Speaker 1: Any effort to create a non agitated state of mind
Speaker 1: is itself a form of agitation. Welcome to the one
Speaker 1: you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think ring true, and yet
Speaker 1: for 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 m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
Speaker 1: this episode is Dean Slider, an award winning author who
Speaker 1: has taught meditation and awakenings since nineteen seventy. Dean leads workshops, talks,
Speaker 1: and retreats throughout the US and beyond, and has been
Speaker 1: featured in The New York Times, USA, Today in Style,
Speaker 1: New York Magazine, OH, The Oprah Magazine, and many others.
Speaker 1: He is also on the faculty of the West Coast
Speaker 1: Writers Conferences. On this episode, Eric and Dean discussed his
Speaker 1: book fear Less, Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, Anger and Addiction.
Speaker 1: Hi Dean, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, it's great
Speaker 1: to be here. It's a pleasure to have you on.
Speaker 1: Your book is called fear Less, Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety,
Speaker 1: Anger and Addiction. And we will go in to all
Speaker 1: that here in a moment, but let's start like we
Speaker 1: normally do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's
Speaker 1: talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there
Speaker 1: are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 1: One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second,
Speaker 1: and she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Well, it's a very powerful story.
Speaker 1: I can see why you've used this as the central
Speaker 1: metaphor for for your program. Here, Uh, so many levels
Speaker 1: to it. I want to go straight to a neurological level. Okay,
Speaker 1: we could approximately, we can identify the aggressive wolf with
Speaker 1: the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. And that's
Speaker 1: the branch of the nervous system, which, when it's activated,
Speaker 1: stimulates the fight or flight response that that you know,
Speaker 1: whatever is stimulus is out there. We feel, okay, I
Speaker 1: have to deal with this in a fearful way, get
Speaker 1: the heck out of here, flight, or I have to
Speaker 1: deal with it in an aggressive way. Fight. Now we
Speaker 1: need that response. You know, we've got caveman cave woman
Speaker 1: nervous system still. But unfortunately, in modern life, every time
Speaker 1: the garbage truck goes by and you hear that roar,
Speaker 1: our cave person nervous system interprets that as, oh, there's
Speaker 1: the saber tooth tiger. So our sympathetic nervous system, our
Speaker 1: fight or flight response tends to kick in inappropriately. So
Speaker 1: the way we balance that the good wealth, so to speak,
Speaker 1: is the parasympathetic system, and that's the branch of the
Speaker 1: nervous system that does just the opposite, gets us cooled doubt,
Speaker 1: gets us settled into the boundless, okay, nous of this
Speaker 1: moment as it is the the fact that from a
Speaker 1: bigger perspective, that we don't have to panic, we don't
Speaker 1: have to run, we don't have to take arms against
Speaker 1: what's going on. We can be in harmony with it.
Speaker 1: And that parasympathetic system, that good wolf is the one
Speaker 1: that we feed through meditative methods. Physiologically, the meditative methods
Speaker 1: activate the parasympathetic system and tend to switch off the
Speaker 1: sympathetic system. It's a great way for us to go
Speaker 1: into this. You know, very early in your book you
Speaker 1: you describe that the book is essentially going to focus
Speaker 1: on two things. One is practice, so some of the
Speaker 1: meditation practices that we can do, and then view, which
Speaker 1: is sort of a way of looking at the world.
Speaker 1: We're going to spend a fair amount of time on practice,
Speaker 1: I think, but I thought let's start with view. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about from your perspective, what is right view and
Speaker 1: how does it relate to specifically having less fear in
Speaker 1: our lives? Right right view? And we want to be
Speaker 1: clear here by view We don't mean view in the
Speaker 1: sense of opinion. By view. We mean it quite literally
Speaker 1: seeing what's in front of you. That's what right view is.
Speaker 1: Right view is seeing actual reality rather than our thoughts
Speaker 1: about it or are feelings about it. I think of
Speaker 1: reality as being what is laid out in front of
Speaker 1: us in each moment, and then all our thoughts and
Speaker 1: concepts are like a piece of tracing paper we've laid
Speaker 1: over it, and then we've drawn all kinds of stuff
Speaker 1: and made all kinds of notes and so forth, and
Speaker 1: and we're always seeing reality filtered through all of them.
Speaker 1: A wonderful example is from the Steven Spielberg film in
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen, Bridge of Spies. I cite this. I
Speaker 1: have a chapter about this in the book actually titled
Speaker 1: would It Help Uh? And that's the based on the
Speaker 1: true story of Rudolph Able, the Soviet spy captured in
Speaker 1: New York at the height of the Cold War, and
Speaker 1: he's now on trial for his life, and the Russians
Speaker 1: and the Americans everyone wants him dead because he's a
Speaker 1: very inconvenient person. And his lawyer comes in and explains
Speaker 1: all this to him. Fortunately, his lawyer is Tom Hanks,
Speaker 1: so you know, probably things will turn out okay. Uh.
Speaker 1: But but in any movie, that's right, that's right, you
Speaker 1: want Tom on your team. So so Tom explains to
Speaker 1: him the dire straits that he's in and and uh
Speaker 1: and the spy was played by the wonderful um Uh.
