The One You Feed - Lodro Rinzler on Meditation for Anxious People

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

Lodro Rinzler is the co-founder of MNDFL meditation studios, has taught meditation for 20 years in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and is the award-winning author of 7 books. He has spoken across the world at conferences, universities, and businesses as diverse as Google, Harvard University, and the White House.In this episode, Eric and Lodro talk about his new book, Take Back Your Mind: Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times and they walk through many practical strategies to employ on the spot when you’re feeling stressed or anxious to help you come back to a sense of “okay-ness” in the present moment.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Lodro Rinzler and I discuss Meditation for Anxious People and…His book, Take Back Your Mind: Buddhist Advice for Anxious TimesThe difference between anxiety and stress Useful vs Not Useful thinkingWhat to do when thoughts come up during meditationThe question “Is this helpful?”The question “Is this useful?”Discovering what happens when we unhook from anxious thoughtsHow to deliberately experience “30 seconds of contentment”Dispelling the myth that your mind is too busy to meditateBuddhists connecting our faith as being rooted in our direct experienceHow turning a boat one degree at a time leads to a completely different landWorking with your mind vs your mind working youMeditating without judging ourselvesLearning to be with difficult emotions through meditationSaying to yourself, “It’s ok to feel this”What it means to drop the story and feel the feelingAsking yourself, “What can I enjoy right now?”What it means to have a “thought party”The idea of “basic goodness”The metaphor of going to get a box of cereal from the grocery store when you already have a cupboard full Lodro Rinzler Links:lodrorinzler.comAdditional Resources from LodroInstagramTwitterFacebookUpstart: The fast and easy way to get a personal loan to consolidate, lower your interest rate, and pay off your debt. Go to www.upstart.com/wolfGreen Chef: The first USDA Certified Organic Meal Kit Company that makes eating well easy and affordable. Go to www.greenchef.com/90wolf and use code 90WOLF to get $90 off including free shippingLiterati Kids is a try-before-you-buy subscription club. Each month they deliver 5 vibrantly illustrated children’s books bringing the immersive magic of reading right to your home. You choose which ones you want to buy and then send the rest back for free. Head to www.literati.com/wolf for 25% off your first two orders.If you enjoyed this conversation with Lodro Rinzler on Meditation for Anxious People, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Lodro Rinzler (Episode from 2014)Hardcore Zen with Brad WarnerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

No one's turning to us and saying, you should be anxious, you should be stressed all the time. We do it to ourself. And once we realize that, we say, oh, I can choose the other wolf. 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 really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really no really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Lodro Rinsler, co-founder of MNDFL Meditation. He has taught meditation for 20 years in the Buddhist tradition and is the award-winning author of seven books. Lodro has spoken across the world at conferences, universities, and businesses as diverse as Google, Harvard University, and the White House.

His new book is Take Back Your Mind, Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times. Hi, Lodro. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me back. I'm excited to be here with you, Eric. We're going to be talking about your new book that is called Take Back Your Mind, Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. 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. The granddaughter stops. She thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather. She says, 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. Yeah. Thank you for asking. And I have to admit, you know, our time together, I think, gosh, we first recorded a bazillion years ago. Yes. You know, it always stuck with me when we started talking about this. And it carried through into this book that you just mentioned, Take Back Your Mind, Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times. Because it was this realization that I don't think many of us have, which is that there's a choice. And so many of us wake up in the morning and the first thought is,

what do I need to do? What do I need to accomplish? What stress should I already be trying to like navigate my life? As opposed to, whoa, whoa, whoa, my mind doesn't have to be in that state. Could I make a different choice? And I think that choice that you present of like,

what do I feed on a given day is really a beautiful one. So that conversation we initially had really did feed into the early chapters of this book. In particular, there's this opening where I say, hey, if you were going to choose between happiness and stress, what would you choose? I choose happiness. Oddly enough, this has 100% success rate. But it's like's like of course we would choose happiness and in that moment you just made that choice the same as the two wolf choice right like what are we choosing to feed and you know coming in from a meditation teacher background not surprisingly there's a lot

of meditation a lot of shorter techniques that are not necessarily formal meditations but all of them are directed to how can we continue to make that choice instead of just reacting and sort of spinning out into the anxiety of the day could we actually start to move our mind out from the stories that bury us in that state into the present moment long enough to then start to choose to feed the wolf that's actually based in happiness i appreciate the work that you've been doing because it really is highlighting to people like, oh, I get to work with my mind. I get to choose how I live my life. And I'm sorry I'm going on so long. I'm just very excited to talk to you. But you don't get an email from your boss that says, hey, here's all the things I need from you.

By the way, please be stressed out the entire time you do it. No one's turning to us and saying, you should be anxious. You should be stressed all the time. We do it to ourself. And once we realize that, we say, oh, I can choose the other wolf. Right. We do it to ourselves, but a lot of times it doesn't feel like that choice is there. You know, I'm sure you do. I hear all the time people saying, well, I'm trying not to worry about this all the time. I'm trying not to just let these thoughts spin in my head over and over. And I feel like I try and stop it and then boom, it's right back and boom, it's right back. So I think that while on one hand we have a choice of which we feed, as we know about thoughts, there's an automatic nature to them. We don't really choose them.

