Balancing Comfort and Ease with Our Accountability to Others and the World

Which only fits about uh I guess like forty five. We've been getting like sixty and seventy people on our gathering. So, um Yeah, we'll be putting up a sign in form uh next week, Dharmapunksnyc dot com. So if you are in the mood just uh to stop by, uh you can sign up. there and everything is of course done by donation. Everything I do entirely as a Buddhist pastor supported by donation. So Venmo Garma Punks with an X NYC if you'd like to support my work.

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topic. I thought tonight I'd give a talk on balancing our need for joy and positive emotions with also the importance of Being accountable or responsible to issues going on in our life, in the world, important events. And that balance can be very difficult to find. And I'll talk about some

tools that have helped me. I'm not claiming that any of them will be the right tools for you, but um hopefully something in tonight's talk will be of interest. Then we'll have a meditation, then we'll have Time for questions or anything you'd like to have explicated further. In the nineteen sixties heralded the arrival of p positive psychology. Famous figures like Martin Seligman, Albert Bandura, Mihali Czech sent Mihali, Abraham Maslow.

Robert Eamons and then over time, very exciting new figures, some of my favorites, Barbara Frederickson, Jonathan Hayes, Sanja Lubermirsky can never pronounce her name um arrived and uh The basic gist that uh they noted that psychology and counseling over its development was overly focused on our pathologies, i.e., the causes of our psychological disorders. rather than noting our innate capabilities that allow us to flourish and feel meaningfully engaged and fulfilled in our lives.

capacities for as a social species with frontal lobes we're We have the capacity for kindness and gratitude and awe and creativity. We can express our internal states to others that so we can bond in deeper, more uh create stronger affiliations.

But the question is, you know, why do we have positive emotions? They were immediately confronted by why do we have jov joy, love, gratitude, pride? The survival implications of our negative emotions are clear. Our fight flight impulses that create anger, fear, frustration, uh mobilize us to survive threat. And on the other hand, our impulse is to fall and shut down, cower.

are impulses that immobilize us Uh and that also can have survival positive implications when we're overmatched, becoming meek and small, playing dead also has its survival implications. But what is the purpose of positive emotions? Why did we evolve to have such a wide array of them? Well, Frederickson, Barbara Frederickson, I think came up with the most. uh profound answer to that uh question and in fact it's her solution is

highly accepted in the world of clinical psychology. It's called the broaden and build uh theory, which is that positive emotions um do two things. One, of course, they broaden our behavior so that we can develop Flexible collaborative ways to think and act and that

alone had vastly important survival implications. We connect for safety in numbers. And any uh attributes such as positive emotions that switch us from the withdrawal impulses of negative emotions to the approach impulses that allow us to connect with others and bond and build tribes and uh together explore our environments.

these impulses clearly had a great advantage. In fact, probably the single greatest survival advantage of our species is our ability to connect. And our ability to connect is largely based on the ability to express joy and uh acknowledgement and appreciation to others.

But it's not just that, uh not just our ability to connect with others, positive emotions are vital for staying alive. You see, um, as Frederickson and many others pointed out, They switch us out of what's called the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for chronic stress, uh, hypervigilance. staying fully alert and engaged, but not allowing us to relax and settle and digest and sleep.

So what allows us to switch from these heightened alert survival states to these relaxed, peaceful, uh healthy states? Well, positive emotions. They activate your left hemisphere, um And so uh without positive emotions, we'd be unmotivated to engage with our environments and our nervous systems would be stuck. constantly in sympathetic arousal, which is over time incredibly damaging to the body. It's associated with

um uh uh what is it diabetes, cancer, compromised immune system, gastrointestinal disorders, and so forth. So the ability to experience uh positive emotions is vital

for our well-being. Now, I should note that when I'm talking about positive emotions, I'm not talking about sensory pleasures that don't do either of the above. Sensory pleasures feel really good. And they produce short term dopamine rewards. For example, shopping, eating, TV watching, spending, you know, people get engaged on social media or or on dating apps. But these pleasures don't elicit the um

the neural rewards, the benefits of connecting and regulating our nervous system. In fact, they're also excit excitatory. They keep us in this um highly uh vigilant states.

