The Dr. Hyman Show - How to Break Free from Suffering: A Guide to Finding Inner Peace

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Can suffering be a path to growth? In this episode of “The Dr. Hyman Show,” Dr. Mark Hyman looks back on his conversations with Yung Pueblo, Tara Brach, and Dr. Robert Thurman to unpack how radical honesty, mindfulness practices, and embracing impermanence can ease our emotional pain. If you’ve ever struggled to let go of the past or find peace in the present, this episode offers actionable insights to transform your relationship with pain and personal growth. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: How To Let Go Of Suffering And Embrace What Is How To Practice Radical Acceptance In All Areas Of Life Why We Suffer And How Not To Which diet really gives you the best shot at optimal health? On Wednesday December 4th, Mark Hyman, MD will answer that question during The Diet Wars, a LIVE digital experience. Joined by Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, they’ll break down the science, debunk the myths, and share their expert perspectives to help you make the best choices for your health. Find out more and get tickets now at https://www.moment.co/markhyman  This episode is brought to you by OneSkin, AG1, and Seed. Unlock your healthiest skin yet. Try OneSkin with 15% off your first purchase using code HYMAN15 at OneSkin.co today. AG1 is offering new subscribers a FREE $76 gift when you sign up. You’ll get a Welcome Kit, a bottle of D3K2, AND 5 free travel packs in your first box. Just go to DrinkAG1.com/hyman Seed is offering my community 25% off to try DS-01® for themselves. Visit seed.com/hyman and use code 25HYMAN for 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. But the reality is that at the mental level, at the atomic level, at the physical level, at the cosmic level, at the most minute levels possible, everything is constantly, constantly changing. And if we don't embrace that truth, then it's gonna hurt. With winter here, it's common to feel that our skin is more dry, itchy, or just plain dull. Often, it's

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So this new year, make AG1 part of your daily routine and see the difference it can make. Right now, AG1 is offering new subscribers a free $76 gift when you sign up. You'll get a welcome kit, a bottle of D3K2, and five free travel packs in your first box. Just go to drinkag1.com slash hyman to get started. That's drinkag1.com slash hyman to kick off your new year on a healthier note. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking

for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, Supplement Store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, a practicing physician and proponent of systems medicine, a framework to help you understand the why or the root cause of your symptoms. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. Every week, I bring on interesting guests to discuss the latest topics in the field of functional medicine

and do a deep dive on how these topics pertain to your health. In today's episode, I have some interesting discussions with other experts in the field. So let's just trump right in. A lot of the suffering that we encounter in our minds is because we reject impermanence. We reject change. And that creates so much mental tension, so much mental struggle, because there are things that we really like in life, and we want them to stay the same. We want the people that we

like to be there, we want the situations to remain in a way that continue feeding that sort of calmness and pleasantness of life. But the reality is that at the mental level, at the atomic level, at the physical level, at the atomic level, at the physical level, at the cosmic level, at the most minute levels possible, everything is constantly, constantly changing. And if we don't embrace that truth, that sort of natural flow of nature that's just constantly moving forward, then it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt a lot.

Because no matter how hard we try, we just can't keep things the same. We may be able to elongate things sometimes, but ultimately, whatever arises will pass away. And that doesn't need to be a truth that strikes fear in you. And that's something that I've been sort of working on in my own life and writing about is that a lot of times our relationship with change is one that's based on fear but yeah it can actually be uh you know that relationship can be evolved into one that's quite inspiring where i i know that i'm not always going to be here i know that this situation won't be here so let me bring presence into this situation let me bring my

attention here let me really try my best to connect with the people who are around me, who are crossing my path in this moment, because it's a special, like, we're not always going to have this. So like, what that has done, it's morphed my relationship with my wife, morphed my relationship with my mom and dad. And these moments that we do share, we're able to connect. It's like, wow, like, they're so precious. And I'm more so grateful to change because if you think about it fundamentally, if the universe wasn't constantly changing, if everything was static, you and I would not be here. Nothing would exist. There

would be no one would be here. So because of change, you and I can exist. We can learn, we can love, we can grow, we can, you know, really flourish and evolve. So change is difficult, but it also gives us an incredible opportunity. It's true, but it's a tough one for people because people get comfortable with the way things are and they live in the fear of what's not here, what's going to change. And I, you know, I can tell you at 63, I just turned 63 and impermanence definitely has a lot more relevance for me i bet yeah and whether i live another 10 years or 50 or 80 years maybe i'm hoping on dying at 180 we'll see how that goes uh maybe you got a hundred do it for the rest of us man yeah i feel like it's a good goal

maybe i got another 120 years left. We'll see. But I think, you know, regardless, there's an end. And I think the preciousness of every interaction, of every moment, of every person is really a beautiful meditation because it brings you into the present moment. Of course, if you feel like crap, if you're not well, if you know. So there's a saying that, you know, a healthy man man wants many things a sick man wants one thing right i think so there there is for sure that and i think i i i personally have become much more clued into the the preciousness of everything like in every moment and every sunset of every experience I'm having. And David White, who's a poet who I love,

talks about being in friendship with all things, which is realizing that you're in relationship with everything. The Native Americans have a prayer called Metakweasane, which means like to all my relations, to all the living and breathing things, to the rocks, everything. Literally, you're in relationship with everything all the time. And I think we get pulled out of that when we're so attached to our own sort of individual self our own ego our own sense of separateness which is really an illusion and so i think you know i'm curious about how you kind of come to share with people this sort of illusion

of separateness that it's you know kind of what you're saying now reminds me of something you said a little earlier and there's that very common quote that's attributed to a number of people but you know it's we don't see things as we are we we don't see things as they are we see them as we are and what i try to do with some of my writing is like expand on that right when we're interacting with reality, what is our perception doing? Our perception is actually seeing reality through our emotional history. It's seeing reality and not just through that emotional history that we carry from our past, but it's combined with whatever is our current emotion. So we're seeing reality through these really thick lenses. And that sort of enhances that attachment that we have towards basically tying whatever

