Welcome to Search Engine, and PJ Vogt. Each week we answer a question we have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. Does we get a question that probably sounds like a very small one, but which to me feels like a very big one? How do you sit quietly? That's after smats.
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Offer valid for a limited time, other fees and terms apply. I always get a little bit nervous like reading an introduction in front of a human being. It's very weird. It makes you read too fast. So just know that I'll read too fast. I have some issues with anxiety. I know everybody does, but I suspect mine are unusually bad. Play live started to wonder if curiosity, which is my job and anxiety, which I consider my enemy, might not just be the same thing.
Or if not the same thing, siblings, one that overachiever, the other slightly destructive fuck up. The reason I think that they might be siblings is because one not bad definition of anxiety would be a condition that floods your brain with questions. What do other people think of me? Is everything okay? Am I safe? Or maybe a question a lot of people have today. What's going to happen next week?
The difference between those questions and the questions curiosity asks is that those questions are frankly terrible questions. I say this as someone who loves questions, who spends my life inside of questions. I believe I have some standing here. I believe a good question takes you outside of yourself. It makes the world feel big and bewildering. Anxiety's questions narrow the world to a straw's aperture.
Everything we are here to see, we become unable to see. And instead, we are stuck somewhere else. Last year, I was interviewing someone. I actually cut this part of the interview out when we aired it. But I was interviewing someone who brought up their meditation practice. He said, every day, he sits quietly for a short amount of time. And I told him that for me, meditation felt like the final boss in a video game.
Like the hardest last thing I was going to have to, at some point my life got hard enough confront. And he was really confused by this answer. Sitting quietly in a room for 15 minutes, instead of seeing it as a helpful exercise, that was the scariest thing in the world to me. His reaction really stuck with me. I kept thinking about it. The day that I'm writing the words that I'm saying is October 29th, 2024. We are somehow exactly one week away from an election.
The national mood right now feels like everyone is visiting the place I usually live. Anxiety. If you consume any media, the most asked question you'll find is an unanswerable. It might be an unhelpful one. What is going to happen next? So I thought maybe this is a week to finally talk to someone about meditation. I wanted to ask someone, how do you learn to set? And I also wanted to ask what happens to you over the years if you keep saying.
Do you mind to say your name and who you are and what you do? Yeah. I'm Revangel, Kyoto Williams. Most people call me Rev, Revangel. I think what I do is I sit quietly. Revangel, Kyoto Williams. She's an ordained Zen priest and teacher. Also author of the book, Radical Dharma, Founder of Transformative Change, CEO of Mindful. I've talked to a lot of people overqualified to answer their questions. I brought them, but even for me.
I help people understand a way of sitting quietly that is consistent with the life that they have. And not some other idea that makes them go crazy and makes them feel like they want to run away. Or that is the final boss. What do you mean when you say consistent with life that they have? Consistent with the life they have means I have this take on things that which is most of the instruction that we have written. That we have received about meditation in the big mainstream world.
Comes from largely monastic traditions. Whether those are Eastern traditions Buddhist, which is a lot of what we think of mindfulness. Meditation is hailed from Buddhism and Buddhist traditions, but also Western mystic traditions and so on. So they are largely the instructions that have been given to and received by monastics. People that have unhooked from life. They have reduced the number of hooks in order to have a life that has less friction.
And that's most of what we have received the instructions of people that have chosen fewer hooks, fewer decisions in life. They home leave, they go away, they cloister, they enter into a space in which they have fewer decisions, fewer things to contend with. They don't have children, they don't have partners, they don't have marriages.
Many of the decisions that the thousands of decisions that are that we most of us make each day are actually made for them by way of the structure and the container that they're in. And then there's this other direction, which is what I'm in the habit of working with, which is how do we stay in life with all the hooks and smooth out the scrunchy, squirrely, you know, jaggedy side so that there's less of us to be hooked into.
So the life hooks remain, but we smooth ourselves out in such a way that our journey is less frictionful, less busy, less harsh on us.
So just to make sure I understand it's like there's sort of two paths that people might take and one is you're kind of retreating a little bit like you're making life that's simpler and maybe more removed and so it's easier to find this piece because like for instance, I live in a city in New York that's like it's a traffic jam and it's an assault on the census and I work quite a bit and like the world sometimes I perceive is just as a volley of elbows.
