The One You Feed - Rick Heller

Episode Date: March 30, 2016

This week we talk to Rick Heller about secular meditationRick Heller is the author of the new book, Secular Meditation: 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy — A Guide from the Humanist Community at Harvard.Rick leads weekly meditations at the Humanist Community at Harvard.Rick received a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University. He also holds a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MITIn This Interview, Rick Heller and I Discuss:The One You Feed parableHis new book, Secular Meditation: 32 practices for cultivating inner peace, compassion & Joy (A guide from the Humanist Community at Harvard)How in the brain, two negatives do not equal a positiveWhat a "Humanist" isA secular view of meditation & mindfulnessOther types of meditation other than breath focused meditationHow there's no such thing as an inherently negative stimulusWhat face meditation isHow the muscles in your face can affect your inner speechHow to relate to emotions with mindfulnessThat recognizing an emotion actually brings it's feeling back toward neutralWhat "positive equanimity" isThe difference between cognitive reappraisal and positive thinkingDifferent approaches to help us achieve "mindfulness of life"When you're more "in your head" about something than you are collecting sensory information about something, you're really just dealing with abstractionsSkepticism surrounding the concept of "no self" as a goal to pursueHis working definition of enlightenmentA secular version of the serenity prayerFor more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I don't believe we necessarily have control of what is going on in the world outside our skin, but we have a great deal of control of how we react to it. 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 no 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's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead the really know really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Rick Heller, the author of the new book,

Secular Meditation, 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy, a guide from the humanist community at Harvard. Rick received a master's degree in journalism from Boston University. He also holds a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from MIT. Rick leads weekly meditations at the Humanist Community at Harvard. And here's the interview with Rick Heller. Hi, Rick. Welcome to the show. Hi, I am glad to be here. I'm happy to have you on and talk about your new book, Secular Meditation.

I think it's a very interesting book about the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness and meditation. We can bring them into our secular lives. One of my favorite books of all time is Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor, which is a similar approach in looking at what we can learn from Buddhism, even if we're not willing to accept some of the supernatural beliefs there. So we'll get into all that in a second, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter, and she 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. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. Right. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and as a humanist. Well, what it connects to me is this idea that when something negative occurs in life, if we try to push it away and try to negate it, it often actually ends up building on it.

And this is something actually that comes out of, in Buddhism, something called the Four Noble Truths, but this is something that I believe there's research that shows that this is actually valid from the way the brain works. I may talk a little bit in the book about how this works, that when we experience something as negative, and then we make a judgment. And if you build up these judgments to aversion, in a lot of life, a double negative becomes a positive in mathematics, let's say. But within the brain, when you try to negate a negative, you're actually still activating the brain areas that are negative, and it just builds and builds. encounter something that's negative, if you can actually bring some acceptance to it,

some friendliness to it, that actually kind of brings you back into neutral and into equanimity. So rather than feeding that fear and making it worse and worse and worse, you can get yourself back to a neutral state. Yeah, excellent. That's a particular area that I want to focus on as we get into the questions. Let's start off, though. This is a guide from the humanist community at Harvard. So let's start off by talking briefly about what a humanist is and what the humanist community at Harvard is. Well, humanist is short for secular humanist. It's a community of people who have no religious beliefs, though we often describe ourselves as a community of

atheists, agnostics, and allies. There's a national association called the American Humanist Association, and the humanist community at Harvard is affiliated with it. It specifically was created to serve the needs of students at Harvard University, but over time it's evolved to actually serve anyone in the Boston area who would like to come and participate. And so the idea of humanism is that even if you do not actually believe in the supernatural, we still do have some beliefs. We believe in helping our fellow human being. Excellent. So the book is called Secular Meditation, and you go through 32 different practices. The subtitle is 32 Practices

