Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 8: Sharon Salzberg

Episode Date: April 13, 2016

A towering figure in the meditation world, Sharon Salzberg is part of a small group of people who helped bring meditation over from Asia to the United States. Growing up in New York City, Salzberg had a traumatic childhood and was a sophomore in college when an Asian philosophy class she chose sort of on a whim led her to find a personal and positive connection with Buddhist teachings and practices. Today, she is a meditation teacher, the cofounder of Insight Meditation Society and the author of nine books, including best-sellers "Lovingkindness," "Real Happiness" and "Real Happiness at Work." Salzberg sat down with Dan Harris to talk about her personal history, her meditation practice and her advice to beginners looking to start practicing. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out. Dot com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Sharon Salisberg, It's my guest today. She's a towering figure in the meditation world and in my life and in my practice.

If you are meditating today, whether you've heard of Sharon or not, she is most likely part of the reason. She was part of a small handful of people who helped bring meditation to the United States from Asia back in the 1970s. She's a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, which is a meditation retreat center in Massachusetts. She's written a bunch of books, all of which are excellent, many of which I recommend to people who are beginning meditators, including a book called Real Happiness and also Real Happiness at Work. She also wrote excellent books by the names of Faith and which we will talk about.

She has a different sort of twist on the word Faith and also a book called Loving Kindness, which may sound like an impossibly sort of syrupy notion, but Sharon is one of the primary proponents of Loving Kindness Meditation, which is a specific kind of meditation, which is designed to sort of boost your compassion muscles. And again, to somebody like me, it sounds irretrievably ridiculous at first, but in fact, there's some pretty solid science that is now starting to back up the utility of this kind of meditation. And I can tell you from first hand, even if you are a type A striver, boosting your ability to not be a jerk actually has a lot of very useful benefits. So one last thing

I just want to say about Sharon is she's also really funny and cool. So Sharon thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Hopefully this is the first of many. For people who don't know you, I want to talk about your backstory a little bit because it's really really interesting. How did you get into meditation? Well I grew up in New York City in Washington Heights and I went to college at the age of 16, being a product of the New York City public school system. I skipped a few grades. And when I was a sophomore in college, I took a nation philosophy course, which honestly looking back seemed like just happenstance. I needed a philosophy course. It was a requirement. It was like on Tuesday or something. It suited my schedule. I thought, okay, I'll do that one.

And it completely changed my life because it was first of all in that course, which was really centered around the Buddha's teaching, that I heard the Buddha saying, right out loud, there's suffering in life that if you're in pain, you're not aberrant, you're not weird, you shouldn't feel left out, you shouldn't feel excluded, which was exactly how I did feel. Like many people I'd come from a family background, which it was very traumatic, very disrupted. And like for many people, it was a family system

where this was never ever spoken about. And so I did know what to do with all of those feelings inside of me. And he was the Buddha saying, you belong anyway. This is a part of life. And then I heard that there's something you do about suffering, not the suffering of circumstance. And you can't ward off all painful events, but the way you hold it, do you hold it in isolation or with a sense of connection? Do you hate yourself in your life or do you have

a sense of compassion for what you're going through and therefore for others. And so it was like the door opened and I heard there was such things as meditation practices. So I looked around Buffalo, New York and I didn't see it. It wasn't in the yellow pages. It didn't seem to be, probably is now. Of course, in fact, I know it is. I just got invited to a mindfulness conference at the university that I ultimately graduated from, but that yearning is fascinating to me. You know that sense of possibility. I thought, I don't know what I thought. I guess there's something here for me. There's something real. I can't be a bystander. I can't just

think about it. So, there was an independent study program at the university and I created a project. I said, I want to go to India and study meditation and get a year's worth of school credit for it. And they said, yes. So, off I went. I went back up for just a second, but you have been very open in a very brave way about the suffering of your childhood, specifically in your phenomenal book, the aforementioned faith, which we will talk about what you mean exactly by when you use the word faith.

Can you elaborate on it a little bit now? Sure. And my parents got divorced when I was four. My father disappeared. I was living with my mother and her siblings. My mother died when I was nine. Very suddenly I ended up living with my father's parents. When I was 11, my grandfather died and my father returned.

It was first of my senior since I was four. He had had pretty severe mental illness and he came back. He was only home really for about six weeks when he took an overdose of sleeping pills and he didn't die, but he spent the rest of his life, which was some decades in some mental health facility or another. So that was when I wrote Faith and I looked back at the time I had lived before I went to college at 16. I realized I lived in five different family configurations. And I looked back at the time I had lived before I went to college at 16.

I realized I lived in five different family configurations, each one of which had ended with someone's death or some kind of traumatic loss like that. Does meditation... It doesn't make the pain go away, right? No, I mean, somebody was interviewing me for something recently and we're talking about one of my teachers, a woman named Deepamah, who had been an extraordinary model for me because she had suffered tremendously. She lost her children, right? She lost two children and her husband and that was when she began her meditation practice was after that. And she kind of emerged from that with such an enormous compassion for everybody and in

the most personal direct real way. And it was very powerful. So she was really my model of what might happen. She was the person who told me to teach. I would never have become a teacher without her. But, but just back to my question, does it, do you think there is residue from that early trauma in your life now? But it's not like meditation, some sort of panacea. I would hesitate to say that in your presence, especially. At the time I said, happy or bad.

