Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 592: The Buddha’s Eight Part Recipe for Happiness | DaRa Williams

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

This episode kicks off our series on the Eightfold Path which will continue on Wednesdays for the next two weeks with Eugene Cash and Joseph Goldstein.DaRa Williams is a trainer, meditation teacher and psychotherapist and has been a meditator for the past 25 years. She is a practitioner of both Vipassana and Ascension meditation and is a graduate of the Spirit Rock/Insight Meditation Society Teacher Training Program and is an IMS Emeritus Guiding Teacher. In this episode we talk about:The first two components of the Eightfold Path: Right View and Right ThinkingHow the Eightfold Path has played out in DaRa’s life The notions of Intuition, Clear Seeing, and Openness And the very tricky skills of renunciation and fostering non-attachment to outcomesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dara-williams-592See 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. Sometimes I think about the fact that the Buddha has near universal name recognition. I mean, there are statues of the guy in spas and restaurants and everybody's backyard. And yet most people know almost nothing about who he actually was or more importantly, what he actually taught as a friend of mine recently joked. It's like there's an inverse relationship between the Buddha's Q rating and what most people actually know about him. If you want to get to the core of what the guy taught perhaps a great

place to start would be something called the eightfold path. As many of you know the Buddha liked to make lists as teaching tools and one of if not the most important list is the eightfold path. It's an eight-part recipe, essentially, for doing life better. Today, we are launching a three-part series on this eight-part list. Why only three parts for the series is a pretty good question? And there's actually a pretty good answer. The eightfold path is often divided into three chunks or buckets. So we're going to bring on master meditation teachers to walk us through each of chunks or buckets. So we're gonna bring on master meditation teachers

to walk us through each of these three buckets. We're gonna kick things off today with Darah Williams about whom much more in a moment. Next Wednesday we'll do part two with Eugene Cash and we will wrap things up in two weeks with the great Joseph Goldstein. As I mentioned on Monday, as you may have heard, we're running an experiment for the month

of May, we're launching two concurrent series. We're going to do some weaving here. Every Monday, we're doing a series we're calling boldface where we interview celebrities who are brave enough to talk about the darkest shit in their lives, and then on Wednesdays, we're going to go deep dharma. So hit me up on Twitter, actually. I'd be very curious to hear if any of you have feedback on how this strategy is working or whether it's working.

You can also comment through our website. Before we dive in here, a little bit about Dora Williams. She's been a meditator for the past 25 years. She's a graduate of the Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Society Teacher Training Program. And she's a guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Society as well. That's in Barry Massachusetts. And she has spent over 30 years as a mental health clinician and administrator. In this conversation, we talk about the first two components of the Afold Path, which are right view, also known as

wise or skillful understanding and right thinking, aka wise or skillful thought. I just want to say right here that these may sound vague, but there is a ton here. These two notions are, as Dara says, the soil for the whole path. We also talk about how the A-fold path has played out in Dara's own life, the notions of intuition, clear seeing and openness, why those are so important to her. And the very tricky skills of renunciation

and fostering non-attachment to the results of our endeavors. 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 McGonicle, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos. To access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10percent.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer.

I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer,

on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Darah Williams, welcome back. Thank you for having me back. Appreciate that. I appreciate you. Let me start with a big broad, probably overly obvious question, which is, what is the eightfold path? Well, that could definitely take more than an hour and a half or a whole week. We've got it.

But what I will say is that it is one of the components of the four noble truths and The four noble truths are actually the organizing conceptual principles of the whole of the Dhamma and the practice and so it's kind of the first Recognitions and understandings that the Buddha had upon enlightenment You know Buddhism and Dharma study can be very upon enlightenment, Buddhism and Dharma study can be very interplaying and integrative. This is really one of the foundational components of Buddhism and Dharma. It's really at the base for everything we study and practice and the jump off point for actually moving towards liberation and freedom. And so it's on the one hand very simple,

but on the other hand, quite deep, right? The Buddha had this realization or this understanding coming into awakening, that there are four basic principles to build upon in terms of moving towards liberation. And that would be the four noble truths. The first truth being that there is suffering, or in Pali, Dukha,

the second truth being that there is a cause or a reason why there's suffering. The third noble truth being there's a way out, or a path, or an end to this suffering. And the fourth noble truth, which is the one we're focusing in on today, is the eightfold path. A set of guidelines that if one practices and engages these eight steps will actually take you to liberation. If not, liberation certainly in open heart and ability to live with less suffering in one's life.

