Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How Do You Love Without Being Attached? | Kevin Griffin

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

In this episode we’re tackling some thorny dharma questions. For example: How do you love someone without attachment? How do you love yourself when the self is allegedly an illusion?  Our guest today is a repeat customer, Kevin Griffin. He joined us a few months ago in an episode about the nature of craving and addiction. This time, Kevin’s back with a semi-skeptical take on loving-kindness -- that venerable, if somewhat misunderstood, Buddhist practice. Our conversation is centered around a book he wrote, called Living Kindness: Buddhist Teachings for a Troubled World.  We talk about lovingkindness vs. “living kindness," the dangers of modern metta practice, and the idea that you don't have to feel love all the time (but can still seek to handle situations with non-ill-will). Please note: This conversation includes brief references to addiction and other forms of suffering. If you don't already have the Ten Percent Happier app, download it for free wherever you get your apps: https://10percenthappier.app.link/download-app. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/kevin-griffin-370 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% Happier early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. From ABC, this is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, we're tackling some thorny Dharma questions on the show today. This is stuff that can trip a lot of us up. For example, how do you love somebody without being attached? Or how do you love yourself when the self is allegedly an illusion? questions and much, much more with my guest today, who's a repeat customer, Kevin Griffin. We had Kevin on a few months ago. I enjoyed that conversation so much, as apparently did you,

the audience, because the numbers were great. We all loved it so much that we decided to bring Kevin back. Last time, as you may remember, we talked to Kevin a lot about the nature of craving and addiction. Kevin is both a longtime Buddhist practitioner and also a 12-step participant. This time, he's back with a semi-skeptical take on loving-kindness, that venerable, if somewhat misunderstood, Buddhist concept and practice. Our conversation really centers around a book he wrote called Living Kindness, Buddhist Teachings for a Troubled World. Buddhist teachings for a troubled world. In this conversation, we talk about loving kindness versus living kindness, the dangers of modern loving kindness practice. He argues that if it stays on the cushion, it's focused on a feeling, and feelings are impermanent. The idea that you don't have to feel love all the time, but can still seek to handle situations with, and this is the very much not mellifluous Buddhist way of saying it, non-ill will. And we talk about a Buddhist text called the Metta Sutta. I do want to note that the interview does include

brief references to addiction and other forms of suffering. We'll get to Kevin in a moment. First, though, this item of business. It's actually very exciting, I think. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you've probably heard me talk about our companion meditation app, which is also called 10% Happier. The app is a place you can go to practice what we talk about here on the podcast, and you can do so with meditations that are led by some of our most popular podcast guests. It's sort of like science class in college. The podcast is the lecture and the app is the lab. So whether you're interested in treating yourself

with a little bit more compassion, having hard conversations without hurting your relationships or pausing and taking a breath instead of snapping at people in your orbit, you can learn about the skill here and then practice it over there in the app. But just like that college lab section, motivating yourself to actually put in the practice time is hard.

I don't want to sugarcoat that. It can be really hard. Those few milliseconds between closing the podcast app and firing up the meditation app are rife with possibilities for distraction, you know, a new email, a breaking news alert, the temptation to doom scroll on Twitter, whatever. That's why we are now trying something new. This show, the 10% Happier Podcast, is now available inside our companion app so that you can go seamlessly from listening to practicing, learning to doing. When you subscribe to the app, you'll also be able to seamlessly transition to meditation right after listening to the podcast. Not to mention, you'll receive access to our courses, sleep meditations, and podcast episodes ad-free. This is available now

on iOS only. Android, I promise, is coming very, very soon. So to get started, download the 10% Happier app in the Apple App Store, and then tap on the podcast tab at the bottom of the screen. Okay, here we go now with Kevin Griffin. Kevin Griffin, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me back. I'm amazed. I assumed, you know, I'd be on the blacklist after my last time. I always assume the worst, so that's me. Oh, that might be a subject for discussion. We could do it another time. So, we're talking about love and kindness today, and I know we're going to get into

your view of what some of us may kind of get wrong about this. But before we get into what we may get wrong about it, for the uninitiated, how would you describe love and kindness or metta, M-E-T-T-A, practice? What is it? So, metta practice, as opposed to just metta itself. Either or both. Well, I mean, see, that's even a really important distinction for me. So there's a traditional metta practice. We call it traditional. The Buddha did not teach it, but it comes from, I think, about 500 AD, the Vasudhimagga, the path of purification, which was a commentary on the teachings of the Buddha. And in that, we find this practice, which really was

made most famous by Sharon Salzberg, who I know you know well. And it's a very intentional way of trying to develop loving feelings. And it uses phrases where you repeat phrases. Typically, may I be happy, may I be peaceful, may I be safe, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be safe. And there are many other variations on the phrases, but along those lines. So they're just noticing that they are not sort of exactly prayers and they're not demands, but they're sort of requests. The systematic part, besides the phrases, is that we go through different categories of people, starting with the self, not necessarily, often starting with the self.

