The Tim Ferriss Show - #300: Jack Kornfield - Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy in the Present

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Starting point is 00:02:50 that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers, people who are excellent, if not the best at what they do in many, many, many different fields. And that scratchiness is Tim Ferriss coming off of antibiotics because I had some little gremlins inside me that I brought back from the Amazon. That's a separate story. In any case, my job, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, deconstruct, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, many fields. And this particular episode, we have a wonderful guest, Jack Kornfield. Alice Walker calls Jack, quote,

Starting point is 00:03:46 one of the greatest spiritual teachers of our time, end quote. Jack trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma, shortly thereafter becoming one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974. That's before I was even a glimmer in my papa's eye. So it's been teaching for a very, very long time. And he has had a profound and direct impact directly on my life. So I'm thrilled to finally have him on the podcast to share our shared history, his incredible stories and the practical tactics and very detailed techniques that you can use. And we dig into all of that. You can also say hi to him on the internet at Jack Kornfield on Twitter. Check it out.

Starting point is 00:04:34 Jack's history, just a little bit, won't spend too much time on it. Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Bar, Massachusetts with fellow meditation teachers, Sharon Salzberg, who's also been on this podcast, and Joseph Goldstein, and later the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California, which is where I did my first silent retreat, and we talk about that. He holds a PhD in clinical psychology, which is important to me and comes into this conversation because he has a very, very diverse toolkit for dealing with many different types of personal challenges, issues, questions, and so on, and is a father, husband, and activist. His books have been translated into 20 languages and sold more than a million copies. He is prolific. His books include, and I polled some of you for your

Starting point is 00:05:13 favorites, A Wise Heart, that's number one, A Lamp in the Darkness, A Path with Heart, After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, one of my favorite book titles of all time and his most recent book, no time like the present subtitle, finding freedom, love, and joy right where you are. He is quite possibly the most purely compassionate human being I've ever interacted with. And compassion isn't a word that I use very much, but Jack is unique and I'm thrilled to give you a window into his story and his teachings. Without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Jack Kornfield. Jack, welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:05:55 Oh, thank you, Tim. Pleasure to reconnect. I have wanted to have you on the show for some time now, and you've had certainly a tremendous impact on my life, both through your writing and through firsthand in-person interaction, which I think we'll touch upon. But first, I wanted to ask you a complete non sequitur from that, which is something that our mutual friend Adam Ghazali suggested I ask you about. And Adam, for people who don't know him, is an incredible PhD, MD, neuroscientist based at UCSF. And he suggested that I ask you about hang gliding. And I have no idea why he suggested that. But I'm going to start

Starting point is 00:06:42 there. And if it doesn't go anywhere, we can change direction. But I figured we would just start with that. And then we're going to rewind the clock. But why did he suggest I ask you about hang gliding? Well, it started many years ago when I crossed country with a friend who had a hang glider. And we would stop periodically and go off different hills um and it was fantastic and then i wanted to do paragliding and started to learn it now because everything is developed paragliding is a lot you know is a lot more official you need a license which i don't have but one of my favorite things is to tandem paraglide and go off the top of places like Grindelwald in in Switzerland where you can take the ski lift up to 9,000 feet and then jump

Starting point is 00:07:35 off and float silently like you're a bird among the clouds the birds actually do come by sometimes and like check out what's this big bird flying up here. You can catch thermals and go way up above the glaciers. And it's one of the most thrilling and delicious experiences that I know. That's incredible. So you first experienced that at what age? Probably in my late 20s. And did some, and then sort of put it aside.

Starting point is 00:08:09 And then I was traveling and teaching in Europe. And I saw a sign for paragliding. And I said, oh gosh, I really want to do it. And started, and now each time I go where there's high mountains and paragliding, that's one of my things that I love doing. You know, there's something about, I've had, most people have these dreams once in a while, if you're lucky, a dream of flying. Or maybe in your meditation you have this sense of not being limited to your body.

Starting point is 00:08:39 And this is the closest thing that I know because it's absolutely silent. And you're floating there. It's quite fantastic. And this is something you still do? Mm-hmm. And hope to do it next summer when I'm back in the Alps. And how old are you now? 72.

Starting point is 00:08:57 72, good man. Well, we're going to then go back a bit in chronology and ask about childhood. I would love to hear you describe your childhood. What were you like as a child? What was your upbringing like? Well, first thing to say is I remember when I got to Dartmouth College in 1963, and I called my mom from the payphone in the dorm sometime in that fall i

Starting point is 00:09:28 didn't call very often but you know how it is and i said mom i said guess what there are a lot of other really fucked up families beside ours so that's kind of where we start. So there, yeah, I had three brothers, and my father was a mixture of a tyrant and a really abusive person and a brilliant guy um i was born on and on the marine base in uh toward the end of world war ii and they didn't send him overseas to do they put him in the medical part of the marines because he tested so high on their tests that they you know okay we're going to use him for something um so he was brilliant in certain ways he was a biophysicist who helped design some of the first artificial hearts and lungs worked on the space program but also did other kinds of weird stuff like work for the army biological weapons people not making biological weapons but trying to design things that were kind of computer biological interfaces, all kinds of creative stuff.

Starting point is 00:10:48 But he was he was all he had mental problems. And so we didn't know when the car pulled in whether we were going to get Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. He would come in and, you know, either he could shout, be abusive, throw my mother down the stairs, rant, chase after us, try to hit us, whatever. Or we'd get this interesting creative person. But we hardly ever had people come over when he was around during the daytime is the way we would because you never knew what you would get. And so our family life in my family life in some way was also there were great parts of it because I had my brothers and we were like our own gang. We moved all the time, but we had each other. And because he was wacky as well as smart, my father either quit or got fired every year or two.

Starting point is 00:11:41 And then we would go from one place to another. I went to, I don't know, eight schools by the time I finished high school. So my childhood, partly it was, there were the happy things of roughhousing and being a boy with three other boys, and adventures. And then in the basement, my father had all kinds of scientific equipment. He had all this stuff from World War II, this huge radio from a battleship that you could tune into a thousand different, you know, shortwave stations around the world and projects he was trying to design stuff. And so we learned from him, you could pretty much take or design or do anything in the physical world um and at the same time uh i felt like my whole childhood was also uh

Starting point is 00:12:35 how to say it um colored with the fear of his violence and his unpredictability. And I became kind of a peacemaker in the family. We all sort of had our roles, and now I do it as a profession, right? Trying to kind of make it a little smoother between my parents so that they didn't kill each other. And each of my brothers had their own strategy. My twin brother, who was a lot bigger and much more outgoing, played football, which I certainly didn't. I was skinnier and, you know, I was in the orchestra and he was the football player. But anyway, I remember when he first got in a fist fight with my dad because my father was abusing our mom. My twin brother had been, as young men sometimes do, he was probably 13, 14, and he grew pretty

Starting point is 00:13:36 big and he was looking in the mirror, making muscles in the mirror to see how strong he'd become. Anyway, he just got into know, got into a fistfight with my father. And I was both thrilled and terrified. But it worked in some way because the abuse settled down quite a lot after that. So that was his strategy was just to get angry and then later kind of to go his own way somewhat more although we're all all have been very close as brothers um so there was that at the same time there was a lot of interest intellectual interest so we read and learned about

Starting point is 00:14:19 all kinds of things both my parents were um really interested in the world around us and so it was sort of this mixed thing of the you know the gift of being together with my brothers and a mom who was basically pretty nurturing although she kept trying to leave the him and never got it together. I think it was too scary in the 50s to have four boys, you know, no job And so we were in the middle of this and the kind of healing that it took it took a long time to do the inner healing work from the pain of my family And I remember when I became a Buddhist monk and I was sitting these first years with my teacher Ajahn Chah in the forest monasteries of Thailand on the border of Thailand and Laos

Starting point is 00:15:14 and I've been sitting quietly and then some of these memories or energy would come where I remember one monk who had a pot near mine in the forest did something that annoyed me and I just got enraged inside and and I sat and I went to the teacher and I said you know um I'm really getting angry here and he smiled he said yeah um where do you think that comes from or something like that and I said well I know. I said, I thought I was a peaceful guy. I was never going to be like close the doors and windows and put all your robes on. And if you're going to be angry, do it right. Sit in the middle of that, you know, and sit in the middle of the fire and don't be so afraid of it because you're afraid of it. You're just going to keep stuffing it.

Starting point is 00:16:14 And on the other hand, or if you're afraid of it, it'll just explode. There's another way to be with it. And so that was the beginning of some healing, just to realize that I could create the proper visual in my own head. So you sat there in your hut in the sweltering heat with all of your robes on. Were you angry in silence? Were you yelling? I was pretty much angry in silence, and that's an interesting question. Yeah, you know, in the monastery, the culture was not much that you would yell. You could go somewhere out in the forest and yell, but it wasn't decorous or something. People go, what the hell is wrong with that monk? So mostly I was sitting in silence, and then scenes would come, and I would realize, whoa, you know, I thought I was peaceful. I carry every, in every cell of my body, I also carry both the pain and anger of

Starting point is 00:17:27 my childhood and my father, and just the anger that comes with being a human being, a human incarnation. And I was never going to have that, but of course, there it was. And it lasted, you know, this was, I had days of, and actually much longer, weeks or months of waves of this coming, and learning how to be present for it and not get overwhelmed by it. So I want to backtrack and then connect those dots. So between childhood and ending up in Thailand, You mentioned Dartmouth earlier. And from what I've read, at least, you were initially pre-med and then ended up Asian Studies. Could you describe that experience in Dartmouth or how you went from pre-med to Asian Studies?

Starting point is 00:18:18 Well, you know, we all get turned in these mysterious ways in our life we think we're going one direction and then something happens unexpectedly and a gateway opens so i was coming from an organic chemistry class to the class that i'd signed up for out of interest on as studies, or Asian philosophy or something. And it was an old professor, Dr. Wing-Sit Chan, who'd come up from Harvard. He was kind of emeritus there. And he even sat cross-legged sometimes, you know, in the front of the room,

Starting point is 00:19:00 and would talk about Lao Tzu and Taoism, and they'd talk about Buddhist teachings and how the Buddha taught suffering and its causes and its end and that really all of a sudden I sat up I said there's an end to suffering there's a way to do and he said oh there's all these teachings and practices where you can transform your heart and mind. And I became thrilled about it and realized that whatever impulse I had to go to medical school, probably part of it came from wanting to heal myself. And so I started to take more and more courses. And then it was the 60s, and I became a card-carrying hippie, a card-carrying LSD-taking hippie, as a matter of fact. And at the end of, yeah, when I was getting ready to graduate, there was still the draft.

Starting point is 00:19:57 And I thought, well, I definitely don't want to go over and kill people in a war that I'd been protesting against. So I decided to go into the Peace Corps instead and ask them to send me to a Buddhist country where maybe I could find one of those old Zen masters that you read about and got assigned to Thailand. And when I got there, people, you could kind of request where you went, and I said, send me to the most remote place you can. I wanted adventure, but I also wanted to kind of,

Starting point is 00:20:33 reading all those old Zen stories, I wanted to see if that still existed. So, you know, and there were little detours, like being in Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love and things like that, that definitely, it changed my life also in a very deep way. Because for at least for a time, there was a window when people were just giving things away. There was such a sense that the world could be transformed. Some of it, as we know, very, very naive. But on the other hand, it also felt like a greater sense of brotherhood and sisterhood

Starting point is 00:21:12 than I had ever known, except with my own brothers, who I love a lot. We've done a lot of things together. And I started to feel like there are other ways for me and for the world to be and live. And that was, that was also very wonderful. You mentioned, you mentioned a three letter acronym that we're probably not going to spend too, too much time on, but I, you and I, you and I have had quite a number of conversations where I've wanted to ask you about some of your experiences with psychedelics, including LSD, but we've never really gotten into it. So I figure why not do it in front of a few million people? The LSD, at that point, your experiences with that, did that

Starting point is 00:21:57 inform your decisions at all to then go into the Peace Corps and end up in a remote area? It did, and I've written a little bit about it in a couple different of my books, chapters in the books I've written, because most Buddhist teachers and Hindu teachers of my generation also started with psychedelics. You know, myself and almost all my colleagues, you know, in the spiritual industry that I'm in, that was a beginning. And for me, it showed an incredible possibility that all is created out of consciousness and the possibilities of inner freedom. And basically I was able, at the best of it, to see my body and my personality and my history and realize that that's not who I am. yes birth and death and to go through those kind of death rebirth experiences that can happen

Starting point is 00:23:07 at times in a deep session with LSD or death of ego or sense of self or removing and realizing wow there's a freedom and a life force that's what we're made of and that profoundly influenced my interest in spirituality and also interest in what the world can be. Now, just a few days ago, I was on Maui with my beloved wife, Trudy, and we were visiting, spending time with Ram Dass, who, for listeners that don't know, was the author of this bestseller in the 60s called Be Here Now, and now he's 86 and in a wheelchair.