So that's what the eightfold path is. It's kind of circuitous within the four noble truths and the four noble truths being within the eightfold paths. So it's kind of like if you're working with this, you can't miss it. You're going to hit everything you need to hit at some point. The Buddha was all about lists on lists. Sure. You've used words like liberation, freedom, and one can understand the eightfold path as a kind of a recipe for enlightenment. However, there are for sure listeners to this show who either don't believe in enlightenment, don't know what that means, don't care. So for those folks, I guess you could say that we could think about the eightfold path

as just a recipe for living a happier life. Absolutely. And when I use the word liberation, I am not necessarily speaking to just a realization of nibbana as many people who are in-depth Dharma practitioners and followers believe in. I'm literally talking about liberation from pain and suffering. Regardless of what your belief systems are, we're all moving through life with challenges in relationship to lots of suffering, whether it be minuscule and on the small level, like that slight dissatisfaction with the way things are

or wanting something to be different, or the bigger things like illness or loss or death, or these kinds of things that cause us to have pain and suffering, it's relevant regardless of what the level of engagement with Dharma or Buddhism is. Well said, now I am definitely not an expert in the eightfold path, but if memory serves the eight entries in the list are often divided up into three groups. We're going to focus today on the first two, which comprise their own group, but can you just kind of walk us through the groupings

overall so we can get a familiarity with the entire landscape and then we'll dive in on the first two. So the first two of the eightfold path are skillful or wise understanding and skillful or wise thinking. The second basket is skillful or wise speech, skillful or wise action, or skillful or wise livelihood. And as you can hear, that basket has a lot of action in it. It has a lot of movement in it in terms of practice. And then the third basket is skillful or wise effort, skillful or wise mindfulness, and skillful or wise concentration.

And as people hear this, it might be useful to try on those three words, right, skillful, and wise, and see what reverberates or aligns with your nervous system in terms of being the most useful way to understand the baskets and relate to them and access them. These baskets, I understand the second basket and the third basket, the second basket is really around ethics, speech, and action and how you make your living. The third basket seems to me about meditation practice,

concentration, mindfulness. Uh-huh. So how do we understand this first basket that we're going to talk about today? What did the Buddha mean by thinking specifically? I think a lot of people might say to themselves, I thought, you know, in Buddhism, you weren't supposed to think that much. Oh, how many times have I heard that?

Because you're right. A lot of people do interpret that that's partly what's being taught about it. So, you know, I'll start just by saying that the first two view or understanding and thinking this basket kind of sets the tone or sets the premise for everything that comes after it. The first two or the first basket is kind of like the soil, you know, and so you're like prepping, you know, making sure all the minerals are in there, making sure that whatever's needed to grow a healthy plant is in there. So skillful understanding or wise understanding is really about understanding the four noble

truths and understanding the content or the offerings that are Buddhist in nature. It sets the precedence for being able to actually move towards practicing, move towards bringing this into existence in one's own life. Because, you know, if you are not clear, if you don't understand, if you're off view, then whatever you put on top of that is going to be off, kind of like the domino effect. So it's really important to have clear understanding, to have wise view about things, about what you're learning, about what you're experiencing, about various conditions of mind and heart. So that's how I would kind of describe understanding or view. And I think it's useful to use both of those words interchangeably, because they

have slightly different energies. The wording has slightly different energy and I think probably why there's even those two ways of speaking about this first step onto the eightfold path is because English doesn't always reflect the full quality of the poly. So there's probably some in between way that view and understanding has a word in poly that wasn't present in English. So they broke it down into these two ways of working with it. Then they're skillful thinking or wise thinking. When people say, oh, I thought the whole premise of Buddhism was to not think.

