The One You Feed - Noah Levine

Episode Date: May 28, 2014

This week on The One You Feed we have Noah Levine.We were lucky enough to sit down with Noah in the Against the Stream headquarters in Los Angeles. Noah's teachings are core to everything that I have come to believe over the years. I'm really excited to present this interview.Noah Levine (born 1971) is an American Buddhist teacher and the author of the books Dharma Punx: A Memoir , Against the Stream,  and The Heart of The Revolution. As a counselor known for his philosophical alignment with Buddhism and punk ideology, he founded Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. As a youth, Levine was incarcerated several times. His first book, Dharma Punx, details teenage years filled with drugs, violence, and multiple suicide attempts—choices fuelled by disillusionment with American mainstream culture. His substance abuse started early in life—at age six he began smoking marijuana—and finally ended in a padded detoxification cell in juvenile prison 11 years later. It was in this cell where he hit "an emotional rock bottom" and began his Buddhist practice "out of a place of extreme drug addiction and violence".He recently started Refuge Recovery which is a community of people who are using the practices of mindfulness, compassion, forgiveness and generosity to heal the pain and suffering that addiction has caused. His new book is titled Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovery from Addiction.In This Interview Noah and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.How he found Buddhism through his life failures.What "going against the stream" means.That the bad wolf has a stronger tendency in us and wins by default.How our capacity for kindness, generosity, and love have to be cultivated.Why the path of the Buddha is revolutionary.Going against the status quo.How to be in the world but not of it.The distinction between suffering and pain.The difference between craving and desire.Why suffering is not your fault.How the 1st Noble Truth normalizes the experience of suffering.The impermanent nature of all things.How we can never satisfy happiness through sense pleasure.How we layer suffering on top of our pain.Not asking "why" but instead asking "how do I respond"Meeting pain with compassion and kindness.Learning to include ourselves in our circle of compassion.The crippling power of doubt in our growth.The gradual nature of spiritual growth.How sometimes the first things we find in our spiritual practice is the bad stuff.His new program, Refuge Recovery. Noah Levine LinksAgainst the Stream homepageAgainst the Stream audio archivesNoah Levine HomepageNoah Levine Amazon Author Page Some of our most popular interviews you might also enjoy:Mike Scott of the WaterboysRich RollTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's actually quite normal to feed the bad wolf. That's actually the norm that our body and our world and our society is based on, these sort of greed, hatred, delusion tendencies. 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 sign jason bobblehead the really no really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to the show our guest Our guest today is Noah Levine, a Buddhist teacher, author, and counselor. He's the author of three books, Dharma Punks, Against the Stream, and The Heart of the Revolution. He's also the founder of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Center that has branches all across America.

His new book is Refuge Recovery, which provides a Buddhist approach to recovery from substance abuse. Let's hear the interview. Hi, Noah. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah, we're happy to be here also. We're in your Against the Stream Meditation Center here in Los Angeles, so it's a pleasure to be here and to meet you. Our podcast is based on the old parable of two wolves that I know that you know,

where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there's two wolves inside of us. 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 hatred and greed and fear. And the grandson stops, and he thinks, and he says, grandfather, well, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to just start off by asking you how that parable applies to your life and the work you do here.

Well, it applies to my life in a lot of ways. And on some level, the first half of my life, I was feeding the wolf of addiction and crime and violence and kind of selfish behavior, self-centered, fear-based behavior. And in 1988, when I got into recovery and started practicing meditation, that was the kind of beginning of turning away from belief and practice of feeding the negative wolf and the greed and hatred and delusion and starting to feed and train my mind, my heart, towards kindness and compassion and forgiveness and wisdom through mindfulness practice. So personally, of course, it's been the huge change in my life. It's been absolutely this parable around

what am I feeding, what am I practicing, what am I believing, and what am I doing. And in the teachings that I, you know, came to settle in, a Buddhist, Theravadan Buddhist, the Southern School of Buddhism's, fitting so well with, you know, when I started studying and having come from a background of rebellion and kind of 80s punk culture. And I found that the Buddha said, this path goes against greed, against hatred, against delusion. And I feel like this fits really well with the parable, is he's saying, you know, there is all of this normal, it's actually quite normal to feed the bad wolf. That's actually the norm that our body and our world and our society is based on these sort of greed, hatred, delusion tendencies, and that in order to awaken, we have to go against