we're seeing in the present to something that happened in the past. And if anything in the present is sort of slightly reminding us of something positive or negative from the past, then immediately our emotions will just flow in these old directions and we'll be repeating the past over and over again. So that creates a situation where I may be meeting someone and I won't be able to fully appreciate them because I'll just be seeing them through my own gunk, through all the old sort of conditioning that I've been carrying in my mind. And you won't be able to see that sort of unity or the potential love or the the depth of a connection that could really be there because you're just looking at them through the unhealed

parts of yourself yeah i mean some of the things you know that i think happen in this sort of framework of personal development self self-help and growth are is this phenomenon called spiritual bypass sure where where people can you know do all the yoga and meditation all these practices but they really haven't dealt with their fundamental framework and beliefs and their conditioning whether it's their epigenetics and inheriting trauma from past generations and just being a human on the planet you know let's face it it's been a hard thing over the last few hundred thousand years. And that's, that's literally wired into our DNA, whether it's our own trauma from our own personal stories. And I, I sort of really have had a lot of recent sort of relationship with, you know, the world I came into with my

mother and father being in a very conflictual relationship, my father, not wanting me, my wanting an abortion. I mean, my mother being alone and depressed, you know the world i came into with my mother and father being in a very conflictual relationship my father not wanting me my wanting an abortion i mean my mother being alone and depressed you know during her pregnancy and me being important into this environment and what that did just to my epigenetics and you know activating my sympathetic nervous system as a is a place of in the world as a place of danger and having to just deal with that um and each of us have our own story and so how do we sort of deal with the traumas and whether they're they're big traumas like abuse or micro traumas of just you know growing up in a dysfunctional family or relationship right um how do we how do we take the things that you've learned as part of your self-discovery and discovery of how to be in relationship to yourself and relationship to others and and sort of heal that without doing the spiritual bypass yeah i

think that's that's a great question i i find that um this really sort of brings in what we were talking about in regards to impermanence because we want to allow impermanence to influence our understanding of our own identity. So we should allow ourselves to learn about our past, to see the way our relationship with our parents and whatnot affects the way that we show up in life today and allow these things to inform us. But the moment that our trauma becomes our identity, then it makes for a very rigid healing situation. Because if we're like, oh, this is how I am because of this moment, and I'm always going to be like this, or this is how I constantly see myself, then it's going to slow down your

evolution. So in some ways, I think we can do our best to understand ourselves, but then we also have to let it go. Because it's like, okay, I'm a changing, growing being. So let me, let me flow with nature and allow myself to develop new interests, new likes, you know, let go of old parts of myself that don't really serve me anymore and start letting my idea of who I am just continue blossoming. And in terms of spiritual bypassing, I think it's tough because the human mind can only process so much information at once. That's the reality of it, is that we can't process everything at once. And I think we get a little confused by the fact that the technological world of today is so fast and information is constantly coming

our way. It's we're constantly being inundated and it's exhausting. You know, there's there, you know, you don't quite realize how much you take in and how much energy that burns because you're processing all of that. So at one, you know, one of our challenges is to be able to develop our awareness and expand our awareness, but also in a sustainable manner, because there are times where, you know, you're going through a hard time and, you know, staying connected to every single part of everything that's happening in the world, that may not actually serve you. And in other times, you know, you want to be active, you want to be out there, you want to stay very informed.

But those may be, you know, one year of your life versus another year of your life. And understanding that we have very different capacities, like, you know, there may be people out there who can not only, you know, have a beautiful business, but then they're also part of all these different organizations and they're out there actively trying to change the world. And they're, you know, doing all these amazing things. And that's fantastic. You're helping all of us. Great. But then there are other people who have experienced so much trauma that all they can do is heal themselves. But that's also beautiful. You're actually serving us by just focusing on healing yourself. Because if you heal yourself and you increase your ability to love yourself well, then that means you're going to be less likely to harm yourself and other people. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. And I think, I think, um, you know, one of the most helpful sort of frameworks I've ever learned about my own mind is that every, every emotion, every time I'm triggered, every belief I have is just my own interpretation of reality that

I project my worldview onto the world. And so when I step back and go, okay, this is just like one version of reality. This is not necessarily the truth with a capital T. Then I can get free from believing all these stupid thoughts. You know, my, my friend Daniel Amen talks about ants, automatic negative thoughts, right? And he says, don't believe every stupid thought you have. And I think a lot of us are so embedded with our thoughts and that's the beauty of meditation is it sort of creates this slowing down so you can kind of watch your arising and your

coming and going of thoughts and realize that you're not your thoughts you're not your emotions you're not your beliefs you're not your body you're not any of these things and and so and i i shared this on the podcast before but i almost died about six years ago and i really had you know was in bed for six months and just unable to function and lost 30 pounds and was was in really just this almost vegetative state and i and i was in anything i was in my mind i was in my body i couldn't answer an email i couldn't do anything and i just lay there and i just got to be in the experience of this sort of place which actually was very happy and blissful yeah even despite the fact that my body was in

agonizing pain i was i was sort of surrendered into this kind of peacefulness. And it's hard to explain, but I realized that at that moment, I, everything changed for me. And I, I, the ideas that I'd had sort of conceptually became more experiential and it was a very powerful moment to kind of start to sort of reorient my life to be more in integrity. And I think sort of the next topic I want to talk about was integrity and honesty. And I think you talk about this concept in your book, Lighter, radical honesty.