The actuality is the mind thinks. Just like the lungs breathe and the heart beats, the mind thinks, what does whole path is about, but particularly this second step is training and conditioning the mind to think in skillful ways, to think in ways that are non-harming, to have clarity about things, but it's inevitable. We have a nervous system. We have interaction. It's inevitable that there's going to be thinking. It's not about trying to get rid of the thinking. It really is about cultivating the mind to have more thought and thinking that is useful, skillful, wise, and nature versus not skillful, or harmful, or wrong. That's how I delineate or start to distinguish those two steps. And you can probably

hear, as you take some of that in, why they are the first two steps. So that as you approach and move through the next six steps, there is some foundation to the mind being clear, to the mind being ready to engage with the other steps. Just to pick up on what you were saying there, we're going to dive much more deeply into right, slash wise, slash skillful view and right, slash wise, slash skillful view and right slash wise slash skillful thinking. But if I step all the way back and survey the A-fold path and its entirety, if I'm hearing you correctly, you were just pretty explicit about this. The A-fold path is sort of a guidebook for doing life better and it gets pretty specific about,

you know, speech and action and how to meditate, but you can't really go anywhere if you don't have a compass. And these two beginning aspects of the eightfold path are foundational in that way. Exactly. You got it. Yep. Compass, direction. Because you can have all the earnestness of effort, all the aspirations for wanting to, but if you don't know where you're going, you're not going to land at the goal. All right. So let's start with view or understanding here. You talked about it a little bit,

but I think it would be smart to really go pretty deep on this now. How do I understand what the Buddha was pointing out when he said view? Is it to realize that our culturally conditioned view of the world, which is like we're going to live forever and the way to get happy is to accumulate as much stuff as possible, that that is a recipe for suffering. Am I in the neighborhood? You are definitely, you're on the block. Not just in the neighborhood, you're on the block. Absolutely. I think the first stepping into the eightfold path is really gaining knowing and understanding visceral maybe is a word I'd use but an experiential

understanding of the first three noble truths that there is suffering. Suffering is inevitable. It's part of the human condition. It's part of being embodied. That's like the first opportunity to touch into a little bit the possibility of freedom from suffering. Like to realize it's inescapable, just like death is inescapable. Suffering is inescapable. So this eightfold path is not that you have to accomplish one

before you go on to two, before you go on to three, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's not like some place that you land and then you're there permanently and you kind of just merrily, happily go skipping through the rest of your life. It's kind of like a constant or an ongoing balancing that has to be assessed and paid attention to

and put into the view of awareness. I love that. Yes, this isn't a checklist where you go through all of them, you get your like EGLE Scout merit badges and you're done. It's a guide that you can use throughout the various ups and downs of any human life. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. That's what really makes this path like a living guideline or a living path that it's constantly useful to take a look, see what's happening, how am I living it, to really incorporate that

or include that as some kind of ongoing self investigation. I love how you talked earlier about how I think you use the word circuitous or interconnecting this list is. So why is understanding, which is the first part of the eightfold path, basically is understanding, as you said before, the first three noble truths, everything is connected here, which just brings me to a question in your life, how has achieving some measure of understanding or view played out and been helpful? That's a good question. It's a good question because one of the things that's, I won't say a challenge, but that I'm not so quick to bring forward for myself is I'm somebody that experiences

life very much from the felt sense way. And so cognitively and intellectually putting words to a lot of my experience doesn't necessarily come easy to me. But in response to the question, one of my first teachers, and she's been a mentor and a support for me in the Dhamma, since I first stepped on to the path, was Gina Sharp. And one of the things that she taught is that the Dharma is like a kaleidoscope. And, you know, when you turn that two parts of the kaleidoscope

so that everything falls into focus and then there's some beautiful picture that you're seeing. So when I think about my life, it's kind of like that and that I've been engaging in different practices within the Dharma. And through the process of engaging in these practices, it has brought my view into alignment. Personally, equanimity has been really, really, I think, the major organizing principle, bringing that understanding to the eightfold path. And literally,

sometimes catching myself and looking at how at any given moment something is playing out in any one of the eight steps. One of the ones that I get to work with a lot is livelihood. Like now livelihood is pretty much an alignment with living the path and really reducing the amount of stress and suffering that I live in my life. But there was a time when there was really a question around am I utilizing my energy, my mind, my understanding, my heart in a way that is useful and contributing to human beings.