that. We have to turn towards kindness and compassion and non-greed, generosity and loving kindness and developing wisdom by training the mind. So, in that way, I feel like, you know, what I teach is very much about, I think maybe even in Buddhism, there's a little bit more, like with this parable, of feeling like the good wolf is actually the runt of the litter. That it's not actually that very natural to us, or it's not very easy. It's not as simple as making a choice that left to our human tendency, our own devices, the confused, the ignorant, the bad wolf will always win.

That that is actually the norm of what naturally gets fed, and it sort of has a stronger tendency in us. And that in order to develop the goodness, the good heart, that it takes quite a bit of effort, this against the stream teaching that the Buddha is saying is that you're not going to just feed the good wolf naturally. You're going to have to put a ton of effort into training the heart and the mind in order to access that goodness, right? It's there, and again, where I like the parable, that goodness, right? It's there.

And again, where I like the parable, it's there because both wolves are there. Both sides of us is there. There is the negative tendency towards causing and experiencing suffering. And there is a positive tendency. There's a potential for enlightenment in all beings. But it's a pretty dormant potential. And it's one that takes quite a bit of effort to bring forth yeah and i think that's i mean that's part of why we started this show was it's i noticed by nature my default patterns are they're certainly not to be aware at the very least right it's to

be it's to be in complete complete autopilot i think one of the things that i've loved about your teachings and one of the things that you've really brought to it is harnessing that spirit of rebellion that a lot of people have and turning that into a spiritual path, which is really, I mean, obviously that's probably what you're known for. But you talk about this practice as being revolutionary. Can you share a little bit more about that? this practice as being revolutionary. Can you share a little bit more about that? I think it's along the lines of what we're already discussing, that the status quo is to live a life based on thinking that happiness comes from sensual or material pleasure or abundance and kind of an addiction to pleasant experiences and an aversion or a hatred of unpleasant, of pain. And that's the norm. That's the status quo. And in a lot of ways,

I think that there's no real blame or judgment in that that's just what our human evolutionary survival instinct dictates, which is in order to survive, you have to be addicted to pleasure and you have to hate pain. You have to love pleasure and hate pain. And it works for survival, but it doesn't work for happiness. So my feeling is that the spiritual path, my experience and understanding is that coming to a meditative spiritual path that includes ethical behavior and generosity, forgiveness, is one that's going against the status quo. It is when we say, I'm dissatisfied. I don't want to be a normal human person who's just seeking my happiness in stuff, in sensation, or even in unreliable relationships, in impermanent people and places and things.

And then this becomes a revolutionary stance. Because first we have to go against the internal forces of clinging and aversion and self-centered tendency. And then as we do that more and more, we see that also this is what's happening in the world. So, it's an internal rebellion against the internal causes of suffering, and then becomes also an external revolutionary stance to say, I'm not seeking my happiness through materialism. I'm not seeking my happiness through sense pleasures. I'm seeking my happiness through an internal sense of well-being that negotiates and lives in this material world and participates on one level. I mean, of course, I choose to participate in the material world. Many say, I'm going to become a

monastic. I'm going to actually take this commitment to internal happiness to the level where I'm going to completely rebel against the promises of material happiness level where I'm going to completely rebel against the promises of material happiness. And I'm going to, you know, forsake that all the way. Myself, I've said, well, I want to be in the world. I want to be of service in the world. I want to have a family. I want to, you know, live the full, I think it was Zorba the Greek, I want to have the full catastrophe, the wife, the kids, the full catastrophe. It's catastrophe sometimes. Yes.