What's radical honesty and why is it so important to have that? And what does that look like for each of us? Yeah, radical honesty is just so critical, so valuable, especially as the first step. And even before I started meditating, I found that, you know, I had no technique, I had no process, I didn't know how to really engage with my emotions, but I knew what the problem was. And the problem was that I had gotten to that rock bottom moment by continuously lying to myself, I did not want to admit to myself that I did not feel good. And when I realized and I finally admit that, I was like, I'm not okay. Like, I don't feel good. I have way too much anxiety, way too much sadness. And that first acceptance of me just being like, okay, this is true. And now I can more so move forward. But I started

realizing that I need to repeat that over and over again, whenever I feel tension, instead of trying to, you know, roll up another joint or just go find some way to just run away from myself. Let me just sit with this discomfort. Let me feel whatever's there as opposed to trying to like scrub it away or ignore it in some manner. And radical honesty, it's a term that's been out there for a long time. But the way that I use the term is honesty between you and yourself. It's not about you and other people. Like this is just about you and yourself and whatever is coming up inside of you. And I think that being able to develop that radical honesty, it's a critical part of self-love. And when you are able

to, you know, see what's inside of you and accept what's there, whether it's good or bad, then that will actually slowly start building your courage, building your inner strength. And you'll start actually seeing that the sort of tough emotions that you're having, they're actually not as fearful and as dangerous and as scary as you originally thought they were. Cause I would run, you know, as if I was being chased by like a, you know, an animal or something like that. And once I started sitting with my anxiety, I was like, yeah, this sucks, but it's not

that bad. I'm okay. Like it's, this isn't going to take me out. Yeah. Yeah. That's so, so being radically honest is hard because you have to be honest with yourself. You have to be honest with how you see yourself and your beliefs and your thoughts and almost take a third party view of yourself because

you get so attached to who we are and our identity and our beliefs about ourselves. And it's just so hard to undo that. Right. So right so you know doing this work and and sort of letting go of these old stories and um you know learning about letting go um how do how do we put that into practice like you know letting go is really hard i'm gonna struggle with it um and we often make things harder for ourselves so what why why is letting go so important and how do we have to keep doing this practice of letting go as part of our life well this um this really you know to what you were saying earlier about you realizing how you were creating your own narrative of what was happening in front of you and one thing that um I really appreciate that the Buddha and my teacher, S. N. Goenko, talks about is how wisdom is actually you being able to see things from different perspectives.

So not just from your own perspective, but seeing whatever the truth may be from different angles. And being able to see your own angle, put yourself in the feet of another person, just see the complexity of the situation as opposed to just creating some simplified, self-centered story. That's just, this was not my fault. This is somebody else's fault. But seeing your own, what is the role that you played in this situation and how may someone else have seen it. I think that can be so informing to your ability to let go. Cause that's probably one of the first things we need to let go of is like, okay, I do have this one perception of what's happening in this moment, but there's more, there's more to understand. And people are seeing this in other ways.

But letting go, I think it's the crux of healing. It's quite necessary to be able to even somehow process your emotions and let them go because we don't realize that as soon as we're born, right, we're constantly reacting. And every reaction, it creates an imprint on the mind. It molds the subconscious. And this doesn't stop at childhood. And I think that's one of the things that I think a lot of modern therapists kind of really hone in on those like first seven or so years of life. And they're very formative, but it doesn't stop there. You know, the big events that happen to you later, you know, the heartbreaks, the loss, the, you know, the accident that you were talking about that you went through, these created massive imprints in your mind that are still playing themselves out, that are still affecting the

way that you act now. But it's you're acting now in relation to what happened before. And the letting go part is letting go of the energy of the past that you're still carrying, that you're still bringing into the present over and over again. And the beautiful part of this modern age that we live in is that there's a lot of ways to let go. You know, like I let go through meditating. Other people let go through the, you know, practices that their therapist may teach them. There's just a lot of different ways to go about it. And there's no like sort of one to five step, like this is how you let go but uh knowing that the letting go often involves really always involves you coming back to the present moment yeah yeah yeah i think i think

it's hard because we get we do get so attached to our worldview and it's and and we think you know it's sort of come apart if we if we actually let go of what happened to us or if we move on or we don't hold on to things but you know i think we we tend to poison ourselves by this constant holding on to our ways of seeing and whether it's in relationship or to ourselves and i think one of the challenge for people and i noticed this for myself which people may find hard to explain given that i'm successful and you know blah blah blah is you know i i realized that I had a certain level of self-worth and self-love, but I really wasn't fully in it. And, and it sort of undermined my ability to love

others, to actually choose the things that were good for me in life, to say yes to what was good and to say no to what didn't resonate with me. And so how do, how do you kind of help guide people towards more self-acceptance, more self-love, more self-worth? Because it's sort of easy to talk about, but it's hard to do. Yeah, it is hard to do. And it's also hard to do in relation to like what society has or like what consumerism has created, uh, in regards to self-love where it's, you know, self-love in terms of just kind of pleasing yourself, just like, things giving us you know just the consumerist aspect of it but I think real self-love it is you basically trying actively and continuously to get to know

yourself and to do whatever it is you need to do to heal yourself and free yourself. So that's self-love. It's really an internal dynamic and it is hard. It's not something that's going to be easy, but the reason that we come back to it, the reason that I can come back to it personally is like, I literally can't make a bigger investment. Like it's the best investment that I could make. You know, I could, you know, be out there working and doing all these things, but all of it will just not, whatever I may produce will not be as good. If I don't have a strong ability to accept myself deeply, a strong ability to, um, balance that with self-love and understand that, you know, I should love myself deeply, but there's also things that I can,

you know, different directions that I can grow in that will help me become a better version of myself and just continue showing up into the world in a way that, you know, honors, um, the emotions that I'm feeling, but it's still, um, you know, showing up in a way that I feel really genuinely good about. Yeah. It's sort of, um, it's sort of an internal journey first, but then the harder part is in being in a relationship, right? With our family, our coworkers, our partner. Ram Dass talks our reality where we think we're moving in the right direction and we may be, but then, you know, we're find ourselves in relationship acting out these old unconscious patterns. So how, how can our relationships be part of our healing as opposed to creating more trauma for us, which they often do? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's tough because relationships are sort of like incubators for growth, whether we want them to be or not, you know, they really accelerate us seeing the different parts of ourselves that are good and the really tough

parts. I think whenever egos are in proximity of each other, it's only a, you know, a short, limited amount of time until there's conflict because egos are rough. And when they rub up against each other, the friction is created. So we cannot help but find, you know, difficulties in the people that we love, but being able to understand that, that it's not just about them, that the initial reaction may be you pointing the finger and being like, you made me feel this way. But when you develop self-awareness and you start realizing that actually, you know, I may have actually just gotten less hours of sleep last night and this is why I woke up and didn't feel good. But then my mind wanted to figure out how this is your fault and place the blame on

