Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Deal With Difficult Emotions Difficult Feedback And Difficult Parts Of Your Own Mind Diane Musho Hamilton

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Cross-training for your mind. Diane Musho Hamilton is an author, award-winning mediator, and teacher of Zen. She is the author of three books on conflict resolution, relationships, and communication. Her latest book is Waking Up and Growing Up: Spiritual Cross-training for an Evolving World, co-authored with Gabriel Wilson. Diane is one of many great teachers featured on Waking Up, a top-notch meditation app with amazing teachers and a ton of courses for all levels. If you subscribe via this link: wakingup.com/tenpercent, you'll get a 30-day free trial—and you'll be supporting the 10% Happier team, too. Full and partial scholarships are available. In this episode we talk about: What Diane means by spiritual cross training and waking up  Cultivating emotional maturity Foundations of Zen practice Integrating shadow and psyche The key aspects of living with purpose  The value of intention setting Ethical action and community Sign up for Dan's newsletter here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Ten Percent Happier online bookstore Subscribe to our YouTube Channel Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular Episodes   Additional Resources:  Dan's panic attack on live TV

It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, gang, today it's a conversation about how to deal with difficult emotions, difficult feedback, and the difficult parts of your own personality. And this approach involves something called spiritual cross-training. If like me, you do not love the term spiritual. You can just think of it as cross-training for your mind, for your brain. As my guest, who is a Zen Buddhist teacher and also a professional conference, mediator, as she will argue, it's not enough to just meditate if you have no way to apply your meditation out in the world. In other words, if you haven't developed any sense of interpersonal hygiene and said guest has tons of practical tips for getting started in meditation, which, by the way, she argues you're already doing anyway, more on that soon. And she also has tips on how to get

along better with people, including people who are saying harsh things to your face. Diane Musho Hamilton is a longtime Zen practitioner and teacher Musho is her Zen name. She is also, as mentioned, a professional dispute mediator where she helps resolve everything from simple neighborhood disputes to complex multi-party negotiations to highly charged conversations about race, gender, and religion. She is based in Utah, where she was raised in the Mormon or LDS church, but she's now much more identified with Zen Buddhism. She's also the author of many books, the latest, of which is called waking up and growing up, spiritual cross-training for an evolving world,

which she co-authored with Gabriel Wilson. That book actually comes out in a few weeks, but you can pre-order it now. In this conversation, we talk about what she means by spiritual cross-training. We talk about cultivating emotional maturity, the foundations of Zen meditation practice, integrating shadow and psyche,

the key aspects of living with purpose, what it means to have a purpose, how to find your purpose, the value of setting intention, something I resisted for a long time, but I'm now fully on board with. Ethical action and community, the value of patience, and much more. Just to say, I first heard of Diane because of her appearance on the waking up app run by my friend Sam Harris. Now that I no longer have an app of my own, I have been partnering with Sam, who has put together an outstanding app that is filled with great courses and meditations and conversations.

In fact, Sam and I recently worked with our mutual friend, the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, to put together an eight-hour audio series on the Buddha's eight-fold path, which is a kind of cookbook for enlightenment. And that course comes with a bunch of guided meditations from Joseph himself. You can sign up at wakingup.com slash 10%. That's T-E-N-P-E-R-C-E-N-T. I'll put a link in the show notes, but also say it again. That's wakingup.com slash 10%. Just so you know, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you will get a 30-day free trial, and you will be supporting me and my team as well because we will get a portion of the proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say, if money is an issue, Sam offers scholarships.

That's the same policy that I have over on Dan Harris.com. If you can't afford it, we'll give it to you. Diane Musho Hamilton coming up right after this. Diane Musho Hamilton, welcome to the show. I'm very happy to be here, Dan. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. So the new book is called Waking Up and Growing Up, Spiritual Cross Training for an

Evolving World. I want to hone in on this term spiritual cross-training because I love it. What do you mean by it? Well, I'll begin by acknowledging that my main spiritual practice, I was raised in Utah, in the LDS culture, but when I was, in my very early 20s, I lost a number of friends. Several of my friends died. I would say I was distraught, but I was also existentially curious. And for whatever reason, I wasn't able to find the solace I needed in the faith-based religion of my upbringing. And so basically what I did

is I somehow found the Buddhist tradition in my very early 20s. I think I was 22 when I first started to read in the Buddhist tradition. And then I went to Neurals. Institute and studied it there. And so I had Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chogam Trunkhberbache, and then my Zen teacher's name was Gempel Roshi. He's an American but very Japanese trained teacher. And then my third tremendous influence is Ken Wilbur. And I don't know if you know Ken Wilbur's work at all, but I have to credit Ken because Ken is the person who calls it spiritual cross-training. He also framed waking up, meaning what do we mean by spirituality? What is waking up mean, we can talk about it in different ways, you know, matters of ultimate concern

or values of compassion, altruism, giving generosity, those kinds of things. Or we can talk about it as identification with all that is, that who we are as a self actually changes. And he calls that awakening or waking up. That's his definition. It's a little more accessible. Zen would prefer not to define it. So waking up is that experience of that kind of of expansiveness where we're no longer locked in the straight jacket of egoic concern, and our attention is free to move outward, and it's free to expand, and there's a tremendous amount of relaxation and trust is another quality that arises. Growing up is actually developing the skills and the capacities and different behaviors that we need to support

us in our journey, you might say. So cross-training is really the expression, that he uses for waking up and growing up. And growing up includes working with our embodiment, our cognitive maps, in listening to your book and listening to you. You have lots of good maps. And one of the things that he talks about is we need the right set of maps in order to grow. So that's what he means by cross-training, is including those different dimensions that sometimes get left out of spiritual practice.

There's a quote you use in the book from Gabriel Wilson. Here it is. what good is waking up to our universal nature if we can't enact this insight because our emotional and interpersonal skills remain undeveloped? Yeah, that's right. And there's the research from Harvard from George Valiant's work originally that says that people, there's just this really high correlation between good relationships, altruism, and how people report happiness. We find that a lot of times the unhappiness in people's lives actually is in the interpersonal domain. It's with family. It's with our spouses or our kids. It's with the people we work with. And so

to realize our nature and then to be able to express that is a value that I certainly learned in the Zen tradition. But some of the skills are ones that I actually learned being a mediator and a communicator. I wasn't taught those in the Zen tradition. I was taught to sit and to experience what is and to let go. Those are sort of the major instructions in Zen. But to learn how to listen, to learn how to clarify your message, as I've heard you talk about to deepen your relationships, to express your care for others, to extend who you are to others, that's a different set of skills and it's often not taught.