for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy. We're not going to go through all 32 by any stretch, but I'd like to hit on a couple that I thought were particularly interesting to me. Let's start with one that's pretty common. You hear a lot in Buddhist meditation around meta-meditation, loving-kindness meditation, and I found it interesting as a secular approach to Buddhism. This is one that you still focused on quite a bit. So could you share a little bit about, maybe briefly, what the idea of meta-meditation is to you, how you do it, and why you think it's so important and figures so prominently in a secular meditation book? Well, metta, which is a word that is often translated as loving-kindness, is really, when I've spoken to some Buddhist teachers, it's actually the attitude that one brings in the concept of mindfulness mindfulness often spoken of as paying attention to the present moment with a non-judgmental

attitude but uh... as one of uh... the people i've study with says that not judgmental me found it wrote actually not actually friendly and welcome me it's actually metro or a kind of feeling toward what is going on so i do that start off with a metta or loving kindness meditation, which is something in which one starts out with contemplating people we call benefactors

who make us feel warm. And then we let those feelings flow toward ourselves and then toward what we call a neutral person. It could be the person who served us coffee at Starbucks this morning. And then also even toward difficult people. I say, let's say a co-worker who we find some difficulty in our relationship, and it's a way of trying to expand this feeling of kindness. And I do think this is something that is actually very consonant with humanism.

So that's one of the reasons I sort of chose to lead off it is that I think it's a little bit more social than a mindfulness of breath meditation. A mindfulness of breath meditation, you are sitting quietly and you're really not interacting with anyone else. The loving kindness meditation, well, you really actually are sitting quietly

and not physically interacting with someone else, but in your mind, you are actually thinking about other people. And then when you get up off the cushion and go out into the world, you may actually be more kind to the people you encounter. So I think it's consistent with what we're trying to do with humanism. Yeah, I think it's very interesting because one of the complaints often about the secularization of meditation and mindfulness in general

is the fact that people lose that sort of thing. So I thought it was very interesting that in a book titled Secular Meditation, it was front and center. Yeah, I'm aware of that critique, and I do have a great deal of respect for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program. That's actually a lot of the research that shows that this works comes from the program. And I think the program does, in fact, include some of these ideas of compassion as well. But perhaps as this idea of mindfulness is going more and more away from people who know a great deal and is being applied often in the corporate setting to just being sort of an intentional training, it might be getting away from that.

So you go through a lot of the basic meditation techniques. I like any book that shows a bunch of meditation techniques because I spent the better part of probably 15 years thinking that the only real meditation technique that was taught or was useful was following the breath, which is not one that works for me. So I'm always a fan of seeing different techniques laid out as a way to perhaps mine the same ground,

but with some different approaches. Yeah, I actually started off again, like you, with mindfulness of breath for many years, and I didn't know these other techniques. And I actually am not that great of mindfulness of breath. I think actually a lot of people aren't that great at that. It actually can be somewhat challenging. So some of these other techniques, you find a way into meditation. So I like ambient sound.

Many of the people, I lead a weekly meditation. A lot of people like the ambient sound meditation where you're listening to whatever is going on on the environment. Often there's a bus going by outside, and you actually learn the message in the ambient sound meditation that no stimulus is necessarily negative inherently, like a bus going by. If you're actually meditating to sound, bus going by is good. It's actually helping you toward your goal. So it's not noise, it's just sound. Yeah, that is my favorite one, too, is meditating on sound. And there's a place that I do it often, which is a very interesting mix,

because there's a lot of nature sounds. There's birds, and there's crickets, and there's industrial sounds. I hear truck doors, and I kind of get it all, and I like that. Because to your point, it's really that focus on not saying, this sounds good, this sound is bad. And I like that because, you know, to your point, it's really that focus on not saying this sounds good, this sound is bad. And I've actually been able to use that technique like when I've been on an airplane with a crying baby, you know, which is, for me, one of the most stressful sounds that, you know, agitates me. And so if I kind of try and focus on that in the terms of a meditation, It actually helps me to deal with it a little bit better. Now, there was a type of meditation that you brought up in the book that I have to say I have never heard of before, and I thought it was interesting,

and the science behind it particularly fascinating. This is face meditation. Can you tell us about that? Well, you know, it's really a way of talking about any kind of meditation. It's not a specific meditation, but it's focusing on the musculature of the face and making sure it's very relaxed. Because there's certain research, it's actually kind of old research, and I'd really like some scientists to take another crack at it with the brain imagery. But going back about 30, 40 years, there's research that shows that our inner speech is actually associated with activation of the muscles of speech at a very low level.