No, I don't think it's a panacea. But anyway, someone was interviewing me. happy or bad. No, I don't think it's a fantasy. But anyway, someone was interviewing me. And I talked about her, my teacher, and the person interviewing me said, well, she said it in this very kind of timid way, do you think you, you're reparented yourself with her? And I said, I reparented myself with all of them, all of my teachers. You know, that wasn't like a tentative, squeamish thing for me to think about. I know that. That I reestablished a sense of relatedness because of their modeling of having been through suffering, of having compassion for everybody,

of being attentive to everybody, no matter who they were. And I think the methodologies actually work. Sometimes when I teach with Mark Epstein. Dr. Mark Epstein, the New York Psychiatrist and author and great friend of both of ours. Yeah, and his great idol is Winnecott. D.S. Winnecot, the... D.W. I think.

Yeah, whatever. Thank you for exposing me. It might be WD. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know either. Winnecati. It was a British psychoanalyst who's great phrase that Mark always quotes is, just be a good enough mother. And Mark says, you know, it was all mothers at the time who were coming with your children.

So let's say, be a good enough parent. And someone in the room always says, well, what's a good enough parent? And Mark says that someone who can survive their child's rage. And someone says, what does it mean to survive your child's rage? And Mark says not to be invasive and also not to be rejecting. To have a stance where you can kind of hold the pain and be and be open. And I always say, well, that's mindfulness. Yeah, it's just going to say it sounds like mindfulness. Yeah, that is mindfulness. And so I learned those tools around my own pain, ultimately the pain of others because of the methods of meditation.

So you you started studying Buddhist meditation, but you specifically were drawn over time, if I recall, to this loving kindness or meta, which is spelled M-E-T-T-A, which is a word in the ancient Indian language of poly, which means loving kindness. So why were you drawn to meta and what is the difference between the two practices? Between basic mindfulness practice or insight practice in Buddhism and meta meditation. Well, we'd say mindfulness practice gives us the ability to differentiate

between our actual experience and the story we're telling about it. It's not that we don't tell a story, but we can know the difference. Maybe you have heartache, for example. That's the true experience in the moment. But our minds then tend to add what's going to feel like tomorrow. What about next week? I want to be alone for the rest of my life, right? So that's just an add-on. That's another ancient Indian word,

proponsha, which has the word I learned from you, which is mental proliferation. Yes, proliferation. Making of movies that go off that allow you to sort of colonize the entire future with your current. That's right. That's why this sometimes call it the imperialistic tendency of mind. So something happens in the whole world is taken over. So mindfulness lets you cut right there between the experience and the beginning of the proliferation. So then you have a choice. You can follow it, you can let it go, whatever. Whereas they say loving kindness practice will change the default story.

So if it has largely been one made of fear, for example, and you cultivate loving kindness, it will often been one made of fear, for example, and you cultivate loving kindness, it will often become a story of connection rather than fear. So they work differently. They kind of do different things. And they're very supportive of one another. It's not like there's no loving kindness and mindfulness and there's no mindfulness and loving kindness.

It's not that, but they are different methods. But in terms of the details, because I am mindful that some percentage of the people who listen to this podcast may not meditate at all. So what is the, how do you do mindfulness meditation and how do you do loving kindness meditation? Usually you start mindfulness meditation with just trying to stabilize your attention a little bit, so that might be choosing something like the feeling of the breath as the kind of home-based object, resting your attention on that object, and the 70 billion times that your mind wanders, learning to gently let go and come back and gently let go and come back. And then when you have some amount of stabilized attention, not enormous, but

some, you begin to pay attention in that same sort of balanced way to other things, what's happening in your body, different emotions, different thoughts. So it becomes a broader and broader array of objects that you're paying attention to in a certain way. So mindfulness isn't so much about the object that you're watching. It's the way that you're paying attention to in a certain way. So mindfulness isn't so much about the object that you're watching. It's the way that you're watching, you know, so that you're not so immediately reactive and you're not, you're like the good enough mother, you know, you're not invasive and you're also not rejecting. With some non-judgmental removal. Yeah. So you're not getting caught up in the traffic of your consciousness. That's right. And by contrast loving kindness is

traffic of your consciousness. That's right. And by contrast, loving kindness is... In loving kindness practice, you would rest your attention rather than on something like the feeling of the breath. You would rest it on the silent repetition of certain phrases. Like, may I be happy, may you be happy? And... Directed at specific people. Or beings, it could be a cat, for example. With three cats, if you're just three. I do. I have three cats. Thank you for putting them. Yeah, that's OK. It's mildly embarrassing. Do you want one?

No, thank you. I'm allergic. I can't. That's OK. So you, I should say, you actually teach any introduction to loving kindness on the 10% happier app. And in, as part on the app, we have all these video discussions that precede your audio

guided meditations and in one of the discussions, I pointed out that when you first, when I first learned about what love and kindness meditation is, it sounded to me like Valentine's Day with a machete to my throat because you basically, you sit there and you visualize beings, which for some people is a problematic word, but they're people or animals and you send them, you repeat these phrases systematically. You may be happy, may be healthy, may you be safe, may you live with these, and then you move on to the next being. And until you actually do all beings. So it sounds, as I said before, sort of irretrievably sappy. But will you fill in the butt?