someone else. So there's one common practice that my wife and I try to do is we do our best to let each other know where we are in our emotional spectrum. And we let each other know, like, how do I feel right now? Instead of it sort of snowballing into this bigger narrative, we try to cut that narrative by just being in contact with each other about how we feel in the moment pretty constantly. And so you wake up in the morning and you go, hey, I'm feeling this. How are you feeling? Or

how do you do that in practice? Do you have like a time to check in every day or? So the practice is really, you know it's us um checking in first thing in the morning it's um just letting us know like okay either i feel like a lot of anxiety passing through me right now or i feel heavy right now or my mood feels really short um that information not only helps the person who's feeling it acknowledge and own the fact that, okay, I don't feel great right now, and I'm not going to try to fake it. And it lets your partner know, okay, that, you know, let me figure out ways to support them or just give them space or, you know, whatever it is, so that we're both aware that one of us is a little short today.

And it's been really funny, because there was this one particular moment where, you know, my wife and I, my wife was feeling tough that day and her and I were working in different rooms because we were both working from home at that time. And we, you know, we hadn't talked to each other for about like two, two and a half hours. And then she comes in and she's like, you know, I just spent the last like three hours trying to figure out how, you know, me not feeling good right now is your fault. And she was like, it was so crazy. Like it was totally illogical, like had nothing to do with you. And there are these times where, you know, certainly the tough moments of our past will play into how we feel and how we act and really the way that our character shows up.

But it's not always like that in the minutia of like regular everyday life where really sometimes it is because like maybe the day before I had too much sugar and now my mood's super low the next day or I didn't get enough sleep last night. And now like, you know, I feel tired. And what happens when you're tired, then you get angry, you know, you like it, um, being able to be aware of these things and honest with yourself and your partner or those around you who are with you. I think it actually stops a lot, a lot of unnecessary arguments from happening because surely sometimes your partner will say something to you that they should apologize for. But I would say 90% of the time, it's like you just jumping through these illogical hoops, trying to like create a

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That's seed.com forward slash hymen and use the code 25hymen. If you're stuck in a pattern that's causing suffering, RAIN, again, it's a weave of mindfulness and self-compassion. And the letters, it's an acronym, are recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. And I'll give you an example of RAIN. I'll give you a personal example. This was, you know, through the pandemic, people have used RAIN a lot. So I get people telling me, you know, RAIN has saved my life. Well, when my mother moved down here, and this was, oh, she moved down here when she was maybe 78 or 80. She came right at a time, super busy. I was

trying to put together all the material for a new book and so on. And I was really torn because I was feeling very guilty about not spending enough time with her. And I was really torn because I was feeling very guilty about not spending enough time with her. And I was also feeling anxious about getting work done and coming through on my teachings. Now, this is a basic cluster for me. If you say, you know, what are your issues? You know, guilt, like I am very programmed to want to come through for everybody. And very, you know, I get a lot of angst when I feel like I'm falling short. So that's a whole story cluster. And then the other one is on the Enneagram, if you're familiar,

is I'm a three, which is a performer who wants to make sure she's coming across well. And so I get anxious about not being prepared. So those were playing out. And I remember one day I was right here in my office and she came in. She was living here then and she had a New Yorker article she wanted to show me. And I was completely focused on my screen writing a talk, believe it or not, on love and kindness, which is embarrassing, but that's what I was doing. Get out of here. You're busy. Right, right. You're in my way. And so she was very discreet.

She just put it down and started retreating. And I turned and I saw her and I thought, wow, I don't know how long I'll have her. So after she left, I did a practice with RAIN. And the recognizes, recognizing, okay, guilt but also anxious. The allow is just what we were talking about earlier, Mark, which is, okay, just let it be here. This is the reality of this moment.

It's here. Just not try to judge it or ignore it. Okay, anxiety, guilt. The investigate, it's not cognitive. That's an important piece. It's cognitive only. You might identify what you're believing. And for me, I was believing, well, I'm letting her down, but I'm also going to could fail. But it's mostly somatic. With investigate, you're investigating how am I experiencing this directly in my body? And for me, I could feel the clutching in my chest and just place needed, and what it really needed was to be reminded of my goodness, that I was a loving being and that the truth would flow through in teaching.

It wasn't going to take a whole lot of selfing to do it. And so that was the nurturing. The nurturing was, I like to put my hand on my heart, and I often teach it with nurturing, the self-compassion, just to say, it's okay, sweetheart. Just trust your goodness. And there's a piece with rain where I call it after the rain, where you just sense the presence that is emerging. And after that kind of presence and compassion, after the rain where you just sense the presence that is emerging and after

that kind of presence and compassion I could just feel I was resting in a much larger more peaceful more spacious

more tender place and I practiced this a lot more when for a few months when my mom this is still the early days

of her being here and I found that we could I started really showing up more. Like I could have our salads in the evening, these giant salads, and I'd just be present. And we'd go for our walks by the river. And she died maybe three years later. And deep grief, of course, but not regrets. And I realized that RAIN had saved my life moments with my mother.

It had really given me that. And so it's just an example of how I'd been caught in the stories and the feelings and by interrupting with rain which is just mindfulness and compassion it really shifted my inner patterning yeah that's beautiful I mean it's a beautiful way of framing a way of investigating and thinking about any feelings we're having or any emotions or any thoughts you're having it's like it's just like a deliberate, clear practice, you know, recognize, allow and investigate and nurture. They're really simple ideas but they're really powerful. I'm kind of moved by the thinking about applying that to things that I have challenges with. So, I think it's great.

One of the things about it that's helpful to people is that when we're triggered, we have very little access to our prefrontal cortex. We forget how to get back home again, you know? And so, this gives a pretty easy to remember sequence. It's not inviolable. If once you go deeper into the practice, you'll find that it's not so logically ABCD, but it doesn't matter. There's still a way in which those elements are crucial. Now, if there's trauma, if the triggering is traumatic, you actually have to start with the nurturing. You have to start by creating more safety before you dive in and try to feel the feelings. And that's an important thing for people to know.