Speaker 1: Mark Rilans won an oscar for this role, actually, and
Speaker 1: he digests this information for a moment and then he says,
Speaker 1: all right, And Hank says, you don't seem worried, and
Speaker 1: he says, kind of shrugs, literally says would it help?
Speaker 1: And that's the best thing in the film. Actually, when
Speaker 1: Mark Ryland's walk, when people spot them on the streets,
Speaker 1: they say, hey, Mark, would it help? Uh? I mean
Speaker 1: that cuts through so much confusion. I grew up in
Speaker 1: a very political family, and I can remember my parents
Speaker 1: screaming at the at the TV news, goddamn Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh. And even then I used to wonder,
Speaker 1: do they know Nixon can't hear them through the TV screen.
Speaker 1: So in this case, one aspect of view is just
Speaker 1: seeing that that doesn't help, and that it's actually very right.
Speaker 1: View is always liberating. Right view is always liberating when
Speaker 1: when you see that that doesn't help. You realize, oh,
Speaker 1: I can stop doing that. I don't have to cultivate
Speaker 1: stopping that. I don't have to try to push down
Speaker 1: my emotions. I just just let that go. I mean,
Speaker 1: a very similar thing everyday experience is sitting at the
Speaker 1: red You know, when you're sitting at the red light
Speaker 1: and you're in a hurry and you tighten your grip
Speaker 1: on the steering wheel, you're kind of straining forward in
Speaker 1: the seat as you mentally try to make the red
Speaker 1: light turn green faster. We've all done that. Now does
Speaker 1: it help? No? And the and the extremely good news
Speaker 1: here and again this is a matter of view. Is
Speaker 1: is realizing that it never has helped, it will never
Speaker 1: help you. Can you can just invest hundreds of man
Speaker 1: hours or woman hours for the rest of your life
Speaker 1: and trying to make the red light turned green faster,
Speaker 1: It never will. Now, think of all the other kinds
Speaker 1: of red lights in your life, the things that other
Speaker 1: people do when you're going no, no, don't say that,
Speaker 1: don't do that. It doesn't help you. Can you can
Speaker 1: breathe out, you can let that go, And that doesn't
Speaker 1: make you less effective in actually helping the situation. It
Speaker 1: makes you more effective because you're not burning up energy
Speaker 1: straining at this kind of unproductive response. Instead, you've got
Speaker 1: more bandwidth open to look around and see, Okay, what
Speaker 1: can I do that will help. Yeah. I had my
Speaker 1: own version of that just a little while ago, because,
Speaker 1: as you know, I was late to this interview because
Speaker 1: I was stuck in traffic, and you know, I had
Speaker 1: that moment of frustration starting to rise, and then the
Speaker 1: you know, and then the realization like there's absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: that getting upset is going to do about this. And
Speaker 1: and sometimes I'm able to have that clarity of you
Speaker 1: and and and other times, you know, I'm not. Um,
Speaker 1: I think we're all that way sometimes. I also, particularly
Speaker 1: like you quote another writer C. S. Lewis in the
Speaker 1: book about this, and I'm just going to read, um,
Speaker 1: just a short part of it because I think it's
Speaker 1: so useful. And and he's basically talking about the slaughter
Speaker 1: and the suffering of the World War Two giving way
Speaker 1: to the Cold War. And um, this is what he
Speaker 1: said in a letter to a friend. One mustn't assume
Speaker 1: burdens that God does not lay upon us. It is
Speaker 1: one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that
Speaker 1: the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning.
Speaker 1: I think each village was meant to feel pity for
Speaker 1: its own sick and poor, whom it can help. And
Speaker 1: I doubt if it is the duty of any private
Speaker 1: person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help.
Speaker 1: And then it goes on to say a great many
Speaker 1: people do now seem to think that the mere state
Speaker 1: of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think
Speaker 1: it is. That's so profound, it's sure as thank you
Speaker 1: so much for reading that. I just love that quote.
Speaker 1: You know that was uh and talk about having all
Speaker 1: the woes of the world that are do you know
Speaker 1: that was way before internet. Every time I pick up
Speaker 1: my phone, it's it's so easy to just swipe right
Speaker 1: and there's the headlines, here's the latest disasters. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: hadn't even in twenty four hour news. It's so staggering
Speaker 1: it and it is one of those things that I
Speaker 1: think that good people today wrestle with, yes, which is
Speaker 1: I don't want to stick my head in the sand.
Speaker 1: I'm a caring person. There's lots of things that are
Speaker 1: happening in the world, but I feel like this is
Speaker 1: somehow eroding me. How can I respond to this in
Speaker 1: a wise way? So what are some things you might
Speaker 1: say about that? Well, the first part is, and again
Speaker 1: this is a matter of view that uh C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis has articulated so beautifully that the state of worry
Speaker 1: is not itself meritorious. The question is would it help?
Speaker 1: It doesn't. And you know, kind of the reverse of
Speaker 1: that is people feel if they're not worrying, then they're
Speaker 1: being flaky, they're not being conscientious, and that's just not true.