So in my experience, I've seen mediators who are great at the communication, but not as great at letting things be and not letting things ripen in a certain way, pushing, peacemaking, if you will. And the flip side is also true that I've seen meditators who just don't have the skills to express as much as they might want to interpersonally. I was just sitting here thinking about part of why I find this cross-training analogy so powerful and really honed in on the Gabriel Wilson note about what good is waking up if you're being an asshole. That obviously is not what exactly what he said, that's my profane interpretation of it. I've honed in on that because that's what happened to me. You know, I learned how to meditate, started in 2009. So my contemplative career

still in its early stages and was at it for about nine years when it was made clear to me that I quite infamously got a 360 review, which is like an anonymous survey with the people in your life. It was made clear to me that I had done some waking up, but not enough growing up. Exactly. That's why Ken makes the distinction. Yes. That's exactly the point. And so I think probably most people, it's the other way around.

I'm just guessing. I think meditation is quite rare still. So I think it's probably the truth that most people have grown up over time and learned some basic interpersonal hygiene, but they need the waking up. So it's both sides are needed. here. Yes, absolutely. The thing that I would add to it is that having a strong body helps have a strong mind so that the fact that these days that people are optimizing their bodies and how to work with themselves physically. And I talk to my students sometimes about going into the Zendo as though you're an athlete because that embodiment really matters because the stronger you sit in your

body, the more the mind can relax and expand. So that's really important as well. Yep. It's all part of what I often refer to as doing life better. And it's not just meditation. It's lots of stuff. So the book follows sort of five-part formula. It's got these five sections. And I thought we should, if you're up for it, just sort of walk through the five sections because it gives a real sense of what cross-training in a spiritual sense would look like. So the first is meditation, although in Zen, it's called Zazen. Can you describe a little bit what you mean by Zazen and how it might be? be different from, you know, for people listening who might have done more like secular mindfulness? Sure. So there are two words that, depending again on the type of Zen that you're practicing,

the word Zazan simply means cross-legged sitting meditation. And so that means that you could be doing a loving kindness practice. You could be working with your emotions. In the Zen tradition, you might work on a puzzle, a co-on, a story. But if you're sitting still and, you're sitting still as open awareness itself. Sometimes we talk about choiceless awareness, allowing things to come and go, and identifying with the very field of awareness, that's referred to as shikantaza.

Shikantaza means just sitting, where you're not doing any kind of internal technique, but the posture, the breath, the experience of what's happening in the room, it's all arising at one time. And basically, the key to this, is the capacity to really just be able to let go. Sometimes I joke with my students that there's nothing more hellish

than sitting for a long sitting period as a self. Now, granted, selfness comes up and we're sitting, but usually when selfness comes up, it's striving. There's usually effort happening. There's usually wish I were doing this better. Oh, wow, isn't this going great? Aren't I great? Whatever it happens to be.

So that sense of identity, relaxing and opening, where we simply allow all of reality to be who we are as we're sitting is what is meant by Shikantaza. There isn't an agenda. We say letting go of a gaining idea. As you know, I listen to this in your book. You know, this part of us that wants to accomplish, wants to achieve, wants to accumulate, wants to grasp is so deeply a part of us that Shikantaza means to really relax that and learn how to just simply be aware, you might say. I could imagine Shikantaza being frustrating for some people in that if there's no technique, like focus on the breath and then every time you get distracted start again,

you could fall into a lot of doubt about, you know, what the hell am I doing here? For sure. So I would say that learning some concentration practices early in the process is important because then one can engage a concentration practice or a noting practice and find stability. And in our tradition, too, there's a lot of private audiences with the teacher. So if you're getting lost and confused, the teacher will coach you in terms of how to stabilize the mind. Would it be fair to roughly encapsulate this first section of the book as it's important to have some sort of seated or formal meditative? practice as a foundation for everything that's about to follow, but you're not super dogmatic

about what exactly you do on the cushion? I think that's fair. Meditation, in my experience, does so many different things, if you want to think about it. But one of the things it does is it prepares the ground for our learning. Having listened to your book, one of the things that I took away is what a committed learner you are in the sense that once you got the idea that it might benefit you, and then you tried it, and then you challenged yourselves when there was data obstacles, and you kept going. Meditation actually creates this kind of open space in the mind that really supports our learning.

We become better learners. So if what we're interested in is transformation of the quality of our life and our ability to contribute to others in a new way and to feel our life force and to actively be able to engage our creativity, then meditation is the most important foundation for all of that. And I would say it's another thing that I took away from your book is just how much you appreciated the benefits of meditation. You sold me on meditation. I was glad you reminded me, you know, what is it we're doing? Why are we doing it? And it was really helpful. So I think as a basis for what we're discussing in the book, it is the ground. Absolutely. And you might say in the Zen tradition, there's the

circle, the wholeness. It's the beginning, the middle, and the end of practice. Well, thank you for the kind of words. I appreciate that. Do you have any practical tips for people if they want to get started in meditation but haven't managed to do so? You know, I work as a professional mediator. I've been involved in working with lawyers and judges and people in conflicts a lot. And sometimes I'll go to conferences and present to judges and lawyers and inviting them to sit down in the middle of a busy day or with a really crowded docket or when you're managing lots of cases or lots of documents, it's not very likely. So what it is that I encourage people to do is to accept the idea that meditation is a natural

state of mind. It's actually not a state because it doesn't come and go. It's the experience we have when this beautiful cognitive capacity that we have that's really late in our evolution, our capacity for language, mathematics, music engineering, all of that, because it all requires dualistic thought, right? When that quietes down and our senses open up and the mind settles into what I've heard the neuroscientists refer to as the experiencing network, when the experiencing network is online and the talking to ourselves quiets down, that is our natural state. You can experience that with babies. We experience it with animals. It's just something that is naturally available.

