Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 556: Deep Genealogy | Spring Washam

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

So many people are interested in their family tree. What kind of lives did our ancestors lead and what do their stories say about us? Today’s guest, Spring Washam, asks us to reckon with the people who have come before us in order to fully understand who we are and why we do the things we do.Washam is a well-known teacher, author, and visionary leader based in Oakland, California. She is the author of A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage and Wisdom in Any Moment and her newest book, The Spirit of Harriet Tubman: Awakening from the Underground. Spring is considered a pioneer in bringing mindfulness-based meditation practices to diverse communities. She is one of the founding teachers at the East Bay Meditation Center, located in downtown Oakland, CA and has practiced and studied Buddhist philosophy in both the Theravada and Tibetan schools of Buddhism since 1999.In this episode we talk about:How Spring came to write about Harriet Tubman’s lifeHer work with plant medicine and the shamanic traditionsThe dream and the “conversations” Spring had with TubmanWhy we are all so interested in ancestryHow we can deepen our relationship with our ancestors Family Constellation Therapy as a modality for doing ancestry work Spring’s own family historyWhy she is still processing the experience of writing her book about Harriet Tubman What she means by the “inner underground railroad” and how it is alive todayAnd, how, in the inner underground railroad, freedom equates to nirvana Content Warning: mentions of suicideFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/spring-washam-556See 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, everybody. We've got a good one for you today. I feel like this is one of those episodes that's going to generate quite a reaction. So many of us are interested in our family tree. We do 23 in me or ancestry.com. We look at black and white photos and quiz our older relatives about the four bears. We never had a chance to meet.

We wanna know what are our roots? What kind of lives did the people who came before us lead? And what does it all say about us? Today, we're gonna take this very natural human impulse to a deeper and for some of you much stranger place before I dive into the basic information about this episode. Let me just say a word here about magic. I, as I think you all probably know, am naturally a skeptical person, I'm a journalist and agnostic raised by scientists, blah, blah, blah, but I'm also a Buddhist,

not in the sense that I pound a table and declare that things like enlightenment or rebirth are absolutely true. I don't have any evidence for either of those things, but instead in the sense that I practice quite a bit of Buddhist meditation and have found that meditation and many of the other techniques that the Buddhists recommend for doing life better really do work for me.

And for me, at least it doesn't hurt that modern researchers have lent a sheen of scientific validity to many of these practices, all of which leaves me in a funny position vis-à-vis some of the more out there claims that you can find in Buddhism, things like meditation giving you superpowers or the existence of other realms populated by deities. The good news here is that the Buddha himself explicitly said that you should not take anything he said at face value. You should check it out for yourself, verify it through your own experience. Still, it's always jarring for me when I realize that my teachers, people I know well and I'm personally very close with, truly believe in some of this stuff.

How am I supposed to compute it when seemingly, quote unquote, normal people, people I eat meals with, write books with, do business with, people I call when I have a problem, people who sleep over at my house. What should my intellectual posture be when I realize that people like that believe in notions that seem so foreign and unprovable to me? Over time, my attitude has shifted slightly, but meaningfully on this. It's not that I personally believe these claims per se. It's just that I no longer dismiss them reflexively. I try to take the attitude recommended by the poet Samuel Collarage, who talked about the willingness, suspension of disbelief. This is what it means to truly be an agnostic. Is it possible that there are things that the mystics understand that science has not yet discovered?

Sure, maybe. How do I know? The person who has perhaps challenged me the most in this regard is my friend and teacher spring, Washington. If any of you read my first book, you might remember spring. There's a scene where I go on my inaugural silent meditation retreat and there's a junior assisting teacher who's there and who initially drives me nuts because I was in my usual judgmental mode and considered her to be the

epitome of spiritual affectation with her sing songy voice, et cetera, et cetera. But she spring goes on to become the hero of the retreat who takes me aside and gives me some simple and direct meditation advice that leads to my first real meditative breakthrough. Over the years since that book came out, spring and I have become friends, and not only that, she's really become one of my most important teachers. She's been on the show many times before, and if you've heard those episodes, you know that she is a remarkable person who has overcome a ton of shit in her life and gone on to become a pioneer in combining plant medicine

and Buddhist meditation and also in bringing meditation to diverse communities. She's also very funny, like all great teachers in my opinion, she takes the practices seriously but not herself. I think you will enjoy our odd couple rapport here. So anyway, Spring now has a new book. It's called The Spirit of Harriet Tubman, Awakening from the Underground. The last time Spring was on the show a few years ago, she had just started to get interested in Harriet Tubman, who as you may know was an ex-slave who became a famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, rescuing close to 70 people. Now, Spring has finished a whole book on Harriet Tubman. At this point, you might justifiably be asking what does any of this have to do with meditation, or magic, or all this stuff I said at the top about family trees. Because, and here's the challenging part

for some of you, a central conceit of Spring's new book is that she has been having conversations with the spirit of Harriet Tubman. Okay. Reminder to the skeptics here. This is where the willing suspension of disbelief comes in. Trust me, hang in there. This is going to pay off for you because even if you don't believe in the notion of conversing with the dead, and I'm definitely agnostic on this one. One of the points that spring

is making here is that we all need to take a deep look at our ancestors. Granted, Harriet Tubman is not as far as we know a direct ancestor to spring-washing, but she is, in a broad sense, an ancestor to all of us. And that is spring's point here. We need to reckon with the people who have come before us, or their actions will impact us in many, many unseen ways. And you really can understand this in a very down to earth sense. As you'll hear, one of the things we talk about is that my own great grandfather, according to family lore, took his own life after losing the family fortune. Given what we know about the basic love, cause, and effect, and the growing research about generational trauma, that energy absolutely has to reverberate in my life today.

And this is true for all of us. If you don't take a hard look at your family tree, you cannot fully understand who you are and why you do what you do. So apologies, this has been an extra long intro. I just wanted to tee you up for a conversation that might be a little challenging, but we'll also, I promise, be both delightful and useful. One quick note before we get started here,

there are some brief mentions of suicide in this episode. We'll get started with spring washem right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral?

Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis Santos. To access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. Hey y'all it's your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur.

I'm a new podcast baby this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family and experts the questions that are in my head. Like it's only fans only bad where the memes come from and where's time from my space? Listen to baby this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Spring Washer, my friend, my teacher. Welcome back to the show. Oh, Dan, it's so good to be back. Congratulations on the book. I know you've been working really hard on it.

