Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 85: Mark Coleman, Meditating in the Great Outdoors

Episode Date: June 21, 2017

Renowned mindfulness teacher Mark Coleman, founder of Awake in the Wild and The Mindfulness Institute, has led wilderness meditation retreats from Alaska to Peru. Coleman talks about making peace with our "judging thoughts" and how nature can "open the heart" and relieve stress, even if you're stuck on a cross-country flight and taking notice of the landscape below or just taking a moment to feel the wind on your face. 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.

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So on the show this week, we've got a renowned mindfulness teacher by the name of Mark Coleman, who has a particular focus on meditation in nature, which I have to say, I've been thinking a lot lately that I am not spending enough time in nature and I wonder if that's a problem anyway.

He got me thinking about that. He also, you'll hear about his backstory, which involved having a mohawk at one point. So he comes to meditation from an unusual background. Before we get into that though, I just want to plug quickly that one of our previous guests on the show, Orrin Sofer, who is back on podcast number 28, we've posted a new course from Orrin on the 10% happier app.

It's called Emotional Agility. And it's really about how to be agile with your emotions a lot of us myself included find it really weird and squishy to talk about our emotions But they are there and when you're unaware of them, they anchor you around and so Orin is actually a Mistro at coming up with really interesting practical techniques for dealing with your emotions and if you check out the the on the app the first session is free. Back to Mark Coleman. A brilliant guy has a new book out and as somebody who's been on the mindfulness scene for a long time had a whole life story about which I was unaware and has a ton of

practical wisdom for dealing with the voice in your head which I really found quite impressive. So here he is, Mark Coleman. So I'm going to start with the voice in your head, which I really found quite impressive. So here he is, Mark Coleman. So I'm going to start with the question, which I ask everybody at the beginning, which is how do you start meditating? So I started meditating in the early 80s. Actually, the interesting story, my father originally took me to a transcendental meditation class when I was about 16. Our family is not in any way meditation inclined, but he had a health condition that his father said, if you don't do something about your stress, you're going to die.

So how about a meditation class? And where was this place? This is in a small working town in the south of England. Okay. And then later, a few years later, and then I had the experience and it was great, and I enjoyed it, but it sort of wasn't really that impressionable and just went on with my life. And I-

Did your dad stick with it? He did for some time. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. And he actually was great. We all meditated together, and it was a very sweet family experience. My mother, my father, and me,

being quiet for 20 minutes a day. How amazing. Yeah. And then I moved to London, became a punk rocker. I was an anarchist. I was a very angry young man. And... Were you in bands and stuff like that?

Or were you just a fan of them? Just a fan of bands. Yeah, I couldn't play anything to. Do you have like crazy piercings or anything like that? I had a white mohawk. Nice. big earrings, I used to make my own clothes. It was a really fun time. It was the boom of punk in the early 80s. And anyhow, and I was an anarchist and there was a lot of sort of, in a similar time,

like now where there was a lot of political underground against thatcher who was really dismantling some of the social fabric. And it's pretty angry, a lot of hatred, and I thought the problems of my mind were all because of the government and society and corporations and the way the society was running. And I ended up squatting. There was a big movement taking over public housing. There was hundreds of thousands of houses that were empty because of the mismanagement of housing in London.

And so I took over this house that ended up being, I realized, was owned by a Buddhist housing cooperative. And I got to know them and they'm being Buddhists. They didn't kick me out. They said, you know, you should really check out your own mind. Go around to this meditation center around the corner and maybe you'll actually find some help to what is you going through. I was definitely searching, I was definitely unhappy and was looking for something, looking

for way out other than drugs, alcohol, and demonstrating on the streets. What do you think the source of the unhappiness was? You know, that's a really good question. I, um, so the reason I wrote the book is because I had a lot of self-hatred, which book you have to, uh-huh, the first, the second book, uh, make peace with your mind, which is a book about how mindfulness and compassion helps free you from the inequity. And I, uh, had a tremendous amount of self-hatred and self-judgment, and that in itself was cause a lot of suffering. And I didn't understand, and I thought that was normal.

And so when I went into this Buddhist center and started meditating, I realized, Oh, wait a minute, that's what's causing this pain. That's what's causing so much suffering is the way that not the only cause, but one of the ways is that I'm torturing myself with self-judgment, self-criticism, undermining myself and just carrying around a general sense of unworthiness, not good enough, and anything I did wasn't right or perfect. And how did you see that? I mean, in the most granular terms, you describe how did that become clear? You just started noticing the kinds of thoughts you were having?

Yeah, you know, you know as you know what happens when you're meditating you start to see you know one of the things that's the loudest is there is the radio station of your mind that's broadcasting a lot of thoughts and I just began to see most of the thoughts were really negative began to see most of the thoughts were really negative, angry, and they were a lot turned towards myself and really harsh and mean and cruel and critical and really just difficult to be with. Wasn't all that was that, plenty of other stuff too. I was also judgmental about the people in the world and the whole variety of meandering thoughts, but there was definitely this strain of, heavy, negative, oriented thinking.