And there's also what's called facial feedback, where if you put your mouth in a particular, like if you're clenching a pencil in your mouth and it puts your mouth in a smile, it actually changes your mood. So there's research that shows that inner speech affects the musculature of speech, including the jaws, the larynx. And so if you can actually relax those peripheral muscles, there's evidence that it actually quiets inner speech. There's probably a couple mechanisms whereby inner speech is quieted during meditation, and that's probably

one of them. But I'd like to see this research repeated now with neuroimaging. Yeah, it would be really interesting to see if, as you relax those muscles, if those parts of the brain quieted down beyond just like what you said, the previous studies around sensing the musculature. But it's a very interesting concept. And there certainly seems to be variations on that theme. There's the common one, right, that you mentioned is if you smile, you feel better. But there's also been some studies lately showing that Botox to sort of paralyze the frown muscles can have a positive impact on depression, which is a bizarre one. But it seems that these things are interconnected

in a way. I mean, I don't think they are. I don't think just putting a pencil between your teeth is the cause for depression, right? But every little bit helps with these things. Yeah, one of the scientists I spoke to, Paul Lehrer, said that you don't just think with your brain, you think with your whole body. It's really your whole nervous system, including the peripheral nervous system, is involved. Thank you. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running.

All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be.

So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's talk a little bit about relating to emotions through mindfulness. So you touched on this at the very beginning where you talked about if we relate with our emotions a little bit differently versus resisting them. But I'd like to spend a little bit more time on that, and I've got a few questions deeper about that. But can you start us off by sort of talking about what the practice of mindfulness of emotions is and what some of the benefits are? Well, there is this practice called mindfulness of motion where you might be doing your regular meditation, it could be a breath meditation, but every 30 seconds or so you pull yourself and use a word that describes your meditation. It could be sad or joyful, whatever it is. And there is actually

evidence that when you recognize an emotion, it does tend to bring it more toward neutral. So I don't think they really actually know why that's the case, but there is evidence, they call it affect labeling, and that it does seem to work, that simply recognizing your emotion, it's almost like your body is sending you a message. And then when you recognize that message, it feels like it doesn't have to send it to you. That's kind of a metaphor. I'm not really sure what's going on. So there is a mindfulness of emotion practice where when you accept the emotion that you're feeling, it brings you back to a neutral state. And actually, I should say that what I'm trying to actually get at in the book is not just a perfectly neutral state, but what I call positive equanimity,

that you actually have this feeling of metta or kindness moment to moment, and that what you are experiencing on a day-to-day basis, most of the time you can be in this place where things are good, at least in terms of what you're bringing to it internally. Happiness doesn't have to come from what is going on outside in the world. You can actually self-generate these positive feelings as long as you have your basic needs met for food, shelter, having a place to sleep and things like that. Because the ability to self-generate happiness does make demands on the resources of your body. So you do have to have adequate nutrition and adequate sleep to be able to make this shift. But if you do that,

you can make this shift. Yeah, I think we've explored this topic a lot on the show, this idea of working with emotions in a more skillful way by recognizing what you're feeling, by not resisting it, by not adding stories on top of it, not adding all the narrative on top of it. And I think that's the key. It's easy to think like, well, I know what emotion I'm feeling, right? But I think for a lot of us, and certainly for me, in certain cases, I might sort of know how I'm feeling, but I'm not in touch with the emotion in any sort of conscious, mindful way. I'm in touch with the emotion and the stories that are generating around it and all the things I'm telling myself. And to your point, when we can stop, and I think