They just sort of show up. I'll let you respond to that and then we'll sort of dive into some of the points of the book. Yeah, I'm happy to. That's, I mean, it's a great point because I think one of the key distinctions here is again, meditation teacher talking, let's acknowledge the lens through which I'm viewing the world. All these like mindfulness techniques that are coming out and are in the news these days, everyone's like, that's stress reduction, which is a bit of a misnomer because it makes it sound like all of a sudden you don't have to pay your taxes. You know, your rent doesn't come due. Like there's no stress. No, that boss doesn't actually expect anything. There's stressors in

our life. There's thoughts that arise around that. And the key distinction here is how long do we hold ourselves in that state? The stressor causes us stress. My landlord says the rent is late. That stresses me out. I need to figure out how I'm going to pay the bills. Fine. How much time do we actually spend? I'm going to actually be purposeful in getting my finances in order. And how much time do we spend walking around the world completely blinded to what's going on around us? Because all we're doing is having a conversation with the landlord in our head. It's not benefiting us. It's not benefiting anyone. The bill isn't getting paid, but we're locking ourselves in at that point. It's no longer a stressor. It's a state of anxiety. So that's the distinction. Can we unhook ourselves from that state of anxiety, the stories, the nonstop stories we tell ourselves in

our own head long enough to say, oh, I can deal with the situation at hand. I can actually relate to the stressor. I can relate to the person in front of me. I can relate to my morning coffee. I can be present for all of it. And actually that makes it feel a little bit less overwhelming also. Yeah, I agree. I think I make such a distinction between useful and non-useful thoughts in this sense, right? Like there's a point if we use your example about the landlord and I don't have the money to pay the rent, there is a point that the thinking about that is very useful. I do need to think about it because I have a problem that needs to be solved. And I'm going to put my mind on it. And I need to solve the problem. Where things tend to go wrong is that we go well beyond useful. There's nothing

else to solve or we've we've already come up with an answer, but we continue to obsess. I often give this example of it. It's a meditation class example. I was in a meditation class once and we started doing the walking meditation and the guy in the front, you know, the sort of the front of the circle was walking so slow. I mean, it would have been a great meditation skit. The problem was that nobody behind him could move. I could just see everybody

was frustrated and they were standing there. And so I finally was like, I just went up to the guy and I said, excuse me, sir, you know, if you could move just a little bit quicker, everybody could kind of walk. And I was really uncomfortable doing it. I didn't know what to do. So then we sit back down to meditate and I got 30 minutes to think about what I've just done. And I'm like, ah, shit, you know, should I have done that? And within a couple minutes, I went, you know what, I'm just going to go up to him afterwards. I'll just say, I'm sorry if that seemed rude. Here's why I did it. I hope it didn't upset you. I'll just set it right. That's that. Problem solved. Except, of course, that I continue to ruminate on it for 25 more minutes. All that 25 more minutes after I decided

my course of action, to me was in that not useful thinking, because I didn't cover any new ground, I didn't uncover a new solution, I just fretted. And I think that's kind of what you're speaking to here when you're making that distinction. 100%. And, you know, I'll kick the dead horse early on in the conversation, which is meditation really does help us do exactly what you just said, which is to acknowledge, oh, I've become repetitive. I've gotten completely lost in what if thinking. What if they think this about me? What if they are going to complain about me? Whatever.

And we acknowledge those thoughts and we come back into something a little bit more stabilizing, such as the breath, and we can return into the present moment, i.e. reality. And that's really helpful for unhooking ourselves over and over again. The more people say, oh, I've got too many thoughts to meditate. You have a hundred thoughts pop up in a meditation session. You have a hundred opportunities to retrain the mind, not to chase after every anxiety-producing story that comes up. And for people that are like, no, I'm bored with this meditation thing, thank you. In terms of like on the spot techniques, you just named something that's in the book, which is we could catch ourself. You know, we're in the shower, we're on a long drive, we're washing the dishes. We're doing these stories. At some point we can ask one of two questions. I find the question, is this helpful?

Is this helpful? Oh no, this isn't actually helping me. This is actually causing me more stress. Somehow becoming that gently inquisitive shifts us. It unhooks us again long enough to come back into the present moment. And the other one is exactly what you just named. Is this useful? It's not useful. Maybe it's useful the first two times, but not the 50th time. Cool. Maybe that's a neat time to unhook myself. What's the distinction you're making between helpful and useful? It's absolute semantics. Some people just draw themselves into one or the other I find helpful because if I'm not actually helping myself and I'm not helping anyone, then for me personally,

it's like, oh, but I think the useful thing is, as you noted, maybe the first couple of times we say, okay, yeah, well, here's how I'm going to actually respond to that person. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go talk to that person after just clear the air. And then after that, we say, well, now it's no longer useful. So there is some acknowledgement that, you know, maybe there is information from our emotional states that we can learn. There's a whole two chapters, I guess, in the book around actually being with some of the emotions like anxiety or fear or worry or whatever might be in that scenario. Can we be with it, learn from it and move through it? You do make a distinction in the book between stress and anxiety, and we sort of covered it there, but maybe we could just go through it again, how you're using those two terms.