Wow. Yeah. So sometimes the order is different of how you engage with that practice, right? Sometimes the dark and the shadows is where the light actually starts to come in. And I know you've suffered a number of really challenging situations in your life um your mother's alcoholism miscarriage genetic issues that you have that you know you struggle with i've certainly had issues you know of health crises and family issues and relationship stuff and, you know, and just life itself.

And, you know, some people can be really in some ways poisoned by those experiences and turn dark and bitter and angry and hurt and isolated. And yet many people find a different way out of those experiences into a very different way of being. So for you, how have your hardships shaped you and how have those difficulties led you to find your way towards mindfulness? Well, first, I want to agree with you that suffering does have a potential to wake us up. And well, maybe just to give you an example of how I got turned towards mindfulness. When I was in college, I was probably peaking in angst. I wasn't alone. I had many others angsting, but depression, anxiety, and it really kind of the hub of it was just a lot of self-hatred.

And I remember at one point being on a camping trip with a friend who said, you know, I'm learning to be my own best friend and how far I was from that. So it just kind of opened up my eyes to, oh my gosh, you know, I hate my body. I feel like I'm failing in my relationships with others. I'm, you know, compulsively overeating. I'm not producing, you know, just every front. So that was a real pit of suffering. And interestingly, at the same time, I was very much a social activist. So I was

out there, and on the weekends, we'd have rallies, and there was a lot of agitation there. But I started doing a yoga class. So weekends, I was agitated, and then Tuesday nights, and it was yoga and meditation. And I remember one night, Mark, where I was, it was right after class. I was walking home and it was spring and fragrance of the fruit trees. And I stopped and realized that my body and my mind were in the same place at the same time. Wow, what a discovery. Amazing. And with that, just such a feeling of peace and belonging to the world.

And what really hit me then was, you know, if we want to change our world, it really has to come from a consciousness that is feeling love and connectedness, not agitation and shaking a fist at bad enemy others. So it was those two things together, the sense of this is really who I can be and also being at war with myself that I made a kind of 180 degree. I was on my way to law school and I ended up in an ashram for 10 years. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah, it was a big shift. That's a law school to ashram. That's like, you couldn't get further apart. I don't think.

I know, I keep double taking on it. But yeah, yeah, that's what happened. And in a way I understand it now because I'm still really very dedicated to social change. And I know we have to keep on waking up our hearts in order to have it come from love, not from anger and hatred. the self-worth issue and i think you know i think people have different degrees of self-worth or lack of self-worth um and often they're not even aware of and i think this is true for me not even aware of where the lack of self-worth lives and i and i've always thought of myself as someone who's fairly um you know uh fairly confident in my, in myself and my abilities, that I love myself, that I feel like I have high levels of self-worth,

but there was a lot of areas where I really wasn't showing up that way. And I, it really was hard for me to see it. And I think you call this the trance of unworthiness, you know, that you were caught in this trance of unworthiness. There was something, always something wrong with life, with you. How did you first sort of wake into the idea that you could let go of that story and really accept yourself? Well, for a lot of us, it's like what you said, it doesn't necessarily appear to us. And the reason I call it a trance is because most people, if I ask them, I do this at workshops,

you know, how many of you judge yourself? And like 98% of the hands will go up. But what people don't realize is that there's often this undercurrent of comparing ourselves to some idealized standard of who we should be, or how we should feel, or what we should be, how we should be behaving in this moment. It's like this inner monitor, like right now as we're doing this, there's a background inner monitor that in some way is evaluating. So how's it going? You know, that kind of a thing. And often we're not aware that there's a gap between how we want ourselves to be and how we're showing up.

We're just not aware of it. And it can affect everything because we're social beings and we want to be accepted and loved and if we feel we're falling short, it's profoundly threatening. And so we're not aware that there's that kind of fear and self-doubt. And it impacts how close we can feel with others. And it impacts how much risk we can take at work or our willingness to be creative or just our ability to relax in the moment if we think we're in some way in the red and we have to make up for it. So it's a trance.

And the cool thing is that when we shine a light on it and even get that there's this trance going on, there is something in us that has a yearning to be free from it, and it starts activating healing. So just seeing the trance is the beginning of freeing from it. So in a way, in some way, you're saying that people don't recognize that they are engaged in this battle with themselves against themselves, that they judge themselves, that they criticize themselves, that they see themselves in ways that are less than, and that they're

measuring themselves against some standard of themselves that is just a fantasy. And that that disconnect, that disparity is what causes just a fantasy. And that that disconnect, that disparity is what causes suffering for people. And that they're not even aware that they're doing it. And that we all have been fed those standards. It's like, I'm not thinking my thoughts, I'm thinking society's thoughts about how I should be, you know? And we all have been conditioned by the same culture that says, produce more and look this way and act this way. And everything from how skinny we should be to how spiritual we should be, we have these standards. And our family is the messenger. And so they imprinted in a certain

kind of constellation but it's in there it's so true i mean we go through life thinking that our beliefs or ideas our feelings our thoughts are all original they come from us that they're you know that we don't realize how powerfully conditioned we are to behave and think and act in certain ways and and if you travel a lot you know you if you meet people from different cultures especially radically different cultures not western cultures you begin to see that wow that's a really whole set of different assumptions and beliefs and feelings and thoughts about life i mean i was just in sardinia and i was i was up in the mountains and i was with this shepherd and and we're sitting there talking and you know about his life and what it's like. And, and I said,

so do you have any stress? Like, you know, he's, he's, he's got like 200 goats and sheep and he says, well, he thought about it. And he's like, Hmm, he'd almost, it was a puzzling question for him, you know? And he says, well, you know, sometimes at night when a goat kind of wanders off and that's i had to go find it that's stressful and then sometimes like it's you know when the goats give birth and we have to move the mothers close to the house and then they wake us up in the night and we have to go help them. And I'm like, oh, okay.