Speaker 1: They you know, if that were so, then the more worried,
Speaker 1: the more stressed you became, the more you would be
Speaker 1: helping the world. And if if we think of the
Speaker 1: people who have really liked the great great political activists,
Speaker 1: you know, and I had all my life, as I say,
Speaker 1: you know, starting with the parents that I grew up with,
Speaker 1: all my life, I've been around political activists. Um, and
Speaker 1: if you think of the ones who have really changed
Speaker 1: the world, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr King right, people like that,
Speaker 1: Nelson Mandela, As soon as you think of them, you
Speaker 1: know that they were not coming from a place of
Speaker 1: stress or worry or rage or any of these. Just
Speaker 1: you know, negative, negative toxic emotions that so many people
Speaker 1: feel their activism has to come from. You know that
Speaker 1: people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Dr King, they
Speaker 1: were coming from a place of great silence inside and
Speaker 1: really from a place of great love inside. And I
Speaker 1: think that it's no accident that they're the ones whose
Speaker 1: influence continues to affect the exactly I often think of.
Speaker 1: Dr Stephen Covey wrote a book, The Seven Habits of
Speaker 1: Highly Effective People, which I think is a master work.
Speaker 1: Gets classified as a business book, but it's not really
Speaker 1: in any way, shape or form. But he expounds this
Speaker 1: idea of circle of concern versus circle of influence. And
Speaker 1: if you think of a big circle with a smaller
Speaker 1: circle inside of it, the big circle is your circle
Speaker 1: of concern, everything you're concerned about, and the smaller circles
Speaker 1: the things you can actually do something about. And his
Speaker 1: point is the more time that you spend in your
Speaker 1: circle of concern, your circle of influence actually shrinks. And
Speaker 1: the more time that you spend in your circle of influence,
Speaker 1: the more it grows. And it it speaks to this
Speaker 1: exact same point, which is that if I spend all
Speaker 1: of my time worrying or being angry or railing at
Speaker 1: the television or all of that. Then that dissipates the
Speaker 1: energy that I can put into my circle of influence,
Speaker 1: which is the place that I can actually make a
Speaker 1: positive change in the world. Right absolutely so, So you know,
Speaker 1: job one is you have to take care of yourself
Speaker 1: and um uh, you know you need to have the
Speaker 1: clarity and the balance and the groundedness and and the
Speaker 1: genuine compassion to help others. Otherwise you're you're not going
Speaker 1: to be making things better, You're going to be making
Speaker 1: things worse. It seems like there's been at tension and
Speaker 1: this has existed in lots of people for many years
Speaker 1: between how much of their time needs to be spent
Speaker 1: in contemplation versus in action, you know, in activism and
Speaker 1: again to your point, looking at someone like Gandhi, who um,
Speaker 1: I don't remember the exact numbers, but apparently spent several
Speaker 1: hours a day off on his own in prayer or so.
Speaker 1: I think it's one of those tensions that runs through
Speaker 1: people in the modern world who are really trying to
Speaker 1: live a good life. Is how do I balance those
Speaker 1: two elements? Right now? That really brings things into my wheelhouse,
Speaker 1: which is that I've functioned as a meditation teacher since
Speaker 1: oh my, since nineteen seventy now, uh, and I've had
Speaker 1: the incredible opportunity to teach all over the country and
Speaker 1: in a few other countries and all different kinds of people.
Speaker 1: I've worked for years with kids at a top, top
Speaker 1: prep school. I've worked with kids at ivy league colleges.
Speaker 1: I've worked with prisoners and maximum security, and with corporate
Speaker 1: executives and creative artists. So I've had the great opportunity
Speaker 1: to find out what works and to find out how
Speaker 1: to share the skills of meditation in a way that
Speaker 1: practical people living in you know, the actual world, not
Speaker 1: living in a story book about about India in the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, but living in America in two thousand and eighteen.
Speaker 1: How can actual people integrate meditative practice into their lives
Speaker 1: in a way that they really can do it and
Speaker 1: it really will do it, and that it's really a
Speaker 1: fact to now. The key that I've been fortunate enough
Speaker 1: to learn from my own teachers is to take a
Speaker 1: natural approach to meditation. I wrote a book actually with
Speaker 1: the title Natural Meditation Um. Usually when people hear the
Speaker 1: word meditation, they think of trying to control the mind.
