Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Be Less Tense Guogu

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Plus: How to take your thoughts less seriously and be the calmest person in the room. GuoGu (AKA Dr. Jimmy Yu) is the founder of the Tallahassee Chan Center  and a Professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Florida State University. He is the author of several books, including The Essence of Chan (2012), Passing Through the Gateless Barrier (2016), and Silent Illumination (2021).  In this episode we talk about: Embodied experiencing  How words and language shape our reality  The practice of wonderment  Body scan meditation  The importance of relaxation — and how to do it if you have pain  The 4 things you need in order for meditation to do its job  How to carry all of this into daily life — GuoGu gets super practical here Join Dan's online community here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel   Additional Resources:  Tallahassee Chan Center & Talks by Guo Gu (YouTube Channel)   Tickets are now on sale for a special live taping of the 10% Happier Podcast with guest Pete Holmes! Join us on November 18th in NYC for this benefit show, with all proceeds supporting the New York Insight Meditation Center. Grab your tickets here! Tickets are now available for an intimate live event with Dan on November 23rd as part of the Troutbeck Luminary Series. Join the conversation, participate in a guided meditation, and ask your questions during the Q&A. Click here to buy your ticket!  To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris Thanks to our sponsors:  AT&T: Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. Northwest Registered Agent: Protect your privacy, build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/happierfree and start building something amazing.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how are we doing today? We spend so much of our lives stuck in our heads in these toxic, recursive loops, these poisonous curly cues of thought. This thinking, this mental activity, it really colors how we see the world. Sometimes it's rose-colored glasses, but more often, I'm sad to report, it's shit-colored goggles. And here's the thing. If you're unaware of how your habitual neurotic thought patterns are coloring your view, then you're completely owned by all of the nonsense in your head. So in today's episode, we've got a Buddhist master and an academic who's going to help us get out of our heads and into our bodies. Why? Because when you do that, when you get out of your head and into your body, which I know is a major cliche, but when you do that, you're not so owned by your swirling stories and your ancient grudges.

And in this way, you can navigate the world more effectively and more successfully so that obstacles become opportunities. Guagu, aka Dr. Jimmy Yu, is the founder of the Tallahassee Chan Center and a professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at Florida State University. He's the author of several books, including The Essence of Chan, Passing Through the Gateless Barrier and Silent Illumination. In this conversation, we talk about embodied experiencing how words and language. shape our reality, the practice of wonderment. We talk about body scan meditations, the importance of relaxation and how to do it if you have pain, either physical or emotional pain, the four things you need in order for meditation to do its job, and how to carry all of this into your daily life. He gets super practical on this score. As always, there's a guided meditation that comes

with this episode. It was designed by our teacher of the month, Christiana Wolf. It's all about short-circuiting your self-limiting stories, the ones that hold you back. FYI, these meditations are for paying subscribers over at Dan Harris. If you sign up, you'll also get access to our weekly live meditation Q&A sessions. Cristiana is going to do the next one solo on Wednesday, November 12th at 4 Eastern. This is crucial. We usually do these Tuesdays at 4 Eastern, but this one time only we're skipping Tuesday and doing it on Wednesday because Tuesday, November 11th, is a holiday in the U.S. Veterans Day. Also very quickly, if you want to meditate with me in person, two events coming up.

I'm doing a live taping of this podcast on November 18th in NYC. My guest will be the comedian Pete Holmes, who's a dedicated spiritual practitioner, so it will be funny and insightful. It's a benefit for a great organization, the New York Insight Meditation Center. And then on November 23rd, I'll do an intimate Sunday afternoon meditation and Q&A session at a lovely little hotel in the Hudson Valley. It's called Trout Beck. If you want a nice day trip from the city, or the suburbs, come say hi to me there. Links for both events live in the show notes to this episode. We'll get started with Guagu right after this.

Guagu, welcome to the show. Thank you, Dan. It's a pleasure to have you here. So you and our senior producer, the brilliant Marissa Schneiderman, came up with an outline for this conversation. I told Marissa, and this is actually kind of a fun position to be in, I didn't fully understand the pedagogical flow, but maybe that's just an opportunity for me to learn.

And so one of the major concepts you wanted to discuss was embodied experiencing. What does that mean? Thank you. Yeah, it's actually a response to what I'm witnessing among my students and what's being taught around. You know, when we hear teachings and we have so much availability of resources to tap into, people generally hear it, see it, read it, and they pray. process is in their head. That's the default. And the default mode of learning the teachings or whatever is to think about it. And that really prevents the teaching to do its kind of

maximized effect. And most people are so much in their head that they're disembodied. So I began to focus on embodied experiencing. So to be more in tune with the body, to be in tune with the body so that one would ultimately be more in tune with the undercurrent feeling tone that actually shapes our experiences. Most people are not able to kind of tap into this undercurrent feeling tone. So in order to be in the body, I teach a kind of progressive relaxation and kind of training my students throughout the day

to have specific moment time to tune in to the body and ground oneself. And all this is just to avoid the process of our discursive thinking

to hijack all of our other sense faculties. Like we have named, label for everything that we're seeing and this filter is pretty much constant in most people.

So it's just a kind of a reaction, response to what I'm seeing out there and among practitioners to be in the body, to actually use other sense faculties, sense organs. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. Let me see if I can restate it as evidence that it makes sense to me. We are stuck in our heads in the world of language and concepts and that can divorce us from moment to moment experience of reality as it unfolds. And so one way to get out of your head is embodied experience to get in touch with what's happening in your body, which is always in the present moment. Yeah.