Starting point is 00:23:51 But Ram Dass, who had been at Harvard University and was one of the early explorers of LSD before he went to India and became a spiritual teacher, in the living room while we were there two days ago Roland Fisher who is one of the senior professors and psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins University Medical School oh Roland Roland Roland Griffin rather and Roland Griffiths, and Roland laid out all the research that's happening now on psilocybin that he's been doing. And it's success for people, terminal cancer patients, all losing a great deal of the fears that they had, working with people with severe depression and it was a beautiful session because you could hear how these sacred substances and these mind altering substances when they're used in the right context can really transform human beings and NYU Johns Hopkins there's a whole series of studies that are happening now that are

Starting point is 00:25:07 finally bringing it back into the mainstream. So I'd love to underscore just a few things that you mentioned. Number one, Ram Dass, for those people who want to do additional reading, formerly known as Richard Alpert, if I'm getting that right, also has a fascinating story coming full circle with psychedelic research, beginning, I guess, at Harvard in some respects. So it makes sense to me why Roland's research would be so meaningful to him. And a number of other just quick comments for people. Number one is if you're interested in looking into these psilocybin, which is considered the research related to treatment-resistant depression at Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths as the senior investigator. And I'll be posting some updates to that. But fascinating work looking at everything from, and this is also, as you mentioned, NYU and at other very well-regarded universities, alcohol addiction, nicotine slash tobacco addiction,

Starting point is 00:26:29 as you mentioned, end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients. The implications are really profound and the data very, very promising. And I wanted to also mention to folks who are perhaps saying to themselves, well, I'm not interested in taking psychedelics myself, that there are people I know, good friends of mine, who do not currently use psychedelics, but had the ego-dissolving experience of a non-ordinary reality through psychedelics that then led them to become, or contributed to them becoming very, very diligent meditators. And Sam Harris, who's a PhD in neuroscience and thought of, or very well known as an atheist, or one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, along with Richard Dawkins and others,

Starting point is 00:27:24 is a very close friend and extremely diligent meditator. And he's written about how his psychedelic experiences, which were in some respects, some of them uncontrolled, and you really have a coin flip there in terms of which direction you can go, but showed him possibilities within his own mind that then led to a very, very, I'm not going to call it devout, although I should just to bother him, maybe, diligent practice. So I don't want to take us too far off the rails, but you go to Southeast Asia. Well, I just want to say one more thing before we move on, because we are talking about this. It turns out, for those who are listening, that set and setting and intention are extremely important if one uses these psychedelics like psilocybin or something to set the intention to learn, to open, to have a quiet. It's not as a party experience.

Starting point is 00:28:22 Absolutely. It brings your attention inward, and then all the kind of discoveries become right in front of you. Whether it's right for somebody to use psychedelics or to use meditation, these are all invitations to step back and see the mystery of your life. Because we tend to live in the daily minutiae and checking off our list of tasks that we have to do and completing them, our work or eating or all the kind of things that make up a day. And we go on to automatic. And whether it's meditation and different or other spiritual disciplines, or for some people, it also can just be that they have what in Greek is called a katabasa, blow. You know, somebody close to them gets cancer or or is dying or they have

Starting point is 00:29:27 some accident or something and all of a sudden you step back and you realize whoa life is uncertain the way i've been taking it it's not just i'm checking off the list this is a mystery human incarnation and what am i going to do with it and And wow, look at this. How did I get in this body? Look at plants and trees and language, the air coming out of your mouth. You shape it different ways and it vibrates a little drum in the ear of someone else. And I can say Golden Gate Bridge and they can envision it. And you start to realize that all of it is alive and made of consciousness. And then the whole sense of who you are and what matters begins to shift and you start to realize that life is not just getting through the hoops but it actually also

Starting point is 00:30:14 can be a celebration of the heart of something that you have to bring to the world that you come out of life and my friend maladoma Somay, who's a West African shaman and medicine man, also two PhDs, a kind of remarkable guy, he says with the Dagra people in West Africa that he's from, that they say that every child comes into the world with a certain cargo, is their metaphor, like the cargo ships that ply the rivers of west africa and that that they're given gifts to bring into the world and that we have gifts to bring to this mystery which include opening to it and as we do love grows connection grows, and a whole different way of being in the world happens that we need so much at this time.

Starting point is 00:31:09 So that's a little interlude there before we move on to your next question. I welcome as many interludes as you would like to interject. And I wanted to just ask you to say one more time that it was, I believe, Greek word for... Katabas, which means a blow. It's like something comes and it just sets your life spinning in an entirely different direction. Right, like a catalyzing event. Exactly. I've had a few of those recently that I'd like to selfishly ask you about later.

Starting point is 00:31:38 So I can bookmark, just so I can bookmark this name Stanislav Grof if I'm saying that correctly when did you meet him roughly what age or what date just so I can come back to it because this is another thing I've been meaning to ask you about for a long time and get into but I haven't had the chance

Starting point is 00:31:59 so I had two things to say when I came back from the monastery, and now it's, you know, I guess the year that I connected with Stan was maybe 1973. I made two really important connections. I came back and started a psychology graduate school. I was in Boston, and the first really important connection happened when I went to a meeting of the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and there was this guy who looked like he didn't look just like the straight psychologist, and it turned out he'd just come back from India not long before, named Dan Goleman, who was a graduate student at Harvard, and he projected on the screen this Tibetan wheel of birth and death that you see in the Tibetan tankas that normally would be taken as some kind of primitive icon, iconic symbol.

Starting point is 00:33:04 And he said, no, no, no no this is a psychological diagram the buddha was actually more than anything else um he was a scientist of the mind and a a profound psychologist and here is how craving turns into contentment and here's how aggression can be transformed into powerful energy to heal yourself and others. And he was going through this diagram, and I went and I talked to him, and he said, oh, you, you've come back from monastery, you've got to come over. And so he took me to David McClellan, who had been the chairman of the social science and psychology department at Harvard at that time, the one who hired Tim Leary and Ram Dass and then later had to fire them for their LSD work.

Starting point is 00:33:52 And his house, he and his wife Mary were Quakers, his home was a kind of soiree where Ram Dass and Tibetan lamas like Chogyam Trungpa and I think Krishnamurti and various spiritual figures would come. People were going to India and coming back. And I connected with this whole group of folks who have now been friends for 45 years. Richie Davidson was another that I met there, who's now one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the world on studying contemplative neuroscience and affective emotional neuroscience. It was a whole collective of people. Dan Goldman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence, that sold 10 million copies and many others. And then I got a job working for an Esalen-like growth center in Boston at that time because I was excited at all the new Gestalt bioenergetics, what are the things

Starting point is 00:34:51 that are transformative here? And they asked me to help set up programs and I thought, well, who do I want to meet? So I set up a program with John Lilly and I set up a program with Stan Groff who is still at Johns, and married at that time, just married to Joan Halifax, Joan Groff. And we became friends. And so we have, Stan and I, have now worked together for 45 years. I went out to join him at Esalen for many, many years, spending many months together, helping during his development of the holotropic breath work that's this powerful breath transformation. And he has been a partner and a heart friend for exploration.

Starting point is 00:35:38 And we've traveled and we've taught in Russia and in, you know, places in Europe and various places around the world. So this is definitely a path that we're going to come down and dig further into. But I'm going to steer us to Ajahn Chah, because I want to know, how do you land with the Peace Corps in a remote, well, what most people would consider a remote corner of the world, and end up finding a living master? How does that actually happen? I don't know, but I assume you didn't speak Thai at the time. I did, actually.

Starting point is 00:36:21 You did? Because the Peace Corps, and then I had to learn Lao. I did because the Peace Corps at that time, it was very early in the Peace Corps, had really good language training. They borrowed it from the Monterey Language Institute. So, you know, initially I didn't speak that well, but because I'd also studied Chinese at Dartmouth, it came more easily. And I was there working in the rural health department on tropical medicine teams, mostly malaria but also typhoid and teams going out to different villages

Starting point is 00:36:58 and drawing blood and giving out medicine and things like that. And then somebody said, there's a Western monk in this province we heard about. Do you want to meet him? I said, of course I do. So I went to this little mountain and walked up 2,000 steps to the old Cambodian temple ruin at the top. And there was this very interesting guy

Starting point is 00:37:22 who had just finished a couple of years before the Peace Corps, I think, in Borneo, and then got interested in Buddhism and come and ordained as a monk. And I talk with him. He's now named Ajahn Sumedho is his monk's name because he's still a monk. And he became quite famous in Thailand and then became the abbot of a temple in in England um and I became friends with him and he said oh I found I found a really fine teacher he said you know a lot of them they kind of take you you're a westerner and they treat you special he said this guy doesn't treat you any differently than anyone else he just wants you to do the work you know and learn the learn learn the deepest way you can and he's in this forest jungle and i said i'm going there

Starting point is 00:38:14 so having heard that i went and i visited ajahn chah and he was a little bit like the dalai lama he was funny and wise and very warm-hearted, but also very strict and very demanding, but he did it in this loving way. And I thought, okay, this is the real deal. This guy looks like what I was reading about in all those Zen stories. So I've read that he said to you, and I'd love for you to tell us when he said this to you, I hope you're not afraid to suffer. If that's true, when did he say that and why did he say that? So I visited him a number of times and told him I was going to become a monk.

Starting point is 00:39:00 And then I ordained in the village where i was living in the peace corps people wanted me to do that it was a beautiful ritual and then after some days made my way down to his temple and he said that's that was his opening gambit i'm walking in into the gates and i see him i bow as i'm here and he looks at me, you know, kind of leans back a little, a little skeptical. He said, all right, I hope you're not afraid to suffer. Welcome. And it was like, you know, you didn't come here just to kind of do some interesting,

Starting point is 00:39:38 cool anthropological experiment or something like that. If you're going to do it, we're going to put you through the training. And he did. But, you know, there was like this little smile as he said it, like, okay, are you up for it? All right, dude, come on in. And what did the training consist of? What were some of the first things that you had to do? And then what was the suffering that he alluded to? What were some of the first things that you had to do, and then what was the suffering that he alluded to? What were some examples? Well, okay. So, of course, the first training was just how to walk around and not have my robe, you know, fall on the ground and embarrass me.

Starting point is 00:40:17 And everyone, oh, they all loved it. Oh, yeah, right. Look at the Westerner. He can't even chew gum and wear his robes right or whatever. So part of it was just the unfamiliarity of it culturally and otherwise. There were the two kinds of suffering. The big suffering, of course, was being alone with my own mind. I mean, there you go, you know, having to do hours of meditation when I didn't know what the hell I was doing. and then more importantly in a compassionate way in a kind and loving way with all the energies that make up our my humanity and our humanity um and that means when you sit and you get quiet anything unfinished in your heart will also come up all the unfinished business so you know um

Starting point is 00:41:21 relationships that i'd had that ended badly in college or certainly stuff from my childhood and family, dreams that I carried, things fulfilled and not. All that comes up. Yeah, my friend Annie Lamott, humorist and writer, says, my mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone. And there's some way in which in community, sitting together with others in meditation and then sitting in my hut, it was really facing myself and my full humanity. That was probably the most difficult thing

Starting point is 00:41:59 because then you get insanely bored or insanely restless. And then how do you deal with all those energies? Normally, when we're restless or bored, what do we do? Open the refrigerator or go online or something because we can't be with our own loneliness or our own fear. So that was the inner. And then there's the outer ones. And the outer ones were things like

Starting point is 00:42:26 um uh getting up the the bell would ring at 3 30 in the morning and i'm not an early riser by nature i go oh god here we go and we walked through it was actually very beautiful then we'd walk through the forest at night either by moonlight or sometimes you'd have a tiny little flashlight and in one of the forest monasteries where there were a lot of cobras we'd have a little stick and you'd tap the path so that the snakes would know you were feel you coming and move out of the way you wouldn't step on them and then we would sit silently for a couple of hours and then do an hour of chanting on a hard stone floor, mind you. Everybody else seemed comfortable and my body was killing me.

Starting point is 00:43:12 And then at least once a week, we would sit up all night with the teacher. And he would sit there comfortably meditating, maybe talking with another colleague that would come. And we'd just be sitting and meditating and he would kind of peek over at us like how are you doing i go god it's been four hours when are we when is he going to let us go back to sleep and he didn't you know so sitting up all night um it got very cold in the cold season um and it got insanely hot in the hot season. And somehow learning to live extremely simply with a set of sandals and a set of robes and an alms bowl. And then you would eat what you got offered in the village and we would share it in that monastery with others around us. And sometimes you'd get nice food and a lot of times in the dry

Starting point is 00:44:06 season you get really really skimpy food and there wasn't that much to eat and so picture a day where you get up at 3 30 in the morning you know and you sit for a couple of hours in meditation and do long then an hour long chanting on a stone floor then it's getting dawn and you walk barefoot, you know, three miles, five miles, 10 miles with an alms bowl and a handful of other monks and get your food and come back, whatever you've been offered. And that's the food for the day. And then you go back to your meditation or to the work of the monastery of sewing robes or drawing water from the well, and it's muggy and 105 degrees hot season, and then you go back and you join in the community

Starting point is 00:44:58 for more meditation. And then the teacher smiles and says, how you doing you know um and then other kinds of practices for example we had a charnel ground there and so i'm sorry a what ground a charnel ground which is where a cremation ground where people bodies would be burned and so on occasion would go to a cremation and then sit up all night and contemplate death. Look at the body and then watch as it burned, and then do these meditations where you would reflect on, well, this is going to happen to the body that you're inhabiting as well.

Starting point is 00:45:38 Who do you think you are? Do you think you're this physical body made of hamburg hamburgers or you know lettuce or whatever you happen to eat is that you are you hamburgers and lettuce you know or where are you your feelings or are you your thoughts who are you really born into this body um like koans um so anyway and the alms bowl so you would be did you eat whatever you gathered in one meal was it spread throughout the day

Starting point is 00:46:13 one meal you eat one meal a day which makes your life easy and at the same at that monastery things were shared there was other monasteries I stayed in where you would just eat what was put in your own bowl. And you didn't have to eat everything that was given to you. There were some things that were, you know, in the dry, poor season,

Starting point is 00:46:37 there would be curries that were too hot for me to eat because they used the chilies to kind of preserve the food. But you know, when it was a really poor village or something, you know, they would have to make curries out of field mice or field rats or bats or, you know, I remember eating there was a curry that was made out of basically the grasshoppers that had come swept through and there was a curry that was made out of basically the grasshoppers that had come swept through, and there was this whole big insect wave of insects that were kind of eating the crops, and they collected them all and made a curry out of it. So, you know, okay, this is what you get for your food today, dude. I think i might take

Starting point is 00:47:25 the grasshoppers over the over the bats but yeah well yeah when it's really highly spiced you can't tell what it's mystery that's true we all had mystery meat in middle school anyway this was like mystery meat on steroids exotic mystery meat what was the what was the longest period of time that you spent in silence during that time in Thailand? Well, then I went to a Burmese monastery because I wanted to do this very intense meditative training. And I spent about 500 days, so less than a year and a half in silence, with the exception that I would talk to the teacher. Every couple of days. I'd have a little 10-minute conversation about what was happening in my meditation.