Well, and just the practice of all of the challenges of it. And I guess it's that simple, kind of how do we be in the world but not of it? How do we have our things that we own but not be addicted to them, not be so identified with, and that new car is going to make me happy, or that new home, or that new relationship. And having an internal understanding that I'm going to have the stuff, but I'm not going to rely on it for my happiness, because I know for sure that it's unreliable as a source of happiness. Right. One of the things that I think a lot of people misunderstand about Buddhism, and I think a lot of people misunderstand about

Buddhism, and I think it's really even challenging if you're not clear about it, is that it talks about, you know, the first noble truth being that there is suffering in life and that suffering comes from our clinging and that there's a way to eliminate that. And I think that, at least for me for a while, I rebelled against that idea because I thought, well, there's no way to get rid of pain. And I think you do a really good job of making the distinction between pain and suffering. And can you break that out a little bit more? Yeah, absolutely. There's this Buddhist promise that says you can, as you're saying, the Buddhist promise

is you can be free from suffering by ending craving. In order for this promise to be realized, we have to have a distinction between suffering and pain. The end of suffering is not the end of pain. Pain is inevitable. You have a body, you have a nervous system, life is going to hurt, you have emotions, you're going to have a body. You have a nervous system. Life is going to hurt. You have emotions. You're going to have unpleasant emotions. So the suffering definition is that layer on top of the pain or unpleasant experience of life that we have when we meet it with hatred, when we meet it with aversion, when

we take it too personally. There's all of this suffering that happens. And that's actually practical. We can't get rid of pain, but we can change our relationship to pain to where we have compassion for it rather than hatred towards it. Likewise, I think that it's important to have a distinction and a definition between craving and desire. Because sometimes Buddhism gets mistranslated as desire is the cause of suffering, and that there's some way that we're going to end desire. But really, the word that the Buddha uses, tanha, is an insatiable, repetitive thirst or craving that comes in the form of clinging and aversion. And so, obviously, it's not going to be possible to get rid of desire. You have a,

you're alive, you're going to desire comfort and food and, you know. Pete Oxygen. Jared Oxygen and even connection, intimacy and relationships. It's a natural and can be a healthy desire. But I would like to define desire as I want, but I'm okay with or without. And craving as I need to have before I can be happy. Right. So I do believe and have seen in my own practice less and less need, less and less craving that causes suffering in my life. It hasn't done that much to make the desire completely go away.

Desire continues to arise, but not the delusion that I have to satisfy in order to be happy. 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. 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. A theme that has come up a few times, especially recently, is talking with some people about depression. We had a guest on who's written a book on depression and also on having children with disabilities.

And that there's an additional layer. So you're talking about the layer of suffering we put on by Kling, and I think there's an additional layer of suffering that we can put on where we feel bad about that we're depressed. We feel like there's something wrong with that. We feel bad that something in our life isn't the way it should be, as if life is expected to be a certain way. And when ours doesn't meet that, then we feel bad about ourselves.

And I think you've said that the first noble truth is an antidote to that. Can you explain that more? Well, I know for myself, I loved hearing a normalizing statement that there is suffering in life and that it's not your fault. That part of taking birth is that there's going to be some suffering. There's going to be pain. There's going to be loss. There's going to be sickness, aging, death. We're going to be separated from that which we love. We're going to not get that which we desire. And this normalizing, like, oh, it's like this for everybody. It's not my fault. I'm not doing something wrong.

This is just the deal we're born into. Now, unfortunately, we live in a world where there's all of these messages that say, you should be happy. You can have it all. You can have it all, and you should be satisfied, and you should be healthy and young forever, which is just a delusional, you know, materialist message. Which is just a delusional, you know, materialist message. So absolutely normalizing it and saying, well, it's not your fault. But you do have the power to develop a heart and mind through mindfulness. There's three insights that come from mindfulness practice or Buddhist meditation practice.

One is seeing the impermanent nature of all thoughts and feelings, sensations, everything that arises, passes. The more we see that, the more we can, the more liberating that is to see, oh, everything changes now. Impermanence is good news when life is painful. Impermanence is not so good news when life is pleasant and you kind of have everything lined up that you want. And you say, oh, this too is going to change. This is also going to pass. The second insight is that we won't find satisfaction in any of these impermanent experiences. And that is also somewhat liberating to say, okay, I can stop looking for my happiness in sense pleasures. looking for my happiness in sense pleasures. I can stop looking for my happiness in mind states of like that my mind is somehow going to make me happy or that my body is somehow going to