And the last time you're on the show, you were just kind of starting out. So if people missed that conversation, can you just tell the story of why you decided to write this book? Yes, it's kind of a magical story in a way. And I remember our last show was, I think it was May 2020. Wow, heavy times. So even though I'm a Buddhist teacher and healer, I ended up writing a book about the spirit of Harriet Tubman awakening from the underground. And Harriet came to me in a very powerful visionary dream. That's how it started. I read about that in the first chapter, or I was running and panicked and being chased, and I would just remember my hands burning,

and I was holding on. I thought it was a rope initially, and then it was the back of Harriet Tubman's dress, and she was guiding me. And then the whole, kind kind of a whole journey, a series of conversations with our great ancestor Harriet began to happen. And the journey I chronicle in a book that is now out. So it's very magical. It's kind of hard. You have to tell me exactly maybe what you want me to share more, but it still is shocking and unbelievable. Sorry to me too. I'm still integrating. What happened here? I don't want you to hold anything back. I will come at you with my gentle, open-minded skepticism. But before we get into the magic, which I do want to go into heavily, let me just ask you something more factual, which is for those who don't know much about her,

who is Harriet Tubman? So Harriet Tubman was born in 1825 and was born in Maryland on a plantation where she was enslaved her and her entire family. And it's the story of her awakening as she gets into her mid-20s. She runs away, goes to Philadelphia, kind of has this epic runaway journey where she goes by herself. Escapes, joins the anti-slavery society, meets up with all these other abolitionist in Philadelphia, and then begins to do a series of rescues on the underground railroad. And for those who don't know what the underground railroad is, it was a, I guess you could say a hidden passageway, a series of safe houses that stretched sometimes 100 miles, sometimes 500 miles. They found underground depots and as far away as Ohio, but a very common one was through Philadelphia, New York,

and up to Canada. And Harriet Tubman was known to be a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and rescued many people, a series of journeys. She did 12. That's what we know from historical that we know from historical facts and rescued her entire family and friends. And then her life was just incredible. She went on to be in the military, first woman in history to lead military raids and then went on to join the woman's movement and was Susan B. Anthony.

And she just is this archetype because she was a woman because the small woman, she was only Bianthony. And she just is this archetype because she was a woman because the small woman, she's only about five feet tall and she's just known for this courage and her legacy of sort of the bodhisattva heart, this great compassion, willing to risk it all for freedom and not only hers but to help other people as well. So that's a very, that's a snapshot, a snippet. One could study her life for a long time and learn many things, historical things, things about her personal life. But the main thing is she's our ancestor, a great ancestor, and there's a lot to learn

from her journey, her experiences, and her legacy. She once said, I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for 10 years and I can say what most conductors can't say, I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger. That's so awesome. I love that. Exactly. My sense and my conversations when she was conducting this was serious business.

She was pretty fierce. And ultimately, Harriet Tubman is a protector. I often see her as kind of one of those decunies, like a raffle, decuny, was a protector. And there's stories about once you left with Harriet Tubman, there was no going back. There was a story where she's stories about once you left with Harriet Tubman, there was no going back. There was a story where she pulls a gun on a guy who wanted to go home and she was like,

oh no, you go on or die. I don't think she was really gonna kill him. I don't know, but that was enough to get him over the finish line. I'm sure he was happy. He listened to her after he got to Philadelphia. But yeah, there was a ferocious panther when we were conversating and I was writing her. She tells me she shaped, shifted often into a black panther when she was conducting. So she can have that sensory perception, hearing, seeing panthers can see great distance. They use their senses, their height and senses in different ways.

So she describes herself like that in one part of the book when she was talking about those days of running those missions. You made a reference to having conversations with her. We're going to just talk about those conversations in the second part. That's the magic part. But I keep putting this off because you keep saying things that I want to follow up on. You used a couple of terms in the last couple of minutes

that might be worth defining for people who haven't heard them before. Use the term bodhisattva and then also dakeenie. Right. Yeah, bodhisattva. Well, that's a word, a Buddhist word that we use in the Buddhist tradition, the Mahayana tradition particularly, and Bodhi means awake, Bodhi mind means awake in mind, and Sattva

is a word that means hero. So, a Bodhisattva is a being who makes a vows that they will continually be reborn in Somsara, or you could say the Matrix. That's kind of a modern word for Somsara. Over and over to be a benefit to all beings and keep turning the wheel of the Dharma and a lead squad of compassion compassion and action manifested in human beings who are dedicated to helping all beings be liberated from suffering. This is a somewhat deliberately absurd reference I'm going to make now, but back when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were together, they once said, we're not going to get married until our LGBTQ brothers and sisters and otherwise can get married. The body of South was making a

much more hardcore vow than that. They're saying, we're never going to Nirvana. We're going to keep being reborn in this veil, this suffering world until every being has achieved enlightenment has been freed from suffering. Yes, which is heroic and insane and impossible, it seems, and yeah, they say, beings are measureless. I vow to save them all. And this is the sort of the intention for one's life. It's rare, Dan. It's a rare being who takes his vow and actually works on living it. So, but beautiful and periotumin definitely had the spirit of that. You also compared her to a Dakinii, which is another Buddhist term.

Can you say more about that? Yeah, so a Dakinii is a manifestation of the enlightened feminine in a sort of magical form, a wisdom Dachini. Now, we're getting into more of a jihanna Buddhism here, where they have Dachini mandalas and there are these Dachinis who appear and they can shapeshift and they often help yogis and meditators and their protectors and they're also supposed to be free from some Sara and they are awakened energies and they appear at different moments in time. So that the kines liberated mind manifested in a feminine, but also the feminine and it's kind of

tantric form. You know, they appear often naked and with bone jewelry on and free from all concepts. I think in the West we hear Tantra, we think about the kind of sex that Sting had with his wife Trudy in the 80s where he put off completion. But Tantra is more accurately used to describe where you, I'm getting a little bit out of my depth here, so please correct me. But you're referred to Vajrayana Buddhism, which is a later school of Buddhism, practiced, perhaps most famously in Tibet. And in Tantra, the sort of esoteric form of Buddhism, there are many practices,

one of them having to do with sex and many of the other of them, just having to do with working with the various energies of the mind to become enlightened. Am I close to accuracy here? Yes, that's very accurate. I think that it does get mixed up with these weekend sex sessions in Marin County

and it's gone way off. Like everything in our culture, there's his depth and there's roots, but it gets kind of appropriated in this one dimensional way. And then people assume exactly staying is vajrayana practitioner. He may be. I love staying, but I think what we're talking about is something with much more deeper roots. We're talking about working with the energy of our mind in a very shamanic way. We're using breath and elements and consciousness itself, too. It's a, Fajiana is considered a rapid path to awakening.

Not everyone can handle it. It's known to be a bit dangerous because it's so powerful. So there you go. Use another term that's worth just unpacking for people, shamanic, you and I will have said this in the introduction, aside from the fact that you've done decades of incredible work in the meditation, Buddhism world, you've also done an enormous amount of work in the Iowasca world.