Speaker 1: I mean, when I meet someone at a party, they say,
Speaker 1: what do you do? I'm a meditation teacher. They say, oh,
Speaker 1: I tried to meditate, but it was so hard. I
Speaker 1: couldn't concentrate, I couldn't clear my mind, that I couldn't
Speaker 1: make the thoughts stop coming. And that's the really kind
Speaker 1: of most widespread conception, I would say, misconception about what
Speaker 1: meditation is that you're trying to control the mind. Now
Speaker 1: here's the problem with that approach, and there's no way
Speaker 1: around this problem if if you take that approach, which
Speaker 1: is that any effort to create a non agitated state
Speaker 1: of mind is itself a form of agitation? Are right? Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try real hard to just be. It's a
Speaker 1: contradiction in terms. So the approach and natural meditation is
Speaker 1: we start by noticing how the mind naturally works all
Speaker 1: the time, and what the mind naturally is doing all
Speaker 1: the time is seeking happiness, it's seeking fulfillment, it's seeking
Speaker 1: that moment you know, after you you drink the tea
Speaker 1: and you say ah, and you go through whatever you
Speaker 1: need to go through. You you buy the tea, bags
Speaker 1: and you boil the water and you pour the water
Speaker 1: in the kettle. All that it's all aimed at getting
Speaker 1: at that moment, to that moment of saying ah. Everything
Speaker 1: else is a means to that end okay. And it's
Speaker 1: because we're built that way. The mind is seeking that
Speaker 1: sense of that sense of just o kayness, nothing else
Speaker 1: that needs to be done for me to just bask
Speaker 1: in this moment. The mind is seeking that all the time. Now,
Speaker 1: the good news, as all the stage is, whether it's
Speaker 1: the Buddha or Jesus or Shankarra or Louts or Socrates,
Speaker 1: the Balsamtov, all the stages in their different language, say
Speaker 1: one way or another that there is an awe that
Speaker 1: never ends, that's not dependent on outer circumstances, and it's
Speaker 1: your own inmost core of being. So all we need
Speaker 1: to do is get the mind turned just a little
Speaker 1: bit turned in that direction and let go of all
Speaker 1: our effort. And then and then the mind's natural gravitation
Speaker 1: toward that happiness, towards that piece and that silence, that
Speaker 1: gravity just pulls us within. So when I lead meditation,
Speaker 1: and I do this in workshops all over the country,
Speaker 1: um and also I have a actually we have a
Speaker 1: group that meets here in Santa Monica usually every other
Speaker 1: Tuesday night, and now we broadcast that live on YouTube.
Speaker 1: That will be tonight on YouTube. Actually, so what I
Speaker 1: do is simply I gently guide people, show them how
Speaker 1: to let go of effort, and then the gravity takes over. Now,
Speaker 1: when you practice in that way, it doesn't take a
Speaker 1: whole lot of time out of your day. This is
Speaker 1: coming back to your presenting question here. When people think,
Speaker 1: and you'll hear this a lot from people, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: meditation has really changed my life, but you have to
Speaker 1: practice for two hours a day. Now. The reason you
Speaker 1: hear that is that the way most people practice meditation
Speaker 1: trying to concentrate, trying to control the mind, that's very strenuous.
Speaker 1: It takes a lot of effort. So they're sitting there
Speaker 1: for an hour and forty five minutes beating their head
Speaker 1: against the wall, so to speak. And then finally they
Speaker 1: get so tired, the mind gets so exhausted trying to
Speaker 1: do this unnatural act of concentration that finally the mind
Speaker 1: gives up and it finally just sinks. And then that
Speaker 1: last fifteen minutes is just ah, there, it is so
Speaker 1: what fortunate well I've learned from my teachers is how
Speaker 1: to skip the first hour and minutes, go go straight
Speaker 1: to the to the just letting go and sinking part.
Speaker 1: And that's how I teach meditation. What I thought was
Speaker 1: interesting about your meditation, and knowing a little bit about
Speaker 1: your past and your teachers, is that the style of
Speaker 1: meditation you describe, the natural meditation right, sounds very much
Speaker 1: like something I learned from Adi Shanty, like the way
Speaker 1: he recommends a meditation. But when I first heard natural meditation,
Speaker 1: I thought this guy might be a t M guy,
Speaker 1: because that's the way transcendental meditation UM is often described.
Speaker 1: It's natural, It's just natural. And I think based on UM,
Speaker 1: what sounds like some of your previous work you you
Speaker 1: did do transcendental meditation, is that, Yes, I learned and
Speaker 1: practiced uh TM, and I became a TM teacher and
Speaker 1: I worked in the TM organization. I taught probably a
Speaker 1: couple of thousand people TM and all over the country
Speaker 1: for for several years. So you're right, the basic principle
Speaker 1: of effortlessness is there in TM, but it's not exclusively
Speaker 1: there in t M. And one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: I eventually went my my own way uh and and
Speaker 1: stopped teaching through the TM organization. Um. There were a
Speaker 1: number of and by the way, I still have some
Speaker 1: of my best friends are our TM teachers. UM. But
Speaker 1: I personally had to go my one was because they
Speaker 1: started charging I thought too much money. Uh. And you know,
Speaker 1: the the original idea was let's share this with everyone.
Speaker 1: And secondly, there's a tendency there to feel that TM
Speaker 1: is the only form of effortless meditation, that that we've
Speaker 1: got a monopoly on it. And in fact they're right
Speaker 1: that most meditation is taught in terms of effort and concentration,
Speaker 1: but not Allso once I had to go my way
Speaker 1: from from TM, that really form the direction of my search.
Speaker 1: And I found oh here in within the Tibetan teachings,
Speaker 1: there's this Tibetan teaching called so chen or um. It
Speaker 1: goes by by other names in other schools of Tibetan
Speaker 1: Buddhism um Haamudra or a Ti yoga. And oh here
Speaker 1: in certain schools of the Indian uh philosophical teachings of Vita,
Speaker 1: here's that that vein of effortlessness, of just being as well.
Speaker 1: So what I've done is to educate myself as much
Speaker 1: as I can in those traditions and try and okay,
Speaker 1: what's the essence? What did they all have in common?
Speaker 1: And it's all this teaching of letting go, of just
Speaker 1: being and again being in America teaching in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eighteen. I always acknowledge that my my debt of
Speaker 1: gratitude to those traditions. But we teach this in plain American.