Oh no, I look to hear your experience. Well, well, it is. It is, especially at the beginning, and in time, you're learning a new skill. It's annoying and awkward. And you're like, why, I was raised in the age of irony, why am I doing this unironically, sending good vibes to all of being, what went wrong in my life that I find myself in this position. However, what reassured me was just hearing about the science. When I hesitate to hype the science because I think it's still

in its early stages, but what it shows is that people who do this practice have lower release of cortisol and other physiological benefits. And also, the early studies suggest that there are behavioral changes. Pre-schoolers taught loving kindness, meditation, are more likely to give their stickers away to preschoolers, they do not know, which is pretty cool. Pretty cool. The research done at Emory,

it had people where microphones for much of the day, what I found was the people who had been taught loving kindness meditation, we're using the word I less, we're socializing more, we're laughing more. So that's what really changed things for me. And also that there is a real, there's even in a competitive, I have an incredibly competitive job.

It actually adds a lot of value not to be a jerk all the time. Or not to be burdened with the wasted energy of hatred. So now I'm talking way too much. Please take over. I amplify my points. No, I mean, I think much. Please take over. Amplify my points. No, I mean, I think, you know, because I talk about it from the experiential point of view, which is that it does sound stupid.

I know that. My first book was Love and Kindness. And one of my great fears was that people were gonna call it Sweet, and because to me, Sweet meant saccharine. And therefore irrelevant to the grit of day to day life. And sure enough when the first blurbs came back, two of them called it sweet, but they didn't mean it in that way. The actual experience compared to just thinking about it is very different where it is, it's

kind of a revolution in paying attention. For all those people we don't actually pay attention to, for example, that we look right through, we ignore, we discount, who don't mean anything to us. What happens when we look at them instead of through them? And so without, like, it being studied or fake in any way, there is a sense of connection that comes about. The truth is that our lives are interrelated. We don't live as these isolated little pockets that our lives have something to do with one another. And the carler said, is that everybody counts, everybody matters. Not everybody's going to be my best friend and I'm not going to take them home and I'm not going to

give them all my money and I'm not going to invite them to dinner, but everybody counts. And so even those people I don't like there can be that sort of bone-deep recognition That our lives are connected and that Moving forward with that consciousness rather than the kind of constructive self and other and us and them that we usually live under is Progress, you know, that's for movement and that's I think that's how we're gonna survive actually and then that we usually live under is progress. You know, that's forward movement. And I think that's how we're going to survive, actually, going forward.

So it's not just sort of woo-woo and phony and make believe. It's a very different way of looking at ourselves in a very different way of looking at the world. How can it be additive in a competitive environment? I know I'm obsessed with this subject, but I can't help it. That is my life. That's okay. So, I mean, I have my answer to this, but you know more and are more interesting than me. So, what is your answer to that? Well, I was listening to your podcast with George Montferd last night. George is an old friend of mine. And he's,'s of course the meditation coach for when we say

the New York makes right now, like you know, with Laurie J.S. with the LA Lakers and Chicago Bulls. He's taught some Michael Jordan, Kobe, Shack, he's taught some major players how to meditate. And they talk about him, you know, they each refer to like the special relationship they've had with him and so When his book came out we were doing some things together in New York City and People kept asking him like How do you take someone whose whole bent is individual excellence like being a superstar and Have them think more like they're part of a team because that's Phil Jackson's

Philosophy and George said Because that's how you win. That's how you actually win. It's having much more of a team consciousness So I said to him Do you use the word mindfulness? Because he and I are both from the days when you know nobody knew what you're talking about and it really did sound weird and When I first came back from India in 1974, and if I beat a party or some social situation, and people would say, what do you do?

And I'd say, I teach meditation. They would kind of go, eh, it's weird. And then walk away. Yeah, walk away. Or did you meet the Beatles? And they'd say, no, sadly, they went when I was in high school. I didn't meet them. But now, so I said to George, use the word mindfulness when you're teaching basketball teams.

And he said, now I can, because of the research and the science, then I said, do you use the word compassion? I said, that's too much. But I knew he must talk about the quality, because how else do you get that sense of a team? So I said, what do you say? And he thought for a moment, he said, I say, don't be hating. Just don't be hating on yourself. Don't be hating on others. That's the message. Because it will drain you. It will damage you. It won't help you get ahead. If you really look at what's most effective, what's most efficient, I think internally,

it's a kind of self-compassion. It's not an endless endless round Against yourself when you've made a mistake Which doesn't mean you've sacrificed stedras of excellence or we're cutting edge And it's compassion toward others in that sense of dissolving some of that real rigidity of self and other I mean I You nailed it which is completely unsurprising, but I'll just add on top of that that, so I'm not a ninja at loving kind of meditation.

