Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 533: A Self-Interested Case for Forgiveness | Jack Kornfield

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

The allure of resentment, of holding a grudge or nursing your rage can be super powerful. In today’s episode, Jack Kornfield, one of the great western meditation masters, talks about Buddhist strategies for not holding grudges and the self-interested case for forgiveness. This episode is the first of a two-part series this week on forgiveness. In this conversation we talk about: What forgiveness is and isn’t Whether forgiveness is a single act or an ongoing processThe cost of not forgivingA forgiveness practice you can try in your meditationWhether it’s possible to respond to the misdeeds and transgressions of others with force and love at the same timeWhether there are things that are unforgivableAnd Jack’s contention that forgiveness involves a shift in identityFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jack-kornfield-533See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. The allure of resentment of holding a grudge, of nursing your rage can be super powerful. In a recent episode of one of my favorite television shows at Lanna. One of the main characters earned played by the genius Donald Glover tells his therapist, and I'm quoting here, I love spite. It's a pure, powerful thing. It gave me courage. I could count on it. He's right. It is powerful. Spite can be clarifying and courage giving. But as the Buddha has said, anger has a honeyed tip, but a poison root.

In other words, it might feel good on one level, but on a more fundamental level, it's toxic. Today, we're going to talk with one of the great Western meditation masters about some Buddhist strategies for not holding grudges, about the self-interested case for forgiveness We're going to dispel some of the prevailing myths about forgiveness. It's not about being a pushover It's not about subjecting yourself to mistreatment. It is not a weakness My guest is the mighty Jack cornfield who's been on the show many times He's a former Buddhist monk and also a PhD in clinical psychology, who was one of the pioneers who helped introduce meditation to the West.

Back in the 1970s, he is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, the Spirit Rock Center, and Cloud Sangha, an online community for anybody looking for a meditation teacher. He's also written 16 books, including no time like the present and the awesomely entitled, After the Exacy, the Laundry. In this conversation, we talked about what forgiveness is and what it isn't. Whether forgiveness is a single act or an ongoing process,

the cost to you personally of not forgiving, a forgiveness practice, you can try in your meditation. We talk about whether it's possible to respond to the misdeeds and transgressions of other people with force and love simultaneously, whether there are things that are unforgivable, and we talk about Jack's contention that forgiveness involves a shift in identity. I'll let him explain that. Before we dive in here, two notes. This is actually the first episode of a two-part series we're doing this week, right here, on forgiveness. Today is predominantly about forgiving other

people. On Wednesday, the great Tara Brock, who is very close with Jack, will be here to talk about forgiving yourself. Second note, you may hear some stray sounds in the background throughout this interview, which is just the nature of remote recording. So, to be a little cute, forgive us. Okay, we'll get started with Jack Cornfield right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos To access the course just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all One word spelled out Okay on with the show Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast One word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. forgiveness in the fine Buddhist tradition you've made a list of skills that we can employ in the realm of forgiveness. But before we get into the list, let me ask you why in your

view forgiveness is so important. Forgiveness is important for us to live a life of well-being, to tend to our hearts in a way that makes us and the people around us happy, because we get disappointed, we get hurt, we suffer, other people make us suffer, we make them suffer, and if we hold on to that, it somehow captures our heart, and we don't live freely. In human incarnation, difficulties are just part of the curriculum. That's what we get. And yet, the possibility is that we can live with a freer heart for ourselves

and those around. And it makes such a huge difference. Otherwise, we're trapped in the past, in some way. And there is another choice for us as human beings. And I want to be really immediate about it because the forgiveness includes, you know, messy divorces and family troubles and things around money and people who betrayed us and ways we betrayed ourselves. How do we manage and deal with that? And I think of a woman I was working with who was in the throes of a very difficult divorce, and her husband was a high-powered lawyer who was trying to keep all the money

and keep the children as well. And he started to spin a bunch of lies about what a bad mother she was when he was actually the one that had the series of affairs. And so I said to her, get yourself a really damn good lawyer to start with to protect you. And it was such a struggle. Then she came in to see me at one point. And she said, you know, he's tried to turn the children against me. That's a terrible thing to happen in a family.

And she said, I was sitting in meditation and trying to understand and I realized that I do not and will not be queath a legacy of bitterness to my children. I will not speak badly of him no matter how hurt I feel. That is not what I want to offer to my children for their lives ahead. And when she said that, I could have wept because it had so much integrity and so much heart in it. It didn't mean she wasn't protecting herself, but she was living a life of nobility, if you will, of spirit to say, this is who I am,

and I will stand on it. I'm sure we'll get to this throat as we dive into the list, but I can't help but ask, are there things that are unforgivable? Must we always forgive no matter what? It's a profound question you ask, and none of these things can be answered glibly. I will talk about things that seem unforgivable, and I recently read a book, I wish I could get the title, I'll get it back to you. I think it's called the unforgivable or the unforgivant, and it was someone who worked with people who were incarcerated for committing murders and some of the most terrible things. And the end of it was the grappling that this woman did

through her own suffering, with what you do with something that seems unforgivable. And the point underneath it all really is, how do you tend your own heart? Because if you don't understand, then even the unforgivable things can be worse because they colonize your heart. They take you over. And so in the end, that's really what forgiveness is about in the deepest way.