So my suggestion to people if they want to start meditating is notice ordinary things that you do where suddenly cognition quiets down, you find yourself relax and become present. So one thing could be looking at a sunset. Sometimes the horizon line, seeing the horizon line out in front of us will do that, where we just suddenly feel that expansiveness. Everything gets quiet and we're just appreciating the beauty in front of us. Some people experience that taking a long drive. They might be thinking for the first hour, 20 minutes, a couple of hours,

and then after that, suddenly they're just paying attention to the scenery and the road, and there's a kind of a little bubble of happiness that comes up, a little sense that things are okay. You could start to notice that. You might notice it petting an animal because we're not engaging cognition anyway, but we are making contact and we're exchanging, and there is a back and forth going on. I sometimes will encourage people to notice what it's like to be with babies when you're with little ones

because you're not engaging that either. You might be doing it a little bit, but mostly you're not. And you can feel that whole body experience take over. And when that quiets and becomes even more deeply, we're literally touching what we call in Zen, our original nature. Our original nature, which is pure awareness, unmediated by the ego. Yeah. Or beingness, maybe.

I know so many people, including people who listen to the show, who are like, yeah, you talk about meditation all the time, but I'm not doing it. And for those people, it seems like you're saying there are lots of times in the normal course of your day where actually you are present, awake, and aware. Yeah. Tune into that and then maybe let that fuel the one, two, three, four, five minutes a day that maybe you could do something. maybe that will boost your motivation to do it more formally. Exactly. So, for example, another one that often works for people is just that moment that you settle into the bath after a long day or the hot tub. And there's just that moment where suddenly you feel that relaxation come over you.

Extend that to five or ten minutes. That's my practical advice. That's great. And I would just add to that you are going to experience distraction, at least most of us, when you slip into the bath, don't view that as the end of the meditation. It's actually that's, that is the meditation. You get distracted. You start thinking about something you should have said to your boss or whatever.

Go back to the warmth and the relaxation. You start thinking about what's for dinner. Go back to the warmth and the relaxation. That is a huge part of the practice. Do you agree or disagree with that addition? No, not in the least. No. I always love the metaphor that our open awareness is like the sky

and the thoughts are moving through like weather. So the sky's there. It's easy to just let go of the thoughts and notice the sky again, just like what you're saying. It's interesting, because you might have this experience, too, where people will often say to me,

I really want to meditate. Oh, I should meditate. When you start with the assumption that you do already at times in moments, and it's just a matter of lengthening that, it just makes that uphill battle so much easier. You're going to hear me start saying that publicly more frequently, and I may or may not give you any credit. I wouldn't want to burden you with giving me credit, because believe me, I don't deserve any.

I think it's a brilliant piece of advice. I haven't, I had not even heard that. Okay, section number two is called cultivating emotional maturity. This is where we get into the meditation is necessary, but not. efficient part of the book, which is really where we're going to spend a lot of the remaining time. So what do you mean by emotional maturity? Well, the word maturity indicates growing up, not waking up. Maturity means that we move from a rather, let's call it immature or undeveloped experience of our emotions. I mean, if we think about it, probably in groups I'm in, unless you were, you know, the child of

psychotherapists, how to deal with feeling states. I think they do better now, actually. It seems like their young children are learning how to work better with feelings. But for people that I work with, for the most part, they've never actually received any instruction on feeling, right? So maturity is going from raw feeling and either avoiding feeling and not expressing it or over-identifying with feeling and then over-expressing it and not really knowing how to capture what is inherent in feeling and emotion, which is life force and energy, which is a form of intelligence, and which is a lot of information. So it's important to be able to feel and really take in what it is the feeling states are giving us because they're more fundamental than our cognition

and they happen much more fastly. They communicate much more readily and quickly. And another thing that offers tremendous connectedness, because when somebody in a group or in a room is feeling powerfully, everybody's attention moves to that feeling or that emotion. And I make a strong distinction between the two and my own work. So what emotional maturity is, is the practice, not unlike the rain practice that you describe in your book that you learned at a Buddhist conference, but the ability to let the emotion in, to feel it, to be present to it, to notice the thinking mind, to notice what's happening in the body. And in the practice that I work with Dan, it's slightly different because there's a definite moment where you hit pause on the story and you move

exclusively into the body. You really explore what the emotion and feeling states are in the body with cognition on pause because what's happening is the story fuels the body and the bodily sensations and the bodily sensations fuel the story. So if you hit pause on the story, you breathe and you feel, what happens is a certain kind of coherence. enters into the body and the mind, then you'll find your thinking actually becomes more positive or more workable, you might say. When my teacher said everything is workable, you notice that your body and mind are more coherent. And so now I'm thinking in terms of what is it that I want to do? How do I want to handle this as opposed to why did that person do that to me,

that SOB, you know, whatever it happens to be? So that's the one thing that in the work that I do with emotions, the feedback loop between cognition and body is really powerful. So we learn how to stop it just to allow more coherence into the body and then bring the thinking back. So how to feel and how not to dwell and how to be able to communicate those feelings, those are all characteristics of emotional maturity. I'd love to get you to describe that practice in more granular detail. Before I give you the space to do it, let me just briefly. You mentioned this rain practice that I wrote about in 10% Happier, which was invented by Michelle McDonald and popularized by Tara Brock. And it's just an acronym R, recognize, A, allow, so recognize whatever you're

feeling, A, allow it to be there without fighting it. I investigate mindfully, like, so use your mindfulness to see, like, how is anger showing up in my body right now? What kind of thoughts am I having? And can either be non-identification, not claiming whatever emotion you're feeling. as yours somehow, or nurture, just hold whatever emotion you're experiencing with some degree of warmth. That's rain. What do you call your technique and what are the fundamental steps? It's an ineligent title, and I will credit Chogam Trunk-Berumpurimpeche, because this is where I learned that process is in the Tibetan tradition. I'm going to use a difficult experience I had during the pandemic when my son, who has Down syndrome, developed voices. So he developed a

form of psychosis during the pandemic. This was a very emotionally overwhelming experience for me because, as you can imagine, I felt terrified. And I also had a lot of feelings of powerlessness. It was during the pandemic, so it was very, very difficult to get appointments with psychiatric people or doctors or whomever. So the whole thing was like super intense for me. basically what happens is one of two things will happen. We'll find ourselves either being numb and not really being able to connect because in that case what we're doing is warding off the feeling or we find ourselves overwhelmed and overcome wanting to maybe cry or who knows.

