Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 97: Justin von Bujdoss, Buddhist Chaplain at Rikers Island

Episode Date: September 6, 2017

Justin von Bujdoss was working as a hospice chaplain in New York City, traveling all over the five boroughs and greater metropolitan area to visit patients, when he began volunteering at the city's notorious Rikers Island Jail. Von Bujdoss started out teaching meditation to groups of female inmates, but now he's the first ever staff chaplain for the city's Department of Corrections, providing spiritual and emotional support for officers, and he talks about seeing suffering on both sides of prison life. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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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. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad where the memes come from. And where's Tom from my space? Listen to, baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon music or whatever you get your podcasts. Hey, hey, one of the things we like to do on this podcast once to allow is to bring in somebody who's practicing and or teaching meditation in what you might consider to be a deeply inhospitable environment. This week we've got somebody who's doing that in spades. His name is Justin Von Boydosch and he teaches meditation on Rikers Island, the infamous jail right here in

New York City. He's got quite a story to tell. Here he is. What's your favorite movie? For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Thanks for doing this. Thank you. I really appreciate it. So how did you get into the meditation game? It started very early and I wanna say I was in middle school.

My parents introduced me to Transcendental Meditation. Can you just describe for people what that is? Yeah me to Transcendental Meditation. Can you just describe for people what that is? Yeah, so Transcendental Meditation is a style of meditation that was developed by Maharishi Mahashiyogi. And the technique involves listening to reciting a mantra and which is like a Sanskrit syllable usually in your head. Usually a sound, you're reciting silently, and at times you kind of lose track of it, and when you notice that you do, you bring your awareness back to the moment

and return to the mantra. And again, I must have been in sixth grade when I started that. So you were like just before adolescence where you were willing to take a wacky suggestion like that? Yeah. And I was a bit of a religion and meditation nerd, even at that age.

After having been introduced to it. Maybe even before. My father is a painter, and I grew up going all the museums in the city. Did you grow up here in the city? In the city, yeah, in Soho. And I really began to connect with Eastern thought at an early age through the art. We'd spend weekends going out of the mat and I'd wander around and look around and just

see the Asian art and somehow that felt very natural and comforting to me and then as I could get older and older I would try and read as much as I could about India, about Buddhism eventually and then about Tibet and from there by the time I got into high school I was already very interested in Tibetan Buddhism and trying to practice it as best I could, initially on my own, and then slowly meeting people and practicing with others. So you made it leap from TM, which is essentially derived from Hinduism to Tibetan Buddhism. That's right.

And how that go over with your parents. Were they super sectarian about TM or were they? No, no, no, they were kind of groovy, experimental. Nice. People. Now, I grew up in a big loft and my mom, at the time, used a weave rug. So her loom going all the time. And we're just experimenting with a lot of stuff.

So this is back before Soho was an outdoor mall. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Well, there must have been, I don't know, eight kids in the neighborhood, all who had crazy parents. Yeah, I have a friend who grew up in that neighborhood and his parents are crazy. And I'm crazy too.

So, okay, so by my high school, you're into Tibetan Buddhism. That's right. And like, when you say you're into it, what do you mean by that? Oh, like I, I mean, it's funny now, but you know, like I really wanted to get involved with the girl. And I was really concerned because I also wanted to be a monk.

And you know, so I had, I thought you could propose tantric sex. I didn't know that much about it though. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Needless to say, I got involved in the relationship and I guess you could say I kind of struggled a little bit with trying to find out how to connect deeper with the Tibetan tradition. And it wasn't until I went to college that I went on a study abroad program in Budgaya where the Buddha was enlightened in India. In India. That's was enlightened in India.

In India. That's right. Central India. And there, I had the opportunity to study the teravattan tradition, which is kind of like the earliest tradition that came after the Buddha, and then the Mahayana tradition, which developed as Buddhism spread to Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and then a little bit the Vajrayana tradition. And everything really clicked for me. And Vajrayana again, to bet. Yeah, to bet, Bhutan, Nepal, Mongolia.