It sounds like you were hard to live with and the person who was taking the brunt of you being a pain the butt was you. Yes, yes, which I think is true for many people. Yeah, yeah. I could have been describing myself. We are the hottest person, people to live with, where our own was critics,

and we tend to orient towards what's wrong, myself. We are the hardest person. People delivered with it. We're our own worst critics. And we tend to orient towards what's wrong, what's negative, what's problematic, what's deficient. And therefore, have a distorted sense of ourselves and feel really bad about ourselves. From an evolutionary standpoint, what do you think we are, have been bred for that, that propensity? Well, I think it's the negativity bias. We grow up in the savannah or wherever it is in the wild. And we've been trained. And we survived through looking at what's threatening,

what's problematic, what's different, what's fearful. And so the brain's very heavily oriented. And your science is really illuminating that, that negativity bias. It lives in today in the way that we still scanning the environment as if looking for that deadly threat, but the acceptance turned inward and also turned outward too. But it's that hard-wired orientation that we can start to unhook with meditation practice. So evolution didn't care about happiness.

Evolution cared about getting your genes into the next generation. So this threat detection reflex kept us alive and miserable. Yes. Perhaps not some miserable back then because there was plenty of threat to be oriented towards now. There's less threat and there's more time for rumination and we also have social media and a whole other realm of things to compare ourselves to and all the ways that we're not good enough and cute enough and smart enough, etc.

So, we're going to talk a lot more about this, the inner critic, but just staying with your chronology for a moment. So, you go on a retreat, is that what happens? You're squatting in these people's house, they say, cool, you can stay, we suggest you go on a retreat and you said sure. No, there was, I just went to the center around the corner and I started taking classes. And I just, actually what happened is I walked

into the center and I saw these people milling around, they were working, cleaning the place. And as you may have had this similar experience, I saw the look in their eyes. And there was something about these people that had a quality of presence and purposefulness and clarity and I didn't know what it was but I knew I wanted it. I was like, they're onto something and I want to know how they got to that place.

That's the way I felt when I met Dr. Mark Epstein who has been a guest on this podcast and was one of the first practicing Buddhists I cyber met and then a lot of these sort of Paleo jubos that he met me it introduced me to like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salisbury They had a something that That I coveted. Yeah, it's tangible. You can see it. You can feel it. There's like there's a brightness in the eyes And there's a certain calmness in the presence And it was was very different than I'd grown up in a somewhat rough working class northern England environment, and the qualities of meditation presence were not what was I was exposed to. It was much rougher. It was an aggressive kind of culture. And seeing this quality in these people is like,

oh, there's another way to be here. And I started meditating and I started to get a little information. As you know, it's slow. It's slow to begin to feel and develop these qualities. But I began to have a taste. And also, something about seeing them gave me a sense of faith that that possibility was available if you put the time and the effort and the practice in.

That's important. And faith, which is a loaded word, can also just be confidence. Yeah, trust. Confidential conviction or, you know, just the awareness that there's a possibility of a way to develop something that seeming there wasn't even on my radar yet, once I saw it, it was like, oh, that seemed like a really smart way to live. So what did you do next? Did you like shave the Mohawk?

And what was that? I shaved the Mohawk. I gave all my clothes away and I moved into basically a monastery, like a retreat center that was way out in the country and I dropped out of college much to the shock of my family and friends. And I just really wanted to go deep into the practice of meditation and Buddhist teaching and it seemed like that was more important than anything. And so I was ready to give up everything for it.

So did you go into it, were you a monk? I was in a retreat. I was in a tradition where you could, there was an ordination process. I didn't get ordained, but I was very much involved in that subculture of Buddhist practice in England. What tradition? It's called the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order

that now called the Tree Rat and Evandana Sangar, I think. The first one was easier to pronounce. I know, it's English. it helps. So is it Thai? It was an integration of Tibetan and Teravader and some Zen developed by Sangra Akshita, who was a Buddhist monk from England in the 40s and 50s, met all the great masters coming out of Tibet in the

50s and 60s, and then developed his own brand of Buddhism that had an emphasis on community, on right livelihood and very integrated practice actually, very much in the world. And so I studied with them for many years and at some point I realized I was itching for something more closer to the original tradition, closer to Asia and India and the Buddha and so I went to India and then I met my first Faisana teacher, Christopher Tipness. Christopher Tipness, yeah. Okay, he I've heard his name. He's based in England, developed a founded Gaya House, co-founded Gaya House. Yeah, and wonderful, the passing of the teacher. Controversial?