The way that I talk about it is exactly what I was referring to before, the sense of there's stress in our life. And unfortunately, this is like the bad news. I always give the bad news, which is stress exists. If we somehow magically maneuver our work situation, so it's no longer stressing us out. All of a sudden we noticed that there's something going on in our family situation that's stressing us out. Family situation is doing well, everyone's healthy over there. Okay, how about our romantic relationship? And so there's always going to be stressors.

And then out of those stressors arise anxiety, which is us holding ourselves in the state of stress. It is, again, no one other than us saying, here's what we're going to do. The brain's a problem-solving device. So the brain goes into overdrive and says, I'm going to solve for any potential situation. And yet, I don't know if you've ever had this happen. It certainly happened to me. You know, you have this conversation coming up with a business

partner, a friend or whatever, and you play through, okay, here's what we're going to talk about. Here's what they're going to say. I know what they're going to say that. So I'm going to, here's my counter. Here's what I'm going to do. If I've ever spent, you know, minutes to hours playing and replaying and problem solving around the conversation, never once has it ever gone the way I thought it would. Never once did they respond exactly as I thought and vice versa. So again, if it's not helping us, we need to actually start to rewire the brain and retrain the brain, not to hold ourselves in the state of anxiety. I agree with so much of what you said there. I think that idea, there's always something,

you know, there's always some stressor. There's always a problem to solve. The writer, she's not a Buddhist writer, but she's a spiritual writer, Mary O'Malley. She has a phrase that I, ever since she said it, and it's probably been five years ago, is never, you know, it's just always with me. She's like, the mind is a problem factory. And I was like, that's my brain. Solve one and it just cranks out another. Your description, you were just talking about like, I've got this conversation coming up with somebody. I'm just like, if I could just get through that conversation, I get through that conversation. I feel relief for a couple minutes and then boom, new problem shows up. I'm like, well, okay, better get to work on solving that one. So you're right. If we don't manage, then for me, if I don't manage my mind, I stay in constant problem-solving mode or at least figuring out mode. Like the brain is just always trying to figure something out.

And that's not bad, except that it does sort of take me completely away from moments of joy, peace, and what's actually happening. Yeah, that's exactly it. So going back to this choice, if I'm in the shower and I'm playing out these thoughts, the moment I'm actually able to unhook myself, I'm like, oh, it's nice in here. The warm water hitting my skin, it feels nice. When we actually drop some of the stories that we keep ourselves locked in pain around we find that there's this great wide open world that we can appreciate that we can actually feel some sense of gratitude contentment but again it's like a two-step process here like step one unhook ourselves from that story so that we can come into the present

moment long enough to step two start to notice and appreciate some of the things. And there's also like multiple chapters in there around gratitude practices, appreciation practices, even just simple things that we can do in this moment where we can say, oh, I never really appreciate that piece of art that's hanging above my desk. You know, can I just rest there for a moment? Give myself 30 seconds of contentment. And it sounds silly when I say 30 seconds of contentment. Many of us don't even do that. We don't do that when we taste the morning coffee. We don't do that when we climb into bed with our spouse. We don't do that while we're petting the animal. You know, mentally, we're not there. So if we actually want to live a very full and meaningful life, we actually have to be present for it. Absolutely. So let's talk about getting better

at this. Because again, I know a lot of people listening, a lot of coaching clients I work with will say, yeah, I get it. Okay. Yes. I need to move out of my thinking brain and my problem solving brain and be a little bit more present. So fine. I do that and it lasts for about a quarter of a second and then I'm sucked back into the anxiety and it just feels like I can't get out. And so let's talk about starting to unwind that pattern, because I think it's unrealistic to think that you or anybody is going to offer us like, well, here, just do this one little thing, and that problem is going to just vanish, right? So how do you go about, you know,

walking somebody who says, you know what, I've got no ability to direct my mind. Where do I start? What do I do? I guess the first step is to disavow them of that belief. And don't get me wrong, I have close friends who love my work, even buy the books, but they're like, yeah, I can't actually meditate, thank you. And they have a belief that their mind is too busy that the anxiety actually does get to control their life and it's the first step really is to say well when we just did that do you want to choose happiness you want to choose stress thing that person makes a choice

they say happiness so can we actually just look for a thousand different ways of choosing happiness? And it starts with that. It can start with as simple as like just verbally saying it and move into any number of tips, tricks, techniques. You know, there's, for example, what I call in the book, the hiccup meditation, which is not a formal term, but it's just, okay, I'm super stressed. This angry email lands in my inbox. What do I do? I close the laptop and I take three deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth.

Again, a 30 second situation. And yet it really radically shifts our focus. Now here's the thing, mindfulness meditation, this whole thing where we could do it for five, 10, 15, 20 minutes, whatever, where we notice the stories come up, we acknowledge them, we come back, that literally trains the brain. But along the way, there's going to be little wins that we need to celebrate. So even if we have those three deep breaths and all of a sudden we feel a little bit like the body's calmer, the mind is a little calmer because of the 30-second intervention, now we know we can have intervention. Now we know we can have times of relaxation, that we don't have to always be in stress.