Nobody and you we can tell that these these short term pleasures don't elicit any sense of pride and sense of self-worth. Very few people I know uh r run around uh or uh screaming that they just how proud they were that they spent six hours on hinge the previous night swiping over hundreds of images of people or how they spent four hours on uh Amazon.

These are not things that elicit pride or they don't regulate our nervous system and they don't allow us to connect with others. Positive emotions arise from impulses one, to connect. Would loved ones as To also finish things that are expressive, like when people finish a painting or they do a walk in nature or they achieve

uh health goals or they meditate or they spend time practicing gratitude by taking in the positive or acts of kindness. These are the kind of what the positive psychologist showed are the activities that regulate our nervous system that allow us to meaningfully connect with others and and create a sense of self-worth. So why aren't we doing it all the time? Why aren't we you know, I mean, why don't we um

focus as much time as we need to practice um gratitude, connecting with loved ones, finishing painting, walking in nature. Why do we spend

so much time fixated on the bad at the expense of taking in the good, even though taking in the good is vital for our well-being. Well Focusing on the good can be edged or overwhelmed by a what's called our negativity bias, an ingrained tendency in our brains to focus and dwell on negative events and negative stimuli rather than positive.

You see, our evolutionary v ancestors um probably did survive in the short term by focusing on threats and things that could go wrong rather than any kind of gratitude practice or spending time telling their loved ones how much they care about them. Negativity has been shown to be a magnet for attention and memory formation. It only takes about a half a second for a negative event.

to wire durably r uh resilient neural connections involving, you know, generally your amygdala and your right temporal lobe. But positive experiences take a lot longer. We really have to savor a positive event for fifteen, twenty, I don't remember the exact uh the suggested amount for it to form a neurally resilient set of connections, but it takes a lot longer. Studies show we spend longer time looking at images of negative facial expressions than images of people sm uh smiling.

Uh we'll remember negative uh if you show people uh five photogra f photographs of five different people frowning, photographs of five different people smiling, and f photographs of five different people with neutral experiences. And you wait a couple of weeks They'll remember every one of the five negative facial expression faces. in the future. They won't remember they'll remember one of the five positive, you know, smiling faces, and they won't remember any of the neutral expressions.

Putting it another way, given an array of good or bad adjectives about a stranger study shows we always give greater emotional weight to bad descriptors when we form an impression. So if somebody says to you, hey, I I just met the neighbor, and you say, Oh, what were they like? And you say, Well, they were um They were very uh friendly. but they also seem to be playing their uh car radio loud or they they also seem to be in a hurry or whatever. The negative

uh the negative uh information will be given far more weight in our minds than the positive. We dwell on the unpleasant. More than we dwell on pleasant events. And classically, bad news has been shown to sell more newspapers, get more clicks. uh get more TV views than good news. In fact, uh there was, I remember at in twenty twenty the actor John Krasinski d made a some good news

web series. I don't know if you remember it, even though it was only three years ago. It feels like a lifetime. But um Uh and even though a lot of people were, you know, gave it alkalods and and very and some positive reviews, it managed nine episodes before. basically the energy behind it petered away. Well meanwhile, every day if you go into any, you know, bank or any place where T V's on, it'll be on a news site showing bad

news in the world. Today's there's lots of negative ends that can hijack our attention towards doom scrolling. There's absolutely horrific military actions going on right now that are killing innocent civilians. Women and children. There's unambiguously vile, authoritarian nations invading weaker nations. In six years from now we reach a line in the sand where the coral le reefs will begin to die off. Uh, we'll have massive global crop failures, forced migration in the hundreds of millions.

And we could very well re elect a neo Nazi in twenty twenty four. So it's not like we're in a shortage of of things to dwell and doom scroll over. And in fact, For many of us, the stressors and the bad news closer to home, family dramas. involving addiction or mental health disorders uh can override our felt permission to relax. to dwell on the good in our lives, to experience gratitude, to take care of ourselves, to you know, uh enjoy.