Yes, somewhat. Yeah. Why? I think, well, he's radical. He's has a certain uncompromising quality. So I think in Buddhist tradition in general, many teachers have this kind of pretty strong, like cutting through no boop, I might not have to say that. Yeah, you are. I'm not. Go ahead. And just not

pandering to people's comforts and need to have it easy and and and cushy and very very on fire at the time in his own awakening and teaching and I was riveted I studied with him and Bodgai I went back to Bodgai the place the Buddha got in line and I was there every year for 10 years and it just completely lit up my practice and also being in that Asian milieu really helped kind of kindle a deep love of the teaching in the tradition and the practice. But if you're gonna go to Asia, why not have an Asian teacher? That is good question. Well I did have a nation teacher. So I also studied with a teacher called Punjaji who is from the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Hinduism. Yeah, yeah. And Advaita Vedanta is quite close to much of Buddhist teaching.

And he was both the lover of the Buddha and of Vedanta. And so I was actually studying both. And then I went to Thailand to Ajahn Buddha, Dasturus, monastery, and studied a little bit there. But to me, it was less about going to Asia to study Asian Buddhism, even though I was falling in love with that, the context of that tradition, it was really falling in love with the practice of awakening, of insight, of freeing one's mind and heart from suffering. Okay.

So, you just used a bunch of classic Buddhist jargon. Put that in English for me because these are alluring terms, awakening. You know, it's a really bad, I want to be awake, except for, you know, when I don't. Freeing from suffering, if you had, if I'm forcing you now, proverbial gun to the head, what do you mean by that in the plainest of English? How would you explain it to your former neighbors in North England? Good question, which I may be going back to in a couple of months to do that very thing. I just found out that many of my school friends are actually becoming interested in mindfulness,

which is amazing to me in giving that it's seemingly a long way from where I am now in San Francisco. How would I put that? You know, the simplest way I like to talk about it is how we show up and meet whatever moment is in front of us with awareness, with kindness, with understanding. So no matter how many spiritual mystical, wonderful, profound experiences you have, and they of course inform who you are and how you live, the practice has always comes down to how are you showing up in this moment? How am I? So today I took me, no, 10 extra hours to get here because of delayed flights and cancellations. And by the way, you don't, you seem unruffled. Well,

here we are. And so the so the so the practice, the invitation of the practice is, you know, awakening has to mean how are you living and responding in this moment? Are you living with to mean how are you living and responding in this moment? Are you living with awareness and presence or are you living with reactivity and self-absorption? And that would be to be asleep, in other words, to be on autopilot. Yeah, to be on autopilot. Sleep walking through every. Unconscious, reactive, resentful, blaming everybody, not taking responsibility and being self-absorbed and self-centered. Versus being aware, being present, whether it's to your children or to your colleagues

or the bus driving down the road. And also, there's a lot of pain and difficulty in struggling life for all of us in different ways, internally, externally. How do we meet that with care, with kindness, with compassion? So from my experience, what arises out of all this deep practice that we do in meditation and in whatever spiritual practice you're doing is the ability to get outside of oneself and to be able to be more present and caring and awake to what's

here as opposed to as you say autopilot being asleep, being reactive, being lost in one's thoughts, being lost in one's self-critic, and etc. Well, your self-critic should tell you that you just did a great job explaining that with no preparation and you didn't know I was going to ask you to do that. So that was very good and I think very compelling and extremely comprehensible and relatable at university. So you walked us through the various teachers with whom you studied. What do you do now? So I am mostly a meditation teacher. So that forms a basis for many, many different things

that I do. So I teach out at spirit rock meditation center, which forms a basis for many, many different things that I do. So I teach out at spirit rock meditation center, which is a central in California where I did my first 10 day silent retreat. That's right. Yeah. That's right. It Joseph Goldstein who taught that retreat, sent me a note over the summer saying he was going back to teach it and he expected that they would have a plaque erected in my honor. They didn't. They didn't. They didn't. No. That's cute. Well, who knows? In time. Dina Arasati on this very question. I was sitting on a chair, man. I'm not limber enough to sit on a good chair. Yeah, yeah. Benzi hurts your knees. So, yeah, I'm a meditation teacher there, but my, so I've been a lot of different avenues. I think of myself as a bridge builder from the tradition of meditation and Buddhism

to different facets and communities. So one of the things I'm passionate about is integrating mindfulness and meditation in nature. So I love this. This is the subject of your first book of life. I've been awakened a while. And I love the wilderness. I love nature.

I love this earth. And I love particularly how we can learn to bring this practice of mindfulness, bring a contemplative awareness to being outside. So rather than just doing it, biking it, conquering it, scaling it, to actually bring that same quality awareness that you might do to yourself or your children, or whatever it is you love to nature. And then in doing that, you actually become much more receptive and open to being touched and also being taught by nature. I think the perennial teacher of wisdom,

of letting go, of connection, of love. So I... How does nature teach that stuff? It does it simply by simply because it is that. So for example, so the so-and-the-key teachings of both Buddhism and many other traditions is the teachings of change, right? Everything is impome, transient, fragile, and unreliable, including our body, including everything. So you go out and you sit in the woods, you see the whole thing is changing, whether it's

the wind in the trees, the grasses are both, you know, and right now they're flourishing, but there's also decay. The trees are, you know, sprouting blossoms, but also have dead limbs. There's skulls and bones and debris on the ground, like every way you look is an expression of change and transient. There's nothing about being outside that's not changing. When we're in our rooms, like let's room room now, it's built to keep out change, to keep out obstacles and wind and garments. Yeah.