Some people prefer to start with something easier like your cat, you know, which is not a person, I guess, but can be a helpful, easy one to feel love towards. So we kind of start with the easy ones and then work with our dear ones and then work with what we call neutral people, which is just sort of like everybody that you don't know, essentially. And then into difficult people, and often it's just you pick one difficult person and so after you've gone through those categories repeating these phrases and kind of feeling the

breath in your body and feeling the breath in your heart center in the middle of the chest so you're trying to kind of connect with this feeling. And once you go through those categories, then you do a practice they call radiating, just sort of radiating loving kindness out to all beings ultimately. And I like to do that in sort of an almost geographical way, imagining where I live, my neighborhood, and then my city, and then outward, you know, around the planet. And you can do the whole universe if you're, you know, ambitious.

So it's very systematic and fairly simple in terms of how it's done. And what I think, one of the things that's very appealing about it is that it gives us something very specific to do. You know, because a lot of times when you're just trying to follow your breath or just try to be mindful it's hard to figure out what what am i doing like the breath that seems so ephemeral you know like you're kind of drifting around but so the meta form uh really helps the mind, I think, to stay focused, which is, again, one of its values, one of its peripheral values. So that's the practice. But you made a distinction between the practice and the quality of mind.

Yeah. So my book, Living Kindness, kind of goes through this, is what was the Buddha really talking about, and are we getting it right, and about? And are we getting it right? And in what ways are we getting it? I don't even like to say wrong, but are we missing something? And so, just the, you know, the word loving-kindness or the compound loving-kindness is sort of awkward to start with and confusing because if it's love, why do you have to add kindness to it? And then, of course, we realize, well, because in our language,

in our culture, love can mean a lot of different things that aren't about kindness. They can be about sex. They can be about desire. It can be about, you know, food or, you know, your latest Netflix show. So, we add kindness to clarify that. So, okay, but that still sort of doesn't explain too much to me. So, I go back to the suttas, the early Buddhist teachings, to try to see what the Buddha's talking about. And this is where, for me, it becomes interesting. Because so much of what the Buddha talked about when he was talking about loving kindness was not loving kindness, was non, what he would call non-ill will. was non, what he would call, non-ill will. And so you have a typical, like, we run into these phrases in the suttas that are sort of, what? What's he mean by that? Why is he even saying that? Why doesn't he just say love? And that then opens up a whole kind of area to think about.

First of all, that the heart of the Buddhist teaching is about letting go. So if he says you should love people, it's sort of creating the potential for craving and for attachment. So instead of that, he says, just don't hate people. It's an interesting distinction because I find it difficult to get that motivated necessarily to love everybody. I can have compassion and kind of a broad sense of caring for the world. But again, this word love sort of suggests that I'm supposed to feel something kind of juicy and warm and affectionate. You know, and that comes and goes. So if I'm supposed to be feeling love, well, number one thing we know about feelings is that they are impermanent.

So I'm putting myself into this sort of losing proposition already by saying, I'm going to cultivate loving kindness for all beings, and I'm going to feel love for all beings. That means that a lot of the time I'm going to feel that I'm failing, that I'm going to be coming up short. I'm not going to be able to feel that all the time. So, then what do I do? Do I feel bad about myself? Then I'm doing the opposite of what I'm supposed to be doing, right? So, if I put that aside necessarily as my goal and just say, what if I can practice non-ill will? Oh, well, that's about letting go, right? And that's more natural to me in my practice because it's kind of what I'm taught from the beginning of my meditation

practice is to let go. There is something kind of like, oh, you know, I'm taught so much about letting go. And then somebody comes in and says, oh, now we want you to add this thing, cultivate this thing. I mean, it's a beautiful practice and you can have beautiful experiences with it, but we can't hold on to those experiences. So, I think it's really valuable to do the loving-kindness practice, but then to take it beyond that and use it really as an insight practice. That is, what you see through doing the loving-kindness practice is what you want to carry with you that isn't so much impermanent. You know, our insights are things that we can sort of arouse in a moment, just like, oh, how do I want to think about this? How do I want to handle this situation?