And not that long ago, when the first time you came on the show, you were a little worried about even talking about working with Iowasca because it was so controversial generally and also specifically in the Buddhist world where you had come up. Now though, I think in no small measure because of your contributions and let's not forget Michael Pauline as well, but it's much more widely accepted and you've been much more open as a consequence about this work. So just to say you've got several things going on that you're bringing to the table as we talk about Harriet Tubman here.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that this whole conversation about plant medicine and healing, it is the doors have been opened primarily because of all the research, right? Because of the benefits, because of all of the people and studies and John Hopkins and writers like Michael Pollan and many others sharing their experiences that were expressing the benefits of it. There was definitely a lot of fear when I was talking about it 10, 12 years ago. It was controversial. But now we're in the time of, by all means, let's help ourselves. Right? After the last couple of years, I think many people are like,

if this is helping with the mental health crisis and the world on this planet, let's look at it. Maybe this is good. So I do appreciate that openness. But I also do understand the controversy. I do understand the fear around it. It's powerful. And we approach it with a lot of respect and preparation and reference. of respect and preparation and reference. I've always said that if I was ever to decide to do Iwaska, it would be with you because if there's anybody I was comfortable throwing up in front of, it would be you. But Dan, you were going to come, right? I thought you were coming on my summer retreat. You were like, once I leave live TV, I'm coming, I'm coming.

Well, what's not privately offline about? I think that we should, you should come so that you have a firsthand experience for all the fidgety skeptics and non-believers. You, you be the great experiment, Dan. I think it would be a joy to work with you on multiple levels and for many reasons. Well, just to be clear, I'm not skeptical at all about plant medicine. I'm just scared.

Right. Okay. What can you say more about that? I mean, I don't know if this is the right moment to go in depth and tear. And tear pain and tear. And to your pain and fears, like, I mean, what, what do you think could happen? Maybe we want to end up using this stuff and I do want to talk about parents on it, but the short answer is the ayahuasca. I mean, you've talked about this.

These experiences, you've written about it in your prior book that these experiences can be incredibly intense and you can feel like the kind of death. I also have panic disorder and I'm coming through a phase now where it's gotten worse and so I've been working with exposure therapists to make it better and that has worked. But I'm a little reluctant to kind of mess

with my brain right now because I feel like I'm just kind of getting control of it again, control not being the right word, but being able to sort of work with it more skillfully again. And so, yeah, that's a long way of saying there are many reasons why I'm scared to do it. Okay. And I do understand that, Dan. But I think it would be a great benefit. I think that it helps. I've seen so many miracles.

In fact, I just came back last week from leading a big retreat in the jungle and it was the miracles. The power. I think you would end up loving it and often people are so scared, but then they have so many positive experiences, you know, it's a way to overcome fear. It's very helpful at a healing anxiety. But you had to be ready. No, I'm sold. I'm just not yet ready. That's probably the right way to put it. Okay, so we've kind of set the table here on who you are and what you do. So now that we've done that, let's talk about the magic. Right in your first answer, which I haven't let you say much more about since then, you talked about this whole thing being kicked off because

Harriet Tubman appeared to you in a dream. You kind of laughed when you said it because you know that I come from a bit of a skeptical place, although not a closed-minded place. So I'm asking you this question with a genuinely open mind, but nonetheless, I retain my skepticism if that's even possible as a balance to strike. Can you tell me more about this dream and then the subsequent conversations you say you had with her? Right. Okay. So first of all, Dan, I was as shocked as anyone. I was not a Harriet Tubman fanatic. This wasn't someone that I had followed. Of course, I learned about Harriet like everyone else and February in high school when they had two days of black history and there was Harriet and

then the Underground Railroad. Of course, I watched a movie in 2019, but this wasn't, this was so unexpected and I'm still integrating that. So yes, I had this powerful visionary dream and that was a week before George Floyd was murdered. I started to have Harriet started to appear and like everybody, I was a bit lost. My whole schedule was canceled. I was at the forest refuge and they kicked us out and I had to go back to California and I got swept up in anxiety and fear and oh my gosh this was the early days of the pandemic and all the violence and all the shootings and I just kept asking and praying how should I respond my community needed me and I certainly didn't feel strong.

And I felt very lost. And I think it was at that time, it was such an earthquake and consciousness, something happened in May of 2020, something opened. And I think it was that crack in our hearts and consciousness, something happened. I feel like Harriet's spirit really fully emerged in consciousness. And it started with that powerful dream, but it wasn't just a dream. It was so much more than that. And after I had that dream, Harriet began to appear in my mind pretty much constantly. Images, songs, I'm going to look her up and then I shared with you on that last podcast.

That's when I thought, I wonder if other people are having herodotment experiences. I'll do a five-week class. And I just threw this five-week class up online. And then the class went viral and I had hundreds of people participating in what was a five-week very simple class meditation, me reading and sharing about her life. But during this time, Harriet's energy began to appear more and more. I would sleep. I would stream of her every night images. When I would be walking, I could feel her hand in my hand. And I was like, okay, this is a blessing,

obviously. I was like, Harriet Tubman, yes, I need you. Thank the Lord. You got to get, you got to get me out of this situation. What's going on here? And during the five-week class, unbeknownst to me in the sea of hundreds of people in Zoom room, you know how it is. The vice president of Hay House, Patty, was taking a class and thought, oh my god, spring has to write this book. So it began to reach out to me about writing a book and I tried to get out of it, Dan. I had no interest. I was like, no way. Are you, you, you, you're kidding. I'm not a scholar. I'm not a African-American history scholar. I'm Buddhist. I lead retreats. No, no, I can't. And so I begged and cried and pleaded to get out of it, but that wasn't to be the case. And then there was this one particular

incident, which I write about in the second chapter of my book, where Harriet makes an unmistakable appearance. I guess in order to close the deal. To give you to say yes, there had to be kind of a breakthrough moment. And then I began to go, oh my God, something more profound is happening here. I think there are a lot of people listening to this show who are open to we're using the word magic. And then I think there are a lot of people who are thinking

to themselves, well, wait a minute, what do I do with this information? This doesn't sound evidence-based. And I come out of that corner of consciousness personally, but I have kind of changed over time and developed what Samuel Collaridge has called the willing suspension of disbelief. So what do you say to folks who are a little bit more like kind of oriented in my direction of Western scientific skeptical materialists who hear about Harriet Tubman

appearing to in a dream and might be tempted to conclude, oh, well, this person is drank too much ayahuasca or whatever. Yeah, I could understand that view. If you only believed in this one realm of existence, and if you only, you had a certain kind of experience, but as Dan, we live in a multi-dimensional universe, even if you read the Polly Canon, the earliest texts of teravada Buddhism is full of magic and spirit worlds and devas and celestial beings. I mean, we live in this vast universe and I understand for a lot of people to survive the catastrophe of humanity. They have to live in a kind of narrow box to keep this controlled. You used that word control earlier. Like I've got control of my mind. I don't want to

shake it. No, let's not do anything to upset the control system here. I understand we're not in control though, Dan, at all, but the illusion of that keeps people on a certain path and to think that we are so much more than just as human incarnation is more than most people can absorb. They need a scientific view of only being able to understand what they can see, and that's okay, but it's just important to understand that there's more going on here. But it's just important to understand that there's more going on here. There's more going on here than just what we can see in here and experience with our senses and this human body that we are vast. And most of our consciousness and our minds, we are not tapped into. We live in like the basement of a large house. And for a lot of us, we're comfortable in that basement.