I do it every day, but I'm certainly not for that long, and I still retain the capacity to be an incredible idiot at times. But I will say that to amplify your point, that in a competitive profession, where I am competing against journalists from other networks, and there's internal competition to drop, even 10% of the time, the burden of unnecessary hatred or anger or resentment or jealousy directed at other people is hugely liberating and by the way makes you much more effective because that hatred is counterproductive. And also, as you said, having some self-compassion so that when you make a mistake or when you lose

or whatever, you aren't engaged in endless rounds of self-laceration that diminish your resilience. All of this is, if you can get past the initial syrupy nature of the thing, all of this is a huge value at. A huge value at. So anyway, thank you for teaching me that. My wife, as I've said to you before, would like to send you flowers on a weekly basis. You mentioned before that it used to be very weird culturally to say that you taught meditation.

It is no longer that weird. In fact, what we're finding is that it's becoming kind of hip and trendy. What are your feelings about that? Because there are those who believe that a lot is being lost in the popularization of meditation. It is referred to in some circles as mick mindfulness. So the floor is yours. Do you agree with those concerns? I think there are concerns as you know we were talking earlier. I don't like to think of myself as like the truth police.

You know, I mean, definitely don't want to be in that position. I think about the times in my life, especially when I was starting out in meditation. And I was so young. I was 18. And I was so, I needed structure so badly. And I needed a sense of having arrived somewhere so badly that I also really adopted the sense of well my way is the best way. The way I've been taught is far superior and kind of ownership of the truth and I really

don't like the memories of myself from that period. It was maybe a necessary development. Like you were pretty strident. Yeah, I was pretty strident. And I'm very, very, very glad that that passed. So I don't want to pick it up again, or, you know, I don't think it's the right space for one to be in that, that I own the truth, which I will not bestow

and to measure upon you. I just don't think it's correct. So there's that. And there's also, I think there are. It's an interesting time. I once was in a group which divided up, I give a talk somewhere, and then we divided up into small groups. And so maybe there were 12 people in my little group.

And I swear nine of them introduced themselves to me as mindfulness teachers. And I sometimes a mindfulness coach, which is a new iteration of that. And I realized that days gone by, my next question would have been, who's your teacher? Because that would have told me something. Like if you said, Tignadeon, that would have implied social action. If you said, pal, excited, that would have implied concentration practice, or whatever. And I realized that's actually an irrelevant question now

that people don't think about having a teacher necessarily. They don't necessarily have a sense of lineage. It's easy enough to call yourself anything. There are many self-arisen teachers, and some of them are doing great service in their communities, but it's a whole other world than the world I grew up in. Where my teacher told me to teach. And I didn't even want to teach.

I certainly didn't see as a career path. That's the, I went to see Deepamada, that woman who had suffered so much in her life in 1974, I was coming back. Ford I was convinced was a very short period of time to the states before I returned to India and spent the rest of my life there. And Joseph had already come back to the coast. Joseph Colesty, who I had met at my first retreat in India and he was peeping back for maybe six months or something like that. I should just jump in and say he's one of the co-founders

of the Insight Meditation Society, which is your home base, and also a very prominent teacher. My teacher also works with us on the 10% happier app, and also a phenomenal dude. Yeah. So I went to C.D. Pumar in Calcutta to get her blessing for my very, very short trip back to the States. And she looked at me and she said, when you go back, you'll be teaching with Joseph.

And I said, no, I won't. And she said, yes, you won't. And she said, no, I won't. I said, yes, you won't. I said, no, I won't. I mean, the idea was unfathomable to me that I was capable of teaching or that I wasn't going to be a student in India forever. And then she said two things to me that were very important.

She said, you really understand suffering. That's why you should teach, which was the first time, especially coming from her. You know, it was the first time I thought of everything I had been through as something that could be helpful to others, you know. And then she said, you can do anything you want to do. It's only you're thinking you can't do it. It's going to stop you. And I left you the sort of in this tournament type place up in the fourth floor. I walked down those stairs thinking, no, I won't.

You know, it never really entered my mind as a possibility. And I came back and I did, you I did things I need to do with family and stuff. And then Joseph by this time was at Boulder, Colorado. And it was the first summer of Norepa Institute beginning. And he was sort of Rondas' teaching assistant. Rondas had this enormous class of like a thousand people and Joseph was teaching the... We should explain who Rondas is. Please do. He wrote the seminal book B here. Now he's more of a Hindu teacher. The Buddhist teacher, but very influential for your generation. And also was you want to go look at the YouTube clips, uh, uh,

booted out of Harvard for, uh, uh, doing experiments with magic mushrooms. LSD, actually. Oh, it was, I thought it was still Simon. Anyway, I got one. Drugs. He intonethyleric drugs drugs. So he run us in this enormous class, Joseph was teaching the meditation subsection. And a number of us had just come back from India and we had nowhere to go. So the joke was that Joseph is the only one with a job in an apartment. So we went to Boulder. And at 1.9 of us moved into his one-bedroom apartment. You can only imagine how he felt about that.

I know. It does. It was extremely meticulous to drove him insane. But as he tells the story, he really suffered until he gave up the thought that it was his apartment. And then we were just all living together. It was fine. And he and I began teaching together.