Oh, I want to handle it with kindness. I want to handle it with non-ill will. And so, I don't have to necessarily feel love towards someone, but I can act then more skillfully, which is why I came up with this term living kindness. I think it might be worth saying more about this distinction that exists in your mind between living kindness and loving kindness. Yeah, yeah. So the first distinction is this distinction between doing a meditation practice and then

the rest of your life, which, again, we know it can be great to meditate. And hopefully, it's not always, but you can have these wonderful moments. It's not always, but you can have these wonderful moments. But the real challenge for most of us is what do we do with that at the end of the retreat or at the end of the sitting? When I put the spiritual book down and walk into the kitchen and face a pile of dishes, how do I take this practice into my life that's realistic? You know, because, and I guess for me, it's not realistic to just walk around, you know, I love everybody, everything is peace and joy, you know. You know, I've had those moments, they come and go again. And so it's, how can I apply this?

And so then there are these simple ideas, maybe simple, I don't know, sometimes very challenging, but ideas that the Buddha is putting forth. There's a beautiful one in one of the suttas where the Buddha is asking one of his monks how he practices kind of in a harmonious way with these other monks that he's living with. And they're kind of on a retreat, like the three of them out in the forest. And the Buddha's saying the phrase is, how do you blend like milk and water? And the monk Anuruddha says, I think to myself, why not put aside what I wish to do and do what these venerable ones wish to do? Well, that kind of epitomizes like living kindness to me, putting aside my own desires in the moment and doing things for someone else. And I actually came upon that sutta when my daughter was just like a toddler. And I thought, oh, this is parenting.

This is exactly what you do as a parent. Put aside what I wish to do and do what this venerable one, this venerable two-year-old needs me to do. And that was very inspiring for me because, you know, if you're a serious meditator and you have kids, which I think you've had this experience, they can kind of intrude. They might seem to be intruding on your practice. And when you realize, oh, no, my practice is to take care of this venerable one, is to put aside what I wish to do, that I am practicing loving kindness when I do that.

Oh, that's a gift to me. It's like, oh, okay, right, because we can turn our practice into this precious little thing of like, oh, it's this meditation, and I'm in these particular states, and I'm feeling all this love, that's my practice. The rest of my life, not so much.

The way the Buddha talks about love or loving kindness, and I guess we could parse those words, might be worth doing that at some point, but the way he talks about metta, at least, it seems at times inaccessible to me. You have a quote from the Buddha that you've highlighted in your book where he said, Even if your limbs are being sawed off by bandits, if a thought of ill will arises in the mind, you are not practicing what I teach. Yeah. One of my favorite lines, just because it's so, I don't know, I guess I'm kind of perverse in some way. It seems so ridiculous.

And it certainly will undercut any spiritual pride we might have, you know, any spiritual ego. to the point of being enlightened in some way. All we have to do is ask someone to start sawing off our limbs and see how we handle it. So, you know, I talked to one of my monastic teachers, Ajahn Pasano, who actually was really kind enough to help me with this manuscript. And he takes more of an attitude of this is more symbolic, that it's not literal. And maybe, I mean, he should know more than I do.

But it was interesting when I was teaching this sutta to some college students at a Catholic college where I sometimes do a little teaching. And in the middle of offering it, I realized, oh, this is kind of the story of Christ on the cross. I thought, that's really interesting. What am I going to do with that? Because before that, I thought, well, no one could do this. Then I thought, well, that's actually sort of an archetype of Western spirituality of the Judeo-Christian tradition of this person being crucified and saying, forgive them, Lord, they

know not what they've done. I think he also has some complaints to God after that. I'm not sure which comes first, the why have you forsaken me? But we do have this ideal here. So maybe it's not so unrealistic. There's another story of a Chinese monk who was attacked by the Red Guard. I guess this was in the 60s. And he was like in his 80s or something, and all his students ran away. He stayed in the monastery, and the Red Guard came and beat him nearly to death. And when his students came back to the monastery, they found him, and they were saying to him, it's okay. It seems like you're trying to hang on to your life, and don't hold on to your life for us.

And he said, I'm not holding on to my life for you. I'm holding on to it for those Red Guards because the karma for them would be just too terrible if I were to die. And so he recovered and apparently lived quite a few more years afterward. So another sort of model of this just unimaginable compassion and forgiveness. I try to take the Buddhist teachings as literally as possible and accept my own shortcomings in regard to them and say, whether the Buddha meant this or not,