So what happened after having, after you spent your year? And I know that I'm familiar with this program because one of our previous guest, David Gellis, who's a New York Times reporter, did this program. I believe the one you're describing where you go to Bo Gaya and you get to kind of taste test that's among the various teachers and schools rather. So what happened to you after doing that? So while I was there, I went on a study abroad program to Sikkim, which is a state in Northeastern India, which is primarily Tibetan Buddhist. And there I met a nun who became my teacher,

a meditation teacher, a spiritual teacher, and she taught me a lot more than I thought I was learning at the moment. And so I kind of, you know, naively finished my time in India, came back to college, and really while I was finishing college, I really kind of kept coming back to, I've got to come back, got to go back. So after college, I went back for a year and practiced with her, and then she passed away, and in the interim, she had introduced me to one of her teachers, who agreed before she died to take me on as one of his students. And he had a monastery in the Darjeeling area,

which is also Northeastern India. I believe they were not. I've actually been there. I was doing a story about snow leopards. Okay, that's right. Go up into Darjeeling. Yeah, yeah, it doing a story about snow leopards. Okay. That's right. Go up into the Darjeeling. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a beautiful place. It is a beautiful place. So, did you ordain as a monk? No. So, I never did. And actually, it was this nun who saved me from that. I had gotten really rigid and calcified kind of in the way I approached, way I had approached Buddhism at that point. And this nun, Anizanamo, really pointed that out to me

and showed me that, okay, yes, you could ordain as a monk, but you're probably gonna create problems for yourself when you come back to the US. People are gonna look at you, you're gonna be dressed funny, they might make a big deal out of you. So it's better to just be yourself. And I could hear that a little bit. And the parts of me that couldn't hear that just decided to say,

all right, you know, she has more wisdom than me, I assume. So I'm just going to listen. And I decided not to. So when you went on with your life, what does that mean? So that means I eventually became a parent. I came back to the States and for a while I'd been a contractor. So I was doing carpentry and stone work and stuff like that. Painting and I would work, save money, go to India, work, save money, go to India.

And between jobs decide, okay, I'll go for six months this time. And then all the while, I was practicing and studying more and more deeply until I decided, you know, I kind of need to bring this together. I can't really have this piece so separate. It feels a little strange to have a part of me that lives kind of in India while I'm not there and then have this part of me that's here. So I decided to train to become a chaplain. And thereby be able to kind of combine what they call the Buddhist tradition,

well, develop right livelihood, which is a livelihood where you can be in harmony with your practice, meditation practice. I'm always trying to figure out whether that's the case with me. It sounds like it. Yeah. You do good work sometimes.

So you train as a chaplain and you picked, I don't know where you're I know where you work now I don't know where you work before this maybe it was your first place But eventually you landed in a what many people would assume would be a reasonably inhospitable environment for Buddhist meditation that's right rightgers island. So how did that come about and how's it going? Well, I'll answer the second question first. It's going well. I came to Rikers from hospice. I had been a hospice chaplain.

And I'd worked in Home Hospice, covering Brooklyn, part of Queens, and then Home Hospice units at Columbia Presbyterian and Cornell Wild Medical Center. And I loved the intensity of it, and I became very attuned to the dying process. And found a lot of peace in this very, very difficult process for people.

And what do you mean by that? letting go so letting go of of one's own life letting go of Story we might have about ourselves If you're the loved one of somebody who's dying it's Sometimes the terror of letting go of the person you love who you may have shared your life with You know, there's this thing called terminal agitation that arises sometimes for people when they're at the end of life. I've seen it. Yeah. And so there's a lot of beauty

in being able to be with people and help support them. Help provide a little bit of peace, a little bit of calm. I've been doing some hospice work myself. I got trained to do that through the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and so sitting at the bedside with people who are dying and I would say the same thing that there is oddly enough peace in that. For sure it puts things in perspective. It's your day. My own life. It's your day. Yeah. And it puts you in touch with a fundamental unshakable, unnegotiable reality, which is we're all

heading in the same direction. Absolutely. Absolutely. And interestingly enough, I was in the first graduating class from the New Exxon Center. Oh, OK. Yeah, we have the same pin. I'm just kidding.

You get when you graduate yet. Exactly. My wife and I did it there. There you go. Yeah. There were previous guests on the show, Chodo and Koshin, the amazing founders who just got married recently. Robert Chodo Campbell and Koshin Paley Ellison to Zen priests who recently got married. You could look it up in the New York Times.

My wife and I were there actually, applauding. And they found a dissenter and they've been guests on this podcast. So listen, go back and check them out because they're amazing. Anyway, I interrupted your story. That's okay. So I really, really loved hospice work and I still do. I don't do it now, although it does overlap with some of the work that I do now. While I was doing that, I also ran a Buddhist temple in Brooklyn, which is since closed.