So we get to believe this idea, the things are kind of stable and steady and you know And they sort of on one level another level nothing is stable nothing is is reliable. So You know all the sense of connection right so one of the things I was just teaching up in northern New Mexico This wonderful Santa Colvalesitos. It's a wilderness ranch. And we drink from the spring, and I say to people, you know, this is the idea that, you know, everything's connected and we're, you know, we're intimately woven into the web of life, and that's a nice idea. And I say, well, think about it. We're mostly made of water, right?

70% water. And we're drinking from this mountain spring. And after a week, you are mostly that spring. And that's not just a nice idea. You actually, it's true. That becomes your cells and your blood and your tears. And so it's when you spend a lot of time in nature quietly with some awareness, that stuff starts to permeate. Oh, oh, we simply walk out of our office or our house where we're having a stressful time. And we look up, even if we're in the city and we see the sky or we look at the clouds

or we feel the wind, it takes us out of that small sense of self. When we see there's something, there's a bigger reality. That is tremendously stressful leaving. It's also wisdom in that, oh yeah, there is this bigger thing outside of this little microcosm of me. So there's just so many ways that nature's teaching us, not like that you should learn this, but just like, here it is. If you spend enough time there to listen, you know, now you can get that from going down

to Central Park. You can see whether it's change or openness or connection, and then it opens a heart. We go outside because we love it. It's beautiful. Full leaves or the spring grasses. Yes, that was driving in California. So there's a little two-day-old little bambi. It breaks your heart open. It's beautiful. Okay, so I didn't plan to bring this up, but I'm going to say, I'm going to bring something up to be a little jarring and heavy and maybe a little horrifying because it's on my mind right now and it relates to the

issue of impermanence. I found out today that a very close friend of mine was on a plane that went down in the Bahamas with her two young children. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. And so air all of my friends or horrified, this has actually been kind of a that went down in the Bahamas with her two young children. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, and so, are all of my friends or horrified? There's actually been kind of a big news story in the news today. Her name is Jen Blum, and she's just a wonderful human being and her children are beautiful, and her,

the children's father has survived, and it wasn't with them, and so obviously he's in a really tough way. But the conversations we're having today are about impermanence. And wake up this morning, everything's normal, all of a sudden you get a phone call, a gen bloom and it's missing. And you know, and a lot of these conversations, we're talking about this and then talking about how

easy, how we are programmed for denial. And so we may be in touch with impermanence right now, but in a week, two weeks, three weeks, we're probably not going to be thinking about it. We'll be just as consumed with the petty obsessions that we're consuming us in the 30 seconds before we heard what happened to our friend. So I just wonder if you have any thoughts on how not to get, you know, now that we are tenderized, our group of friends, how could we stay tenderized to this, to this inarguable fact of human existence? Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, the gift of, and I'm really sorry for your loss and for your friend's loss. I think the gift is, it does tenderize us, and it does open us to appreciating those that

are here, right? That has been your friends, and not taking each other for granted. Your kids, people you love. And that happens for a while, and you just say, over time, it's built into the hard-wiring, I think, that we have amnesia around loss, around death, around fragility. And we do go back into autopilot and we get caught up in petty things that we can't believe we're getting caught up in,

given where we were a month ago with the tenderness. And I think it does behoove all of us to keep turning our attention to it. Whether it's, for me, I live semi in the country. When I drive past Rokekill, I look at the Rokekill. Oh, that, right. That was a deer yesterday. Now it's dead. I've just been doing this practice that I learned from wonderful teacher, Vendible Enalio. And it was reflection around death, but I added a piece where I say to myself, one less.

So with breath, one less, fabulous meal, one less before I die. This wonderful conversation having you, one less this time on retreat or in the country, one less time. This full moon, be one less full moon. And I keeping that close to my to heart and my reflection that each time I do something, I was one less time, I'll have a fabulous time with my sweetie. What do you say to people say that's more bid and depressing? Yeah, it definitely can feel that way, but it's actually not, the irony is it makes you wake up

and appreciate the preciousness and the beauty, because we just don't know. I mean, I'm flying out to it to New York, I was on the plane, the plane had some turbulence. Maybe this is it. You know, how did I leave my friends and family last time I talked to them? You know, was it really with that knowing

that this could be the last time my parents are in the late 70s, I really, every phone call, like this could be the last phone call. And I really want to be present for them. So I think it's actually, it can be morbid, but I think that's if we have a resistance to the truth. I think one of the gifts I feel like I've gotten from my Buddhist practice is, yeah, things come and go.