It's like the two ex-prisoners of war who met many years later and they had been tortured and beaten terrible things happen to them. And now it was a couple decades later and one of them said to the other, have you forgiven your captors yet? And the second one said, no, never. And the first one said, well, then they still have you in prison, don't they? The oft-repeated, I don't know if it's a cliche, but it's in that zone. The oft-repeated admonition when people are talking about forgiveness and what's forgivable and what's not is holding a grudge is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies. Yes, yeah, exactly. So it's really, it points to the

possibility of how we might live with a sense of dignity and well-being no matter what. And I think of, you know, teachers and folks that I've admired or spent time with, and there's that beautiful book called The Book of Joy of dialogues between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu and part of the theme of it when they come together they're both joyful people with amazing compassionate spirits and a beautiful sense of humor and they talk about the immense suffering that they and the people that they tend to live through, to bat the colonization by the Chinese army and apartheid and so many people died in South Africa. And at some point, the Dalai Lama's asked about it,

maybe two to us. And he said, so much has been taken from me, our temples destroyed, our texts burned, our monks and nuns and people thrown in prison. Why should I let them take my happiness to? And that's an extraordinary statement to recognize and honor even things that are difficult and then to realize that when it comes back to us in small ways and in huge ones like this, it's still, who do we want to be in this world?

What do we want to model? What actually matters? I love the Buddha's emphasis on self-interest, enlightened self-interest. Not all of us will have experienced victimization on the level of the dollar alarm or Desmond Tutu, the dollar alarm with the Chinese Desmond Tutu with the white architects of apartheid. But I sometimes think about our lives as being like pinballs. You know, we're just bouncing around

against other human beings, bad analogy, because in pinball, you're not bouncing against other balls, you're bouncing against the obstacles in the machine, but we're bouncing around. And if you're walking away from every bank shot, from every connection, every interaction, holding a grudge, well, then your movement through this world is going to be pretty sludgy. And you're just making things so much less supple, so much less smooth. If you can't get over the small and large infractions, am I rambling? Am I making any sense? What do you think? You are. I mean, it's a kind of fun semi-modern mid-century image.

What can we say? That's kind of fun. I like it. Let me just pause because talking with you, but also I'm somehow talking to the people who are listening. This is also a really tender topic. And you're saying something important that how you tend your heart, if you carry grudges around, you're not going to have a very happy life. One succession after another. Part of what you're talking

about is in the Buddhist teachings where I was originally trained as a monk and of course trained in Western psychology and so forth, the first of the noble truth is that life has suffering. And it doesn't matter. I mean, I work with people at every level, people who've been homeless and people who have a billion dollars or many billions, and they're suffering, you know, different kinds of suffering. And what do we do with that? It doesn't say life is suffering. Life has got magnificence that, you know, unbearable beauty of the world and the ocean of tears And then how do we live with this and if we contract? Around the suffering if we fear it if we hold on in ways

Because of the grudges of the past and so forth. We actually increase our suffering and Yet it's possible to live with a free or spirit. And I think about Victor Frankel, the author of Man Search for Meeting in this great existential philosopher and writer who said, we who lived through the concentration camps as he did can remember those who walk through the huts, comforting others, and giving away their last piece of bread.

They may have been few in number, but they proved for once and for all the greatest of our human capacities, our capacity to choose our heart, to choose our spirit no matter the circumstance. And of course, this is a really radical circumstance that he speaks of, but all of us have times that we wouldn't choose and that hurt and that are difficult where others have harmed us and we've harmed them and we struggle. And this is really part of the gift of the teachings of compassion and mindfulness and forgiveness, they say, you as a human being can live with a noble spirit, with joy, with well-being,

even though human incarnation includes suffering and difficulty. That's just part of the curriculum, if you will, of getting through human life, but you have this possibility. And that's why these practices in training, it's an out of philosophy, but they're actually practices in trainings, in compassion, in forgiveness, that you can do that change your heart and mind. You've kind of brought us nicely right up to the list of practices, just to say, and this is me paraphrasing you back to you, but you have pointed out in

some of your writing that forgiveness is a theme and all major religions and contemplative traditions. The difference in Buddhism, you've argued, is that it's a set of practices. It's not just an exhortation, it's stuff you can do. Yes, that's one of the strengths of the Buddhist tradition is that there are a series of trainings and practices, and that's how we learn. We actually learn through inner training and inner repetition, and the fact that the mind and heart can be

trained is one of the most amazing and great gifts to acknowledges a human being. We don't have to just follow our conditioning, but we can learn new ways and that's inobeling and liberating. So let's get to the list. This is a list of twelve principles connected with the process of forgiveness. The first is to understand what forgiveness is and what it is not. What do you mean by that? Forgiveness does not mean that we condone what happened in the past. It doesn't say forgive and forget. In fact, for forgiveness to be genuine, it means we have to see it clearly and feel the impact

on our lives and others, whether we've harmed others or they've harmed us in small or in huge ways. So it doesn't condone it, it sees it clearly, and not only does it not condone it, but when you see it, the first step is to say, I will do everything I can to prevent this harm from continuing. I will stand up, or I will speak out, or I will stop, I will do whatever it's necessary to protect myself and to protect others. So it doesn't mean rolling over to forgive.