Just that sensation of this is too much. So then what happens is that one makes the decision to work with the feeling. And again, it can be the zoning out or it can be the overwhelm, one or the other. For me, at that time, because it was so strong, I would lie down, but you don't have to lie down. You can sit down. So you can do it in a meeting if you need to. And basically what happens is you give yourself permission to feel the whole thing, to experience everything, which is the thoughts, the feelings, and those are anything that we label with an emotional label, anxiety in the solar plexes, clenching in the jaw is a sense.

sensation rather than a feeling description. You feel heat in your face. You're angry at the system. You're terrified of the future. You're overwhelmed and powerless to do anything. Then after experiencing the wholeness, then you hit pause on the story. The story of the future, the story about how bad the system is, the story about how this shouldn't have happened if I had done this or that. You hit pause on all the thinking. And then you just let yourself literally move into the body and just feel. And it's not easy to do when we're not practiced at it. So you use the breath. You know, your sensations are jumping around. They're somewhat chaotic. You notice your attention moving from your head to your solar plexes, to your gut, to your heart, to your limbs. So you just use the

breath and allow yourself to feel as fully as possible. And I encourage people to just identify in very simple language what the feelings are. Terror, anxiety, anger, hopelessness, and then a little bit of breath. And just, I'm just going to feel, I'm not telling any story now, I'm just feeling. And then I can feel some coherence return so that I'm breathing and I'm feeling and now my cognition is going to be more trustable. So now I hit, play on my thinking mind. And what I notice is, I'm doing the best job I know how I need to be patient. Isn't it great that I've got two or three people who are helping me get an appointment? I can deal with this. I've dealt with difficult things. I can deal with this. You just notice that

it shifts. We sometimes call that prajana or wisdom. Like there's a quality in which that quality of emotional maturity emerges. Instead of reacting in a way that makes me feel like a young child, I'm actually responding in a way that is commensurate with my experience and something I feel I can deal with. So you literally will watch the whole thing transform. And you can do it in small ways when you're talking with your spouse, and you can do it in big ways like I did when I was overwhelmed. And you call this process transmutation of emotion, is that correct?

That's what I mean. It's not the best type. It's not bad. I like it. I've got a few books, and there's a chapter on working with strong emotion in the books on transmutation. Just to reemphasize something you said earlier, this is something you don't have to lie down for. You can be in a meeting and run through this quite quickly, which is where you say, I'm going to drop the story, I'm going to feel the feelings. I'm going to get pretty intimate with how they feel.

And there's something magical, even mystical, about doing that. because it does allow some wiser aspect of your cognition to come online, and then you can make a better move having done that rather than reacting blindly. Yeah, that's right. It does link into the fight or flight system, just in the sense that there are so many things that happen if we've got cortisol and adrenaline dripping into the system, including that our cognition becomes quite untrustable,

when we're in a state of panic of really high levels of defensiveness. Our cognition is not very trustable. Like, we lose access to memory, for example. We're unable to remember. Sometimes you can't even remember why. If we're in a certain, if we're in a defensive state with our spouse or our boss, we can't even recall that we like them. Yeah.

I mean, so often for me, it's just like you're making people enemies in your mind. Yeah, exactly. In your mind. Absolutely. That's what happens. But what's cool, and I think this is the case, because a brain scientist told me this in a workshop that I was doing. But when we remind ourselves that we can be for someone, even if we're not feeling like

then, if we remind ourselves cognitively, we're literally creating new neural pathways in the brain. So the old part and the cognition are starting to work together a little bit. So that's kind of cool. My teacher Joseph Goldstein has this expression that I like that feels apropos. don't side with yourself. Great. I like that.

Don't side with yourself. Side with everything. Coming up, Diane Musho Hamilton talks about integrating shadow and psyche. We talk about some practical tools to help you see the difficult parts of your own personality and not be owned by them.

And we talk about the point of having a purpose. She gives us one simple question that you can ask yourself. Section 3 is on integrating shadow and psyche. What does that mean? Well, Ken Wilbur, who, as I told you, is a big influence of mine. And he probably is considered to be one of the founders of transpersonal psychology because he has been very interested in the role that spirituality plays in healing

and the role that psychology plays in spirituality. So he's kind of created that. I mean, he's been involved as one of those people that gets, those two dimensions speaking to each other. Well, shadow is really, I mean, a term that comes from Jungian psychology from Carl Jung. And the way that Jung talked about it is anything that is left out of the light of awareness will likely be projected out into the world and seen out there, but never seen in my own psyche. And so shadow work has to do with bringing those things, those parts of ourselves that we don't want to see into the light.

You know, the one that everybody's been working on for the last, you know, for a while, depending on who you are, is racism, for example. I'm not racist, they are. And then that gets enacted and you just plain don't see it. You just can't see it because you can't hold it in the light of your own awareness. The way that Ken talks about it is anything that can't be held as I. Anything that is not me is going to be projected and not only, So he feels like that shadow work is really critical in terms of spiritual cross-training.

One of the tendencies I think that spiritual practitioners have is we have a tendency towards idealization. We want a better life. We want a better experience. We know it's possible. And to admit that there are parts of ourselves that are kept in the dark, that are maybe not the best parts of who we are. And there's a very particular technique for working with shadow that can promotes and that

in my work at Integral Institute, we develop together. We call it 321 of Shadow, which is you start in the third person and you just complain about somebody in this quality in them that you don't like. And then in the second person, you make a relationship to that and say in a journal, you talk to that part that you don't like or you don't want, and then finally in the first person you own that is you too. Now, it may be that you have a very small amount of it, even having a tiny amount of something that you see in others and you don't like, just finding that in yourself, it's almost alchemical.