It gives us the security. We get through our lives. But that doesn't negate the existence of 500 other rooms in the house. They're there, too. And when people are ready, they're ready. And if people want to think of this as a conversation with an ancestor, that's maybe accepted.

Like, the idea that maybe we can talk to our ancestors? To me, that seems very normal, but I know I live in a certain reality. But we can talk to Davos and ancestors. It's not like we're talking to them every day and getting confused about, I'm very much clear about spring washam in this reality. I'm very grounded on the earth. I have a Social Security number. I'm not lost in that.

These are experiences that many spiritual beings write about. I mean, if you read any of the biographies of the great masters of from Parmahasa, Yogananda, to Paul Rinpoche, to everybody in between the stories of Ajan Mun comes out of our tradition. I mean, he was battling demons in his cave. I mean, he was, I mean, it's, this, what I'm saying is little compared to that stuff. That's what I'm trying to say. So there's a tradition of this damage just that a lot of people, we don't know how to make sense of it. So the easiest thing is to negate it. And I understand that. I don't have fault with that. I just accept that, okay, that's one experience and there are others. I've always taken the descriptions that you use the phrase polycanon with the Buddhist,

earliest Buddhist teachings that you know were phrase polycanon with the Buddhist, earliest Buddhist teachings that you know were written down in the language of polypa and in the polycanon, this collection, this vast collection of the earliest Buddhist teachings. There are lots of references to the spirit world and magical beings called devas, dv a and superpowers that can be developed through meditation. And so yeah, that's all in there. And the Buddha, you know, on the night of his enlightenment, sitting down under the Bodhi tree

and engaging this epic battle with the bad guy, Mara, who's the god of desire. And I guess I've always taken that as poetic language, not necessarily something to be taken literally. And I'm saying this because I want you to push back on me. It may be that it's just too much for me to take in as you described. And I, so I shut down and stick to science. But I, the story I'm telling myself, which may be inaccurate, is that I'm just reluctant to make claims for anything that I cannot directly prove.

I understand. Yeah. I don't even think I need to push back on you, Dan. I don't. I've always accepted that that's what's funny about our connection is that I have all this stuff going on. Then you have yours, right? I think that's what's funny about our connection is that it's okay. They're parallel. They're parallel reality. And it's like, it's all perfect because I can't, I'm not really interested in convincing people that what I'm saying is true because it's just my

experience. This is just my experience. And who's to say other people's experiences aren't just as valid and they are as valid. And my goal is not to try to get people to believe in the unseen world. It exists. I mean, we don't know how it works, but it exists. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with all of it. People believing people, not believing in devas people believing in Buddhism people not believing in Buddhism But the stories are there nonetheless they're filled with Matt I mean, there's a story in the middle link discourses where the Buddha built a Staircase of gold to go visit the gods in the 33 realm Right to climb up the staircase like if I was to take all the magic,

I could give discourses on that part of the Dharma, and they do in Thailand. They talk more about the magic. I'm not here to convince anyone. I think the book and the message of Harriet Tubman is about inspiration. It's a kind of medicine that we need right now. We're kind of a little

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I want to talk about these channeled conversations that you write about in the book. Just make a few quick comments and also get you talking about ancestors generally before we get into those conversations. The quick comments are, one, as you're talking, I was remembering something that our mutual teacher, Joseph Goldstein, has said to me many times, and this was a thing that was said to him by his teacher who was a guy named Munnindra. And Munnindra was an Indian gentleman who was Joseph's meditation teacher. And when he would talk about magic, which is again, that we're using in this context, Mnindra would say, you don't have to believe it,

but it's true. And that sometimes comes to mind when I'm having these conversations. The other thing comment I was gonna make is that you talked about our friendship and I'm actually right in the middle right now of doing a rewrite on the chapter in my long delayed book that stars you, and you and I went on a

one-on-one meditation retreat back in the fall of 2018. And I made a comment there that is even more true now, which is that we're coming from totally different worlds and we have this friendship and I'm this skeptical guy and you're much more open to many more things. And you, notwithstanding my skepticism, make no effort to, in any way, hide your light under a bushel. Like you completely let your flag fly all the time. And if anybody's changed over the course of the relationship, it's not you, it's me, because I think I've become more open-minded.

Again, I don't make any claims, but I've become more open-minded over the course of the relationship. So those are my two comments. I have a question I want to ask you, but before I do that, I'm just going to pause in case you have anything you want to say. Well, I agree with you, Dan. You have become so much more open-hearted. Even your recent TED Talk, I just cried. Oh my gosh, I just loved it. I was like, I feel like I was just proud. Oh my gosh, I just loved it. I was like, I feel like I was just proud. I know that's a weird thing to say.

I was like, yes, Dan, this is it. Exactly. So I appreciate your evolution and we all are evolving. We're all waking up, we're all learning. This is school. And I'm just happy to be a part of your story, our story. I think there's a lot that people will find important in it somehow.

There's something really sweet and yet very deep in that in our connection. Agreed. I take the word proud very well, even though you're, you're, you're my teacher. You've been my teacher for a long time, at least doing some rough math 13, 14 years since my first meditation retreat, 13 years. So I take that very well. Just to get this back to the level of sort of more universality here, before we get into these really interesting conversations that you write about between you and Harriet, I want to talk about, and you made a reference to this earlier. So I want to see if I can get you to speak more broadly

about it. Our relationship to our ancestors. You said your world is pretty normal to speak to your ancestors. I mean, I can't speak for the whole world, but it's not something that I hear people in my universe talking about much. However, we are interested in our ancestors. People are doing 23 and me and

ancestry.com and my colleague Amy Breckenridge, who I work with very closely at the 10% happier company, actually has a side hustle where she works with people on doing genealogy. So this feels very much a current interest. And so I'm wondering if you could address our current interests in our ancestors and relate that to the work you're doing. Yeah, I would agree. Everybody, I don't know anybody who hasn't done 23 and me ancestry.com, all of that. And we do have this fascination because we want to know more about ourselves and where we come from.

Right. I think the interests is when people start to think about their genealogy, they think about it just as DNI initially. Right? Well, who are my people? Where were they born? Where did they die? I think that's an important first step.

I just think we don't go to the next step because you know, in the West, we don't really grow up with the idea that we come from a living lineage and that your great-grandfather is part of the person that you are today. We don't make that connection. In the Western society, we believe, I come, I'm born, I'm alone, I walk alone, I do my own loneliness, isolated individual, I'm a cell separated from the membrane or whatever. We have this view of that. So we don't see ourselves as streams of consciousness

and that we get more than hair color and eye color from our ancestors. We know we get illnesses, depression, you know, as they know through epigenetics, we get certain switches turned on or turned off, right? We inherit a whole set of conditions. Now, what we do with those are completely up to the person, how conscious we are, what we seek to transform, we can heal ourselves from greed, hatred, and delusion on various levels.