Speaker 1: You don't have to learn sanscrit and you don't have
Speaker 1: to uh chant mantra, Tibetan mantras or so forth to
Speaker 1: in order to practice like this. You can if you want.
Speaker 1: I love my seeing mantras in the shower every morning.
Speaker 1: But as I always say with especially with my guys
Speaker 1: that I were within prison, everything's optional. Thank you. That
Speaker 1: was helpful. I was just curious about that evolution for you,
Speaker 1: because I could kind of see where it started. And
Speaker 1: that's you know, the term natural meditation has often been
Speaker 1: in my life. UM. I tried TM in UM in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, UM, which sounds like about when you started
Speaker 1: teaching it. I was um just experimenting, and I was
Speaker 1: amazed I could find any kind of meditation in Columbus,
Speaker 1: Ohio in nineteen seventy. So let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: then about natural meditation. Um, I just want to read
Speaker 1: something you wrote, and then I'm gonna let you just
Speaker 1: sort of talk a little bit more about it. But
Speaker 1: you describe it like this, we'll be hanging out in tasklessness.
Speaker 1: The Italians have a lovely expression for this. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: probably pronounce this because I can't speak Italian, dol se
Speaker 1: far niente. Okay, don't don't and you have to. You
Speaker 1: have to. You have to wave your hand. Yes, there
Speaker 1: you go. Don't sweet doing nothing. And then you also
Speaker 1: go on to make this analogy, and I thought this
Speaker 1: was a really useful because you're saying that if you
Speaker 1: leave the mind alone, it's going to settle by itself.
Speaker 1: And you say, think of leaves falling from a tree.
Speaker 1: They tell the whole story. A falling leaf will reach
Speaker 1: the ground in a percent of cases. And then a
Speaker 1: little bit later you say, but rather than a leaf
Speaker 1: falling to the ground, most people approach meditation like they're
Speaker 1: pushing a boulder up a mountain fighting gravity, rather than
Speaker 1: using it grunting away at whatever task they've set themselves.
Speaker 1: And I think that's such a great way to sort
Speaker 1: of frame up the way you think about this. And
Speaker 1: now I'm wondering if you could talk just a little
Speaker 1: bit about the practice of natural meditation. So listeners are
Speaker 1: going to be intrigued by this. They're gonna hear, oh wow,
Speaker 1: that that all sounds great. Boy, I have been, you know,
Speaker 1: it does feel like I'm fighting my brain every step
Speaker 1: of the way. Deems probably onto something here. What do
Speaker 1: I do? And you can't teach all that in a
Speaker 1: in a five minute answer to a question. But I'm
Speaker 1: wondered if you could point in the right direction. Right.
Speaker 1: Let me mention, by the way, that there's a page
Speaker 1: on my website. My website is Dean words dot com
Speaker 1: and there's a page they're called meditate now where I
Speaker 1: have guided meditation audio tracks and anyone can stream them
Speaker 1: for free. And uh and in those tracks you it's
Speaker 1: you know, ten minutes or fifteen minutes, and I'm just
Speaker 1: walking you through the thing. I'm guiding you the same
Speaker 1: way that I know guide the groups and guide my workshops.
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about it in principle right now.
Speaker 1: But people can get the direct experience by going to
Speaker 1: that page on my website, wonderful, and I'll link to
Speaker 1: it in our show notes for sure. Perfect, thank you.
Speaker 1: So yeah. Tasklessness. The thing is, if you set yourself
Speaker 1: any kind of task in meditation as meditation, then um,
Speaker 1: there's something you're trying to accomplish, and you're creating more
Speaker 1: agitation by by trying to create a non agitated state
Speaker 1: of mind. Your any effort, any effort that you expand,
Speaker 1: is a form of agitation, So you wind up chasing
Speaker 1: your tail. If I had a dollar for every time
Speaker 1: someone has said to me, well, I tried to meditate,
Speaker 1: but it was hard. You know, what I want to
Speaker 1: tell them is no, no, no, you tried to meditate,
Speaker 1: and therefore it was hard. What I do is I
Speaker 1: point out to people that there's a delicious, effortless natural
Speaker 1: nous to the way we're experiencing things right now. Right now,
Speaker 1: people who are listening to this, they're hearing the sound
Speaker 1: of my voice. They are feeling perhaps a chair or
Speaker 1: a couch or an automobile seat under their butt. They're
Speaker 1: seeing whatever shapes and colors are there before their eyes.
Speaker 1: And all of this seeing and feeling and hearing happens
Speaker 1: completely completely automatically. They're not expending any effort in order
Speaker 1: to have the awareness of the sounds and the and
Speaker 1: the smells and the tastes and all of that. Also,
Speaker 1: thoughts are there. Also feelings are there, and the thoughts
Speaker 1: and the feelings come and go, just like sounds or
Speaker 1: or shapes coming and going. There's nothing special about them.
Speaker 1: They're just you know, in Buddhist psychology, thinking is considered
Speaker 1: to be the sixth sense, so you have hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, thinking,
Speaker 1: So thoughts, thoughts are just objects of experience passing through
Speaker 1: the scope of our experience, the scope of our the
Speaker 1: porthole of our awareness. Just like sounds. There's nothing special
Speaker 1: about them, and there's something very liberating and knowing that, Okay,
Speaker 1: a thought is there. It's just like a sound being there.