So where do we pledge our mental allegiance? Do we pledge it to developing more stories around stress? Or do we start to say, well, no, it's not a Lodro or an Eric or anyone saying, here's how you're going to change your life. It's me. I just had that experience. You know, when we coming out of the Buddhist tradition, when we talk about faith, faith is often referring to our own experience. I have a moment of relaxation while I'm practicing

meditation, while I'm doing the 3D press, whatever it is. In that moment, it's me. I've discovered that. And I liked it. And I can go further with it. The faith is that I have an experience that I'm confident existed, that I can go further. And if I had one moment of relaxation, maybe I can make it two. It's two moments of relaxation in a day. Maybe I can make it five. And we just start to build our life in this direction. And again, the bad news here is that it isn't a quick fix. It's like a constant working and reworking with the mind. Sometimes it feels like we've swayed into the ocean. We're trying to push back the tide with our own two hands.

That's where we all start. Don't get me wrong, and I get it. I'm a lifelong meditation practitioner. I've been doing meditation for 30-plus years, and only in the last few years do I really, really get serious and say, okay, not just during meditation, but in my post-meditation experience, i.e. the rest of my waking hours, I got to really address this. Otherwise, it's going to take over my life. And it's that. It's like, once we make a real commitment, we start to notice how anxiety and all the what-if stories come up. And there's so many

different modalities expanding beyond meditation therapy, all sorts of exercises, journaling, things like that, that can help take us from different angles of working with the mind and bring us into the present moment long enough to again, choose happiness. I love that idea of what am I pledging allegiance to? Because I do see a lot of arguing for our own limitations. There's a lot of arguing for why anxiety gets to win. There's a lot of arguing. I see that in a lot of people instead of like you said, sort of saying, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put my, my allegiance, my faith and my energy over here that says, no, that's not the way

it has to be. You know, it feels that way a lot of the time, but it doesn't have to be that way. And little bit by little bit, I can reclaim the mind. And I think that for me, that's so much of it is just lots and lots of things. One of my favorite phrases is a little by little, a little becomes a lot. And so 10 minutes of meditation here, 30 seconds of reclaiming my mind here, five minutes of breathing here. I mean, little by little, because most of us are not in a position where we go, well, I'm just going to go away for three years to the monastery and train my mind.

And I'll then have a little bit of a steadier place to come from. We have to, we have to carve it out little bit by little bit. And to go a completely different analogy, you know, if we are a boat and we set off from one dock and we're going to sail across the ocean and the way that our momentum, the way we were raised, the way our schooling happened, our work situation, our living situation, all of that has come together so that we are on course to live in land of complete anxiety. But I'm not saying turn the ship around. I'm saying we're turning this ship one degree at first, two degrees. And then what happens as we sail over the course of the ocean, we end up going to a dramatically different land. A friend and

person who I admire very much, Dan Harris, wrote the brilliantly titled book, 10% Happier. 10%, right? Like that's it. It's like 10% less stressed out, 10% more engaged in our life and more present and more appreciative. That's where we're going. If we took 1% of our day and said, no, I'm not going to chase after anxiety. I'm just going to hook myself a little bit, come into the present moment, sit my coffee, take the duck for a walk. Again, all of this is in the book too, where it's like there's 10,000 different ways we can, beyond just a simple meditation technique, that we could start to retrain the mind to be present, not to chase after anxiety. That 1% a day means all of a sudden we're one degree in a completely different course than living our life based on anxiety. Two degrees.

And it goes over time. Weeks turn into months turn into years. And the people I've worked with over the last 20 years starting to feel 20 years i've been teaching meditation now it's a situation where i've seen them over and over again say for example here we are in the midst of a pandemic i can't imagine how i'd be able to handle this without actually having this established meditation practice without the ability to work with my mind it would be completely overwhelming which is actually a big part of what inspired this book which is there's so many people who aren't working with their mind in any way, shape, or form. The mind is working them. It's taken over, and it's overwhelming them.

So can we at least take ourselves down to a state of relaxation, if not complete joy, bliss, et cetera, et cetera. So you and I have both had, in our illustrious past, lots of debt. Yes, absolutely. And I think you got out of yours the honorable way by actually paying it off. I did. And the way I did it was with loan consolidation. And it's really, really effective because all of a sudden, instead of having all these multiple credit cards with these really high interest rates, and if I miss one, I incur an extra penalty, and I'm just never going in the right direction. With a loan consolidation, all of a sudden, I have one simple payment with one lower interest rate. So Upstart is the fast and easy way to get a personal loan to pay off your debt all online. Kind of makes me want to run out, open five new credit cards, and then really just go crazy over

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Upstart. Find out how Upstart can lower your monthly payments today when you go to upstart.com slash wolf and make sure to use that URL to let them know that we sent you. Loan amounts will be determined based on your credit, income, and certain other information provided by your loan application. Go to upstart.com slash wolf. Eric, did I tell you that I made three of the Green Chef organic meals? You did tell me, actually, because you were pretty excited about how enjoyable it was to make them and how delicious they were. I made them three nights in a row, basically. But the porcini mashed potatoes and the orange miso tofu were just so great. My wife loved them, everything.