I know I can't do that. I can't be that person, but that's okay. I don't have to be that person. You know, I'm not perfect. I'm not enlightened. You know, I have this vision, and I think spiritual teachings are often about an idealized vision. Enlightenment itself is a kind of idealized vision that really, you know, what is it? Is it real? You know, I think one of the things that keeps us motivated on our path is to have these visions of some kind of perfection and maybe the humility of knowing you're not achieving it is something healthy. So we can look at enlightenment,

which is classically defined as the uprooting of greed, hatred, and delusion, or we can look at loving kindness, which the bar has been set by the Buddha of not feeling any ill will while somebody's sawing off your limbs. We can look at this as we might look at the speed with which Michael Phelps swims a lap as part of the extreme end of the human repertoire, but shouldn't discourage us from trying to swim. Yeah, fair enough. I think that's a good analogy. I also like to come back to something very simple, which is why I like this idea of just non-ill will, you know. very simple, which is why I like this idea of just non-ill will, you know. That's a nice sort of ideal to live toward, is can I just not have ill will? There's one of the interesting

pieces in the Vasudha Magga that I talked about, where this form of meditation comes from. You know, when you get to the meditation of sending loving kindness to the difficult person, many people, obviously, have trouble with that. And the Vasudha Magha actually suggests rather than trying to feel love for this difficult person or this enemy, they sometimes call it. Just try to make them into a neutral person.

And I like that one too, because it's, again, kind of like, oh, here's something I can do. I can just stop hating that person. I'm not going to want to go and embrace them. And it's hard for me to wish for them to be really happy and have everything that they want. But I can maybe let go of hatred for them and just make them like a neutral person. So, you know, it's interesting. I don't know if I'm talking about out of both sides of my mouth, but on the one hand, suggesting, oh, it's great to have these ideals, and on the other hand, saying, let's have achievable tasks as practitioners,

as meditators, as people on some kind of, I guess, spiritual journey. You know, one of the other models that I really like, Bhikkhu Annalio, one of the great scholars and translators of the text, sort of the next generation, he was a student of Bhikkhu Bodhi. He says that just following the five precepts of non-harming, to not kill, not to steal, not to lie, not to harm people sexually, not using intoxicants to the point of heedlessness, just to follow those guidelines for living is an act of compassion. Because you're being non-harming, you know? And wow, that's another one of those moments, like the realizing that taking care of my daughter was an act of loving kindness. It's another one of those moments when I realize, oh, I'm already doing some of the good stuff, you know? I'm already, yeah, it is an act of compassion. And, you know, I think that

when we get interested and excited about spiritual practice or Buddhism or whatever, and we start to have these ideals, you know, we see these goals and enlightenment and as you were saying, like, not, you know, not being angry with people who are sawing off our limbs. And we lose sight of the fact that something as simple as taking the precept to not steal is actually a big deal. You know, that can we imagine if everybody in the world followed the precept of not stealing or of not killing, the world would be a completely different place. As individuals, we might not feel that we've done anything particularly special because we haven't gone out and murdered anybody today. today. But when we know that people are being murdered and killed both through individual hatred and through state violence constantly, and we realize, oh, that actually is a big deal if I do that. I actually, I'm participating very much in a communal act of compassion.

I want to go back to this non-ill will notion for a second. Please. My concern about it is that it feels a little neutral, a little dull in some way, you know, a little cold. You know, I'm attracted to the notion of, you know, I talk about this a lot on the show. I don't want to pretend this is an original idea. I've stolen it from smarter people. But I'm attracted to the notion of defining love down to just the human capacity, the mammalian capacity to care. And, you know, it can range from slightly north of neutral to, you know, you complete me, Tom Cruise uttering, you know, famous love lines in a movie. But non-ill will seems really firmly in neutrality. And I get that anything north of neutrality could be clinging or attachment and contrary to the Buddha's primary goal, which is non-attachment, letting go. So how do we compute all of this? Because caring seems to be pretty important in terms of the survival of the species.

Yeah. Well, absolutely. And I think what I'm trying to suggest is let's have a baseline. Let's have our baseline be non-ill will. It's definitely not the end point. I mean, radiating kindness over the entire world, that's the line from the Metta Sutta. Absolutely. I mean, from the Metta Sutta. Absolutely. I mean, beautiful and something to practice and to pursue. I just like the idea that on my bad days, I can practice non-ill will. On my good days, I can radiate kindness over the entire world. And so, certainly, I don't mean to suggest that that's the end point of practice. And I'm really actually pleased that you used the word care, because that's actually

what I came to as I was particularly addressing the question of self-love was care. And I would suggest that care is living kindness, because care is active, right? If we're talking about caring, not just I care about you, but I take care of you. I take care of me. I take care of the world. That's actually my translation for metta, is care. And it's not an accurate translation at all. You know, it's not a translation of the Pali. But I'm completely unsatisfied with the translations that say, well, it's more like friendliness. I'm like, that leaves me kind of cold. But care, because this question of self-love, which is a persistent one in our culture and in the mindfulness community and in the Buddhist community, especially when people are challenged to do loving kindness for themselves. selves, I really like the idea of, okay, again, I don't have to feel all warm and fuzzy necessarily.