What's always in the body, that's the biggest, you could say, sense organ as an anchor, as a grounding. And then we can start using other sense faculties, hearing, like deep listening without adding containers and label to whoever's talking. And we can see and we can feel, touch. What I'm really trying to do is get people to slowly not be so hijacked by their own categories and notions and ideas to be more in tune with the body. I had this experience recently. I got back about a week and a half ago from a meditation retreat, a 10-day meditation retreat. And I was studying with Joseph Goldstein, his great meditation teacher. And he gave me this very humbling piece of advice that I think rhymes with what you're saying, which was when you're in the dining hall, in the dining room, where you're with a bunch of other people, try to be mindful of seeing. And I, did that, I were attempted to do it, and I just noticed how quickly I was seeing somebody and launching off into compartmentalizing them into, oh, what's their income? What do they do for a living? What are

their political views? Do they have a ultimate frisbee bumper sticker on the back of their Subaru? Like, that's the, I was just off in these judgments of people so quickly, even when I woke up and went back to just noting the raw data of my visual. visual senses, man, the ego or discursive mind is so slippery and so sophisticated in its ability to just suck you back into your... Why is this person taking so long at the salad bar? And really, they're going to slice the bread that thin and on and on? Yeah, we actually teach many different methods, direct contemplation. It's called a general name, aside for an body experiencing, of seeing and hearing.

We usually teach seeing and hearing because these are the two most prominent ways that vexations, afflictions, judgments, containers are stirred up by what we see and what we hear. So it actually takes an active, kind of proactive training of these other senses. If you want to actually slow down or kind of bracket the monologue. that's kind of running. I want to get to the practices soon, but before we do anything constructive, let's stay in the problem.

Let's marinate in the vexations. You and Marissa, as I look down at this outline that you guys collaboratively prepared for me, there's this sentence here that the problem is that the nature of words and language is to discriminate, bifurgate, compartmentalize, put things in containers. And that's true, but I wonder also, like,

aren't words and isn't our inner dialogue useful to some extent? Yeah, it's very useful. Words and language is not really the problem, but it's the ways in which we are dictated, shaped, and our whole well-being, sense of well-being is actually shaped by the habitual ways we are conditioned by words and language. So words and language themselves, they can be very productive. Sometimes we need to put a label to things,

what we experience, in order to work through it. The point is we have to expose the ways in which we tend to label things, the categories we tend to use. So this is a direct window into how within us manifestations, of vexations, afflictions, or lies. So everyone's different. So that process of exposing,

embracing it, we have to accept because there's a history to why we see things in a way. Then we can work through, and then we can let go. Does that make sense?

So exposing, embracing, transforming, and letting go. Because, you know, our perception shapes our experience, the degree of our suffering, like the Buddha taught, suffering, cause of suffering. It's actually shaped by perception. So what's the constituent of perception?

Words and language. But words and language are very useful, as you know, be a journalist. So when we expose certain habit tendencies of seeing things, we have to use words and language to rephrase them. You know, ancient India thousands of years ago. just the general milieu, the different spiritual traditions,

they tend to express truth, reality, in apathetic terms. You know, not this, not that, it's inconceivable, things are impermanent, there's no self. But that's the ancient way. So when we rephrase our tendency to see things, In this example, impermanence, for example,

we could rephrase it as new beginnings, dependent origination, which I'm sure you're very familiar with. What it really is talking about is relationships, connections. So words do matter, whether it's apathetic or cataphytic and a positive way for any things, carries with them certain feeling tone. and this undercurrent feeling tone actually subtly, even subconsciously shape our experience.

I just want to underline this for a second because I don't want to let this slip by. You're using this very specific language, which I think comes out of theology. Apophatic and cataphaptic. Apophatic is understanding reality through negativity. So in Buddhism, like even nibana or nirvana is a kind of extinguishing or a blowing,

out. Cataphatic is understanding reality positively. So it's, it actually, you can describe the same thing with different words. Yeah. Yeah. So compassion, for example, in the East Asian tradition, specifically Chan, Zen tradition, compassion is understood as actually the function of wisdom. It's not just ordinary wisdom. It's actually selfless wisdom. No, self-referential agenda. So compassion would be something of a cataphaptic way of expressing things. Or Buddha nature. Prudent nature is basically the nature of emptiness,

but it's just shining a light on the function, how selflessness actually manifests, interact with the world. Yeah, please. I just want to jump in and explain some of those terms. And please, I'm going to try to explain some of those terms to listeners who may be newer to the Dharma. And when I inevitably make a error, I would like you please to correct me. Because the most important thing here is that we give good information, not that I be seen as omniscient.

So in the Dharma, in Buddhism, and in other spiritual traditions, but really in Buddhism, there's this idea of seeing through the illusion of the self. And the Buddhists, especially in the classical tradition, tend to phrase that in to use the term you like apathetic ways. You know, we are empty of self. We're selfless. And what you're saying is, well, once you get out of your own head or see that the self isn't as real as we think it is, you can phrase it in a cataphaatic way, which is compassion, which is the activity of emptiness. Once you turn down the volume on your ego and you're not so insourcialed by your discursive thoughts, oh, you have more room

to pay attention to other people's stuff. Excellent. Well, you know me well. I'm always looking for the gold star. Do you want to take a shot at Buddha Nature, another technical term? I mostly know Terra Vada, which is the oldest school of Buddhism

and Buddha Nature doesn't really show up there much, but it's essentially the argument that we are inherently good. And the analogy that's often used is like a golden Buddha statue encased in mud. And the world and our habit energies and the karma from past lives, if you believe in that kind of thing, encase our inner Buddha nature, our inner golden Buddha in this sediment. And the practice is about clearing away and bringing forth the benevolence that can shine forth from beneath the karmic residue.