in the book you referred to Dr. Siegel as saying, you know, name it to tame it as a way to do this effective labeling. I definitely find it to be very helpful to stop and become conscious of the emotion, sometimes to become conscious of how it feels in the body versus just pushing it away. Yeah, and mindfulness is one practice. There are also practices in psychotherapy. I'm not a psychotherapist. I'm not an expert in this, but one form of therapy is called cognitive behavioral therapy. And in that case, one often recognizes that if one is having an overreaction to something, one kind of works with rational thoughts to say, okay, maybe I'm overdoing it and things like that. That can be very effective.

But there are other situations where you may have a very serious illness, and there's actually no way to sort of out-argue the fact that this is quite serious. But sometimes mindfulness techniques of acceptance can bring one to equanimity, even in such cases where there really is no way to sort of out-argue it. Yeah, that was one of my favorite parts of the book, was the discussion that you had around this idea of affect labeling versus sort of what you were just describing, which is known as cognitive reappraisal, right? Where I try and tell myself a different story about what's happening. And I love how you talk about how in different scenarios, those things can be useful. Because one of the things that,

again, comes up on this show a lot is this idea of positive thinking. I'm not a huge fan of excessive positive thinking because at a certain point, you don't believe what you're telling yourself. And if you don't believe what you're telling yourself, it doesn't do any good to keep trying to do it. And that's really what I think you were getting at. It's certainly good to put the best spin on whatever's happening and to be as rational as you can and recognize like, am I overreacting? Am I misinterpreting? Am I taking personally something that's not personal?

Those are all forms of this cognitive reappraisal. But at a certain point, sometimes you just feel lousy, and there's good reason to feel lousy, but what you can do is work with that so that it's not such an overwhelming, and you don't make it worse by resisting it and causing it to stick around. Very much so. And I, you know, there is a critique of positive thinking that sort of is, if you just think hard enough and believe hard enough, you're going to get the rays at work, or you're going to have a lovely home. I don't believe we necessarily have control

of what is going on in the world outside our skin, but we have a great deal of control of how we react to it. So we can bring this equanimity and get to a reasonably positive state of feeling in most cases. Yep. I like the use of that word equanimity because it really, to me, it strikes that sort of balance of there's a realism to it. And there's also yet a peacefulness with what is. It's a great word, and you make good use of it throughout the book. I'd like to change directions a little bit right now and talk about, there's a whole section on, you know, mindfulness, I'll just call it mindfulness of life, right? Like paying attention to being out in the world. You bring up a study that I've referenced a couple times from Daniel

Gilbert, where, you know, basically the title of the research of the study was that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. And it's been staggering to me since I've heard that the more I look at that in my own life, how often that is really true. So you have a lot of different approaches to basically stopping our mind from wandering. And you say, and I'll just read this from the book, part of the reason we get bored is we cut ourselves off from the sensations around us. If we can do a task without paying a lot of attention, we think we're better off if we don't pay attention. But if we do pay close attention, there can be a lushness to the sensations. Do you want to elaborate a little bit on that? Yes. So when I do something, let's say like washing the dishes, I can get where I'm

paying close attention to my actual movements, the sensations of the warmth of the water that I'm washing the dishes, reflections on the dishes. The first time you do this, it probably is actually better to do a meditation, like a breath meditation. After quieting your mind, settling your mind, and you've quieted the distracting thoughts, when you actually then get up, open your eyes, and start doing things, you actually still have this meditative consciousness where your inner thoughts are quieted and you can really be open to what is going on out in the world.