That is the reality. And I feel like I've learned over 30 years of practice to soften into that. And it doesn't mean I feel depressed, it just means like, oh, I want to really do the best. You know, when my flight's delayed and the man behind the counter said, wow, you really seem to be in a good mood. It's like, I don't want to take it out on you.

He's a nice guy just doing his job. And I want to show up as the best I can. That's what it makes me to do. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities

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You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. It's interesting to talk about this one less practice because in practice is the key word here. So my friends and I right now are attuned to impermanence. As you say, we are programmed to eventually start tuning out from that and back into our petty desires and competitions and whatever else is going on in our respective lives. But if you make a practice out of it, just as you,

I mean, there are many ways to do this, but you, one example being one less, then it kind of pounds it into your neurons in a way that is, is, I think, quite useful. It's interesting to me, though, because I've done, started doing this practice for once a week, I volunteer in a hospice for three hours. And I, it's easy for me to walk in and out, consumed with a whatever baloney I had been concerned with overall. You know, definitely I tune out of that stuff in a pretty powerful way when I'm in there. But it's not uncommon for me to get back on my phone in the Uber on the way home. And that was less common when I was start when I started doing it eight

months ago than it is now that I've kind of habituated to the experience. So it's powerful. What the Buddha would call delusion, we could just describe as ignorance or confusion or anything in that family of synonyms. His, his, his, somebody said to me recently that so the Buddha talks I was having lunch with some friends in the city and they're both pretty avid Buddhist practitioners, although they're in business. And one of them said to me, you know, we desire and aversion get all the headlines in Buddhism, but delusion is the Joker. You know, it's the Trump card. And I think there's something to that. Yeah, it's true.

We walk around. We don't see the veil that we're walking around obscured by. It's the water-wish woman in her fish. Totally. And we're in our little bubbles, our little microcosms, our little stories, projections, perceptions, and ideas about the way the world is and who we are. And it's mostly, you know, what in Hinduism they call maya, illusion.

It's just stories we make up to, you know, the brains are meaning making machine. And we believe it. We buy the press release. And then you have these moments like you've had today and it, you know, reality shadows through. It's like, no, it's not actually gonna just continue on forever. It's actually gonna be really bumpy at times. And we're gonna lose things and lose things we love.

And we're gonna be woken up to not just going to sleep. And I think most practice, like in Buddhist practice, is trying to wake us up. That's what's meant by awakening. It's this sort of a grandiose term when said without the proper context or understanding, but the way you're describing it is riveting, you know? I mean, it's not a bromide.

It's a crackling, lively, applicable goal. Yeah, and it does make this. a crackling, lively, applicable goal. Yeah, and it does make life very alive and very juicy and very, you know, vivid. So, you know, I was interesting. I was aware as I was having this very kind of hastily day, you know, long plane delays and just, you know, long plane delays and just, you know, annoying, the annoying part of flying and delays. And I noticed that as soon as I was

on the plane, and I would just look out the window and I was just, I'm riveted by, you know, landscapes and flying over deserts and mountains. And the whole drama of being delayed completely disappeared. Like I know I was going to be late for this interview and it just disappeared. You know, because being able to be present, just like, okay, well, I'm on the plane. I'm going to get there when I get there. What an amazing skyline going over Nevada or going over the Rockies or wherever we were. So it also helps us come out of the drama. Yeah, yeah, a lot of drama, a lot of self-created drama. Yeah. Well, speaking of self-created

drama, so the new book, make peace with your mind, it really talks about the inner critic. In fact, in there, as you told me before we came on, after I sheepishly admitted to that, I hadn't read the book, which makes me the worst podcast host ever, you very kindly pointed out that one of the things in there is an inner critic toolkit. I think it will be of extremely high interest to people listening to this podcast. So can you talk about what's in there? Yeah, so there's a whole list of practices, probably, I don't know, 20 practices or so. The two basic baskets of the practices, one mindfulness, one compassion. And so we start, as I think with anything, we have to start with mindfulness, with awareness. And so we bring that quality of mindful, self-awareness to ourselves.

And we start to see what's happening in our minds What is our mind saying? Can we see the difference between a judgment and what I call a negative latent judgment versus just a random thought or an evaluative thought? Can we see so can we first just be aware when the mind's judging because mostly it's it's so automatic We don't even notice we don't even see it just rambling on you should have done this you could do that better Why haven't you gone to the gym you should lose weight? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah And yeah, I'm looking at you actually and I'm thinking he's so lean does he at whole 30?

Is he a vegan? Why am I such a fatty? You like that? That's just happening all the time. It is. So first we have to just recognize, oh, that's a judgment. Different than, oh, this was gray and I, you know, you know, it's like the judgment and the the piece about the judging thought that we have to understand is it's not It's not neutral, which may be obvious. It has an implication about who we are as a person that's not good enough. It's not just, oh, you know, you should have shaved today and it's like, oh, you didn't shave today, you know, you look terrible. You really, I mean, you can't even shave. You're gonna die alone. You're gonna die alone. That's where you get the word.