Like you literally, it will change the way you relate to them. It doesn't mean that they're not still jerks. It doesn't mean that they're not doing things that you wish they weren't. But if you can find even a drop of it in yourself, it will change your relationship to how you deal with them. So shadow work is really important in spiritual cross-training. We're at a time, I'm not saying anything that isn't blazingly obvious, but we're at a time of immense polarization in the United States, but also many other parts of the world. And when I talk about having some sort of empathy or compassion or understanding vis-a-vis people on the quote-unquote other side, I sometimes get quite a bit of pushback. Oh, well, the people on the other side are

never trying to understand me. So why would I do that? Or if I do this, you know, it's making me vulnerable. This is not a time for compassion. This is a time for action. And so I'm curious, how do you respond when you recommend 3-2-1, perhaps in a political context, and people push back on you? I don't think that political action means that we have to hate on each other. I mean, I think we can take really strong political stands and use all the tools available to us as a person in the media, just all the different ways that we have. And we may have to develop some new ones because we're so polarized.

but hating at the same time we're doing that is destructive to everybody. That's just a given. I mean, the best way to think about it is if you're dealing with a child who's really upset, you set limits and you create boundaries and you don't tolerate it, but you don't start hating on the child. You figure out how to do it. It's a bigger demand to figure out how do you do it, how do you accomplish it, without engendering hate because hate is just by its nature destructive.

Now, can hate be liberated? if you can experience hate and allow it to be liberated, and then maybe that's the kind of sense of righteous justice of putting a stop to things. But if you literally enact it on others, it just is going to lead to destruction. We know that. We've lived through that.

And do I sound like Pollyanna when I say that? No, not to me. I understand there are people listening who say, well, this is not dealing with a child. This is dealing with somebody trying to hurt me, trying to enact policies that would hurt me. And I get that. And I just wonder whether the most effective fuel for dealing with it is going to be rage and hatred and anger.

Or if it's going to be compassion for yourself, for the people you're trying to protect. And even for the other person and that compassion as it pertains to the other person is not condoning their behavior. It's not inviting them over for dinner. It's kind of in the spirit of this great. story that Sharon Salzberg tells the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg was on my mind because I'm having dinner with her tonight. She tells a story about having been over in India and the six years of 70s and learning about Buddhism for the first time and hearing all this talk about compassion and piping up to one of the teachers, what do I do if somebody tries to mug me out on the street

when I leave here? And the teacher said you very compassionately whack them with your umbrella. And the point is you can be fueled by compassion and and still take the same tough actions that you would take if you were fueled by anger or hatred or rage, it's just you're likely to be more effective, less burnt out, less toxicity in the system. So it's not a quietude or a passivity or resignation. It's about what's most effective for you. Yeah, that's right. You know, anybody who knows me knows that I'm a hot head.

Really? You know, yeah, saying strong nose and setting limits and saying, don't you even. I'm all about that. I just think that once it settles into their wrong and bad and deserve to be treated poorly, then we're in a different territory. In my own life, it's just proved over and over again. Yep, that's the seas of war. Just getting back to something you talked about, like transforming, liberating something like anger. All the negative emotions can transmute. So anger transmutes to clarity into empowerment. right grief transmute to compassion because everybody has lost something they love right fear transmutes to

life force so when the ego is stripped out of it when you're no longer coming from a self-centered place but you're coming from a place of using the energy of the emotion for the benefit of the whole you can experience these emotions transform and that's training that I received from trunk Let's get back to the shadow for a second. This is, I'm sure most people in the audience are like, well, don't get back to, I don't want to talk. I don't want to think about this. And yet, if you don't reckon with the darker, more difficult aspects of your personality, they're in there. They'll be just working on you outside of your consciousness.

Yeah. So it's valuable work to do. And I said, I think it might be interesting to hear you describe a little bit more about how we could do it. One of the things I believe you recommend is journaling. Journaling is a good way to get it out so you can write it, see it, read it. Here's a simple example. In my relationship with my husband, we have some issues that correlate to gender stereotypes. I'm always kind of asking for more communication.

And I don't think he's actually asking to be left alone, but sometimes it feels like that that he's asking to be left alone. Do you mind? So sometimes it's a good practice for me to take a minute because the accusation is you're not communicating enough. We're not on the same page. We're not able to execute together. I need to hear more what's happening. It might be nice for me to just take a moment and go, wait a minute, okay, what are the ways that I have not communicated in the last 24 hours? And then go, oh, right, I do that too.

even though my habit and my self-identity is that I'm the communicator and he's the more autonomous one, there are plenty of times that I don't communicate, but I just don't see that in myself because I'm so identified. And that's the whole idea of shadows, that I'm identified as the communicator. So the non-communicator goes into the background and I don't see it in myself. So just a simple exercise like that can be really helpful. Any other recommendations practically for how we can see the shadow sides? of our personality and thereby be less owned by them?

One bit of advice that I think is helpful is that when you're in groups, you know, we all need to belong to groups of people who are interested in this kind of learning. And when we're in groups that are interested in this kind of learning and everybody's working on how to liberate ourselves in order to contribute, then if we're doing that together, then everybody's got shadow. Everybody's seeing it. It's not such a, you don't have this dreadful experience of having been exposed. There's that way in which we still don't want to be seen.

So working in a group context can be really helpful. Working when you get feedback that you don't want to hear, that's an interesting moment to use it. So I'll give you an example. One time I was working in a mediation, and a woman called me later and was upset with me. And she said, I don't know if I can keep working with you because you're flirting with my husband in the divorce mediation context.

And so my first response was completely defensive. I mean, the defensive thoughts that went through my head, the first thought was, you're the one who married him. Why would I be flirting with him? You know, it was like that. And then kind of getting mad at her for bringing it up. And so I just had it, I had the wherewithal to say to myself, all right, what's right about what she's saying?

What's right about it? And when I just took that moment to feel what's right about what she's saying, I realized that she was right. Right. But the way she was interpreting it and what I intended weren't the same. So I kind of offered her a reframe where I said, you know, I can see why it looks and feels that way to you. Do you want to hear how I'm thinking about it? And she said, she was open. She said, yeah. And I said, I think it's because he gets very somber and heavy. And it's hard to work. It's hard to move to agreements. It's hard to get settlements. It's hard to negotiate. So I think what I'm doing is trying to be playful. I think what you're seeing is me trying to engage him in a way where he's feeling a little more playful and a little less like, that just put her completely at ease. That was the end of that.