And there really is a lot more coming at us in terms of stimuli from the world than we normally notice. The brain has some certain shortcuts. It's kind of efficiency to be able to do a lot of things. But if we focus on one thing and kind of allow ourselves to observe it in more detail, there's actually quite a bit of invigorating stimuli that come, and it can be very pleasurable. Yeah, I think that is one of the benefits of mindfulness practice that I've gotten that I didn't really necessarily expect or look for, but have started to consciously cultivate more is that sort of

sensory perception about sharpening of the senses and thus being able to be more engaged, entertained, enraptured by the normal small things in life. Like, there's that cliche, like, well, it's the small things that matter. But there's a certain state of mind and a way of looking at the world that makes that statement work. And it's very easy for that not to be the case if your mind is always not attuned to those things and doesn't become receptive in the same way to them. One of the mindfulness practices is walking in nature. And it used to be that I'd like to get to the top of a mountain and have a great view, but I'd kind of board along the way and just walk in leaves and trees and things.

And now, once I've started a mindfulness practice and I actually bring the meditative mind to the walk through the forest, I actually find the lower parts of the forest to be very invigorating. And I'm very attuned to the space, the negative space in between, let's say, the plants and leaves. And it really, there's a sort of sensory amplification that goes on. And I actually, I think I give a story that my wife and I were in Ireland a few years ago, and I was walking along the Cliffs of Moher, which is fabulous, spectacular, and it was really wonderful. But then on the way back on the very same path, I was actually starting to get bored and distracted because I'd seen that cliff before. So what I actually did is bring my mindfulness to my steps, and it actually came back to me. And

the walking on the path that I was on brought back that same sense of wow that I had had by looking at the cliffs. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair

you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple

Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart Series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth

with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be.

So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the book, you quote the neuroscientist Daniel Siegel multiple times, but you talk about his concept of bottom-up and top-down flows of nerve signals.

Could you walk us through that? It's a bit challenging. It really goes to the neuroscience, but the cerebral cortex has various layers where the signals that are coming from your periphery, let's say your fingers going up through the spinal column up into the brain, and there is a sort of higher level process where they are being brought together in a more abstract form. And what he says, and there's some evidence for it, I wouldn't say it's ironclad proof, but I think it's a pretty good hypothesis, is that the more you're sort of in your head,

you're actually dealing with abstractions. You don't actually see the physical object that you are observing, but you're actually bringing some of the patterns in memory. There's actually evidence for this that when we actually observe something, so for instance, if we see an apple, we are actually imposing our recollections of other apples to this patch of red to see that this is an apple. And we have this sort of generic apple in our memory that we sort of impose on this top-down basis. And when we're doing that, it's actually a little bit more boring

because we're not seeing the individuality of whatever the apple or the rose or whatever we're seeing. And when we quiet the mind, there's more focus on the actual signals that are coming up from the senses, and we see the individual object in greater detail, and it actually fires, there's more novelty, which actually probably fires sort of the dopamine neurons, and it is a lot more interesting. I'm a big fan of dopamine. Pursued it to points way beyond what was even reasonable or advisable. But I agree completely that when you're busy and your mind is running, like mine is running

off and on my next plan, my next scheme, what am I going to say on the podcast? You know, all the stuff that's happening. Then the shorthand for the apple, which is that I don't really have to see the particular apple because my brain sort of already has this placeholder for it. You know, that's a useful skill. But what it does do, at least for me, is sort of deadens everything around me until everything becomes sort of like, you know, like, there's just no, no novelty in it. So I think the point that you were making, and we was talking about from the bottom up is to spend a lot more time on those sense signals and allow those to occupy more of the mind versus the representation. Yes. You know, all these shortcuts that the brain has,

they do help us with our efficiency. So if you're trying to work very hard, be very productive, it actually might be more efficient to pursue these paths, but it's not going to be a lot of fun. And I believe that mindfulness can help get you from a negative state to neutrality, and then from neutrality to a joyful state. But it does require slowing down a bit. And you might not be quite as productive, but you might be if you can focus. Right. Well, I think this idea of, I mean, I think we tend to take everything too far sometimes, or, you know, any one thing taken too far can become problematic. I mean, I don't think that mindfulness is the right tool for every job all the time. It's not