And Jack was there. Jack Quinnfield. One of your co-founders of the In-Site Meditation Society, also a prolific author, great meditation teacher, And he and I began teaching together and Jack was at Jack Quinnfield. One of your co-founders of the InSight Meditation Society also a prolific author, great meditation teacher and also founder of Spirit Rock, which is kind of the West Coast edition of IMS. Yes, so that's where the three of us really met. And we began responding to invitations to teach and then other invitations to teach. And between we slept on people's living room couches

and we had nothing, we had nowhere. Somebody finally, I think, because he was tired of us living with him, said, you know, I have an extra house that you just really rent out down in Santa Cruz area, wanting to stay there a while. So we went there and somebody came through and said, you know, you should really start a retreat center. You don't have to like, disperse at the end of 10 days wherever you are. And he said, I know the people who can do it.

They're all in Massachusetts. And he said, that sounds good, you know. And so all this time I kept thinking, this is temporary, this is temporary. I'm going back. I'm not a teacher. I'm not a real teacher. And then one day it was like, oh, wow, she was right. You know, this is very different than how it is now.

You know, where does it career path? Where you kind of undertake out of whatever desire or intention is motivating you to become a meditation teacher. It's just a whole different world. Hey there listeners. While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind

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I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. Well let me give you my view and just see what you think of it on this whole sort of popularization of meditation thing. Yes, there are things in the meditation world, like David Gellis, our mutual friend from the New York Times wrote a book where he wrote an article in the Times recently where he talked about mindful mayo being sold. So there are things in the meditation world that kind of give me pause, let's say. And let's be honest, there are people who have looked at my book and have found it to be

irksome from a traditionalist standpoint. And fine, I don't begrudge them their opinions. But overall, I think more mindfulness is better than less mindfulness. And yes, maybe it's being taught in places that make Buddhist traditionalists uncomfortable like corporations in the military. But I don't know. I can't see how that's a bad thing. I can't see how it's a bad thing. But maybe I'm wrong. What's your review? I don't think it's a bad thing. I certainly don't think where it's taught is a bad thing. I mean, I'm happy it's been taught in corporations. I'm happy it's been taught in the military. I know that it's a controversial point of view. I think the teaching in the military, because I know, I watched the progress of that. People's fears that it's being used to make like super soldier, like the mindful sniper.

But really, it started out with people teaching veterans whose lives were really shattered by PTSD. And everybody I know in the Dharma community was just so happy about that. You know, just how can you want, I mean, who knows if it will really be a tool that will help resilience. But if it is, how could you possibly want to deny somebody who's suffering like that? And then somebody said, what if it's a preventive? You know, what if people have this in basic training? And they were less likely to fall apart

and less likely to kind of do these extreme acts in the theater of war and less likely. And so then, you know, the training got sooner and sooner and so someone's entry. And that's when some people really got upset, you know, talking about the mindfulness sniper and all that. But I think it's fantastic. You know, like, I think everybody should have these tools available, whether they end up using them or they

end up being useful or not is another question, but I'm all for the completely widespread availability and accessibility, whatever that means. But I do think that, and this is controversial too, because people have very different opinions about this, but I do think the qualifications of the teacher make a difference. I agree with that. You know, and so, and how many really- Getting under the hood of somebody's mind, right? So you need, and people like you have years of training and silent retreat.

So the fact that people are whatever, just doing a little class here and there, who taught by, who knows, who knows who's teaching these classes. I don't know that gives me a little bit of pause. Yeah, that gives me a lot of pause. And again, it's not up to me, you know, and have like the good housekeeping seal approval, you know, but it gives me a lot of pause. But we don't just that's an interesting question because on the one hand, yes, I certainly want my teacher teachers to have had an enormous amount of experience. But if mindfulness is going to be, if meditation is going to be scaled in our culture, given

that what I think is the rising demand here, we need to have people who are sort of frontline teachers who haven't spent three years in Burma like you did or whatever. So how do we do that so that the quality is high enough or a good enough to quote whatever his first initials are Winnecocca. Yes. I hear it too far. From now on, we've heard too, it's Winnecocca

because we can't remember his initials. That's the problem. I mean, I've had these discussions so many times with so many people. I don't know, but that's it right there. Technology may provide some of that answer, frankly. You know, and I'm not just saying that because you're an app, that I'm on, because the means of distribution is then widespread, and the accessibility is widespread, but the quality is the quality. And I've really honored the fact like on the app,

you're very careful about who's answering those questions. You know, the coaches, yeah, the coaches. Yeah, on the app, we have a coach function, is somebody you can ask questions at any time, and we're very careful about who's answering those questions. And we have layers of security to make sure that those, that you're not getting bad answers. Because it's pretty easy to get bad answers.

Like if you were to ask me a question about your practice, I'd probably give you a bad answer. Because I'm not a teacher. So anyway, you were saying, I jump in. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I don't know the answer to that. I think that people come really good-hearted, well-intentioned, smart people come down

on different sides of that. They say, you know, you've got to train the people from within the community, like within the military, would be the example, even if it's a very brief training. And then I always say, well, then you've got to make sure there's such a thing as continuing education. I mean, I would really dislike the feeling of myself that I was done learning. You know, I have teachers, and I keep practicing. And if that ever stopped, I hope somebody would point that out to me, you know. Like, remember when you

thought you were still a student? That was better. You know, so I really worry about people who take a three day course, for example, as a training, and then they think they're done. So even within those more widespread training programs, there could be safety that's built in, in terms of continuing education and community. I mean, Joseph and Jack and I, we knew nothing. You know, like, institutionally, we knew nothing. I don't even know where the mortgage was exactly. You know, we bought the place, but even in terms of teaching,

