after this? Okay, let's talk about the second level because this one may sound to some a little dangerous because instead of picking something as an anchor like the breath or sounds movement in the body or even just sensations of the sitting body, the second level in Tuarice Law's system here is using the thoughts themselves as your anchor, as your objective meditation. Please say more. So in this level, this is assuming that you've had some time going back and forth with this

labeling, knowing, thinking, knowing that this is a little bit more, I would say, you want to be in formal meditation for this. You want to actually set yourself up so that you're beginning to notice something. And for those people listening that have practice, you know the hindrances and this desire, this aversion, this restlessness, sleep, this doubt, all of these kind of their mind states, there are emotions, there are all kinds of, kind of, even if we talk about judging or comparing or that self-legulation, complaining, all of these mind states come with a lot of information, a lot of words, a lot of statements,

pleasant feelings, unpleasant neither. They come with all kinds of complexity. It's not just judging. There's a whole level of complexity that comes with judging. And so in this second layer, you want to begin to get into that complexity. And so in this second layer, you wanna begin to get into that complexity. And so in order to get into the complexity, you're actually wanting to let go of the anchor of something else and actually the thinking is your anchor, which is kind of strange. It takes some practicing and you have to be prepared

to get lost in thought. It's just gonna be part of it. It's part of the whole process. There's no, oh, I did it good, I didn't do it good. It's just this consistency that you learned with coming back to the breath. It's the same consistency you learn to begin again. And let me just look at these thoughts.

And you want to look at, is this thinking that I'm doing? Is it pleasant? Is it unpleasant? Is it neither? Is it a version that's happening here? And am I caught in some unpleasantness? Do I feel the pushing away? Do I feel the grasping after a desire?

Do I feel the excessive energy in restlessness? Do I feel the sleepiness? Do you know this? You're looking at the content itself, what you're saying, and the complexity, the dynamic of what's happening with all of this thinking. The reason why this is a actual practice is because you're using a part of the brain

we don't normally use. You are stepping out of, say, the habit you and you're actually using awareness. You're actually opening to this quality of mind that is aware of what's happening and is not caught up in it. So you may be aware that you are, you can be aware of judgment, let's say, and you can be aware of its unpleasantness and you can be aware of the tension in certain muscles. You can be aware of all of this, but you are not actually feeling you're not lost in judgment. It's what I can say. The present moment, the direct experience, is the knowing of judgment, the knowing of its complexity, and you can actually see the harm that comes from judgment. You're not judging yourself, I guess is what I'm saying. You can just

see judgment as judgment, the same way we see and hear sound as sound. And this is a very important aspect of cultivating deeper concentration, that we can know thought as thought and not be caught in it. You're in the direct experience of it and it's a present moment. So treat it like it's a practice and not something I have to perfect. This is a practice of learning how to know this the same way you have to learn how to play an instrument. You have to learn how to do your job. Whatever it is, it's a learning curve and you treat it that way. And so not holding yourself to some kind of gold standard that you should be able to do. I just want to make sure I understand how to do this practice. I'm very compelled because of all the words you just uttered. It sounds important. Let me try to see if I can describe it to you.

So you sit there in meditation, whatever position you generally take, close your eyes, and then nothing. All you do is watch what happens in the thinking mind. And so you may have a few seconds or nanoseconds where you're actually aware of the thinking as it's happening, and then inevitably you'll get carried away by it. And when you wake up, you can notice what kind of thinking that was and start again. You're missing a step here, which is why this probably sounds a little confusing, because in order to do this second layer, you have to build up a layer of concentration. So you're missing that when you first sit down, that's why you have to do this in meditation

as opposed to just walking about. You can maybe do it walking about, but it will not have the same quality. I would encourage people, especially until you get used to it, that you do it in formal meditation. So you sit down, you take your meditation praster, you actually cultivate a level of concentration. So you cultivate a level of present attention, a level of being here, coming back to, you still need to get an anchor, and you still need to come back to that anchor,

and come back to that anchor, and come back to that anchor, until you get a felt sense that you know the difference between the thinking as an object, just label of, oh, I keep going back to my rehearsing that conversation I have to have. And I come back and I rehearsed that conversation I have and I come back and I keep rehearsing and come back. And okay, I'm going to stay here a little bit.