Okay. However, what I've noticed in my work over many years of helping people who come to either my retreats or start to work with me individually is they can't put a finger on why they're so unhappy. A lot of these people have everything that on the outside you would say, wow, you're successful, you're handsome, you have a nice husband, but they're suicidal. Or they are killing themselves in some other way, or they're depressed so much that they can't get out of bed. Or they're so all this suffering.

And so when people began to work with me, I began to see more and more that it was connected to their family tree, to the energy, see, we get energy from our ancestors. We relate it all to science. Okay, I just get this, but we know we get alcoholism, we know we get programs, we know we get whole ideologies. So I am trying to bring more awareness

that when people are suffering and they have tried all these different modalities of healing and they still feel this torment that let's start doing work on your family tree. What has happened that we as a descendant could put right? What were the lies? What is the lack of forgiveness? What is the problem there? Right? Who can we talk to? How can we help make things right? Where karma is action, right? And in some ways, we're healing the karmic lineage, we're cleansing our ancestral line. And people are doing that in a lot of ways. Sometimes people are doing that in a form. We'll use the word reparations as some kind, right? How did my family accumulate as wealth?

Oh my gosh, they accumulated through this violence and this terror. Okay, well, what can I do now to offset that? It's kind of like carbon emission offsetting, right? We are looking at what has happened that affects us, even though we don't realize it's affecting us. even though we don't realize it's affecting us, because again, in the West, we cut off all idea that we're connected to a living lineage. That is like a root. It's like an umbilical cord.

And if you're unconscious, you're still dealing with the programs. I've met people who had an issue with their leg and their grandmother had the same issue and their great-grandmother had the same issue. And you know what I mean? We're, this is really powerful. And so when we start to look at it and we become conscious, we can begin to clear things in the present. And we become much more happy and joyful. And I feel this is greatly overlooked in the spiritual communities. Like we're looking for everything else but this. We're like, okay, how do I be happy? How do I get happier? Give me the happiness button. But

they're still considering themselves as an isolated individual. They're not looking at what has happened to my mother, what has happened to my grandparents, what happened to where they buried, what happened to my culture. I believe this has a huge effect on the person that we are in this moment, but we are not conscious of that yet. And the DNA, the passion for DNA and genealogies, people hunting for answers. Who am I? Why am I like I am? Why do I think like I think, right?

We're looking, but we're just not making all the connections around the energetic level. I feel like much of what you just said there is very much not magical. Karma is another one of these words that we in the West have taken and kind of perverted, but at its root, it basically means cause and effect.

Something happens, and as a consequence, something else happens, and then as a consequence, and other thing happens, it doesn't mean that if you call somebody a name, you're definitely going to be reborn as a gila monster in the next life. I mean, that's, I think, the way we make a caricature of the word. So if you think about karma from a just a simple cause and effect level, of course, the accumulated karma or causes and effects of our ancestors are going to be alive in us, medically, genealogically, psychologically, just as a quick example, I was having dinner the other night with another of my teachers, a guy named Jerry Colona, who's quite a well-known

executive coach and also Buddhist. And I was expressing some shame about the fact that notwithstanding the fact that I have everything by objective measures, I still experience quite a bit of anxiety about work and finances. And I said, I don't know why I'm like this. And he was like, what do you make? You don't know why you're like this. I he was like, what do you mean, you don't know why you're like this? I've known you for several years. I know a few things about you. One of them is that your great grandfather put his head in and of and killed himself

because he lost the family fortune. Another thing I know about you is that your parents wouldn't heat the house in the winter because they were so worried about money even though they were both doctors. And so what do you mean? How can you wonder why you are the way you are? And that just goes right to your point about the living lineage.

Exactly. What a beautiful example. Because here you are in this moment and you have everything that you need, but there's a thought I don't, and there's terror around, you know, that's exactly the point. And I'm glad that you had that experience because the next question is, what do we do with that? And is that repairable? Is that transformable? And I believe the answer is really yes. We can begin to do work with our ancestors. And then in the present moment, our moment to moment experience changes to one of lightness,

enjoy, and ease, and we feel less burdened by these deeply entrenched habits. I think many of us are looking at our habits now like, why is this compulsion there? Right? When we know on every level that it's not serving us, that it doesn't work. So, so we started looking in the family tree and we started doing some of that work. And I feel like, you know what happens? A lot of power is restored. Because right now, you think about your anxiety over this issue of livelihood or survival. And it's a lot of your power. It's drained out in that, right? Imagine if you didn out in that, right?

You imagine if you didn't have that, you'd be like, all right, here I go. We sort of become disempowered by these energies that are alive in us connected to our lineage. So how do we do this work? Let me, you acknowledge before that many of us are looking into our family tree. What's the add on that is missing that might make that, I don't want to call it superficial, but maybe

surface level work way deeper. To start a relationship with the ancestors, with your grandfather who put his head in an oven, and to start to make a connection, to start speaking to him, to start trying to help him, to start forgiving him, to start understanding him, to build a relationship and to understand that our ancestors are around us. And the veil right now between the ancestor spirit world and this world is like a piece of paper. It's very thin. Right? It's like these are energies that often people that have done things like that,

say committed suicide, my grandmother, the same. They also need us, right? Just because they go on to the spirit world, they're not resolved. Their karma is also tied up here, right? So it's almost like we enter into like a collaboration with them. So the skeptics challenge is that they don't believe that they can have a relationship with an ancestor. They don't do because they, the person's gone.

But as you see, Dan, they're not. They're alive in you. They're not gone. They're right here. And it reminds me of Maya Angelou, the great poet and writer, used to say, I stand as one, but I come with 10,000. So Maya Angelou always talked about 10,000 of her ancestors standing with her, wherever she was. And you could feel that in my Angelo, right? Like, whoa, this one person speaking these words, it would have the magnitude, the power behind it because they were really in tune with the ancestor world. And it's okay that we all have hurt ancestors. That's part of our journey is to heal the lineage,

is to heal our own family tree. And so how we do that is by believing that they're real because they are. And they're around us and they need something from us. And so we begin to have a conversation. It's not to become deluded. It's just that we begin to do healing work on their behalf consciously. Right. We begin to say, Grandfather, this action happened and this energy is alive in me. How can I transmute this?

Right. I have what I need. We have what we need now. We don't have to be afraid. We do things like that. We start to gather. I often have people do visuals of all their ancestors in a circle around them and we're offering them. We're almost like we're teaching the Dharma. Like everybody is okay now.

We survived. Right? And we start to engage in a relationship. That's just an example. You're gonna laugh at me because I'm gonna search for ways to follow your advice without the magic. So what's coming to mind for me is there's a kind of therapy that's, and we've talked about it here

on the show several times, and it's becoming increasingly sort of accepted in the psychotherapeutic world, it's called internal family systems. Basically means where you identify various parts, that's the technical term they use in IFS, the parts of your personality, and you develop relationships with them. You actually have a dialogue often with a therapist present, with the angry part of your personality, the selfish part of your personality, the selfish part of your personality. I'm picking those not by coincidence. And so I'm wondering, so my great-grandfather, I can pull the picture out of my drawer and start trying to think about him having a dialogue with

the parts of his personality that reside in me still as opposed to believing necessarily that he's here behind a sheet of paper in a parallel universe, which may be true, but as you said, there is a challenge here for skeptics and maybe we don't want to make that leap. Exactly. So, I love there's these modalities. Like we're all talking about the same thing. Like so an indigenous person would say, just talk to your grandfather, right? And then we would say, no, I'm going to go to family constellation therapy and have this mode. It's like, it's just another way to get in. It's ancestor work. It's a family lineage work.