like my goal is to be mindful every second of every day in a particular way. It's like, depending on what I'm doing and what I'm engaging in is, you know, different methods of using the brain are more effective. But to your point, I think we had a guest on who said, you know, different methods of using the brain are more effective. But to your point, I think we had a guest on who said, you know, the brain is very optimized for survival, but not necessarily for happiness. Correct. Yeah. And I also say that you don't necessarily have to be present focus all the time. Actually, one of our meditations is I call it a daydream meditation, where you actually sit down quietly, and then you quiet the mind first, and then you actually open yourself up to envisioning the future. So

you're not actually focusing on what is going on at present, but what is going on, you hope, in the future. I think one of the insights of mindfulness, though, is that if you're trying to do something in the present, you don't want to be distracted by these anxieties over the future. to do something in the present, you don't want to be distracted by these anxieties over the future. And so in that case, it's great to be able to focus on the present. But there are also times when you do need to focus on the future. And that is something that can be worthwhile. Absolutely. I think it's the ability to have your brain or your mind do what it is you're trying to do in the most effective way is really the goal. And to your point, to get to more positive mood states. One of the things that you talk about, and you say one way to open your eyes

to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, what if I had never seen this before, or what if I knew I would never see it again? Right, I didn't write that. That was Rachel Carson, the environmentalist in her book, The Sense of Wonder. And as far as I know, Rachel Carson was not aware of these sort of mindfulness sort of practices. She wrote this more than 50 years ago, but she hit the nail on the head with that. Exactly. So I want to talk a little bit about the concepts of enlightenment and the concept of there being no self. And I think it's very interesting to hear people's perspective on that who are not representing a certain orthodoxy. Like, I find Sam Harris's takes on this to be very interesting. And so I wanted to have you talk

a little bit about those two ideas and how you see them in terms of what you do. and how you see them in terms of what you do. Well, I definitely feel that as a direction, trying to be, let's say, more selfless, more caring for others is the way to go. But, you know, I read Sam Harris's Waking Up, and I find it a little bit confusing. I have not achieved a state of no self. I do think there is evidence, you know, from Harris and from James Austin, he's a neurologist who's written about this, that one can get to sort of a state where this sense of self is less present. I am somewhat skeptical that that is something that should be

a major goal for most people. I think there's not a great deal of evidence that, you know, the people who achieve such a state, I do think the state exists, but I'm not sure that the people who achieve such a state are, let's say, are happier or actually necessarily even more compassionate. And one of the problems is you can't do placebo control. The trial of that takes years and years to get to that state, so it's just impossible to do a study of that in any sort of controlled method as far as I can see. I know there are some scientists who are trying to look into this, but I think it'll be very difficult. But I think as a goal to try to raise one's compassion. So every moment you are bringing kindness, hopefully to other

people, but also to your perception of what is going on. If you're just walking down the street and you're looking at a tree, a street, a house, and kind of see these stimuli with accepting a friendly attitude, that is sort of getting toward, I think, an enlightened state. But I'm a little bit skeptical of sort of traditional Buddhist notions of enlightenment as the state one achieves and that the person who is enlightened is purer in any way. Right. Well, you certainly point to, which is obvious in a lot of scenarios, is people who claim

enlightenment do things that seem awfully unenlightened sometimes, at least to the people around them, which doesn't mean the state doesn't exist and doesn't mean that it's not valuable because perhaps people are self-reporting enlightenment that aren't. But I think it's an interesting idea that one of the things you said was that, and I won't get this right, but you said something along the lines of that a working definition of enlightenment for you is being able to find happiness regardless of what your outside circumstances are. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get at. I'm not saying that I'm at that place. And the other

caution I would add is I actually bring in the logic of the serenity at, and I'm not saying that I'm at that place. And the other caution I would add is I actually bring in the logic of the serenity prayer, which I've reconstituted as the serenity statement. It's easy enough to get rid of the supernatural language. And in general, I think most of us in the West are living lives that are very advantageous compared to our grandparents or our great-grandparents. And we can and should, I think, be grateful for this most of the time. But on the other hand, there are sometimes crises, there's things going on in the world that are bad, and we shouldn't accept everything. So I'm not advocating accepting everything.