So, you know, it's like we are just in such different worlds. And he just had such a glow about him, such a, you know, sereneness. And his whole family was there helping with, you know, their home and the whole shepherding thing. And I was like, wow, you know, we really have different points of cultural reference about life and joy and happiness and meaning. And we've all gotten, you know, and I, you know, I've been thinking, I was thinking about this today, Tara, I was thinking about how, you know, people from other cultures are quite different. So when I meet people from different cultures, I'm like, wow, they're,

they're from a reference, their way of seeing the world, the, you know, the, the, the, they're seeing the of reference, their way of seeing the world. They're seeing the world through their eyes. It gives me a very different perspective about life. It's kind of liberating because I realize that all of my beliefs, thoughts of what I should do, my notions, beliefs, ideas about how life should be, what I should be, what I should be doing or not doing are so programmed and ingrained and never really begun to question them or question those thoughts about them. In education, when you go to medical school, the doctor doesn't say, believe you're a doctor and you'll be fine. And you can practice. No way. You have to study biology. You have to study

anatomy. You have to study chemistry, pharmacology, blah, blah, blah. so Buddhism is like that you have to you have to study it no authority can just tell you it's like two and so and then you believe it and that's that and and so that's why the four noble truths the sort of main framework of Buddhism they translated as truth and that's not wrong but if you translated it as the four noble facts that would be better yeah yeah you know there were aspects of reality yes and the first one is if you don't know what it is you're gonna misunderstand where you are who you are and where you are and you're gonna suffer but you can learn where it is that's the big kicker everyone else tells you in school the religious people told me you can't understand anything you just have to believe and and you have to believe

whether it makes sense to you or not just believe and I said that I don't like that I refuse that's no good and then I think that's a great joke on that you know the joke about that the theologians joke no where a theologian was asking the congregation like define faith tell me folks what is faith can you tell me and nobody would speak you know so then the little johnny in the front row was going like i can say i can say and he didn't go to him because he's a little kid then finally nobody grown up would speak so he says well you all should be ashamed yourself little john is the only one who's answering the question. Okay, little John, you tell these good people here,

what is faith? He says, oh, I can tell, I know what it is. Well, what is it? He says, faith is believing what you know ain't true. Langdon Gilkey, theologian at University of Chicago told me that joke. I love it, it turns out a little bit cynical. Yeah.

Anyway, so the point is, you can understand yourself and the world, and you don't have to be Einstein. Every human being with a brain is a kind of Einstein if they develop it. And that's what he said the human life is so fortunate not because we animals are not former humans they are but because they have souls etc that he's like Albert Schweitzer but I was like was like Schweitzer on that one yeah but the point is you have the ability to understand one and two you have to understand to be happy and when you really understand your world you will be happy so you know our misinterpret our reality and that's what's that suffering exactly but and

then in concert and then and then they reinforce our misinterpretation by telling us ignorance is bliss you don't want to know what it is because you'd be so scared of it, you know. And they misinterpret Darwin as thinking that it's nature red in tooth and claw, you know, they're gonna all destroy us if we don't have nuclear weapons or something, which is absolutely wrong, you know. But the point is, you know, even death, they tell us is so terrible and scary and had they threatened us with hell and things Like that then the scientists they tell you oh, yeah, we don't believe all that We're atheists and etc and then but we also think we're looking to understand this gene and this atom and this

subatomic particle and that Bacteria and this virus but we know that we'll never know everything so we still never will know so we just always keep looking for more stuff but we have a preconceived idea that you can't understand everything if any scientist jumped up and said Eureka I know everything now like Buddha did they would have them arrested or give them a tranquilizer you know because they have a preconceived idea that you also, you can't understand, you see. Yeah. But then I used to ask them, well, if you can't understand everything, how do you know you can't understand? And they

could never answer that one. Yeah. Well, I mean, to me, Buddhism is the science of the mind. That's it. So, but it's also it says you your mind you know Mark Hyman your mind Bob Thurman you whoever it is if you really develop your mind it is capable of understanding the world and you therefore you can understand your world not only can you but you experience it all the time you started with the four facts or the four truths. Yeah, yeah. The first one is that... If you don't understand it, it will bring you suffering. And because you will always be dissatisfied with everything

and you will not understand what you are and where you are. And so you'll be afraid that different bad things will happen to you. And so you'll fight things and you'll try to impose your own control on them rather than go with them and then that will fail and then you'll be frustrated and even happiness what you think of as happiness you'll be dissatisfied with because it won't last hmm and then you you won't be you won't get you won't be joy it well enough to make it last you actually can think there is a happiness that laughs but not that not the sort of ones that depend on some some external circumstance so so that's the first thing then second noble fact is that

that suffering has a cause and the causes are an inability to understand it understand nature of reality right no no, that's just our habit. It actually is luckily less real than our ability to understand it. That's the good news. But in order to do that, we have to analyze it. We have to figure it out. And therefore, he was a scientist. He figured things out.

The Buddha did. And meditation is not just shutting down your mind. That's wrongly taught meditation meditation is focusing your mind to a very much higher degree of intelligence which we all have the capacity for and then then we will reach an experience of what reality is and the third of fact and the reason they're called noble is that they are factual for a noble person. They're not factual for an ignorant person. Can I go back to the second one? Because my learning of that was that the first is recognizing that we suffer, that the way we think about reality causes us to suffer.