It was amazing. So taking an interest, looking for what's right about it, even if you can't buy the whole thing, is there any piece of it that you can see? That sometimes can be helpful. I love that. When you get tough feedback, just developing the habit to say what's right about this. Just what's right about it. Even a little. Doesn't it have to be the whole thing.

And also just to emphasize something you said before in passing that if you're looking to do shadow work, it's helpful to be part of a community that's also doing it because it normalizes it. You feel way less dysfunctional. And there's a ton of data to show that if you're trying to make any change in your life, the carpool lane, the HOV lane is the way to go. Yeah, I think a lot about how to create that kind of community. That's a huge project. of mine. Okay, section four. It's like, you feel like, oh, no, I could, I don't want to do this practice. It's way too involved. No, I mean, I get that a lot of people feel that about so many the things we discuss on the show, you know, because we're, as our executive producer, DJ Kashmir, describes us as relentlessly practical. We are constantly coming up with talking to people about practices they can do in their life. And look, yeah, all of these things are pain in the ass.

They're time consuming. But like, what's the alternative? You want to just keep on suffering? Suffering. Yeah. So I just leave that. I leave that to you, listener. Okay. So section four is living with purpose and presence. What do you mean by that? I kind of like to think of meaning and purpose together a little bit. And I like to think of meaning as that which gives us an internal experience. that helps us to give significance to our life and our experience, and it also helps us participate in the greater stories of being human, greater sets of values. And I like to think of purpose is more what we're doing on the exterior

and the way in which we have direction, and we're moving in a particular direction. So a lot of times, when people come to spiritual practice, what is true is that they want to meditate, and they want to open and discover more of things. who they are. But almost immediately, there will be challenges around how they're manifesting in the world and what they're doing in the world. And well, that should occur, you know, that if I'm changing my life and suddenly I find that I'm in a job that I don't want to be in, for example,

I have a young student who's here at the Zen Center here in Salt Lake City. He works for brewery, a local brewery, which he loves. He likes the people. He doesn't mind making the beer. But it just isn't supporting the direction he's wanting to move in his life. And so just giving yourself permission to care about your life being coherent. In Zen, we say there's realization and there's manifestation, realization, manifestation. So I've realized that I belong. I've realized that there's goodness. I realize that beauty matters. I want to be able to manifest that. And so my purpose and the way in which I'm using my energies in my life should be something that's on the table. And I'm not an expert in helping people identify their life purpose,

but I do see it come up so much of my students that we do have lots of conversations about it. There's a statistic in the book about having a sense of purpose, being associated with health benefits like lowered risk of heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer's. I just find that so fascinating. People who are clear about their purpose, they enjoy life. It can be very simple. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It can just be something that you enjoy and feel very coherent and congruent and that you're helping with the big picture. How does one develop a sense of purpose? Well, I can tell you how I did, but I'm not sure. It has a little bit of a fairy tale kind of quality.

And purpose in this way, what I'm talking about is kind of vocation. What is my life's work? And where do I put my energy and what matters? I had gone to Noropa Institute when I was young. I think I was 23. And so I had three really good years of meditation training. And then came back to Salt Lake City. I think I was 26 or 27 years old. And I'd been trained to do massage. I had done environmental work.

I mean, I had different jobs where I earned a living, different kinds of things. But I hadn't landed on what would be a genuine vocation. Like, what was I really going to put my life force and my energy into? And then when my son was born, he wasn't getting enough oxygen at this altitude. So we had to move to the coast. So we moved to Seattle for a year just so he could grow and get bigger. And I needed a job while I was there. But this question about what should I do?

And I don't know how it happened, but I decided to change the question from what do I want? Because I'd gotten nowhere with that question. I changed it to what are people telling me? What am I hearing? And when I changed it, I promised you three times in a row, people pointed out to me that I was really good at helping people who are fighting. Like there was a fight between my mother and my brother, and I kind of said, hey, here's what she's saying, here's what he's saying, you guys overlap way more than you know. And my mother was just so relieved that she thanked me. I was in a group setting where some people were trying to make a decision.

I helped them make the decision. And then there was one other experience. There were three. That was kind of the fairy tale part. And right after that, I just happened to walk by the Seattle Dispute Resolution Center and they were advertising for a job on their staff at the Seattle Dispute Resolution Center. So when I saw that, I hadn't even thought about being a mediator. It never crossed my mind.

I'd never known a mediator. I didn't even know it was a thing. And then when I got that feedback and I was carefully listening, then suddenly I was like, okay, so I applied, got the job. When I moved back to Utah after my son's year was a thing. up. Believe it or not, I was contacted by the judiciary, by the state court administrator. They were looking for someone to direct the mediation program for the state. So that just was a magical thing. But I think for me, it had everything to do with not being so self-centered about what I wanted

and actually being willing to listen to what was I being told. Coming up, Diane talks about the importance of setting intentions and the value of patience. Have you ever done a daily purpose check and you're a purposive person? The history of my contemplative career is that I encounter ideas, completely reject them, and then ultimately adopt them and pretend they were my idea in the first place. So that just happens over and over again. And so the idea of setting an intention always struck me as like new age psycho babble or whatever. And so I was not into that.

But over time and doing 700 interviews on this show, I, heard enough people who I respected mention it that now before I get out of bed and before I do many of my daily activities like meditation or exercise or going back to bed, I will just say I'm doing this to make myself stronger and happier so that I can make other people stronger and happier. Well, so I do do intention setting and I, and it, when I am doing mediation work or facilitated work, I'm bringing groups of people together, the first thing I do is ask them to identify what the intention of our being together is. Because the critical thing about intention is that when you're clear about it, it guides your attention. So, for example, I quit paying attention

to what do I want, and I started to paying attention to what am I being told, right? That intentionality of, I can't arrive at this on my own. I need help. I've got to listen. So intention guides attention. and the clearer you are, the more your attention will know where to place itself, or you'll know where to place it, depending on how you like to think about it. I don't know that I could create a taxonomy where I describe the differences between intention, purpose, and meaning, but I just find that stating my intention, actually, I'll be honest about where I got this from. I got from Dr. Richie Davidson, the eminent neuroscientist, who's quite a dedicated Buddhist practitioner,

And he just talked about it like he just does it before he brushes his teeth. He just dedicates everything to the benefit of all beings all day long. You know, we are so wired to be selfish and that this is a great way to get your head out of your rear end on the regular. And I really have endeavored to integrate that into my life. And it's reminding me of my purpose. My purpose is to be useful. The Dalai Lama talks about wise selfishness. If you want to do selfishness correctly, you should be useful to other people because that's what's going to make you happy. And so that's kind of my guiding principle. I like that.