End up in a row, every bridge. No one loves you and forget it. You're a loser. Why bother, right? So everything leads back to that fundamental sense. You're good enough, you're not lovable. So we first have to see that. And then it's useful to name it. Oh, there's the judge. Hello, old friend. You're back again today. Joseph gave me this practice of counting judgments, right? So I was on these long retreats at Insight Meditation Up in Massachusetts. And, you know, it can be comical to count the judgments. One is in 23, 495, 8262.

And you start to see, this is ludicrous. It's just this machine that keeps cranking out these enane, except painful jabs. And so, he's got this other thing where he thinks he says, pretend all of your thoughts are coming from the person sitting next to you, as I hate that person sitting next to me. He's so worst. So first you've got to know the landscape of the thoughts.

And then what's really interesting is to pay attention to what your relationship is to them. Do you believe them? Do you let them go on and on and on? Do you take them in? Do you feel like they're true? That's a really good question to ask. Because often we think, oh, my thoughts are what is true.

I believe all my thoughts, they're objective truths. It's a news ticker. Right. And when we really pay attention, and we are what is true. I believe all my thoughts, that are objective truths. It's a news ticker. Right. And when we really pay attention, and we, you know, so I have people on my courses right down their judgments, you know, top 10 judgments, pretty painful list, but right and down anyway, you know, I'm a loser, I'm never going to be loved, I'm stupid, I'm too overweight, whatever it is. And, and when we actually bring a sort of scrutinizing, you know, awareness to overweight, whatever it is. And when we actually bring a sort of scrutinizing awareness to that, we read them and say,

well, that's not really that accurate. Maybe I could be a little better in shape or I could be kind of from time to time, but doesn't mean to say that I'm a loser, horrible, mean person. So we're noticing the thoughts, we're looking at our relationship to them, we're seeing how much we believe them, we're seeing how much we give it the time of day. So ultimately one of the the fruits of doing this work is we become somewhat disinterested. It's just like this little yapping dog in the back of our mind. Eh, not good enough. We should do this, should do that. And if we can see, if we've become, if we trained to see the judge, to not buy into it,

to not believe it, to not give it so much attention, it doesn't matter whether it's here or not, because it's just like, you know, it's like static in the background. It's a similar way in meditation. You know, we have thoughts, plenty of thoughts, distracting thoughts, fearful thoughts, wanting thoughts.

Over time, you know, they have less stick. You know, of course we still get pulled away into thoughts and dramas and stories, but over time, we care less whether the thoughts are there or not. It's just not such a big deal, not so alluring. We lose the fascination. So we want to have that kind of relationship to the critic where...

How can we have that relationship before not meditating? Well, you don't need to be meditating to pay attention to your mind. You just simply need to notice what's happening, whether you're thinking, what kind of thoughts you're having. Are they judgmental?

Do they have negative tone? Is there some implication about you in those thoughts that you're an unworthy bad person. Just easier to do that if you're engaged in a daily training of doing it. For sure. Meditation definitely is the lab for cultivating that self-awareness. But once that's initially developed, I think you can do it anywhere.

And you just simply learn how to pay attention to the inner dialogue rather than just being lost in the external world. And you're tracking. So you're tracking the thoughts, you're tracking belief, you're tracking relationship. And then you're tracking how they impact you. Because the thoughts, you know, the critic manifests mostly as words, but then it affects us physically, emotionally, and agetically. So for example, I can be sitting at my desk, I love to write, and I love that sort of few hours in the morning, why I just get to, you know, play with words. Now you should come write my books, I hate writing. Okay, sign me up.

You just have to learn how to use the F-bomb a lot. All right, that's how it works. That's how I roll. Not on this podcast, because I were owned by Disney, but the books, all mine. Anyway, so I'm gonna keep tearing you out of whatever you're gonna say. So you're at your desk, at the library writing which I already envy you for, but go ahead.

And then I might remember like I may have showed a poem to a friend the day before and they had some sort of slight, you know, not so flattering comment about it. And so I'm writing away and then I remember that thought and then suddenly I started to feel kind of heavy and foggy and kind of blah and and I asked myself what's going on? I was loving writing and suddenly the whole kind of juices just sapped away out of me and then I remember all right I had that thought. I showed my friend the poem. I could tell it looked on his face.

He wasn't really into it. And then I just realized that, and then the thought came, well, you're not a writer. You're hopeless. It's why bother. And so that thought, I didn't catch the thought, but the thought then made me create that sense of fatigue, foggy brain, kind of lethargy.