The second is that we're attached to things being the certain way, and that that causes suffering. Is that a misunderstanding of the second? No, that's correct. But the certain way and that that causes suffering. Is that a misunderstanding of the second? No, that's correct, but the certain way that we're attached to them is that we can't understand them. They are not us, they are a vast, in the case of materialism, which is our mainstream view in America nowadays, it's a vast material realm that is, you know, nobody can count all the fish in the ocean, all this kind of thing. So it's quantum, knowledge is quantifiable, has to be, and you never will get to, in an infinite universe, you'll never get to the full quantity, ever. So our misunderstanding of the

way things are has to do with our inability to be all right within everything, you see and the key component is that we're ignorant but we know we're ignorant so therefore we're attached to being ignorant actually and and if we really realize what ignorance means then we will realize that we don't know that we that that we can't be sure that we're going to stay ignorant and then we can change our mind follow me so it's that first beginning point it's a shift that's the big shift we can know and we can develop wisdom and the

wisdom can overcome that cause it's like that's the antidote right but wait then the next thing is the third noble fact. And the third noble fact is freedom from suffering, happiness. And this is what nobody, I'm afraid, really teaches well, who teaches Buddhism. They all stick on the suffering. And that's joining and terrorizing people. And the Buddhists themselves do that. And they say, oh, I I'm so happy I'm allowed to suffer that's nonsense nobody's allowing Buddha doesn't want

anybody to suffer he's compassionate he doesn't want them to suffer that's the whole point the recognition of the suffering is just a way of starting to cure it it's like when you when you're a doctor if you go into the patient and you say oh you had diabetic yeah yeah you'll never get rid of that have you done the job as a doctor I don't think so you're just taunting people basically right that's no that's no good if you if you see a patient and they have a problem sometimes you may have to say, I don't know how we can deal with this. You know, get ready to move on to a new life. But of course, that's a big problem. And that's a big problem for materialist doctors, because

they're trained that all people have is the physical life. So they don't know how to help them across that frontier, you know, which is actually not that bad. Once you let go, they actually, it's, you know, in French, you know, they have an expression for orgasm. You know what that is? Little death, the petit mort. And so that's not when you're fighting to stay alive, that's when you let go, you know, and you're no longer burdened with a body that's malfunctioning. And then you think you're going to be nothing, and that of course is typical delusion. It's like science supposedly goes by experiencing things through experiment, and experimental data

is supposed to outweigh theory, dogma, like everything is matter, for example, that's a big dogma. But experience is supposed to outweigh that, right? And yet, which scientist discovered the nothing that a materialist is so certain they're going to when they die? Which one discovered that? That's a great question. So if we think there's nothing after death, who proved that that's true? Nobody. Exactly. And not only did nobody do it, but common sense will tell you nobody ever will because not, nothing is a word for something that you don't discover. Therefore you won't get there by dying. Yes. The law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy goes for the mind.

It's the conservation of energy of the mind yeah so but with the exact what it is well that's an open question and we can investigate and science should be invested and buddhist science investigated that thousands of years ago and has some descriptions but this is also the great thing they say that no description of relative reality is the final description the dogma except for that You know that it's open in other words Yeah, then it's always open for a little more refined better analysis and helpful in this context But all such explanations are only good in certain contexts Yeah, and your mind is doors open for further deeper understanding so wait then the fourth

yes effect the fourth noble fact is the eightfold path of education and here's where typical mistraining comes from buddhists most buddhists they say training they call it but the word Adi shikshya in Sanskrit or in Pali or in Tibetan shikshya today in Hindi is the word for the Department of Education in unique privilege because he speaks all these languages. No, I don't really speak Hindi. Or he reads Tibetan, you speak Tibetan? I read Sanskrit. Sanskrit? Yeah, but not Hindi. But you speak Tibetan? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. And so you read the original text, so you don't have to go through a filter third party. You get to actually go directly to the source. It all gets so rusty, I'm getting to where I can barely speak English often. You're doing OK. But the point is, the fourth noble truth, therefore, is a curriculum.

It's a higher education in reality, science, discovery of reality, which is the job of science, wisdom, which is the goal of science, should be not just a quantifiable data list but wisdom, ethics, you know how to behave in a realistic manner and mind or meditation or how to cultivate your mind and how to manage your mind. so there's a higher education in those three things and the eight branches fit into these three higher education but they say training why do they say training i'll tell you why because in our culture we're all totally over educated yeah we've been four years here, eight years there, four years there, medical school, you know,

totally. And we have these degrees and we're still pissed off. We're still suffering. Still suffering and still frustrated. So we think, and of course we think our education is the greatest that ever happened on the planet and in the universe. You know, and maybe we're the only beings in the universe we stupidly think and had also we know that talk you know and then we think it's the

greatest so if since we've had this huge education it must suck so we want to think that Buddhism is just empty your mind and then you're fine don Don't have a mind, in other words, it's just absolutely the wrong thing to do. The greatest thing we have is the human mind. It's a little bit divine, you know? Yeah. And we agree with the religions on that. And it's vulnerable, which is the problem with the gods, is they are divine, but they're just in their

thousand year jacuzzi and they never do anything. So they deny all about the suffering. But we are not because we bump into things, we stub our toes. And so the point is, it's an education process. But it's a higher Adi, the Adi part means higher, Adi Shiksha, Shah you know intense education yeah because you're educating your whole being your mind and your body your head also and this I love that you said you know our body you know in your book you say we have to we have to do something with our body our body is we are responsible for our body when we save our body. We save the world. Yes, that's just

That's the fourth noble truth, that's the fourth noble truth. Yeah, that is the education process Yeah, and it's like really a doctor With a patient, you know this and you call it functional medicine but every doctor should do that we have to educate the patient yeah the patient has gone wrong in this beautiful environment that is just suited for the human being it's a perfect one for us if we didn't mess it up you know the plants are out there they want they're in love with us give me your carbon they say, I love that you breathe this carbon, noxious carbon, and I'm going to give you back oxygen because I love you. And it's a total gangbang with the plants. There you go. But not if we screw them up, not if we mess them up. No. So, Professor,