be comfortable all of the time. Pain is obvious why it's unsatisfactory. Pleasure is not always so obvious. Like, well, if I get enough pleasure, I'll be satisfied. If I get enough attention, enough money, enough fame, whatever it is. But it's all impermanent, right? That praise arises and it passes. So, it's never going to actually be satisfactory. The third insight, which I think points a lot towards your question, which is coming to understand that there's an impersonal nature to life, that this is the human condition, that this is just what it's like to have a brain and a body and a heart. You have emotions, you have sensations, you have this planning, remembering, perception, and that it's not so

personal, and that even the depression, not so personal, even the anxiety depression not so personal even the anxiety not so personal it's just the causes and conditions that are arising right now and then the practice well i think one of the holes that people get stuck in is why what did i do wrong why me and i think buddhism often asks us to say don't ask so much why but ask how can I respond to this in a way that will minimize suffering? Yeah, one of my favorite Buddhist teachings, and I'm sure I'll get it not quite right, and if you know it, maybe you can give it in its full thing, is the one where the guy shot with the arrow. Can you tell that one?

Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of what we're talking about here is the Buddha says that often we, human beings, are like someone who's been shot by an arrow, so we're in pain. But before having the surgeon remove the arrow, we say, who shot me? And what kind of arrow is this? And what kind of wood is the shaft made out of? And what kind of feathers are on the end of this arrow? And we're so like in the inquiry that we're sitting there bleeding to death and that we're actually, you know, all of that questioning and all of that is actually creating a second arrow where now we're creating suffering on top of the pain of having been shot once. Yep. I love that story because it's such a clear representation of that second arrow,

that level of suffering that we layer over. And it's becoming aware of that stuff. It's so funny. I'm here. We're here in LA and we're on vacation. And I think we've got, we're about halfway through and immediate, I'm already starting to get the, wait, I got to go home soon. Right? You know, I'm like the clinging to the pleasure starts to spoil the pleasure itself right in the middle of it. And I look back on my life, how often I've done that. I find a beautiful place

and I'm immediately thinking about how can I own a house here? How can I be here all the time? And it's not your fault, right? That's just what the mind does. We take the mind so personal and this is where the insight into the impersonal or not self can really help

because we're so identified with our thoughts. We think, oh, and then we start judging ourselves like, okay, I'm here and now I'm attached to being here. I'm craving to make this a permanent experience. And, but I know I shouldn't be doing that. So now I'm judging myself and with a mindful relationship to the mind. You say, oh, yeah, the mind just does that. It starts having a pleasant experience and planning for how can I keep it. 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. You talk about meeting pain with compassion and kindness. What does that mean in a, I mean, I get, I think it's easy to understand what it means in a theoretical sense. What does that mean in a real sense? How do you do that? One of the first ways that I learned that, and I think it's a practical thing for everybody,

is that as you pay more attention to your body, when you have physical pain, there's a tightening, a clenching in the body, like the simple examples when you stub your toe, there's a sort of tightening around the pain. And that tightening around it increases the unpleasant sensation. And I was taught very young to try to soften to pain. And that softening to pain, then, you know, because, again, there's the pain and then there's the hatred of the pain. Hating pain is totally normal survival instinct. But learning and practicing softening, relaxing into, accepting this is just unpleasant sensation, whether it's emotional sensation or mental

sensation or physical sensation. So softening is a practical way to start developing. I might say that it's a compassionate response or a merciful response to pain of not clinging around it, clenching around it, but actually softening to it. And then, so that's, I think, a somatic, a body way to start developing compassion. And then there's the, you know, all of the aversion and hatred actually arises in the mind of, I hate this. So starting to train the mind to be friendly through loving kindness meditation practice. Starting to train the mind to forgive pain rather than resent it. To say it's just pain and I meet this pain with mercy, with compassion, with forgiveness. So a lot of compassion. Towards ourselves in that moment?