Speaker 1: It's just like the texture, the temperature, the air being here.
Speaker 1: There's nothing special about it. It's there's nothing I have
Speaker 1: to do about it. It's kind of like sitting by
Speaker 1: the side of of the lake and you know, you
Speaker 1: see the breeze blowing the trees, you see the ripples
Speaker 1: on the lake coming and going. Stuff is just slashing
Speaker 1: around and we're just sitting there letting it be. There's
Speaker 1: nothing we need to do about it now. If we
Speaker 1: just sit in this easy way, another thing we may
Speaker 1: start to notice is that as all these things come
Speaker 1: and go within our awareness, there's one thing that does
Speaker 1: not come and go, and that's our awareness itself. Awareness
Speaker 1: itself is like open space, right, So if we have
Speaker 1: objects here and think of the space of the room
Speaker 1: that you're in. If we happen to move the teacup
Speaker 1: to a different place on the table, or we move
Speaker 1: our guitar from one corner of the room to another,
Speaker 1: the objects are moving through the space, but the space
Speaker 1: is not affected. Space is always open, it's always free,
Speaker 1: it's always space. So our awareness is like space, and
Speaker 1: all the different experiences that we have, all the things
Speaker 1: we're aware of are like the different objects that sitting
Speaker 1: in the space or moving through the space, and space
Speaker 1: has plenty of room for everything, and space is not
Speaker 1: affected by anything. You know, if I move the teacup
Speaker 1: to the other side of the table, it doesn't damage
Speaker 1: the space, it doesn't improve the space. So in this
Speaker 1: way we can start to notice our awareness itself and go, Okay,
Speaker 1: I can just rest in this awareness. I can just
Speaker 1: rest in this openness. In this openness, I can just
Speaker 1: rest in this natural spaciousness and let everything come and
Speaker 1: go within this space in its own natural, frictionless way,
Speaker 1: and know that I have no role in it. I'm
Speaker 1: just the observer. I'm just the witness. Really, I am
Speaker 1: the space because what is that, that's the awareness. I'm
Speaker 1: the awareness that's aware of all this stuff. And just
Speaker 1: remain like open space, just allow spaciousness to be there,
Speaker 1: and whatever is there coming and going within it, let
Speaker 1: it come and go within it. And I've actually done
Speaker 1: some practices very similar to what you're describing, and was
Speaker 1: startled by the fact that actually, some of the time,
Speaker 1: for sure, there was a true settling. I was like,
Speaker 1: holy mackerel, I'm just leaving my brain alone. Yes, so
Speaker 1: you yeah, you did not do anything to make settling happen.
Speaker 1: There's nothing you can do to make settling happen, because
Speaker 1: any effort is going to be non settling. So and
Speaker 1: in fact, often it sneaks up on people when you
Speaker 1: lead them in this natural way. It sneaks up on
Speaker 1: them and such so naturally and kind of organically and
Speaker 1: incrementally that uh, you know, when I ring the little
Speaker 1: bell to signal the end of the meditation. People go,
Speaker 1: you know, they may startle a little, and I tell
Speaker 1: them take the time, opening your eyes, and then they
Speaker 1: raised the hands. They go, boy, how long was that?
Speaker 1: And often they have no idea. Was it five minutes?
Speaker 1: What was it an hour? And that's because you've just
Speaker 1: settled deeply into the place, which is really where there's
Speaker 1: no time, there's no space, there's no cause and effect.
Speaker 1: You're you're truly off the grid, You're truly out of
Speaker 1: the matrix. Sometimes people practicing in this way, you may
Speaker 1: be practicing at home and feel, no, nothing's really going
Speaker 1: on here, you know, I'm kind of wasting my time.
Speaker 1: And then suddenly the phone rings you forgot to turn
Speaker 1: your phone off, or the cat jumps in your lap,
Speaker 1: and you go, uh no, no, no, no, I don't
Speaker 1: want to come out of this right now. I guess
Speaker 1: I really am settled. So let's talk about the times
Speaker 1: that that is not the experience. So, you know, I
Speaker 1: love that that idea of that thinking is a sixth sense,
Speaker 1: because I do really think that is. I think it's true,
Speaker 1: and I think it's a it's a great way to
Speaker 1: look at it. However, for a lot of us, it's
Speaker 1: as if like all our other senses are blind or
Speaker 1: deaf or whatever they are, and so our sixth sense
Speaker 1: is so hyper developed that thinking sense is what dominates.
Speaker 1: And again I know you're going to object to the
Speaker 1: word effort, but that if we don't work on a redirection,
Speaker 1: often we sit right in there. And and sometimes that
Speaker 1: what I think about with the open space, right, that
Speaker 1: awareness is our is our open space, um, and that
Speaker 1: we can rest in that awareness and that these things
Speaker 1: come and go. And you made the analogy of in
Speaker 1: the room, like if I've got this teacup here and
Speaker 1: I move it over there, Sometimes it seems like thoughts
Speaker 1: aren't a teacup, that they are the size of the
Speaker 1: room itself. Yeah. Yeah, Or it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex stomping
Speaker 1: through the And so to your point, I think it's
Speaker 1: I think it can't be stressed enough. That thought is
Speaker 1: not going away, right, That's what our brains do, and
Speaker 1: it and it doesn't write, and thought doesn't have to
Speaker 1: go away, just as the mind. The the eye doesn't
Speaker 1: have to stop seeing colors, and the ear doesn't have
Speaker 1: to stop hearing sounds. The mind does not have to
Speaker 1: stop entertaining thoughts. I mean, do you think that the
Speaker 1: Buddha had to say, oh, no, I'm seeing colors in
Speaker 1: this room. I got to close my eyes in order
Speaker 1: for me to enjoy my Buddha hood. No, uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's compatible with everything you know. But in giving
Speaker 1: meditation instruction, I don't tell people, okay, just don't do anything.