I have a question. We're recording this podcast, and it's in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are not doing it in person because we're socially isolating and being responsible. And there are so many people suffering right now. There are so many people who lost their jobs, who have lost their purpose. It's sort of like what John Lennon said, life, what happens when you're making other plans. And we all have other plans right now, including you and me and everybody. We're all in this together. And there's just such a massive global suffering of humanity. How do you use Buddhism as a lens to help us think differently about this moment? And what can you offer in terms of some

wisdom from your learnings about how to navigate this for all of us? Well, let's thank you for asking that that's good, and that's a great question and the thing is this first of all you know it is a suffering but It just it also you know First thing and first wisdom of Buddhism is ancient English Buddhism count your blessings you know if you're if you have if you're isolated but don't have the virus hey that's better than being sick if you have the virus but you don't have a severe case that's better than having dying if you're dying in a

at least you know you're gonna have another good life if you notice that you're dying and you can't help it and you then realize you're not gonna be nothing and also just because you believe in somebody else is going to help you that necessarily is not good but if you develop a positive view and relax yourself and let go into the light and you know and there's movies that teach you how to do that like Jacob's Ladder like like ghosts you know there are movies even nowadays that help you do that and you just let go or you know close encounter of the third kind or uh 2010 you just go into one of those special effects zoom you know you let go of yourself and then you'll be you'll be out of the body you know so in other words no matter what there's no worst case analysis that that is the ultimate horror no Buddhism

teaches you to look for the silver lining and focus on that on the other hand it doesn't teach you passively to accept the bad stuff and therefore you can demand that the government pay your unemployment insurance Yeah, you can demand that they they stopped a bank from foreclosing on your mortgage You can demand that they take the hundreds of billions that they give to the corrupt Corporations and they give it to you to grow your garden and they start subsidizing regenerative agriculture. And they move 20 billion, we give 20 billion dollars of direct subsidy to the oil industry, which they use to lobby the government to buy the congressmen like the Moscow Mitch.

And other corrupt also corrupt Democratic congressmen. And the president, they buy the president They'd buy presidents are cheap Give them a million dollars for his campaign and you get billions of dollars of subsidy. That's a total that that's like Hiring some somebody on the street. So it's interesting a lot of Buddhists are political activists Oh, yeah, they well some not when they understand Buddhism as meaning, shut yourself up in your shut down mind and just sit there and take the pain of sitting there uncomfortably. But the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, these are guys who

are real political activists. Well of course they are. They not only activists but they are activists. To be a politician, any kind of activist has to be an educational activist. You don't hate the bad guys, you want to educate them. Sometimes people are harming you, and you have to, like even with demons, the Buddhists usually try not to kill the demons they try not to now and then you know you have to have been self-defense by accident you know it's something bomb goes off but they try to capture them sit them down and get into the classroom with them they have these legends of interminable multi-life lectures going on with the demon and

Then the demons shape up once they realize that that's not gonna make them happy to harm people and harm other beings that never makes you Happy because that increases your isolation if you're harmful to someone that means you don't identify with them And that means you're different from them. So you divided up the world and you have stuck yourself in isolation. So the fact that we're all in isolation now, if we are under a sensible government, and with helping us to do that, to stop the plague because our human life is so valuable because it can give us the opportunity to understand the world, that is only showing us actually that we normally live in isolation. People are lonely. They are shut down.

They go on Facebook instead of having a friend who's their neighbor. They don't build their community. They're purposely isolated by industrialization because that makes them potential brainwashable consumers. They can do, as you said, 4,000 ads shown to children about some disgusting, poisonous, sugary color thing. They get brainwashed by the media. So they don't want them to hang with their parents, and the parents who know about, have a good doctor, tell them don't eat that stuff. Don't drink that nasty, diabesity drink.

Yes. They, so in other words, the isolation is imposed on us actually by industrial culture. You know Jerry Manders work, I'm sure you know that book for reasons why you throw out the television Well, I don't I don't agree with him. It's the ultimate bottom line I don't agree, but his awareness of that these things are gonna be so badly misused So you're actually good things that people are fearful now, right? So people are having a fear and and how do we how do we change? Our relationship about fear instead of it shutting us down. How can I serves? How do we change our relationship without fear?

Instead of it shutting us down, how can it serve us? How do we change relationship with fear as a tool to improve our lives? A great Bodhisattva who was once our president told us how the only thing to fear is fear itself. FDR. Yeah. One great Bodhisattva.

So what is a Bodhisattva for those listening who don't know or a noble person is someone who genuinely cares about other people hmm in other words and technique the technical in the Buddhist education the technical barrier of it is beyond having a theory about I should care for other people you begin to have you open up your natural human empathy to feel what they feel which we all have everyone feels that about a newborn baby their newborn baby they know this yeah yeah it's what's empathy and compassion is empathy actually but it's not only empathy beyond empathy it then is the sharing of happiness is what it is because it the only way to get rid of

suffering is to feel happy so compassion wants to spread happiness that's what it does so my understanding was the bodhisattva is someone who's reached the gates of enlightenment yeah but rather than get there himself turns back to help relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. That's right, that's right. But that's because that person, it isn't just because this person is automatically nicer than someone else, it's because that person has investigated reality enough to realize that no matter how cushy they feel, if there's ten people around them in agony the vibe is going to destroy their sense of feeling happy so we feel each other's

feelings you know the 60s but we have this wonderful expression from the 60s good vibrations and bad vibration but that's it that's an they have those kind of expressions in more enlightened languages than ours about how you do actually feel each other's feelings you do do that yeah and of course we can cut we cultivate that like like military people they cultivate but out of you know sort of riding on anger and hatred for the enemy they cultivate a sense of expanding the kinship empathy to your platoon members to your nation to your patriotism you know so and only that far and then they do it only as an opposite of the hatred for the enemy so but they should shows that you

can shift the way the mind of a person is and and but it's very hard for the military and it creates great suffering for the soldier because it means it truth they have to do two opposite things at once they have to cultivate their empathy for their fellow soldier and and citizen supposedly but meanwhile hatred for someone else which means no empathy for them yeah so they're there puts them in an internal conflict right away, 100%. And then they come back with their PTSD, and then pretty soon they don't have empathy for anybody, and they're like Rambo, you know?

They're impossible. The sheriff is going to get them. They're going to get the sheriff. They're going to shoot the sheriff. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at

Dr. Mark Hyman. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes, and lots more. And now you can have access to all of this information by signing up for my free Marks Picks newsletter at drhyman.com forward slash Marks Picks. I promise I'll only email you once a week on Fridays and I'll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey and I hope they'll help you too.

Again, that's drhyman.com forward slash Marks Picks. Thank you again and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional

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