In the Zen tradition, at different stages along the path, you take vows, if you will, or you receive the precepts or you take vows. And I like to think of vows as an intention that's joined with the devotion of the heart. An intention that is joined with the devotion of the heart. So it's not just cognitive. It's not just cognitive, no. It's heartfelt, and it requires your whole body and mind to inhabit and live that vow. Is it true that within a Zen context, often these vows are taken in a group setting? I can imagine that supercharging it.

Yeah, it's very powerful. And, you know, when we do long retreats, of course, we recite the four vows at the end of the evening. Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Desires are inexhaustible. I vow to put an end to them. The dharmas are boundless. I vow to master them.

The Buddha way is unsurpassable. I vow to attain it. End of the day when the sun's gone down, you've been sitting together for a long time. It's beautiful. Leads us to section number five, which is about ethical action and community. Sometimes I wonder right now

where people receive their ethical training because traditionally a lot of our ethical training came from the religious traditions. If you're studying as a professional, of course, you receive ethical training, do no harm, you know, if you're a physician or if you're an attorney. But it seems like, along with civics, that ethical training seems like it kind of may have faded into the background a little bit. But ethics is really the agreements that we make with each other in terms of how is it working.

What are the rules of the road? How are we going to treat each other? So ethical training is a big part of, certainly of the Zen tradition. And in the work that I do training mediators and facilitators, we also have a kind of ethical guidelines that we agree to in the course of the training like the first one is to be for each other. Because as I was saying earlier, you know, when we're triggered or upset, it's very hard to remember that we're for each other. So we practice that. We practice listening. We practice talking straight, giving really clear and congruent messages.

We agree to develop an atmosphere of support and challenge. because environments that are only safe actually will become heavy and kind of complacent. If there isn't enough challenge in the system, that's how we learn. That's how we grow. So we need to be safe in order to relax, but we need to be challenged in order to be stimulated. So we've got to have both, but they have to be in right relationship to each other. We agree to offer more praise than usual because of our negativity bias. And we also agree to keep our agreements. So that whatever the context is to be able to,

establish what kind of what the ethical agreements are. How is it we're going to treat each other? In Zen, when you receive the precepts, there are 16 precepts that we do together. They're related to speech and action. And, you know, again, just how is it that we're going to treat one another? But I do the same thing in other trainings because I feel like we've got to have a set of agreements so that we know, you know, so our intention is shared, I guess, just like what you were talking about. You're right, that I think ethics has a PR problem. often because it can seem arbitrary, like a set of arbitrary rules that often serve the most powerful people or, you know, are based in like bronze age theology that may or may not have any grounding in truth. And so many of us rebel against ethics. But in the Buddhist context, ethics are actually another example of wise selfishness. It's like if you have these guardrails, you're less likely to spend a bunch of times. in self-laceration and shame and guilt because you're, what's that phrase, the Buddhist phrase I like,

the bliss of blamelessness. That's nice. My son says, let's not play the blame game. In this last section, it's ethical action and community. So we've talked about ethical action here. But let's talk about community. And it's come up a couple times in this conversation. One question a lot of people have is I don't even know where to start.

I have friends, but they're not interested. and this stuff. And so, like, how do I build a community where this stuff is taken seriously? I would venture to begin by saying that there are many communities that we belong to. There's a lot of overlapping communities. So the community of our home, the community of two, you know, if you have a partner or spouse. And it doesn't hurt to have certain kinds of ethical agreements in that container. If you want a learning community where people are really working with their own minds and their own hearts,

my biggest suggestion is just to experiment and try different kinds of practices out in different communities and see if they're ones that work for you. I mean, the one thing I've learned being in spiritual communities is that it's a little bit of something that I teach about, which is that when we're meditating or cultivating the sameness, you might say, the unitive experience of ourselves as the same. There's a tremendous amount of relaxation. Where we get in trouble is when differences arise. And that because we're kind of entrained to confuse conformity with unity,

we don't know how to deal with our differences, but we evolve. Our nervous systems get excited by differences and get excited by authenticity, and that's how we learn and change. So one of the things I'd be looking for is groups of people that know how to deal with conflict and know how to deal with difference. Because that's really when you get in trouble with groups. As long as everybody's agreeing and getting along, everything's fine.

But the minute something arises that creates a disturbance or a little bit of turmoil or there's lack of agreement, even if it's in a book group, unless that group knows how to surface that distinction, be interested in it, maybe hear the opposite, and then integrate it as healthy, that is going to be a group that doesn't, I mean, conformity is the rule of the day. It may endure, but it will endure out of these rules around conforming. And then there's a lot of wanting to be able to be more authentic and not really knowing how to do that. For example, when I would teach sometimes at the law school or at the university,

and I would ask people, what's your conflict style? Are you avoiding, are you accommodating or fawning, or are you a fighter? always more than half, if not 60 or 70% of people feel they're too accommodating. They'd like to be able to experience their differences more. But as soon as you express a difference, it can very quickly become a threat. And when it becomes a threat, we stop learning. We don't know how to engage. I'm very passionate about that particular skill set because it means that you can be the same

and different. Conformance groups are only the same and don't allow for difference. If you only know how to deal with difference, you end up not having communities. But if you like sameness and you can deal with difference, that would be my test for the community I want to belong to. That's really helpful. We've now marched through the five sections of the book. I have a few more questions on my side, but before I go there, are there any concluding thoughts you'd like to add about your latest work here? I think my concluding thoughts would be to not to be so overwhelmed by the different discussions and the different techniques

and to really trust that with meditation as a basis and with the kind of curiosity and openness and capacity to learn that most of your listeners have, that you will be able to integrate and learn these things as the time is right. You know, it's not that you have to learn everything at once, but you'll suddenly, you'll take an interest in shadow work and you'll realize, wow, like there's something really that's getting freed up because I feel like I don't have to be, I don't have to idealize myself so much. I can have weaknesses or shortcomings and it's okay, or I can expose my vulnerabilities or disclose my fears or my bad habits, whatever it happens to be. Again, it's one of the things, Dan, in your book that I appreciated was just the raw honesty with how you experienced yourself. So, please. please don't be overwhelmed. Just see it as you can learn these when the time is right for who you are and what's most important. That's really helpful. So you've laid out a rather ambitious plan for cross-training, spiritual cross-training, and you're not saying we need to boil the ocean immediately.