Starting point is 00:48:09 And the rest, I was just sitting and walking and pushing it, as young men do, you know, I'm going to get enlightened and all of that, and not moving, sitting with a lot of pain, which is also part of what happened at the Forest Monastery, sitting on a stone floor for hours without moving. You really had to learn how to deal with your own physical pain. And I was exhausted from sitting and walking in my little hut that I had for that long retreat. And after a couple months, I thought, I'm really tired. I got to lie down. But then I thought, well, but I'm not going to nap for very long because I'm on my way to enlightenment, whatever.

Starting point is 00:49:07 I'm going to do this right. So I said, all right, I'll lie down on the wooden floor rather than on the little mat that I had, and that way I won't sleep so long. And I'm lying there, and then I wake up, and I get up, and I walk very slowly, doing this mindful slow walking to the end of the hut and look out the window toward where some of the other direction in this this meditation hut that i had then you could walk probably it was maybe 15 18 feet long it was long and narrow and i see this body lying on the floor and all of a sudden i go oh that's me and then i realized that um i'm having an out-of-the-body experience and what had happened is that I

Starting point is 00:50:05 was so intent I'm not going to sleep long I'll get up very soon that intention was really strong but my body didn't want to get up so I got up but it wasn't it wasn't in my body and I walk very slowly and I peered down at my body and I turned around and walked the other way I walked back and then the second time I walked back I got closer and then I fell into my body and I turned around and walked the other way, walked back. And then the second time I walked back, I got closer, and then I fell into my body, and I woke up, and I said, oh, wow, that's interesting. But what I saw out the window wasn't just like a dream, because I was watching my teacher and talking to these other monks,

Starting point is 00:50:38 and then I got up again, and that's exactly what was happening. And that was the first of a series of all kinds of very interesting experiences that happened. And what would other examples of those types of unusual experiences be? And was it your time in Burma that found you experiencing these for the first time well um first of all the first experiences even though i had experiment with meditation back in in uh in in college and so forth um were experiences again that came through psychedelics um and so i was familiar with all kinds of weird and powerful and mysterious or mystical kind of experiences. But there's something about learning how to navigate it without taking a substance and learning that your own consciousness is the field that you can learn to navigate. First, all the personality and emotions

Starting point is 00:51:48 and history and so forth but then you start to realize that you're bigger than that that who you are is not just your thoughts and feelings in your mind and so whether it's out of body experience or the experience of vastness of becoming the sky within which everything arises and passes or the experience of profound silence or of the void where you enter enter a stillness before experience even arises or the experience of luminosity where Where my body would dissolve into light. There are times sitting as you get concentrated in samadhi, your concentration builds, that your whole body and mind open up. And, you know, first you get the elements.

Starting point is 00:52:33 Your body can feel heavy like a stone, the earth element, or it can feel so light that you have to open your eyes and make sure you're not floating because it feels like you're floating in the air. Or it can be filled with fire and you feel like you're in the middle of a raging fire or it can get icy cold you know or all kinds of vibrations and kundalini energies and chakras start to open and sometimes it's present sometimes it's not you know as deep energies start to move through your body they also kind of push open the places that are held closed so that when your heart starts to open in deep meditation sometimes it feels like you're

Starting point is 00:53:13 having a heart attack that's physically painful because all the all the things that you've held around your heart to protect yourself start to loosen or when the energy hits your throat and it starts to open weird sounds come out you know and then you get to visions that come in the you know brow chakra you start to see all kinds of colors and visions and hear things that all possibilities of the play of consciousness can start to open after both period of silence, but also with really deeply training attention and concentration. So these experiences, just to put them in, or at least part of what you said, in context for people listening, there are a number of things you mentioned, but one in particular, that opening

Starting point is 00:54:07 in the chest that I experienced in the 10-day retreat done at Spirit Rock, for which you are one of the instructors or the lead instructor. And it was an incredibly powerful experience. And listening to your description of some of the feelings, it makes me want to go to the jungle and spend time doing this type of training. However, the 10-day retreat, as you know from firsthand observation and interacting with me, was incredibly difficult for me and terrifying at a number of points where I felt like I had crossed a boundary into maybe even madness where I was fearful I wouldn't be able to return from. And so I'm curious to know, during that period of time in Thailand, in Burma, could be afterwards as well, but when you were in the jungle and doing this very intense work, were there any particular points when you wanted to quit to go home?

Starting point is 00:55:12 Oh, absolutely. I mean, and I remember I got what I think was malaria, a really high fever, and I was sick as a dog, and I'm lying in the bottom of my little hut there, high fever and shivering, and Ajahn Chah came to visit me. And in the Lao language, and he was also funny and quite blunt, and the Lao language is a very straightforward kind of, the sentence structures are fairly simple. So he looked at me and he said, sick, huh? And I said, yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:48 And he said, hurts all over, huh? I said, it sure does. He said, hot and cold, yeah. He said, you know, makes you afraid. I nodded. He said, makes you want to go home and see your mother, doesn't it? And I'm nodding there. And then he looked at me and he said, you know, this is the jungle fever. This is malaria.

Starting point is 00:56:04 We've all had it. But now there's some good medicine. I'll send the medicine monk over and in a couple of days you'll be fine. And then he looked at me and he said, you can do this, you know, you can do this. So, I mean, that was an example of wanting to go home to my mother. What am I doing here? What kept you going? I mean, I don't want to interrupt, but it's like, what kept you going?

Starting point is 00:56:27 I'm imagining 500 days of silence. I could barely handle 10 days. You know, Tim, I mean, what's kept you going? What keeps any of us going about things that we care about? I had somehow, I don't know, kind of a wacky, but I think also important kind of passion to say, I want to understand. Or, you know, I've started down this road and I want to see where it goes. And I think all of us find at a certain point in our life that there, or if we're lucky, that something really matters. And you've done it in your work and your travel.

Starting point is 00:57:01 You want to explore what your human capacity is. And I'd read these old zen stories and i said i want to see if this is true i want to find out and then as i started things started to happen like that out of the body experience and rapture and changes and and openings um and i realized there's really something to learn here. But there are a couple of other things that I want to add to this. One of them that's the most important is that it turns out that it wasn't and it isn't so much about the actual experiences. So Ajahn Chah, my teacher, talked about how in his own training for the first eight years in the jungle um he had been a very ardent meditator and had all kinds of insights and dissolving and samadhi and jhana experiences all kinds of samadhi is awakening samadhi is uh yeah or certainly it's profound

Starting point is 00:58:01 samadhi has a lot of meanings as a word, but it can mean profound states of concentration in which the mind dissolves into light or into joy or bliss or becomes absorbed with any one of all kinds of states. teacher of that time another adjun adjun man and told him about all these experiences and the the master looked back and said cha you missed the point these are just experiences you know it's like going to the movies and you have a romantic comedy and you have a war movie and you have a documentary you know and you have uh you know a disney movie he said they're just movies on the screen, some pleasant, some unpleasant. The only question is, to whom do they happen? Turn your attention back and ask, look to see who is the witness of these? What is the consciousness that is knowing these ever-changing experiences? This is where your liberation will come. He said, become, his language, if I translate it, is the one who knows,

Starting point is 00:59:10 become the knowing rather than the experiences. And then you can tolerate anything and you can respond with love and understanding because you rest in the timeless consciousness which is your true nature so part of what i also learned in meditation and teach is that it's not so much about the experiences oh i want to have this or that experience but it's this profound turning back to ask who am i what is this consciousness itself and that was born into this body that will leave it we can talk about death at some point if you want um what is this mysterious consciousness itself um so there is that um and then um then i've also had the opportunity of being with a few other teachers and one of my uh the one of the people that i was very close to

Starting point is 01:00:09 and um inspired me profoundly was a cambodian monk named maha gosananda who was the gandhi of cambodia and when i met him we were living and training together in a forest monastery in Thailand. And it was during the time that Khmer Rouge came to power and eventually killed two million Cambodians in a kind of genocide. And he survived because he wasn't in country, but all 19 of his family members were killed. His temple burned. You know, all the Buddhist texts and so forth were destroyed. And when he was able to, he went to the refugee camps. Refugees were pouring out of Cambodia by the hundreds of thousands. And he went to the refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Cambodia. I was able to go with him at

Starting point is 01:01:07 a certain point. And he decided to open a temple in the middle of one of the biggest refugee camps. Here's 50 or 100,000 people in these tiny little bamboo huts. And got and got permission from the UNHCR, High Commissioner of Refugees, and built a platform with a little roof over it and put an altar with a traditional Cambodian Buddha on it and so forth. But it was a camp with the Khmer Rouge underground, lots of them. And so they put the word out that if anyone went to be with this monk, when they got out of the camp back to Cambodia, they would all be shot. So we wondered who would, if anyone would come.

Starting point is 01:01:55 And went through the camp the day, the opening day, with a big kind of temple gong ringing it and 25 000 people poured into the central square around this little temple my god and he maha gosananda sat there and he was a scholar he spoke 15 languages and he was a you know extremely um kind-hearted human being who had suffered enormously and had transformed it into the kind of compassion that we think of with the Dalai Lama or something like that. In fact, they became friends and Gosananda became the head of all of Cambodian Bhutan. But there he was at this point, sitting, looking out at 25,000 people who had suffered immense traumas, and you could see there was a grandmother and the only two surviving grandchildren that she had, or an uncle and one niece, and their faces were the faces of trauma and of survivors. And I thought, all right, what is he going to say to them and he sat very quietly for a long

Starting point is 01:03:07 time just in their presence and then he put his hands together in this kind of modest way and began to chant in the microphone he had a sound system uh in cambodian and in Sanskrit or Pali, the Buddhist language, one of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes, Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And he chanted it over and over in Cambodian and in Sanskrit Pali and pretty soon the chant was picked up and in a little while 25,000 people were chanting this verse with him and I looked out and they were weeping many of them because they hadn't heard their sacred chants for years, but also because he was offering them a truth that was even bigger than their sorrows,

Starting point is 01:04:13 that hatred never ends by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And they were sitting in the middle of the healing energy of the Dharma, of the teachings of the heart that can liberate us. Later on, Gosananda, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times, spent 15 years walking through the killing fields and the, you know, mine areas and so forth, leading people on foot back to their village.

Starting point is 01:04:55 And he said to the refugees, you can't go back in a bus or the back of a truck or something like that. You have to reclaim your land with love. And so he would lead a thousand people and he'd be in the front with a bell and a gong and a few other monks and the whole way back they would be chanting the chants of loving kindness so that by the time they got to their village uh whatever had been destroyed there was this sense that they were reclaiming not just the land but they were reclaiming their own hearts. That's a beautiful, really beautiful story. And it prompts me to ask a question that I struggle with answering myself. And it's also a question many of my friends have asked themselves, and I'll take a stab at it. How do you decide when to do deep inner work and take an extended period to do that versus being in the world and trying to impact others in the world? And to just provide a little bit of background on that, I have friends who are

Starting point is 01:06:05 building businesses or building careers of some type or families. And I, at this point, do not have wife, kids, or company to build, at least with a large organization. And I've come back from various experiments, sojourns, experiences over weeks or months and shared these with them. And they've, they've expressed this longing, this deep yearning to do something similar. And then they asked this question, like, how do I, how do I best decide if and when to do the deep extended work versus being in the world? And I know it might be a false dichotomy, you might not have to choose. But I'll talk a little bit more just to fill the space. But I had this experience personally, not long ago, when I was in South America, and had someone telling me in Spanish, which was not their native language,

Starting point is 01:07:01 this indigenous tribe, but this Apo, this mayor, effectively, who worked a lot with different plant medicines. And he said that he recommended one 15-month diet, very, very strict 15-month period with many different restrictions, no sex, no alcohol, no pork, etc cetera, and to develop certain capacities and to practice in effect, I mean, at certain types of meditative practices. So I struggle with this myself as well. How do you suggest someone think through? So did you give up sex and pork?

Starting point is 01:07:40 I've done it for short periods of time. Not a year and a half. I've done it for weeks at a time not a year and a half I've done it for weeks at a time but not for 15 months but what appealed to me about that definitely not the lack of sex and pork I like both of those things it was he said that's something you only have to do once in your life and it opens

Starting point is 01:07:56 doors and creates opportunities that are difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise so of course that's very tantalizing. But 15 months is a really, really long time to opt out of everything else. And I'm not saying it has to be 15 months. For some people, as you know, setting aside even 10 days to do a silent retreat is hard.

Starting point is 01:08:17 And I know there are things that they can do on an ongoing basis, like morning meditation and so on. But for those who are really drawn to this extended, deeper work, how do you think about, and that's why Ghosnanda brought it up for me, because he'd spent so much time outside of his country and then went back and was really on the ground doing work with locals. How do you think about that or suggest someone think about it? First, my answer is yes.