One of the places that I have not so much yet had a whole lot of success, I'm much better than I used to be, but driving and right speech. For me, that's my playground where I'm really a worker with stuff. But the one thing I will say about that is that whatever my initial or reactive response is to any situation or condition or circumstance that arises as a result of driving. Whereas it used to take me off my center, I would be furious.

I'd be, I can't even say what the kinds of things that I would say. And now having worked these steps and having studied and practiced the Dhamama to the degree that I have, the response still comes. It's just right there. The response just still comes. But immediately after I say whatever the thing is that I say, I will say to myself, now you know that ain't right. You don't know what this person is dealing with. They may be trying to get to the hospital or, you know, no, no, no, no, whatever. I'll start making up the story to support Y-Speech.

So there's been a shift in that being one of the places. And you know what, I guess what I'm saying, which I use that to illustrate is that in my life, personally, the place where the A-fold path has impacted me the most is probably around anger and rage the most is probably around anger and rage. Yeah, probably around anger and rage. And especially earlier in my life, there was a lot of that that manifested or showed up like passive aggressiveness. But over the course of the work, over the course of unfolding and unfurling and growing the seeds of Dhamma in my life,

not a whole lot of that going on anymore, even with all the many, many conditions in circumstances that could easily be righteously bringing that forward. And a big piece of how I do everything that I do and do it with a smile is that one, really that effort and that usefulness of being present in the moment. So not thinking about what I have to do coming or what I didn't do leaving, but really being present in the moment. And also the experience and the understanding of how draining it is to be fearful, to be angry, to be, you know, any number of things, it's really draining. It really takes a lot of energy to entertain those conditions in those states. And I don't really have time for that, but I think cumulatively speaking,

pretty much equanimity and balancer, the name of the game as I move through each day and applying that, applying equanimity and balance to the eightfold path. It's the fantastic insight into how this list has played out in your life and it's inspiring. I mean, there are a couple things in there that I really resonate with. One is I have my own pension for anger and rage And it's just so not helpful for me. And the other is how you talked about how draining it is to be in a state of fear. And I was just, I had a conversation with my wife today.

We both work at home and she came into my office and I was sitting there and she has incredible radar for when I'm in a rabbit hole. And I said, yeah, I'm just like stuck on all these what if thoughts about career stuff and she was like, look, we're going to be fine no matter what. You should just know we're going to deal with it, whatever happens. And I was like, yes, I wish I could have accessed that on my own, but it is so draining. Like I was supposed to be doing something creative

in that time. And I couldn't because I was so stuck in this. What if thinking that stuckness or that worry or fear or it's not about not allowing that to arise. If that's the real truth to the moment of what you're experiencing, but it's actually catching yourself and knowing. Like I said, about the driving. Now it're experiencing, but it's actually catching yourself and knowing, like I said about the driving. Now it's like the minute it's out there, I see it, as opposed to two days later, still talking about the gut, it was behind me flashing his lights,

trying to get in my trunk. You know, so it's, that's mild, that's mild, yeah. That's exactly it. We're not trying to squelch any emotion or thought pattern. We're trying to have a different relationship to it, so we're not drowning in it all the time. Exactly. It's amazing how many times I can hear those words. It's amazing how many times I can say those words and the need for me to hear and say it over and over again seems to never fully evaporate.

Coming up, Darao Williams talks about intuition, clear seeing, and openness why these three qualities are important to her, the four Brahma Vikaras, and other four qualities that are important to her, and how we can all work to cultivate wise thought. Life is 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 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. So let's go back to skillful or wise view or understanding. You have said that to your mind there are at least three parts of it that play out in your life to this wise view. And those include intuition, clear seeing, and openness. Can you say more about each of those?

Hmm. So maybe I'll start with openness. So what I'm referring to or how I'm thinking about the openness piece is that if we're not open, if we're not willing to engage the possibility that there's another way of understanding or that there's another way of thinking, it kind of closes us down to the possibility of really engaging with any aspect of the AFO path. And then the intuition piece is really around using the body as one of the components of how

we can gain understanding and awareness about what's happening with this system, our system, our body, our mind, our heart. And intuition in our culture is not necessarily one of the pieces that are highly developed, you know, like really leaning into and trusting the wisdom and understanding that comes from the intuition, that comes from the felt sense, the pre-verbal, pre-cognitive kind of way of understanding something. If you have the ability to plug in or listen to or acknowledge the information through the body, that's a great support for working the eightfold path. Those leads are clear seeing, like not through the lens of the ego of past experience.