And once you recognize that there's harm that's been done and you do what you can to stop it and not allow it to continue, then forgiveness is an act of your own heart. Then it says, all right, I've done what I can. I've seen what's clear about it. Now forgiveness says, can I begin to let go? And it's not just our own individual practice, but if you look globally at what happened in Bosnia or Northern Ireland between the Catholics and the Protestants or the Palestinians and Israelis or the Hutus and the Tutsis and so forth, it's very easy to say, and you know, modern kind of radio in those countries and places

fuels this. Your people did this to my people 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago. We can't let this remain. We have to keep this going, and there's no end to it. Finally, somebody has to say, yes, this happened. Yes, this is the truth. And I will be the one to have it stop, to stop revenge.

And what kind of a world would we have if there isn't a place for forgiveness? Otherwise, we live in a world where people only remember the way they've been hurt. But there's another possibility, and we know this. Now, I'm speaking in very big terms, but in the smallest ways in friendships, you know, or in family matters or in business,

the first thing is to see it. The second, maybe, is realize that you're not going to condone it. In fact, you do everything you can to prevent harm continuing. And then you realize, all right, now what do I do so that I don't carry this forward with a grudge and continue to keep the dynamic of hatred? I'm glad you start here. I think it's obviously not a mistake. It's quite wise to start the list with one of the biggest qualms that people have about forgiveness, which is that we'll make them into a polluca.

But you're being very clear. It's not about accepting the unacceptable. So let me move to number two on the list. Okay. I have to remember, by the way, I just made this list up. As you said, you know, it's the Buddha was a listmaker, the four-no-world truths in the eightfold path and the seven factors of enlightenment and the three characteristics. So there's a lineage of listmaking.

Maybe you probably had shopping lists for the senior monks to go out and, you know, pick up things they needed to monastery. Anyway, so keep going. Let's play with the list. Um, duly noted and we will approach this list in the spirit that you just encouraged us to approach it with, which is, you know, this is not 2600 years old and trying to, it's not the 10 commandments, you know, or that, whatever.

Exactly. So number two, since the suffering in yourself of still holding on to this lack of forgiveness for yourself or for another. Yeah, if we are to forgive, it asks us in some way to look deeply in our own heart and see if holding on to that suffering, he or she or they wrong me in this way, if this actually fosters our well-being. There's no question that the suffering will be felt in body, in heart, in mind. Now, what do we do with it? And I think there's a kind of honorable grieving that may be part of forgiveness for some. To really let

ourselves feel the pain or the suffering or the tears that come and say yes. This is so. I have lived through this, you know, and I've tried to put a stop to it, but I still carry these tears. And knowing that, then we start to honorably say, all right, this is the suffering I have to bear. There's a Sufi passage that says, overcome any bitterness because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was given to you in this human life. Like the mother of the world you were sharing in the beauty of the world and the pain of the world. It is all in your heart and you are called upon to meet it with compassion instead of self-pity. And there's

some way in which we honor it. It's not that it didn't happen or that it isn't painful. We hold it with compassion and we know that it also doesn't define us. We hold it with compassion and we know that it also doesn't define us. You may address this later in the list, but just the question is according to me now, so I'll say it. We've talked a little bit about what forgiveness is not, but it might be worth saying a little bit more about what it is, because I might be willing to forgive somebody in my family who's got a problematic behavioral pattern. But I can't stamp out my bitterness.

Can I? I mean, if you compartmentalize or deny a thing that's happening in your mind, you might just be making it stronger in some way. So help me understand how you do this thing. That's well put. And that's exactly what this point is that you don't skip over the suffering. You know, this isn't a spiritual bypass. Okay, I forgive and forget. You actually let yourself feel, as you say, in a family situation where somebody's behaving in ways of causing

suffering, you do what you can to prevent that harm from continuing, but you can't control other people. And then you not only do you grieve, you feel it, you honor it, so it's not in any way papering it over. And then you say, who am I, you know, and you realize that you have that same spirit, the Victor Frankl or Archbishop,u had in these terrible circumstances, but you have that same possibility in yourself to let go. And someone said forgiveness means letting go of all hope for a better past, right? That in some way we might wish that we would be different and certainly wish that people would behave differently and often they don't.

So the forgiveness becomes an interact that doesn't deny the suffering, but in some way holds all of it with a great heart of compassion and say yes, we've all suffered and I will not let this suffering take me over. Is it a conclusive interact in your view or is it a process? I mean, in a way, we're sort of spontaneously going through these points. It doesn't happen quickly. And when I was first taught a forgiveness meditation, and I started to do it, and it was partly toward my father, I mean, lots of things to to forgive and be forgiven for quite honestly. But this was my father had some mental problems basically.

He was paranoid and violent. He was a quite brilliant scientist, but he was a wife batter and a really angry temper. So we'd be terrified when the car would pull in the driveway, which father were we're going to get? We're going to get the mean abuse of person who would throw my mother down the stairs, you know, or beat her. And the teacher that I work with said here, do this forgiveness practice, which is an intermutation. And do it 15 minutes a day, maybe twice a day, for the next, yeah, next six months or so. And I thought, okay, and then I realized, wait, six months twice a day, he said, do it 300 times. And sometimes it brings up its opposite

no. I'll never forgive how could he, I won't, and all those feelings come, and they need to be honored. And held in tenderness and compassion to say, yes, this is the suffering that I've experienced. And then you do the practice of offering or extending forgiveness a little at a time. And it wears open the heart. It softens that deep holding and pain that we carry. As you mentioned, if there's time, we'll do this practice together. But before we get to that point, I'd be curious, could you just describe how the practice works so that if those of us who are interested want to do it at a later time, we can?