Often when we're asked to practice self-love, there's an immediate problem of grading ourselves or trying to ask ourselves if we deserve it, if we've earned it. And I don't think that's what the Buddha means by loving yourself. Like, oh, check your spiritual resume. Are you a good enough person? But rather, can you take care of yourself? And that comes back to very basic daily actions, behaviors. Do I feed myself? Do I rest when I'm tired? Do I exercise? If I'm feeling a spiritual hole, do I seek to fill it with something healthy and nurturing?

Or do I harm myself? Then I don't have to be grading myself and do I deserve love? I don't know, you know, but I do care about myself and I do take care of myself. And that's what I think in practical terms, that's loving myself. That's meta for myself. How do you compute the seeming riddle of caring for yourself or others without attachment? I'm glad you saved that one. Because that's a hard question. My immediate response is kind of in the same way that if we see someone fall down, we just go and help just pick them up.

It's not because we're attached to them that we help them to get up. anybody, rather than as ourselves, just as we would treat another human being, and maybe even, hopefully even just another being, then there's a spontaneous response to suffering or to need, to the need for care. And there doesn't have to be any, I'm attached to myself or I'm doing this because it's me, but if it were someone else who was hungry, I wouldn't give them food. You know, I think that's what comes to mind that might not be, you know, the most profound answer. Let's assume it's not the most profound answer. I guess what I'm getting at, though, is not just how we feel about ourselves, but any being about whom we care. Yeah.

You know, let's take your then-toddler and now, I assume, somewhat older daughter. And I've got a son. I am very attached to my son. Oh, yeah. Six. son. I am very attached to my son. He's six. And so how can I love my son or my wife or my friends or my cats without clinging or without attaching? I would say you can't. And I have a chapter on the sutta called Born from Those Who Are Dear. And it's another sutta that I discovered around that same time when my daughter was a small one. Yeah, she is turning 23 this week. And I saw the title of

that sutta, and I thought, Born from Those Who Are Dear. Oh, this is going to be about loving your children and how sweet and wonderful it is. No, not so much. What the Buddha says is born from those who are dear is suffering. He says, yes. So, exactly what you're and his son has just died. And he's, you know, going to the Buddha for some kind of help, like bring my child back to life or, you know, what am I supposed to do? And the Buddha says to him, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are born from those who are dear. Okay, well, thanks for that, you know. It doesn't really seem like it's offering much hope. He tells this man, come to your senses,

which I think is a very telling line. You know, it reminds me of John Kabat-Zinn's book, Coming to Our Senses, I think it's called. And that's a common phrase in our language, come to your senses. But if we think of it in mindfulness terms, come to our senses means come into your body, come into your experience of your body. So he's trying to calm the man down by just telling him to be present with his experience. But as I've reflected on this sutta quite a bit, first of all, it's quite apparent that that's true. And the sutta goes on to kind of argue for the truth of that, that

if we are attached to people, at some point we will have suffering around that attachment. It's not suggesting that having attachment to people is just continuous suffering, but that inevitably things will change. My daughter is living across the country, My daughter is living across the country, and I miss her, and that's painful. But what I think the Buddha is talking about is have insight into the truth, and that if you have insight into the truth, then you don't experience dukkha. You can still experience pain, but it's not confused. You can remember, like, this is natural. This is what's supposed to happen.

And for me, again, a lot of what the Buddha is saying is meant for me to understand the truth. And that if I understand the truth and I hold that with wisdom, with acceptance, and yes, with compassion, then it doesn't create dukkha. Because dukkha implies ignorance. It implies you don't understand reality. And that's why it's particularly painful, because there's nothing quite so painful as going through an experience that doesn't make sense to you that hurts. Whereas when you go through something that makes sense to you that hurts, you can be with that. You can hold it. Okay, they're going to stick a needle in my arm right now. It's going to hurt. That's okay.

I'm doing that so that I'll become vaccinated. Ouch, that hurt. Okay, but I'm not suffering, right? It's not dukkha. So that to me is, it's just a really critical idea because everybody, including ourselves, is going to die, you know. Hopefully we'll get old beforehand, including ourselves, is going to die. Hopefully we'll get old beforehand, which is also difficult. How do you hold that? That's just, for me, especially as I get older, these are the really important questions about my practice. How do I hold these experiences? They're inevitably going to be

difficult. The Buddha's not offering us, you know, a rose garden, you know. That's not the promise of the Dharma. The promise of the Dharma, to me, I know the ultimate promise is, oh, I'm going to let go of all attachment. But, you know, well, I've got it. Well, I've got attachment. To me, the promise is that if I understand the truth, I will not experience dukkha. I will still have pain, but I will not experience dukkha. Does that make sense to you? It does. It might be worth explaining the word dukkha for folks who are new to this. Right. So, it's the term that shows up in these early teachings.