And part of the work with that was I would volunteer at Rikers, along with a group of people, sometimes anywhere between one extra person and six people, we would all go and provide meditation for the inmate population at Rosem Singer Center, which is the female facility for the female inmates. And I loved that. You know, the first time I went in there, I was like, wow, this is amazing. And over the course of about three years, I've just only stopped here on that one. I was suspect, I've been to a lot of jails and prisons.

Yeah. And I've never had the thought of, wow, this is amazing. Other than, wow, this is an amazing story. Yeah. But not like this is amazing, I want to be here. Well, you know, that's, that's the way it was. Well, you know, that's that's the way it was you know when I when I arrived there I met with the women who participated in the group

What will group this meditation group? Oh, they had a meditation group. Well the one that I started. Oh, I see okay, and I would start off by checking in with them and just you know asking them to tell a little bit of their story and It was really their stories that I find very galvanizing. I tend to bristle at how intellectual American Buddhism is, and that a lot of the, it functions in these circles that are very academic. They tend to be big universities. And there's a lot of great work being done there to study how meditation benefits us, right?

How our mind works. And that's great. And at the same time, there's this whole other group of our society that doesn't really have access to this. And I think it really was, I'm gonna say, it was growing up in Manhattan in the time that I did in the early 80s that really made me naturally connect to

the more common person, you know, New York City back in the early 80s when I watch movies, I mean, I love watching movies that are set then because it's raw, it's real, it's things aren't being hidden. We're still graffiti on the subway. Yeah, absolutely. People urinating on the street, which they still do, but it's not the same.

I yearn for those days of the urination on the street. So do I. I was kidding. Anyway. I mean, for those days of the urination on the street. So do I? I was kidding. Anyway. Well, you know, come to records. That's right. So I think that really for me, part of my spiritual formation circles around being able to practice

and be available in the vernacular, so to speak. So for, quote unquote, the common person, whatever that means. And so it was really being with these female inmates and listening to their stories and listening to, you know, that they were hard stories and a lot of them were sad stories, but there were also stories that I could imagine myself in. And it was very easy to also see the humanity in these stories. The huge and wide range of emotion, being separated from your children, coming to jail because

you feel safer than you might on the outside. All these things that we tend not to think about is we walk around the city or we commute to wherever we work or do whatever we do on the weekends. And so there was something that was very compelling for me in that. And then simultaneously, as I did my hospice work, meeting people in their homes and Brooklyn. So deep, deep, deep Brooklyn. You know, all of these different homes, all these different neighborhoods, the old Italian

neighborhoods, old Irish neighborhoods, the projects, and different parts of Brooklyn. And really, beginning to understand the democratic nature of suffering. And that doesn't matter where you live. This is what happens. And yet, and also the beauty in that, when I worked in hospice, the hospice really picked up that I love meditation. And so then all social workers would ask patients, do you want to do any meditation? And if the patient's consented, then I would then sometimes

go out of my zone and go practice meditation with people at the end of life. And I had the chance to do this for very wealthy hospice patients and very poor hospice patients. And everybody had the same fear. It was fear of no longer existing. You know, this anxiety around saying goodbye to family, making sure that your loved ones gonna be okay,

making sure that your kids are gonna be protected. It didn't matter how wealthy they were. No, no, not at all. And so you started with volunteering and with this women's group. And now you're there full time. So yeah, so what ended up happening was, I was then invited to start working

with the young adult male population as there had been this push to increase services for the young adult male incarcerated population of records. Well, that seems like a tough group, having been a young adult male. That sounds like, I mean, I wouldn't have been receptive. Yes. And it was, it was that way sometimes. And at the same time, I quickly learned that it's really how you can connect to people

has a lot to do with how you're walking into the situation and presenting yourself. And I think with meditation, people think of these like, again, people who have the time, who can afford the time to meditate, the people who can afford the ability to have a peaceful place to meditate, which is connected to economics. So very easily you could walk into a cell block and people will be like, you know, what the hell is this guy? You know, what's he doing? Oh, he want meditation, right? Okay. Like, I need to meditate now, you know, right?

I'm here, here in jail. And so I learned very quickly that it's about developing relationship. Okay, so yeah, I'm here to teach meditation. Do you know what that is? Like, no, uh-uh. And then, okay, well, do you know what pieces like? You know, have you ever had that moment,

even while you're here? Have you had a moment where you feel like you get a little bit of rest and be able to appreciate the experience that might be having? You might be having right now. And then, you know, very easily, it would be yes or no, or a man shut up, you know, or anything like that. What yes or no or man shut up or anything like that. What do you do with man shut up?