Yes. So the practice is done in three directions inwardly and it helps to have it guided. So for people who want a guided forgiveness practice, I have them on my website, checkhortfield.com. And if you look at guided meditations, there's a guided 15 minute practice. And it's three directions. First, you begin by reflecting on the ways that you have hurt and harmed other people. Because before you can forgive somebody else, you often remember that it's not a one-way street and that in your human life, each of us has betrayed or disappointed each of us has betrayed or disappointed or hurt or caused suffering to others, if we reflect honestly at certain times knowingly and unknowingly, and you bring those into mind so you reflect and remember these deeply. And then once you have, you also begin to feel the inner intention that arises

when you see that you cause harm, and you begin to ask forgiveness in the ways that I've heard or harmed you knowingly or unknowingly, out of my own pain, out of my confusion, out of my fears, out of my herd and anger and my own struggles, in the ways that I've done that, feeling how I got caught up, please forgive me. Will you forgive me? And you envision asking that forgiveness. And people will respond to different ways,

it's not going and talking to the person. It's an inner process. And if you do it over and over again, it becomes more genuine. At first, it can feel mechanical. But then you begin to realize, oh, yeah, I really do want to ask forgiveness. I really do want them to know that out of my hurt

and pain and confusion and anger, knowingly or unknowingly, I know I caused you pain. Please forgive me. And it frees you to do so. And then you move to the second dimension, which is forgiving yourself, because just as you've hurt and harmed others, knowingly or unknowingly, we've all betrayed ourselves. We've all caused pain and harm to ourselves. We've all in different ways made suffering for ourselves. And so that too, asks for forgiveness in the ways that I've heard or harmed myself out of my confusion and fear and pain and anger. In this moment, I offer myself forgiveness. And you do that again and again.

And it's as if you hold yourself with both a respect and a tenderness. And honorably you see what you've done and say, yes, I see it. And I will forgive myself. As if we don't forgive ourselves, we go along as many people do with a tremendous amount of suffering from self-judgment and self-hatred things that are so common when people begin to meditate and they see how much self-criticism there is. So to actually have self-compassion, which is what forgiveness is, is a profound

practice. And then the third dimension or the third direction, and it pedagogically, it's set up systematically in this way, this practice, because when you realize that you've harmed other people and you've caused pain to yourself, then you begin to realize, oh yeah, now I can see the way others have harmed me in a different light. And you reflect and remember the ways that others have hurt you, small and large. And also notice sometimes it was intentional and sometimes it was unintentional, but they betrayed you and caused you pain. And then you examine and remember that they too act out of their own fear and confusion and hurt and pain and anger and ignorance and say, all right, in the ways that you've hurt or

harmed me out of your fear and pain and confusion, to the extent that I'm ready. You can't hurry it to the extent that I'm ready. You can't hurry it to the extent that I'm ready. I forgive you or I begin to forgive you or I begin to let go. And you do it a number of times until you can feel that that holding starts to soften and loosen. And you don't start with the worst thing. The beautiful thing about, again, the pedagogy, the interunderstanding of how the heart and mind work, you start what most naturally opens your heart. When you do a loving kindness meditation, you begin by thinking and feeling connection with the place where you feel the most love to another person or maybe it's your dog, it doesn't

matter, but your heart starts to open and then you add somebody else and little by little it opens further. And forgiveness you start in little ways. And then step by step by repeating this inwardly, you free yourself. And you free your heart. It's not a weakness to forgive and that's part of what confuses people like, I'm going to roll over. You can stand up and be very strong in protecting yourself and others. And it doesn't mean you ever ever talk to that person again, whether there are someone outside or even somebody in your family to protect yourself in the best way, may mean you never talk to that person. But what it does mean is that you

don't put others out of your heart in the end because it closes your own heart. So it's not weak. In the Bhagavad Gita it says, if you want to see the heroic look to those who can forgive, if you want to see the brave look to those who return love for hatred. And when we look at our lives in this world, we have this kind of capacity as human beings to live with a wise and compassionate heart. We're going to take a quick break. But before I send you to break, just a note that the book Jack mentioned early on is called the Uninnocent Notes on Violence and Mercy, and it's by Catherine Blake. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. After the break, Jack talks about whether we can respond to mis-treatment in ways that are

simultaneously forceful and loving 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 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. What's the downside for us of having a closed heart? wonder, yeah. What's the downside for us of having a closed heart? That's a beautiful question. And the only person who can answer it is you yourself, peach person. What is your day like when you feel closed off, not loving to yourself or others, just trying to get through the day, holding grudges bitter, you know, caught caught and fear what kind of day is that or imagine even again

keeping it really close to home going to a family gathering where you haven't seen people for a while if you enter that with a closed heart like they don't appreciate me and they've done this and that and you go enter that with a closed heart, like they don't appreciate me and they've done this and that, and you go that way with a bit of a scowl on your face or in your heart and so forth, how will that be for you, that gathering? On the other hand, if you change the channel of consciousness, which is the amazing thing we can do, and look with more tender eyes toward yourself and others and say, wow, this really is for compassion. We've heard each other, you know, we're

struggling, we all have our pain and sometimes these people behave really badly and and so forth. But if you enter it not with that closed heart and grudge, you have a very different experience. Let me see them. Let me see who they are. It grows the capacity for love. And maybe in the end, that's all that matters. You know, when a baby's born, the first thing we do almost always is to hold this being with love.