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. When we're in that situation where it's
Speaker 1: just okay, we noticed things are just easily coming and
Speaker 1: going um uh, then then find there's nothing we have
Speaker 1: to do. Just rest. Is that open space now when
Speaker 1: the the when whatever is going on, the thoughts of
Speaker 1: the feelings, whatever is going on, seems so intense or
Speaker 1: so engaging, it seems like the Tyrannosaurus rects brand paging
Speaker 1: through the room. Then there's one more instruction. First of all,
Speaker 1: a couple of things not to do. The thing that
Speaker 1: what what most people will try to do at that
Speaker 1: point is find some way to slay the tyrannosaurs. You
Speaker 1: can't it he's bigger than you or or else. Run
Speaker 1: away from the tyrannosaurs. You can't. He will outrun you. Okay,
Speaker 1: So here's the third thing, The third way is just
Speaker 1: when you feel you're you're resisting something, or you're deeply
Speaker 1: engaged with something, or you're struggling with something, a thought
Speaker 1: of feeling, whatever it is. In meditation, simply this, relax
Speaker 1: your grip, relax your grip on it, and then relax
Speaker 1: back into yourself. Relax back into that open space of awareness,
Speaker 1: and then don't worry about whether it continues to be
Speaker 1: there or not, because no matter how big or intense
Speaker 1: or troubling or whatever the thought or the emotion is,
Speaker 1: it can't do anything to you unless you're gripping it.
Speaker 1: We think it's gripping us. We think, oh, the tyrannosaurs
Speaker 1: is gripping me. It's if you experiment around a little
Speaker 1: bit with this, you'll find and this is a life
Speaker 1: changing discovery. It has no power to grip you. Only
Speaker 1: you grip it. And once you realize it's you gripping it,
Speaker 1: then you realize you have the power to relax your grip.
Speaker 1: I used to say let go, and you hear that
Speaker 1: a lot in you know, the meditation world, in the
Speaker 1: spiritual room. Just let go, just let go. That's valid,
Speaker 1: but it gets misunderstood. I don't say let go anymore.
Speaker 1: Because people here let go and they think, oh, the
Speaker 1: thing has to go away. Let's say I'm trying to
Speaker 1: let go, but it keeps being there. No, that's not
Speaker 1: letting go. That's like requiring it to go away, which
Speaker 1: is a form of holding on. So what you do is,
Speaker 1: you know, like, right now, I'm taking a ballpoint pen,
Speaker 1: I'm gripping it hard. So this is me, This is
Speaker 1: my mind and meditation where I'm starting to engage with
Speaker 1: this thing, struggling with it or or resisting it or
Speaker 1: whatever it is. Now, if I relax my grip, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that it's still there, because now my hand
Speaker 1: is open to the whole space of the room. And
Speaker 1: in fact, once I since I've relaxed my grip, eventually
Speaker 1: the thing's going to fall away of its own accord.
Speaker 1: But but that's none of my business. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: whether it falls away later or sooner. I love that
Speaker 1: relax your grip, recognizing that, you know, feelings might not
Speaker 1: be gripping us, we're gripping them. And I think that
Speaker 1: let it go. The way I've learned to think about
Speaker 1: it is let it be, like you know, because because
Speaker 1: they let it go sort of assumes to your point.
Speaker 1: Like I remember, like early I was, you know, I
Speaker 1: was UM in a a for a number of years,
Speaker 1: and that was such a big thing early on in
Speaker 1: my recovery. Let it go, Let it go. You just
Speaker 1: gotta let it go. And so I would try and
Speaker 1: let it go and it wouldn't go anywhere, and I
Speaker 1: would think I'm failing, you know, I'm failing. And I
Speaker 1: just realized, like it was just I can't I can't
Speaker 1: control whether it goes or doesn't go. I can just
Speaker 1: control my relationship to it or my gripping or or
Speaker 1: not gripping of it. Right, there's a related principle. And
Speaker 1: actually I have a chapter about this in the book
Speaker 1: UM titled Relax at the Moment of Contacts and UM.
Speaker 1: And this came out of this is a I think
Speaker 1: a wonderful story. Really years ago, I was practicing I kid,
Speaker 1: it's a beautiful, very graceful martial art. It's a non fighting,
Speaker 1: non conflict of Japanese martial art where when the other
Speaker 1: person attacks you, uh, you joined the direction of the
Speaker 1: attack and you go, okay, you want to rush in
Speaker 1: this direction towards me, I'll just help you fly across
Speaker 1: the room. I'll just help you keep going. And I
Speaker 1: was in the dojo one day. I was practicing for
Speaker 1: my next promotion test, and the particular thing I was
Speaker 1: practicing is where three guys, one after another, all attack
Speaker 1: me and try to tackle me. And I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: be just helping usher them across the mat, and instead
Speaker 1: I kept winding up grappling with them, and then the
Speaker 1: first one would pull me down and the other two
Speaker 1: would pile on top of me. It was a complete mess.