And then last thing I wanted to do was right. I've lived in that state for weeks at a time, mindlessly, even post-meditation. If the circumstances of your life are acute enough, you can get, I can get there. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure, you know, when you're doing, you know, whatever show that you're doing, and you haven't maybe been so attuned or on the ball,

like all your facts wrong. Yes. And then of course, people are hammering me on Twitter or I'm not even getting something I wanted and professionally, yeah, I can revert that state that you're occupying at your desk. I can live there for weeks. Right. And then of course, the critics so particular and distorted in what it sees, right, you

may have had a fantastic show. 19, 5% of the show was fabulous. And then the couple of things that were just slightly off. And of course, what do we notice on? What do we focus on is, you know, what we could have done better. Okay. So, but so we're still on step one here of the toolkit. But, but you're talking about this, whether powered by mindfulness,

what whether powered by meditation, formal meditation or not, it kind of, uh, mindfulness of our thinking, whether it's laden with value, negative value judgments, what kind of, are we believing it? What kind of physical effects is it having? And I guess my question on, on that is, this requires some wherewithal does and not it requires some intention to do this because most of us walk around locked into the movie, we're in the matrix.

It takes some real intention to be aware that we are not our thoughts and to continue to come back to that, it does take energy because Otherwise, we're sucked up in the thing. We're not seeing its 24 frames per second. Right, right and I think the biggest motivator is to realize how much pain It causes because once we get that like oh, this is miserable I mean, so a big turning point happened for me I was and if some years into my meditation practice of sitting meditation just no idea exactly

what happened before, but, and I was following my breath or doing what I was trying to do, you know, as we meditate. And I could, then my critic was just assaulting me with just, you're just, you know, not good, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't remember exactly what it's was saying, but it was really painful. And I said, I suddenly, for whatever reason, as meditation could do, sometimes I took a step back. And I felt rather than being a friend of the critic, normally I'm just believing in, yes, yes,

I should have done that and yes, I'm bad, no, no, no. I started to feel how I felt in the hot. And I felt like, well, this is really painful to just listen to this to raid over and over and over, and I was saying most of the same old stuff. But really harsh and in a way that if someone had said that a friend or a stranger had been doing that same kind of, you know, litany of woes, you know, I would have felt collapse. I would have, I would have, you know, felt so withered and battered by them.

But with our, with our, in, with our our mind, we don't see it so much. And so we let it go on and on. And that's why I think the practice is illuminating. When we cultivate mindfulness, we do start to have that space where at times we step back and go, wow, this is really painful or delusional or unnecessary. And so it's really important to see that the critic, on its case like that, it's attacking our fundamental worth and value as a person. And we all make mistakes, and we all do what we do, and it's never perfect, because you have a matter of perfect human being,

then there's such thing. I have a two-year-old who's perfect. Every he poops in his pan, so I guess he's not perfect. Almost.ies perfect. Every he poops in his pants. So I guess he's not perfect. Almost. Almost perfect. Yeah. So we set us out to these impossibly high standards. And that's where the second basket of practices come in, which is compassion. Because it's so painful, what happened in that meditation was I shifted from being an ally of the critic to an ally of my own heart, because I actually felt felt in my heart it felt like it was being bruised.

When you say heart, you actually mean... I felt like... I felt like in some way in my chest I could feel it was like a wound that was being like stamped. I mean not literally obviously, but it just felt like I just felt you know really bad at it. And I think our critics do bad it. I think personally the leading cause of depression is the inner critic, that voice that's telling us that we're bad, that we're stupid, that

we're hopeless, that we're loser, and that good stuff. You listen to that for 10, 20, 40 years, you know, you're going to feel mildly depressed or if not seriously depressed. I've done plenty of battle with the black dog. Yes, I know that. I'm sure. I mean, it's the nature of your work. You have, you know, you're in the, you know, the critic business in a way because people are watching you

and evaluating you at every step, whether it's the producer or the audience or. Yeah, it also runs in my family. Uh-huh. Yeah, so. Yeah. So, So the compassion component is really important to because it's so painful. It's one of the most painful things that

and I work with students all over the world in meditation context, mostly I've also been a therapist and a coach and consultant and all of that. But no matter what work I'm doing and who I'm working with, I see this phenomena play itself out. People, you know, they could be running tech companies in Silicon Valley, they could be successful surgeons and parents and talk show hosts. And that same voice will just diminish

any sense of well-being or success or accomplishment. And so it's essential that we find some way to meet the pain of that. And so in Buddha's practice the way to turn towards suffering is with kindness, with compassion, which is of course very easy to say, very challenging to do. But the first thing we have to do is to acknowledge how painful the critic is. When we acknowledge that, let me feel the suffering of being defeated, attacked,

diminished, put down, and feel the vulnerability under that. That allows the heart to feel a little warmth or tenderness. So practically speaking, how would I do that? So maybe you're sitting in meditation, maybe you've been on the air that day and something didn't go so well and you're on your case because you could have done better theoretically. And then so your critic is just lashing out at you for whatever being not, you know, perfect and big stupid or whatever. And so you shift from the thought and the critic to, well, how do you ask yourself,

how much feeling right now? What, how does that land? You know, what do I feel in my heart or my body or my energy? And so you shift from the thoughts to the feeling. With that awareness of the feeling, my experience when we acknowledge the suffering is something,

it doesn't create, but it allows the conditions for a compassionate response to arise. It doesn't create, but it allows the conditions for a compassionate response to a rise. It doesn't always arise, but it's much more likely. And what would that compassionate response be when you're dealing with your own suffering? How would that look like? Well, the first response might be, the sucks. This is hard. Right. Yeah.

