Speaker 1: I want to give a big shout out to our
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Speaker 1: and Stephen Jay. Thanks so much to all of you,
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Speaker 1: If you'd like to experience being a Patreon member at
Speaker 1: all the benefits that come with it, go to one
Speaker 1: you feed, dot Net slash join. For me, one of
Speaker 1: the brometers for how is our practice going is like
Speaker 1: how alive do you feel? And how free do you feel?
Speaker 1: To be curious? And as Charlotte Joco Beck says, you
Speaker 1: know like us, it's an ordinary wonder in the midst
Speaker 1: of your life everywhere. Welcome to the one you feed
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think ring true, And yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is sin Say doctor Koshen Paley Ellison. He's an author,
Speaker 1: send teacher, Jungian psychotherapist, and certified chaplaincy educator. Cohen co
Speaker 1: found at the New York sen Center for Contemplative Care
Speaker 1: and is currently on the faculty of the University of
Speaker 1: Arizona Medical Schools Wild Center. On this episode, Cohen and
Speaker 1: Eric discuss his book Untangled Walking, The Eightfold Path to Clarity,
Speaker 1: Courage and Compassion. Hi Kashan, Welcome to the show. The
Speaker 1: delight is her. It's very nice to see you again. Also,
Speaker 1: we're going to be discussing your latest book, which is
Speaker 1: called Untangled Walking, The Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage and Compassion.
Speaker 1: But before we jump into that, we will start, like
Speaker 1: we always do, with the parable of the wolves. So
Speaker 1: there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
Speaker 1: hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think
Speaker 1: about it for a second. They look up at their grandparents.
Speaker 1: They say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
Speaker 1: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 1: by asking you what that parable means to you in
Speaker 1: your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, Today,
Speaker 1: what I'm thinking about is how do I feed kindness
Speaker 1: even when it's difficult. And I think that sometimes it's
Speaker 1: easy to say or will feed the good things and
Speaker 1: sometimes leaving out or I'm noticing in myself that kind
Speaker 1: of impulse to not feel like it's good if it's uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: or if it's distracting or contracting, and yet it is
Speaker 1: beneficial except it's challenging, accept it's a little stressful. So
Speaker 1: to me, I'm thinking about it today in terms of
Speaker 1: kindness when it's uncomfortable, that's a great place to start.
Speaker 1: As I was reading that parable, I guess I don't
Speaker 1: read it because I obviously, after having said it five
Speaker 1: hundred times, I haven't memorized. My memory is not that bad.
Speaker 1: I was hearing the words greed and hatred, and it
Speaker 1: made me think about in your book you're talking about
Speaker 1: they're called different things in different traditions. You refer to
Speaker 1: them as the three giants. Yes, talk to me about
Speaker 1: what the three giants are and why are you referring
Speaker 1: to them as that? So the book is really about
Speaker 1: I wanted to do a deep inquiry into suffering and
Speaker 1: how we work with suffering, and I felt that I
Speaker 1: really needed to. As a teacher, I feel an ethical
Speaker 1: obligation to share my own challenge and really tracks the
Speaker 1: four Noble Truths in a fresh way. Perhaps, and the
Speaker 1: three giants are traditionally thought of as the three poisons,
Speaker 1: but I felt that in some way, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's also beautiful ways to think about turning the poison
Speaker 1: into medicine, which is also beautiful. But I also feel
Speaker 1: that I'm a lover of world mythology, and in every
Speaker 1: world mythology there are giants, these kind of things that
Speaker 1: are larger than life, These beings that you have to
Speaker 1: deal with and they don't disappear and they're not usually killed,
Speaker 1: but they have to work with them. You have to
Speaker 1: integrate and be direct with them. So I felt that
Speaker 1: it requires strategy, and it requires groundedness and softness and uprightness.
Speaker 1: So the three giants or the three poisons are, you know,
Speaker 1: greed and anger, which I also think is more like
Speaker 1: a resentment when we hold on to that anger and
Speaker 1: delusion where we mostly think I'm not you or nobody
Speaker 1: knows the trouble I've seed, you know. And so I
Speaker 1: think that the giants are these aspects of our daily
Speaker 1: life that we need to meet directly and can't ignore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think it's interesting to talk through those three
Speaker 1: a little bit because they really do cover sort of
Speaker 1: the gamut, right. I often when I think of them
Speaker 1: and I do some version of the Bodhisattva vows. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you guys have your version of them right, where
Speaker 1: it's like greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly. Right, I
Speaker 1: vow to abandon them, but I often will rephrase that
Speaker 1: in my own mind as wanting right greed, I want things,
Speaker 1: not wanting things. A version I don't want that, And
Speaker 1: then I often think of delusion just as my confusion
Speaker 1: about how being tied to greed and hatred, wanting not wanting,
Speaker 1: how that causes me to suffer. When I'm sort of
Speaker 1: bringing it down to my day to day life, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about I'm being controlled by wanting certain things
Speaker 1: really not wanting other things, and believing that if I
Speaker 1: just get that right, if I push away the things
Speaker 1: I don't want, I bring in the things I do want,
Speaker 1: that then I will find peace, which is delusional. Truly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that it is really important to slow it
Speaker 1: down and to really reflect on these because they are
Speaker 1: really from the historical Buddhist point of view, they are
Speaker 1: the causes of our suffering or our entanglement. And you
Speaker 1: know that beautiful parable or the teaching of you know,
Speaker 1: the Buddhist as the whole world is tangled in a tangle?
Speaker 1: Who will untangle this tangle? And I remember hearing that
Speaker 1: when I was eighteen years old and realizing, oh, it's
Speaker 1: up to me. So it gives us the sense of
Speaker 1: responsibility to deal with the source of our entanglements of
Speaker 1: where we get lost, which is of course all the
Speaker 1: time yep. And you know, walking down the street, we
Speaker 1: can get lost. We get lost in our phone because
Speaker 1: we feel like there's we have to check something when
Speaker 1: we don't really have to check something. So to me,
Speaker 1: one of the things about greed but that wanting creature,
Speaker 1: as Cober calls it, You know that thirst tona of
Speaker 1: I want or I don't want. You know that. And
Speaker 1: I think that even our approach to our spiritual practice,
Speaker 1: you know, can be a place where we can investigate greed.
Speaker 1: When at this beginning practice, I really wanted to understand
Speaker 1: and I really wanted to not feel what I was feeling.