Okay, I'm going to stay. Okay, okay. I feel like I'm staying here. Then you can actually let go of the anchor and open to thought as thought. Just notice when the mind is thinking. You've cultivated a degree of present moment, so you know your thinking. And you notice, is this pleasant or unpleasant? That is very simple.

Is this an unpleasant experience here in this thinking, is it pleasant? Is it neither? You can notice, what am I actually saying? What are the words that are actually coming here? Or you can begin to notice it as a hindrance and you can notice the pull of grasping, of wanting the meditation to end. Or you can notice doubt, as I don't even know if I know what I'm doing

I don't even know if this is what I'm supposed to be doing but you can notice that as doubt This is what you're actually beginning to notice the words that the thinking is saying and beginning to experience it as an experience. And that part of you that is aware is what is paying attention. So you're not just lost in thought, you're actually aware of the various aspects of this thinking process. I appreciate that clarification. So I think at least one of the things I was missing was, and I think this is what you're arguing here is that these three ways of working with thinking are meant to be done sequentially. So you should start by sitting and picking an anchor or an objective meditation.

That process of trying to focus on one thing and then you get lost and start again, get lost, start again, get lost, start again, get lost, start again. That builds up your concentration, you're more and more awake as you do that. And once you feel like you've got some level of concentration, you can drop the anchor and just try to use the thinking itself as the anchor in your meditation. That's right, because we don't always talk about it a lot, but think thoughts and emotions are a foundation of mindfulness. So knowing thought and knowing emotion as part of our foundation

of mindfulness, so it's not like you're leaving this understanding. You are actually still in practice. You're still in meditation and you're still practicing with the foundations of meditation. You are just using thought as your anchor, thought as your establishing mindfulness. And you're using that thought as establishing mindfulness by looking at the dynamics and the qualities and the experience around thought and not just lost in it. Just to say to anybody new to meditation or Buddhism, this idea of the foundations of mindfulness. The Buddha is said to have given a talk roughly 2600 years ago called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Four Ways to be mindful, the Four Ways to cultivate in yourself the

kind of self-awareness that allows you not to be yanked around by your thoughts, urges and emotions. And the first was the body just using your breath or any other sensation. The second is what's called feeling tones noticing whether something is pleasant or unpleasant or neither neutral. The third, and this is what to area referring to, is mindfulness of mind, mindfulness of the using the machinations, the machinery of your mind as a way to wake yourself up. So, a long way of saying, being mindful of your thought is not cheating. This is enshrined right there in the founding documents of this contemplative tradition.

Let me ask you, I notice I can see the thought after I've thought it. You know, I can back announce like a FM DJ who just tells you what songs have played. But I don't know, and I'm not some Olympic meditator, but I've been doing it for more than a decade. I don't know that I can see a thought emerge from under its rock in the mind. So if I can't do that,

can I not do what you're recommending here? No, what you're doing is just fine. I think one thing I really, really liked about the way the Buddha described his practice is that he did not make a difference between seeing something before, seeing it during or seeing it after. He didn't make a distinction between that. It's all the same. So it doesn't matter if you catch something before you do it, or if in the middle of something you realize, oh, I don't want to keep going this way. Or you think about something you did and you're like, oh, I wish I hadn't done that. There's no distinction. He didn't make a distinction between those three. So to me if you notice the thought afterwards, it's the same. You just notice it and when you notice it, notice if it was pleasant. Was it unpleasant? I, it's normal for meditators, we don't notice that we're thinking until we've been thinking for a while. And in the midst of that thinking, we'll notice that we're thinking. And I have taught myself to not go to that immediate impulse to get rid of the thought.