Towards ourselves, towards the experience of pain itself. It depends. You know, like you have to look at your own relationship. When you hurt yourself, when you have pain, whether it's self-inflicted stubbing your toe or grief, loss happens, you have to look at do I hate the pain or do I hate myself for being in pain? So sometimes it is compassion towards and forgiveness towards ourselves for being in pain because I blame myself for getting in that relationship that ended,

or I did something wrong that made it end. But sometimes it's just changing your relationship to that pain. When I stub my toe, I'll send forgiveness and compassion to the toe because I have this instinct that says I hate my toe because it hurts. And though that's the wrong response, the correct response is caring about that pain, caring about the toe. It feels a little bit hard to teach. It's more of an experience. It's talking about compassion. And a lot of these spiritual principles is a little bit like talking about swimming, where you actually have to get in the water. You can't learn to swim until you get in the water. And I feel like it's like that too with meditation. Once you start meditating,

start softening in the body and start developing a positive mind state towards pain, eventually we have the experience of like, oh, this is compassion towards my own pain. We seem to be wired in a way that many of us, we have empathy for other people's pain. We have compassion. We can care about our loved ones. We can care about others. And it is very similar. It's just making ourselves one of our loved ones, we can care about others. And it is very similar. It's just making ourselves one of our loved ones, turning ourselves into one of the people that we really care about, not just our partners or our children or our, you know, of actually placing ourselves. I think that a Western definition of compassion is something like putting yourself in someone else's shoes.

So, it's much more like empathy towards someone else. But that a Buddhist definition of compassion is something like putting yourself in someone else's shoes. So it's much more like empathy towards someone else. But that a Buddhist definition of compassion is more like putting yourself in your own shoes, caring about yourself, loving yourself, caring about your pain the way that you would care about a loved one's pain. One of the things I've heard you talk about is doubt in spiritual practice. You talk about how the Buddha right before his enlightenment, Mara came to visit him and tempted him with lust and riches and all these different things. And that one of the most powerful ones that we're tempted by is doubt and how that plays a role in our spiritual practice.

Can you talk more about that? It's one of the classic hindrances, one of the five hindrances that is spoken about in Buddhism, five things that make meditation, make awakening difficult. And it's considered the most debilitating because the other four are craving for pleasure, aversion to pain, restlessness, and sloth and torpor, sleepiness. But you can deal with craving and aversion and still practice. You can deal with restlessness and sloth and still practice. But if doubt is strong and you believe it, it will stop you from practicing. And so that's when it's considered, you know, as Mara is attacking the Buddha on the eve of his enlightenment.

First he tries craving. First he tries aversion. First he tries restlessness. And none of that works. And he says, okay, well here's my most powerful tool against humanity. And that is doubt. And this sort of low self-esteem, this self-doubt that says, I don't know if I can do this or I can't do this, questioning our own ability. And then sometimes doubt is personal.

I can't. And then sometimes it is this is impossible. It's like philosophical doubt where people say, well, it couldn't be possible. I think what you were talking about, that you went through a phase of, well, this couldn't be possible to not have any pain. So I doubt this whole Buddhist stuff, because if they're saying freedom from suffering means freedom from pain, then that can't be possible. Now, I think that personally is a healthy skepticism. be possible. Now, I think that personally is a healthy skepticism. But when you believe it's not possible to be happy and to have a life that's free from suffering, then you won't even try.

And so, that's one of the reasons it's so debilitating as a hindrance. Now, I am totally convinced that Mara is not anything but our own minds. And I think that it's very important in telling that Mara's with the Buddha as he's struggling for enlightenment, but Mara continues with the Buddha all the way after his enlightenment until his deathbed. And so that this doubt, these hindrances, aren't something that go away. Craving, aversion, you know, is going to continue to arise. Now, what happens for the Buddha is that he has a perfect relationship

to the doubt and to the lust and to the fear and to the anger. All of those natural human emotions continue to arise for him, but he, every time, is relating to them. He's saying, I see you, Mara. I see the craving or the lust or the doubt, and I'm not taking it personal. I know that this is just part of what a mind does, and I'm not taking the bait. Yeah, and then you have an analogy where the person who gets into the water, at first, it may take an awful lot of effort swimming to even just not keep floating down. You're trying to go against the stream, and you're putting a lot of effort in, and you're not really, you're not going down the stream,