How am I doing? Goat Star. These are all languages. So, apathic, cataphytic, you shouldn't get too stuck on them. And the process is exposing the ways in which we tend to rain things. You know, like, there are all kinds of ways. Like some people are kind of fighter type.

Some people are self-defeated. or maybe they always blame other people, or they feel, you know, I'm not good enough, I can't do this, I don't have a skill set. So exposing that and understanding that they have a history, embracing that,

then we can work with it. So words and language, getting back to your original question, the words and language are not bad. It's the habit force that manifests that we have to expose and transform.

Because once we expose, embrace, then the work is actually transforming. Then we can be free from them. Is what you're saying, at least partially, that if we can learn, and you will teach us soon, how to get into the habit of embodied experiencing throughout the day,

breaking up this hitherto non-stop stream of discursive thinking, if we can get into that habit of, you know, having a regular circuit breakers on the nonstop thinking, that we can create newer, more positive, more cataphaffatic ways of talking to ourselves and thinking about the world that can create a virtuous cycle? Yes, including talking to ourselves, but also just experiencing new possibilities, experiencing new ways.

So the more rigid are containers. are meaning the more rigid we can identify with that which we will always know the words and language and so on so much trust in that the more we allow them to be more poorest then could be could be not maybe maybe not exposing that then new possibilities are able to come so there are practices, and we have to work on the practices that we can do to facilitate that. We'll be 10% happier if we do. Yes. I always say that the 10% compounds annually. But I do want to do my little restatement thing to you again, because I think this point you're making, I want to make sure people get it. First of all, I want to make sure I get it. And then I,

by extension, want to make sure everybody else gets it. If we are not so stuck in our heads, We are injecting into our days, these moments of dropping into our bodies and really experiencing the raw data of our sensations. Not only might we not be so stuck in our heads, and we start to learn to not take our ancient neurotic thought patterns so personally or seriously. I sometimes talk about the coerizing of visibility and risability, which is a fancy word for laughability. It's like as soon as you start to see with some mindfulness, the types of thoughts you've had your whole life, they become ridiculous and in a nice way. And I think with the last point you were making, which is what I'm building to in my clumsy, cultish way here, is that we develop a kind of intellectual humility. in the Zen tradition might be called beginner's mind, where we're less certain in a very helpful way.

Is that the point you were trying to make? Yes, less certain would be something like apathetic. Not only less certain, but also positively more engaging, like allowing things to flourish. Yes. Like, for example, if I have certain idea, if I see someone dress some way, have some fixed idea, start this monologue.

If I allow that chattering to subside and be in the body, it's actually compassionate to allow that person to be without my container. So you could say less certain, like this person could be this way, maybe not. Maybe so, maybe not. Or you could just say it positively, that person can be the way he or she, the way they are, it's accepted. That kind of wording or perception exudes out through you. And when you actually connect with the person, it's a completely different experience.

And that person may not even know it. That person may not even know what you're thinking, but they feel, they're seeing, they're heard, they're accepted. It's very, very subtle. That's what I'm talking about, this undercurrent feeling tone that shapes our reality. So it's not really up here, like my reality, only everyone's walking around, their own reality, actually has an effect on the people around us. I think it was Maya Angelou that nobody remembers what you say.

They remember how you made them feel. I studied for a while with some Zen teachers, who I'm still very close friends with, and there was enormous emphasis on spontaneity. I think about this. When I was a kid, I would notice that there was some age where a child would go from completely spontaneous. Every little kids, you know, every reaction was totally authentic. There was no filter that they were running things through. And then at some point, the world sets in on them and they become kind of self-aware in a not helpful way,

of quite a apathetic way. And then the spontaneity is gone and there's a, or diminishes. And there's a certain emphasis to the extent that I understand then at all. But I think the whole Dharma shot through with this idea of as you turn down the volume on your constantly compartmentalizing, judging mind, there's this availability, spontaneity that is kind of like getting yourself back to the best version of childhood. Does this make any sense what I'm saying? Yeah, perfect, perfect. I would just say that the spontaneity is different than how ordinary people say spontaneity,

like no filter, vexation, just spread, contaminate everything. Not that kind, right? We know that. So it's a kind of authenticity, free from greed hatred ignorance, what the Buddhists call the three poisons. So absence of that, there's a kind of, of innocence and this kind of curiosity, that is what I actually call the practice of wonderment.

Practice of wonderment. Curiosity. And again, you know, our brain is wired to identify problems and threats, and that's how we survive as a species, it's all good. But sometimes when we feed into that with our habit tendencies of receiving things in a certain way, and we believe in it so much, then it really just stresses itself. So we really need to cultivate this practice.

It's connected totally to embody experiencing. It would be like the next step. That is the practice of wonderment, the curiosity. Because, you know, the amygdala contacting hippocampus, pituitary plants, send out stress hormones. that whole mechanism can be shifted. So if we experience something, instead of seeing as threat,

we can train ourselves to not know what is it? How is it? Automatically, our experience shift to another part of the brain, which is problem solving, instead of fight or flight, you see? So that cultivation of innocence, non-judgmental, curiosity, wonderment, that all comes from this diminishment

of our identity with these containers, labels, words. And the words that come out, not that we don't have anything to say anymore, the words that come out, doesn't come from that place of breath, stress, problem, obstacles. How do I get over this? How do I overcome that?

It comes from another place. As you cited, the beginner's mind, that kind of innocent. I love this stuff. So just to pick up on your word of cultivation, or as you said, before practice, let's talk about that. You've mentioned progressive relaxation techniques. Can you sort of walk us through it? Sure.