To just stop and go back to the anchor? And instead, I always check what's the feeling tone that quality? Is it pleasant? Is it unpleasant? Is it neither? What is that? And what was the words I was saying? So there's a way that I'm beginning to train myself to notice the words, the quality, the tone, the mood, I'm in, all of that. I'm

beginning to look at that before I go back to the anchor, if I want to go back to the anchor, but I don't just immediately run away from thinking anymore. You know, there's a reason why I think we have to learn this about thought. I just thought about this, but and maybe this would be too much. I don't know. I was going to say it anyway. Usually it's the good stuff that comes when people say, I don't know if I should say this, but I'll try. That perks my ears up. I'm listening. We are never going to stop thinking. It is never, there's never going to be a time when our minds are just never going to think. And so if we're going to learn, almost I was just thinking about what your brother said. If you're going to learn

to direct your thoughts towards the most supportive, helpful, kind of, skillful way of moving through the world, then you cannot be afraid of thinking. You have to get used to thinking. We have to get used to being with thinking and understand what the thinking is and to know what thinking is not in keeping with what's skillful and what thinking is in keeping with what's skillful.

What thinking is true in my life now and what thinking is no longer true anymore. That is just, it's obsolete. Just like with computer systems, they're obsolete. They don't work. And that's why you can't play your games. It doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you're good, you know, good game player.

But if you got an old computer, those newer games just aren't going to work on it. And you need to get rid of that old system and upgrade to a newer system. And then you can fly like you were before in the play into the game. And so that's what you're actually doing by spending some time practicing with thoughts and thinking. You're beginning to see how the mind is thinking. So I have a caveat here. And I think this goes to probably the third level. I don't know if you're ready to go to the third level, but this I think probably goes between

the second and third level. There's something that we have to be prepared for. We have to say it out loud to ourselves that this is a practice. And what that means is, you are going to see things and hear yourself saying things that you will not like, that you will not want to accept, that you even talk like this, that cannot possibly be me. And it's almost like you have to give yourself permission to both know this is habit, this is why this whole knowing the difference between thinking and direct experience, habit versus being in this direct experience is so important. Because a lot of our thinking is habitual. It is the mind just saying the same things over and over and over and over. So it's no wonder that we wake up with a lot of dread. It's no wonder that we're always anxious and worried about things because the mind keeps repeating the same programs over and over.

But those programs aren't necessarily real. They're not necessarily true right now. And until we start seeing them, we won't ever question them. We won't ever change and shift. So you need to know the direct experience and then you need to know the old obsolete programs that are running in the mind over and over so that you can say, no, that's not true. And in this practice, the greatest limitation or the greatest sort of challenge is that when you start hearing things that Your mind is saying and you don't like it That you begin to take it as oh, I'm a terrible person. Look at what I'm saying

And I had to actually tell myself before I would start any practice with thoughts that What's set in the mind stays in the mind. It's just, I mean, it's basically like, I'm not carrying what I see into this meditation out into my life as this is me. This is a practice designed to help me see what program is running in the background and to unhook myself from these absolute programs. And so I want to see things that is running in the background. And a lot of that stuff is really negative. It's really bad. It's really self-defeating. It's really negative. And it's, or it's the opposite. It's overexposing, building up our egos, and it's not really telling the truth about how we're actually being.

So mostly, you have to make sure you don't carry that into your life. Make sure you leave it in the meditation as a meditative practice, and we're not, it's not psychology. It's not therapy. We're not trying to fix ourselves. We're trying to see what's running in the background and let go of that, which is no longer applicable anymore. Yes, I mean, I think it's beautiful and really important. And I think there are, and I think you would agree with this, aspects of this practice that you really should take into your life. One is, once you learn to see how horrifying your inner

cacophony is, you don't have to be so owned by it. That's really important. The second thing is, once you see how terrible your mind can be, you understand anybody's mind is probably a pretty dangerous neighborhood, and you can have less judgment of other people's behavior and all of that judging and anger and resentment. The flavor of that isn't very sweet either. Yes.