I try and redirect. You know, come back around. All right, look, I get that. Let's just try this. Two minutes. Okay. Pretend you're a scientist. You'll check this out.

If it feels okay, you'll know it works a little bit. I'm a bit, oh, I don't know, man. It's this, it's that. I know. works a little bit. I'm a bit odd. I don't know, man. It's this, it's that. I know, it's not hard, right? I can't be like, you know, hard and meditate. All right, well, let's see. What about Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant?

Exactly. You can enlist a lot of allies. Yeah. And then warrior cultures. Single-pointed concentration is an important thing to have. That's right. That's right. So I ended up working with that population and then as service is increased and I was

still volunteer, I found myself spending more and more time on Reckers Island. And then this position became available. And it was a fascinating position, because right now I'm the first ever chaplain for staff, for the New York State Department of Corrections. Oh, so you're not working with the Emmett. That's right. And that was the hard thing for me.

I had become very, very attached to, you know, the work I had been doing there. And yet, at the same time, I was invited to provide meditation for a group of officers in one jail facility for about nine months. And it really wasn't until I started working with the officers that I began to kind of understand the complexity of incarceration and that they're suffering on both sides. And also the same level of, you know, initial emotional closure that both populations at face value when you first meet them as an outsider have. You know, the law enforcement community, you don't really talk about your emotions much.

You don't talk about vulnerability. You kind of keep your armor on to protect yourself. And it's very similar for the incarcerated population. So I found a lot of parallels and then I began to recognize a lot of the difficulties that arise for the officers and the Department of Corrections and that a lot of them have families. And whole lives and you know, series of aspirations that they like to have come true of the course of a career. career and yet they didn't be overworked or feel they are and work in a very unpredictable

place, place where it's not uncommon for officers to be assaulted. There have been a lot of controversy as you know about Re but writers a lot. Sure. Allegations rampant, allegations of mistreatment by the staff. What's your view on that now having spent some time there? Well, you know, again, I'm, I only started last September, you know, it was a full time chaplain there. And I think, you know, my answer to that is that there's human suffering everywhere. And you know,

the big policy issues, I'm a chaplain, you know, I don't have the power or the ability to change anything. But I do have the power and the ability to help change the experience of the people I'm with, the people I serve. So my being hired, I believe, was connected to this realization that the administration understood that the officer population needs more support. And I believe the reason why I was hired was because they wanted somebody who would do more than just prayer as a cha would do more than just prayer. That was a chaplain, right? More than just a religious person coming in and offering religious support, but actually somebody who can come in and offer programming around meditation for the officers.

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Yes, absolutely. Like, what percentage of their staff do you think is actively meditating at this point? Well, I mean, you know, it's staff of 13,000 people, and there's me. So it's a work in progress, but from the groups that I run, there's pretty good buy-in. That being said, you know, again, it's this process of creating relationship, a process of allowing people the space to be, to get vulnerable and to share and to put their armor down a little bit. And I guess if they sign up for your group, they're willing to do that.

Yeah. So there's a certain sort of selection bias, I would imagine. And in that, if you sign up, you're willing to do it. But I don't know that if you walked into a meeting of at the Union Hall with a thousand people that all of them would be willing to do this. Right. And that's probably the case everywhere. Yeah. I mean, for sure. And also, you got to start somewhere. And hope that they evangelize within the community. Right. There's that, right? And so what I do is kind of, you know, meditation that's taken from a number of traditions and kind of adapted to fit a wide kind of variety of people who might be coming.

Right? And at the same time, my role also as staff chaplain allows me room to help develop programming that, so maybe we could get a mindfulness training program in, or we're working on trying to get some folks from Kropalu to offer, I was kind of like, breathwork, meditation in for the officer population. There's a lot of support of me by the administration and a lot of room to develop programs. So a lot of this is, you know, in Mahayana Buddhist tradition,

there's this Bodhisattva model. And so the Bodhisattva is this kind of pre-Buddha who acts out of compassion to try and benefit beings. And that's what I'm trying to do in a small way. And in the midst of the heat of everything that's going on right now in our culture around around mass incarceration. And my view is, my position allows me to be somebody who interacts with people in a direct way. I've never been the kind of person who can organize and friends who are very effective organizers,