And the people who be like well just move upstate and find a quiet room to sit in and what you're talking about is a kind of practice that allows you to still. And have it the world but more peacefully. Yeah, there's saying get less elbows right like go go someplace where there are fewer elbows yeah and I'm saying that that's most of what we've received in terms of the instructions.
And that doesn't align with the lives that many of us live even if we move upstate we find elbows right my idea that upstate is a place where life is perfect is better than that I haven't spent. And so I'm saying that where I'm coming from is how do we live with the elbows yeah and we find a way in which we're able to navigate life and navigate the elbows and actually appreciate them and appreciate the ways that we can do it.
And appreciate the ways that the elbows communicate something to us about ourselves give us information make us more curious. So I guess what I'm curious about I'm curious both how you got to that understanding of like living with elbows but also even how like to even go back earlier like what was your.
And I'm kind of very long time thinking about these things and and sort of in a habit in different spiritual and meditation practices I'm like using terminology that's unfamiliar to me which is why I'm stumbling but who were you before all of this like at some point I imagine you were a person like anybody else moving through the world the way for instance like I am right now and something happened to make you curious like can you draw me a picture of you before you were rev and then what happened.
Yeah I was I was like you I was I hope I'm still a person like anyone else and I was a New Yorker and I'm always a New Yorker by the way all of us did a New Yorker's we know that that's true so I'm ever a New Yorker I was a young New Yorker though and living in a post at coach era and New York was kind of emerging from its you know dirty grimy vibe.
But I grew up in that I grew up with the burnt out Bronx the you know the harsh be afraid we used to call them murder Avenue and Brooklyn murder Avenue. You know I grew up with the New York of legend stuff the the place that is angry and harsh and and rough and you had to look over your shoulders watch your back all of the time and you kind of you know shuffling in with like millions and pod millions of people.
And it it had a lot of elbows and my life had a lot of elbows I had a lot of elbows growing up was a latch key kid. A group of single parents swapped between them my earliest recollection was living with my dad who was a fireman and fireman for many of you that don't know work either nine to six you know like nine to five or 96 or they work from six to nine which is six at night and to nine in the morning and so.
Baby sitters you know handed off to other people toggling between you know going to this person's house and that person's house and being taken care of in that way and and learning quite early to take care of myself to make my way home to take care of myself before my dad could get home which would be you know maybe six 30 maybe seven and doing that and understanding that is that is just what my life was and having to navigate all of the things that come with me.
All of the things that come with that you know the scary kids in school that were not very kind to you you know that you had to like just pay attention to and keep your your senses and your wits about you. I got different kind of curiosity about that. I got a curious but what do they have to what's going on over there what's in that shadow what's happening.
I did a lot of raising myself in that way in between the people that were you know taking care of me and little blocks of time I was raising myself in that in that same space that's that's who I was and you're describing the thing that like I feel like all like happens to everybody to some degree but happens to some people more in a different times where it's like life is teaching you.
And alarm system and like the alarm system might be the right arm system for time to get you through place and then maybe you through the place you saw the alarm system like you're just anticipating and predicting and like yeah. Well that's a very particular part of my journey actually and I it's interesting of the many podcasts and things that I've done I've not said a lot about this and I think I'm just in this turn you know this kind of place in my life now that maybe it's time to come.
Have this piece come through one of the alarm systems I was abused and quite significantly when I was young i'm so sorry yeah i'm sorry for anyone that has to go through it and those kinds of experiences in your life are a real.
So junctures of what's going to happen with that what's going to be the path that unfolds as a result of that one of the things that happened is that I by series of events I ended up back close to the person that you know it was discovered and they was separated from me and so on and so forth and then I ended up about 15 years old back in the place close to that person's family the place that I associated them with.
And talk about alarm system i was on you know I considered myself a pretty precocious child i was you know very very intellectually culturally precocious and I was back in Queens which felt like you know back in the back in the woods and I was like okay that's where i'm going i'm going high school and in Chelsea you know in the midst of all the things you know growing up in.
Greenwich village and you know sort of party vibe and everything is happening it's kind of the center of all the things and and I was living i went to live back with my granddad and he lived in Queens and I was on the bus two fairs on for those. I like train and and a bus and I was on the bus and suddenly I would feel this like prickling in the back of my neck and I found myself looking around for this person and.
Talk about anxiety you know I didn't know that that's what it was I spent some I don't know how long it was you know time is weird and elastic i spent too long for me a period of time. Feeling like I was truly looking over my shoulder at every turn and feeling this alarm system that was going off of like I might run into this person.