Speaker 1: And I really began to see how this was this
Speaker 1: insatiable greed to not have the experience I was having,
Speaker 1: and I really felt that, oh if maybe I'll urdane
Speaker 1: and maybe one day, you know, be free of that,
Speaker 1: or these robes will change it, or it was like
Speaker 1: the rearranging of the deck chairs and the Titanic, like
Speaker 1: just gonna think it would just do that I won't
Speaker 1: actually meet myself. And I realized too that in the
Speaker 1: clinical work that we do here at the New York
Speaker 1: sen Center, is you know that my own greed to
Speaker 1: be liked. I found that my desire because of my
Speaker 1: early childhood stuff like I really found that if I
Speaker 1: could get people to like me and felt safer and
Speaker 1: so really beginning to see that and you know, walking
Speaker 1: into a room and feeling like hi, you know, like
Speaker 1: I'm please please like me basically, you know, and having
Speaker 1: this undercurrent of energy of see me and like me
Speaker 1: and approve of me, feel good about me. That greed
Speaker 1: for that really became rather painful actually because I saw
Speaker 1: in the moment, you know, what I was doing at
Speaker 1: the bedside, and I remember seeing this one woman, you know,
Speaker 1: who was really just experiencing immense pain, and I really
Speaker 1: wanted her to not feel that pain, and so I
Speaker 1: would I kind of jumped over her, you know, her pain.
Speaker 1: I was like trying to help her to imagine not
Speaker 1: feeling pain. And I also saw it somehow because she
Speaker 1: kept looking at me like why are we talking about this?
Speaker 1: And I just remember feeling in myself, you know, I
Speaker 1: realized in that moment when she looked at me, she's
Speaker 1: wincing in pain. I'm trying to talk to her about
Speaker 1: a pain free moment, and I said, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: And I realized in that moment too that I was
Speaker 1: trying to get her to feel no pain so that
Speaker 1: she would think that I was being helpful to her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I realized I was just being a jerk, you know,
Speaker 1: I was just putting my stuff onto her. So that
Speaker 1: kind of giant of greed can really take over and
Speaker 1: really invade the room. Where sometimes in that moment before
Speaker 1: I really received her look at me like are you crazy?
Speaker 1: You know? Somehow that was the moment where I realized, like,
Speaker 1: I am being crazy, I am actually not attuned with
Speaker 1: you right now, and I'm so sorry, and let's just
Speaker 1: breathe with your pain. Yep. And then she said thank
Speaker 1: you so much. I said, with that, how would that be?
Speaker 1: She's like a relief, Just be with me and my pain.
Speaker 1: In the book, you talk about these three giants. You
Speaker 1: say when we see the giants in ourselves, we can
Speaker 1: be paralyzed by shame and fear, which is not helpful. Right.
Speaker 1: We see it and we're like, ough, okay, you say
Speaker 1: what is needed as something else, which I call healthy embarrassment.
Speaker 1: This is not embarrassment that the giants exist within us,
Speaker 1: but at the fact that we have cooperated with them.
Speaker 1: Talk a little bit about that. I actually love that
Speaker 1: phrase because I'm always looking for how do we talk
Speaker 1: about holding ourselves to some sort of account or standard
Speaker 1: of who we want to be? Right, Because I think
Speaker 1: that's really important. But not doing it in a way
Speaker 1: of fear and shame, because that tends to perpetuate whatever
Speaker 1: bad behavior it is, right, So I really like that
Speaker 1: idea of healthy embarrassment. Say more about that. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: shame works beautifully to ensure you don't change. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: very good at that because we feel really shitty about
Speaker 1: ourselves and then we just kind of withdraw and then
Speaker 1: just feel bad and then do the same thing again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really is like a wheel of suffering and rumination.
Speaker 1: As an addict, you know, shame it drives addiction. It
Speaker 1: is a huge part of what makes it so hard
Speaker 1: to get out. So I think it just then, as
Speaker 1: you're saying, it applies to kind of everything, Yes, and
Speaker 1: I think it applies to greet you know. It's like
Speaker 1: we can actually have this, like we just this compulsion,
Speaker 1: just like if I could just get one more thing,
Speaker 1: one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, or
Speaker 1: if you like me, Eric, then ah, then I'll feel good.
Speaker 1: I do like you. So I'm hoping that you know
Speaker 1: you're I've healed you. Now we can move on. Yes,
Speaker 1: So the shame, as we know it does that, and
Speaker 1: I think it's really important, and at least it has
Speaker 1: been for myself. Like if I think about that moment
Speaker 1: with this woman wincing in pain, that it was so embarrassing,
Speaker 1: and there's something so important about that that it's healthy.
Speaker 1: It's like, yes, I was a jerk, like and I
Speaker 1: can own that, and we can just be embarrassed and
Speaker 1: say like, wow, I'm crossing my own values. And I
Speaker 1: think that one of the stories that I love the
Speaker 1: most about this is this story that I read maybe
Speaker 1: as a teenager. I think it was in one of
Speaker 1: those books by Paul Reps. It's a story of a
Speaker 1: get in a monastery and he's very late to make
Speaker 1: the meal, and he runs out with a scythe you know,
Speaker 1: with one of those things to cut vegetables, and he
Speaker 1: cuts some vegetables really quickly, puts in a pot, and
Speaker 1: they bring the food up to the monks and the
Speaker 1: abbot of the temple lifts up his spoon and he
Speaker 1: has a snakehead in it, and he calls the head
Speaker 1: cook up. And I always think like, well, what would
Speaker 1: you feel in that moment? You know, would you feel shame?
Speaker 1: And what happens in the story is the cook just
Speaker 1: approaches the teacher, bows, takes the snakehead, pops in his mouth, crunch, crunch, crunch,
Speaker 1: swallows it. They bow together and it's done. There's something
Speaker 1: so important about acknowledging how we fail, you know, and
Speaker 1: how we screw up, and how we are just so human. Yea,
Speaker 1: And I think that healthy embarrassment. It's just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was embarrassing. I was so preoccupied, it wasn't even
Speaker 1: breathing all right, got so caught up in my little
Speaker 1: tornado of thoughts and feelings that, ah, I wasn't with you,
Speaker 1: And that's embarrassing. Yeah. It makes me think of a
Speaker 1: conversation I had with the writer Ebramex Kendy, who's written
Speaker 1: a lot about racism, and there was a really important
Speaker 1: point in his work that really hit me. And it
Speaker 1: was the ability to say that thing that I just
Speaker 1: did was a racist thing to do, but without having
Speaker 1: to say I'm a racist, right, because if I can't
Speaker 1: acknowledge that that thing that I did, then I'm pushing
Speaker 1: all of it away. My fear. To not be a
Speaker 1: racist means that I can't acknowledge that I did something racist,
Speaker 1: and if shame is involved, the shame is so painful
Speaker 1: that I've got to push away misbehavior. I've got to
Speaker 1: justify it. You know. Here's why instead of just being
Speaker 1: able to go, yeah, that thing I did was a mistake.