you know, we were always talking to one another. What about that? What do you think about that? There are a lot of people who are much more isolated than that just kind of going off and doing this thing. So this is your discussion about your own continuing practices, is a nice pivot to the other thing I wanted, which actually both of us wanted to talk about coming to this podcast. If you think about the broad pool of meditators out there, the metaphor of a pool is actually

kind of useful because most people are kind of on the shallow end of the pool the 10% happier like let's just you know dial down our monkey mind and maybe dial up our or compassion a little bit, but there is a Whole deep end of the pool which you explored at great length in your early days and continue to and your meditation practice I assume and One of our previous guests, Jay Michelson, who is a journalist and lawyer and theologian and came on and talked, did something that's actually taboo in the Buddhist world,

which is to talk about his experiences at the deep end of the pool, to talk about this loaded e-word enlightenment. Because that's what the Buddha, granted, most people who are doing meditation these days in America are doing a secularized version of Buddhism, you know, straight up mindfulness. But the dude who's this or a progenitor of all,

this is a guy named the Buddha, and what he was talking about wasn't being 10% happier, it was being a hundred percent happy enlightenment and the uprooting of negative emotions. And yet it's actually in the world in which you were trained, it's considered sort of unwise and you can actually get in real trouble for talking about your attainments. unwise and you can actually get in real trouble for talking about your attainments So what is your view on on the fact that there are now people out there talking about their experiences On the cushion and how they've attained certain levels of enlightenment Well Back to I don't like that part of me that feels I know the truth in the best way. So. You're allowed to have an opinion.

I do have an opinion. That's fine. I did kind of grow up in a tradition for a number of reasons that we would never talk about your entertainment. Other people may talk about it. I've had many teachers who'd say, oh, not the teachers, but there are other students would say, oh, they're, you know, whatever.

We fill in the blank there on that there. So within, there are many schools of Buddhism, but you come from the Teravada school, which is the oldest of the old schools. And in this model, there is a four step progress toward being fully enlightened. So the first step is to be a stream-enterer. The second step is, this starts to sound very done. Just drag it, but this is the terminology. The second step is, one-streturner. The third step is a non-returner. And the fourth step is the arhant, where done is what

needed to be done. You have achieved full enlightenment. You have uprooted greed, hatred, and delusion. And with each of these steps, one has an experience of Nirvana, which is everything in our lives is a vast soup of causes and conditions, but Nirvana is the absence of conditions. It is the unconditioned. So pretty heavy stuff, pretty heavy stuff as well. And again, you're not supposed to talk about whether you're a once returner or a non-returner where you are on what's known as the progress of insight. And yet, we now

have people out there who were talking about it openly. So, carry on. Well, there are a number of reasons why talking about it was discouraged. Some of which are very quaint in our eyes. When the Buddha was teaching a lot of moral precepts, a lot of that was to the menastica community. The monks and the nuns were going out every day for food. They were dependent on arms rounds, right? And so he instructed them, don't, for example, only go to the street where the rich people live, so you get better food.

You have to give everybody a chance to feed you. Don't just go to the place where you know there's a good cook. You know, you have to give everybody the chance to feed you. Don't just go to the place where you know there's a good cook. You know, you have to give everybody the chance to feed you. Don't boast about your attainments, because then, you know, people might want to feed you more than your brothers and sisters behind you online. So it was a lot about that relationship, you know, with others and the presentation of the teachings. So that's where it started.

You know, don't post about your attainment. Don't show off your psychic powers. Don't, you know, do this. Don't do that. So, um, there was just a natural sense of, I don't want to be outstanding away from my brothers and sisters on this path. Uh, some of it comes from the fact that these, you know, the words are all the unwords, the unborn, the undying, the unconditioned, the unconditioned, you know. And so there are no words, you know, it's, it's ineffable. It's like a mystical experience you can probably read about in every tradition. Sometimes poetry comes close and Buddhism is the unwords. And so different schools just throughout history will interpret that differently.

Typhars tradition has a very different descriptor of stream entry, for example, than Burmese tradition. And so that's the kind of thing that drives practitioners crazy. It's like, well, Thailand, I've been London, in Burma, I'm like nowhere. And the teachers I had would never tell you. They'd never affirm your experience. They wouldn't say, oh yeah, you're a once-returner? No. Never.

Why not? I think partly, it reifies a sense of identity. Like, now I'm a this right which is going backwards and partly because I think other people would kind of give out certificates and they saw they saw that is very bad form you know it's like I did it you know you did it and if you think the basic motivation is supposed to be compassion compassion for yourself and and your own suffering and compassion for others, it gets to be a little bit like, um, what's the point, you know? So you, I heard that the early days at IMS, your meditation center that they're... We get that certificate.

But that there were times when there was a lot of sort of comparing of, oh well, he's returner he's a non-returner or whether I don't know if that's true but that's part of the lore and part of the reason that people cite that you guys you Joseph and at least you and Joseph aren't big fans of people walking around talking about their attainments. I don't know about that I mean it was four years ago maybe my memory is like we started at the place. Well no I mean as people as peers know, we've had some very interesting discussions as you and I might have, you know, if we chose to do that, and you're living here sometime, you know, if I take a benedrial, because the cats, you know, like, what is your deepest

experience? And Tibetan Buddhism, the word that we call meditation, they call getting used to it. And so from their point of view, so there are lots of points of view, from their point of view, we have all had profound experiences of connection and selflessness and boundless love and infinite wisdom, but we don't live there, we don't get used to it, right?