What will happen if I see her where what goes on here what do I do how do I manage this and you know all of this you can feel that like just the energy as I speak about it was like that kind of energy and. I just decided like no I decided no i'm not doing this so okay so you're at a point where you're a perkotia like your teenager you have this problem just that you have dramatic experience and you're having the thing that people so often have which is like your.
Brain is trying to keep you safe but the way is trying to keep you safe is that it is imagining terrible things happening all the time and you decide this isn't how I want to be. What what do you do yeah I decide something more like you know in New York speak now.
You know because by this time i'm as I said i'm precocious right so i'm 15 and i'm in high school and I was in 10th grade by then so I had already moved forward some more and so it was a little younger than people are typically at that time.
And my crew you know who I run with is even older than that so typically I grew up in a in a world of people that were maybe you know four to five years older than me that was just how I moved to the world and so that's also informed by that you know it was like not.
It's not happening whatever this is going on this is not happening so my response to it is i've just got to go and face it and so i went and went to her parents house and said you know where does she live in turns i should have literally blocks where i was.
And got the address and you know pulled myself together and did some of the self talk of like yeah you know like i'm not five anymore you know i'm this person i have a wife i have friends i have people that you know care about me and you can't hurt me this person can't hurt me and so i talked myself into that and and i went and i rang the doorbell.
You rang the doorbell of her home i rang the doorbell of her home and i sought her out and she wasn't there that particular day but the point here was that i got to have a conversation with the person that created the conditions for the most terror and horror in my life and ask them why what was this about. Nobody of it's so rare for people to get to ask that question did. What was her answer entirely unsatisfactory and probably untrue.
But what she could offer at the time which this piece is true she was suffering and that became clear to me that the piece of the suffering that she shared with me wasn't the entirety of it and it was a very slim slice of it because I came to know her for a little while over a couple of next few years. But it was clear that it was suffering and that she didn't know what else to do with her own suffering and her own suffering her own not knowing what to do with the box that she found herself in.
Of also kind of abuse within her family with a confusion and you know trying to be in a relationship that was probably too soon for a person at her age and at that time that was the story that I told myself that's the story that I came away that this was a person that didn't know what to do with the suffering that they had so all that they could do is to extend suffering to someone else that that was the way that they found control that's how she found control.
Was to try to control someone else and that's what she did try to control me through these various forms of abuse. The way you just describe it is that how you understood it at the time. I think bits and pieces yeah I think it unfolded I think that the abuse is as much as people speak about the horrors of abuse I think they it also gave me a window. And an awareness and a tenderness about the the frailty like how I wouldn't have used that word then but you know how.
Exposed we are and how easy it is for people to assault us I had a sensitivity as a result of that abuse that gave me an inside and a care for what it means to be so tender. And so the very abuse that she visited upon me gave me access to a tenderness about the abuse that was visited upon her. Wow. Did you feel safe after that? I did much safer. Yeah you know safe is relative I'm for those of you black and so black in America is safe is it.
That's negotiated term but I felt safer and I felt like I had claimed my life and I think that that opened a path for me to make that my business to claim my life that every place in every turn where it felt like something else sought to determine frame feedback what my life could be. I decided that nope it's mine I get to decide and I would.
You know people are weird when kids get abused they don't they didn't ask questions they didn't want to know they wanted to disappear and make it like it never happened. So no one had ever asked me about it or said you know what happened or how that happened or so all of the meaning making of it got pushed away I didn't get to make any meaning I think that's why I was able to ask the question and want to ask because I needed to make some sense of it.
That's what we do we want to make sense of this life with all of his hooks and barbs and figure out why me you know what did this whatever is going on why did this have to land here with me. What was it about me you know that made me worthy of abuse. And that question felt gone after you spoke to her because it sounds like what you saw is just this person was suffering and you were just. There yeah I was I was in the space it wasn't about me.
And I carry that to this day that you know most of the things that people are up to better causing and creating harm is not about you it lands on you landed on me landed on this body and it has all of its impacts but I now have a sense of oh I get to decide that I'm not going to land my suffering and extend that and have it land on someone else. And so where did you take that lesson like where did you go next so that lesson.
Took me to so many ways of having more curiosity about the way in which the experiences that we have can be metabolized right like I'm a I got to metabolize a. And that tremendously difficult painful life altering terror in my life and that metabolizing that's the word that I would use now.