So it can take a lot of spiritual effort to focus on the good.

And yet the Buddha's middle path emphasizes finding a healthy balance in life is crucial to the spiritual journey in life. And this is what we could call in today's clinical language switching from either or thinking to To both and thinking, or from dichotomous to dialectical, if you're more clinical. In other words, We tend to gravitate towards extremes, flipping from one opposite to another. As if there's only way one way to play the game of life and we have to choose.

So we don't get to balance uh gratitude with awareness of world events. We have to either adapt one extreme or the other. So for example, I'll give you a couple of examples. Um People can bounce back and forth between staying at a job they hate or suddenly quitting it. And staying at the job they ha they don't like obviously is unpleasant, but quitting brings up the fear of how will I find another job? How will I pay the rent? What am I going to do for food? So

Those are two extremes. Another set of extremes is um some people spend entire relationships demanding that their partners change. Other people just uh either resign themselves entirely that nothing will change or c or just immediately run away and quit a relationship at the sign of any difficulty. Some people rely on social media when they're lonely. Uh, and will be on it for hours, just on their phones addictively for four or five hours on Instagram and uh, I don't know, bumble or whatever.

Or and then they'll spend time going cold turkey where they won't use the you know, any social media at all, any dating apps, anything on the internet. So they jump from one extreme to another. Couples that are unhealthy, unhealthy couple dynamics, one person will uh the they'll ambush each other whenever they're unhappy with something. Some people will avoid

on uh unpleasant topics altogether. Neither of those work those two strategies uh have been shown to lead to disastrous outcomes in John Gottman's work. The Buddha himself in his life went from one extreme of indulging in comfort, he grew up in a very wealthy environment. to then jumping to the other extreme of deprivation in the forest, not eating, only practicing, not enjoying f uh any food or any company with others.

So the solution, of course, is to find a way to transcend these uh extremes, these either ors, and to go to both and where we accept uh that we can have what seems to be incompatible needs or truths and taking them both into account. So for example, I'll give you example the solutions to those hypotheticals I just ra raised. If somebody's bouncing for back and forth between changing, between quitting their job that they don't like or staying in it.

the the middle path is to either go Meet with their boss and and change w the role, set boundaries, or make a decision in their head that they're gonna start looking for new work and that they're gonna leave as soon as they find a job that's uh that brings them a greater sense of uh enjoyment, fulfillment and so forth. But they won't they're not gonna just stay in it.

and suffer, nor are they just gonna prematurely quit and not have another job. Another example, um uh Um couples that um ambush each other whenever they have uh any frustration or a thing they're disappointed about. in the relationship or other couples avoid any difficult conversations whatsoever. Gottman's research showed that couples who set aside a time each week where they would meet and make requests of each other.

rather than demands and would also express in that time gratitude for uh things the other about the uh their their partner uh met their needs. and were healthy relationships. The Buddha when he bounced between indulging in comfort and depriving himself of food, uh, found the solution in what he called the requisites. He said we should all eat. and have enough clothing and enough shelter, uh, that's just necessary for being healthy. Not more than what we need, but not less

than what we need that causes so much stress that we can't experience peace of mind. So it's about balance and transcending the extremes. So this brings us to a way forward.

Um avoiding political issues um or becoming, on the other hand, consumed by painful socio-political drama dramas to the extent that we experience uh in our the times when we're not that we have very little time to relax, enjoy ourselves, feel peaceful, feel a sense of well being. Neither of those are the way forward.

Well if we try to avoid the painful events of the world, we know from Dan Wagner's ironic process that whenever we suppress some an idea or an issue, the thoughts become actually more persistent. We can only suppress things temporarily, but over time the reminders in the world around us produce preoccupation with the suppressed content. So paradoxically, we wind up thinking more and more and more about the issues in the world that we've been trying to avoid.