Past experience should inform us, but it shouldn't determine action and choices. experience should inform us, but it shouldn't determine action and choices. But I think all three of those openness, intuition, clear seeing are important considerations. It might not be something that everybody can plug into. But I think that they're important considerations to support the A-Full Path. I like this a lot. And I like it in part because it's not an area where I'm particularly strong. So if I'm going to recapitulate it what you're saying is openness and intuition can help us see things clearly. And I'm curious, how do we go about developing openness and intuition, which one might define as kind of like the intellect that resides south of the neck.

That's right. That's right. Yeah, that is intuition. For me, one of the ways to access that is actually through meditative practice, especially intuition, because in the silence and the quiet, you can actually plug into or get present to the experience of what intuition feels like, looks like in your body system. And then once you have an understanding or a knowing of that, you can then use that information

to cultivate a connection to intuition in your body. This may sound really, really simplistic, but for all of those, getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, like taking care of this body, at least at the very base level, in terms of what's useful for supporting the body and, you know, walking this earth. I also said, I know you and I talked about this. I think it was when we were together the last time, because I think I spoke about equanimity then. But the engagement of the Brahma Vaharas, like intuition, that's intuition territory, really.

Really cultivating our capacity and our internal experience of loving friendliness or loving kindness. Those are two words that are used to describe this non-code dependent feeling of wanting people to be well. Including ourselves, not just people, like we're in that too. This is not about that today, but I'll just

name the other three, our compassion, which is not wishing ill to anyone, including oneself, as well as being able to cultivate the capacity to sit beside or be with suffering, and then having the wish or the want for people to not suffer. And then the third heart quality, or Brahma-vahahara is sympathetic joy, which is taking delight and pleasure in the joy that someone else is experiencing or actually lending some of your joy to someone else, perhaps, if they're not able to generate it for themselves or bring it into existence for themselves. And then for me, in my personal evolution,

and in my personal life, the most powerful of the four has been equanimity. And that's what I've faced a lot of my whole practice around, regardless of what aspect of practice I might be engaging with at any time. But equanimity, the ability, the capacity to stay in the middle, to be equidistance from suffering and difficulty, and elation, and joy, but just be able to stay at Bikuboti, says it this way, to be able to stay in the middle. When I talk to people about equanimity, I describe it as, for many of us, probably I'll include you in this generation. And when we grew up, there was such a thing as a seesaw.

And we'd be on the seesaw with our friend. And so there's the going up and down, which was fun, but the real fun thing was like trying to get it to stay even with both of you on both sides. And the constant adjustments that had to be made in order for that equanimity, in order for that equal, that straight board.

And so, I find that the Brahma Vaharas, any one of them, certainly all four of them, are a good contribution to any aspect of practice that any one of us might be engaged with, but certainly around those qualities of intuition, clear seeing, and openness. You did a nice description there of the Brahma-Viharas for people who haven't studied or practiced or learned about this in the past.

These are just these four mental skills of sort of friendliness, compassion, the ability to take pleasure in other people's happiness and equanimity or balance in the face of whatever is going on that are trainable through forms of meditation. I found that practicing the Brahma Vihara's which roughly translate into the four heavenly abodes, which is a kind of grand way of putting it, but you can just think about them as very useful mental skills. I found that practicing mindfulness, which allows me to have self-awareness that includes awareness of like how my body's feeling in any given moment with, and I don't understand exactly the mechanism for this with, you know, loving kindness, just sort of

warming up my whole system, being more friendly as a frosting to Englander, that does not come naturally to me. Really has improved my intuition, my ability in a moment to see that it's not just what I'm thinking about what's happening, it's also what I'm feeling about what's happening that can guide me. Can you just say a little bit more about how we can

practice wise thought? happening that can guide me. Can you just say a little bit more about how we can practice wise thought? I don't know that you practice wise thought, and this may be a matter of semantics, as much as it is that you cultivate wise thought, because that's what we want to do. We want to cultivate wise thought, and there's three aspects of wise thought. So the first aspect of wise thought is renunciation, knowing or touching into the experience of non-addiction. Right? I mean, we can be addicted to anything. It doesn't just have to be drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex or whatever. We can be addicted to work. There's so much that we can be addicted to. It's kind of like one of the components of human nature that lends itself towards causing suffering.

