The One You Feed - Koshin Paley Ellison

Episode Date: January 4, 2017

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Koshin Paley Ellison Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, cofounded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care,  which delivers contemplative approaches to care through education, direct service, and meditation practice.  Koshin is the co-editor of Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care . He received his clinical training at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center and the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association. He began is formal Zen training in 1987. He is a senior Zen monk, Soto Zen teacher, ACPE supervisor, and Jungian psychotherapist.   In This Interview, Koshin Paley Ellison and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable His new book: Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care The influence of his grandmother on his life and his work The story that changed his life forever That to truly love someone means to love all of the parts of them, even the ones you don't understand or like The importance of asking "where am I contracting away from things around me?" How we get into trouble because of our aversion The power of asking "I'm so curious about why you are angry?" Learning how to feel the feeling without becoming the feeling How his job is not to change people but to be with people That it's difficult for someone to move until their cry has been fully heard and received The healing connection with other people That dying people reflect on how well they loved and who loved them in their lives The recipe of resiliency: Including ourselves in how we care, the importance of community and having a contemplative practice with a group The relationship between having a contemplative practice and caring for the dying Learning how to give and receive freely = generosity To show up with beginners mind, to bear witness and identifying the loving action are the three important teachings for service Operationalized meditation         Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you can realize that people are really angry, maybe they have good reasons to be angry. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts thanks for joining us our guest on this episode is sensi koshin paley ellison who co-founded the new york zen center for contemplative, which delivers contemplative approaches to care through education, direct service, and meditation practice. Koshin is the co-editor of Awake at the Bedside, Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care. He received his clinical

training in Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center and the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association. He began his formal Zen training in 1987. Koshin is a senior Zen monk, Soto Zen teacher, and Jungian psychotherapist. Hey everybody, a couple quick things. One is by the time you listen to this, we will have celebrated our third anniversary. So three years of doing this show with a new episode every single week. So thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it. Secondly, I wanted to give more details on the One You Feed group coaching program.

The program will be limited to 10 people per group. We'll meet virtually once a week. The first part of it will be some education and teaching from me. And then the second part will be questions from you. The group is focused around making a change in your behavior, specifically starting a new behavior. So if you're hoping to exercise more in the new year, if you're hoping to eat better, if you want to start a meditation practice or spend more time with your children or whatever the behavior is that you want to start this year,

it will ensure that the changes you're making become a part of your life and stick and don't fall off like a lot of New Year's resolutions do. The program is $100. In addition to the formal part of the course where I am talking with you guys, we're also going to do some things where we pair people up as accountability partners that you can get some help in keeping these behaviors going. So it's a great chance for you to start a new behavior and make sure that it sticks through the new year. Just send me an email, eric at oneufeed.net, and we will talk with you a little bit more and get you signed up. So hope to talk with you soon. Bye. And here's the interview with Koshin Paley Allison. Hi, Koshin. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to have you on.

You are the editor of a new book that came out called Awake at the Bedside, Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care. And so we're going to spend a good portion of this interview kind of talking about your experience taking care of the dying and how your Zen practice has influenced that and vice versa. But let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there's a great battle that goes on inside of all of us between two wolves. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things

like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, Well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I love this parable very much. Well, I love this parable very much. And I think that for me, what's most moving about it is the grandfather and the grandparents spending time teaching the grandchild. Yeah. than the parable itself, the value of spending time together and really using that time to pass on what is helpful and of use. So, it's so moving to me to, before we even get to the wolves,

just the setting of the parable for me is the heart of what is so missing in many of our relationships that you know there's a incredible epidemic of isolation and loneliness in our culture now that is you know has these morbidity rates that are being shown in these new studies about that basically it's more unhealthy than smoking and overeating. You know, they're finding that people's loneliness. So, the story of the tenderness between the grandfather and the grandchild, to me, tells of a different kind of relationship that is possible and is necessary. And to me, that relationship itself is feeding the wolf of tenderness and compassion. So those are my first thoughts. Well, it's interesting that that's what you targeted on because your journey into what

you do really was because of your grandma, right? Yes. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? I think it's a great place to sort of frame the conversation or to start the conversation. Sure. You know, my grandmother was a Hungarian Jewish lady and who had, her parents had immigrated here early in the century and I didn't know her that well until actually I moved to Brooklyn where she lived and we spent a lot of time together and when my grandfather died I you know there was a lot of pressure from my aunt, Carol, and my father to move from Brooklyn to where they were living and move into an assisted living. And my grandmother was this incredibly vibrant woman

and was working as an office manager for a very busy law firm at the time when she was 82 and loved it more than anything. And she was beloved at the law firm. So when she was getting all this pressure from her children who loved her very much and very much a thing of our culture that, you know, someone's older, so they should be in assisted living. She didn't want to do that. She wanted to live where she had lived her whole life with the beauty parlor and the local diner and her neighbors and her friends. And she really was so embedded in the community and she couldn't even imagine giving that up. And so she and I made a pact to take care of each other. And I would look after her and she would look after me. And it was really the first time that I had made that kind of commitment to someone and really realizing that this is it for the long haul.