I guess what I mean by not taking it into your life is you don't want to reify what you see, what you hear and what you notice in this practice. As concretized, you don't want to reify this selfie that you see and use what you see or hear as proof that you really are you know a crappy person because it's habit. It's an old program that maybe a five-year-old thought, oh, I'm a crappy person because I missed up on my spelling exam. I'm a crappy person. And then the mind picks that up and it keeps saying it.

And it's been saying it now for 15, 20 years. And you didn't hear it in this process of practicing with mind. I'm a crappy person that you don't want to reify. That's what I mean by not taking it into your life. You want to see it as, yeah, that's an old thought. It's been around a long time. It's time to let that thought go. Yeah, I mean, it goes back to, I completely agree, and it goes back to the beginning of this discussion around the illusion of the self. You don't have to take it also personally. You don't have to use it to build as the foundation of a whole structure that's in the mind, that is a story that's telling you

what kind of person you are. You can see it as nature or as the great meditation teacher seven a. So, lastly, once quoted to me something from a very famous meditation teacher named Jay Christian Amerti. And this was in the context of some teaching that said was doing bias and racism and our temptation to see some sort of bigoted thought and then tell ourselves a whole story about what a terrible person we are. She said, remember what Jay Christiana Merti said, which is, you think you're thinking your thoughts, but you're not. You're thinking the culture's thoughts. And so that can be very liberating, not only in terms

of your own self image, but I think it's the wellspring of compassion for other people too. That's exactly right. And part of why you do the first part and you get used to that first part is you remember you're learning the difference between direct experience and thinking, direct experience and thinking, so that by the time you get into this more, seeing the complexity of thought and how it shows up in the mind, you are also comparing that against this more direct experience. You know directly how you are in the world now, not just some image in the mind of some old subconscious thing or a lot of times you are thinking things that other people have said to you and you think of it as you. So this is all this stuff is you can begin to uncover it and see what's running in the background. What I think happens, Dan, at least it did for me. A lot of people have kind of practiced with this,

with people. What happens is when you get rid of a lot of these old habitual, outdated thinking patterns, it's not that you stop thinking, but you have less thought going on because the thought is more in relation to what's actually happening and not just a whole bunch of random, constant, verbiage. Yes, and you can think new and better thoughts sometimes. It makes room for that as well.

Let me, because I want to be sensitive to your time. Let me ask a quick clarifying question on way number two of practicing with thoughts. And then we'll move into the way number three. You may have said this, and I may have missed it. When we're making thoughts are anchor, and then we wake up from being lost in thoughts, is the move there just to pay attention to, oh, is this pleasant

or unpleasant? Or is it also to put a label on the kinds of thoughts we've just been thinking? That's a technical question. Yes, you can still put a label on it. That labeling is going to help you move out of the story or the narrative and move into this kind of awareness mind, observing mind, observing what's going on. I go to the pleasant, unpleasant, neutral because that's the easiest, it seems like that's the most noticeable thing as soon as I notice that I'm thinking. I can tell how the body is.

I can tell whether I feel tense and where I'm tense. And then I just start looking around that thinking to begin to get more and more interested in what the thinking is. So what are the words? And oftentimes what are the words I just said? That's what it's more like that. And you know, is it old? You can think about, is this something I hear a lot?

Is this more recent? I mean, you're actually investigating that thinking. You're not just labeling it and going back to the anchor. So the labeling and going back into the anchor is what's cultivating concentration. Enough concentration that when you're ready, you can actually start looking at it, investigating the nature of that thinking, not the story, but just quality and the context around it. Thank you for that. So, let's do, if you're ready, the third level of practicing with thoughts. This third level might seem like it should go before the second because it seems more complicated.