And it's one of those words that's just, it can't be translated into English directly, which says something about both what the Buddha was teaching and the culture he was in. was teaching and the culture he was in. Its literal meaning is something like an axle or a wheel that's on a bent axle. So, I like the image of the grocery cart with the bad tire, and when you're pushing, it doesn't work. It's this feeling that things aren't right. It's this discomfort in the world. And I think it does really imply this confusion about reality. It is the pain of life. And that's kind of how the Buddha defines it. It's all the physical and mental pain of our existence. And yeah, fundamentally, he says that that's caused by our attachment. So maybe I'm exaggerating when I say that if we're not confused, we won't experience dukkha. Maybe we have to be fully enlightened not to experience dukkha. But to me, the real problem of it is when we're confused and we just don't understand.

Why does this hurt? But I could see it being a turnoff for some people and maybe even me. If the end point of this path is we're not going to love the people that we love the most in the same way. In other words, we're not going to be clinging, we're not going to be attached. That feels like a certain amount of frigidity is creeping into the relationship. Are you picking up what I'm putting down here? Absolutely. I think the Buddha is portrayed in this way, in the suttas, as really not having emotions about people.

And I don't believe that it is a creation of the people who put together the suttas, that they wanted to create the image of this sort of perfected otherworldly being who was not affected by anything. And I don't think that's true. And I don't think it's really what the Buddha is pointing to. Again, that's like, but we have to distinguish. I mean, first of all, let's distinguish attachment from love, right? Those are two very different things. When we're talking about attachment, and of course, again, we have to kind of define terms. I mean, we're talking about an unhealthy kind of attachment, a needy attachment.

I need you to be the way you are, and I need you to stay the way you are, right? Which is like the problem. Like, I don't want my kid to grow up and leave me because she's abandoning me. You know, that's really unhealthy, right? And that's the kind of attachment I'm talking about. But love and caring for others, I mean, we see the Buddha as spending his whole life after an awakening just giving, acting. It's said that his 45 years of teaching were an act of compassion. years of teaching were an act of compassion. But to make it a little personal about the Buddha,

there's also this image that I like to call upon where late in his life, he lived to be 80, late in his life, his best friends have died. And you can imagine this guy has now got all these followers. And a lot of them are young, and some of them are kind of annoying and behaving badly, and he has to deal with that. He's got this big organization now, you know, and I'm embellishing here. But this part I am not embellishing. In one of the suttas, he says that the assembly of monks feels empty to him, and then he names a couple of his dear old friends, right? And then he quickly, in the sutta, says, I'm not suffering. I don't want you to misunderstand. Don't worry.

I'm not suffering, you know. But I kind of go, yeah, who put that part in about how he's not suffering? Because I believe the first part. I believe that he is sad. I believe that he misses them. I don't think it belittles the Buddha. I think it makes him a greater teacher if we see him as having human emotions, because he was a human, you know, and he was a father. And there are suttas where he's teaching his son, you know, his son ordains, you know. There's got to be emotions going on there. So, I don't think that we're not supposed to love and care for people. It's that we have to watch out for the ways that our attachment creates suffering. And our attachment creates suffering if we expect them to stay this one way, or if we expect them never to get sick,

or for us never to have a conflict with them, or for them not to leave us. So, it's challenging, no doubt. Much more of my conversation with Kevin Griffin right after this. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place. When you're away, you could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. I personally love Airbnbs. My friend Glenn and I just rented an Airbnb in Fort Lauderdale. We're going to bring our families down to see Inter-Miami play some soccer. Glenn and I both have boys. Our boys really want to see Messi play. So anyway, I'm really looking forward to all

staying in the same place instead of being in hotels where we, you know, maybe run into each other once in a while. I love the intimacy of all being in the same house. It's really cool. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter or you've decided to go someplace warm. While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money toward the trip. It's a smart and simple way to use what you already have. Whether you could use extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination.

With over 750,000 titles, including bestsellers, there's a listen for every type of listener. Discover all the best in audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, featuring authentic Canadian voices and celebrity talent. Check out Audible Canadian Originals, including The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby. A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. Let's go back to self-love. I sometimes think about like, so if love is probably the greatest cliche of all time, self-love is even greater.