And we're going to be completely there for each other. And so it was extraordinary. Things happened, you know, from mostly just spending time with her to grocery shopping, to doctor's visits, to, you know, emergency late night rides and ambulances, to the hospital, to pneumonia in the hospital, to finally moving in with her into the hospice where she and I stayed for the last six weeks of her life. It was a time of talking about storytelling, of her telling stories of her own life and what she's learned. And in particular, I think, you know, one story that probably changed my life more than any other is that, you know, one night she woke me up in bed and was crying. And I said, Grandma, what's wrong? And she said, oh, you know, I'm so ashamed of myself.

And I said, why? And she said, well, I realized that I didn't fully love you. And I said, what do you mean by that? And she said, well, there are parts of you, that Buddhist thing, that Zen thing, really scared me, and I never really understood it, and I realized that a part of my heart contracted from you,

and I'm so sorry, because I can't believe it took me 87 years, but to truly love someone is to love all the things about them, even the things you don't understand or like. And I realized too, that I was not very curious about it. And that that way I also wasn't curious about what was most important to you.

And for that also, I'm sorry. So that, you know, was one of the most incredible teachings that stays with me every day. You know, where am I contracting, you know, from fully loving where I am? Because it's so easy, I think, to pull away from what you don't like. And what's challenging and what is an adventure is when you or various snippets here and there. You talk a lot about how much our ideas and our opinions and our preferences get us into trouble or take us away from intimacy with people. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that and maybe some examples? Yeah, I would say it's the heart of, you know, these are not certainly my ideas. of, you know, these are not certainly my ideas, they're my experience, but, you know, Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, was very clear that we get into trouble because of our aversion, right? And we're aversive to things. So, if you're a person, you have aversion, right?

And in my experience that, for example, I used to not think of myself as a very sad person at all, so not thinking of myself as an angry person. And I always wanted to be a nice person and to be liked and to be pleasing. And I realized that I had relegated myself into a little itty-bitty room. And I was not fully living. And so when I had been practicing Zen practice for about, I don't know, 15 years or so, I started volunteering and doing chaplaincy training after my grandmother died. And that's where I really saw my preferences, really at work in my habits.

Like the kind of people that I would want to go see or the people I would spend more time with. And for example, I really found that anyone who was kind of angry, I avoided. anyone who was kind of angry, I avoided. And it was a huge learning for me to realize that it was my own anger and my own frustrations and my own, you know, murderous feelings that we actually, we just all have, you know, it doesn't mean we act them out, right? But to really learn how to do that. And I'll tell you a brief story about, I've got so into really investigating anger and letting my patients in the hospital teach me about anger and what anger is about that

I became the person that the team would send to really angry people, which is so ironic for the person who identified as not angry. And this one woman, they found very difficult. This is on inpatient oncology floor. And that she was not following medical advice. And she was throwing things at people and cursing at them. And they said, oh, Koshin, maybe you should go see her. That would be good. And so I went into the room to see her. And immediately she's swearing at me and throwing things like that little kidney-shaped thing that they have like the way chris and you know even throwing her own pillows so she didn't even have pillows and so i was dodging them very lightly and then

i just stayed there and she said well what are you are you still doing here? And I said, well, I'm so curious about why you're angry. And she said, she paused for a moment and said, really? And I said, yeah, can I sit down and I would love for you to tell me about how you are so angry. And so I sat down and she began to tell me the story about how she had taken care of her two parents. One had Alzheimer's and the other one had Parkinson's. Early onset, both of them. And for 20 years, she had taken care of them in her home. And within the past year of when I met her, both of them had died and she felt like that was the beginning of her life. She's now in her late 40s and ready to live.