So like anything else, if we want to learn to play, ping pong or tennis or something, we first have to maybe practice it against the wall and then with a live person. And then the more skill the other person is, you actually learn faster. Similarly, we have to start with seated meditation. Not too much stimuli.

We're kind of grounded. So we begin with seed meditation. And after this, I'll talk about daily life. So seated meditation, we have to always build a good foundation. And that foundation is a kind of priming, like priming a canvas. You have to put a primer on it.

Then you can paint it. So priming first the body and then tap into the undercurrent feeling tone, dial it in to a particular beating tone, and then use the method whether it's meditation on breath, loving kindness, or any other method. So progressive relaxation is a way to relax the body and actually feel grounded. So we start with top of the head and trickling down the forehead

and landing at the space between the eyebrows. That's the number one most difficult part to relax. in the body. So in order to relax this part, unlike other parts, we have to tense it up and then release. So we raise the eyebrows up and then do that a few times so you feel the tactile sensation of the helpful sense of release. Then allow that sense of release to the eyelids, a lot of tiny muscles around the eye sockets and then the eyeballs.

The eyeballs is very important. We treat the eyeballs like muscles. So we're not using the sense faculty of the eyes. Right now, we're just amplifying the sense faculty of the body. So as you know,

Buddhist talk about five senses. Eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and then they add on mind as a sense faculty. So we're not using eyes, ear, nose, tongue. We're using the sense faculty of the body. So when we relax the eyes, the default is start using your eyes. If you see darkness, if you see kind of sparkling lights, that means you're using eyes. So you have to actually see if you can feel. through the sense faculty of the body,

tactile sensation of the contours of the eyeballs resting, even the very soft but sense of weight of the eyeballs, resting the eye socket. This will automatically start to amplify, heightened our ability to tactile sensations. So relaxing the eye. without using the eyes. It's very difficult, but we can train to do that. Once we do that, allow the sense faculty to roll down the veins of the cheeks,

and follow the jaw line from below the years to the chin and then tuck in the chin a little bit, like a meditation posture, and then go to the lips. And for the lips, we can wet our lips if we want, but What we wanted to do is a gentle smile. Just by that muscle memory, gentle smile, if you're sensitive enough, you would have sense a subtle shift in your feeling tone. It's all good. And that will actually relax the facial muscles even more.

After the face is done, we go to the scalp. So relaxing the scalp from the front all the way to the back, opening all the pores, see if you can actually feel the fullness of the air. Now, my head is shaped, but maybe for people's hair, they can't feel this,

but they could see if you can feel, for example, there, see if you can feel the weight of your hair, and then sweep back to the back of the cranium, amplifying sense faculty in the body, and then throw it down the neck, and with the neck, we rotate the neck, both directions, rotate.

Now we begin to zero in on the skin, muscles, and tendons. Especially when you stretch, you can feel the tendons. All the fiber is relaxing. And then we arrive at the second most difficult area. First is the space between the eyebrows. Second, shoulders. A lot of people hold a lot of tension here. Just by tense posture, it causes an injury in the shoulder.

It's like rubber band. If you're used to tensing up and then it relaxes, the rubber band doesn't know how to relax. It feels like it's stretching even. It feels painful. That's because most of the time the shoulders are like this. So the rubber band loses its elasticity. By being working on a computer, so this is the second most difficult part. And it's the same way.

For these special areas, we want to tense up. Inhale, exhale, let them drop. Do that a few times. And zeroing on the embodied experiencing of release, sense of release. You can almost sense the center of gravity, the weight, which usually for people is up here, when it releases, drops down, sink down. into the seat. From there,

you want to relax the arms, skin, muscles, tendons, biceps, triceps, and then wiggle the elbow on a bit. Make sure the arms are relaxed. Forearm, wrists,

palms and fingers. Now, palms and fingers, a lot of nerve endings. a lot of capillars, so you can actually get a good sense. In the practice of progressive relaxation as a way to prime the body for meditation, I teach my student to put the hands on the lap, not folded yet.

So they get a good sense, how to relax. And then after the arms, go to the chest. How to relax a chest? See if you can feel the same. subtle rise and fall of your chest, following the rhythm of your breath. So you have to refine your awareness. And now zero in on the accelerations.

To see, how is it affecting? Now you can tell that when you exhale, there's a sense of bodily weight sinking down to the abdomen. See if you can feel that. There's no words, no labels, just embodied tactile sensations. And then allow it to sink to the abdomen, and now see if you can feel.

This is the third most difficult area to relax, the abdomen. But see if you can feel the subtle rise and fall of the abdomen, following the rhythm of your breath. For people that have difficulty experiencing this, Lace one of your palms over your tummy because there are so many capillaries, nerve endings in your palm you can definitely feel the subtle movements.

So now you can use your exhalations. Excel, sink, release. You sense the movements. And now we go to the back. Upper back from back of the neck to the shoulder blades, the upper back. And if you're attentive enough, there's actually subtle movements there as well, following the rhythm of your breath, back at the shoulders. And then move it down.

Next exhalation, drop it down to the midback. Movements there as well, in fact. your whole rib cage is naturally expanding contracting. This is one of the reasons why when we do seated meditation, even for those who sit on chairs, they should not lean their back on the back of the chair. They can support the lower back rule of towel over there, but the back should not be pressed against something,

preventing the natural flow of oxygen, the natural movement of rise and fall. Okay, next exhalation, drop it down, lower back, right down to the buttocks, the seat. In fact, at this time, we should be able to experience the sense of bodily weight, resting, on the seat. And now at this time, in order to

make sure the upper body is completely relaxed, without any extra tension anywhere, we can sway the body from left to right,

allow the swaying to come to a stop. Let the body find that center point of gravity. Like one of those Daruma dolls. Blow a ball with sand inside.