The second one seems really complicated, but it actually helps set us up for this third level. And the third level is noticing mind states. They're really, they put a noted eight of them. So there's a wanting, there is a anger or version not wanting, distraction and delusion. I consider this the ordinary mind side. That would be the relative reality. And then there'd be this ultimate reality, which is whether or not the mind is spacious, which includes this kind of tranquility is whether or not the mind is spacious,

which includes this kind of tranquility and calm, whether the mind is surpassing, whether the mind is concentrating, whether the mind is liberated. So fundamentally, what I think these eight qualities of mind are pointing to is whether or not you can begin to see, it's not just calling it wanting. You actually feel the pull of wanting. You feel the tug and the mind stayed together so you can feel that there's wanting in the mind and you can feel this kind of pulling towards it. You can feel this kind of aversion or anger in the mind, and you can feel, you can know there's anger aversion in the mind, and you can feel the pushing against it at the same time. You can know that the mind is distracted, and you can feel the felt sense of scatteredness, a lack of containment, this non-present experience,

non-direct experience, same way with delusion, you can know there's delusion, and you can feel this quality of confusion, it felt sense of being adoubted and a lot of that comes in there. So it's the same way for the higher minds. What you're actually practicing here is that it actually combines, I think, both the second and the first together. So you are both knowing the

mind state and you're feeling it in the body at the same time. And that felt since alone is what helps you know where you are in the mind. So you know when your the mind is spacious and you know when the mind is not spacious. You know when there's wanting in the mind and you know when there's not wanting in the mind. It doesn't even have to get into a story, words, or anything.

You know when there's wanting in the mind and when there's not wanting in the mind. But it's really more of a felt sense experience in the body, more than it is, thoughts in the mind. It's hard to explain it, but it's almost as if you begin to realize that mind is a bodily experience, more than just anxiety. I feel really, really bad. You, oftentimes when we feel anxiety, we feel the physical sensations of anxiety,

but we don't really even know all the thinking that's going on in the mind. And the mind is going crazy, but we feel so much anxiety in the body that we're trying to get the body calmed and we're not really thinking about the mind that's pushing it. In this last layer, you're actually beginning to see what pushes the body, what, that you can see the relationship between how mind pushes the body.

That's what I think is why this is a third level and not, it doesn't come before the second one. It's probably me being obtuse, but I want to see if I can say it back to you because I'm not sure I get it and I want to get it. First question though, is a technical question, which is, do I need to remember these eight states of mind in order to do this that you referenced earlier? I don't think you need to remember them, but it is a good idea. When you've gotten comfortable with the fact that the mind is thinking and there's thoughts

and there's all kinds of levels of thinking going on, then it's good to know these eight as eight states of mind and you can just begin to feel how you are being in some given moment. Meaning you can know that you are grasping after wanting something, pushing after it, and you can learn to let go of the grasping. You can know when you're not grasping. When you actually, there's the absence of wanting something. So those eight that wanting, it's called anger, but I think of it as a version or not wanting

and distraction and delusion. You know those different states of mind as pushing against you and you know when they're there and you know when they're not. And then the other ones are spaciousness, surpassing, concentrated or liberated. Spacelessness, I think people understand, generally. So passing, I've never really had teachers really give it a good explanation. So I had to come up with my own. So I'm going to give you my own understanding of what I think it is. In any moment in time, we all have opinions and views.

And surpassing to me is when you're in a state of mind where you're open to the possibility of the other or something else, you're not locked into an idea that it's this and only this. So you're in a quality of mind that you can take in new information, that you can consider something that you don't even know exists, and you're open to the possibility of something else. That's what I think of that surpassing mind or this quality of mind that's open beyond this kind of limited, everything has to be a certain way. And then concentrated is a mind that's unified and gathered.

It's still as present right here right now. And then this liberated mind is not what I would think of as, I'm enlightened, but it is released of some kind of constriction. You are released from it and you feel like it's almost like you've been stuck in a wanting mind and then you feel that release of the absence of wanting, the absence of not wanting, the absence of distraction and delusion and confusion. That's what I think that liberated mind is. So I do think that knowing those eight is very helpful because I used to run down those eight all the time, just run down it, ask myself, is this present is this absolute?

Is the present is absolute? Present, absolute. And you can begin to see. And each one of these qualities of mine carries with it a felt sense in the body. So you can begin to feel, you can feel this kind of grasping after a version of pushing away. And I believe that when you begin to feel the pressure that comes from our thinking and you know what is present in what is absence, this is what I think is true liberation in the long run.