She was very impressed, thinking that I could cook that well. Well, the interesting thing about Green Chef is that they have all kinds of different plans to fit every lifestyle. So the one you mentioned was the vegetarian one one because that's what we like to have. But they've also got keto, paleo, vegan, vegetarian. Or if you're just looking to eat healthier, there's a range of recipes to suit any diet or preference. And Green Chef is the first USDA certified organic meal kit company. Yeah, which is important certainly to us is that,

you know, if we can get it organic, it's ideal. And then it's also very sustainable because they offset 100% of their carbon emissions and plastic packaging in every box. So you can feel great about what you're eating and how it got to your table. One distinction I want to make too between Green Chef and some of the other meal kit plan companies that I've made is the instructions and the packaging are absolutely fantastic on this. You really would have thought that I knew a ton about cooking. It's got these beautiful printouts, very simple step-by-step instructions. I'll have to make you one someday. Yes. So go to greenchef.com slash 90 wolf and use code 90 wolf to get $90 off, including free shipping. Again, that's greenchef.com slash 90 wolf and use the code

90 wolf to get $90 off. And it has free shipping. Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating well. I want to explore two areas here. I want to talk about what you just mentioned a few minutes ago, this idea of I can't meditate because I think that's a really important one. And then I'd like to explore some of the on-the-spot practices that you recommend. I mean, my obsession over the last couple years has been something I call spiritual habits, but spiritual habits is finding those on the spot practices, things we do in the midst of our lives that allow us to

change. Not things that we have to take time away from and go do, like meditation, which is critical, but things that we do as we're going about our day. So let's start first with, I can't meditate, my brain is too busy. Yeah, I think we have to start small. And there's also this part of the book, which is, I keep saying, here's something that you can do. And by the way, if you go to loderoventler.com slash anxiety, you get like me talking you through this. So a lot of times people say, I can't do it.

And I watched a thing on YouTube and I put it down. It just felt like too much to have supportive guides have people that you can talk to i made a commitment when my first book came out nine years ago that i was going to respond to everyone who ever wrote to me about my books and it does keep me ridiculously busy but i still do it people say you know lord of renfrew's team like i'm the team books um you know it's me so when people are like i can't do it if they've taken the time to read one of my books i can take the time to actually help you know guide them a little bit i'm a bit of a tangent but like i'm there for whoever's listening wants to explore the book wants to actually learn these techniques

i know it's not like i'm just a podcast guest i I'm happy to engage. All of these things are now recorded and they're live. And we can actually talk about, like someone's going to talk you through this. And it can start with five breaths. We could just count five cycles of the body breathing. Maybe the mind wanders during that. We try it again. But it's just we've got to start with a bite-sized thing. And as I talked about earlier, that's how we breed confidence. Oh, I was able to breathe with my breath for five cycles,

five in-breath and out-breaths. Okay, now I can move to 10. Now I can sit for 10 minutes. And often what happens with long-time meditators, they look over their shoulder, they don't know how they've changed. They're often the last people to acknowledge it. It's almost like they're wading into the water centimeter by centimeter. And then all of a sudden they have no idea how they're up to their neck in it. It's just this gradual change. I've seen it happen over and over again. For many years, I co-founded a network of meditation studios that particularly in the pandemic have now closed down called Mindful. And there are all these sorts of people and they'd come in with friends and I would say, what, you's going on how do you two know each other and she goes you

know it's so interesting we'll say the guy's name is ethan ethan here you know he was always such a jerk and yet you know he's a longtime friend we go to lunch every tuesday and i noticed he started listening to me more he started following up on things and actually really caring about like what we had talked about because he was sort of hearing me more. And as someone I was like, what's going on with you? He goes, I don't know. Is it because you've been doing this meditation thing? And then of course he said, yes, I guess that must be it. That's the only thing that's changed. He didn't know that he was becoming kinder or a better listener or any of it. And now she wants to do it, right? Because she saw the change in someone else. So I do think that, again,

surrounding ourselves with people who are going to support us in these endeavors can be really helpful. It doesn't have to be a loader or a rinsler. It can be going to a local meditation center or a meditation studio. It can be, you know, there's so many online communities,

including my own these days, that you can actually start to work with a teacher and have someone hold your hand. And it's not like there's, you know, certainly not me, but many of the people I often refer individuals over to. It's not like there's some guru on the top of the mountain. There are individuals who are just a little bit further down the path than you

who might have been doing this and are still so close to where you are that they understand exactly what you're going through. So if I walked into a room full of meditators of all ages and ranges and backgrounds and said, who here thinks that they're the worst meditator of all ages and ranges and backgrounds and said, who here thinks that they're the worst meditator of all time? I would put good money on every hand going up. And that if it's everyone, then it's no one, right? So we sort of all have to be in it together. And I think that's why I'm sort of pushing the community support and teacher support during all of this. Yeah. I love that idea that everybody would think they're the worst

meditator ever because you're in your head and you know like well jeez I am trying to stay focused on this thing and yet my mind wanders anywhere from every two or three seconds to you know best case scenario every two or three minutes maybe maybe it extends a little bit longer but I think when we realize that that's what happens that that's just the process then we can relax with it and I think that's one of the biggest things for me with what changed my meditation practice. And I've seen change a lot of other people's meditation practices is to stop judging it and just to go, yeah. Okay. So yes, I thought, you know, 35 times in a 10 minute meditation, because if we feel like we're failing, nobody likes to do something they feel like they're really bad at. Like, you know, and so I'm

like, well, if I'm failing every 10 seconds, I'm going to develop an aversive relationship. And if I've developed an aversive relationship, it's going to be hard to stick with it. That's exactly it. I think there's so many areas of our life already where we're unkind to ourselves. Meditation meditation in my mind should be a judgment-free zone. If we even look at the classic definitions around mindfulness that are bandied about in the West, it's often that we are present to what is currently occurring, dot, dot, dot, without judgment. So why are we judging ourselves in this practice? There's actually a beautiful moment in meditation. This is such a geeky thing to say,

but most people are like, oh, this trains me to be present. It also trains me to be kind because this moment I drift off and I catch myself. What do I do with that? Do I say, you jerk? Why are you so bad at this? You're bad at everything. No surprise that you'd have your mind.