So there's this practice of renunciation, understanding that it's a gradual process and you can maybe begin this practice with using a practice of restraint, practicing the wisdom of the word no, sorry, can't do, won't have, but really practicing the wisdom of no and how that lends itself towards changing habituated patterns that we might have.

So there's a little line from Ajahn Chah who is one of the teachers of many of us that are speaking from the Teravadna or Insight or Vapasana lineage of thinking. And Ajahn Chah was one of the great teachers. And he said, if you let go a little bit, you'll have a little bit of peace. If you let go a lot, you'll have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will have complete piece. Your struggles with the

world will come to an end. So that's how I hold renunciation. It's really like the letting go, like letting it be, like leaving it alone. We are so inclined towards having, getting, doing more, being more. All of this kind of like never present and satisfied with where we are at any given moment. And so I think really being thoughtful about creating conditions of time, of rest, of well-being, of the habits and the conditions that support, not suffering, could be a really useful practice. So there's that first aspect in terms of working with wise thought. Then the second aspect, which we kind of actually touched into a little bit, is loving kindness.

So cultivating thoughts that lead to our own well-being and the well-being others, thoughts free of judgment, non-acceptance, wanting someone to be different, wanting ourselves to be different, but all of those kinds of conversations, the antidote is loving kindness. So cultivating loving kindness or practicing loving kindness is one of the ways to work with developing and cultivating wise thought. And I have a little something for loving kindness too. And this is Neo-Shu-Kin Rinpoche, who said, I would like to pass on one little piece of advice I give to everyone. Relax. Just relax. Be nice to each other. As you go through life, simply be kind to people. Try to help them rather than hurt them. Try to get along with them rather than fall out with

them. With that, I will leave you and with all my very best wishes. Like so simple. And then the third aspect that's helpful in cultivating why I thought is practicing compassion, you know, having this understanding in this place of knowing that we human beings walk with so much and that there is so much suffering, whether it's the little suffering or the big suffering, there's just so much suffering. And to bring compassion to that, let me come back around and say that one of the unskilful

or one of the unwise components of unskilful thinking is cruelty, wishing ill will on people, like wanting to get back at people, causing harm to people, and compassion is the antidote for that. And so we're working with our thoughts, such that at some point with practice, the probability is that a skillful thought is going to arise as opposed to an unskillful thought that's going to arise as opposed to an unskillful thought that's going to arise.

And so these are kind of like some of the ways to work with thought and that are really useful. And again, it's so interesting. This is just as I'm speaking and as we're here today with each other, just really present to the simplicity of this path, but the real challenge of sustaining and maintaining a foot on the path in the face of all that we are navigating on a daily basis. What I like about this is perfection is not on offer, at least not for most of us and maybe even not to the enlightened. The eightfold path isn't calling on us to be, you know,

utterly and unimpeachably immaculate. What right or wise thinking and what I'm hearing you describe as the ways to cultivate it through renunciation, loving kindness and compassion, what these practices can do, what this cultivation can do, as you have just said, is make it more likely

that in any given moment, even when we're at our worst, we might have a skillful thought as opposed to an unskillful thought. Yeah. And every time you have that skillful thought versus an unskillful thought, you're building capacity, you're building muscle, you're building the bridge over less suffering. If you have a skillful thought, you're not going to suffer behind a skillful thought, but you sure as hell got to suffer behind some unskilledful thought, whether it's meniscule or big, for me, I'm all about like, I don't have to suffer. Just tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do and I will do it. I will practice it. I am interested in not suffering.