And she was diagnosed within a year of stage four ovarian cancer that had metastasized all over her body and her bone. And she was so pissed and it was so normal. So to me, the beauty is when you can realize that the people are really angry, maybe they have good reasons to be angry. they have good reasons to be angry. And if we can just hear them, if we can hear ourselves and not get caught by the feeling, but to be curious about the feeling. So like learning how to feel the feeling without becoming the feeling. I think that's really interesting, the listening to the angry person. With some people, that tends to help them, and it seems with other people, it seems like the lit... I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really no really yeah no really go to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The agony of anger is sort of endless. Is your perspective just they can be angry as long as they want to be angry, and my job isn't to change that? Well, my job is definitely not to change anyone. And, you know, that's as a chaplain or as a Zen teacher or as a friend. I'm more interested

in just being with people. Some people are just so wounded that they are just howling. And part of me, you know, I don't know, I can't say this is always the case, but I think that it's difficult for someone to move until their cry has to be fully heard and received. And I think that some people who are really angry, it's just that no one has really ever fully received their anger. I can't say that that's true across the board, but I know that has been really important for me in my own personal life, you know, in my own anger and frustration and hurts. Like I've really needed just for someone to receive it. But we all know what it's like probably to have people who want to change us or make us feel better or to do something to us. for a moment of someone who could just be with us just as we are and receive us with a whole in our where we are. My grandmother was that person for me consistently. She had a huge gift

of really receiving people. And when you were with her, you felt like nobody else was important. And she didn't try to make you feel better. She was just so interested in what you were experiencing. So I had a great teacher. Yeah. I had a conversation with somebody earlier today that's a little bit similar to this. And we were talking about how he sort of knows what the right answer is, you know, whether it be going to see a therapist or a spiritual teacher or just a friend, like he sort of knows what the right answer is, you know, whether it be going to see a therapist or a spiritual teacher or just a friend, like, he kind of knows what the right answer is. And I

said, Well, to me, that's not really the point, right? And the point isn't that someone can give me advice that I can't think of myself, the point is, there's something healing about that connection with another human that helps even if what they turn around and tell me is something I already know, there's still some, I always get some benefit in reaching out and to what you said into being heard. So important, right? It's, I feel like that's the one thing that's so lacking in our culture. And as you know, again, goes back to the parable, you know, the grandfather and the grandson. And wow, how special that is. And I have a friend, Taroni Lodog, who is this incredible integrative medicine physician and person. And her first question as a primary care doctor is always, in the first consultation, she says, okay,

so let's have a really serious conversation about who are the five people who would drop everything if we needed them to come here to be with you. And I want you to tell me about those people because we're in a web of relationships. But she said what's happening more and more is that people can't even come up with one. It's heartbreaking. They think like, oh, my sister, well, well, I don't know if she would come. And so I think that kind of fracture is what needs the most addressing. And to me, that's what, you know, working with dying people is so amazing because I've never met a dying person who said, I'm so glad I closed myself off all those years that isolated myself. And you never hear a dying person say,

I'm so glad I buried myself in my work and didn't nurture relationships. I'm so glad. You never hear those things. What you always hear is that it's about relationships and how well they loved and who loved them and who knew that they loved them. It's been so amazing how simple it is, but we're so distracted that we forget what's the most important thing. It's extraordinary. Part of what you do is you train people to be involved in palliative care,

how to sit with the dying. And I have a question for you related to that around a good friend of mine is a nurse, and she works in clinical trials for cancer, which pretty much means the people that she gets are the people that everything else failed for. And they're given a last shot, right? So a great proportion of those people end up dying. And I know it takes a toll on her. I'm curious just how you would, again, it's, you know,

you're not going to teach somebody in three or four minutes, but where would you tell that person to start with finding a way to remain open, to remain caring, and yet not just be a, you know, a basket case about it? It's the critical question, you know, I was talking to one of our board members this morning about the same thing, like, how can we support these people who are off in the field and doing the work on the ground? And, you know, our center is really based on three things that we feel like have to do with the medicine for that, which is we have study programs, direct care programs. The third prong is meditation in a sangha, so having a meditation practice in a community. So, you know, I don't think that someone has to be Buddhist, but to have a community, you know, where there's some kind of contemplative practice.

So what I would encourage everyone to do is to keep learning. Keep yourself learning and nurtured in that way. To keep training, keep learning new things, and to care. And to me, in modern healthcare as it is at the moment, there's a lot of focus on self-care. And so they often will tell people like your friend, oh, well, I hope you're doing your self-care but I think that is a real deprivation because I think my understanding and our center's understanding is that it's just care there's no self-care because if you're not nourishing yourself that is going to inform how you care for others. So including ourselves in how we care is crucial. And community.