Speaker 1: It wasn't good, it wasn't the best of me, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to try and do better. But I'm not
Speaker 1: at fault. And that is a really difficult and mature
Speaker 1: thing to get to. But I think it's so critical
Speaker 1: for any kind of growth is that ability to recognize
Speaker 1: we've made a mistake, be willing to learn from it,
Speaker 1: have the humility to do it without the shame. And
Speaker 1: that is a difficult needle to thread, sometimes totally. And
Speaker 1: that's why we need good friends, right to remind us
Speaker 1: of that and just to be able to hold us,
Speaker 1: not to just reassure us, but also to challenge us
Speaker 1: and just say, wow, what's it like when you're not
Speaker 1: living into your values, when your actions and your values
Speaker 1: don't match. You know, we all know what that's like,
Speaker 1: but we rarely talk about it. And so the having
Speaker 1: the courage to be a good friend, both to ourselves
Speaker 1: and others. And I think that it's also just keep
Speaker 1: going back to this moment at the bedside and just
Speaker 1: thinking about if I just stayed in my absolute desire
Speaker 1: to be liked, you know, I wouldn't actually see this
Speaker 1: woman and I wouldn't receive her reaching out to me
Speaker 1: and saying wake up, I'm in pain, stop it, and
Speaker 1: me be able to say I'm sorry. Like and to me,
Speaker 1: there's just again the beauty of apology and just to
Speaker 1: say that is so embarrassing and it's healthy, and to me, actually,
Speaker 1: those moments of true apology are healthy. It's one of
Speaker 1: the best things I got out of twelve step recovery
Speaker 1: because baked right into the steps is the idea that, yeah,
Speaker 1: we screwed up, and we're going to then go and
Speaker 1: apologize for that. We're going to learn to make it right.
Speaker 1: And then it goes on to say, oh, by the way,
Speaker 1: you know, in the tenth step, like you're going to
Speaker 1: continue to screw up, right. It's not like if you
Speaker 1: make a mistake. It's like when you make a mistake,
Speaker 1: when you do something wrong, which is inevitable, we're still gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, go back and clean it up. It gave
Speaker 1: me a way to separate myself from my behavior a
Speaker 1: little bit, and it gave me some practice and learning
Speaker 1: in apology and how beautiful apology can be, because done rightly,
Speaker 1: my experience is afterwards, the relationship is stronger. We often
Speaker 1: think like, if I go make admit that mistake, if
Speaker 1: I go like, I'm weakening the relationship and my experience.
Speaker 1: It's not to say that never happens, right, but most often,
Speaker 1: in particularly in relationships where there's some good faith between
Speaker 1: both people, it strengthens and heals. I think it really
Speaker 1: also has to do often our shame around the things
Speaker 1: that are most reliable, which is our aging that many
Speaker 1: of us feel a shame around us getting older, our
Speaker 1: bodies looking different, our minds working differently, and we have
Speaker 1: shame around illness, and even we're experiencing that now with
Speaker 1: people with coronavirus. Also, just like people have a there's
Speaker 1: some kind of quality of shame around like, oh where
Speaker 1: did you get it? And you know, what what's that about?
Speaker 1: And how do we just kind of come back to that?
Speaker 1: And even dying, you know, we experience so many people
Speaker 1: who you know in particular, you know with children who
Speaker 1: are dying, or people in their twenties, thirties, forties, and
Speaker 1: fifties dying and people think like, oh, that's not supposed
Speaker 1: to be happening. And often the young people feel like
Speaker 1: there was something wrong with them and being told that
Speaker 1: they did something wrong, as if that it's up to us.
Speaker 1: And so it's like this kind of miscalibration of reality
Speaker 1: of realizing that we are just subject to change. And
Speaker 1: it's so amazing to me and so painful. How just
Speaker 1: the fact that everything changes, that many of us feel
Speaker 1: shame around change, that even in a relationship, our feelings
Speaker 1: might change and we might have to reevaluate the form
Speaker 1: of that relationship. Right, Yeah, what you're saying there is
Speaker 1: really interesting about the shame around illness and aging and
Speaker 1: all that, because it's really interesting that we're beginning to
Speaker 1: learn more about how, say, for example, our diet affects
Speaker 1: our health, how our sleep patterns affect our health, how
Speaker 1: our emotional states and the way relate with them affect
Speaker 1: our health. There's good knowledge there, But what comes with
Speaker 1: that if we're not careful is that when we're not well,
Speaker 1: it becomes because we didn't manage our emotions right, because
Speaker 1: we didn't eat right. Because I just went through this
Speaker 1: with my partner Jenny. Recently, she's been having some trouble
Speaker 1: with her hands burning while she sleeps, and so she's
Speaker 1: been going to a chiropractical chiropractors suggested getting some x rays,
Speaker 1: so she got some x rays and arthritis. And she's like,
Speaker 1: I'm eating as anti inflammatory a diet as I possibly can.
Speaker 1: And she's smart enough to immediately as soon as she
Speaker 1: says she shouldn't, but to recognize, like, you know what,
Speaker 1: you can't control all of it. Eating better is like
Speaker 1: buying an extra lottery ticket or two. You know you've
Speaker 1: got better odds, but still out of our control. Or
Speaker 1: we can affect it, but we can't control it. How
Speaker 1: do you think about that? We had this idea that again,
Speaker 1: like things are not supposed to happen, which are the
Speaker 1: most predictable things, and thinks that we are sure can happen, right,
Speaker 1: So we had this idea that we can control things,
Speaker 1: and as you're saying, yes, we can buy an extra
Speaker 1: lottery ticket, but it's not really up to that. And
Speaker 1: so actually, something that I wrote about in the book
Speaker 1: is also this, you know, my own experience of finding
Speaker 1: out that add cancer, right, and and that was thirty
Speaker 1: two years old, you know, and as someone who's worked
Speaker 1: with lots of people who are receiving these kinds of diagnoses,
Speaker 1: that I had this idea, you know that in the
Speaker 1: back of my mind that most people say, why is
Speaker 1: this happening to me? That's like the most popular response
Speaker 1: to a diagnosis as opposed to what I experience actually
Speaker 1: was like, oh, it's my turn to experience this. That's
Speaker 1: our nature. And so I think that it's also this
Speaker 1: disorientation that we have if we're good enough or if
Speaker 1: we're kind enough, as if it's a transaction, right, is
Speaker 1: if I put in enough log enough things into some
Speaker 1: app then I will get good health and I will
Speaker 1: live forever. Then my body won't age, you know, and
Speaker 1: or then I won't get sick. But the beauty into me.