It says way, come to the center, and then sink down. Same thing with front and back. Find that center access point. Allow the swain to come to a storm. Perfectly, naturally, upright. Body weight, completely grounded, rooted to earth. At this time, we can place the hand in the meditation posture. folded, palms up, thumbs gently touching.

Upper body. Light as a feather, lower body, rooted, sense of palpable, sense of weight. And continuing, relaxing your hips, thighs, and knees. Use your mind to touch those areas. does the check there's any tension the calves, ankles,

and feet once the body is primed now the defense mechanism is dropped now we can access the undercurrent feeling tone in this moment in traditional

the Buddhist language don't grasp, don't reject at the fatac right? The cataphytic way is What does that mean actually? Don't grasp and reject. Greed aversion. It actually means content.

Taping to that feeling of contentment. What is that like? I-A-G. It's all good. So just like the body, we have to prime the feeling tone. Spend a few seconds to just soak it in feeling tone. Then use the method. So once the body's primed, heart content,

then we avail ourselves to the meditation object. So that actually shapes the whole experience. The feeling tone is like an undercurrent mood or an attitude, non-verbal. So that's progressive relaxation, how to enter into meditation. I didn't know we were going to meditate today, and that was the best part of my day thus far. So that was awesome. Thank you.

Coming up, Guagu answers some technical questions about body scan meditations. I get some clarity on a question I've always had about body scans. We talk about the importance of relaxation and how to do it if you are enduring pain. And he tells us the four things that we need to know in order to let meditation do its job. I have a bunch of technical questions. Are you okay with that? Sure, please. I definitely want to talk about feeling tones. But before we get to that, you use the term feeling tones a lot.

and I want to make sure that we all really understand it. This is quite a technical question, but in a, what are often referred to as body scan meditations, I've never understood, and maybe these are just two distinct styles that can work together, whether you're trying to progressively relax, which can have a bit of greed in it, like you're going for a specific state of relaxation, or whether you're just supposed to be mindful of whatever is happening at each of, the body parts as you sweep through. So being relaxed does not necessitate that being greedy. It's just causes and conditions.

I mean, if you want certain things to happen, you have to make sure the ingredients are there. So like anything else, even traditionally in Theravanna Buddhism, let me say, if you want to be lived, liberated, you got to do X, Y, and Z. Precepts, meditation, wisdom. The three studies, right?

So you can't say, well, I want to be liberated, so that's a kind of greed. That's a kind of conceptual question. If you want to be a businessman, you're going to make connections, you've got to have business skills. It's just the necessary ingredients. So what you don't want to do

is to entertain kind of, I want this, I don't want that. It's just taking care of what needs to be done. Does that make sense? So in order to have, even practically, if you don't go through relaxation and you jump right into the method, basically we're carrying with it the baggage that we bring from the day's work and we just, it takes so long to actually get calm.

If you can get calm, if you can get concentrated. So in order for something to happen, different conditions must be present. It's just how things are. So in order to have an effective practice, we must make sure the body is primed, relaxed. Not that we're seeking relaxation, it does several things when we do progressive relaxation. We release tension.

we allow the energy flow without coagulating at the tension spot 1, 2, 3 and we actually naturally allow the body to generate serotonin dopamine

naturally. Just allow the chemicals to do whatever they're supposed to be doing. So we're working with the body. Relaxing, relaxing. But in daily life, we may be tense and we have to just accept it, being with it. That also works too. But in seated meditation,

a lot of people, you know, sometimes they don't sit well, they don't know why. You know, sometimes they sit well, sometimes they know it's like haphazard. Actually, it's not haphazard. There are these undercurrent conditions that must be taken care of.

body, breath, feeding tone, and the mind. So these four things must be taken care of in order to have an effective meditation method, in order for the method to do its job, to be efficacious. So maybe that's worth clarifying as well what you mean by the method, because I think what you're saying

is the relaxation prepares us for the method, but what is the method? The method could be, meditation on the breath, whatever method that people use. So commonly, people work on the breath, either they count it or they just be aware of it. In the Chan Zen tradition,

we have different methods, like silent illumination. It's a kind of simultaneous practice of calming and insight. Silent illumination. We also have something called Huatou, the Japanese say it as koan, meditating on a phrase, a kind of paradox.

So it doesn't matter what method. The foundation must be solid. So it's just a very practical thing to do. If a person is tense, there are particular chemicals that's flowing through the body throughout the day.

Do we want to carry that into meditation? Is that even affect or do we want to take care of business? Okay, that makes sense to me, but how do we progressively relax if we have pain, either acute or chronic? Yeah, that's difficult.

Sometimes when we have old injuries, the bones have healed, the tendons have healed, the muscle, except there's an energy block there. There's an energy block. So we have to do massage, self-massage. In our tradition, we do stretching and self-massage before and after sitting. During the sitting, we relax the body.

So it's like this whole package of stretching before, during the sitting, we prime the body to relax. After the sitting, we do self-massage. This package will take care of old injuries, old injuries. that causes discomfort. And you would minimize pain. So if you kind of triangulate pain with these three approaches, pain will be reduced.

And your threshold for tolerance of pain will actually increase. The problem is, you know, if you have pain, this is speaking from experience, all meditators know this, if we have physical discomfort legs and we're thinking about it, that actually makes the pain worse because you're not dealing with the mechanism of stress.