You're not the person that can meditate. Or do I actually infuse that sense of friendliness? Hey, it's not a big deal. It happens to everyone. Generate thoughts all day long. It's what the mind does. Not a big deal. Come on back.

Relax. That moment is planting one of two possible seeds to come back to our parable, right? Like, am I planting the seeds for aggression towards myself that will ultimately, if I don't feel good about myself, lead to me causing harm and causing aggression towards others. Been there, know that one. Or the one that I've gradually gotten better at over time, planting the seeds of deep kindness toward ourselves. And that's the moment that we say, oh, wait, if I actually have a deep well of love and kindness for myself, then I can actually go and offer that to others. I love that. I think that's a great thing to really draw attention to is that that moment really matters. What do I do? How do I respond to my mind having wandered off

again? You know, and it's so funny. I've said this on the show many times. I know that I heard meditation teachers were saying, your mind's going to wander, not a big deal. Be friendly to yourself, bring it back. I know that's what they were saying. And yet, I don't know why it took me 20 years, I feel like, to really get that message, to really get that that moment that my mind wandered, the more friendly I could be to myself and the more relaxed about it I could be, the better it was. I almost feel like we can't go too far in stressing that. I'm with you on that. And, you know, maybe even to answer the other question that you asked about sort of short practices, you know, one of the things that's in the book

is just a mindfulness of emotions practice. Because often when we feel something like anxiety, stress, fear, whatever it might be, we start to say, well, something's wrong with me. I'm bad. fear, whatever it might be, we start to say, well, something's wrong with me. I'm bad. No, these are emotions that come up and we could actually learn to be with them, that we're not somehow broken or bad or wrong for feeling what we feel. And this particular phrase was bandied about by Joseph Goldstein, who's one of the co-founders of Insight Meditation Society, a wonderful organization here in the West. And he says that when we notice this, we can just say, it's okay to feel this. So the pith instruction, if I may, is to drop the story, feel the feeling. And by that, it's like, oh, you know, here I am either in the meditation practice,

or let's say actually perhaps more accurately, since we're talking in this realm, in my day-to-day life, and I'm either beating myself up or feeling bad. I should have said that thing last night. Oh God, I feel weird. Can I drop the story and actually come into feeling the energy of the feeling itself? Can I actually feel it in the body and just rest with that? When we aren't throwing fuel on the fire of our emotions, it tends to just naturally burn out. And that's how we do it. The fuel, of course, is the stories that keep us locked there.

What if I do this? Maybe I should go tell them that. We drop that. We feel the feeling. The fire naturally just does its thing. It's like holding our hands to the warmth of it, feeling it, as opposed to adding fuel. So that's one of just even acknowledging on the spot,

it's okay to feel this, dropping the story, feeling the feeling. That's a really important one in terms of offering ourselves that sense of kindness. Thank you. One of the greatest loves of my life that I've had forever, besides Chris, is reading. Great children's books can open up new worlds for discovery. And with Literati Kids, your child can explore uncharted places every month with spellbinding stories handpicked by experts. Literati Kids is a try-before-you-buy subscription book club. Literati Kids is a try-before-you-buy subscription book club. Each month, they deliver five vibrantly illustrated children's books,

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book subscription, the most joyful way to foster a lifelong love of learning. And what could be better for a kid than that? It has served me so well in my life. That's literati.com slash wolf. What I get a lot from listeners or people are saying like, well, it's great. I try that, but here's the problem. Here's what's not working. So I love to get folks like you on and explore these things in a little bit more depth because drop the storyline, feel the feeling. We all get it and we're like, well, that makes a lot of sense. The challenge that I have in my own life with it sometimes is it's like, I try and drop the storyline, feel the feeling. I drop into the feeling for about a quarter of a second and then boom, I'm back up at the story. And then I'm down

and I'm, you know, and it goes back and forth. And maybe sometimes I even managed to stay in the feeling a little bit, but when I come back up, the story's still there just doing its thing. Is it just that the fuel takes a while to burn out? And this is something we have to just back to that word of practice. We just have to keep trying. It's exactly it. Yeah. And I think, don't get me wrong. I wish that we can wave a magic wand and all of a sudden say, this makes the story disappear. Anyone who says that though, in my experience is not accurate. I was going to swear on your show. I'm not going to do that, but you know, it's's not accurate we do have to gradually retrain the mind we spent decades many of us saying i'm just gonna let the mind run around like a wild animal and now

we're trying to tame the wild animal we're trying to say you know come on back let's let's come on inside let's get warm you know like it's it's hard because the animal doesn't know what we're even talking about first but we say you know on, I'll give you a treat. At some point they say, oh, I like treats, and they come back in. And then they run off and they do their wild thing. Come on in. So we actually, going back to what we were talking about before, we really do have to be quite gentle with ourselves.