Yet at the same time there are studies like ignorance by choice. that show that given the chance To learn about how our actions negatively affect the planet or other people's lives, over forty percent choose not to know, so that they can have an excuse to live selfishly. Bye. There was a companion set of studies, uh 2007, Ignorance is not bliss, that showed an enormous amount of emotional discomfort associated with being ignorant.

of social issues, including nagging thought, regret, and also a s a loss of self-worth associated when, you know, obviously you're around people that are conversant and are taking actions about terrible events in the world, if we're not doing anything, then we start to have us our sense of agency and self worth begins to suffer. Um they and once again the American Psychological Society warns

Against either extreme. It warns that if we follow news too much, we wind up with what's called headline stress disorder. And you won't you don't want to have headline stress disorder because it's like if we follow too much the climate change wars injustice, if we allow to consume too much attention. Then we're more likely to experience anhedonia, loss of joy, depression, and PTSD.

uh symptoms. But on the other hand, becoming fixated and troubled by events prevents us from meaningfully connecting with others.

diminishing our sense of agency and burnout. So what is that balance? Well I'll tell you what I've done in my life that's been helpful. Um I personally set aside time Each day. to in a very limited window Uh generally never more than about a half an hour to forty minutes.

in the morning, I'll check out the news and I won't check out news on a site that is meant to inflame, but just uh are sites that allow me to uh read about events in a way that doesn't uh that allows me to be informed but not activated, that doesn't encourage obsessive um fixation. So for me, I'll I literally go to sites like The Guardian and the BBC. because these are not if it bleeds it leads sites. They tend to be uh they tend to make their headlines far less uh

you know, threatening and but they create a familiarity with what's happening in the world. There's other sites, everybody will have their own Reuters, the AP Press, uh Some for some people it's their own favorite um newspapers or whatever. But carving out a certain amount of time and then making it a spiritual practice to then uh spend and that to s devote the rest of one's day to task positive activities.

Now for me, I also feel a very strong need to take some kind of positive action towards world events. And so I after I read, if there's something that evokes a sense of of moral outrage or concern, I'll very often take a very specific act towards it. Um there are very for me very uh causes that I deeply believe in. They all happen due to my bent to be very progressive. causes that I um when I have any money I'll donate to. When I have any time I'll do what they request on their website. Um

I've been a long time supporter of Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, uh and so forth. There's also Jewish Voices for Peace. So but that's for me, you know, your own uh emotional makeup might have your own uh specific uh causes that you can spend a little bit of time

uh maybe once a week taking a positive action. But then it's important after we've taken in the news and we've d made whatever positive action to make it part of our spiritual practice, what the Buddha called right effort, to then put down the concerns of the world. To not carry them with us or Cling to them as the Buddha said. He said that one of the four things we cling to are our views and opinions about the world, and that causes suffering.

So after reading, after devoting some attention, after taking an action, then I focus on whatever activities I have to do to where I show up for others in counseling, whether I do um I go to the gym, or whether I go out and find some food to eat, um, or whether I sit and poorly play the saxophone, or, you know, noodle on the piano. Um, I then will do those activities. I always try to do the more unpleasant or difficult.

issues first in my day, address them so that I can then make it a mental discipline, knowing that I've taken a beneficial act and then I'm going to let it go. So for example, um There was a time back uh before I became a f uh basically a full time Buddhist pastor, and I still had to get work as a graphic designer, art director. And looking for work was always very, very stressful for me. It was never pleasant.

So r but many people when they're out of work, they'll spend a lot of time either uh distracting themselves by focusing on uh things like dating apps or doom scrolling or social media or because they don't want to deal with the looking for work part. Or on the other hand, they might s try to make up for that and spend entire days just I'm gonna today I'm gonna look for a job. And neither of those extremes are beneficial.

What I did is I would wake up and after I had my coffee, I would take one action each day towards looking for a job. I respond to one uh notice I'd um I would uh um I would uh call up one head hunter or whatever. And then I'd let it go. I wouldn't think any more about it because I had taken the action, I'd already addressed the issue, and it was now my time to do whatever.

And I've I found that doing that one action a day and getting it done early allowed me to not stress out or become uh overly gloomy when I was looking for work. Likewise, another example, uh back in 2015, I signed a book contract with a large publisher to write a book.