So the amygdala is sensing threat, threat. My leg's going to fall off. Oh my gosh. And it's contacting hippocampus, telling the pituitary gland send our cortisol now. That's it. Got to be fight or flight. So you've got to kind of short circuit, short circuit that.

Right? How? Relax the body. Relax the body and then isolate the pain because anyone who's experiencing pain, the whole body's bearing up. Actually, if we isolate, it's just one knee, one ankle. And among three, four places, you have three, four places. Actually, just isolate reduced to one because the other places are tolerable.

It's just maybe my left ankle. But once you isolate that, don't use words and language. Don't say pain. You can say, interesting. Or something like that. So short-circuit this process,

this perceptual process. Relax, ground, isolate. It's just one area. Interesting. And then watch it change. Watch it change. Pain is just a word. It doesn't actually refer to

any particular experience, really, because the range of experience that people can actually have. So many. Sometimes it's numb, sometimes it's staggering, sometimes it's like a knife, sometimes it's just dullness, sometimes it's feet.

It's all kinds of stuff, right? So pain is made up of non-pain. Yes. So don't use words. Just embodied, experiencing with that interest, interest, interest, then the stress hormones will not send down. Then the pain tolerance will increase,

and by the time, you know, maybe people have 20 minutes into the sitting, 25 minutes into the sitting, they have physical discomfort, just five minutes more, pain is over. And that's not the end of it. When the bell rings, the period is over, I want you to experience,

change of posture, we do massage, right? Experience the pain, go away less than 60 seconds, guaranteed for ordinary leg pain, back, cake, and you can do massage. Make the hands warm, and I don't know if we want to go into that, but massage the body and the pain will be away. What do we do? Well, mirror your eyes, watch it, observe. allow it to sink in the illusory nature of pain.

Don't talk to ourselves. Don't label just personal experience. And if you do that for several times, next time you experience pain, the neuroplasticity, your brain will have developed personal experience realizing the illusory nature of pain. Next time the physical pain happens,

it's not so much a big deal anymore. Now, that's for pain that naturally arises from just being this posture when I'm used to it. What about chronic pain, like sciatica? That's a tough one. These are like nerve pain. It's not like old injuries and your leg putting in a pretzel shape sitting. It's actually some illness there. So one will always need to adopt a power.

posture that's comfortable, comfortable, and emphasize relaxation, emphasize massage, not someone else's massage, with our mind concentrated, creating heat, and going over the physical part of the body that's actually painful. At the end of the sitting, that will actually help some chronic pain. And if one can't sit, some people just they don't like sitting, they're not sitters, that's fine. Buddhism, we have walking meditation, like you do yoga, people can do yoga too, but we're not just doing yoga.

Dharma practitioners, we do yoga as embodied experiencing, cultivating, concentration and clarity. So whatever movements that one does, is fine. If one want to skip seated meditation, or the physical, chronic issues that the body prevents one from sitting.

That's super helpful, yes. Just so I don't forget it, you have made references throughout this conversation to, once we're relaxed, we can get in touch with the undercurrent feeling tones. What does that mean? Yeah. So in traditional Buddhist lingo, that refers to subtle thoughts. kind of unformed, not fully formed,

conceptually thought, but remains as kind of continuation, trickling, continuation of very subtle thoughts. In modern language, it just means mood or attitude. So, for example, if you're in a happy mood,

maybe we just came out of jacuzzi or whatever had things that we've done, I'm happy. You're not actively thinking, hey, I'm pretty happy today. Like, it's not fully born, but it's like these feelings, this attitude,

the way we look at the sun, the way we look at rain, the way we look at people. Now, if you're in a bad mood, you can look at the sun and rain and start to get annoyed. So what is it that different? The sun is the same.

Maybe the rains are the same. in your body, the body is the same. You're not thinking any particular thing. What's the different feeling to? These undercurrent, affected, subtle thoughts that's actually shaping your experience. So meditators will have deep meditative mistakes, they will be able to pick up these.

But ordinary people, we can train ourselves to actually be more aware of these undercurrent feeling tones. Because that is the headhancho that dictates our experience, these moods and attitudes. The Burmese master of Siyadhya Utejaniya often tells his students to get into the habit of asking themselves regularly in meditation and elsewhere, what's the attitude in the mind right now?

And I find that really helpful because I notice, oh, I'm wearing shit-colored goggles right now. Everything is going through. Or I'm wearing rose-colored glasses, whatever. But it's very helpful to see, you know, what the lens is, the prism that you're viewing reality through. That's right. Excellent. I'm glad I hear some other teachers talk about this.

That is the dictator. That shapes completely colors or experience. And we can train ourselves, train ourselves to do this. and the fitting tone for seated meditation through that short period of guided sitting, we want to dial it into something that it's not grasping and not rejecting. Gasseting and rejecting is just the Chan Zen approach of saying, you know, the three poisons, greed, aversion, ignorance.

So that first two. So what is it like to be free from greed and aversion? When not asleep, we should be wakeful. We can be wakeful, yet we don't engage in that. What is that like? What is that feeling to like? Content. Traditional Theravaden lingo, equanimity.

Yeah, neutral. Equanimity. So you're not kind of pale to chase after this, nor are you trying to get rid of it, to fix my problem, too much wandering thought. I'm trying to fix it. If we do that, wondering thought's going to be more. So we want to make sure the beginning of meditation is beautiful.

It's conducive to practice. And train ourselves more and more, but materialize ourselves with not grasping, not rejecting. Fraving aversion. That's very important. It's not active thinking. It's these tendencies. these kind of poles that we feel or repulsion that we feel.