There's no whipping the mind into shape. This is not a book about beating ourselves up to the point of mind submitting to us. It's actually just befriending ourselves. It's just being really kind to ourselves. And to the best of our ability, moving the mind in the direction that actually feels like, what is that tree? For some of us, it's like a gratitude practice. Every morning when I wake up, before I put my feet on the bed, before I look at the phone, before I do a thing, I just rattle off some of the things I'm grateful for. And it's the world's shortest contemplation practice. It's a minute. But what am I grateful for? I sit with

that question. I notice what arises from within my own mind. Sometimes it's a few things. Sometimes it's many. Sometimes I'm surprised. Sometimes it's very basic things. I'm healthy right now. There's a roof over my head. There's quiet in my home right now. It doesn't have to be something hyper-specific that we've always wanted. No, it's just starting the day by being present long enough to appreciate what's right under our nose. And then what happens when I swing my feet over and they touch the floor? I actually am already starting my day, not from a place of stress, from a place of appreciation. So simple things like that that are in the book as well. So let's talk about a couple more on the spot practices.

You got a couple more you could share with us? Along those lines, another question I think is really helpful is what can I enjoy right now? You know, we're going through our day, you know, we're sort of bouncing between this meeting and that meeting and this thing. And then there's a gap. And it could be the simple gap of, you know, when we get off the line today, there's going to be a gap. And it becomes, what can I enjoy right now? Can we train the mind to just ask that question? Again, looking over at this painting that's above my desk, you know, that my wife and I got, and it's something that we saved up for.

And there's something really sort of sweet about having like a grownup piece of artwork here, you know, and there's deep appreciation for the whole experience it's that simple well there's flowers over there there's fresh flowers they perk up the room they uplift me I feel uplifted looking at them so what can I enjoy right now is a really important question particularly for those moments that are as I'm saying like gaps gap moments like I'm in an elevator commuting you know I'm in the waiting room while before the doctor calls you in, whatever it is, those are moments that we could just start to notice, what can I appreciate right now? What can I enjoy right now? That's a really helpful one in my own experience alongside the, what am I grateful for? And then there's one that I probably should have

mentioned for the people who are still like, this guy's, you know, full of it. I mean, you know, I can't actually ever meditate or any of it. There's a practice in here called the thought party, which I love, which is something I was introduced to when I was 18 years old. And it's the idea of not trying to stop the thoughts, but actually to invite them all in.

It's like to get it to the point where it's almost extreme, where we're sitting, like, and again, you could be in the waiting room. This doesn't have to be a almost extreme, where we're sitting, like, and again, you could be in the waiting room. This doesn't have to be a formal meditation. But we're like, oh my gosh, someone said this, and I'm going to do that. And then after this, I've got to do that thing.

And then all of a sudden we say, let me invite in all of us. Let me see if I can think every thought that I could possibly think. And it becomes very, very, very, very, very big. And at some point it pops, because it's just like, it becomes so ludicrous that we start to develop a sense of humor about it. And that's been my experience. It's been the experience of any number of meditation students that I work with, that if we get to that point where we say, I'm just going to make it really, really, really big. At some point it becomes ludicrous. My favorite example of this is when I start talking to someone around work and they say,

well, you know, sort of dropped the ball on this project and there's so much anxiety around it. Okay, let's spin this out. Let's do it. If they are mad that I dropped the ball on this project, then I'm going to get a bad review. What happens if you get a bad review? I get a couple of bad reviews. I'm going to lose my job.

What happens if you lose your job? I'm never going to get another job like this again. What happens if you never get a job? Well, then I'm going to lose my mortgage. I'm going to be destitute. And it always ends with people living in a box on the street. It could be I sent an email late at night, and my boss is going to be mad I bothered them. And it ends there.

So it's like at some point, we almost have to laugh and be like, oh, this isn't reality. So we make it big enough so that we realize how far we are from reality. And then it pops. And then we can come home to reality again. So that's another one that I think could be helpful for people that are like, I have too many thoughts to meditate. Think all of them, bring them all in, and then come back home to reality. Feel the breath for a moment. See if that's helpful. One of the notions that really underlies Buddhism as a whole, but is particularly important in Shambhala Buddhism, which I think is

at least the path that you spent a lot of time in, I don't know if you would describe yourself as part of that path now, is basic goodness. So explain to us what basic goodness is and how does it help us in dealing with anxiety? Yeah, it's a great question. This term basic goodness is really profound and it's something that was developed by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who is a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and is very well known for bringing these teachings here to the West. But we look at other traditions, even within Tibetan Buddhism, for example, we could sometimes say, oh, this is Buddha nature. The fact that underneath all of these stories, we're inherently awake. That's just who we are. The Buddha didn't attain some

sort of enlightenment out there. He just discovered that he was already wakeful and developed a relationship to that. We too can do that. In Zen, the famous contemporary of Trungpa Rinpoche, Suzuki Roshi, would refer to it as universal nature or original mind, or perhaps famously known in his book, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind mind it's the sense of complete openness and wakefulness that is inherent to all human beings so that's what we're talking about but i do like the term basic goodness because basic is not sort of uh i'm gonna be swearing i apologize like it's not like a basic bitch it's not like you know we have this like term here that's like you know it's not uncouth it's a sense of fundamental it's foundational to who we are it's not uncouth. It's a sense of fundamental. It's foundational to who we are.