social justice folks, And that's great. But for me, it really is about being able to meet people where they are one-on-one and help soften the experience, help allow them to be themselves in a place where maybe they don't want to, or maybe they've, you know, typically people will work, you know, a full 20 years and then retire. So what if you've been working 15 years and you've just been hiding all of your emotions,

all of your anxiety and all of your fear, you know, that are associated with coming to work? And it's locked in you. Is it safe for these people to show emotion on the job? I try and create safe space while we do this. So maybe they're not doing on the on the on the tears or I don't know what they go to the yard or whatever the terminology is there, but with you, it's okay. Yes, with me, it's okay. And I'm very careful if a group becomes very open and very soft with one another. And people are able to actually express how they're feeling,

express how hard things are, right? Or express what's going on at home, and how hard that is. And therefore, makes work harder. Then I take great care to make sure people don't necessarily go right out to their posts from that place, right? People need a little bit of an on ramp. When we're so vulnerable, it's very difficult to modulate very quickly to a place where you

need to, you know, kind of suit up and, you know, take the abuse that they might take from, you know, the inmates. And what's your sales pitch for lack of a better term? God, I'm sure you don't like that term. But why, if you're talking to a corrections officer about why he or she should meditate, what's the argument? I mean, will it make you better your job? Will it make you better able to handle the stresses of the job? What's your argument?

So it's many fold. You know, the primary hook, I guess you could say, is stress reduction. Yeah. And really, the reason why I use that is because that connects very easily to health, right? And then physical health as well, right? If you're stressed out and work really hard and maybe doing double shifts and not bringing the best food for you and not getting exercise and not taking

care of yourself because you're stressed out, you're anxious. Maybe you're feeling shut down, right? Wow, Ben, this isn't really what I signed up for. Or, you know, like, well, this is just hard, right? It affects your body. And the other side of my work is providing spiritual and emotional support for officers who are sick. So I visit them at home.

I visit them when they're hospitalized. I visit when they die. I visit their families and I'm involved in their funerals. And what I found is that it's not uncommon for correctional officers to have strokes when they're in their early 40s. You know, heart attacks, you know, in your mid 40s. And it's not really necessarily because, oh, they've got a bad diet or because they don't exercise.

In some cases, that is true, but that's also primarily a function of just having not very strong self-care techniques. Self-care means self-appreciation, which means being open with oneself. I was with a police officer, Sergeant Raj Johnson in Tempe, Arizona, in January, writing along with him, talking about the police department in Tempe, the chief who's also a previous guest on his podcast is really into meditation. She's trying to get it out to her folks. And so I was asking him about it and he was worried, he had was not yet a meditator and

he was worried that if he did it, it would make him slower and softer at the job and that it would be dangerous for him. Is that something that corrections officers worry about? And should they worry about it? They shouldn't worry about it. They may worry about it and I think though that that's a little bit of an assumption that meditation just makes you slow. Meditation increases awareness.

And awareness can actually connect to situational awareness, which is really important, especially in jail settings because they're closed areas, right? There's not a lot of room. And that also means that things can happen very quickly. So if you maybe are less stuck in your head and more able to just be aware of your surroundings, maybe put down one zone irritation or frustration that people are yelling, one zone irritation or frustration that people are yelling. One zone

irritation around not even wanting to be here, right? This is my job but man I just can't take this right now, right? We all feel that from time to time. And if we're able to be a little bit more aware of the fact that yes I'm feeling that and I have this job that I need to do. It is possible to be more attuned situationally to what's going on. So it's very easy to say that meditation makes you soft, it makes you light, it makes you compassionate, and it does, right? But that doesn't mean that you can't do the job that you need to do. Even though you grew up in Soho at a time when people urinated publicly, you still was pretty privileged upbringing,

but parents who were a painter and somebody who did some work on a loom. I mean, there was a pretty, a pretty supportive environment to parents, etc, etc, not having been there. I'm speaking somewhat based on assumption, but I think safe assumptions. So, but now you find yourself in rikers. So, I would imagine you've seen some things that you that pretty far outside of the trajectory of your experience. Can you give me a sense of some of the more wild moments you've been able to experience in your time there? Well, and how does meditation help you?