And it led me to being able to take things not as a personal offense to me but part of life that could either be metabolized or it could be something that I end up you know making me like terribly ill and you know and just hugging the toilet bowl of life trying to vomit everything out again and then rinse wash repeat we just do it again and again and again it doesn't go away that's what I got it doesn't go away until you metabolize it.
How do you in the project of metabolizing these things I think what's often hard I'm going to say for people but really it's for me like is that you can't always knock on the door like how do you metabolize yeah if it sounds like part of the work is that when you suffer to not see your suffering as personal but to see it as part of a chain of suffering and unscaledness and confusion. What if you don't have that opportunity.
To meet with the person like how do you how do you metabolize those experiences yeah you mostly don't get the action of this the truth is you mostly don't get that opportunity. I slipped it in and it's probably the most important thing the answer was entirely unsatisfactory and likely untrue right that was the best gift of the whole experience had she said something that just made sense and it just like all lined up.
I probably just would have gone on with my life expecting things to line up and make sense because it was unsatisfactory and because it was likely as became clear very quickly and likely and true other than the suffering piece it was like all that was left was the suffering the only thing that was solid and had meat was the suffering.
And so what that gave me was the kind of access to the sense of like oh yeah I'm not going to get an answer here this is not going to get an answer eventually we learn to in order to metabolize things that we are not given like a data said you know we can add it up and put it in the spreadsheet and it also compute nice and neatly is that we sit with it.
And then we sit with it we metabolize it in a way that comes with every single one of us as human beings there's all sorts of things that can come about and disrupt our natural operating system of being able to metabolize life we are all given that that is what we come with.
And I don't believe that whatever it is that is necessary for that is hidden into the deep ocean or in a cave and some mountains it doesn't belong to some particular culture some people or some time every single one of us have a navigation system for life itself.
That is an endemic to who we are it is our fundamental nature it is our birthright and then we have shitty things that happen in life that can disrupt it and throw that operating system offline but we can go back and try our best to get it back again. After a short break, Rav before she was Rav decides to pursue sitting quietly more seriously after an interruption will return.
Welcome back to the show back in the early 90s when Rev first wanted to deepen her meditation practice she started going to retreats you might not be familiar with these until a few years ago I wasn't.
I've never gone but people close to me have what I understand is that at a retreat people interested in meditating come together to meditate a retreat might last five days a week or longer if you go you agree to follow this set of rules you'll agree to wake up at the break up dawn often these retreats are entirely silent meaning for the whole time you will not talk at a retreat you are meditating many times a day
Rev would say you are sitting meditation many times a day in these sessions you keep meditating until you hear bell ring there might be a walking meditation as well or what's called a work meditation where you're helping the center with chores. The people I know have gone describe this experience of mostly being alone in silence in your own mind for a week as exactly as excruciating as I imagine it.
But they also describe it as beautiful and most of them go back I don't understand any of this at all and part of the reason why I was talking to Rev and ordained send priest was because I was hoping to understand it more she told me what it's like to go learn to sit in retreat. It's like a pendulum swing between like the most profound stillness you can enjoy the feeling of your body or the movement of a butterfly and utter excruciating why is that person coughing.
Was somebody please rain the fucking bell. It's all the things in between and that's the best thing about it is you realize that in this you know spaces that are set just so and everything is right and it's all prepared you still managed to drive yourself nuts and to hate people and to love people you do the whole gamut in there in a little tiny.
Tiny tiny tiny constructed container and yet you manage to play out all of the shenanigans do all the things you hate people you love them you want to have sex with them you wanted to get as far away as possible you know the smallest things hurt your feelings you get upset you get cold and distant you do all the things and you realize well wait a minute if all of this is here. Even though I'm in a different space maybe I have something to do with creating.
Maybe I have something to do with creating all of this and it's not everybody else's fault I might have to take responsibility for my life. I see so it's like the thing that it offers or one of the things that offers is that if it's like you find out that even if everything were taken away like the things we think the world is doing to us when you take away the world you see that we do them to ourselves and so then it gives you. A place to start to.
Find a way to not do that yeah well first it humbles you bring me see you know and it's a space of reconciliation you reconcile the distance between the truth and untruth of your life can you tell me a story about for you what it was like early on when you are sort of. Less skilled like what it was like to do a treat like that like what you walked in with it and what it felt like to grapple with it. It was this cycle of. I was trying to find a way out.