Starting point is 01:08:49 Because all of the things that you say are true that yes they're you know most cultures um encourage at some point human beings most wise cultures human beings to step out of their ordinary roles and their ordinary routine whether you go to the mountains or the ocean you know or a temple or a change in how you're living, so that you can open up to the mystery. And so that you also can open up to love, because what I saw with my teachers, and Gosananda was one, Ajahn Chah another, is that they were able to love no matter what it was really because they they inhabited consciousness in a very different way than just a small sense of self there was something much a possibility that we could live with forgiveness and love and be really effective in the world at the same time

Starting point is 01:09:41 so they're not separate and that's sort of what your question is how do we live in the world at the same time. So they're not separate. And that's sort of what your question is. How do we live in the world? And at the same time, you know, what trainings and how do we connect with something deeper? And part of it is just intuitive. You know, Tim, if you have newborn, you know, or young children and so forth, it's not the time to go on a long retreat your kids are your practice and in fact you can't get a zen master who's going to be more demanding than you know an infant with colic right where you or you know or a teenage you know certain teenage kids where you but with the young ones you know your zen master might say you've got to get up early in the morning and you know once in a while you might

Starting point is 01:10:29 roll over the kid is crying and sick you have to get up um your family needs tending and you know if you're even vaguely um a responsible and caring parent as you that becomes your practice and if you think well if only i could be in the great zen temple of kyoto or in ashram in india or down in the amazon with tim you know taking ayahuasca or whatever that's plant medicine they give you know your kid is can be like ayahuasca on steroids. Okay, you want to face yourself and your own limitations and your own, you know, you want to look at the small sense of self and find out how to live with a freer and bigger spirit. Here, we've just hired someone to live with you and train you full time.

Starting point is 01:11:22 So it's really, you know um and that's an important thing but but what makes it work is that um you have that intention not just to soldier through it but to say let this be a place where i awaken um graciousness and inner sense of freedom and peace as things come and go where i awaken the possibility of presence um in pleasure and pain and joy and sorrow and gain and loss and all that changes that i find a an inviolable or a timeless place of um becoming the loving witness of it all, becoming the loving awareness that says, yeah, now I'm having a family experience. And this is the place to find freedom, because freedom is not in the Himalayas or in the Amazon. The only place it's found is in your own heart exactly where you are. And that's what Gosananda taught and what Ajahn Chah, that's really what

Starting point is 01:12:26 they wanted to communicate. Now, that being said, if you have an opportunity and you're drawn to it, like somebody you might, do you know Jack Dorsey? I do. I do know Jack. Yeah. So Jack just did his first 10 day meditation retreat. Oh, good for him. And he tweeted about it. I wouldn't say it otherwise, but he tweeted about it, and it was, you know, one of the top transformative experiences of his life. And it's not to say 10-day retreats are the be-all and end-all.

Starting point is 01:12:55 They are very powerful and compelling. But even if you have a company, or even if you have a family, there might be a period of a week or some days where you can, in fact, get away and step out of those roles and turn inward. And that can be tremendously valuable. So I think both are important. You just have to listen when the time is right. So there are so many things that this brings up. The first, though, is just housekeeping for people who may not recognize the name Jack Dorsey. That's Jack, at Jack, I believe it is, on Twitter. You might then wonder, how did he get that user handle? Well, he is one of the people behind Twitter. So he is of Twitter and Square fame, among many others. A fascinating, fascinating guy. So people can check him out.

Starting point is 01:13:55 The comment on the infant being the full-time trainer working with you 24-7 reminded me also, since you mentioned Ram Dass earlier, of a quote of his that I like, and I'm going to paraphrase, I'm sure. But if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family, which I think is a fantastic one. And, uh, that's part of the reason. And, and you know, some of the backstory, but, uh, we all have, I would imagine we all have tough things that happened to us, experienced traumatic experiences as children have a lot of triggers related to family members typically. And for me, the forced break takes a number of different forms, but that includes

Starting point is 01:14:35 a trip every six months, an extended trip of two to four weeks with my parents and my brother when he can make it. So that's only after being introduced to meditation, something that I would even consider as a practice. And the last point I'll mention, just out of my personal experience, is that there's a piece of paper I have in my wallet, and I've had in my wallet for a few years now. It's getting a bit worn down. It's a piece of construction paper paper and an ex-girlfriend gave it to me who knew me very well. And it says, the task that hinders your task is your task. Beautiful, beautiful.

Starting point is 01:15:14 And that's a good reminder for me. I wanted to ask you two questions that are personally important, but also may apply to other people. The first is the question that I believe you mentioned, Ajahn Chah, perhaps others have indicated is the question versus the experiences or movies of these, say, out-of-body experiences and so on. To whom do they happen? To whom do they happen? Is this a koan, like what is the sound of one hand clapping, where there isn't really an answer you're expected to arrive at? Is the

Starting point is 01:15:51 value in contemplating the question more than any answer? Yes, both. No. Yes, both, and no. Yeah, because it is a profound contemplation for us. One of the great questions of human incarnation, who are we?

Starting point is 01:16:14 How do you get into this body with the wiggly things on the end of your limbs, you know, and those little bits of claws that you have left, you know, as nails in a vestigial tail and a hole at one end into which you stuff dead plants and animals and glug them down through the tube. I mean, the whole incarnation thing is really pretty wild. So who are we? And then how do we make meaning of it? This is a lifetime question. In that way, it's a koan.

Starting point is 01:16:42 But in another way, it's a koan but in another way it also actually does have an answer and the answer of course has to be found by each person the answer to point toward it it's very clear that you're not just your you know salad and vegetables and hamburger body and you're not just your emotions I hope because they're always changing and your thoughts good god i hope you're not your thoughts um so you start to realize all right what is there then um what is this self who am i in neuroscience you know there was a time magazine issue on modern neuroscience where it said neuroscientists have searched throughout the brain over many decades now and come to the conclusion that they cannot find the self

Starting point is 01:17:30 located anywhere in the neural mechanisms of the brain and that it simply does not exist but what does exist is the sense of self that's built out of a sense of identification with our thoughts and body and so forth that's all wise and appropriate we should be but we also know that it's not the end of the story and you know it from walking in the high mountains or listening to an extraordinary piece of music or making love or taking some sacred medicine, or sitting at the bedside of someone when they die, that mysterious moment when spirit leaves the body. Or when a child is born, we have these moments where we open to mystery and realize that

Starting point is 01:18:19 who we are is not just our personal history or our body and emotions, that we become the consciousness itself, the witnessing awareness that we are the loving awareness that was born into this body. And that becomes actually a direct knowing, a direct experience. So there is a way in which we also can come home to ourselves, and it brings a tremendous sense of freedom and well-being as all the movies of ever-changing life happen to us. So that's why I said yes and no in both.

Starting point is 01:19:00 And just a little aside, thinking about you going back to your family as a practice, and twice a year as you're doing, I just want to remind you and the listeners that Buddha and Jesus both had a hard time when they went back to their families. So don't think that there's something wrong with you. That's why they call it nuclear family, I think. Anyway. you it's just part of it that's why they call it nuclear family i think something like that anyway

Starting point is 01:19:25 uh the uh the there's another i guess it's a word more than a question that i'd love to ask you to define and that is compassion or compassionate when you use that word or those words what what do you mean exactly or what would you like it to mean for people? I would like to distinguish compassion from empathy, and I'll use a simple illustration. If you're on the playground and you see a kid being bullied, and you feel, oh, that must feel terrible, that hurts, right? That's an empathy. And empathy can be useful it also can be you can get overwhelmed by empathy if you don't know what to do with it but there's some way in which you start to feel resonating you because we are not limited to these bodies we are actually a an interconnected um uh system of consciousness and i'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute

Starting point is 01:20:31 but we all know whether it's mirror neurons from neuroscience or the field of presence as as you know scientists like Dan Siegel talk about extended presence that we can feel empathy with one another when someone's sad someone's angry someone's hurting compassion is the next step you you see or recognize you feel and then you care you you care about it and you want to if you can do something that helps so that you see the kid being bullied and you realize um i want to tell the teacher or the you know principal i want to just walk over there and say something or intervene to help stop it and so compassion it's called the quivering of the heart um when it wants to move to alleviate the suffering of yourself because you can have self-compassion, it's very important, or those around you.

Starting point is 01:21:32 And it's born into us. And the earliest studies of infants at Yale and various places like that show that even very, very, very small children have this resonance and this kind of care. And so it's not shut down in us. We're a species that's interconnected, and we care for one another. And this is your birthright, this natural compassion. And through practice and meditation, you can reawaken it, you can extend it, and it can become your way of living and moving

Starting point is 01:22:08 in the world um as a little aside and i'll just bookmark this one um just got back from a conference with our dear friend adam gazali our mutual friend richie davidson who's another of the most famous neuroscientists, especially in this area, and a number of other, some contemplatives and neuroscientists and some technologists from the Valley and VC, talking about how to build compassion into our interface with the technological world, compassion tech. And starting from the very simplest things of projects like can you build a fitbit for compassion where instead of your body where you can either note moments of care around you or in yourself or be prompted to care for yourself you know or

Starting point is 01:22:59 when you say to siri or alexa you know i'm feeling lonely or, you know, and so forth. What kind of response do you get from the algorithms and all of that? Because the UK, England, just appointed their first minister of loneliness for the country. And you'd think it was a joke, but it's not. It's like an old beatle song all the lonely people there are 10 million lonely people in england they've estimated and this minister has got and it's you know it's for isolation and loss of capacity and health and all kinds of reasons that loneliness makes things way worse but there's some way in which compassion is that which connects us and it's a beautiful thing even

Starting point is 01:23:48 if you walk down the street and you see someone you know who's struggling and so forth doesn't mean you have to fix the whole world that's not your job that would be egotistical but you can reach your hand out and mend the things that you can you can tend the things that you can and you can do it not because oh you pity them those poor people but because they're your family you recognize that we are common humanity we're in this together i'd like to build on that and preface it with a comment on the text so So you mentioned collaborating with Adam and at least discussing the potential of combining or utilizing technology to help people to

Starting point is 01:24:32 develop and harness compassion. And some folks listening might be like, oh, come on, that's so pie in the sky. But I'd like to point out that you've already collaborated successfully with Adam on software like Metatrain, M E D I T R A I N, which was one of the tools Adam has used in his end of one or end of two experiments in rejuvenating his mental capacity to, I want to say in, in his twenties and Adam's Adam's one of those guys,

Starting point is 01:25:02 you can't tell if he's 28 or 45. He's just a silver fox who always looks young. So I don't know how old he is. But he's not he's not 22. But the Mediterranean was one of the tools that he utilized. And I don't remember the the name that he used for this run of experiments, you might know that the training that he did Neuroman or something like that was very, very successful. So you already have a track record of collaborating successfully with neuroscientists and technologists. On the compassion front, I'd love to use that as a segue to loving kindness. And by way of personal example, I failed. Well, failed is a strong word. I quit.

Starting point is 01:25:46 I stopped meditating after many, many attempts. I had a very absurdly high number of false starts over many years. And it really stuck after a number of experiments and experiences I had doing three or four day trainings with, say, Transcendental Meditation and having the social accountability, being accountable to someone else is very helpful. But another turning point was experimenting with loving-kindness meditation. And I think in part it succeeded because it took the focus off of me, me, me, I, I, I, and allowed me to focus on others. But I'd like to read a brief paragraph from a profile of you in the New York Times. This is from 2014.

Starting point is 01:26:36 And feel free to correct anything that is incorrect, but I'll give it a read first. And I quote, began to believe that Americans needed particular meditation closely, I'm sorry, practice closely linked to the concepts of self-forgiveness and loving kindness, a training in the unconditional acceptance of imperfection. Without such a foundation, says Kornfield, meditation can easily become, and this is the part that I underlined and starred, without this foundation, says Kornfield,

Starting point is 01:27:18 meditation can easily become yet another form of striving, quote, another thing you do to make yourself better, end quote, instead of a path to true contentment. So could you please describe for folks what loving kindness meditation practice looks like and elaborate in any way that you feel might be useful or helpful for folks? Yeah. And that meeting, which was some decades ago with the Dalai Lama, yeah, he didn't understand when we talked about self-hatred.

Starting point is 01:27:50 There's no word for it in Tibetan. Back and forth with his translator, what does this mean? Finally, he looked up and he said, but this is a mistake. Why would anyone do this? But then he asked how many of you, there was a group of us who were teachers that had experienced this and almost everyone raised their hand. So we see that when people begin in our culture, in the West, to meditate or to turn inward, really, that it's very common to encounter a lot of self-criticism self-judgment or even self-hatred um and you know they're all the causes from our these are all kind of conditioning that we got

Starting point is 01:28:34 from from our childhood our education and so forth but what it means is that you're sitting there saying i'm not doing it right i'm'm no good. You turn meditation into one other thing that you don't do right because you can't control your mind. The truth is that you can't control your mind easily. That's not the point. There's a different way of approaching your mind, which gives you tremendous capacities, but it's not, oh, I have to stop my thinking,

Starting point is 01:29:02 or I don't want to have these feelings, and I hate having all these judgments. I don't want to be so judgmental. I hate this judging mind. What is it? It's just more judgment. So instead, as you become first able to become the loving witness, the mindful, loving awareness that says, oh, this is the judging mind, and it's been trying to protect me. Thank you for trying to protect me. I don't need you now. Thank you. All of a sudden, there's a distance from the painful or destructive or self-critical thoughts simply by witnessing them with loving awareness and acknowledging them.