I mean, those three things are, to me, the most important. And they keep us, not perfectly, of course, you know, but we will, I think it really helps us to maintain a sense of resiliency because we feel supported. We have people to turn to. We can keep learning and we can keep really checking with ourselves, like, how are we caring? And so to keep those as alive questions, to me, are part of the recipe of resiliency. But I think what's happened so often and, you know, we train clinicians across the country and what we hear constantly is that people are isolated and that people are stuck. They don't know how to keep learning and that people are stuck. They don't know how to keep learning

and that they feel that self-care and care are two different things. So it's like there's a real breakdown. And yet, you know, there's a wonderful Zen expression that says, you know, fall down seven times, get up eight times. So, like, I think we just have to learn to be a bit foolish and to realize that we need each other and we're not going to do it perfectly. And we do the best we can and we need to stretch a little bit

For people that are outside of the Zen tradition, can you point to the relationship between a meditation practice and being able to care for sick and dying people better? Can you connect those dots for people who may not have the perspective on that? So for us, when we started our center, we came up with the term contemplative care. So contemplative care is given by someone who has a contemplative practice, and that may be a yoga practice, a prayer practice, a walking in nature practice,

whatever it is, hopefully that has some kind of community in it, and that they see their caring as a practice that they're trying to learn how to show up for. So even if it's a physician who has an average three-minute visit, how they... I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like...

Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

They embody themselves in those three minutes so they're using their contemplative practice as a way of like staying with their breath, staying open and receptive. To me it's all a practice of generosity, like learning

how to practice generosity which is giving and receiving freely. And so that is an encounter in a relationship, like in the parable, or with a nurse, with a patient, or with myself and my favorite barista at Starbucks. It's about how do you show up in relationship. At one point I hear you say that at the Zen Center we start with three important teachings for service. Beginner's mind, witnessing, and loving action. Can you kind of walk me through those three and frame that up sort of in terms of what we've been talking about? Can you kind of walk me through those three and frame that up sort of in terms of what we've been talking about? So beginner's mind is easy to say and challenging to do. It means that it sounds good.

Yes. But it's this experience when we're not dragging all of our big black bag as robert bly says you know into the room we're actually not having a toolbox which will end up tripping over we're trying to practice like coming back to our breath in our belly having a soft belly and an open shoulders and almost like transparent torso so this ability just to like really be rooted in yourself so that you can really look at and listen to with your whole body what's happening so the beginner's mind is that you're not trying to be an expert because you've never been in that situation before, ever. And neither has the other person.

But we tend to make a lot of assumptions and fill up the space. For me, it's beginner's mind. And also, a very quick story that I love very much about it is a Western academic professor went to see a Zen teacher in Japan, and he wanted to know all about Zen. And the teacher said, oh, let's have some tea. And while the Zen teacher was serving tea, the professor kept asking lots of questions about what is everything?

What is that? And the Zen teacher kept pouring the tea until it overflowed the cup and was pouring all over the table. And the guy was saying, like, what are you doing? You're crazy. And the Zen teacher said, no, that's your mind. There's no space. Everything overflowing. No room for anything fresh.

So beginner's mind is that kind of not so full cup. Yeah, I love that story. Once we can cultivate that, which is a constant cultivation, we can bear witness to what's happening. We really take in like, wow, check out what's happening in this room. There are flowers or the person looks like they're wincing in pain or the homeless man on the street. Now, how is he doing today? You know, that we can actually arrive where we are. And to me, it's intrinsic to compassion to really bear it. I think we have to first bear it. And if we can do that, then we can actually do loving action,

which is the third part of our work, which is to be loving. Flows from compassion. So flows from compassionate action, like what actually is needed here? Or like the story of the woman on the oncology floor. Wow. I think what was most compassionate is that she just needs someone to stay. She's testing. What I was able to see when I was bearing witness to her was that she was testing who's going to stay and really hear her. And so to me, the loving action in that case looked like staying and being curious about her sorrow and anger. I've heard you use the term operationalized meditation. I don't know if you just made that up one time on another interview,

or that's the term you actually use, but I heard it and I thought it was interesting. So now you get to explain it. Well, that comes from the chaplaincy world, where they talk about operationalizing your spirituality. And to me, what that means is, how do you put it into action? So, for example, in Zen meditation, we focus on a place called the arhara, which is about two inches below our belly button, and we focus our attention there. inches below our belly button and we focus our attention there. So it's a great way of using concentration and spaciousness. And so when you operationalize that, so you sit on the cushion with that awareness, but then what about when you're in a relationship or you get off the cushion and you go on the street and someone falls in front of you? How do you return to the place that's soft and grounded in yourself? How do you operationalize that practice so that you can actually use it in relationship? Because

to me, the beauty of any kind of spiritual practice is, how does it help you become more intimate with who is in front of you, including yourself? Excellent. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on. It's been a great conversation conversation and thank you for the work that you do. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, take care. Bye. All right, bye.

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