Speaker 1: What is so exquisite is if we meet life, if
Speaker 1: we can actually begin to understand what life is, if
Speaker 1: we can use those moments and just be embarrassed even
Speaker 1: by our response, like, oh, my goodness, I thought that
Speaker 1: I wasn't subject to the realities of life. How embarrassing,
Speaker 1: my goodness, that I'm not really with it. And it's
Speaker 1: like that's part of the falling down. We fall down
Speaker 1: into that, you know, we missed the boat, and yet
Speaker 1: we can come back and say and I'm back hello.
Speaker 1: I want to jump way back here because in the book,
Speaker 1: you actually talk a fair amount early on, particularly about
Speaker 1: your life as a child, you know, primarily a lot
Speaker 1: of the fear that you lived in and the things
Speaker 1: that you experienced. I'm wondering if you could sort of
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about that and why you featured
Speaker 1: that a little bit more maybe in this book. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: as a zen teacher and as a psycho therapist, I receive,
Speaker 1: you know, I feel the honor to receive people suffering.
Speaker 1: And many of us, like myself, carry around a lot
Speaker 1: of wounds from our life. And if we want to
Speaker 1: think about kind of these basic wounds that we carry,
Speaker 1: I always think about these just primal wounds that we experience,
Speaker 1: can if we use them like the Buddha dead, they
Speaker 1: can actually wake us up. But what was my experience
Speaker 1: as a young child. I experienced sexual abuse and physical
Speaker 1: abuse and verbal abuse and very gross forms and deeply
Speaker 1: violent forms of anti Semitism, and I was hunted. I mean,
Speaker 1: I do share a lot of that in the book,
Speaker 1: and it was not to tell us story like poor me,
Speaker 1: but those things happened, and they happened to lots of people,
Speaker 1: and people are the victims of violence all over the world,
Speaker 1: as we know, and you know, one in three women
Speaker 1: have experienced sexual assault. Sometimes people say one in four men,
Speaker 1: you know, so it's it's not a rare thing. That
Speaker 1: I felt that it was really important to share. Yes,
Speaker 1: that happened, and it was awful, of course, and it
Speaker 1: was also my own exploration, which I think that is
Speaker 1: the part of the path of freedom is to say.
Speaker 1: And I carried around this feeling of being a victim
Speaker 1: of those things, which I was, but it became an
Speaker 1: identity like I was the victim of these things and
Speaker 1: that's who I am, and untangling that was the reason
Speaker 1: I shared those stories. You know, the book is not
Speaker 1: just about me, but I wanted to share I'm with you,
Speaker 1: I'm with you. This is hard, and as of sharing
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of our conversation that you know,
Speaker 1: it's also kind to say, yes, this happened, and this
Speaker 1: is how I'm working with it now. And these are
Speaker 1: some of the places that have been really challenging and
Speaker 1: really hard and really important, and you know, I really
Speaker 1: share in some ways those stories also to talk about
Speaker 1: the miracles in some ways of being able to see
Speaker 1: a way out of that identity. You know, it's almost
Speaker 1: like having a blanket over yourself, which I think was
Speaker 1: for me as a very apt image, is like trying
Speaker 1: to literally hide because everything felt so unsafe. And it
Speaker 1: was also what I learned in writing was it was
Speaker 1: a series of meetings with people who actually were able
Speaker 1: to see me in different ways that began to kind
Speaker 1: of crack the veneer and kind of allowed me to
Speaker 1: peek out of my blanket. And you know, from my
Speaker 1: karate teacher when I was eleven, who you know, I
Speaker 1: really learned an amazing thing, which was he used to
Speaker 1: have a sit in Saysa, with our legs underneath ourselves
Speaker 1: and on a wooden floor and a really stinky basement
Speaker 1: and he would just have a sit there for about
Speaker 1: sometimes twenty minutes and sweating. I was so painful, and
Speaker 1: he would just walk around very steadily and just say,
Speaker 1: you'll never be free until you could be still with
Speaker 1: your pain. And that was the first moment for me
Speaker 1: that I remember so far of real pivot It was
Speaker 1: also the beginning of compassion for me because I realized
Speaker 1: I didn't know how to do that, and I was
Speaker 1: learning how to do that. And it also began to
Speaker 1: see which I didn't articulate at that time, of course
Speaker 1: because I was so young, but I really see how
Speaker 1: I began to have compassion for these different perpetrators in
Speaker 1: my life. I really saw that, wow, their actions and
Speaker 1: what these were like, all very good people who were
Speaker 1: doing terrible things, which reminds me of your conversation about
Speaker 1: the difference doing a racist thing or saying a racist
Speaker 1: thing and being a racist. You know that it's really
Speaker 1: the actions that really don't match the people's values. And
Speaker 1: I really saw that, and that in some ways has
Speaker 1: always been one of the biggest motivating energies for me,
Speaker 1: is to bring my actions and my values together, which
Speaker 1: for me is the heart of zen practice, where the
Speaker 1: form and oneness come together. I want to read something
Speaker 1: you wrote about that time, because there's something in it
Speaker 1: that I then want to unpack. And you said I
Speaker 1: didn't know what to do with my fear, so it
Speaker 1: had fed me thoughts, insisting that the only way out
Speaker 1: was to kill myself. I felt invaded and terrorized both
Speaker 1: at school and at home. Yet it was my thoughts
Speaker 1: that had cornered me. It's the thoughts that actually became
Speaker 1: the prison. The feelings were just fear, the thoughts where
Speaker 1: I had leveraged though I couldn't see it yet, I
Speaker 1: needed to understand that between feeling and thought was a
Speaker 1: space of freedom. Talk about that difference between feeling and
Speaker 1: thought and the freedom between them. Yeah, well, first of all,
Speaker 1: I feel touched. That was one of the hardest things
Speaker 1: to write about and to move into. One of the
Speaker 1: times that I did attempt to kill myself. I was
Speaker 1: in the bathroom upstairs. It was the one room with
Speaker 1: a lock on it, which was, you know, really important
Speaker 1: room for me, and it was quite high up that
Speaker 1: and I remember there with a razor at the sink
Speaker 1: and really feel like there was nowhere to go. And
Speaker 1: it was like the thought like there's nowhere to go.
Speaker 1: And I was so terrified, and I was so afraid,
Speaker 1: and I just wanted a release. And this actually was
Speaker 1: probably it was like might be eleven years old. So
Speaker 1: just imagine eleven year old boy, you know, like to
Speaker 1: me just thinking about myself as that eleven year old boy,
Speaker 1: and the eleven year old boys of this world and
Speaker 1: eleven year old people right so little, And so that's
Speaker 1: part of the tenderness of that memory, is just like
Speaker 1: feeling that boy and feeling like in the razor of
Speaker 1: my wrist and just really caught in the thought and
Speaker 1: the thought and the thought. But the feeling really was
Speaker 1: that I just wanted to get out. I wanted relief.