Family constellation therapy is so popular right now and everybody has been asking me about it. And the funny thing is I've never done it. I actually would love to do it. But every week somebody is mentioning about going to one of these groups and a whole group of strangers gets together and they become the other's family trees acting out patterns. And then all of a sudden a deeper awareness, like something is happening there. So I think we're all talking about the same thing, Tan. We're talking about opening the door that these streams are alive in us. And let's become conscious.

Let's enter into conversation. Let's talk about it. Let's, yeah, so whether we use that or we're with a trained therapist or we believe through the photo, if we put our grandfather on the altar that we can sit and have a one-on-one. Okay, use a therapist to have the three-way conversation. If that's easier. Whatever place is easier, but this is all moving in the direction that I see is incredibly beneficial for where we are right now, especially in the West, we have particular blocks to this that I think if we could open and see ourselves as a living lineage,

we would have much more a compassion for not only ourselves, but it would make us more compassionate to others. Because after people do this family constellation, work their more compassionate, it opens a doorway into the harvey. We understand why others are the way they are. Oh, they're like that because of their family tree too. Yeah. I think that's about understanding karma.

Yes. And again, this doesn't have to be mystical at all. It's just the vast soup of causes and conditions that contribute to the way we are right now, and you can really understand your own personal karma by looking at your family tree. And in extra police, as soon as you understand that, you realize everybody's walking around with their own set of causes and conditions. And of course, that's going to contribute to the way they are right now. I would love to hear, if you're open to it. You talking about your own ancestor work with your own family tree because one of the things that I admire so

much about you is that my family tree, even though we've got some problems in there, I was coughed up onto the planet in a very privileged position given all the advantages. You were not and you had a lot of issues in your family tree. And one of the things that's so incredible now that I know more about what you dealt with coming up is where you've ended up nonetheless. And so I wonder if you could talk a little before we get back to Harriet about your own work with your own parents and grandparents and beyond. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting how we grow up with the suffering of the adults around us. Yeah, there was a lot of confusion with me around sorting out my ancestors.

So my mother is white. Her family is all from Germany and England, mostly England. My father is African-American. Our family is from the south, right? But recently when I did my own DNA, a huge 25% Nigeria. So just thinking, wow, that there was a middle passage experience, they came over from my grandfather, I could see the Nigerian man and my grandfather actually recently just posted a picture on Facebook, this picture of me right before he died visiting him. Yeah, and you know, we are born into these situations. And I think the thing about this is not to feel powerless, because just because we have a certain set of conditions, what we do know from science and what we do know from practice

is everything's malleable, right? What we do know from epigenetics as we can turn things on and off in our own DNA based on awareness. So whatever your situation is, if you were born in a situation like mine and your parents separated and your father had addictions and ran off and your mother had traumas and you just grow up experiencing all the difficulties

that come from, not having parents to protect you. You can heal that and you can move forward. I have one story that I wanna tell about some current work that I'm doing with my own family tree and this is on my mother's side. So my grandmother, I'm gonna even say her name Arlin because I always feel Arlin is a little bit around

and I don't mean to freak anyone out by not seeing dead people but Arlin, because I always feel Arlin is a little bit around. And I don't mean to freak anyone out by not seeing dead people, but Arlin, that's not my reality. I'm in the normal everyday reality, 99% of the time. And this is something I can turn on and turn off. If I'm choosing to go into these areas, I can almost like flip a switch and go, all right, let's do it. But Arlene committed suicide when my mother was 16. And my mother was never the same after that. Never the same was devastated. And she living in a little apartment building in LA and the police knocked on the door and they're like, is this your mom? And she had went into the car. She had done it with a car in the garage. And so it sent my mother on a drama, trauma spiral for the next 10 years of just kind of hell

and marriage and terrible relationships and suffering, just grief. So that was a big thing always for me. What happened was my mother and my aunt buried their mother in a grave site, a cemetery in Los Angeles, but they left the tombstone with no marker. They were mad and they thought, you killed yourself so you don't exist. So our Lynn and ceremonies and the jungle and here and there has come and been like, I did, I lived and I loved my daughter. You know, there was this unforgiveness toward their mother. So now I am in the process of getting a new headstone because in the world, the ancestor world, you don't bury dead like that. Even if they killed themselves, you leave them in a terrible carmetancle because

imagine their kids won't even acknowledge that they were alive and she is not resolved in the ancestor world. Our karma is tied up in the past and the future, right? We are, there's a link there. And so I have been working with my mother over the last year to forgive her mother. And I tell our Lynn when I'm in deep meditation and experiences that I will rectify this, I will get you the headstone. So in this very moment, we are working on that. I reaching out to a headstone carver and then we're going to go down and then I'm going to have the whole family sit together and we do this forgiveness work because that should come from my mother as the matriarch. Like you're now we're putting love in our lineage now forgiveness and on the tombstone that was the only word I wanted was we forgive you

Arlen and then the dates. I said that must have that because we must remember that. So it's brought up so much for my mother and my aunt emotions and unresolved feelings. And I just keep holding that. This is what I want to do. And I want to make sure that I'm doing the work as a descendant. And then I love Ardlin. My grandmother, even though I never met her, there's a love there. More of my conversation with Spring Washroom coming up. Keep it here.

You talked about how 99% of the time you live in conventional reality, but you know, 1% of the time you can kind of turn it on. And I think that kind of brings us back to Harriet Tubman and these channeled conversations you write about, how does that work? How do you get into conversation with Harriet Tubman? Well, I will say that I was never, this is a new experience, Stan, what happened with Harriet Tubman.

I'm still integrating that experience. It still shocks me. I'm still amazed. I'm still in awe of the whole story. I'm in awe of the book. I'm in awe of Harry Tubman. I'm in awe of what's happening. So know that I'm real time. I haven't reached like a final analysis on it. Here's where I am right now with it and from based on where I am. But I'm still every day my mind is blown open

even when I read the book and I remember oh my gosh that was beautiful oh my god yes I'm taking back so so I'll leave you I'll start with the story of about when my publisher saw me online teaching about Harry Tubman in this five-week class. That was exactly when you interviewed me last. I was right in the middle of that class and I was talking about it. I was like, yeah, darn my Harriet Tubman. I don't even think I was talking about the book. We might have come back later and I was like,

oh my god, Dan, they want me to write a book. I think we texted or something. They came to me and asked me and I said, no, and I said, well, I'll wait for a sign. If I get a sign, I'll do it. But there is no way I'm writing a book about Harriet Tubman. I was in the middle of writing a shamanic book. That was more of my speed. The Harriet, the topic, it was like a deep dive. And I didn't want to go off that cliff. I was like, I know, call the Angela Davis, call a scholar. I really said this to them.