Let's say you have a habit of your city in meditation and you have this habit of wanting the bell to get quick. I need it to come quick, I need to come quick and you start obsessing over what time it is and did I sit the talk? Did I sit the clock? Maybe I didn't sit it. Maybe I've been here longer than I should have been here.

You start obsessing over it. maybe I didn't say it. Maybe I've been here longer than I should have been here. You start obsessing over it. In the first level, you are knowing that you're thinking, come back to the anchor, try to stay present. You're thinking, stay present. Just you can see that. In the second level, you can begin to hear yourself talking about the clock and obsessing over in the clock and you can begin to feel the unpleasantness of the obsessing over the clock and you can say, I do this all the time. I can see that. Oh, I see what's going on here.

This is a habit and really I'm okay. I can just stay here. In this third level, you feel the pressure of wanting and you just let the wanting go. You don't even have to get caught so much in that what you're saying, you just let the wanting go because you can feel that thinking as wanting and that you let that wanting go. wanting and that you let that wanting go. And that's where I think we start actually having the freedom with thoughts is when you can get to a place where you notice wanting and you can let it go and you can notice the absence of wanting. So you're sitting in your meditation and all of a sudden you can just

notice there's no wanting this to be other than it is. There's no not wanting anything. I'm not distracted. Is there delusion? No. I'm here, present. I know what's going on. Is the mind feel spacious? It's like, yeah, I can feel spaciousness or you can just go through it. You can just like, no, I don't feel like it's surpassing.

I don't feel any concentration. I don't even know what surpassing is or liberated. That's okay. You don't have to know. I think it's surpassing. I don't feel any concentration. I don't even know what surpassing is or liberated. That's okay. You don't have to know. I think it's not here. That's good enough. And you just begin to go through these qualities of mind as a quality in and of itself, that noticing the presence of it and the absence of it.

This is when I think people really begin to feel that sense of liberation because at this level, thinking really doesn't matter. You're not caught in, what am I thinking? Is this judgment? I can't stop the judgment. You're not caught in any of that. You just feel it as wanting and you notice wanting present or you notice wanting absent, notice not wanting present, you notice that absence, anger, aversion, whatever. Do you see what I'm pointing to? It's a little different, yeah. Yes, and it's similar to a practice that I do sometimes, which is just simply asking myself, what's the attitude in my mind right now? And it's a little bit, I've made this joke before, but it's a little bit like

those classic news segments where the reporter goes into the hotel room with a black light and shines the black light on everything. You see all the disgusting substances that are everywhere. And as soon as you ask yourself, what's the attitude in your mind, you're like, oh, I thought I was meditating like a good little meditator, but actually I was just sitting here wanting something or feeling aversion toward something and that could be a really help kind of mindfulness bill. Walking through these three levels have been really helpful.

I want to ask too habitual, but in the positive sense, questions for me, one, is there anything I should have asked but didn't? There's one thing I want to say, I think, towards towards the end here is that I know I probably said it several times But I want to say at one more time this is all practice and it's practice around thoughts because thoughts are a big part of our lives So we want to practice with thoughts and not be afraid of them or not be somehow try to get rid of them or run away from them. So we are practicing and this is really just a offering on how you can practice with thoughts and not be afraid of it. But I do think people should make it their

own. If something in the way I've said it seems too constricting and tight and I can't remember it, then make up your own way. Just make it up and learn to be with these thoughts in whatever way will support you. Great, and the final habitual question of mine is, if people have listened to you to this point and wanna learn more from you, where can they go to get more to area Salah?

Oh, I have a website they can go to is toarysalah.org so they can go there. I teach a lot at spirit rock and they can also find me at Seattle Insight. So either one of those three places would be a great way to get a hold of me. We'll put links in the show notes kids. Toari, thank you very much for doing this. Thank you, Dan, for having me. It's been a while, but I'm really glad to come back and support people's practice. Thanks again to Tawari Salah.

Always great to talk to her. Thanks as well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% Happier is produced by DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin Davie and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman, Kimi Reggler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. Hey, hey, prime members.

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