It's inherent, primordial, innate to who we are. So it's a part of us. And the goodness is not a good versus bad Star Wars thing, right? That's not what it is. It's a wholeness, completeness. Like we're basically okay. I think most of us walk around saying, I'm not basically okay. I'm basically messed up.

So this view can be really radical and profound for people who may not have contemplated this possibility before that inherently I'm okay. I'm not basically a mess. We can mess up at times. We can be completely blocked from our goodness, our basic goodness, our Buddha nature and act confused. I have, Lord knows I have, I've made many mistakes, but that's not who we are. And in those moments, can we say, oh, I can acknowledge it. I can say, I don't want to do that anymore. I can say, can I even hopefully make some sort of reparation and connection to these people who I might have wronged? Fine. Good. None of that negates our basic goodness. And this is horrible for most people right now because they're like, well, surely you don't mean

the QAnon people have basic goodness. Surely you don't mean this politician has basic goodness. Surely you don't mean this person who committed this atrocity. And the unfortunate thing, according to the Buddhist view, is that we actually all possess basic goodness and some of us just act really, really, really effing confused. So we can't unfortunately control who has complete access to their basic goodness who's blocked from it but

we can work with our own minds and hearts and that's the beautiful thing that on one hand yes we're treating the disease of anxiety in this book and this conversation but in the other it's like what do we find underneath the stories that keep us locked in anxiety? Our own goodness, our own wholeness. And again, this is not a loader of answers saying, this is what you're going to experience. Here's a philosophy. When we are able to relax with ourselves in the moment, maybe it is during meditation. Maybe we're just there with the breath for a moment. We say, oh, I feel okay.

I'm whole, complete good in this moment. That's it. It's not, you know, I'm shooting laser beams out of my eyeballs. I'm just whole, complete good in this moment. Then you know it for yourself. And then you can develop more and more of a relationship to it. As far as I found in my limited experience with these teachings, the point that we started on the path is that moment where we say, oh, I can actually relax. I can be with myself and who I am is basically good. And then the entirety of the path going forward is, can I develop deeper relationship and confidence in that experience

and be more in touch with that as opposed to more in touch with my anxiety? The fruition then would be that we would lead a life living and interacting with people through that lens. I would agree with you. That's my understanding of the path also. I'm more of a Zen practitioner these days. But same thing. Yeah, everything you said there is, you know, it's that basic idea. It's already here. What we're seeking is already here. I was rereading Zen Mind Beginner's Mind the other day, and Suzuki Roshi talks that we're not attaining enlightenment, right? We're not attaining Buddha of nature or any of it. It's sort of like saying, I'm going to go attain a box of cereal from the grocery store when my cupboard's full of it. It's right there. It's already here.

I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to get anything. It's already here waiting for me to dive in. Yeah. The spiritual teacher Adyashanti once did this thing, one of his retreats I was at, he said, all right, I can't remember whether he had a stand up or not, but for the purposes of it, let's imagine everybody stands up and he says, okay, now take one step closer to yourself. You suddenly realized like, well, I can't, I, I'm as close as I can be. I'm here because everybody's prepared to move. And all of a sudden toward closer to yourself and you're like, well, you know, in Zen, we talk about the backward step. You know, the backward step, which is just stepping inside instead of outside. Yeah, beautiful point.

As I mentioned before, the book is called Take Back Your Mind, Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times. And not only is it something that you are publishing yourself, but you're also doing something special with the proceeds. Say a little bit about that. Yeah. So the beauty of this going through the new imprint that I'm founding with some colleagues called Dharma Club Publications is that we can actually determine where the proceeds go. And I think sometimes when you go through a larger publisher, I'll just say often, you don't often realize that the author gets very little of the proceeds and it goes to everyone that generates the book, which is totally fair. But in our current situation, you know, with the pandemic, we want to get this book out very quickly and we wanted it to help the most people. So part of that is that all of the proceeds, which is everything that is not going directly into

the production of the book, the vast majority of every dollar that's spent when someone buys it goes to one of two charities, split between the two. The first is the Feeding America organization, which is food banks around America for those who are in need. And the other is the Loveland Foundation, which is a really wonderful and beautiful organization that is committed to offering therapeutic support to Black and Brown women and girls. This is a funny story that I reached out to both organizations. I said, you know, I would love to offer the proceeds from this book so that when people buy it, they're helping others in addition to helping themselves. Both organizations were delighted. And small world situation is that the current executive director of the Loveland Foundation had read The Buddha Walks into a Bar a number of years before and got inspired and got into philanthropy and then ended up with this organization.

Wow. I never would have predicted that one, but I think it's a really sweet story. So I'm hoping that similarly, this book has ramifications that actually do really help people, both the readers and then hopefully we can raise a lot of good money for these excellent organizations. That is a great story. That is really wonderful. Well, Lodro, thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's always a pleasure. I think we've had two full interviews and you've come on a couple of times for our little short little moments.

I'm happy to have you. I always enjoy talking. So thank you so much. Hey, my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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