I was trying to do game the system whatever your stick is you're going to see it and it's going to be like clearing and so if seducing is your stick that's you're going to try to seduce everyone and everything.
I was gaming I was a good talker and so internally and externally I was gaming the system in every way that I could possibly find I would you know sneak like extra bits of sleep or I would try not to be asked to do the things that I didn't want to do I would sort of get into myself into a little corner somewhere and try to disappear.
I said no one would notice me to ask me to do the task that I didn't want to do you know you try to sit and look like you're sitting while you're really like you know doing your taxes.
I'm just like yep I look really still note they can't see that I'm so so still okay if I just move this little way then I look even more still and I look like a very concentrated and I really I mean I want to say that that's not the very earliest because the earliest early as early as you're just holding on by the seat of your pants it's like why why did I do this yeah I shouldn't be I could just get up and walk out.
Yeah but everybody will see you but I can still just I'm grown I can just get up and walk out.
You do that for at least four days you know what will happen you play out fantasy well what would happen if I just got up and you know I and then you get to your clothes and you like okay nobody's stopping you you could pack your clothes and you have to make a decision yeah and you make a decision and you make a decision and that's all it's made up of is making decision to come back and so at that point like you're walking up of mountain in a way like you're going to these retreats and you're
finding that the practice is worthwhile for you what did it mean then to decide to become a Zen priest I don't know how that like I know nothing like how it what is what was that it's like I feel like it's when you you know you watch the movie you're like oh I could be a wizard you know I could be a
mugwort or whatever they call that yeah I could be a wizard that's it that you're like oh it's going to be hard and there's going to be the snake people and the like rough people that are doing terrible things to me and playing jokes on me and stuff like that or I could go back and just be a human.
I'm going to do I'm going to do it you know and I might fall off my broom and you know and I've been being dragged and I I rather be a wizard you know I rather know what a little bit more about what's going on in this life and not feel so confused and put
upon. So Raab chose the more interesting path she studied the precepts she trained eventually she was ordained as a Zen priest she's the second black woman recognizes a teacher in her lineage that was three sentences but they describe many years.
So I did all of that and I went through the ranks so to speak I hold the most senior title in the Zen tradition is a very small handful of black women that actually hold that role as a sections and teachers and I'm one of them and then I got a Vino like cool honorific it's
called Roche means old teacher not that old but you can't see me but I got you know so I hold that and right around the time that I was heading towards that and they were you know I was getting the titles and all the ranks and I was like I don't know about
this you know I'm back to wrote an essay called I mean I get there with you and it was saying that yep I did this thing was like climbing the mountain you know doing all the ranks and all the things and I was like I don't know if this is really what most people are
going to be I know most people are not going to be able to do this what I just did they're not going to commit the time the energy the you know whatever and it's not because they're bad or because they're less or they're less deserving of liberation and freedom in their life it's not because of that it's because we haven't structured in a way and we are I'm an activist social just to see to do to do to do all of that and I was like we're Jack in the planet up and creating destruction at a
place at which this will never solve and so this journey this 20 year thing that I've done now 30 now 30 plus years this is we are not going to be able to deal with the crises of the world and the planet if we don't have more people mature
or right become more mature human beings more kind human beings at a more accelerated rate and we need something that will operate forgive me for saying this at scale and lighten the scale we need to be able to I don't know if that we I don't think we need a thousand more bootings I think we need
millions more people that are I like to say aware more aligned and more alive and when we do that it is not that all of our problems will disappear we will learn to conflict well with each other we will learn to conflict honestly and with integrity
and with a willingness to meet life as it is and not to abdicate to fantasies and the fictions that we're creating and getting ourselves into to be clear rev still holds the title of Zen priest it's just that she's decided in her words to leave the track to help people find liberation where they are presumably this mission includes slightly unusual choice to talk to do feet pod castors such as myself average for break where does someone go to sit quietly welcome back
so my life has begun to fill up with meditators I mean not fill up but they've been sneaking in and you know they still seem to experience the world roughly the way I do they don't seem like different you know in like they're not so different but it does feel like they have access to a practice that I know it's like if you never jogged and everyone's jogging and they seem a little bit happier and they seem like a little bit like fitter
and like they're breathing a little bit easier and I honestly don't understand the relationship between I understand that the very few times I've tried to sit down in a room quietly it has been surprisingly excruciating but I don't understand the relationship between closing your eyes for 15 minutes or 20 minutes and contending with that feeling of wrongness or resendering yourself like I it's not that I'm skeptical of it I'm
really curious about it and I'm slightly in awe of it but I don't understand it and maybe it's something that you have to experience to understand but I'm just curious about it I know that's more of like a question mark that I'm a question.