Yeah, I'm the wrong girl, wrong. I'm Buddhist. This doesn't make any sense. Harry was Christian. Get a Christian scholar, someone in the South, all of these, I was really putting up a lot of roadblocks and stop signs. No, no, I don't can't.

And that was my biggest thing. It's like, I can't. I'm not qualified. So then one night after I had done all these prayers with a friend of mine who I came over back in those days, we were praying for humanity all the time at night. Like, oh my God, we would do these prayers. So she left.

And I was reading this Harriet Tubman book. I had bought one of the many. She came to slay. That was the name of it. Anyway, as in my room, it was late at night. I had been saying Bodysapha prayers for two hours. So there was this beautiful energy around my house. That's when Harriet made a kind of appearance. I'll say, I think what Harriet did was she just, I guess an aborigines would call it the dream time where they can talk to their ancestors. Aboriginal people always used to say that they would,

the heaven and the earth would part and for a moment they could talk to their ancestors. Somehow, Harriet found the latitude and longitude and kind of made an imperson appearance. And I write about that in detail where it just showed up like in a spirit form. And it took me days to recover from that, by the way. My body shook for six days.

It was the electricity. And basically Harriet showed up to tell me, no, this is your task to write this book. And you and I had agreed to this a long time ago. And I tried to get out of it. And the whole chapter two is about this appearance where I'm given this task. Because I think Harriet knew unless she did that I would never have said yes.

So it was, okay, I'm gonna remind you. So that's how it started. So I finally said yes, and the wee hour to the night after this dialogue and these memories and all this, it was a whole journey. And then Harriet would just start to appear in my mind. We decided to write, and Harriet would appear, like as it started with a lot of thoughts,

and then images would come, and then it would be like time to have a session. And I would sit down at my computer, and it would come out. And I call them sessions. I don't like to use the word channeling because channeling makes people think of like that movie ghost where I'm gonna sit down and be like,

no, I am Harriet Tubman with a message. I don't do that, no. Ha ha ha ha. You saw her in your mind, but it wasn't like you were wearing AR goggles and there was an image of her Sitting on your couch with her legs crossed dictating her words It was more like she was showing up in your mind in some way

Yes, and it was a conversation like I the chapters became conversations and I would clarify and write but it was like Yeah, it was all through consciousness. Only two times three, maybe most Harriet appeared as like a spirit, and that was the first time she got me to say yes to the task of writing this and taking on this project that for me was epic because when I said yes, I didn't understand that I would be writing this book from her perspective.

Like, basically, I became one of her passengers on the Underground Railroad. I became a student and then I'm writing from the view of the teacher trying to document. So I'm the passenger who's freaking out the whole time. I'm writing as the student who is trying to make sense of it. And then it's Harriet's voice. Yeah. So the book is a three piece dialogue that is like juggling these three pieces. So I feel very much like I was a passenger on the spirit underground with Harriet. And Harriet took me through 12 stops. That's how I see it. One of the arguments you, and I'll use the term you in the collective sense, you Harriet and teacher spring make in this book, is that the underground railroad is alive today. And I think you

use the phrase inner underground. What do you mean by that? Oh,, this is like a really, I feel like this is the most essential question with why Harriet is back because we know we had the historical underground railroad and we can actually go and you know, there's very important stops in Philadelphia and Boston, Massachusetts and there was for 60 years the historical underground railroad was open. They estimate over 100,000 people traversed it. That's only an estimate. At one point, everybody was running away from plantations. Harriet Tubman describes an inner underground,

another secret passageway. She talked about it all the time. She said, there's another one that's through consciousness. There's a physical, yes. And then there's the mental, there's the mind, there's the spirit. And on this passageway, there are conductors, there are stops, there are agents helping beings get through each point. And this is what I guess one could say is similar to like the path of Nebana. Because I would say, well, where does this underground railroad go? And she's like, freedom. Out of suffering, out of hell, out of bondage, out of pain.

And so her job now, how she describes it, is that she works on the spirit underground. Consciousness, she's like, now we're in the age of consciousness, we're now in the air element, we're moving into the aquarium age, a shift from earth, air moves faster, everything moves light, speed, everything's sped up, right? We're not in the earthy, she's like like before when I was born in the 1820s, I could only help people get physically free, literally break open the chain and take you to living without a chain. That was the only level that I could move at because that's where humanity was, the consciousness. But now look, we're at a completely different place.

People can understand the inner underground railroad now. Right? We understand that it's our minds that matter. The battle is here now, Dan. It's always in the mind. It's less, even if we had a civil war, what is it? It's a war of ideas. Just to be clear, Nibbana is the poly version of the Sanskrit term Nirvana.

You use that word and I just want to make sure people know it. Yes. Thank you. Because I do use a lot of Buddhist jargon. It's all good. This is a safe place for that to be a little college campus. So what does that mean for our individual lives? How and why would we want to get on this inner underground railroad?

Well, because we're stuck in chains and imprisoned by our suffering. And if we trust Harriet Tubman to conduct us to, let's say the Promised Land, where she writes about the Promised Land, not being an outer destination, but a place there is a stoppage of suffering. That's why he's the word nabana, which is the poly word, which means the end of suffering. And the Buddha never talked about what Nibana was.

He always talked about it in the negative, meaning what it isn't. It is the absence of suffering. It is the absence of greed, the absence of hatred, the absence of delusion. So we talked about what it was, and he said it's undescribable though. So I'm not gonna try to put words, but I'll tell you what it's not.

And that's more understandable for where we are, right? So Harriet, if you think about Harriet Tubman as a conductor who that was the job, conducting people to freedom, then now working in consciousness, it would be doing the same thing. Moving people from a place of despair and stuckness to a state of freedom and power.

I don't know how far this goes. I don't know. But it's changing your view on Harriet Tubman too, which shocked me. And I'm moving into those in the later chapters where I start, Harriet Tubman's voice starts to take on not only this grandmother, but actually an incredibly wise being. I remember I wrote in there, oh my God,

after this conversation of consciousness, I was like, Harriet, you're actually an incredibly brilliant mind and I was like, yeah, I'm always underestimated. Nobody thinks of a black illiterate, formerly enslaved woman as a great teacher. So be it, but we appear in any form. That's where I started depositing that area. It was not just a regular person, but actually was a prophet, a great spiritual being, a great bodhisattva. As the book goes on, I saw it, it starts revealing itself to me. So what are the beginning steps? You spell it all out in the book, but just for people listening right now, haven't read the book yet, when you talk

about being on this railroad, what is that actually entail in a concrete way? I think for people, it means you're committing to your spiritual path. You're committing to understanding the four noble truths that there's suffering, that there's a cause of suffering, which is holding on, clinging. We commit to the third noble truth, which is letting go. And then we commit to the fourth noble truth,

which is the A-fold path, which is the path of awareness and mindfulness. We commit to living a spiritual life. We make a commitment to get on the path. This doesn't just happen, my friends. We actually had to put effort.. We actually had to put effort. Harry Tubman had to put effort. The people who left with Harriet effort it, you know, I mean, it's not an easy journey.