We should do this in our own time and let the benefits of whatever we've done fuel any future work. Yeah, and just let your natural curiosity lead you or the conflicts, you're dealing with or the challenges in your own psyche? What are the nature of those? Could be that you have really good ethical training. You don't need that right now. Or it could be that you're finding too many lapses that are creating difficult situations. So you want to learn that. So that would be the thing is to see it as a kind of a lifetime curriculum and not something that you have to accomplish in a short period of time. Finally, you've mentioned before we started rolling that you had some thoughts on. You had listened to 10% happier the book before this

conversation, you've talked a little bit about some of your reactions in the course of the conversation, but I do want to leave some space if you had more to say that you hadn't had a chance to get into yet. Having an experience where I decided to listen to it on tape, it's important to me when I have an experience to take a minute to really reflect on, well, what do I feel like I received? And as I said to you before, I think the first thing I received is just your willingness to learn. You said it yourself that you get exposed to an idea or possibility. you encountered some pain and some difficulty, and you decided that you were going to really try to

work on that. And then you might have a judgment about somebody, and then you, next time you see them, something about that shifts, and you let yourself shift and change. So the willingness to learn and the willingness to shift and be changed by your life and by your experience was one of the things that I really appreciated. The second thing I appreciated was your enthusiasm for the practice, and not just your enthusiasm for yourself, but your genuine enthusiasm for others. I think I sometimes can be shy around sharing what I feel has benefited me because what do I know about you and I don't want to get in your world and your space, but the power of the vision, that this is really important for people to learn and to understand. I really felt very good about that. And then I thought the

way you wrestled with the relationship between the contemplative life and that of a high-powered media personality, who's working in lots of different contexts and has to be on his A-game, so to speak, and how do those things work together? In Zen, we'd say that was like a real co-on in the book. Like, how is it that I can realize and I can manifest and still bring a lot of energy, a lot of excitement and ambition to what I'm doing, but in a way that includes the whole, that isn't exclusively about me. It's about the story. It's about the team. It's about the experience we're giving each other. It's about what I'm doing with my life force. And I guess the last thing I'd say is just you're funny. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you very much. It does feel like another person

wrote that book because it came out 11 years ago. It's been a long time ago. Yes. And this person needs to finish the sequel. That's on my mind every day. Yeah, yeah. I did watch your most recent interview with Jay Shetty, too, so I got just checking out what you're thinking about these days. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Most, most guests, I have many guests who come on who have no idea who I am, so that's a treat, so I appreciate it. Oh, I did watch your panic attack, too. I watched some original things. I watched the panic attack, and that was kind of interesting. Yeah, panic attacks are usually interesting. I think it was cool that you're so open about it because honestly, I don't know that I would have known as a viewer.

Yeah, I think most viewers didn't know. I mean, I'll put a link to the panic attack in the show notes if anybody wants to watch it. Most viewers didn't, but my mom was watching and she knew and got me in to see a shrink right away, so that was helpful. Yeah. Yeah, thanks, mom. Before I let you go, can you please remind everybody of the name of your new book and any other books you've written that you want people to know about and frankly, frankly, any other resources you've created that you'd like people to know about? So the book that is being released this summer in June is called Waking Up and Growing Up, a Guide to Spiritual Cross Training for Evolving Times.

And I have three other books. The first one is called Everything is Workable, a Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution. The second book is called The Zen of You and Me, and it really explores this idea of sameness and difference and why our sameness is so good for us and why our differences are so essential and that we have to learn to work with them. And then the third book is called Compassionate Conversations. And it was written at the time that DEI was on the ascendant.

And I think that the healthy expression of DEI should always be on the ascendant. I think the unhealthy expressions of it do need to go by the wayside. So I'll stand behind that book. It's called Compassionate Conversations. And then I also have a website, Diane Mushaw Hamilton, and I train mediators and facilitators and do that every couple of years, a seven-month program. I invite people to have a look at that. It's called the Real Life Programs, and the website is Two Arrows Zen, two arrows zen,

two arrows zen, which is in Salt Lake City and Utah. And also, if you want to come and do a meditation retreat, we'd love to have you. I'm going to put all of those links, including to the books, to Two Arrows, to Everything, in the show notes. So if you don't have a pen handy, you don't worry about it. It's all right there on your phone. Diane, it was a pleasure. Thank you for making time to do this.

Yeah, it was a pleasure to meet you, Dan. Thank you so much for reaching out. I really appreciate it. Thanks again to Diane Boucho Hamilton. Don't forget to pre-order her book. Also, if you want to hear more from her, you can go to the wakingup app, wakingup.com slash 10%, T-E-N-P-E-R-C-N-T.

as I mentioned earlier, I put a link in the show notes. And just a reminder, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you'll get 30 days free, and you will be doing me and my team a solid because we will get a portion of any proceeds from the subscriptions that are generated through that link. And as I said earlier, if money's an issue, don't worry about it. You can go to the waking up website and ask for a scholarship. That's the same policy I have over at Dan Harrow. If you can't afford it, we'll hook you up.

I've got a lot of cool stuff going on over at danharris.com. You can get ad-free versions of this podcast, live guided meditations with me and more. And if you can't afford either my substack or the waking up app, just make a request and we'll give it to you for free. Finally, let me just thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vassili, are recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager.

Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.