Starting point is 01:29:43 This becomes the gateway to the practice of loving kindness and self self-compassion um and very often people can't do it for themselves they feel that's too much of a stretch like why would them, remember them, put them in your mind's eye and feel the kind of well-wishing you would want for them you know may they be protected and safe from difficulty may they be held in loving kindness may they be well or healthy strong and you wish them that may they be happy and you do this for a time a kind of inner well-wishing um and also maybe you feel as you think of this person that you care about you let yourself also tune into the measure of sorrows they have the struggles that every human being has you know and it tenderizes your heart as you think of them because you don't want them to suffer you feel the kind of

Starting point is 01:31:10 Rising of compassion and care so may they hold themselves in compassion may they be Safe and protected and well and you do that with one or two people that you care about for a time and then you can imagine even as I'm Describing this and you follow in your own heart you can imagine, even as I'm describing this and you follow in your own heart, you can imagine these two loved ones looking back at you with the same kindness and saying, just as you wish us protection and safety and happiness and well-being and compassion, they gaze at you and they say you too may you be safe and protected and may you be filled with tender compassion for yourself and kindness may you too be

Starting point is 01:31:56 healthy and well and may you be happy they want you to be happy i think about when i'm doing this i'm visualizing some loved ones and i know that as i do it i can feel they want that for me and then finally as you feel that from these loved ones you can put your hand on your body or your heart even if you like and take it in and and then begin to realize that you can wish this for yourself may i hold all of the joys and sorrows of my life with tenderness and kindness may i hold my struggles with compassion may i be filled with loving kindness and loving awareness may i be safe and protected? May I be well, strong or healed? And as you repeat these simple intentions that have been done for thousands of years, it's as if your cells are listening. and Alyssa Epple, who got the Nobel Prize for discovering the telomerase and the telomeres at the end of the caps and the DNA, it turns out that your cells listen to your heart and

Starting point is 01:33:17 to your intention, that consciousness affects your body. And little by little, even though it can bring up its opposite, I hate myself, I'll never be good enough, and you see all those and you say, thank you for trying to protect me, I appreciate that, may I be well, may I be safe, may I be held in love. And little by little, like water on a stone, it starts to soften the places that are holding your lack of self-forgiveness, your lack of care, and loving kindness starts to grow in you. And it's a very beautiful practice.

Starting point is 01:33:50 There's lots of places you can find it in my work, and teachers like Sharon Salzberg and Pema Chodron and Tara Brock and so forth. Are there any particular, do you have any guided loving kindness meditations or audio that you can recommend people listen to? I do. And I don't know, they could go on my website, jackcornfield.com. I think they will be on there. I do know for sure. I have a whole series of great programs with sounds true sounds true.com that include um meditations on the mind vast as the sky meditations on compassion and loving kindness and i did a book one of the books i've done is called um a lamp in the darkness and it contains uh i think eight or nine different guided practices

Starting point is 01:34:46 that you can get either with it on the CD, but you can get it as a download, basically. And Sounds True also has that, and it has a compassion practice and a grounding practice and a vast sky-like mind practice and so forth. So you can look for all of those wonderful the beautiful thing is that you can learn this and i was a couple of years ago invited to be part of the first white house buddhist leadership gathering um there were 120 buddhist leaders from around

Starting point is 01:35:20 the country from different communities i don't think that's going to happen again very soon, but there it was. And one could hope. And we talked, most of the communities did beautiful things. They were involved in the soup kitchens and tending the homeless and projects, you know, to support healing for whether it was malaria or other diseases in different other parts of the world and so forth. All kinds of great stuff. And certainly meditation. And when I got to talk, which was kind of a summary talk toward the end of it, I mentioned that in this historical record, whether it's true or not, that the text and so forth described the Buddha meeting with kings and princes and ministers and

Starting point is 01:36:15 so forth. And probably if the Buddha were around now, he would go to the White House if he were invited. He certainly would have met with Obama, and who knows now. And he had advice about why society, which he would give to leaders. And he'd say, if you can train your people to meet one another with respect, to listen with respect to differences and to come together peacefully, listening to one another, and then your society will prosper and not decline. And if your society tends the vulnerable among them, the young people, the old people, those who are sick, it will prosper and not decline. And if your society tends the environment around it in a healthy way, it will prosper and not decline and so these are these are principles of compassion

Starting point is 01:37:06 and wise society that you could read perhaps in a number of great traditions from the Iroquois nation or from the Taoist sages but here's the beautiful piece yes these are these are good things meeting in harmony and discussing in harmony and being respectful for one another and so forth there are practices that you can teach and learn that develop this capacity so that in our elementary schools now you know through organizations like Castle which is a consortium for social and emotional learning that's worked in 10,000 schools. Kids learn social and emotional learning. They learn compassion. And it changes their lives.

Starting point is 01:37:55 They're better academically. And all these kids carry the troubles of our times. They hear the news. They see the trouble even in their own family. To teach you how to steward your own heart from when you're young. And then these capacities are now being incorporated, as we know, mindfulness-based stress reduction in clinics and hospitals and businesses. And, you know, there's the mindfulness teachers that for the,

Starting point is 01:38:22 when the Seahawks won the championship or the Chicago Bulls and the L.A. Lakers, when they were championship teams, they had a meditation coach, a mindfulness coach, George Mumford, a good friend. And that these capacities can be learned wherever we are. And they transform our life. It's not just by accident or that you have this beautiful experience on the mountains or making love, but you can make that alive for you through these trainings every day, every part of your life. Jack, there was a question I was planning on asking

Starting point is 01:38:59 at some point anyway, and I think this is a good segue, which is how can you get a busy person hooked on mindfulness practice? What would be a first step or how to start? And since we're talking about loving kindness, I would like to give a bit of a hard sell for loving kindness meditation as one option. Because I recall, perhaps it was two years ago, I was really beating myself up. And for people who don't know this about me, I've spent the majority of my life being the, the, my own worst enemy in terms of inner dialogue, extremely brutal and hypercritical and loathsome of myself in, in so many different respects. And I was going through a particularly intense and difficult time with that inner critic, just ruthlessly beating myself up. And at that point, another friend of mine, Chade Mangtan, who created the Search Inside Yourself class at Google, he was a very early engineer, which became the most oversubscribed class for employees at Google,

Starting point is 01:40:08 recommended that I take a look at loving kindness meditation. And I didn't have any particularly sophisticated approach to it, but I decided with nothing to lose, and that I was having so much trouble during that period sitting still and trying to focus on, say, the breath or anything like that, that at night, this happened to coincide with book deadline, probably not pure coincidence that my beating myself up was exacerbated during that time. That was a few years ago. And I began at night, in my case, when I would take a shower at night or sit in a sauna, I very often go to hotels to write, which is something Maya Angelou and a few

Starting point is 01:40:45 others convinced me might be a good idea, that I would consider two people, just like you had mentioned, two people I really cared for and wish them well. That's all I did. And Chet had said to me, Meng is usually what I would call him, that at one point, a woman in one of his classes had done this for one day at work, every hour on the hour, she would just look out of her office and wish someone well that she could see in her mind's eye for 60 seconds or so. And she said, she said it was her best day of work in seven years. And I found that unbelievable. So I decided to try it myself. And that week of just spending maybe two to four minutes at night before going to bed ended up being one of the most blissful weeks in memory, certainly at that point in several years. It was really profound. And I couldn't pick out

Starting point is 01:41:39 any other variable that had changed. So for me, I just want to, for people who are listening and saying, ah, you know what, I'm type A driven, super hyper competitor, this doesn't apply to me, that it very well could apply to you. And that by taking a little bit of the harmful edge off, you don't automatically remove your competitive edge. And in fact, I would argue, just as you mentioned that the Bulls and so on used to have or still do but used to have a mindfulness coach for competitive advantage that that it can be another tool in your toolkit and doesn't take you out of the game so to speak it just makes you more aware of the games that you're playing so that's a long sort of infomercial sales pitch that I wanted to just make sure I got in because I discounted a lot of these practices for a very long time because I thought it would

Starting point is 01:42:33 at best be a waste of time and at worst take away some of my skills or tendencies that allowed me to get to where I am. So that is more of a confessional than a question, but I would love to hear your thoughts, any additional thoughts on loving kindness meditation, but also any additional thoughts on how, if you wanted to get a busy, maybe even impatient person hooked on mindfulness practice, what first steps or approaches you might suggest?

Starting point is 01:43:08 So a lot of different questions sort of woven into what you said. And the first is that there's a kind of misunderstanding in our culture that love is a weakness and it's not. There is a way in which it's the force that can, probably the only force that can meet the level of aggression or violence and other such things that are happening in the world. It's the power that lets mothers lift cars off their children or lets somebody like Dr. Martin Luther King stand, you know, after his church was bombed and children were killed and say, we will meet your physical violence with soul force. We will not harm you, but we will love you so deeply that we will not only transform ourselves, but we will transform you in the process. And so the notion that love is somehow a weakness,

Starting point is 01:44:06 I think we do everything out of love. We want to be loved, even in our, you know, ambition and our desire for success. Underneath it is, you know, we want to be well. We want to find our happiness. And that's part of love. So it's actually a power. And my colleague and friend um Wes Nisker went to interview Gary Snyder a couple of years ago Gary is a Pulitzer Prize

Starting point is 01:44:33 winning poet um and environmentalist for 50 years been writing about bioregionalism and one of our great kind of elders in this environmental movement. He said, Gary, what do you have to say to us now? The oceans are rising. The world climate is changing, you know, hotter and hotter. The species extinction. And Gary looked back and he said, don't feel guilty. If you're going to save it, don't save it out of guilt or anger or fear.

Starting point is 01:45:04 Those are the very things that are actually making the world worse. Save it don't save it out of guilt or anger or fear those are the very things that are actually making the world worse save it because you love it because it's part of you because it and that's the that is the is the power um whether you're starting a company but also it's not just that you you know some vision okay now i'm going to become this wealthy, you know, playboy or whatever, you know, zillionaire, that what does your life mean for you? And what do you really want? And when you listen, there is something in you, and it's part of your birthright, to both be able to give your gifts, but also to love and be loved in return and it turns out that it's a power so then what you talk about is that um it doesn't take much to begin the training and you're you know two minutes or four minutes in the evening or this woman at her work taking once an hour you know 30 seconds

Starting point is 01:45:59 or a minute to look at somebody there and offer a well-wishing can transform everything. For people who want the practical support, because it is hard to do on your own, if you go to soundstrue.com and look up the programs that I have, first there's a 40-day program called Mindfulness Daily, which is 15 minutes a day or 12 minutes a day, depending on the segment, that both gives instructions in mindfulness, loving awareness, and loving kindness practice. And it's 12 or 15 minutes a day. And by the end of those 40 days, you really have learned the inner skills. And then it builds up.

Starting point is 01:46:42 There's then a deeper training called Power of Awareness. And for those who are interested, we're about to open an online teacher training for people interested in mindful, in passing along mindfulness and loving kindness to others. Jack, just to interject for one second, for people listening, I will also link to all of these resources in the show notes,

Starting point is 01:47:03 which you can find at tim.blog forward slash podcast. So you don't necessarily have to remember all these things, you can go to the URL, and we will have direct links to these resources. Sorry to interrupt, Jack, just wanted to mention for people listening. And with it, then there is also the programs there, there's one called guided meditations, that's, you know, a download download it's like 10 bucks or something and it has a loving kindness practice compassion practice a forgiveness practice um i think it may even have a joy practice uh and and so forth so you can and it's really helpful to have guided meditations at first because otherwise your attention we have a very short attention span in modern society albert einstein at least according to

Starting point is 01:47:47 scientific american uh said if you can drive safely while kissing a girl you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves and we are in this kind of multitasking world with our devices and we've forgotten how to tend our own hearts we've forgotten how in some ways to really be present for one another and more importantly for our own life and so getting guided meditations and is tremendously helpful and doing these little mini practices that you talk about one minute, two minutes, several times a day can transform you. Now, I was just going to mention to people also, if you look at behavioral change, if you look at BJ Fogg, formerly of the Persuasion Laboratory at Stanford, you look at diet, dietary change, any of these things, doing less than you think you're capable of doing is a really good long-term strategy

Starting point is 01:48:48 in terms of starting off rigging the game so that you can win in the beginning, so that your pass-fail mark in your mind is a really, really low hurdle. So I just wanted to reiterate guided meditation. Don't white-knuckle in the beginning. Make it as easy as possible. And the same principle from ancient texts say that you start in the easiest way.