Speaker 1: I wanted relief in the space between. In a way
Speaker 1: was to me is experience and something. You know. The
Speaker 1: bathroom had this window, and outside the window was the
Speaker 1: tops of these amazing pine trees and the sky, and
Speaker 1: it was summer, it was in the evening, and the
Speaker 1: sun had already set. And somehow there's this moment that
Speaker 1: maybe some of you know where that when the sky
Speaker 1: goes from like this particular blue into like this deep
Speaker 1: deep blue before it goes even darker, and I just
Speaker 1: have always that moment where it kind of pops into
Speaker 1: this deep kind of sometimes called midnight blue. And and
Speaker 1: somehow like that change of light caught my attention, and
Speaker 1: I just remember looking out and seeing that beautiful color
Speaker 1: and the silhouette of the pine swaying in that and
Speaker 1: somehow just experiencing that and being kind of caught and
Speaker 1: attuned with the beauty of it. In the midst of
Speaker 1: standing at the sink with a razor at my wrist,
Speaker 1: I remember looking down thinking like, this doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 1: that there's something else, and I think that how do
Speaker 1: we drop into our bodies? Who used to be called Evensler.
Speaker 1: You know that she talks about to be in the
Speaker 1: body of the world, to enter not just your own
Speaker 1: personal experience, but just the experience. And I had that
Speaker 1: experience and that's when I realized I had to change
Speaker 1: in some ways. Now, you know, it's a little bit
Speaker 1: of hubrist but it's sort of like the end of
Speaker 1: that incredible poem by lco where he says, you know,
Speaker 1: at the end of this poem called the Archaic Torso Apollo,
Speaker 1: he sees the Torso, he just sees it. It's one
Speaker 1: of my favorite poems. At the end of the poem,
Speaker 1: he says, you must change your life. And it's just
Speaker 1: like when we see something so deeply in our experience,
Speaker 1: we have to change, can't stay the same anymore. So
Speaker 1: that's to me, that space between thought and feeling is
Speaker 1: experience and the beauty of actually experiencing life. That's beautiful.
Speaker 1: You mentioned a minute ago that you were a victim,
Speaker 1: you were victimized, but that that becomes an identity. And
Speaker 1: you talk in the little bit that I just read
Speaker 1: about recognizing that our thoughts were sort of where we
Speaker 1: had some leverage. You go on to say at another
Speaker 1: point that the fundamental shift, which is the essence of zen,
Speaker 1: is taking responsibility for what we are doing in the
Speaker 1: present moment. So talk about how for you and for
Speaker 1: all the people you've worked with, there's a way of
Speaker 1: acknowledging what happened to us, feeling what happened to us,
Speaker 1: and also taking full responsibility for what's happening now. Because
Speaker 1: it's easy to be on one side of that pretty clearly, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm responsible, and you know what happened
Speaker 1: to me doesn't matter, and I have to be responsible.
Speaker 1: That's one way of being The other way is to say,
Speaker 1: all these things happen to me, and so how can
Speaker 1: I be responsible? You know, I'm broken, And you're talking
Speaker 1: about sort of hitting a middle ground between there of
Speaker 1: doing both that I'm acknowledging what happened, I'm acknowledging it
Speaker 1: had an impact, but I'm also taking responsibility for myself.
Speaker 1: How did you or how do you see people find
Speaker 1: their way into Again, we talked earlier about threading the
Speaker 1: needle on some of this stuff. Right, it's this little
Speaker 1: place to get into that can be very difficult. Three
Speaker 1: is a place of intimacy, you know. I know how
Speaker 1: easy it is in a certain way to just feel victimized.
Speaker 1: I found that I didn't have to do a lot
Speaker 1: of work because it was just true, which it was,
Speaker 1: and I could have stayed in that, but I felt
Speaker 1: actually imprisoned by It was like a cage that was
Speaker 1: exactly the size of my own body. And I had
Speaker 1: created that cage actually thankfully actually, I think because it
Speaker 1: protected me for the time that I needed that kind
Speaker 1: of protection. It's what once was armor became a cage,
Speaker 1: which was really important for me to see, you know.
Speaker 1: And through lots of serious zen practice or maybe even
Speaker 1: just sincere zen practice, steady steady over the years, lots
Speaker 1: of amazing work and therapy and having awesome friends, and
Speaker 1: that's a really good combination to me. Those are really
Speaker 1: important parts of like how to create any stakes in
Speaker 1: the ground of support so that we can actually begin
Speaker 1: to change and yes, it's one thing to you know,
Speaker 1: stay with the story, and the story is to me
Speaker 1: now that those things happen, and yeah, they did form me,
Speaker 1: and at the same time, I'm responsible for how I'm
Speaker 1: functioning with them now. And the opportunity is now. I
Speaker 1: was just talking with someone, you know, a student just
Speaker 1: today who was talking about this family pattern that was
Speaker 1: deeply unhelpful that has gone down from generationship generation, and
Speaker 1: they said, you know, but I could actually have the
Speaker 1: opportunities that could stop with me if I do the work.
Speaker 1: And so it takes work, and it's so uncomfortable, and
Speaker 1: so we have to be courageous because I think that
Speaker 1: most of us have the clarity of what's happened to us,
Speaker 1: and the clarity is we could tell the story. But
Speaker 1: I think that then we need the courage to set
Speaker 1: out into kind of like that place in the old maps.
Speaker 1: I loved old maps where you know, they would put
Speaker 1: little monsters and things because that was the unknown and
Speaker 1: really learning how to appreciate the unknown. And we need courage,
Speaker 1: We need a lot of heartfulness to do that because
Speaker 1: it's challenging, uncomfortable, and you know, there was a study
Speaker 1: done in the eighties where I just love this study
Speaker 1: so much, where why do people stop meditating because they
Speaker 1: didn't feel better? Well, meditation is not designed to make
Speaker 1: you feel better. It's teaching you, like what I learned
Speaker 1: when I was eleven, which is how to be still
Speaker 1: with it, to have a sense of equanimity with it.
Speaker 1: And to me, that's part of courage, just to say
Speaker 1: I'm feeling pain, i feel scared, i feel overwhelmed, I
Speaker 1: feel frightened, and I'm here and I can stay with you.