Help me, yeah. Sure, so I'm going to bring this back to hospice first, because when I started in hospice, I was surrounded by death all the time, and it was pretty sudden transition into that. Previously, I had been around people who do die, so I covered a medical ICU, and there'd be a death occasionally. In coming into hospice, I was surrounded by death, and would have moments where I would have sometimes three or four patients spread out over a very large geographic part of New York City actively dying at the same time, all of whom wanted to chaplain. And learning how to deal with my own anxiety that would arise in that moment, right, my desire to be in all four places at one time, but the knowledge that I

can't get there. And learn how to handle even the sense of ownership that happens in crisis, right? In crisis, sometimes we just want to make it ours and learn how to chill out, learn how to slow down and realize that this is not about me, even though I'm having these experiences, these responses. Meditation really helped me with that, even to me out, so that in the midst of intense crisis, I can do what needs to be done. So then when I came to the New York City Department of Correction, I was stunned by the violence, and it's not that it's any more violent than any other place necessarily as far as I know, as far as jails go.

But I had not dealt with people who were being brought to the ER because they'd been assaulted by an inmate or just the number of times that might happen. And did you witness any of this violence? No, because while I do visit the jail facilities, I don't really necessarily visit people often while they're on post. I do sometimes, but I don't hang out on post, right? Because that's where they work. And that's where they need to be alert.

And I'm very mindful of not being a distraction in that way. That being said, I do tour facilities to check in and see what's going on in the ground, see what people need. Again, in law enforcement, people don't really share their feelings. So it could be you've had a couple family members pass away and you're on post. And it isn't until somebody comes to meet you that you

will learn that and then you can provide some support, some relief, help them work through that. But it was really the response to my coming to grips with what responding to those people who had been responding to violence brought up in me. That was very hard. And then, you know, to be totally frank, I'm a pretty liberal person. And so now I'm, you know, working in law enforcement. And there was a time when the previous commissioner had asked me to, you know, wear uniform for formal occasions, like

funerals and things of that nature. And I hold the rank of Deputy Warden. And so there was my own need to kind of re-examine this identity that I hold on to or held on to very tightly and just say, look, like, you know, I'm doing this to benefit people. And maybe the clothes don't matter. Go back a second, you talked about what the violence brought up in you. What did it bring up in you?

Anxiety, hopelessness in the sense that, you know, like an existential hopelessness, like people are going through this, right? They're going through this. And it wasn't even really the amount of violence just facing officers, you know, I'd see the reports of what was happening, you know, inmate on inmate, right? And then, you know, you can't help but project and try and, you know, play these stories out in your mind that wow

you know all these people who are incarcerated grow up in violence wow these CEOs right they work in a really intense atmosphere and they have families and sometimes they they you know come from the same communities that they incarcerated, you know, the detainees come from. Sometimes they know one another. You know, it's the level of complexity that exists, you know, again, because I only know New York City. And just the way our communities work and don't work is astounding. What does your daily practice look like? So my daily practice is primarily a combination of two things. One is in the Tibetan tradition, we do a lot of visualization.

So it's visualization practices, visualizing myself is perhaps a particular Buddha, the recitation of the mantra. So this kind of sound, collection of sounds that doesn't necessarily have literal meaning, sometimes it does, and using that as a way to focus the mind. And then at the same time, not during the same session, though, then there's non-conceptual meditation like you find in Zen tradition, where you just focus on trying to maintain awareness of what's happening in the mind. So once thoughts, once emotions.

And in a way, you could say it's a little bit like watching clouds. You know, sometimes the sky gets stormy, right? Sometimes when I mind it stormy. How can you, from what position do you watch your thoughts and emotions? So I try to create the space in the experience of meditation so that it's as objective as possible, which means that I'm not looking at this from the perspective of my body, right? I'm just trying to allow

the things to come and go. How do you do that without getting distracted due to some pay attention to the breath for a little while? Yeah, there's open up and look at whatever's happening. Typically with these kinds of meditations, use the breath. You can use mantra silently. You can use mantra out loud as well. Just as a way of bringing you back to some element of stability of mind. And then it's a little bit like rowing about and you know, you have

paddle, you paddle, you paddle, then you let go. So in a way, it's a little bit like TM except the goal, if they're, if you can say there's a goal, is to just build a rest naturally in the moment. Right. So you're just hard. You're right. And you're hopefully just resting in awareness, right? Just this ability to know what's happening without thinking about it.

And if thoughts happen, don't get to wrapped up and carried away by them, but just watch them come and go. I think to bet there's an expression of like, I set up a spy cam in your own mind or something. Which is, you know, you're just kind of like spy in on what's going on without getting caught up in the story. Exactly. And there's some kind of really interesting descriptions of what it's like.