Starting point is 01:49:12 For some people, kindness for themselves seems impossible, but then you pick a child you care about or someone else. Or even when you do go to yourself, you think of yourself when you were an innocent child and wish yourself well the game is to do where whatever naturally opens the the gateway whatever is the easiest for some people it's their dog you come home and you know the most non-judgmental being in their life wags its tail and loves you and it doesn't care you know what's going on in your head um so you take the avenue that most naturally opens your heart and then you do this just a little at a time as you

Starting point is 01:49:49 said and it doesn't take long but the other thing that's important is that sometimes as you do it it can actually display or show you the hypercritical nature of your mind the shame that you carry um the you know the self-judgment or self-loathing and so then you then you say well what do you do then or it brings it brings up its opposite is that's the place that you just breathe and hold all that stuff with kindness because this is our humanity and we all have some of that and the point isn't to get rid of it or judge yourself for having it or try to fix it it's almost as if you put your hand on your heart and you say you know this is like mindful self-compassion or deep training this is part of

Starting point is 01:50:36 the measure of struggles that i've been given like every human being these things have tried to protect me and now i can hold them with tenderness and say, all right, you know, thank you, but I don't need your help anymore. I can be kind to myself. And in that way, you're not trying to fix yourself or perfect yourself. If anything, you're trying to perfect your love. Jack, I wanted to give you credit for help that you gave me and also tactical advice that you gave me during the 10 day silent retreat. You gave me a lot, but I want to highlight one that's related to what you just said. I was going through a very, very difficult time, particularly

Starting point is 01:51:17 days seven, eight, nine. And you gave me the advice that you just mentioned. And there's, there's one component I want to really underscore for people. And that is when you're, for instance, trying to do loving kindness meditation, and instead you get the opposite, or you get this self ridicule, uh, who are you to try to meditate in this self-indulgent way? This is ridiculous. Or this voice starts to pop up that is angry or hateful, whatever it might be. The process of not simply dismissing it or fighting against it, but recognizing it as a coping strategy that helped you in the past in some way that you

Starting point is 01:52:05 developed because in my case, you know, the rage was a fuel that if I had, without which I probably would never have left Long Island where I had friends who later overdosed on opiates and so on. So it was a gift in a way and a tool. And as you said, you can thank that response or that part of yourself and then put it. And I remember you recommended even visualizing and please correct me if I'm wrong or elaborate, but visualize taking that part of you that is a coping strategy, thanking it, and then putting it say on a shelf where you can use it later if need be, along with, say, other icons or figures who, whether it's Buddha or other, that you recognize as wise, and then continuing with the meditation. So that thanking that part

Starting point is 01:52:59 of yourself for the function that it once served, even if it is not serving you now, it was such a key insight, uh, for me that then helped me to, uh, manage my internal states or, or observe and appreciate my internal states for the next several days, uh, where I really felt like I was lost at that point. So that was a really direct tool that, that helped me tremendously. Yeah. Thank you for bringing it up. was lost at that point. So that was a really direct tool that helped me tremendously. Yeah, thank you for bringing it up because it's so important for people when we come to that hypercritical shame place. We feel very vulnerable and we've been identified with it

Starting point is 01:53:38 because you needed it. I needed these things for survival. And if you try to get rid of this stuff, you just end up in a fruitless battle against yourself, and it's just more judgment. So what you described as saying, thank you for helping me survive. I appreciate it. Let me put it on the shelf or the altar. I'll put it in the lap of the Buddha or whoever, you know, the goddess of infinite compassion. You hold it for me. If I need it, I'll pull it back. And that sense that this isn't who you are. It doesn't describe who you are. It isn't who you

Starting point is 01:54:10 are. It was a strategy because we're vulnerable beings and you were tender as a child, you know, and you had to make sure you could survive. Thank you for that. And now I have a different capacity. And let me just talk about that capacity a now I have a different capacity. And let me just talk about that capacity a little bit, because the capacity for presence and the great heart of compassion that's said to be your birthright is a really mysterious thing. Talk about identity. And when my youngest brother's wife esta was dying of cancer and she was just a beautiful being and i spent quite a bit of time with

Starting point is 01:54:55 her and with my brother i had gone home she was close to dying i'd gone home to sleep and i wanted to get up early and hurry back because it was very close. And I got in my car. I had to stop at the drugstore to pick up a prescription. Hurriedly running, you know, dashing through the aisles and so forth. And I'm at the checkout counter, and all of a sudden my whole body relaxed. And I thought, oh, Esther died. And I got out to the car and

Starting point is 01:55:26 I called my brother I said how's it going he said oh Esther died a few minutes ago and I said I know you know I'll be there shortly and we've all had these experiences if I ask in a room how many have had this particular kind where you knew someone died when they died you know a quarter of the hands will go up why is this it's because who we are is not this body we are we are the consciousness itself and so with all these practices what they allow us to do is to step out of what's called the small sense of self or the body of fear and reconnect with a field of connection, of interdependence, of compassion,

Starting point is 01:56:12 and to take our history and to honor it, but not be bound by it. One of my favorite stories is of Ram Dass, again, this wonderful spiritual teacher, in the early years when he came back from being with his guru in India, he was sitting up there and teaching, you know, devotional practices and meditation practices. And he had a beard and white robes and a and and beads and he's sort of in the guru outfit um and a woman in the front row raised her hand and say ramdas ramdas aren't you jewish what's with this hindu stuff and ramdas said well yes i am actually i was bar mitzvahed as as i was too um and there are many things i love about the Jewish spiritual tradition, the generosity of it, the Kabbalah, all the great teachings on the many stages and states of consciousness, the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters. And then he paused and looked at me and said, but remember, I'm only Jewish on my parents side and there is something both witty which he was but also profound about it because we are not just our parental history or or the historical circumstances of this place and

Starting point is 01:57:38 body that we were born into and something in us knows this so that when you look at the there's a wonderful book that came out last year the the year before called The Book of Joy, which was a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu. And both of them have marvelous laughs. I think people go to hear the Dalai Lama by the tens of thousands, not just for the Tibetan teachings, some of which are actually hard to understand, or even the fact that he's this Nobel Prize winning, you know, world figure, I think people go to hear him laugh, that somebody who's carried so much suffering from the loss of his country where he can't return,

Starting point is 01:58:20 and the burning of temples and texts and all of those things and he and tutu had a week together when they were asked and took and this created this book how can you be joyful how can you laugh like this when you've lived through apartheid and the death of so many people around you and dalai lama i mean they banter back and forth and like brothers and dalai lama says so much has been taken from me you know they've taken our sacred texts they've taken our ability to make prayers in public they've taken you know so much of our culture why should I let them take my happiness and then Tutu starts to laugh and giggle and say you know I've been through much, but I am not going to let myself

Starting point is 01:59:05 live in that place. I'm going to let myself live in that which affirms life and in a kind of profound joy that we made it, that we're still alive, that we can contribute, that we can be here in this beautiful earth. And this shift of consciousness is what's needed for the world. Because if we look honestly, no amount of technology alone is going to save us. Nanotechnology and space technology and biotechnology and worldwide web, internet, computer, supercomputer technology is going to stop continuing warfare and racism and tribalism and environmental destruction those are happening based on consciousness of the human heart and so we are now you know these we've made these enormous developments outwardly where you have the great library of alexandria and your smartphone in your pocket along with a million you know cat

Starting point is 02:00:05 youtubes or whatever but there it is it's all in there and then um what we need is um collectively to develop a transformation inwardly of our inner life that is parallel to this enormous outer transformation um and that's that you know one of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff some years ago said we are a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants you know god or you know how old i don't know how old humanity is but it's time you know it's time to grow up so so that this this work that we're talking about is both individual but as you learn to meet your own life with greater understanding and compassion it empowers you to move through the world in a different way and to help others do the same and then you get that kind of joy of Tutu and the Dalai Lama,

Starting point is 02:01:05 that you're somehow part of an awakening that humanity now needs more than ever. Jack, I'd love to ask you, and these interviews are always driven by some self-interest. I always have some issue or challenge or problem that I'm trying to figure out, so I reach out to someone like you to help me do it. But I record the conversation. As we chatted about before we hit record, and you know this already, but the last several years have been very, very important for me in terms of addressing certain traumas. And the last eight weeks in particular have been transformative in a lot of beautiful ways. And the periods, the duration of periods within which I don't berate or attack myself have become longer.

Starting point is 02:01:58 But there are still times when the wheels fly off the car. And this last week has been one such example. And I tend to, when I make a mistake or feel like I'm backsliding or relapsing, to compound the problem by beating myself up, which then I start to, then I beat myself up about beating myself up. And you know where that goes. So let me paint a picture. So I found out recently that my Japanese host father, and I've been in touch with this family since I was 15. I'm very, very close to them. I'm 40 now.

Starting point is 02:02:32 And I found out that he just was admitted, because the host mother sent me an email, to the hospital with liver cancer. And they don't have the details yet. I just sent a follow-up email. They don't know what the prognosis is exactly, but needless to say, the worst case scenarios are, are certainly being conjured in my mind or the potential of those. And then, uh, simultaneously have been contending with, and I believe you have some experience with this,

Starting point is 02:03:12 contending with what should be a very simple construction project of a cabin up in the mountains. And it has been delayed and delayed and delayed. And there have been cost overruns and cost overruns and cost overruns and promises made promises broken expectations set expectations missed and a friend of mine called with a whole new slew of problems yesterday related to this place and i lost my shit for lack of a better term i mean there are many other things going on simultaneously but i got really pissed and i was like you know what this extending the olive branch being understanding can't gambit is not working with these people like i need to i need to i need to take out the baseball bat and like pull old tim off the shelf who was just this like juggernaut head through brick walls and be like listen fuck face like if you don't do abcdne here well these are going to be the consequences and then i'm like well wait

Starting point is 02:03:59 i'm supposed to be compassionate but how do i not be a pushover? And it turns into this big, dramatic play inside my head. And then I wait, then this is going to end soon. I'm not going to keep going. But what I then often do is self-medicate with caffeine. And I think it's a way of feeling productive without actually being productive. And it also creates so much volume on the noise. I think I use it to tune out a lot of feelings. So when someone relapses or has this kind of experience, what do you suggest to them? I mean, is there a particular pattern interrupt or approach that you've found helpful for regaining footing oh so there's a number of things to say um yeah first of all um you could call it relapsing or

Starting point is 02:04:55 you could just call it like yeah this is being human the the one of the poet the most most The most beloved poet in Japan was a Zen master named Ryokan. And there's a two-line verse of his that I particularly find fitting for this, where he wrote, last year a foolish monk, this year no change. And you can sort of feel the humor and the tenderness in it. And there's a way in which you see your personality, the point, you know, you have a body, you have this particular body you're born with, and you can transform it in certain ways within the limits of the body that you were given. And similarly, you have a personality.

Starting point is 02:05:40 And anybody who has a number of kids realizes that you don't come in tabula rasa, that you actually, this kid is born and has this kind of temperament so you have a personality and just like you don't want to look too closely to the body at the body sometimes you don't want to look back closely the personality either um you know it has its foibles and its fears and you know all of that um and so you start to kind of look at and and say, oh, now there's a really good example of how neurotic I can get. Thank you. Thank you for reminding me. You know, and then you get a little sort of like the keeper of the zoo, a little more tender with those kind of creatures.

Starting point is 02:06:16 So it's bringing in the non-judgment, you know, or the loving kindness for the way that you actually are and not your ideal um or bringing compassion you could say yeah this is a tough one and this triggered i got triggered so what um now the other thing is that i had the same experience when we had a a big remodel of our house when i was some years ago um and raising my daughter and and in my first marriage and we were supposed to go and teach and travel in europe in this guy who was a good contractor but you know everything of course gets more expensive and you have to do this and it kept getting slowed down i said you are going to get this done so we could make these decisions for into europe and it's not happening you've got to hurry up i do that like three or four different times and it doesn't happen finally i go in i get pissed and i say listen you know

Starting point is 02:07:11 you said this in our contract was going to be done by and if you don't fucking get this done by the time i'm going to haul your ass in court and sue you because i i need this done and i'm not going to pay you the goddamn money he looked at me and he said oh you really want this done and i'm not gonna pay you the goddamn money he looked at me and he said oh you really want this done don't you i said yes next day there's a huge crew it starts to get done and i realized okay what i've been sort of talking meditation speak yeah nice get it done he was a fucking contractor and i just had to teach i had to speak contractor ease get the goddamn job done or i'll haul your ass in. Okay, I get it.

Starting point is 02:07:48 Yeah, I'll send a team over. And that's all it took. So there's something playful about that as well. It's not that you can't. I've seen the Dalai Lama get angry at people. It's not that you can't use that power and that understanding, you know, when it's necessary to get very strong or forceful. And you don't have to judge yourself unless you hurt people. And then, of course, that's the

Starting point is 02:08:13 misuse of it. But it's just, it's part of being human. Is there something you say to yourself when, now, I think, I don't know, you are certainly in person and with any contact I've had with you, one of the most compassionate people I've ever met. And I don't use that word very much, but your presence of listening and being with someone is really incredible. And I don't know how much of that is intrinsic versus trained, but for better or for worse, coming out of the womb, I've been very impatient since day one. So I worry about, I can get, it seems like my default is the yell is is speaking contractor ease to uh more than just the the wayward contractor who's uh who's putting off work is there some when i feel that the sensations of anger beginning to bubble up? Is there something that you would suggest as self-talk

Starting point is 02:09:28 or just a temporary pumping of the brakes to make it an informed decision versus just a lashing out? Well, I could give you an answer, but in a minute I'm going to guide you in a little practice perfect so that you can find that find the better answer first i just want to say that um that anger you know yes it's your habit or maybe your temperament that's energy and there's nothing wrong with energy you know it's it's the power to let you do all the kind of things you've done in your life that are tremendously you know creative or resourceful or daring or whatever kinds of things so you want to respect okay i'm getting filled with energy and and you you know it might be then you want to lash out

Starting point is 02:10:15 but first you want to respect that energy wow let me feel this in my body whoo anger how big is it okay then your question is then your question is what can I do to modulate it? I could give you, you know, okay, take some breaths, ground yourself, look at that other person, blah, blah, blah. But instead, as we're talking, let yourself picture a circumstance recently. It might have been with your, you know, the contractors doing your cabin or something else. And, you know, that uprising of the injustice of it and how right you are, you know, and how you're going to get this goddamn thing done, you know, and how you have to have to be hard and strong. You feel all that and feel the energy in your body. First thing is just remember what it felt like and now you're becoming the the kind of mindful loving witness of it and saying wow this is a lot of energy so can you feel that and remember that oh yeah okay now next step

Starting point is 02:11:19 is that the wisest figure you can imagine, maybe it's the Buddha or maybe it's, I don't know, it doesn't matter, some great master or martial arts master who's mastered themselves as well as their art comes to you, and let yourself imagine somebody's going to teach you how to manage this powerful energy. And see who appears. Somebody appears to you.

Starting point is 02:11:50 And first, they look at you and they smile and they say, yeah, this is really, this is the big energy. And they appreciate you. So instead of saying, oh, you're a doofus, you know, they say, oh, you actually you actually carry some powerful energy and they acknowledge that they bow to you yeah tim you got it all right and then you say yeah but how do i manage this when it takes me over and so this and master whoever comes reaches under their robe and pulls out a gift for you which is a clear symbol of exactly what you need in that moment to help you regulate it so that you can keep the energy, but do it in a way that doesn't cause harm to you or another.