Whether it's having maybe not performed well on a show, or there's funny, I was on this flight today, and I had a choice to just sit out and wait for the next. There was a bunch of flights canceled, and then I could have just waited there to get the next flight. Or I decided, oh, I'll just find the next best flight quickly and jump on a plane. And of course, I ended up making a decision that made me much later than if I just stayed behind.

So my critic had a few things to say, why didn't you stay? Why was the most obvious thing to do? There's a chapter in the book called 2020 hindsight. The critic has 2020 hindsight. It's always on our case. Coda woulda, Shoda. You do the best you can. So I'm sitting on the plane, my critics yada yada yada. I'm like... And actually, I wasn't really taking that seriously, so you know, because it was pretty clear and silly to be judging myself for that. The old you would have taken it. The old yeah. And it's like, oh god, I really can't do anything right.

I really should listen. I should. So, but you know, the times that I'm really suffering from the critic and you should ask me about what the compassionate quality looks like. It looks like, and what it feels like is the word that comes up for me, rather than like, oh, you stupid, you should have done more, you should have done better, it's like, oh, this is hard for you. This is hard for you. This is difficult. And there's something in the just that acknowledging of that that everything sort of drops a little.

And they're just like, oh, yeah, this is hard. Yeah, I could have done better. I could have said this and done that. And I didn't. And and it's a little painful and I kind of feel regret and a little silly and it'll still but and the whole thing is just a little icky and I just hang out with that. Oh yeah, that's that's not very pleasant. That's hard. So maybe you can move from mindless self-laceration to what the Buddhist call wise remorse. Wise remorse and also just holding the pain of whatever the situation was. Does it work all the time or is this just you know sometimes this process works? Well it works most of the time my credit hasn't gone away. I mean it's definitely

a lot quieter and I most of the time don't care whether it's, you know, I'm late for, you know, I make the stroke when I'm going out to teach at Spirit Rock, you know, a few times a week. I'd like to cut my time a little fine. I hit traffic. I'm late for my meditation class and my critic. And I know, like the critic is going to say, why didn't you leave earlier? Why can't you get this together? Why can't you be organized?

And I'll say, thank you, Mr. Critic, or I'll be leaving the house, and I can't find my keys, so I'm going to wall it, because I'm like that. I just seem to live wherever they want to live. And my critic says, you're so disorganized. And I say thank you, Mr. mindfulness wins the day yet again. So I make a joke of it. So the humorized is actually really important quality

in the critic toolkit, because we have to laugh with ourselves. We are strange, idiosyncratic silly beings, and the critic is also silly. You need to just like having 2020 hindsight. Oh, you should have taken that. Like, how do I know what flight to take? I don't know what freeway to take, which one is the worst, you know, the...

So if we can find a sense of lightness in it, you know, I know I know I know I was just Be sitting these long retreats. I'd be imagine wearing this grey wig, you know, the the judge the the wigs of the old English judges were meditator failure out You know, so kind of hammered up a bit sometimes I exaggerate. Yes, I really am the worst meditator in the world I am the worst friend in the world. Whatever you think. Yes. Yeah, you know, so it kind of hammered up a bit. Sometimes I exaggerate, yes, I really am the worst meditator in the world. I am the worst friend in the world. Whatever you think, yes, I can't cook, yes, no, I can't meditate. Okay, great. So we can find a sense of playfulness because human does the same thing mindfulness does, which is it disengages us from being so identifying

it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is why we love humor. I love going to see a stand-up comics If people want to learn more about you how and work and they do so so My main website is mark Coleman dot org that's mark with a king and That will take you to many other websites my awake in the wild dot com website Which is my nature work and my mindfulness institute which is my mindfulness Concelling but if you go to mark common dot org. That's where most of my work and the information about the critic and my mindfulness institute, which is my mindfulness counseling. But if you go to markcoma.org, that's where most of my work and the information about the critic and my retreats and teachings. My final question for you is, what would it take financially, I don't know, whatever,

what would it take for you, for us to get you to re-road the mohawk? To re-road the mohawk. I wouldn't take much. I could take this headset off and I could rev my head and it would go up into a mohawk immediately, but I'd be happily dispray painted. Why that? It wouldn't take very much a toll on it. Nice. All right. Well, you've been a fabulous guest. Thank you for being here. You had a tough day. And you now have more traveling in front of you because you're heading up to the Insight Meditation Society in Barry Massachusetts where everybody should go at least once in

a lifetime because it's amazing and you're going to teach a retreat with Sharon Salisburg. Thank you very much. What a pleasure. Good to be with you. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts.

You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.