Speaker 1: I can feel helpless and hopeless and here and to
Speaker 1: me like last night where we have a beautiful contemplative
Speaker 1: medicine fellowship for doctors and nurse practitioners and physician assistance,
Speaker 1: and one of our faculty members is this wonderful woman
Speaker 1: maybe you know or Naomi. She have nine and she
Speaker 1: was with the fellows last night and she was talking
Speaker 1: about the importance of writing and expressing being a place
Speaker 1: of compassion and connection. And so I think that that
Speaker 1: movement from the whole holding onto the story and then
Speaker 1: the space and the pivot into how do I actually
Speaker 1: say it without sentiment and how do I actually come
Speaker 1: into experience and take responsibility for Yeah, I'm feeling that
Speaker 1: habit I have to hide or to armor up, and
Speaker 1: I'm still with you. And to me, that's what responsibility
Speaker 1: looks like. Like the other day, I was with my
Speaker 1: husband Chodo, and we were you know, we have all
Speaker 1: of these like funny moments, you know, in our house,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's often around the literature and like
Speaker 1: who scoops it? You know, it's like a little drama.
Speaker 1: And you know, he got so upset about me about it,
Speaker 1: like that didn't scoop it? Or dead I don't remember.
Speaker 1: And I was like, what is it that you're so
Speaker 1: angry about? What's the story you're telling yourself? And so
Speaker 1: we have this practice together where we stop each other
Speaker 1: and say what's the story you're telling yourself? And I
Speaker 1: share a bunch of these in the book too, and
Speaker 1: he said, well, I'm feeling out of control and that
Speaker 1: you don't care about me, right, and so like it's
Speaker 1: so wonderful and to me, that's how we begin to
Speaker 1: undo the linking back that our brain just does, like
Speaker 1: because we have this moment with these innocuous seeming moments,
Speaker 1: but it touches these old stories. Yeah, and then we
Speaker 1: could both just like look, at each other and laugh,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's just it's so insane, you know,
Speaker 1: and the love is so clear. And yet those moments
Speaker 1: that we can all have and are willingness to take
Speaker 1: responsibility for what the story is and come back, as
Speaker 1: we were just talking about, into experience and saying, oh
Speaker 1: there you are, Eric, good to see you. What you're
Speaker 1: pointing at is one of these things that I've thought
Speaker 1: a lot about. You know, I know a lot of
Speaker 1: why I have the patterns I have. Some of them
Speaker 1: are just being a human, right, It's just you know, greed,
Speaker 1: hatred and ignorance and all of us. It's a human condition, right.
Speaker 1: And then there's my own flavors of it, right that
Speaker 1: it come from my own conditioning, my own upbringing all that.
Speaker 1: And so I know these things and that's good. And
Speaker 1: the really important step is how now and it arises again,
Speaker 1: do I deal with it? So? Like I know, men
Speaker 1: who are older than me who are slightly grumpy or
Speaker 1: angry scare the hell out of me, right, I know why? Right?
Speaker 1: I mean I had a dad who screamed at me
Speaker 1: all the time as a child, so it's very obvious.
Speaker 1: But knowing that does not stop it from happening, because
Speaker 1: when I'm in that situation, there it is again boom,
Speaker 1: it's right there. And that's the moment. As you're saying,
Speaker 1: I have to come into experience. I have to bring
Speaker 1: the past sort of to the present and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: what's here right now? Oh, there's a guy over there
Speaker 1: who you don't know, who has no impact on your life,
Speaker 1: who you're not going to ever see again. In twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: You're okay, you're safe. The knowledge is helpful, but it's
Speaker 1: not liberating at least has not been for me on
Speaker 1: its own. It's still I have to face that when
Speaker 1: it arises, and it does, then I have to go
Speaker 1: in that moment, how do I respond? And to your
Speaker 1: point earlier about bringing our values to together, who do
Speaker 1: I want to be here? And that's the work. And
Speaker 1: I love the way you sort of said that as experience,
Speaker 1: because that's what it is. There's an experience that's happening.
Speaker 1: It's a thought slash feeling experience. It's somewhat unconscious until
Speaker 1: I bring it conscious. I just love that idea also
Speaker 1: as you talk about that responsibility, because that's enormously liberating
Speaker 1: when we really get it at first it often feels like,
Speaker 1: but wait, you're not hearing me. These things happen to me,
Speaker 1: you know. But the liberation is, oh, there's no possible
Speaker 1: way to undo any of that, but if I hold
Speaker 1: the key to some degree, that's very powerful and very liberating. Right.
Speaker 1: Who reminds hims like sometimes you know, as a teacher,
Speaker 1: I got a lot of projection and people say, oh,
Speaker 1: you're so kind and so compassionate, you're so best in
Speaker 1: your I thought mostly mostly except around the litter box guys,
Speaker 1: But there's something about the responsibility of that, you know,
Speaker 1: just like it's to me, it feels more responsible not
Speaker 1: to say like, oh, thank you so much, yes I am,
Speaker 1: instead of like, because I think that could become intoxicating.
Speaker 1: That's just realist. Yet I'm mostly that way. Yeah, is
Speaker 1: to me, it's actually a healthy way to kind of
Speaker 1: come back to us, to realize that we're still going
Speaker 1: to have embarrassing moments even if we're doing what we can.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you to tell a story about
Speaker 1: another Zend teacher. He's a he's a fairly famous Zend teacher.
Speaker 1: You talk about it in the book, So I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm not asking you to dish out dirt on you know,
Speaker 1: Henry Shukman or anything. Right now, I'm any Henry. You
Speaker 1: would love Henry. No dirt on Henry. Um No, it's
Speaker 1: my Zoomi Roshi. And I think that the way he
Speaker 1: handled a certain situation embodies a fair amount of what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here about responsibility, about facing what is
Speaker 1: is about being able to separate my behaviors from who
Speaker 1: I am. I think a lot of that is embodied.
Speaker 1: So talk to me about my Zomi Roshi and what
Speaker 1: your experience of him in the situation he went through was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Amazumi Roshi. He was an amazing Zen teacher, and
Speaker 1: you know, Zen has been in America for a hundred
Speaker 1: years this year. But he was part of this wave
Speaker 1: of teachers who came over in the sixties, fifties and
Speaker 1: sixties who really brought in many folks to practice, actually
Speaker 1: people who are not Japanese to practice, and it was
Speaker 1: a very exciting time. And he founded the Zen cent
Speaker 1: Our Los Angeles and at a certain time, you know,
Speaker 1: he was having sex with students and was an alcoholic
Speaker 1: and those are real things. And we hear about this
Speaker 1: from corporations to you know, in every kind of group
Speaker 1: of people where there's some kind of leader, this happens.
Speaker 1: And people often say it's in spiritual groups or circles,
Speaker 1: but it's everywhere, right, families, you know, politicians, Yeah, it's everywhere.