Starting point is 02:12:35 And this clear symbol, you'll be able to see it's just what you need. So let yourself picture the gift that they put in your hand and let yourself imagine, see, envision, picture what it, what it is. And if you can't see it clearly, hold it up to the sunlight, you'll be able to, and then let me know what you get. You want me to tell you what it is? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So the person who came to mind for me, I went through a few was the creator of Judo, fascinating guy named Jigoro Kano, a really small guy.

Starting point is 02:13:12 Yes, who could throw all the big guys and smile at the same time. Right, exactly. Changed a lot also in Japanese government. Fascinating guy. fascinating guy the the symbol i i don't know why this is to be honest but it's a uh pyramid the size with with with straight edges about a little too big to hold in your palm that is uh uh blue it's like a a sort of almost a mixture of scott pure sky blue like a sort of almost a mixture of pure sky blue, like bluebird blue with a bit of electric blue mixed in. And it's sort of a smoky vapor that's floating around inside this glass pyramid. I have no idea why that's the case, but that's what came up. All right, so we'll stay with it and then there's one more little piece so he gives you this this pyramid um free associate a little bit on pure what it might possibly mean because these symbols are like dream images and they have they come from a deep place in your psyche and this pyramid has a message for you this blue. Just guess what it might be. I think it's very, very stable.

Starting point is 02:14:27 It's an extremely stable structure. And for me, it also, I could imagine it representing power also. It seems like a very powerful symbol in many different cultures, certainly. Yep. The blue is a little easier for me it's a very cooling soothing color where uh certainly red is the the color i would associate with a fire with the right the uh high uh resonance anger energy would be more of a red fire element. So the blue would be a cooling or countering balancing force for that. All right, so now what I want you to do is imagine taking this blue pyramid gift,

Starting point is 02:15:18 which represents a kind of extreme stability and also a kind of power and cooling that's given to you by jigarokano and taking this into your body so that there you are filled with this energy and anger you know this huge wave of um you let that be there and you take this pyramid in and you let that energy be inside this stable grounded place of power and feel what it's like to be inside this blue pyramid with this energy and feel how it feel how it affects it just notice as if there you're in that circumstance and now i'm remembering i am the blue pyramid with the and what do you you, what does it feel like? Uh, well, I, the, the most noticeable thing. And, uh, you know, I wonder of course, how much of this is the, the actual visualization versus the timeout that I permit myself to have.

Starting point is 02:16:18 But, uh, there's a, there's very often a tightness on the left side of my chest, right by the sternum, that I feel when I start getting wound up. And that is absent when, after taking this gift and then visualizing it being incorporated. So what you're practicing, and you know this very well in athletics, that yes, you practice things, but other times you also practice envisioning, whether it's playing piano or whether it's some Olympic training, that some of the times you just do it through like to be in the middle of this upwelling of anger and so forth. And then taking a couple of breaths and feeling the blue pyramid and the connection with the earth and the stability of it.

Starting point is 02:17:16 And the power then of that presence that cools you and allows the anger to be there, but not in the same uncontrolled way. Now, there's one more thing, and that is if you imagine, again, Jigoro Kano, I believe you said his name is. You got it. He comes up to you after giving you this gift, and he touches you kindly on the shoulder, and he has a few words of advice of how to handle this powerful energy that comes up in you, because he knows all about it. And what does he whisper into your ear, kindly? Well, he whispers, this came to mind immediately.

Starting point is 02:18:00 He says, zen'you ko zen'you, which is, you know, I still have this, actually. There are two, he has many famous quotes, but he has what you might consider proverbs, short aphorisms that I've actually carried with me since I was 15,

Starting point is 02:18:19 but they're packed away somewhere. I have two of them. They're on cloth. And the first is which means basically, if you work hard, you will achieve, you will reach your target. It's not the best translation, but that's the idea. The other one is whichryoku zenyo, which is effectively the most efficient use of energy, but it could also be the best slash most benevolent use of energy. And it's a principle of judo, but it's something that he applied to everything, including education. So it would be that very short, bite-sized aphorism, which is, and I'm sure some scholars probably disagree with me, but roughly translated here, at least as I take it, is the maximum or most efficient use of energy.

Starting point is 02:19:17 So take that in, take his intentions, Zenyoko Zenyo, the benevolent and efficient use of it feel the pyramid and now your assignment is that the next um five times that this comes which it will maybe tomorrow or next week or so forth bring in the blue pyramids stable powerful cooling so the energy is still there and then you hear his voice say zenyoko zenyo and you go oh yeah i can use this but i can use it in a benevolent way um and try it five times and then then um text me let me know what happened because now we're closing the loop if you do it and see now you now you're responsible if you agree that you're going to do it it sort of goose it gooses the game a little bit you You go, okay, now

Starting point is 02:20:06 I better do it because I have to let Jack know what happened. And let me know what happened. Well, I'll be able to use it this week because I'm flying out to the site of this cabin to meet with everybody and see what the hell is going on. So I'll have at least five opportunities to do that.

Starting point is 02:20:21 You have your Zen training ahead. I mean, the other thing that's great, and then that you can hear in this, rather than by giving you a cookie-cutter answer, is that we actually have the wisdom that we're seeking or that's available, we have it in ourselves. I mean, you didn't have to fly to Kyoto you know, Kyoto and get in your time machine to go back and see Jigoro Kano, you know, or whoever it happens to be, the Dalai Lama, or whoever happens to come to you, the Buddha or some other great figure, that actually, the goddess of compassion, that we carry that wisdom in our own heart. And part of what these contemplative trainings do is they give us access just by taking a little pause.

Starting point is 02:21:10 It didn't take you 30 seconds. Okay, he appears. What do I do? Here's how my body would feel. What perspective should I bring? Here's efficient and benevolent use of energy. Okay, now I remember so these answers for the for the questions of the psyche in the heart don't require going somewhere they ask us to quiet and

Starting point is 02:21:35 begin to listen and as you do then you discover your own and your own inherent wisdom and your own compassion as well because the benevolent use that he offers to you, where does that live? It lives in Tim. It lives in you. One of the reasons I've wanted to have you on the podcast for so long is that for me, you represent a very wide spectrum of tools. You have developed a toolkit that has enabled you to work with everyone from the seekers of, say, the Buddhist, along the lines of the Buddhist traditions,

Starting point is 02:22:22 to, say, adolescents who are cut cutters to war vets with PTSD, missing limbs and so on. You've worked with a very diverse set of students and patients, maybe even. And that leads me to my next question, which is after these experiences abroad, why did you decide to pursue to come back? Why did you decide to pursue, to come back, why did you decide to come back to the U.S., period, and then why did you decide to go back to

Starting point is 02:22:54 school and study clinical psychology? So, after the first five years in Asia, there were a certain, there were a few other Westerners who had become monks. It was a handful. And some were going to stay for the rest of their lives. I'd learned a lot. And so that was kind of a choice. Am I just going to stay? And I realized, no, I want a family.

Starting point is 02:23:19 I want a lover. You know, I was a young man after all. And just the celibacy for those years was actually pretty hard um I want um I want to see if what I have learned really translates um into the life back home I don't want to just leave it um and so it was some wrestling but it became very clear to me that I that I wasn't fit for the monastery for the rest of my life. I had not only other desires and longings, but also a real interest to say, does this

Starting point is 02:23:54 work elsewhere? So I came back and thought, well, what can I do? I got a couple of jobs right away. And of course, what I knew how to do was be a student student but I was now a student of the mind and the heart and I thought well how do I learn more about what happened to me in the monastery? Oh I'll study Western psychology and so that started me on that particular path and I learned a lot of complimentary things. There's some very good trauma work in the West that I've learned about that really enhances the compassion and loving kindness and mindfulness things that I learned in the temple.

Starting point is 02:24:32 And, you know, now I've done a lot of years of teaching Eastern and Western psychology together. These principles that I've learned are spreading so widely in Western psychology. I went to the largest therapy conference in the country in December and down in Anaheim and gave a talk, you know, here's a room full of 3,000 or 5,000 people and I asked how many of you have some experience of meditation or mindfulness practice and the majority of the hands went up. And that would not have happened 20 or 30 years ago. So Eastern psychology is now becoming more invisibly woven into the understandings of clinical psychology in the West, and it's beautiful.

Starting point is 02:25:21 Now I want to say something else, you know, when you talk about working with a variety of population, you know, yes, people in prisons, yes, vets, or kids coming out of gangs, but also CEOs, and there's a dialogue that Bill Ford and I did. He was at that time the chairman of Ford Motors. He was actually the CEO, perhaps, before that. But he's the chairman of Ford Motors. And he talks about it, too. It was in 2008, I guess, when the auto industry was just about to melt down. And he called.

Starting point is 02:26:09 We'd had some contact. He's a meditator. And he said, you know, I'm going to lose my grandfather's company and maybe the whole industry on my watch. And it's hard to sleep. What can I do? And we did loving kindness practices and mindfulness practices together and so forth. And I gave him some practices that he could use. capacities that we have to be present without getting lost to bring a an understanding attention

Starting point is 02:26:49 to these energies just as you were doing with anger in ourselves are really really liberating and sometimes you know what's needed like for the vets or the the people coming back from the war is also a kind of forgiveness practice in trauma work. And we'll come together and, you know, they'll say things like, I can't tell you what I saw. Because, in fact, people don't want to hear the horrors of war. They can't tell the story. And if they do, often they re-traumatize themselves. And the people around them couldn't bear it.

Starting point is 02:27:28 But there's something worse, because they'll say, I can't tell you what I had to do. And so it's locked up in their hearts, you know, and then what do they have? They can drink, or they can, you know, distract themselves, or get in, you know, blind rages periodically. But if you get a room of returning combat vets and hold it with a proper space of understanding and compassion, not only can they tell their stories, which they've never told, but they can listen to one another and say oh yeah i've been there and all of a sudden they're not so alone anymore and and that release of the weight on their heart so there's a social dimension to trauma where we need to tell the story

Starting point is 02:28:18 helps them release also what's carried in their nervous system and in their body and there's some some correlation between between those two together that becomes very powerful and we need that we need i do a lot of teaching of forgiveness practice and self-forgiveness those are also on those those guided meditations that i teach and for a lot of us self--forgiveness, like self-compassion, becomes a very, very important way to liberate ourselves from what we had to do to survive in the past so that we're actually free in our life. How do you set the stage, for instance, with those vets? What do you say to them, or what exercise might you do that opens the door for them to share these stories?

Starting point is 02:29:06 So a couple of images, one with gang kids and then one with vets. For gang kids who come in or these kids who are trying to get out of gangs and might come with a mentor or something like that to some events we've had, you get these guys and they're, you know, their hoods are up and their hats are on backward and they're leaning back and saying, like, come on, man, you're going to teach us meditation, you're going to teach us, give us some poem stories. Listen, we're out on the street. People got nine millimeters.

Starting point is 02:29:41 You know, you got to give us something better than that so we try to make a a setting that honors who they are from the very beginning and say well we can't talk yet about the real things that we came here to do because there are too many people in this room who have not been acknowledged um and not respected. So would you go out in the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person you know who's been killed, and we light one candle and put it in the center of a table, say bring it back in and say their name and put their stone by this candle. The simplest possible ritual. And these guys, and sometimes gals, will come in and their hands are full of stones. No young

Starting point is 02:30:31 people should know that many dead people. And they'll say, this is for Tito, and this is for RJ, and this is for homegirl. And pretty soon there's a mound of stones and the names of people they've lost were put into the fabric of the air of that room and their hoods are no longer over their heads. They're sitting up like, okay, this is a place where we can talk about what's really going on. So there's something about making, whether it's through the simplest ritual or making a container in which people realize that this is a safe place to talk about what we've never done before.

Starting point is 02:31:12 With the vets, one of the things that Michael Mead, Luis Rodriguez, these guys from Mosaic Multicultural Foundation that I've worked with for years and are really wonderful. Michael, who's a great drummer and a storyteller and mythologist who's also been working in prisons and with vets and gang hits for years, he'll say, let me tell you an ancient story of returning warriors. And he has a handful of stories from Africa or Tibet or the Mayan tradition about warriors coming back with you know, with their hands covered with blood. And, you know, their eyes filled with the mars, with the martial energy that they would,

Starting point is 02:31:56 that they can't stop the violence because it's taken them over. And here's a myth or a story that tells about how ancient warriors were brought back into their community. I'll tell you the myth if you want to hear one of them. Oh, yes, please. So here we are, you know, and there's these vets and already stories have started to pour out about, I can't tell you what I saw, I can't tell you what I had to do. And Michael stood up and he said, let me tell you an old Irish story of an Irish warrior named Coculain. I'm not sure how his name is pronounced. Something like that. And he was the most fierce and famous of all Irish warriors.

Starting point is 02:32:39 And the Irish warriors were madmen because they would go out and they'd paint their bodies and they'd go out naked. And sometimes you'd just see them coming and you'd run the other way. But anyway, there was some marauding king and army that had come to threaten their area. And so Kulain went out and almost single-handedly chased them and defeated them. But then he was coming back to his own town in a chariot covered with blood and his eyes blazing, bearing down on his own town, still possessed with the violence of war, with the god Mars. And they were all terrified he would come and do violence there too. And so they went, what can we do? What can we do?