There's such tenderness in that. When somebody dies, and you have the privilege of being in that mysterious time when spirit leaves the body, you hold their hand. What else is there to say who hold it with love, to send them off with love? How about in between? That's the game. So it's a reflection for all of us. What I'm about to say brings us even further away from the list, but I'm going to go for it just because I answered my mind and why not just spit it out.

A meditation teacher with whom I'm quite close who you may either know or have heard of. Her name is Seven A. Celacis. She's been on the show many times. You're nodding your head. So you know her. She gave me a gift from my 50th birthday and it was a painting, a little painting she had commissioned from a friend of hers. And it's kind of a nice little painting abstract art that hangs in my office. And the artist entitled the painting, my open heart keeps me safe. And I have been puzzling on that like a co-on, which is one of those.

You obviously know what a co-on is, but for the uninitiated in the audience, it's a Zen meditation technique where you ask yourself an unanswerable question, like what's the sound of one hand clapping, and it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that can be healing. But I've been asking myself this question for a year and some months. Anyway, I throw it to you. Can you define some meaning out of the title of that painting? I'll tell you an old kind of Buddhist story that said that there was a group of monks and nuns who took teachings and then went off

into the deep forest to meditate. And when night came, this is a small group of people, there were all the jungle and forests sounds, including pretty scary sounds of wild animals, and tigers, and things that there weren't commonly an idiot that time. And they came running back the next morning to the Buddha and said, we went to try and quiet our minds

and practice there, and we got terrified. What should we do? And that was the occasion, as the stories told, it's all sort of mythological, for the first instruction on loving kindness and compassion meditation. The Buddha said, if you practice compassion and loving kindness, it will protect you in your life wherever you are.

And other beings will also feel and know this, and it will be a protection for you. So that's a little bit of a story, and I'll tell another one since I lived in those forests in jungles 50 years ago for some years as a Buddhist monk. And my teacher who harkened back to the generation before when all those forests had not been so many of them and decimated and cut down and sold. He said there was a monk who was doing his walking meditation at night in the forest back and forth, quieting himself, but he was really frightened. And so his teacher had given him a mantra, a repetitive meditation to do of loving kindness, but what the poor monk was reciting to himself is the tiger is coming, the tiger is coming, the tiger is coming. He went and talked to his teacher a few days later and the teacher said,

coming. He went and talked to his teacher, you know, a few days later, and the teacher said, if you were to recite anything that would bring a tiger to you, that would be it. Is that really the mantra that you want me to repeat? Anyway, yeah, it's a beautiful co-on. Thank you, Seminé. I mean, there's something else too, Dan, that's a little bit related to the practice of forgiveness. And I think about it, for example, in the church, the Catholic church, when people go for confession, but it's not just a Catholic practice. There's some Buddhist practices that are somewhat like it. There are times when we need to be forgiven. somewhat like it. There are times when we need to be forgiven. There are times when it's hard for us to forgive ourselves. And there's a kind of blessing that comes when somebody else who has a truly open heart can look at us and say, yes, I see who you really are.

And, you know, yes, I see the suffering that you've experienced and caused, and I forgive you, or you are forgiven. In India, there's a saying that when you meet a really great wise being, one of the most transformative things that happens is called the Glance of mercy. When someone looks into you with the kind of power to see, like to see your soul or to see who you are, underneath all the personality and things you do or don't do, to really see with the deepest eyes of love, they don't have to say much. They see you and they love you as you are. And it can change your life to be seen in that way, to be accepted in that way.

I'm not a great spiritual leader and I'm not sure how capable I am of the aforementioned glance of mercy, but to the extent that I've been able to hone my own forgiveness chops, one of the things, and you made a pretty solid nod in this direction earlier, but I might make sense too, as the kids say, double click on it. One of the things that's been helpful for me is to understand how in the right conditions I too would do exactly the thing that was done to me.

Yeah, that's a very deep and wise reflection. I think it was longfellow or someone said, if we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find forgiveness and compassion enough to open our hearts, that somehow when you look with those eyes of wisdom and compassion and say, yeah, given these circumstances, I too might have done that. Maybe you wouldn't, but we can get caught up all of us. We can get terrified. And yet it's not the end of the story. We also realize that in seeing that there is another possibility. And it's so interesting. It's like you're walking out of the grocery store with bags of all the

stuff you bought, sort of heavy. And somebody kind of rudely bumps into you and all the stuff drops to the sidewalk and the eggs come out and they break and there's yolk all over the sidewalk and the milk bottle shatters and you're about to shout at that person. What's wrong with you? Are you blind? And then you look and you see that person actually is blind. And in that moment, you see their cane or you see something that shows that they're actually blind. You see their cane or you see something that shows that they're actually blind. In that moment, instead of shouting, what's wrong with you, you realize, oh, that kind of mercy comes. Oh, here we are, bumping into each other in ways that we don't even understand.

I'm going to make it an attempt to get us back to the list with the understanding that we've probably touched on many of the items that are deeper in the list. So we'll just do our best here. All right, so three on the list. I love that we're this far into the interview. We only got into three. I think that's a good thing, probably. Three on the list is to reflect on the benefits of a loving heart. It's a beautiful prompt, if you will, as a reflection. When you think about the days, when you most felt in love, how was it to live that way?