So familiarizing ourselves with that, making sure that our meditation is not contaminated, hijacked by the three poisons. Yeah. Coming up, Guagua gets very specific and very practical about how to carry all of this stuff we've been talking about into your daily life. Guagua, I need your advice on what we should do in our remaining time here.

We've got about 25 minutes left. And as I look down at this outline that you and Marissa provided to me, there are at least three places we could go. But I think we should probably pick one. So I'll give you a menu and maybe you can choose. There's something on here about the junctures of life. There's something about causes and conditions and the four-step method for working with causes and conditions.

And then there's also your, process of transformation being four steps, you know, facing, embracing, et cetera, et cetera. Which of these, what do you think is the right place to wrap things up with? I think now that people have learned how to properly prime their seated meditation, I think the next thing is daily life, how to carry this into daily life. So let's talk about the junctures. Great. Because the same principles apply then, you know.

Relax, ground, engage. That's basically what I was talking about. Rining, relax, feeling grounded, content, and then engage with the method. Anaphanasati, meditation on breath, loving kindness, or in daily life in this certain senses, your work. Right? So your research, the task at hand, that is the method then. That's the method.

So if you are talking with someone, to really be present so the person's actually feeling heard they're seeing and they're feeling you're there with them relax

you're grounded and you have no judgment grasping, rejecting trying to get rid of something, try to change the person no containers and then engage so you're just present listening

not too many things here You're not oblivious, of course, you're like right there. Do you understand English? But there's some other ingredient that's present. What is that? You're grounded. Without awareness, the other person will feel that. You know, our mind is not, from the Buddhist perspective,

our mind is not just in this container. The Buddhist, as you know, talk about a tripotic, understanding. Six-sense faculty, six-sense object, giving rise to six-sensory cognitive moments, right? Consciousness. Basic, Buddhism 101. That means our body and mind

are socially constructed, interactive. It's not just in the shell. So when we are present, the other person feeling, our feeling tone, actually impacts, not just how we're pursuing things, the whole conversation. So relating this general principle of relaxing, grounding, engage. That's how we face the junctures of life. What kind of junctures?

Contact, tension, psychologically, emotionally, circumstantially, circumstantially. So contact, six-sense organs, six-sense object, that contact, junctures of tension, also another big one, junctures of change, changing job, changing life, you thought you're going to get this,

but you didn't. We planned this trip, but then something else happened, we can't go through it, we're going to take another route, all of these things, are junctures. And practice exist at the junctures of life.

Not just this corpse sitting here, you know, breathing. Actually, that's what I was talking about before, about playing tennis, right? You've got to play with the wall first. What's that wall? Steep the meditation. In order to make it really useful, you've got to play with a live person.

And the better the person, actually, you get better. So that person is circumstances of life. different contacts, change, tension spot. And I was telling your assistant and all these other things like life, what's life? Practice exists at the junctures of life. What's life? Recognition.

And lack of someone else takes your credit. You're now recognized for something. Oh, those are big ones, recognition. sense of gaining, losing that culture, power, authority, who has it, how power circulates, how you can have your agency, all these things,

and then status, promotion, this and that, and then influence. These are just some of the things, kind of pointers, but if we just remember the principles, because there are too many junctures to remember. The principle, relax in daily life, ground, and engage. So how do we bring those principles into our daily lives super practically?

Go ahead. Excellent. I call it one minute chan, one minute. So we start with something innocuous, like first bite of lunch, same walkway that we do, escalator, elevator, same curb that we walk. Or you can do it like

every time you see your boss or every time you see a particular co-worker. And then in the evening, washing dishes or something, you stick to whatever five that you choose and for one minute you've got to discipline yourself. Do this for one month to three months

and you'll see a change. Choose five things. One minute each. What do we do during those one minute? Say the same bite of lunch, the first bite of lunch. We unpack the sandwich or whatever. Relax.

Actually feeling the bodily weight at your buttocks. On your feet, so much of your feet. Grounding. and then very quickly tap into the feeling tone. It's all good. I-A-G.

And then don't use thinking mind, use the sense faculty of the body. Tasting. You're going to train ourselves not to always filter everything through the sense faculty of the discursive thinking. So use other senses.

The eyes, your ears, body. In this case, the sandwich, taste, actually tasting the root and the chewing. One minute you can do it. Just the beginning. And then these five things, just the beginning, and then they will extend to other areas. It's not like, well, one minute's up.

I got to stop. Now I go back to you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, binking, right? So if you just do these five things, innocuous, start with something simple with yourself. And then after a month or a few months of that, you change five other things that you already do. Don't add on another burden to. I'm going to practice in daily life.

Things you already do, particularly like triggers the people that you see, the voices that you hear, the news, for example, Or the phone ringing. Same thing. As soon as you rings, the phone ring, relax, ground. It's all good. And then, hello.

Or the difficult people in your life. So you shift yourself, your body, feeling tone, your mind, and then you re-engage with that. And then you do that for a month or a few months. That means you will really see a drastic difference. Just those five minutes, one minute each, one minute each.

That's very concretely how to incorporate that. Yeah, it's like how to infiltrate mindfulness into, it's the camel's nose under the tent. Like, you start with these five minutes, these five areas where you're going to bring one minute of mindfulness. and then you switch to another five, and eventually if you follow this far enough, you're just awake. Most of the time, your mind is clear and your body is grounded,

most of the daily life. And then when tension comes, that becomes the anomaly. Usually we're so tense, that's like the norm, the default. So, you know, meditators know that there's an intricate connection between body, breath, and mind.

If your mind is a certain way, your body is definitely intense, and your breath is hasty, maybe faster. So if you bring yourself this one-minute chung into your daily life, and that becomes the norm, then the tension when it arises, you catch it earlier. Because that's like a thorn, suddenly stab, because most of the time you're rounded, relax, and engaged.