Speaker 1: And so he did that, And what was amazing to
Speaker 1: me was to learn what he did after, because most people,
Speaker 1: I find like create a strategy of denial or defending
Speaker 1: or somehow covering it over in different ways. And my
Speaker 1: understanding of what he did is that he just said,
Speaker 1: there is nothing to say. What I did cause great harm,
Speaker 1: there's nothing to defend, and there's nothing for me to
Speaker 1: say more about it. And what he would do into
Speaker 1: the mornings and Sarah Los Angeles just continued and you know,
Speaker 1: of course some people left, and you know, the community
Speaker 1: really fractured, and he would acknowledged his responsibility for that.
Speaker 1: And so he would sit in the zendo and after
Speaker 1: the morning sit he would just stay there and invited
Speaker 1: people to tell him whatever they needed to tell him,
Speaker 1: and people screamed at him, and people yelled at him,
Speaker 1: people cried and tried to reason with him, and he
Speaker 1: just received. And there's just something about that. And I
Speaker 1: remember hearing about that. I was in New York at
Speaker 1: the time and just feeling like, my goodness, I want
Speaker 1: to meet this person. And where at that moment some
Speaker 1: people were like, oh, you know, that's terrible, and I said, wow,
Speaker 1: like I didn't know, I had never met anyone who
Speaker 1: had done something like that and just acknowledged it and
Speaker 1: didn't defend or gaslight or pretend or say like all
Speaker 1: that didn't happen, and in denial. And I met him
Speaker 1: one time and I just remember this humility and graciousness,
Speaker 1: and he gave a talk, came to the Encenter where
Speaker 1: I was practicing, and about harmony even when it's hard,
Speaker 1: and our responsibility, and he actually left a calligraphy of wah,
Speaker 1: which is harmony when he left, and to me, it
Speaker 1: was just the most extraordinary thing coming from my background.
Speaker 1: I just like never imagined and I felt like I'd
Speaker 1: met an adult. Yeah. Yeah, And I'm sure there's more
Speaker 1: complexity to it, but I think the fact of that,
Speaker 1: if we talk about responsibility and just eating the snakehead
Speaker 1: and just saying yes, I did that. And I just
Speaker 1: remember thinking as I was bowing to him, as if leaving,
Speaker 1: I was like, my aspiration is to be that courageous
Speaker 1: in my life not to do what he did, but
Speaker 1: to really just take on my mistakes, take on that
Speaker 1: we will transgress. You know. I always tell students of
Speaker 1: mine that, you know, I will disappoint you for sure.
Speaker 1: And what I can vow is that I'm open to
Speaker 1: the conversation and open to hearing how it is, and
Speaker 1: I have a decent capacity to take responsibility. And I
Speaker 1: think that the students that I have would say that
Speaker 1: would be true. You know. I always find it like
Speaker 1: the most enlivening when students can come in and just
Speaker 1: like really give it to me, you know, like I
Speaker 1: feel like that's kind of the beginning of a deeper
Speaker 1: relationship where we can be with our disappointment and then
Speaker 1: we can be together in actually a more real way.
Speaker 1: So the projection, it's usually what happens in practice when
Speaker 1: you know, at least it's been my experience, and I
Speaker 1: think that there is an arch of practice where we
Speaker 1: sort of idealize the teacher that we hate the teacher
Speaker 1: or so disappointed. A lot of people leave at that stage.
Speaker 1: They have some disappointment or some discomfort that they can't
Speaker 1: face and they leave. Actually, I wrote about that experience
Speaker 1: I had myself with a teacher, and and if you
Speaker 1: can stay with that, if it's healthy enough, you know,
Speaker 1: unless it's like crazy, you know, but it's healthy enough,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty amazing place because usually the disappointment is
Speaker 1: so flavored, at least in my experience of all my
Speaker 1: conditioning and all my habitual moving away from what's uncomfortable
Speaker 1: and wanting to feel comfortable and wanting to be special,
Speaker 1: or wanting to be seen, or wanting want ding wan
Speaker 1: ding one ding wanting, And if we can bear it,
Speaker 1: there's such fruit to that of staying with what's uncomfortable again,
Speaker 1: if it's not unhealthy, which is always actually an interesting reflection,
Speaker 1: but I think that there's something so valuable about staying
Speaker 1: with it. Yeah, you talk in the book about we
Speaker 1: encourage people to stick with something for thirty years, which
Speaker 1: melts most brains, right. I mean, when I started working
Speaker 1: with a zen teacher several years ago, here's what I
Speaker 1: had to go to to commitment wise. I'm not leaving
Speaker 1: for six months, right, which I know is ridiculous, but
Speaker 1: that was where I had to start, was like, all right,
Speaker 1: six months, I'm not going to every time my brain
Speaker 1: goes maybe this is the right teacher. Maybe this is
Speaker 1: you know, just quiet, you're here, you know, And then
Speaker 1: I sort of kept re upping after that. So that
Speaker 1: idea of thirty years to our modern mind sounds insane.
Speaker 1: Yes it does, you know. It's like that's why it's
Speaker 1: then so unpopular, because everyone wants like the weekend version. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let me ask a genuine question there about that, though.
Speaker 1: Is there a way to I don't even like the word,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to use it because I don't have
Speaker 1: another one measure or even if we take the word
Speaker 1: measure out of to have a sense that we're at
Speaker 1: least on the right path, no matter how slow we
Speaker 1: might be going down it, is there a way to
Speaker 1: feel into to know, to gauge that, because I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the benefits of the modern world is we
Speaker 1: are exposed to all the wisdom of mankind. Wonderful. But
Speaker 1: the problem of course with that is that if we're
Speaker 1: not careful. And this is me given the nature of
Speaker 1: what I do for work is a show. Is I
Speaker 1: could just hop from one thing to the next, to
Speaker 1: the next, to the next to the next in a
Speaker 1: never ending pattern. So being able to say I'm on
Speaker 1: a path that feels right. It's the right one for me.