I share that interest. Coming up, Dorault talks about loving kindness and her own work at boosting that muscle in her own mind. And we also talk about two sometimes tricky concepts for modern Western people, renunciation and not being attached to outcomes. And really, this gets me back to something we touched on a couple times here, which is the Brahma Vaharas, or these were sometimes referred to and I don't really love this term, but heart practices, developing loving kindness or compassion, you know, and again, for anybody who's new to the show and hasn't really heard about this before, generally these are practiced by informal meditation. You sit in formal meditation, you close your

eyes and envision a series of beings, animals, or humans, and send them good wishes. Like, if you're trying to generate the capacity for loving kindness or friendliness, you may be start with yourself and you picture yourself and you say may you be happy or may I be happy, may I be healthy, safe, live with ease, and you move on to an easy person, a neutral person, a difficult person,

and then all beings everywhere. And then for compassion, you may picture somebody who's suffering and say may you be free's suffering and say, maybe free from suffering, maybe free from pain. In my opinion, especially for a beginner and a skeptic, it can be a very forced kind of saccharine practice. And yet, as I often say, if you went to a gym as an alien, a new being on this planet, and you saw people running in place for 45 minutes at a time where systematically picking up and putting down heavy objects, that would look forced and strange too, but it does build the body. And these practices build capacities of mind.

And they can have a bearing on our thinking. And I believe as previous guests on the show have pointed out that there's at least preliminary evidence to show that meta or loving kindness practice, which I have jokingly referred to as Valentine's Day with a gun to your head. This loving kindness practice can reduce bias. And I've seen it in my own life that the more friendliness I have, and on a related note, the more compassion I have,

the more tuned in I am to the suffering of others and of my own suffering, the less judgmental I am, the more I see that I'm a mess, and therefore everybody's a mess, and I don't need to be as judgmental, which by the way is a good source of suffering, very reliable source of suffering being judgmental. So anyway, I'm saying a lot of words in support of your words. Yes, yes. Well, I appreciate that. And you're speaking about training when you talked about going

to a gym and what are people doing? are training their bodies training their hearts training their good health We use the word practice a lot But another useful way to think about it is that we're in a training to bring about conditions that cause less suffering And you're the best example of the bram of ours of like that's a loving kindness cutting through the of R is of like that's a loving kindness cutting through the the energetics of skepticism and judgment and all of those good New England ways of seeing the world and each success each growth of capacity around any of the things that we're talking about, lends itself or leads itself to there being more capacity. What you were just being to in terms of the heart qualities or developing the heart, I just came out from Georgia.

I drove from Savannah, Georgia to New Jersey. And especially down south, you stop in these out of the way places to get gas and you go in and you see the cashier. And it like occurred to me as I'm moving along down the South, like, these folks don't even get seen. They're in here, you know, making sure to gas get pumped. I went into this one and it was a young lady.

She must have been probably in her mid 20s, maybe even a little bit younger. And I noticed that she had a tint of color in her hair. And I looked there and I was like, I really like that hair color you have. And her whole face like she was seen, right? She was actually seen and actually engaged with, right? And what that caused in terms of even if it's just for that moment, one that connection with another human being, but two, also this real sense of loving friendliness. And I've kind of taken that on as a practice,

seeing people and not just seeing them internally, oh, I see that person, but actually connecting with people that I'll see for that moment, never see again, but offer one moment of being seen as a fellow human being, and what that does for me, not just what that does for the person that I'm engaging with.

There's a lot of data to support the argument. You're making not that we need data necessarily, but Barbara Fredrickson, who's been on the show before wrote a book called Love 2.0 and her evidence base her research suggests strongly that these micro interactions can really add up to a significant boost in your happiness and in my experience practicing loving kindness and compassion formally on the cushion, makes me more likely as somebody

who can, you know, spend a lot of his time with his head up his own ass, makes me much more likely to see people I otherwise would have ignored. And that is good for them, I think, but I know that it's good for me. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Before I let you go, I do wanna go back to renunciation because that's a loaded word, a lot of people hear it and it doesn't seem attractive. And you're reframing of it as non-addiction is very resonant.