but you're not exactly making progress up the stream. And I think it was a talk about not being discouraged by that. Yeah, sometimes our practice is not even stopping the backslide. It's just slowing it down. It's slowing down the current of selfishness. It's not getting rid of it. We're not actually making progress towards generosity yet, but we're just becoming less selfish. We're still selfish. And I know how discouraging that can be. I can be like, well, I'm meditating, but it's not working. I still feel totally uneasy or whatever. The meditative path is absolutely a long process and a gradual

unfolding. And so I like to quote, you've probably heard me quote before, the Dalai Lama saying, commit to your practice and check in on your progress once every decade or so. And it feels like it's, you know, in this parable of the wolf, you know, start feeding the good wolf. It's a runt. It's not very powerful. It might take five years for it to just have the same strength as the bad wolf, and another five years before it's stronger than the bad wolf. You know, it's not a quick fix. It's not something that just all of a sudden goodness comes forward. It actually takes quite a long time, in my experience,

and it's different for each person, to develop wisdom. You don't have that one weird trick to instantly make your good wolf giant and strong. I don't know. Yeah, we should try some steroids, you know. The good wolf on steroids. Well, and I think that this is, personally, I feel very critical because you'll find a lot of people out there who will sell you a bag, a bill of goods that say, oh yeah, here's the five easy steps to inner peace or to the goodness. That's our culture. And for me, yeah, it's our culture. It's this very sort of quick fix culture.

And I don't believe it at all. I don't believe it at all. I think that all spiritual transformation takes long-term, effort-based practice. For it to really be reliable, it's something that we're going to have to work at for a long time. Yeah, I think that's one of the very first things that when I'm exploring any new thinking around that sort of stuff,

is if anybody's telling me it's going to be easy, really with anything, I'm going to be like, I don't think so. That's not been my experience with really anything in life that's been worthwhile, that it's been, that's just not the way it works. I like Houston Smith as one of the writers and teachers. And one of the reasons that he was such a scholar on world religions is because he

took 10 years and he practiced Buddhism for 10 years. And then he took Native American practice and he practiced Native American for 10 years. And then he came back to Christianity and the kind of, you know, God of Abrahamic, you know, theistic traditions. And he really studied and practiced them for 10 years. And maybe something else, maybe Islam. I mean, he really, you know, he said, well, I don't want to just read the books about this. I want to experience it. And I know it's going to take a decade for me to get a real taste of the experience in these different traditions. And I always honor that, and I think that that's such a good idea.

and I always honor that and I think that that's such a good idea. We're so quick to read a book and choose or just choose what our parents were doing or whatever without actually, people all the time say, well, I can't meditate. I tried it, I can't do it. I was like, well, try it every day for two years and tell me if you can do it or not because it's going to take you a couple years

to get really good at it and you'll see the changes, you'll see the transformation. Sometimes there's that initial pink cloud, as they say, where you get some big aha moments. Sometimes it's just trudging away, and the process takes place gradually. That was certainly me with meditation. Like I said, I expected something to happen. I'd hear people say, I meditate and I feel so peaceful. I was like, I meditate and I feel awful, right? Like I can't, I don't want to sit here. I can't, and I, when I, I think the best analogy that I heard was somebody just compared it to mental hygiene. It's like brushing your teeth.

You're not brushing your teeth expecting an experience. You're doing it because you know it's good for your teeth. There's a teaching when the Buddha says, it's as though we were wandering lost in a forest and we came upon an ancient city. And then our work was to excavate, to uncover, to refurbish this ancient city. And I feel like it's like that, that when we start practicing, we're starting this excavation. And first thing while we're excavating, often as we come upon the trash heap, we come upon all of that stuff that's burying our heart, that's covering it, and it's the skeletons, and it's the resentments, and it's the fears, it's all of that survival instinct stuff that has been causing suffering for us, and that that's first what we see. Until we get a little bit lower and we start to see more of the love and more of the kindness and more of the compassion and generosity. But you have to keep digging for it. Because what's on the surface is what has been causing the difficulty.

So, of course, in meditation, first, that's what you see. So you've got a new book coming out, I think you said, in two weeks. Can you tell us a little bit about it? The new book is called Refuge Recovery. It comes out June 10th. And it is about recovery from addiction. It is using the core Buddhist teachings of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path as a path, as a program, as a treatment for all forms of addiction.