Starting point is 02:33:30 And they went to ask the old wise woman in the village, and she said three things. And so the first thing, they lined up all the women in the village who bared their breasts breasts and this slowed him down as if it reminded him of his mother's milk or something and because he was slowed down and the second thing they did was take a rope and tie it around him and put him in a huge cauldron of cold water which hissed off his body and then they filled it three times with cold water and finally his body cooled down and then the third thing they did is they took him

Starting point is 02:34:13 and still bound and they lay him on a carpet in the court of the local king and they sang to him the stories and myths and songs of warriors who had protected the kingdom and then come back and released the violence and the fears that they carried and planted their crops again and loved their families and resumed living in harmony with the community from which they came. And they told the ancient stories and sang the songs for three days and nights. And when it was over, Kukulain's eyes opened, they untied him, and he was back as a normal human being again. And after Michael told this story to vets who'd been telling terrible accounts of things that happened, in this room, a hundred men stood up and we'd been working with a simple African chant, a song that was really an African chant of a prayer, you know, Earth, hold me

Starting point is 02:35:21 for this living is hard we all sang to the vets together for a long time as if we could sing them back into their bodies from this as if they were lying there in the the court of the king so this is and you asked the question how do you how do you make a setting that allows people to truly feel that they can tell their stories and be held in compassion? Whether it's the grief of these gang kids that no one's really given them the place to give voice to, you know, or the vet who says, I can't tell you what I had to do. That's very powerful. And it makes me also think back to conversations I've had with Sebastian Younger, who is a wartime journalist, has co-produced and shot a number of really harrowing documentary films,

Starting point is 02:36:27 including Restrepo, uh, and most recently wrote a book called Tribe, uh, that touches on some similar topic area and leads me to ask you, are there any rites of passages or rituals that you feel would be useful for every man or woman to experience? And this is something that I've felt a longing for and a lack of since my teenage years, because I'm not Jewish, did not have a bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah. I don't know if that serves that purpose in the Jewish tradition necessarily. But are there any rituals or rites of passage that you think we could use in, let's just say, the United States that would be helpful to, whether it's a specific population, specific group or,

Starting point is 02:37:27 uh, anyone. So, um, what you're talking about is a really big subject. It's a subject of initiation. And unfortunately bar mitzvahs, at least when I was,

Starting point is 02:37:38 whereas it was a relatively lightweight and meaningless thing. You get up there and you recite your, you know, Hebrew portion of the Bible and now you're a man and they thing you get up there and you recite your you know hebrew portion of the bible and now you're a man and they give you a bunch of presents and there wasn't a lot of meaning in it but the problem that you raise is that of the lack of initiation and what's true is that it's been forgotten in our culture um one of the few places you get initiation is going into the military. That's an initiation. But a lot of these gang kids, for example, they're trying to initiate themselves, which can't really happen.

Starting point is 02:38:13 You need elders and you need it in a ritualized way. tradition in East Africa, the Maasai people, as everybody's heard, a young man at a certain age of 14 or something will go out and kill a lion to prove that they're now an adult member of the society and that they're brave and that's part of their initiation. There were initiations for young women as well and it's not just in Africa. The Mayans had initiations for young women as well, and it's not just in Africa. The Mayans had initiations. And in Thailand, when I lived there back starting in the 1960s, at that point, almost every young man and many young women, when they reached the age of 1920, they became a monk for three months or for a year and lived in an austere way. And it was part of their initiation to learn both the inner life of themselves and also a kind of discipline. We don't have it. And because of it, you know, kids are trying to initiate themselves on the streets by, you know,

Starting point is 02:39:19 shooting somebody or doing something, you know, that shows that they're brave, but it's not a lion. It's another person or it's you know um trying to get the attention of the others and say prove how how powerful or strong they are so we desperately need these and we need them built into our education and to our psychology and i can't give you a simple answer but one of the people who has the most intelligence about this is a man, a colleague of mine named Michael Mead. And if you look at Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, his writings on initiation and what's possible here and the things he's led are very, very inspiring. So that's a place that I would look. That's a good starting point. Wonderful. I will definitely find that. Well, Jack, I think we could go for hours and hours and hours. And I always love chatting with

Starting point is 02:40:12 you. And I'd love to perhaps even consider doing a part two sometime. But given that we've already gone for two plus hours, I want to ask just a few more questions. And I'll actually start with just reading something very short, which is from your 2017 year end message. And I think this is just to inject some more optimism into our conversation, which we've already had plenty of, but this is just a small portion of your year in message. Martin Luther King Jr. describes our collective journey with hope, quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, end quote. And Pablo Neruda explains further, you can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming. Renewal is happening. This is back to your

Starting point is 02:41:05 voice. Take quiet time to listen to your heart, to meditate and to rest amidst the great turnings. Feel the renewal of spring that can be born in you. Align yourself with goodness. Let yourself blossom like a Lotus or whatever unique flower you are shining in the world, offering tiny seeds any seeds of love amidst it all. Blessings to you in 2018, Jack. And I want this note to then lead into, and certainly you're welcome to comment on that, but which book you would recommend of yours people start with or where they start with all of the many materials, recordings, readings that you produce, because you're a fantastic writer and a prolific writer. You have some of my favorite book titles I've ever heard, by the way, including After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, which maybe we could touch on. But

Starting point is 02:41:55 where would you suggest people start of the many things that you've written and shared with the world? And if you have any comments on that year-end message, you're welcome to share that as well. So for books, if you want something simple, I have books like, you know, An Introduction to Meditation that Sounds True Publishes, or I have a little book called The Art of Forgiveness, Loving, Kindness, and Peace,

Starting point is 02:42:23 which is very simple stories and practices if you want something that's richer and fuller then you could look at one of my bigger books like a path with heart or the wise heart the guide to the to principles of buddhist psychology and again i think lots of stuff online and Soundstrew is particularly a good place to go, along with my website. Then, and that 40-day mindfulness, Mindfulness Daily, which is like 30 bucks or something, you know, is a really wonderful way to start. written about the trusting heart. One of the greatest Zen texts from a thousand years ago says to be awakened or enlightened is one with the trusting heart and mind. And it doesn't mean that we won't go through hard times. We always have, and we will again, and we are now in many ways. But that we also have born within us the capacity to meet these difficulties with understanding, with courage, with compassion, and to transform them.

Starting point is 02:43:33 And in that way, one of my favorite recent books is called The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, and he's a remarkable professor at Harvard, anthropologist, historian, talking about the growing consciousness of humanity in spite of the kind of wars and conflict and environmental things. There are so many good things that have happened that he charts over the last few centuries of the development of certain abilities for peacemaking. There's actually less war than there'd been. You know, respect for women, the reduction in child labor, all kinds of things. And in that same regard, there's a wonderful book called Bury the Chains, which is about

Starting point is 02:44:23 the ending of slavery in the british empire starting with this handful of men who met in a british tea shop or printing shop and spent 30 years um riding around the country bringing ex-slaves who are well spoken to talk about the middle passage and the you know the horrors of slavery and so forth. And even though the British Empire's economic engine was built around slavery and sugar, by the end of their work of 30 years, the British Parliament outlined slavery in the British Empire decades before it happened in the U.S. And the Quakers were a big part of this, and the Quakers famously wouldn't take their hats off for

Starting point is 02:45:10 the king. But when, what is his name, Thomas Clarkson, who was the center of this group trying to end slavery and going everywhere to do it. When Thomas Clarkson died, all the Quakers of England took their hats off because he'd freed so many spirits and so many lives. So we have these amazing possibilities as human beings, and we're just growing into them now culturally, and it's about time. But they are possible. into them now culturally. Um, and it's about time. Um, but it's, it, but they're, they, they are possible and we, um, each have a, have a contribution to make in it. Jack, I'm going to ask you one more, uh, question before we wrap up with, uh, just, uh, letting

Starting point is 02:45:59 people know where they can find you on social media and elsewhere on the website and so on. But last question is one I like to ask, and this is, this is a metaphor, but if you could have a short message on a billboard, uh, in other words, get them, get a message out to millions or billions of people could be a few words, one word, a phrase, a quote of yours, a quote of someone else's, uh, what might you put on that billboard? Um, well, two things come to mind. One is a question that when I've sat with people many times at the end of their life

Starting point is 02:46:37 that they then ask of themselves silently or out loud is, did I love well? Because in the end end what matters really um the billboard would have a question rather than a statement um and it would have a question something like um I don't know how could I love myself better or what you know so that it actually it's not that I'm gonna tell them something they already know this but I'm gonna remind those who read that there is something that's asking to be awakened in them how could I love myself and this world better and then you know or what gets and you know then you go

Starting point is 02:47:24 well gets in the way of that and how can I love that too how can I love myself in this world better well Jack I want to of course thank you for your time today but beyond that I want to thank you and this is very

Starting point is 02:47:39 very much from deep in my heart thank you for helping me to learn to love myself better. And quite frankly, to see something in the first place that is worth loving. That's not where I've spent most of my life. So it's turned into, if not my, I hesitate to say my top priority because I'm, I worry about sounding self-indulgent, but it's become one of the most important and fruitful tasks in my life is asking that question. How could I love myself better? Or how could I learn to love myself better? So thank you very, very sincerely for that. And the words don't do it justice, but that's the best I can do right now remotely is to put it into words.

Starting point is 02:48:31 So thank you for that. Thank you, Tim. This was a pleasure to do. And what I feel and I know is that as you tend your own heart in a wise way, then it makes you available to bring the gifts, the many gifts you have to the world, you personally and others, but to do

Starting point is 02:48:52 it in a way that's on the carrier wave of connection and love, and it transforms everything. So, thank you, too. Well, Jack, I'm looking at a text thread of ours and I'm feeling the necklace around my neck, which is really a thread, a red thread that was used to close one of the elements of the closing of the 10-day silent retreat. And I shot you a text not too long ago asking what the three knots meant,

Starting point is 02:49:17 because I'd forgotten. And this is what you wrote back. First knot equals refuge in whatever you hold is most inspiring and sacred. Second, commitment to compassion for self and others. Third, following your highest intention. And the intention that I've set at the end of that 10 day retreat was to learn to love myself so I could love others more fully. But I've realized that maybe what it is, is learning to love myself so I can help others learn to do the same. And you've been an integral piece of that. And I just love that I have the opportunity to introduce you and your work and these traditions to more people. And I will certainly be linking to where everyone can find you online. But are there any particular best places just to reiterate where people can find you? And I'll link to these in the show notes.

Starting point is 02:50:14 JackCornfield.com and also look up Jack Cornfield on sounds true.com for those programs that I talked about. And then spiritrock.org, which is our great meditation center in the San Francisco Bay Area. Absolutely stunning, stunning, beautiful location. Worth visiting just to bathe in the scenery, but many more reasons to visit as well. Well, Jack, thank you again. Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure.

Starting point is 02:50:45 And to everybody listening, you can find show notes, links to all the resources, books, and everything that we discussed at tim.blog.com. And until next time, thank you so much for listening. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered.

Starting point is 02:51:27 It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com.

Starting point is 02:51:53 That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Man, oh man, do a lot of listeners of this podcast and readers of mine love FreshBooks to the extent that I ended up meeting with the CEO

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Starting point is 02:53:15 out FreshBooks? Claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial at freshbooks.com forward slash Tim and enter Tim Ferriss, two R's and two S's in the how did you hear about us section. That sounds like we're going to get very little tracking. That's a lot of work, but just go to freshbooks.com forward slash Tim and try it out because it is a very good product and I think you will find it simplifies your life. Enjoy. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. You might remember Four Sigmatic for their mushroom coffee, which was created by those clever Finnish founders. And when I first mentioned that coffee on this podcast, the product sold out in less than a week. It lights you up

Starting point is 02:53:57 like a Christmas tree, which can be really useful. However, recently I've been testing the opposite side of the spectrum, a new product, and that is their Reishi mushroom elixir to help me end my day, to get to sleep. As you guys may know, long-time listeners at least, I struggled with insomnia for decades. I've largely fixed that, but still shutting off my monkey brain has never been easy, still isn't easy very often. And I found Reishi, which I've been fascinated by for a few years now, has been very, very effective and calming. Their old formula, however, Four Sigmatic's old formula included Stevia. And I like to avoid sweeteners, all sweeteners, for a host of reasons. And I then

Starting point is 02:54:39 just pinged them and asked, hey guys, I would love to experiment with this and maybe actually suggest it, but I'd like a version without sweeteners. If you'd be open to it, if too much of a headache, don't worry. And they are always game for experimentation. And so they created a special custom version without the Stevia, without sweeteners. Now it is part of my nightly routine. Their Reishi Elixir comes in single serving packets, which are perfect for travel. And in fact, I'm about to leave the country right now. And I have a packet in front of me that's just going to sit in the end of my carry on bag. You only need hot water and it mixes very, very

Starting point is 02:55:15 easily. Here's some recommended copy that they put in the read. So I'm going to read it and I'll give you my take. Quote, a warning for those in the experimental mindset. Reishi is strong and bitter in parentheses, like any great medicine. So if the bitterness is too much, I recommend trying it with honey and or nut milk, such as almond milk. End quote. So I'm going to say, no, you should suck it up and you should drink the tea because it's not that bitter. And maybe you should take the advice of all Chinese people when they're criticizing youngins, when they say, which means you're not able to eat bitterness. Bitter is, in many cases, an indication of things that help liver detoxification and so on. I'm not saying that's the case here, but I've tested this reishi literature on family members, on friends. Everybody has liked it.

Starting point is 02:56:05 It's a little bit earthy. It's not that hard. So I would just say suck it up and no, don't put in honey or nut milk or any of that shit. Just drink the goddamn tea. It's delicious. I think. If you like pu-erh, that kind of stuff, that type of tea, you're going to dig it. So just try it.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #300: Jack Kornfield - Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy in the Present

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #300: Jack Kornfield - Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy in the Present

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