It wasn't through the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, and it's not easy on the Spirit Underground. Now, the same demons that the Buddha face. Mara's are everywhere. There's people trying to derail the train, left and right. I mean, it is. It's a story, Dan.

We're in a sort of fairy tale. This is consciousness. So essentially in the book, she and you are teaching Buddhism. Yes. In a different way, using different language. For those of you who are a dharma, you'll see that right away because there's only this is like what Harriet's talking about. It's like freedom, liberation,

consciousness. Yeah, we're moving from bondage and hell to the promised land. These are all different languages that people can understand, different concepts for the same place. Her definition of the promise land is nibana. It's promised to us and we'll get there, but you got to work. And you got to just like there was the physical underground railroad, you're going to have to go through a lot and brainstorms and hail and blood sweat and tears, the spirit underground the same, obstacles, confusion, doubt, but Harriet saying, I will help because I'm a conductor on this. Just like I was in the physical reality, I was conducting people to freedom.

I'm still conducting, but now it's through consciousness because we're not in physical chains. We're in mental ones. And some of us are in physical chains. Some people definitely are, but the mass majority of people in this country, we have everything. Our minds are what is creating hell. That's what Harriet is interested in. In the book, you talk about three flavors of abolitionism in a modern context, inner, outer, and ultimate. Yeah.

Okay. So, inner abolitionism, right, would be to abolish the programs of green hatred and delusions, right? We want to abolish suffering. This is where we start with the Buddhist path. They're sick. We need to get better. So the word abolitionism is the energy of abolishing, right? But it's on the inner level.

All right, we're seeking to be on the inner level, less abolish all the programs that block us from our hearts to compassion to love. So for me, I'm always translating things down from my years in Oakland. I used to look at Dharma texts and look at the audience and think, what is the language that they can understand? They'll know the ideas here. This is timeless. Everybody gets suffering. I mean, you don't have to, most people can understand the Dharma. Actually, they know it. It's true.

You know, so the inner is that we seek to abolish all of the inner. We do our work. We do our practice over and over. Outer abolitionist is that's what we seek to go into society. And we stand up to what is unjust, right? We're willing to say we should abolish that. That is not compassionate. That is cruel. That is unjust. Right? We become like Dr. King. We refuse to participate in evil. That's what you should say about the Montgomery bus boycott. We refuse to participate any longer.

We're no longer going to ride this bus because it, we participate in evil acts done. So non-cooperation with greed hatred and delusion. So that's on the outer level. Then ultimate, as we know is like, we're getting to the bodhisattva super power, sit-up power, Buddha levels. You have said that writing this is a quote from you, writing this book has completely changed me. How so?

Well, first of all, it awakened me a deeper belief in myself through Harriet Tubman, because Harriet Tubman chose me in every day had to affirm I made the right decision spring. You are the right person to write this. And you have more power than you know. So I think it was from that I felt a transmission of like strength and courage that I didn't know I had. I mean, in May of 2020, I was face planted. I mean, put a fork in me, Dan. I was just like, there was something so devastating about what was happening. I was just done. Flat.

Many of us were. We were just, how do you rise from this and meet the day with love and compassion again? It just felt like, whoa, we've gone through so much. But I think it's just a resiliency, true resiliency. And Harry gives me that all the time. I think about her actions and I think, no, you can get up and do this. Look what Harry Tubman did.

There's a kind of like, not in a negative way or a self-abuse way, but in an actual way that wakes me up and like for compassion, let's go out again. Let's rise. Let's focus. I don't know. She just gave me the steep chance mission of I can do it. And that I'm more powerful than I know. But I'm still understanding what that means, Dan. The first step was the first seed she planted. It was like, I'm more powerful than I know. Step two, unknown. I don't know the second step yet. I was like, okay, just know you're more powerful. Okay, I don't know how to act on that yet, but I'll just know that.

Maybe she tricked me in finishing the book that way too. Who knows? Well, I have no doubt about your power. Can I just ask you a couple last questions here. One is, is there something I should have asked, but didn't ask? No, I think all your questions are so good. I love your questions.

Thank you. I wasn't necessarily looking for after they came. I know, but I do like your questions, though. They give me a perspective to talk in ways that are different. And the final question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book, the book you wrote for any other resources you're putting out into the world that people might be interested in accessing? Can you just plug everything please?

Well, you know, I have this new website at Springwashem.com and everything is there. I'm put it all there. All the information about everything I'm doing. I also have a podcast with Lama Roddoin's. You could check out, it's out, and just, yeah, if you feel inspired, the book is a spirit of Harriet Tubman, awakening from the underground. And my other book is a fierce hard finding strength, courage and wisdom in any moment. And Dan, I have one final question for you. Fire away. What about 10% kinder? When is it, when is the new date?

Pissed hated. When is my new book coming up? Yes. It's funny because part of the book is about self-compassion, speaking of Kristen Neff and taking it easier on myself as a way to be happier and then improve my relationships and then be even happier and then be even nicer.

And I think one of the big problems in my relationships was that I was being so hard on myself. And so my first goal after I had my 360 review, which is the thing I'm writing about in this new book, that was in 2018. And my first goal was I'm gonna get this book out for the 2020 presidential election because that would be a good time to talk about kindness.

That didn't happen and my new goal is the 2024 presidential election. And I'm just really committed to doing this book sanely. And I have a lot of other things going on in my life. I have this podcast. I give speeches. I'm a dad and I have a lot of friends and a wife and company and lots of other things that I'm doing. And so I work on it every day, probably six days a week for a few hours, and then just trying to steadily chip away at it. So my current goal is to get it out to hand it in at the end of 2023 and have it out at the beginning of 2025 or end of 2024. I'm so excited about it.

I can only imagine how much revisions as worked all changing so much we write something. And then a month later, it's like, no, that's not it. And goes deeper and more spacious and compassionate. So we'll be waiting, Dan. You'll see it before anybody because I want you to make sure that the parts you're in are okay. Thank you. I'm sure they'll be great. Spring, thank you for coming on the show. I love you. You're the best. Congratulations on this new book. Thank you. I love you too, Dan. Thanks again to Spring Washam. One note before I let you go. Are you interested in sharing mindfulness

with young people? IBME's teacher training program is a comprehensive year long training that will support you in feeling confident in your skills as a mindfulness educator and inspired to make a difference in other people's lives. Applications are open for the 2023-24 cohort and the training includes some of the teachers and coaches that you hear right here on the 10% happier podcast.

Scholarships are available. Just go to ibme.com for more info. We'll put a link in the show notes. Go check it out. Before we go, I just want to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy and Lauren Smith. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman.

And Kimi Regler is our managing producer. We get scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself

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