And it starts with looking at the suffering of addiction and looking at the first truth. And there's a detailed inventory process in, let's look at all of the ways that we've suffered. And some of them are about addiction and some of them are just about life, about human suffering. But this is the beginning of the path. And then let's do a detailed inventory about the second noble truth, which is the cause of suffering, the cause of addiction, which is that repetitive craving for sense pleasures. Everyone has suffering. Addicts have an intense level of suffering. have an intense level of suffering. Everyone has craving. Addicts have an intense experience, more intense experience of craving. And we can't say 100%, but I would say most of the time that craving for, that becomes alcoholism or addiction, is fueled by deep wounds,

is fueled by deep wounds, some kind of deep trauma, pain, insecurity, loss, not the kind of proper sort of attachments to our parents or connection with our parents. So in the second truth of refuge recovery, I ask people to really look at what are the underlying conditions that made us so reckless that we drank over and over and over until we were alcoholic? What are some of the underlying conditions that led us to doing drugs and recklessly doing drugs to the point where we became physically addicted? And then it follows along with, you know, the third truth of refuge recovery is that recovery is possible. And looking at where we've been going for refuge.

And are we at the point now where we're willing to take refuge in a recovery process and a spiritual practice and in a community of addicts to help support us? The Eightfold Path is the Eightfold Path where we learn meditation and we learn forgiveness and we learn kindness and compassion and ethics. I have big hopes for refuge recovery. We've been doing it in Los Angeles for over five years where we have refuge recovery meetings. This is an alternative to the 12 steps, yet there's still, to some degree, a, I won't use the word religious, but there is a teaching from a religious background. I'm wondering what people would run into the same concerns they have with the 12 steps where they go, I don't believe in God. I think that what we'll run into mostly is people's idea about Buddhism as a religion and their misconceptions, and people think that you worship the Buddha,

or, you know, they see people bowing and offering incense to, they think that Buddhism is just a sort of replacement god or something like that. But original Buddhism is much more about psychology. And I don't think that there's much to believe. The only thing that's really asked in Buddhism is believe in the potential for your own freedom. And that this is something that you can do based on your own effort. And that's, again, where that question about doubt. If we don't believe that we have the potential for happiness, that that's really all we're being asked to believe.

The rest is see for yourself. That it's a verified faith. That it's an experiential process that one has through doing the practices. I was given some encouragement as I was doing this to make it completely secular. Don't say Buddhist recovery, say mindful recovery or something like that. I'm happy that there's a lot of mindfulness secularization happening. I think it's good for the world. I, myself, I think there's also some problems with the secularization of mindfulness. And I, myself, I'm a Buddhist. There's a whole package here

that I would feel out of integrity to steal all of the Buddhist principles and pretend like they weren't Buddhism. To package it in a path that I think is really compatible with the atheist and also the theist. So for people who have no belief in any kind of God or higher power, Buddhism is very practical for them because it's not asking you to believe much. And for those who have a God-higher power relationship, it's also not telling you not to believe that. It's saying try these practices. Maybe they'll get you closer to your concept of your higher power.

So we'll see. It's a big experiment. I'm very excited. We've had great success here, and people, you know, a lot of the people that come are new and looking for recovery, but then I get a lot of people who are 10, 20 years sober and are saying, I'm looking for an advanced process to my recovery. The 12 Steps told me to meditate, but they didn't really tell me how. And so then they come to Buddhism to learn how to meditate. Well, I'm certainly a recovering person. I'm excited to read it. And I might hit one of the meetings if there's time while I'm out here. Maybe you'll start one in Columbus. I very well might. There is a 12 Step group in Columbus that has meditation as part of it.

It's called the Meditating Peacocks, and I think they start and end with 15 minutes of meditation. Great. It's held in one of the Buddhist centers there. Great, great. All right. Well, thank you very much, Noah. It's a pleasure to be here and talk with you, and thanks for all the work you're doing. I look forward to reading the new book.

My pleasure. Thank you. You can learn more about this podcast and Noah Levine at oneufeed.net slash Noah.