There are times where we have to decide to have the courage to challenge things that are wrong, even if we need to suffer somewhat to do that. But overall, I think we can bring this state of kindness and acceptance to what is really something where we have so much more than previous generations had, and there's a great deal to enjoy. Will you walk us through your restatement of the serenity prayer? I just substitute the words, I would like to have the courage to change the things that can be changed,

the serenity to accept the things that can't be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference. So I just say, I would like, as opposed to God grant me. Yeah. Simple as that. I like that. I think it's one of the wisest things that's ever been said, and sort of the, you know, that wisdom to know the difference

is sort of the holy grail in certain respects. I think if you can figure that out, boy, life gets better and easier, or harder, to your point, right? Like, I think my natural tendency is to accept anything. I kind of have, you know, I can have the eff your point, right? Like I think my natural tendency is to accept anything. I kind of have, you know, I can have the effort attitude, right? So for me, sometimes what I need is not the serenity to accept things, but the courage to change them is often the area that I need to look more at. Coming up in a 12-step recovery program, everybody always focuses on that acceptance piece. And I'm like, well, I don't think that's what everybody needs to work on.

Yeah, and actually I will say at the humanist community is quite a bit focused on social justice. And I do think that loving kindness or metta and social justice can go together. We really need to work more to try to bring those together because there's a little bit of, I would say, the traditional humanist community is organized to change the outer world, but not so much the inner world. What I'm doing is really mostly focused on the inner world, but hopefully can also help the outer world. I think that's a perennial challenge, and it's one that I look at and I

wrestle with, which is if you work on the inner world and you find that inner peace, how does that manifest in the outer world? I'm always interested in the question I ask a lot of guests is how do you balance, because a lot of the people that come on this show are relatively ambitious, driven people who do a lot of good things in the world. And how do you balance that, that striving, that ambition, with accepting and being present and grateful in the moment you're in. And I think that's just an interesting conundrum. It is. And I don't think I necessarily have success all the time in doing that. Sometimes, particularly now that my book is coming out, I have had this desire to let people know about it. And I have noticed myself perhaps slipping in my mindfulness and kindness at times

because I feel a little self-induced pressure to try to get this word out. I think as more people know about this, it will be helpful to many people. But the pressure that I put myself under to try to communicate this can sometimes actually be at a bit of a cost. And I've been trying to communicate this can sometimes actually be at a bit of a cost. And I've been trying to recoup my serenity on certain occasions. Yeah, I'm familiar with the dilemma. Part of it for me is just accepting, like, I think I want myself to be like, I only have the best motive. Like, I only do this to serve other people. And then I'm like, no, but then there's a part of me that does things for success or for recognition. And I try and get comfortable with but then there's a part of me that does things for success or for recognition. And I try and get comfortable with the fact that I think most of us have a mix of motivations happening within one thing.

Yeah, that's right. And I do think that the book is something, hopefully, where a certain amount of personal success would actually accompany others being able to read it and benefit from it. accompany others being able to read it and benefit from it. So I don't think the two are necessarily inconsistent, but one has to sort of calibrate one's way as one goes through that. Absolutely. It's that, you know, the success, if the book is successful, a lot more people read it and get a message that I think can be very important. You're absolutely right that, you know, that that is a positive motivation, and it's watching when the other things start to creep in. Well, we are out of time, but I want to say thanks so much, Rick, for taking the time to come on the show. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed the book a great deal. We'll have links in our show notes at oneufeed.net where people can get a link

to the book and a link to your other online presences. I really enjoyed talking with you as well. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye. you can learn more about rick heller and this podcast at one you feed.net slash heller that's h-e-l-l-e-r thanks