So these other times become very sharp. and then you'll be able to notice and then very quickly relax. That becomes the default. So that, when we relate to other people like that in our life, when we deal with chaos around us, you become the source of stability. You know, people will look to you. You can impact those around you instead of being impacted.

How to be the calmest person in the room. Yeah. so junctures of daily life what I did is just providing a list but you can come up with your own list the list that I have is whenever you're about to

contact with someone see something you're about to be in a situation where you need to pay attention sensory contact tension whatever circumstances you know preemptively that

I'm going to be tense. So you make sure to have that 10% happier game. So you go into it preemptively priming yourself. So tension, circumstances. Third, change, transitions, junctures of transition. Sometimes it's unanticipated. Suddenly, you know, things don't work out. Great.

Train yourself. That's a juncture, right? And then all the other things of life, recognition, gaining, power, status, influence. Those are like more typical. Those are more like great tennis players. You got to start with something simple, like just your own lunch or the same escalator ride that you do. Then slowly move on. Let me ask you the two questions I ask at the end of every interview.

The first is, is there something you were hoping we would. get to that we haven't touched on yet? What's the other question? The other question is, can you? You're the first person to do that, but I like it. The second question is, just please remind us of the name of your books and your website and anywhere we can go to get more guagua. Oh, okay.

All right, let me choose the first one there. The first one at these junctures is really opportunity. because where we get caught up shows exactly where we are, how we have been weird, conditioned. You know, that's where our habit tendency, it's operating. So it's actually really good.

It's really good. Things may not work out, and you may have a lot of exercise, in the long long, it's very good. For people that don't practice, you know, what's so good about it? But for practitioners, it's very good, because that's the exposing.

Once you turn on the light, then you can actually understand, embrace it, learn to, and then you can work with it, and then you can be kind of move on, let go of it. So just remember at the juncture, it's all good.

I-A-G, it's all good. It's opportunity. And in our day and age, very important. I mean, to circle back to your thing about language, very important to see obstacles as opportunities, to see where we get hung up as potential possibilities, possibilities for the better.

That will help ourselves and help the circumstance and other people. Ourselves, meaning your body is listening to you, The words that you use is listening to you. If you keep on saying this is a problem, I hate this, I hate that, this is too much, I'm overwhelmed, why is this happening to me? Not good, not good. On a cellular level, every part of your fiber of your being, it's like stress, stress, stress, get ready for vital flight.

So you have to train yourself, cultivate what we're talking about. First thing that I do, it's all good. it's all good. Now, I may have to force myself to, like, a forced smile. It's all good. But even saying that, that reminds me, you know, it's all good. Then there's possibilities. Then there's possibility for openings,

for things to be more porous, not so rigidly defined. So it's all good. not that socially, politically, circumstantially, things are objectively out there good. I'm talking about an attitude, the feeling tone that we cultivate. It's all good.

Now we have to make it, how to make it good. Then resources are open. We start to find ways to resolve problem. If we just say this, difficult and obstructions and all that, very bad for ourselves. And for others in circumstances,

you will be able to see possibilities of what needs to be done, what can be done. The doors are open. I'm so glad I asked you that question because, yeah, I really like the point you're reemphasizing there. This isn't toxic positivity. It's a cognitive and experiential reframe. It's all good, meaning, not that, you know,

whatever war zone images we're seeing on our feed or that it's good, it's that, okay, well, no, this is an opportunity for me to practice and my body is listening to how I'm taking in these various junctures of life, how I'm relating to them. And so I can cognitively and somatically, experientially reframe all this as an opportunity to practice the skills. Excellent. Another star. I appreciate that. But I don't want to let you off the hook. Can you please remind everybody of your books

and where we can learn more about and from you? Okay. Books-wise, I have a book called Essence of Chan. And passing through the gateless barrier. I don't want to get into that. The gateless barrier. And third one, island illumination, natural awakening. That's my Dharma books.

I have other academic books that's not related to practice. As for articles, you can just go to some of the big journals, tricycle, Buddha Dharma magazine, Lions Roar, and just search Guagu and the articles will come up. Of course, there's YouTube and all of that. We'll put links in the show notes to your YouTube channel, and I assume you have a website. Yes, there's a website.

Yeah, like Gua Gu, and then things will come out. Such a pleasure to meet you. I suspect if you're willing that we will be asking you to come back to do this more. Maybe we could talk about silent illumination or passing through the gateless barrier or both. But yeah, I'm so glad that you're in our little orbit now. It might not be great for you, but it'll be great for me and our listeners. So thank you. That's good enough.

Thank you. Thank you for invitation. and later part of the year I may see Joseph. Oh. Those things at DCBS. I lead to be treats there. Great. Great.

Thank you. Thanks again. Deguagu. Don't forget there's a guided meditation that comes with this episode. That's all about how to deal with yourself limiting stories. It comes from our teacher of the month, Cristiano Wolf. Cristiano will be leading a live guided meditation and Q&A session on Wednesday, November 12th at 4 Eastern. We are skipping Tuesday, November 11th because it's Veterans Day in the United States,

but we'll be back to our regular scheduled Tuesday at 4-Eastern cadence after that week. If you want access to the guided meditation that comes with this episode and the live guided meditation a session, sign up over at Dan Harris.com. And as a reminder, two IRL events coming up, one in New York City on November 18th. It's a live taping of this podcast with the comedian Pete Holmes, and then I'll be doing a, Sunday afternoon thing on November 23rd at Trout Beck, a lovely little hotel in the Hudson Valley. There are links to both of those events in the show notes.