Yeah I do think there's something of experiencing it so there's a state and there's trait right so there's the state of meditation there's people that you know practice meditation they have a kind of meditation practice and letting you that system that operating system go offline for a while and not just keep churning and churning and churning and churning and churning and churning and churning and giving it a giving it a break and letting it reset so that you are you
become a little bit more aligned and entuned with your own pace rhythm speed and the frenetic pace rhythm speed or sometimes the too slow pace rhythm and speed of life you recognize them as not being yours and so you can stick closer to your own pace rhythm and speed and when we are more attuned to our own pace rhythm and speed then we feel happier when we are more aligned within ourselves within whatever confluences of this thing that we call this fellow once said the thing I shamelessly
refer to as me when we're more entuned with it we feel more aligned with it with even with those which weird how weird we are and odd we are out of you know sink we seem with everything else we feel more happy that's our navigating system our navigating system says that you are here to be you you're not you're not here to be anybody else you're not here to be me you're not here to match up and sink with my
rhythm in the way that I am you're here to be you and that's telling yeah that even when we don't seem to fit in whatever else is happening that we are more and this word is a funny little word for me but I'll just use it happy right we're more content when we are more true to ourselves that is just
real and the other thing is we are more content when we're just doing what we're doing what do you mean when we're not running other programs while we're doing what we're actually doing so in other words if we're not talking about what we're doing questioning what we're doing wondering
about what we're doing as we're doing it when we're just doing what we're doing we experience ourselves as more content so it's like what you're saying is one of the things that people might develop from my practice
like this is like the voice gets quieter or it goes away sometimes yeah for sure I would say that the what the voice does is the voice sinks up and it's got something to do which is the thing it's doing instead of watching the thing that it's doing it's like we're separated from ourselves literally right because there's us doing we're doing and they're thus watching us and having commentary and having judgment about what we're doing and anxiety about what we're doing and then we're like wait a
minute but I don't think you should be doing that it's like when you're watching you move for you like well you don't don't don't go there I know what's over there I'm not sure what's over there but I have a sense
because I've watched this movie before I've watched movies just that are like this and so that I'm anticipating what might happen if that person and you're getting all of the you know anxious feelings and the heart racing and the blood rushing of what happens and when you're watching someone
else and you're closely connected with the watching but that's your life that you're doing you can turn it off if it's Netflix or a movie or something else but when it's your life you live with that and you're just running on that fight or flight you're running in the sympathetic nervous system
all the time because you don't get to turn the movie off and it's it's sometimes time to just join in and just be just be the character and for you for most of the time you don't have like the voice in your head is in sink in that way it is very much in sink out in fact the voice in my head
just now was your voice what do you mean so as you were speaking the only voices in my head is your voice with your voice because that's what's happening so I'm in the habit and the practice of being with what is and not
running commentary alongside which for some people maddened them because it means I respond to things as a result because I did that process I'm with life I'm with what is happening not watching life and being a spectator I am in my life I think being alive rather than being a spectator of my life
that's sitting there on the sideline you know annoyingly having all kinds of judgements and interventions and you know postulating about and perseverating about what's going on and what could happen and what might happen and what happened why didn't I do this or that you know you can feel the energy
of it is just it's maddening and when you throw that offline you just get this so when you said what do you hear when you sit quietly so when I said earlier that the instructions that I think most of us get is you know we think and even sit quietly right so that that conjures up all sorts of weird stuff for us and then we sit there where actively trying to be quiet and so then we're in a little bit of a battle so here's the way that I come to it we're super stealthy right like the ego structure
or that extra voice the side show is super stealthy is faster smarter than us and so my approach is you have to kind of get out of the way of even getting out of the way and the way to do that is to have one single instruction and the one single instruction is that you just return you just come back to yourself just come back everything else is a side show everything else that you're doing is a side show or a rationale for the side show or it's a judgment of the side show
or if it's a judgment of why you should have the side show or maybe the side show is worthy this particular time and it's all a side show all of it is a side show there's just your life can we just pause and say you've just got a life and that's it that's it and when I'm fully in my life that's kind of enough for me it's just my life it takes up all my time takes up all my energy takes up all my attention if I'm fully online with my life that's all I need is my life