And yet when I hear quotes like the one you read from Ajahn Chow that a little bit of letting go will give us a little bit of happiness or peace. And then a lot of letting go will give us a lot of peace and then complete letting go will lead to complete peace. It sounds right. And yet, you know, I don't know how to practice that because, you know, I have a seven year old son. I'm definitely not going to practice non-attachment to him. And I love my cats and my wife and my friends. And, you know, I'm pretty attached to this house we live in. How do I begin to make inroads here? So non-attachment to outcome, as opposed to person,

or cat, or house or son. So we're kind of moving a little bit into for me, a little bit into the domain of trust and faith that when you are engaged in actions, practices, ways of living that foster and cultivate well-being, reducing suffering for self and others automatically automatically to trust that the outcome of some circumstance situation or condition, it's out of our control anyway, right? And so being loving towards your wife, being loving towards your son, being loving towards your Kamakap person to appreciating your home, your house, bringing all of this goodness

in relationship to your relationships, two things. But really, when you get to the end point, at some point, you have to let it go. You know, knowing that you've done all that you could do to cultivate goodness, to cultivate well-being. So there's another word that I'm going to throw in here in relationship to the non-addiction and renunciation and that's generosity and like generosity and appreciation for the goodness in life, for the goodness in others. That's really how you begin to practice that. I mean the core, the bottom line, to addiction is us trying to make things good. So to cultivate goodness in a skillful way,

not in an artificial way, is one of the goals. So one of the places to start might be to investigate what are the meanings or what is the understanding in relationship to the word renunciation. What does it generate in your body? What does it generate in your body? What does it generate in your mind to actually become intimately aware of where you are in relationship to renunciation? And then you can start to see, okay, well, I can just let that go. I no longer need that belief. Or you can say, oh, I may need to deconstruct this a little bit.

You'll be able to delineate and determine for yourself if there's anything to be done about it. I think you put your finger on something important because I wasn't really aware of it until you pointed it out, but I think there's a misunderstanding because when I hear complete letting go, I guess I imagine just not giving a shit. And that's not the case at all. Exactly. You care very much. But you care for creating well-being for self and others. Yeah. So for my life, I can love that we have this house, but not be attached to us having it forever. I can love my wife and my child and my cats, but not expect that they're gonna be here forever

or that our relationship is gonna be this way forever. And that's a healthier way to relate in a world that is hardwired for impermanence and chaos. Exactly. This understanding or this fact is that everything is impermanent. And that's painful. That causes challenge. When we're able to let go, when we let things be,

it can support even deeper levels of love, of appreciation and generosity. Because there's no attachment to the outcome. Is there something I should have asked but failed to ask? No, I don't think there's anything you fail to ask. I appreciate, and I know this is known by your listeners and new people. We'll see this if they didn't catch it today, but that you're just a person that's very transparent and authentic about being human. And I can appreciate that. And it's actually the fodder for great depth of learning to be able to be that transparent and forthcoming with who you are. And so the only

thing I've kind of come back around to is, yeah, lighten up because there's a lot to be heavy about. is yet lighten up because there's a lot to be heavy about. And so the conditions that support well-being, that support the access to energy and effort to engage the A-fold path, to really play it out, to really work with it, are the conditions of kind of lightning up and relaxing a little bit and bringing the mind to pay attention

to what's happening for you as you engage with each step along the way. I've said this before, but the common denominator among all of the great spiritual practitioners or meditators or teachers, or whatever you wanna call it, having conducted hundreds of interviews on the show and I would definitely put you in the category here,

the virtues of which I'm about to extol. The common denominator of all the great meditation teachers have come on the show is they do not take themselves too seriously. They have a sense of humor. That doesn't mean they're trying to crack jokes all the time. But if you're sitting for hours and looking at your mind, eventually you're going to have to start laughing. You got it. That is my sure. That is for sure. Derao, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Dan. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks again to Derao. Thanks as well to you for listening, really appreciate your ears. And finally, thanks to everybody who worked so hard

on this show, 10% happier is produced by Justin Davy Gabriel Zuckerman, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer. Marissa Schneidermann is our senior editor and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, scoring a mixing by Peter Bonaventcher of Ultra Violet Audio.

We'll see you all on Monday for a brand new episode. We're going back to the celebs and we've got a great one coming up on Monday, Neil Begrass Tyson, the super famous server-de-le-so astrophysicist. And don't forget we're going to be continuing with this eight-fold path series next Wednesday. It's Eugene Cash after that. It's Joseph Goldstein. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

at Wondery.com slash survey. Com slash survey.