Speaker 1: I was getting more and more frustrated and got up,
Speaker 1: dusted myself off of getting I need to do this again.
Speaker 1: And suddenly I hear the voice of my my instructor.
Speaker 1: He's across the room and he calls out, dean, relax
Speaker 1: at the moment of contact. And it came as a
Speaker 1: surprise to me because I was so caught up in
Speaker 1: in tensing that I didn't realize I was tensing right.
Speaker 1: There's a catch twenty two there. That's why sometimes you
Speaker 1: need outside intervention. You need that. In this case, I
Speaker 1: needed the teacher to point that out to me. So
Speaker 1: the next time the guy rushed me, instead of tensing
Speaker 1: up and my shoulders rising up towards my ears and
Speaker 1: my you know, my my gut tightening up. Instead, I
Speaker 1: relaxed and as the guy and I did exactly the
Speaker 1: same thing with pivoting my hips and using my arms
Speaker 1: as I had before, only now at work. Now we
Speaker 1: the guy just went flying across the room, and the
Speaker 1: next guy and the next guy. Now, most people are
Speaker 1: never going to practice i q do in their lives.
Speaker 1: But the real i q do is life. The stuff
Speaker 1: that's coming towards you can be the whatever it is
Speaker 1: that makes you fearful, whether you're afraid of flying, or
Speaker 1: afraid of public speaking, or afraid of you know, asking
Speaker 1: that nice attractive person out on a date, or it
Speaker 1: could you're you're probably the thing coming. Yet you could
Speaker 1: be rage, you know, at the driver on the road
Speaker 1: that's cut you off, Or it could be if you
Speaker 1: you have a problem with with drink or with drugs
Speaker 1: or anything any addictive cravings. When the the that craving
Speaker 1: is coming towards you, that rather than do what we've
Speaker 1: done before, which is just automatically tense up when we
Speaker 1: have that encounter, do the opposite, very deliberately relax at
Speaker 1: the moment of contact, just let the thing go past
Speaker 1: you and It's so simple, but it's really powerful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is such a great story that you tell. And
Speaker 1: I that's such a great catchphrase, relax at the moment
Speaker 1: of contact. And you describe another version of that in
Speaker 1: your own life, which I've burienced often. Um, you say,
Speaker 1: I once spentner winner in Southeast Iowa, and I will
Speaker 1: say I've spent an entire lifetime of winners um in Ohio.
Speaker 1: But that that idea of you know, we get cold
Speaker 1: and we just tense up. Our shoulders are up, our
Speaker 1: whole bodies tight, We're just clenched against it. And you know,
Speaker 1: for me, I just found like when I when I
Speaker 1: just relaxed into it and stopped the resistance of it
Speaker 1: in such a way, you know, the experience of it changes.
Speaker 1: I'm still cold, but I'm not miserable in the same way.
Speaker 1: And I thought that was another example that you use
Speaker 1: that that I've certainly experienced in my own life. So
Speaker 1: interesting the way you put that, Okay, I'm cold, but
Speaker 1: I'm not miserable, And that recalls a saying that you've
Speaker 1: probably heard, which is pain as mandatory, suffering as optional. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We interviewed shin Zen Young on the show, who you
Speaker 1: probably have at least heard of through your meditation travels.
Speaker 1: But he wrote out this equation, you know, um, suffering
Speaker 1: equals pain times resistance, and it has lived with me
Speaker 1: just constantly, and I it's a lesson I learned over
Speaker 1: and over and over again, is that you know, yes,
Speaker 1: I mean like I have, I have back pain, and
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse, but it's
Speaker 1: always worse when I am like resisting it, when I
Speaker 1: am really like fighting it. It shouldn't be here. It
Speaker 1: shouldn't be this way, you know. I just I find
Speaker 1: that that non resistance is and it really gets to
Speaker 1: the heart of your meditation method, right, it's the non
Speaker 1: resistance of what's happening in the moment and just knowing
Speaker 1: that whatever is happening in the moment is is here.
Speaker 1: There's nothing. I once saw what I felt was the
Speaker 1: perfect complete meditation instruction on the side of a carton
Speaker 1: of Tropicana orange juice. UM. It said, nothing added, nothing
Speaker 1: taken away, not from concentrate. That's great. Well, that is
Speaker 1: a great place for us to wrap up because we
Speaker 1: are out of time. You and I are going to
Speaker 1: continue in the post show conversation and we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about. You mentioned the idea of on roads to meditation,
Speaker 1: ways to sort of go into meditation, and boy, that
Speaker 1: has been something over the last year that has fundamentally
Speaker 1: changed my meditation practice is having some of those, and
Speaker 1: you've got some great ones. So we're going to discuss those. Um.
Speaker 1: I'll have links, as we mentioned in the show, notes
Speaker 1: to your book, to your homepage all that. But I've
Speaker 1: had a great time talking with you. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for coming on. Thank you, it's really been great.
Speaker 1: All right bye. If what you just heard was helpful
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