You know, whether you fell in love with another person or there was an amazing piece of music you heard in your heart just started to open and sing, or you got out of whatever cubicle you were in and went out to the mountains or the streams and you just, you know, were laying the grass or watched the night sky and you said, oh my God, it's magnificent. I mean, how do we want to live?

And there's a very beautiful benefit to the reflections of the days that you felt was loving because it colors everything. The reality is that we're not our bodies, so we just rent them for a while, we get to use them, then we have to turn them back into hurts or whoever we rented them from. We're not our personality. We sort of inherit a personality, maybe kids are born with different temperaments and that it's developed, who we are, spirit. We're consciousness that was born into this body, and that gives us a tremendous freedom and part of the gift of meditation, which 10% happier has certainly been founded on in

part, is that it allows us to change channels to enter different states of consciousness, which we do all the time. But now we can choose and do it deliberately. We can practice compassion or loving kindness, and that can be where we live a lot more of the time, even with difficulty. We can practice a mindfulness that keeps us more present for our life so that we're not walking around living mostly in our thoughts about the past and future, and don't taste the food or see the sunset, you know, the lavender colors and the amazing display.

We don't see the beauty in the eyes of the people we live with. We live life more fully, we can train ourselves to do this, or practice doing it. Training sounds onerous, but we can practice it, just like you practice guitar, or computer coding, or tennis, or something. You actually can enter other dimensions with your heart and mind, and it's one of the great gifts of being human that we can do so. Now, since we're talking about this, I'll up level the game a little bit.

And I'm a little bit concerned because I'm telling these sort of grandiose forgiveness stories when forgiveness mostly is much closer to home. How I treated this woman that I was in a relationship when I was in college and I was so clueless. And now I really regret that I was as clueless as I was or how in working with colleagues in the guru industry, you know, I hang out with a lot of swamis and llamas and mamas and gurus. And sometimes it goes well and sometimes like anybody, and all that easy. And we get in conflict and I can, you know, get pissed off or judgmental or vice versa.

So it's really immediate in our lives, or we talk about what state of heart we want to live with. But I'm also instructed by something so much greater. Yeah, a man who had been through the Holocaust came to me and wanted to work on forgiveness in some way or other. And I looked at him and I said, I don't feel that I have the moral authority to take you to the level of forgiveness that you're asking for for what you live through. But I want to tell you a story. And in a way, I will bring in want to tell you a story and in a way I will bring in that moral authority from a different dimension. So when I lived as a forest monk for some years in Thailand and Burma and so forth, one of my companions who became a very dear friend and also

kind of a teacher was a man named Mahagosananda, a Cambodian monk, who was also a scholar that spoke 12 languages and so forth in a meditator. And because we were living in Thailand in this forest monastery, when the Cambodian genocide happened, he was spared. All 19 members of his family were killed, his village temple was burned, all kinds of, you know, 2 million people out of 6 or 8 million people in the country were killed by the Camero Rouge. And as that happened, people began to flee, and there were these huge refugee camps that grew up on the Thai side of the border. And when time was right, he went to those refugee camps, and I went with him. And there we were in

these big camps, Kaui Dung, Sakau, 100,000 people on a hot, dry, plain, in tiny little bamboo huts protected by the UN guards and barbed wire around them. And Ma Gosananda asked if he could put a Buddhist temple in the camp and the UN said you can do this. So he built it was very simple a platform and an altar and a roof on it in the middle and he said some of these people may want this again. The day that the temple was to open we went through the camp ringing this big gong a temple gong inviting people and we didn't know if anyone would come because there's a Camaro Rouge underground that said, if anybody goes to that temple, when you get back to Cambodia, you'll be killed. So we thought, well, maybe people won't come.

And to our surprise that morning, 25,000 people poured into the central square. And there sat this one man, Mahagosananda, this Cambodian monk, who had been practicing in the forest for years. And he looked out at them and I said to myself, what can he say? Because there were the faces of Trolla and Sorrow, a grandmother, and one surviving grand child out of four, you know, an uncle and his only remaining niece, people whose lives had been decimated. What could he say?

And he sat there with them quietly for a time and then put his hands together and began to chant in Khmer, Cambodian, and in Sanskrit or Pali, one of the very first verses from the Buddhist texts, hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone as healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And he started chanting it over and over again, and pretty soon people began to pick up the chant, and after some minutes 25,000 people were chanting hatred, never ends by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And I saw him offer a truth that was even bigger than their suffering, that it doesn't matter again, whether it's the utus and the tootsies and the, you know, basians and the serbs and

the croats. That somebody has to say it stops with me. And he was nominated for the Nobel Prize a dozen times. For 15 years, lead peace walks back through Cambodia. He said, you can't get in a bus or the back of a truck and go back to your village. You have to reclaim your land and your heart at the same time. And there he would be in the hot season with some other monks winging their bells and chanting in a thousand people walking behind him through the killing fields or the dusty plains.

And the whole way they were chanting, hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. He said, you were claimed, your life, every step of it with loving kindness. So I told this story to the fellow I was sitting with and he began to weep. And he said, I understand, I understand that even in the worst of circumstances that we human beings have a choice. It's an incredible story. I did find it listening to it. I did find that there's a question coming up in my mind that may seem crassly

practical, but hopefully not too much, which is there are times, I think, everyone would acknowledge or most of us might acknowledge that a forceful response is required. And I believe even the Dalai Lama has pointed out that there are times when maybe even a violent or military response is required. Can you do that with love? I wish I could.