And there's one that's like, it's like an eye trying to watch itself. So it just like doesn't make sense. And that's, and's like an eye trying to watch itself. So it just like doesn't make sense. And that's and and because kind of conceptually it doesn't right it's not like this spike him that's placed right on the identity of Dan. So where is the you that's watching the stuff? So the you that's watching the stuff is not something that you try and orient yourself around. The whole idea of the me, we're just trying to be, we're trying to rest without any particular point of orientation.

The who's doing the resting? Justin. But Justin isn't something that is right here that I'm really worried about in this moment. There's this element of relaxation that needs to be present. When my mind becomes agitated or just very active, it comes back to Justin and Justin's story, right? And Justin, oh boy, I really need to do X, Y and Z or my phone goes off because there's an alert I need to go

to a hospital or something. And then I'm really brought back into this point of orientation, this Justin. But in the moment of this meditation, you just try and let go. And what's amazing to me when I do that is everything kind of just slows down and stress and anxiety and worry and agitation just dissolve.

Just to be clear, you've done a ton of practice. As compared to, say, the folks who may be listening or me, this is not something that somebody can walk in off the street and just do. Yes and no. I have done 20 plus years and I also don't like to really look at it as something that you have to have put the 20 plus years into to have that experience. I come back often when I teach meditation to trying to teach it from the perspective of making art, and I think a lot of this has to do with growing up with parents who are very creative.

And that, you know, there's something about the experience of meditation that has a lot less to do with actively doing anything in a willful way, and more just kind of relaxing into some kind of experience from which, for example, a painter might paint. What is an everyday experience that we've all had that would be some approximation, facsimile, microcosm of what you described before about what you're experiencing in meditation. So maybe you go for a run, right? So you're jogging. And you exercise your whole body, right? And you're feeling kind of tired and you find a nice patch of grass and you just lay

down. That sense of stillness, that sense of relief, that sense of ease. In fact, there's a meditation instruction in the Tibetan tradition that says, when you rest your mind, you should rest it the same way a workman would rest, sit down and rest at the end of a hard day. So stillness. I get that. I get that part of it, but that doesn't necessarily give you this meta awareness, this what I often

describe as behind the waterfall experience where you're not caught up in the river of thoughts and emotions, but you're actually out of the traffic and watching it with some non-judgmental removal. How do you get there? So by settling. First settling and then what happened? No, it's settling and then it happens. So when you settle, so it can be fast, right?

Same way, you know, you're jogging, you lay down, boom, you know, there's a change. It's all about recognizing this space in the changes, right? So thoughts come, I could be in this actually, I frequently do in the car, right? I about to you know drive across the city and then about to go into a hospital and I'll just take a moment focus on my breath and try and allow in that moment of stillness everything to just stop and in that place just rest the mind. So it's not, it's not forceful, right? You're not trying to repress anything. You're just trying to let it exhaust itself.

And it does. And it's a beautiful thing. The mind is always changing. And this is the thing that I enjoy telling the C.O.s is, you know, if we just had the same thought over and over again, we would go insane. You know, if I just had, you know, I got irritated or agitated by somebody. And all I was was agitation for four days, I would probably go crazy. But luckily, our mind is constantly changing. The beauty of that means that at

many, many, many, many, many different points, there their space. And it's all about developing a relationship to actually what's going on. Even in the normal, so in your life, which I imagine, very frenetic, their space in that. Sometimes the beauty and the art, really, is being able to appreciate touching that. And it doesn't have to mean that you're doing it for 20 minutes. It could just mean that you're doing it for a minute.

And then you go on to the next task. There's been great sitting here talking to you. If people want to learn more about you and what you do, how could they... How can they do that? So I've done some writing for Lions Roar, which is a Buddhist online periodical, and a little bit for Bodidharma. I'm working on a book manuscript right now which I hope to have published. And I teach at a variety of places in New York City. I used to run a Buddhist temple but I don't do

anymore. So where do you teach? At present, I'm occasionally teacher Brooklyn Zen, and then I have a group upstate that's kind of this informal Tibetan group and then different places Philly, Boston. At this point, I'm trying to be free. So great to talk to you. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Come back when the book comes out. Absolutely. Okay, thank you. Thanks. 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 V. Harris.

Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Tohan, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who help 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 add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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