I don't need the side show I don't need the conversations I don't need the judgment I don't need the perseverating I don't need the postulating I don't need going into the past projecting myself into the future wondering about that I can just take up the full as a space of my existence with facing my life and meeting my life just what's right here so rather than sit quietly I just invite people to come back to themselves because that's what we're trying to do
it's kind of a shortcut instead of doing all these other things that are about coming back to your life just come back you don't have to sit quietly the way that I say it is you're getting quiet enough to hear yourself whatever is happening you can hear it
and you're getting still enough to be able to feel yourself because if you've got a lot of things happening and moving around so that you can't even feel the condition of yourself then you're not even in the game at all right so enough means just enough for you and if you can feel yourself and hear yourself when you're running that's awesome you don't have to sit in a room if you're on a bike and you just go it's just like wow I can feel my senses I feel my heart I feel the quality of my skin
I feel the temperature I feel the air moving through my hair and and I'm in this body that's still enough that's quiet enough and that's the point when Rev uses that word point she's referring to something specific I might use the wrong words here so you ought to forgive me
but my understanding is that she means a particular place where you learn to rest your attention and awareness a place you will drift away from but what you'll learn to return to I'm describing a place I'm trying to learn to get to but the instructions for getting there as I've heard them
go like this find a place that's quiet enough get your body into a position that's comfortable enough find the specific place Rev specifies your lower belly that's the place where your attention is supposed to rest as you breathe naturally and as you find your attention awareness moving away
and it will to a to-do list to questions about what's going to happen next week or what happened in the past you'll just gently return to point that's the whole thing but I'm at the very beginning of trying to understand it so it feels very strange to try to explain it
at the most basic instruction is just return meditation is not for me about sitting quietly or becoming quiet it's about the choice then when you find yourself anywhere other than where you intend to be you come back that's what I did when I was a kid
I was like I don't want to be there I want to come back I am out here someplace else tripping on some other possibility that hasn't happened I don't know if it's going to happen I'm just going to come back right here I'm curious how many people come to you like me
like whether election week for people who have a meditation practice is sort of like January at the gym like just like a lot of nervous people who like help yes yes absolutely I don't personally entertain it anymore like it's not how I face the world but I always get my most podcast and everything
election and red run in January when everything jumps off it's like prayer you know it's like you lose your keys and suddenly you get religious I need to pray I need to do something but that makes sense you know it's when the bottom falls out we feel the bottom
is falling out or we fear the bottom is going to fall out beneath us that we want to find some ground so it's it's right it's the right thing to do whatever brings you there whatever throws you over the edge that's the thing that should get you there the thing I've been most like astounded by
and the people in my life who have been drawn to this hasn't it's funny like I feel like this not the sales pitch but the sales pitch a little bit is feels like maybe it would be easier to live in your own mind which for me is very attractive but then what I've seen some people
growing into has been instead meditation that's about compassion that's like about not just being in your own mind is easily but extending compassion to people who might be difficult or just far away from you and I was wondering if you could talk about compassion practices
yeah I would love to say that compassion naturally arises out of every type of meditation I don't think that's actually true I think there's ways that people can meditate and use very focus meditation right where there's it's about focus and concentrating attention that if there's no moral container
there's no moral container and it doesn't necessarily cause compassion to arise so yay for your friends and the people that are like this this comes along with it as well because they they clearly have enough of a moral container either that they brought to it
themselves or that's coming along with with it as they teach that that is the ideal if we want to be useful for humanity meditation that doesn't cause and insight compassion to arise who's not going to be of much use to us on the planet frankly meditation is not in and of itself
it's just going to be good it makes us better at something but not necessarily things that are prosocial all the time we pitch it as prosocial but we should be clear about that you could be like an executioner who was living in the moment and you would still be an executioner
totally but what about I mean like I guess one of the things that I was I want to say drag too but I attended as like as as I was going with my editor truthy to this event that was a bunch of meditation people and they were speaking and it sounded interesting and it was nice to be
among people who were not my people who were like trying to ask and answer some of the questions I care about and the moment that stopped me short was somebody I think was an audience member asked one of the people on stage they said well
you know I'm somebody who's trying to practice compassion meditation and how do you when you sit and you try to extend compassion to to you know difficult people what do you do about Donald Trump and I had a moment it was funny sitting in the audience the first feeling I had was like a grown
which was interesting where I was just like how can we have to talk about this right now or maybe it felt very like and where everybody's of the same tribe and everybody agrees that the same person is bad and there's something but then really sitting with the question for a moment I thought like