Maybe in some circumstances, I can, you know, even Gandhi said, if I had to choose between cowardice and violence, I would choose violence. He said, but I believe I can protect people more greatly by satiagraha, by the power of my heart and my nonviolence than anything else, anything his way he did that. These are not commandments. And these are not easy answers. And yes, there may be a time to stand up and there may be even a time to protect yourself

with violence. There are all these kind of moral questions. If, you know, I've heard people ask the dog, I like them, well, if you could shoot one person, but they were a mass killer, and it would stop them from killing other people, would you do it? Right? And that's sort of extending your question in a difficult way. And I don't remember for sure, but I think the Dalai Lama said, I don't know. He said, maybe it would be the right thing to do. I don't know if I could do it.

And I don't know what I could do, Dan. I know I wanna protect people. I wanna protect myself and those I love. And then it starts to grow because I love more and more people. I love the earth and the people on it. So I think in a way, I'm trying to get really practical now. People need to stand up for themselves. Sometimes you need to get really practical now. People need to stand up for themselves. Sometimes you need

to be really strong. Sometimes you need to get angry. I don't get angry that often, probably would be who have made it get angry a little bit more often. And mostly it doesn't help. But then I found dealing with certain things like I was getting my, when my house was getting rebuilt certain things like I was getting my, when my house was getting rebuilt and remodeled big time. And I was supposed to travel and do a lot of teaching in Europe and all the things that were supposed to be done weren't getting done. And I kept saying in my nice Buddhist way, please, you promise get it done. Nothing. Finally, I called the contractor. I liked a lot. I said, you promised you were going to get this done. I've got to leave. I want the damn thing finished and if not, I'm going to haul your ass into court. I will sue you. I just blew up and he looked at me and he smile. He said, oh, you want it done. Next day,

triple crew came. They all started working and I realized, oh, that's just how contractors talk to each other. But there's a way in which you do need to stand up, and there are people who are listening that really have to stand up for themselves. Absolutely. And then your question is, can you do it with love, and is it love for yourself as well as love for others? And you have to practice. It's not that easy, but you can,

because you can harm people in the way you respond, or you can stand up with a lot of courage and strength and do it out of compassion for yourself and others. That you think this is actually what's needed that will actually reduce the suffering for all of us. So it's a great question you ask and I thank you for it. You know in Hawaii there is a place on the Kona side of the Big Island, I believe that's where it is called Pua Honao Honao now, which is sometimes translated as the Temple of Refuge. It's an old Hawaiian temple ride on the rocky shore with some of these big black lava rock walls where some of the ali-e and nobles and priests lived. And it said in the Hawaiian culture where there were many taboos and laws that if you'd broken even the worst taboos like killing someone, if you could get yourself

inside the walls of that temple, you would be forgiven, which is partly why it's also called the temple of forgiveness. I went there and I went inside and I thought, wow, what an amazing thing to have a temple of forgiveness where you can start over. Then I began to think, couldn't we build these in our country instead of so many prisons? You know, I mean, we've have more people in our prisons than any other country in the world. And as you know, I mean, there's 40 or 50,000 people in prison from marijuana offenses still. What are we doing? So it's not just an individual thing we're talking

about, but also we need to somehow wake up as a culture and ask ourselves, what does it mean to treat each other with greater respect and include forgiveness in that? And it doesn't mean there isn't a place for prisons and there isn't a place for police, there is. We have laws and we have to order our society and there have to be consequences. But on the other hand, what's the spirit we do it and how might we do it in a way that

benefits us and others? And again, that's sort of going big, but we could ask that in our families, what limits do we need to set? And then how do we set them? There aren't really many questions in the end of life. Did I love well? Did I live fully? And maybe in the end, did I learn to let go?

Because otherwise you get a crash course. After the break, Jack explains his contention that forgiveness involves a shift in identity. It's a deep point and he brings it home as part of a memorable closing argument that you don't want to miss. So keep it here. argument that you don't want to miss. So keep it here. We're almost out of time. So I'm going to jump to the end of the list. And looking at the list, we did cover a lot of it without actually being explicit about the numbers. But the final two items on the list, items 11 and 12, I'm just going to read them out to you and you can attack them sequentially, pick one, ignore it completely. However, you want to respond

as fine with me. But number 11 is forgiveness involves a shift of identity. And number 12 is forgiveness involves perspective. What say you about either or both? Well, we're talking about things that are really central to the human heart and to our life as human beings and human incarnation. How do we manage the measure of tears that's given to us? How do we manage love in a world that's imperfect where there will be disappointments and loss, and each

one of us has at times been betrayed or betrayed others, betrayed ourselves. It's just part of learning as a human being. Who do we become? And that maybe points to the question of our identity, because we can get caught in what's called the small sense of self-separation and they did it to me and I'm going to do it back to them and so forth. Or we can sense that we're interconnected as part of a whole and who might I most want to be? What is that? Nobility of spirit or that beautiful spirit for that

great heart of compassion? That's actually born in every child, all the early child research with infants and Yale and so forth shows that even before they have words, infants care about the other babies around them who are suffering, they respond. What can we do? So we're social beings, we're connected in that biological way, and we're spiritual beings, we're connected in consciousness. And you know this as well as anything when somebody walks in the room and they're furious and angry, the whole room vibrates with that. It's not just them. Or when somebody walks in the room and they've fallen in love, the great love of their

life and they're beaming from that. Or they've just made an amazing piece of music or hard or whatever. We catch it from one another. Yeah, there's the, you know, 10,000 studies on mindfulness and compassion already in the last 30 years and neuroscientists and there's the neural networks which resonate one to another the mirror neurons and so forth when the identity shifts we shift from that sense of separateness