And it was for a two hundred and sixty page book. And the moment I started, I realized, what the hell have I done? I've never written anything longer than eight pages in my entire life. How could I have sign this book contract to write a two hundred and sixty page book. So I knew if I just allowed the extreme part of my brain to take over and I was just gonna sit there and force myself to write, that nothing good would come of that. But if I allowed myself to dawdle

uh and just put it off until what seemed like a good idea came up, then I would just waste an enormous amount of time. So instead I decided each day I'm going to write two pages No matter how bad, I'm not gonna criticize it, I'm not gonna judge it, I'm just gonna write two pages and then I'm gonna let it go. And some days I would even write three.

Some days I wrote two really terrible pages. Most of the time I wrote two really terrible pages. But I never evaluated it. I just would write it and then let it go and then go out. Uh or sometimes I'd indulge and look at my favorite. uh website for a while and then I'd do the counseling work I had to do and then I'd do the fun things like going

To the gym or meditating or listening to music or uh playing the piano, whatever it was I would do. And So doing it this way, just getting over the obligation And getting it done with I wound up writing the whole damn book in one fourth of the amount of time that they alleviated.'Cause every day I took the action then let it go. So if we're looking for balance in our life. I find it very important to follow that uh tool that c clinical psychologists have shown, which is setting aside a time

to do something, limiting it to just that time, associating that time with reward if we need. So if it's like an unpleasant issue we have to address, then the m after you spend the time addressing it. reward yourself with something that you enjoy and then spend the rest of your day with the discipline of I'm not gonna think about that issue for the rest of the day at all. So if it's a health concern, deal with it first thing in the morning. Address it.

And then or if it's uh dealing with any other issue Deal with it. Give yourself a little reward like a snack that you like or go out and spend an hour walking around or whatever it takes. And then make it the discipline to not think about that issue again. So over time we're developing a kind of meditation in life itself.

Where we deal with issues and during the time we deal with it, we allow ourselves to think about those issues. But outside of that, every time our minds go back to the stressful, like uh the wars, uh the uh events going on in Gaza, all that. Every time we go to those places, after we take the action We but after that we bring our attention back to things that we can do. So we're neither on the one hand avoiding important issues nor are we dwelling. We're finding that balance.

There's a lot of um Studies that show that finding balance is also associated with actively switching viewpoints. We tend to be cognitively frugal. And we tend to only take one viewpoint because that minimizes mental effort. Studies show that.

uh not having views that are so inflexible, so rigid that we can't uh adapt and understand other people's points of view is a or an attribute associated with cognitive flexibility that allows us to get out of either or thinking and into what's called both and thinking. And in the Buddha's Dharma, we see the need to do both. On the one hand, acknowledging the bad things in life, seeing what's called dukkha is

foundational in the practice. It's called the first noble truth, acknowledging the the the suffering in life, acknowledging the uh where there's uh

disorders where there's trouble in our own life, acknowledging them, taking an action. But the Buddha taught that if we can never experience joy while there's suffering in the world, we'll never experience any peace. So Uh the this Seeing dukkha and addressing it with compassion or some kind of action is also balanced by what's called Sukha Vedana, which is practicing gratitude, appreciation. Uh connecting with friends, Kalyana Mita.

um reminding of times that we've act skillfully, sila nusati, reflecting on our generosity and the generosity of other people, Kaga Nusati. So what we're gonna do in our practice is these very tools. We're gonna acknowledge the difficulty and the suffering, but then we're also gonna practice balancing it with savoring the good.

So that's it. That's tonight's talk. I hope something in there was worth reflecting on in some way. If not, I'll try to do better next Tuesday. So find a really comfortable seated position.

You could simply dwell, listen to the sounds arising and passing around you without adding any images. to represent what's creating the sounds, just allowing the sounds to arise and pass without holding Thinking about, dwelling on And working with sounds is a good way to let go.

And bring your attention back, you're wiring the capacity into your brain to let go.

If you like to do denied practice Bring to mind some issue in the world. or in your family or in your life. or in your immediate environment. That is difficult, unpleasant. is hold it in mind And acknowledge