Until we practice. That's why we practice. So is that to get something you've never had? It's to make a home in the place that you've already known. You know, so the lots of ways of framing that conversation. I don't see the exact benefit of saying to somebody, there are shifting definitions of this state. According to one, I think you may have gotten there, but I'm not totally sure. Keep trying, which would, you know, for me as a student that would drive me insane. But isn't it, so you're saying that it doesn't,

you're not a big fan of a public proclamations of attainments and b, even private discussion from teacher to student because it creates, it sort of sets us up for competition and striving and comparison. Yeah, I mean I think there are ways of saying it because I think there are attainments for sure. But what's the result of that first stage of enlightenment, for example, it's said to be a stage from which there's no going back. Right? You may get confused in the heat of the moment or a lot of pressure on about whether there is a solid, separate self, immune from influence and conditionality. But if someone asked you, you would absolutely know, what does everything change all the time? Like when I'm full of craving, asked you, you would absolutely know. Or does everything change all the time?

Like when I'm full of craving, I forget, you know, I think, oh, if I had a bigger apartment, I would be perfectly happy forever. You know, but if you actually asked me, I would absolutely know. That's not the answer. So there are lots of moments in life where we kind of break through to the other side of something, from which there's not going back. Even though we don't live it all the time, we don't live from that place. We'd so deeply know something that is just not going back. And so that's what that first stage is,

around who we are fundamentally. But so if there are attainments and there is a map, if there is, if you can make progress toward enlightenment, again, I haven't tasted any of this. So I did I maintain a high level of journalistic object, let's not say object skepticism about whether this map is real or not. But anyway, just let's stipulate that there is a map. Why not talk about it? Isn't it disempowering? This is the argument from those who get up and talk about their attainments. That it's useful to say to people, you can do this. And it isn't just for monks and also that here's how to do it. Anyway, yeah, that's the argument that it's empowering.

Right, I agree with all of that. And I would probably choose still to say all of that, you can be a lot freer than you are. You can let go of grasping a version in delusion. You can see your life clearly. You can get on that subway and genuinely feel your life has something to do with all those others. You can have these huge effects of insight.

And insight is very disruptive to one's life. You know, you don't go on in the same ordinary patterns. It's very radical. You can, absolutely. And I believe there is a way not everyone agrees on the map, which is another issue. Well, at different schools of Buddhism have their own maps. That's right.

And there's disagreement within the schools. That's right. So uphold's disagreement within the schools. That's right. So upholding something, upholding something as dogma is very problematic. But I do believe, and I have experienced that very map of the progress of insight. So I believe in that. And I think one can see, one can

glean the wisdom of it. So for example, something that you and Jay were talking about was those stages where it's like what happens as your mind just naturally falls on the beginnings of things, you know, thoughts starting, sensations beginning. And you live in a world for that time of beginnings. It's like renewable beauty, light, you know, ecstasy. It's just like, it's a world of creation. It's amazing. And a lot of people think,

wow, this is it. You know, it's this tremendous good feeling. It's going to last forever. And it doesn't last forever because nothing does. And so you go through all the difficulty of letting go of that. And so on. I think that's really interesting to know. When it becomes a really linear sense, which nobody actually knows if it's like this stage exactly followed by that stage without any back and forth, then it becomes another prison for us. Like, oh no, yesterday I had three and a half minutes of light, you know, today it's

about here. I'm, I fall in, I fall in backwards. It's, it's just not, it's not the way the path happens. You're just punishing yourself. So we're, what's the answer? Do you mean should we not talk about it or should we talk about it carefully or what the how to, I think I took the answer, I think the answer? Do you mean should we not talk about it or should we talk about it carefully or what the how to I think I took the answer really well. No, it's what I just said. It's like I would talk about the insights. I would talk about the results. Otherwise, you're just trying to have trying to go off the box. Yeah, stream entry. Yeah, I feel that with myself. I mean, I feel like I want to get there, I want to see what it's all about. But I feel like the more you want it, the more you're trying to go for it, specifically, the less like you are to get it, and what is it anyway? That's right.

All right, I've held you for a long time, but I'm not going to let you go yet. So, so, You go yet. So one of the things I did in preparation for you coming on the podcast was I asked people on Twitter to send questions. And so we're not going to get to all of them, but let's start with some of them. Any easy trick to start. This is one of the questions that came in. A lot of people have trouble starting meditation.