Speaker 1: And I know there's no easy answer to this question.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not asking for an easy answer, But
Speaker 1: how do you think about that? And how do you
Speaker 1: in your own life, on your own path, how have
Speaker 1: you thought about like, yeah, I think I'm in the
Speaker 1: right place. A couple of things come to mind versus
Speaker 1: Winnicut's good enough. Yeah, every community is weird and it's
Speaker 1: going to have its own eccentricity. And to me, it's
Speaker 1: finding one that's healthy enough. And do you feel a
Speaker 1: trust There's some kind of flavor of trust with the teacher,
Speaker 1: and I feel like it's really important. There is just
Speaker 1: something to it, you know, about going deep. And I
Speaker 1: think about my friend Roni Lodog, who is this an
Speaker 1: amazing human being, And she's a physician and acupuncturist and
Speaker 1: martial artists and just extraordinary friend. And she has this
Speaker 1: property that she is a steward of in northern New Mexico,
Speaker 1: which is a place of great wildfires. And there's a tree,
Speaker 1: a great cedar tree there in the forest where she's
Speaker 1: stewarts and it's so big and when the fires come through,
Speaker 1: that tree gets singed but not burned. And I asked
Speaker 1: her how is that and she said, oh, well, her
Speaker 1: roots are so deep that the fires can come through,
Speaker 1: and she stays wet inside. And so there's the depth
Speaker 1: of our rootedness in a tradition of some kind. And
Speaker 1: to me, you know, the amazing thing about the world
Speaker 1: is that there are so many different traditions because there
Speaker 1: are so many different kinds of people, and there is
Speaker 1: really just something that happens when you stay in a
Speaker 1: continuous practice over in a very steady way, and steady
Speaker 1: sometimes starts like this kind of crazy, like it was
Speaker 1: for me for sure, but there's something about the kind
Speaker 1: of okay, and then I'm back and I'm back. I
Speaker 1: felt whoa, and I'm back. Whoa, I'm over here and
Speaker 1: I'm back. You know, that kind of that kind of steadiness.
Speaker 1: So steadiness doesn't look dead, it's very alive. And I
Speaker 1: know for myself, some time around twenty five life years
Speaker 1: into my practicing, I really noticed something change. I felt
Speaker 1: in general, but it was mostly and you're asking, how
Speaker 1: do you know? I just felt so alive walking down
Speaker 1: the street in general. And I find I'm much more
Speaker 1: curious about pretty much everybody pretty much all the time.
Speaker 1: And so I feel like for me, one of the
Speaker 1: barometers for how is our practice going is like how
Speaker 1: alive do you feel? And how free do you feel
Speaker 1: to be curious and as Charlotte jocobc says, you know,
Speaker 1: like a sense of ordinary wonder in the midst of
Speaker 1: your life everywhere where your practice is no longer what
Speaker 1: you do on some zafu or some kind of yoga
Speaker 1: matter something. It's your life. So when a practice is
Speaker 1: with us, they asked me like, I, how is my
Speaker 1: practice going? Like, well, tell me about you know, do
Speaker 1: you shop at the same grocery store And they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And I said, tell me about some of the cashiers
Speaker 1: and their lives. And they were like, what are you
Speaker 1: talking about? And I said to me, that's a good
Speaker 1: barometer for our practice is to see how alive are
Speaker 1: people who you depend on and get to know them
Speaker 1: and the amazing thing is they have And suddenly they
Speaker 1: were like, Wow, that's like a real thing. Now I
Speaker 1: go in the grocery store, I look forward to it
Speaker 1: and it's not like he is the best friends of
Speaker 1: the people, but he knows them and knows a little
Speaker 1: bit about their families and knows a little their situation,
Speaker 1: and it turns out that those kinds of social engagements
Speaker 1: are just like good medicine. Yeah, I'm reading a book
Speaker 1: right now for an upcoming interview with one of the
Speaker 1: directors of thing. It's called the Harvard Longevity st They've
Speaker 1: been studying people since like nineteen forty eight, generations of
Speaker 1: people for a long long time in a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways. That's so exciting, and they basically boil the
Speaker 1: entire thing. I mean, We're going to have a whole
Speaker 1: interview about it, but I'm going to spoil the entire
Speaker 1: thing right now, which is that relationships are it like,
Speaker 1: if you want to do one thing that's going to
Speaker 1: make you more likely to live longer and live happier,
Speaker 1: invest in relationships and relationships of all kinds, with your partner,
Speaker 1: with your family, with your friends, with the cashier at
Speaker 1: the grocery store. It's all of them as a mosaic
Speaker 1: that comes together. And that is what is most important.
Speaker 1: It makes me think of in the book, you quote
Speaker 1: something from the Buddha that I love, which is beautiful
Speaker 1: friendship is the whole of the spiritual life. Yes, and
Speaker 1: to me, that's the fruit of practice is to realize
Speaker 1: that everyone matters, because I think that in some ways
Speaker 1: that maybe many of us have that value about being
Speaker 1: carried or being loving is really important value. But you know,
Speaker 1: and I think that practice and life gives us the
Speaker 1: opportunity to practice that. And just said, like, how am
Speaker 1: I putting that into practice? Now? Yep? And how about
Speaker 1: now yea? And what about in the hardware store, you know,
Speaker 1: like into like actually like really in the midst of
Speaker 1: our life. Yeah. It makes me think of somebody we
Speaker 1: interviewed about kindness, and I remember something she said that
Speaker 1: really hit me and caused me to have to really
Speaker 1: do some deep introspection. And it was really about that
Speaker 1: kindness is going just a little bit beyond and that
Speaker 1: sounds kind of obvious, but it was extending beyond sort
Speaker 1: of where I'm sort of naturally comfortable, where am I
Speaker 1: indifferent and trying to move just a notch beyond that.
Speaker 1: You know, it wasn't about just being pleasant. There's a
Speaker 1: level beyond where you are entering into a relationship with
Speaker 1: that person and where you are to use a phrase
Speaker 1: you've used multiple times, where you're seeing them and that
Speaker 1: is hard for me, it's very easy for me to
Speaker 1: go about my life sort of locked in my head
Speaker 1: and I can be I can be basically pleasant, polite,
Speaker 1: right without having to emerge from my little shell, right,
Speaker 1: you know, to notice that again, you know, and to
Speaker 1: how do you say, yeah, but that's my habit yep?
Speaker 1: And how do I be more than a separate head yep, yep?
Speaker 1: How can I be a whole body? Yeah? You know,
Speaker 1: very often we're just like selling touristed in our thoughts
Speaker 1: and not even thinking about what our skinness saying. Yep.
Speaker 1: So we could summarize all this basically is if you've
Speaker 1: got a cat, go scoop the litter box. Is that
Speaker 1: what you're saying is that we're going to boil all
Speaker 1: this down to some basic, basic zen, very simple. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've got a coon in you about a litter box.
Speaker 1: If you haven't written it yet, maybe it's come, but
Speaker 1: it's you know, Yeah, it's so simple, like when the
Speaker 1: letterbox needs to be scooped, just scoop it. And when
Speaker 1: you're feeling separate, learn how to love yourself into relationship again.
Speaker 1: I think that's a beautiful place for us to wrap
Speaker 1: up a beautiful last line coach, and it's always a
Speaker 1: pleasure to see you. Your new book, as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: is called Untangled Walking the eight Full Path to Clarity,
Speaker 1: Courage and Compassion, and we'll have links in the show
Speaker 1: notes to where people can get the book, where people
Speaker 1: can visit your Zen Center and all that. So thank
Speaker 1: you so much for coming on. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Eric Joy to be with you. If what
Speaker 1: you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
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