To feeling ourselves as part of a whole and it changes everything. It's our planet and it's our trees and our children, it's not their children, it's the children, it's the earth, it's part of us. Alice Walker writes at one point, she writes of a character, one day I was sitting there like a motherless child, which I was, and all of a sudden it come to me that feeling of being a part of everything. And I knew if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laugh and I cry, I run all around the house. In fact, when it happened, you can't miss it. And we know this. We know it from walking in the high mountains and making love

and, you know, being at the birth of a child or sitting in that mysterious moment when someone dies, with the spirit leaving their body as silent as a falling star. We know it from taking some sacred medicines or entering a great cathedral or forest. We know it. It's who we are in some way. And that shift of identity is a remembering. That we are actually consciousness, taken birth. We are vast and not limited by the body or personality. And so the great heart of compassion is your birthright. You could call it Buddha nature or divine nature. And it's not a philosophy. The beautiful thing is that it's true. It has a great charm of being true, but also that there are practices and trainings that awaken it. And I remember being at the White House. Some years ago in a previous presidency, two presidencies ago, where Barack Obama had called together

a Bibudas leadership conference. And there were a hundred different leaders doing incredible projects, both teaching meditation, but doing beautiful things for the homeless or, you know, for the environment. All these communities were also deeply engaged in the Bodhisattva compassion, care for the world, caring for oneself, and caring for others as if they're truly the same, which they are. And then I was one of the last speakers kind of summing up all this stuff. And I said, you know, these teachings are universal.

If you look in the best teachings of turning the other cheek of the New Testament, or you look in the Jewish, you know, what is a true Mitzvah and the blessings that we can offer to this world, or you look in the Hindu teachings or the Irakwai and the Native teachings in every culture, there's teachings of wise society, of treating each other with respect, of caring for one another and so forth. I said, what we, as Buddhists have to offer to this, is both those philosophies of Lao Tzu and the Taoists, or the Sufis Ages, we have practices. We actually have

things that you can do inwardly like that forgiveness practice that support you and enhance you and allow you to embody and live these very beautiful values that are there at the core of all these great human traditions. And that's, I think, what 10% happier is founded on as well, that we have these possibilities and their ways to do them. Yeah, well, 10% happier is founded on your work, really, your work, Joseph's work, Sharon Salzburg work, and the great Asian masters going all the way back to the Buddha and beyond the geniuses who came up with this stuff. Speaking of your work, before I let you go, Jack, you've written so many books, you have this amazing cloud, Sangha, that you're building, you have a website, almost too much to plugs

succinctly, but are there any resources you've put out into the world that you'd in particular like to let this audience know about? So I'll name name if you will, you just name them. One is something called cloud, Sangha, S-A-N-G-H-A, which is a place where you can find a teacher to work within a small group for weeks or for a whole year, people want teachers. So it's a beautiful place to look. My website, jackhornfield.com has lots of guided meditations and lots of teachings, much of it, almost all of it for free. I have a wonderful teacher training for people who are interested through sounds, true, the mindfulness and meditation teacher certification for beginning teachers. And we have

people who are learning to teach mindfulness in schools and business and clinics in 70 countries. So all those things they're there on my website. But mostly I just feel an honor to be part of this web as you said, you know, some of us had the privilege like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzburg, myself and others to learn in traditional temples and places in Asia, but it's actually our human heritage, and it goes way back and that culture and many, and we're the beneficiaries of it. And now we get to kind of share the blessings. And you're doing that as well. So it's cool, Dan. And this was a treat. It really is because it's stuff that's close to my heart. So I thank you. I thank you. It was a treat for me. Anytime I see, I've got a Jack Cornfield

interview on my calendar. It's a bright spot. And I do want to say we're going to put links in the show notes to all the resources. Jack just listed Cloud Sangha, his website. Maybe we'll highlight the forgiveness meditation from there. And also his teacher training program, kind of an awe of all of the things you've done. And we didn't even mention the books. I'll just plug one of your books specifically

because it has one of the greatest titles of all time, which is after the XC, the laundry. And he's written many, many books. I'll just plug one of your books specifically because it has one of the greatest titles of all time, which is after the XC, the laundry, and he's written many, many books, but that's just one that I, that's just one of them. Yeah, just in closing, Jack, just to say thank you so much for all the work you've done and for coming on this show and sharing a little bit of it with this audience. It's mutual. We're in it together, and it couldn't be better that way. So thank you, Dan. Take care. Thank you. Thanks again to Jack just to say, I don't think we made it through each of the 12 items on the list. I think that was for the best because I just wanted to kind of go with the flow and not be a completist vis-a-vis the list. But if you're interested in seeing the full list, we're going to post a

link to Jack explaining all 12 in order in the show notes. 10% Happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimmy Regler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Quayant. We get our scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. As promised, it will be Tara Brock on Self-Forgiveness. 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 1-3-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-survey. you