So do you have any views on, so we're diving from the deep end back of the shallow end here any easy trick to get started. Two things one is establish a reasonable commitment like don't think I'm gonna sit for eight hours on the weekend. It might be five minutes a day. Could be ten minutes a day we've had that discussion to I I now say five to 10 minutes a day. Thank you. Because of you. The discussion was about my saying the first five minutes of the hardest five minutes, usually, because you're so agitated often, thinking about what you have to get done that day,

that 10 minutes is like kind of true self in five minutes. But if it's a reasonable commitment for a short period of time, like I'll sit 10 minutes a day for two weeks, or a five to 10 minutes a day for a month, something like that. That's much better than thinking about sitting for an hour or something that's really unreasonable. And it's not a lifetime commitment. You are going to assess and evaluate. But at the end of that month, let's say, look at your life to see if it's any different,

because that's where the difference will show. at the end of that month, let's say, look at your life to see if it's any different, because that's where the difference will show, not necessarily in that dedicated period. And the other thing was, if it helps you, see if you could set up some system of accountability. It's like a community. Like I have a small cyber group I belong to, or somebody somebody said if he wakes up in the morning and he turns right he's at his computer if he turns left he's at his meditation cushion. So we formed a support group, they're only five of us and every day when you've meditated you email the other four and the subject line is always turned left. And if you want, you can say something else like for

turn left for two and a half seconds or two and a half hours or the weather is great here or say nothing. You know the important thing is that you've you've reminded one another. What do you say this is not on the list of questions which we'll get back to in a second but I hear this all the time and I would love to hear what your answer is to it people say to me all the time I get it meditation is good for you But you don't understand I can't do it because my mind is too busy. I can't settle my mind What do you say to people?

That's a place where you need a good teacher whether it's a person to person or on an app or tape or whatever person to person or on an app or tape or whatever. Because first of all, everyone can do it. The goal is not to wipe out thinking or annihilate the ability to think. The goal is to have a different relationship to your thoughts. So even if you have a torrent of thoughts and even if they go on and on and even if they're not very positive, it doesn't matter. Because first of all, you're settling more on the breath a little bit more,

and then a little bit more and a little bit more. And you're also developing more space toward the thoughts, which is the goal. So that will definitely happen, but it's such a common idea. Like, I shouldn't be thinking. It's all wrong to be thinking. It's, you know, I'm doing it wrong. And so you really need a good, good amount of guidance. That's a better answer than the one I give. That's not surprising.

How to handle emotions when they surge? Again, this is another Twitter question. How to handle emotions when they surge? Let's say anger, for example. Here too, it's like a suite of tools that one just needs to practice with, because some emotions are harder than others, but the more you practice, the more you can establish a different relationship to the emotion. So a common one is feel it in your body.

You know, rather than just go round and round and round and round, like a fist one will write that, then we're going to write that, then we're going to write that, then we're gonna write that, then we're gonna totally bring them down that way, like feel it in your body. And see if you can switch from the content, like the grievance or the plan of action to the emotion itself. It's like, when we have a strong emotion, even if it's like strong desire, we're usually paying attention to the object not to what it feels like to have so much desire.

Right? So, I need a new car. So, I might think of, should I get that kind of a poster or that kind of thing or whatever and we get consumed by that, not kind of pivot our attention back to, what does it feel like to have a desire? So that's what we we do with the anger. I try to do that around cookies. Yeah.

That's a good one. Doesn't always work. What does it feel like? Yes. And so you feel it in your body. Also we look for the add-ons. As with everything, it's the pepuncia that gets us in the end. You know, such an angry, I will be forever.

I spent $10,000 in therapy and I'm still angry, what a waste. You know, whatever it might be. And those are just add-ons and come back to it. Okay, what does it feel like? And then we kind of deconstruct the anger movie. We just look. And so maybe within the anger we see sadness, we see fear, we see helplessness,

whatever it might be. And then if we choose to take action, we can do that with a full comprehension of all those feelings, you know, not just the topmost layer, which was the anger. And we also see change. You know, if you look at anything in that balanced way, you'll see it's constantly changing. And so that quality, that emotion, which seems so solid, so oppressive, so overwhelming, when you really look into it, it's constantly changing. And so it's different. Very nice. I'm going to cut off the Twitter questions in the interest of time and just finish on the last question,

which was promised at the beginning, which is to talk about this word that you use, which is faith. Because I actually think it works nicely with the folks who are asking us questions on the sort of beginner side of things here. In order to keep going, you need some faith that this thing works. In other words, you need some confidence that you're not wasting your time And that really is the spirit in which you're using the word faith is not Talk a little bit about that I think it's different kinds of faith at different times. It's like When I think about what brought me out of Buffalo to India, you know like

It wasn't like an overwhelming confidence, but it was some possibility, some sense of possibility that made it worth going for. So maybe that's all you have. It's kind of intriguing or it's interesting or it seems like it'll be challenging in a good way. And that's why I think we need structure. It's like a period of experimentation. So you need the willingness to try it wholeheartedly for that period. And then it's faith in your own ability to discern. Is this making a difference? You don't have to believe anything or anybody else.

And is it really making a difference? And take a look at your life and see if that is supported or not. And there are kinds of faith that are really based on our own experience, that are really the best kind of faith. You know, rather than dogma or just excitement or enthusiasm about something. And so you have to trust yourself and trust your ability to really see clearly. Thank you for listening to today's show. You can find video of the episode

and an article about it at ABCNews.com. Thanks as always to the producers of the show, Lauren, Efron, Josh Cohen, Sarah Amos, and Dan Silver. You can hit me on Twitter at DanB Harris anytime you like. If you liked the episode today and you want to hear more like it, you can subscribe to the podcast, rate it, and leave a review. Thank you for that, and we'll talk to you next week. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

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