And yet, it's a very powerful idea. It's had a big impact on me. And yet again, if you're a Buddhist, doing anything that concretizes or builds up the idea of a self is kind of verboten. So, I don't know, what do you do with all of the foregoing? I think it actually helps to maybe start with the external. So, for me, getting sober was probably the biggest act of self-love I've ever done. And yet, it comes in the framework of, you're an alcoholic, you know, taking on that kind of, which sounds like I'd hate myself if I were an alcoholic, you know. So, the idea that I'm an alcoholic is terrible.

That doesn't sound like self-love at all. And it's probably one of the reasons people object to having to say they're an alcoholic, which nobody has to say it if they don't want to, but it was, oh, when I stopped drinking and smoking dope all the time, I was taking care of myself much better. And so that was, as I say, the external. the external. But on the internal, from the meditative standpoint, I think it's watching how you are creating suffering for yourself. So when we watch our thoughts and we see the ones that are really not helpful, when we realize that our thoughts are not who we are, then we can step away from them and not believe the self-hatred in the thoughts.

If you start to watch your mind in meditation, after a while, you start to see that the thoughts are just coming. They're just pouring out. And some of them will feel intentional, but then a lot of them won't. then a lot of them won't. And as we establish mindfulness, we start to realize that we have this capacity to just watch, which means there's some aspect of mind that can just be aware, that's separate from this profusion of words and images and ideas that are pouring out or pouring through the mind. And so having that experience allows me then to question the thoughts. Because I see that the thoughts can be contradictory.

One day or one minute, I can have one thought, and five minutes later, I can have another thought that's in total disagreement. So, if I think that I am my thoughts, how can my thoughts contradict each other? So, as I gain that kind of distance from the thoughts, then the ones that sort of embody this negative self-image or self-hatred or, you know, the ways that I don't like myself, I can start to just see that, oh, that's just part of the crap that's being generated out of this. And it comes and goes. It's not me. It's not true. And that allows me then to be more kind to myself, to say, oh, well, maybe I'm not just a loser or a jerk.

Maybe that's just an idea. Maybe the highest form of self-love is to see that there's no self at all. And in that, so you described seeing your thoughts and how contradictory they are. And the inference there is that there can't a messy process, often causing a lot of pain, then you can kind of direct some more care in your own direction. Am I anywhere near the point here? That makes perfect sense to me, yeah. And I think it does somewhat go back to that instinctive response to suffering. That's not about earning it. You know, if somebody

is rolled into the hospital on a gurney, the doctor doesn't go, well, are you a good person? So getting back to our individual response, just as you're saying, if we're not judging ourselves, then we're not judging ourselves,

then we're just going to respond as we would to the suffering of any being. I think that that's what the Buddha is saying when he's talking about really unconditioned love, metta. it's just not about individuals it has a practice where oftentimes when the buddha describes practicing loving kindness in the sutras he just describes it as ascending loving kindness in like the 10 directions you know it's it's very it's of, there's no emotion there particularly. It's just this, it's this radiating, which it's kind of a beautiful practice. When you can get to that place where you just sit and you just imagine that out of your, from your whole, all the pores in your body and from your mind and your heart and everything, there's just this like beaming rays of love going out and spreading and imagining it surrounding the world.

And even I like the image even of holding the world, you know, imagining that you have the earth in your arms and you're holding it and touching all the beings, you know. It's really a lovely way to just connect and to feel loving kindness, which I was sort of somewhat discounting. I mean, it's beautiful. I love to feel loving kindness. Again, just I warn against the urge to feel it all the time. Yeah. Or the urge to make it into some special precious thing that only happens on the cushion, but then you walk around in your actual life and are a jerk to people. Yeah. No, absolutely.

Yeah, and really, my most common daily experience of loving kindness is when I'm outside and I look at trees and listen to birds, basically. Those are kind of the things that birds and trees kind of, like, trigger it for me. Like, I just, like, me. I can just like stop. Sometimes clouds, you know. So, nature, you know. I think nature is a, it evokes loving kindness from us very naturally. It's one of the reasons, you know, I mean, the Buddha lived outside, right? And he says, go sit under a tree.

You know, what does he say? Go sit under a tree. It's not like a random thing. And he became enlightened under a tree. And supposedly he was born under a tree. And then he died under two trees, two solid trees. So, you know, I think there's a whole story about the Buddhadha and nature that we don't tell enough i think i misspoke about self-love now that i think back when i say this is the highest form of self-love is to see

there's no self at all i guess i think what i really should have said was more that it's kind of an act of mercy to yourself to see that there's no solid self there to hate or to be pissed off at all the time. To stop taking yourself so seriously, that seems like an act of self-love. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I like that. That's an act of mercy, yes. I think that's right.

You know, it's an insight. The understanding of how we create self is an insight. And when we have that and we realize that it's a creation, then we are letting go of the attachment to self, which is ending suffering. And ending suffering brings happiness, which is another way of talking about love. Yeah. Can you get enlightened doing loving kindness practice? Because that certainly seems like it would argue that, yes, you can. And yet, it's often that there's a concept, many listeners will be familiar with this, but just for those who aren't, there's a concept of relative versus ultimate.

What is ultimately true is that nothing is really solid and stable. Everything's changing all the time. Nothing has a true essence, including you. What is relatively true is that you, Kevin, exist and I exist and we have to put our pants on in the morning and make appointments for ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. This practice of loving kindness is often described as a relative practice. I am sending good wishes to you. And so would seem to be precluded that you could get enlightened doing this because you're failing to see the ultimate truth, perhaps. Well, anything I say will just be my own opinion. I have not become enlightened through doing this practice, and I prefer to speak from personal experience, but since I'm on a podcast and being asked a question, I'll try to say something useful. I think it does

point to, first of all, that the Buddha is not talking about love in the sense that we conventionally think of it, and that in fact it is a practice of letting go, And that when we are radiating kindness through the entire world, there is a letting go of self in that. There is almost a kind of merging. So, there is this kind of oneness that we are trying to work toward in this practice. It's not really meant to be a dualistic practice. It's probably one of the things that I don't love about doing it in that formal way. May you be happy, may you be happy, and thinking of individual people and trying to project out to them. It feels much more natural to just sort of radiate love or be love. And in that sense, yeah, I think that there's an awakening that can happen through that. You know, Jack Kornfield has a great essay. If you've never read it, it's called Enlightenment's Plural.

I think it's in one of his books, Bringing Home the Dharma, something like that. And in it, you know, he makes the argument that enlightenment takes many different forms. And then he talks about the Dalai Lama as sort of the embodiment of compassion, and some other teacher as the embodiment of emptiness, and then another teacher as the embodiment of just mindfulness. And so he kind of says that enlightenment isn't one thing. Of course, the different schools will tell you that, no, enlightenment is what we tell you it is.

And the Theravadans have a very specific kind of map for it. And as you referred to, I guess we've talked about a little bit, and as it says in the Sutta, there's something fundamentally about letting go of greed, hatred, and delusion. So, it seems like loving-kindness practice is a practice of letting go of greed, hatred, and delusion. It's certainly a practice of letting go of hatred. And I would say that the risk in it is that it doesn't let go of greed for the feeling that we're practicing

for the feeling that we are staying attached there. And it can be also not letting go of delusion because we can be trying to hold on to that feeling. So, clearly, it is letting go of hatred. But, you know, I think the Metta Sutta is trying to point to all three of these things. I think the practice, if done really in its essence, absolutely is a path to awakening, a certain kind of enlightenment, you know, the enlightenment of loving kindness. This has been great, as always. Before we go, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and any other books that are worth mentioning that you've written and where we can find you online, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

So, yeah, the book I've been talking about is Living Kindness, Buddhist Teachings for a Troubled World. And my website is kevingriffin.net, where my five other books get talked about. This is the one book that is not about addiction and recovery. So, the others are. And yeah, I'm doing Zoom classes right now. Hopefully, I'll be out and about at least next year, maybe even drop into New York. May it be so. Yeah. Thank you very much for doing this. Really appreciate it.

May it be so. Yeah. Thank you very much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate you highlighting this and being interested in it. It's great.

Thanks again to Kevin. Great to talk to him again. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Kashmir, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poyant with audio engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. As always, a hearty shout out to my ABC News comrades, Ryan Kessler and Josh Kohan. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus meditation from a new teacher to the TPH multiverse. Her name is Dawn Mauricio. That's coming up on Friday. She's great, by the way. If you like 10% Happier, and I hope you do,

you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. Where can I get help hiring people with disabilities? There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians with disabilities who are ready to work. And many local organizations are available to help you find qualified candidates and make your workplace more accessible and inclusive. Visit Canada.ca slash right here to connect with one near you today.

A message from the Government of Canada.ca slash right here to connect with one near you today. A message from the Government of Canada. Being an actual royal is never about finding your happy ending. But the worst part is, if they step out of line or fall in love with the wrong person, it changes the course of history. I'm Arisha Skidmore-Williams. And I'm Brooke Ziffrin. We've been telling the stories of the rich and famous on the hit, wondery show, Even the Rich,

and talking about the latest celebrity news on Rich and Daily. We're going all over the world on our new show, Even the Royals. We'll be diving headfirst into the lives of the world's kings, queens, and all the wannabes in their orbit throughout history. Think succession meets the crown meets real life.

We're going to pull back the gilded curtain and show how royal status might be bright and shiny, Think succession meets the crown meets real life.