it's a great question it's a really hard question like how do you feel compassion towards people who have become an avatar of people just like inflict suffering on a really wide scale and I think like I live where I live and I in the tribe where I am and so like it's like not hard for
a person to predict like most of people in my life what they want to happen in a week but everybody in the country right now has kind of been everybody feels like the world's about to end maybe you feel like the world's about to end because on Trump's about to be
elected or maybe you feel like the world's about to end because Karma Harris has been elected and it feels like a moment of I think most people feel alienated and most people feel like who are these people even if they don't agree who are and I'm curious whether your meditation practices when you think about having compassion for people where you really disagree with them or you really feel like they are moving through the world without compassion and just like kind of like human bulldozers
but those feel like the people that you're supposed to aim at and again this is more of like a series of statements that are shaped like a question mark then a question let me put it as a question okay you I assume have a smartphone I do and you open your smartphone and like one of the apps pushes you a notification that's just like here's the last thing Donald Trump said and it's horrible and and you know a part of your brain comes online
what do you do at that part of your brain? what is the way you talk to yourself or what is the way you think about that? I'm from New York so I say oh oh and then I put it down yeah it's like return yeah it's like that put it down I wonder what I do I actually it I have a lot of compassion toward toward him or for him I don't this mean I have to keep him closer you know make him my bed fellow or
want him to win the presidency but I feel a great amount of suffering from that human being and mostly because I believe I don't believe much but I do believe that human beings are designed to be human and so when they're acting outside of humanity and ways that are in conflict with humanity
then there's something wrong and I feel badly for that I feel badly for anyone that's been fashioned or shaped in such a way that the demands of their nervous system express themselves as operating against humanity I feel for that I
and if I didn't feel for that I kind of should just jump off of this whole ship and get out of here because that means that I've lost a hope and aspiration for us to do better when I take it as you know somehow a person is like that and they're just a shit because they're like that
and I can write them off then I've lost aspiration for all of us honestly or I've decided that I'm going to partition and cut everybody up into the like the ones that deserve to be here and the ones that don't because they align with my values, beliefs, orientations, wishes, once and I'm queer and I'm black and I'm like so many like of like points on the little like marginal spectrum I would just suffer immensely if I spent all my I spent my time not even all some of my time
suffering because of what other people are doing in ways that are contrary to the way that I want to live my life I take it that they're doing their thing and I put my time in my effort and my energy and to try to slow down the wheels that are grinding
some of my freedoms to a halt the best that I can and then try to advance and accelerate the ones that open up portals to evolutionary leaps to something else like marriage equality that just leaps us forward and despite our best intention many people's best intention to keep it from going that way
then I just play that but you know what none of that is my life that's not my life that's the structures in the contours that we're living within and operating within but I think the trait of I don't want to say meditation I would say liberation the trait of liberation is to not mistake
the mechanics and operation stuff for who I am I don't mistake all of the things that are happening I have to contend with them but they're not who I am I get to keep being me I get to keep choosing who I am how I show up and when I find myself veering off the track of how I'd like to show up
in relationship to life then I return get back on track what do you think people come into meditation typically wanting and do you think that they get the thing that they come in wanting yeah I think they come in wanting a scape scape quiet right which is escape and if they mature they don't get it
and if they don't mature they do so you don't mature you do get the escape and when you mature you don't get the escape and when you mature more you don't want it it's what you're describing that you're able it's like you're able to sit more fully and completely
I guess people talk about wanting to be in the present more everybody says it it's like this I always joke with my partner and I was like you need to be in the moment but like what it really means to be in the present is to it's not turn away from what hurts as well
it's not turning away it's like welcome it welcome it as an understanding of it's the flip side it's just another facet of the joy and everything that we want to welcome you know that's like oh yeah that comes to that too that's my favorite thing to say I'm like oh that too
yeah and then you take a breath and you make more space in your body, your heart, and your physicality we don't get a single direction door where we can let all the good stuff in and you know keep out and ward off the bad stuff you know it comes in how should I start?
well you started already you used to return you know that curiosity that you have the that yearning to find yourself is all you need respond to it it's like oh we are my one of my okay right here that's the whole thing that's it there are courses if you were 14 week courses there's the other
but you know I don't know call me lazy call me expedient and interested in scale that really is it what we're building on is the motivation to heat it you have it it's there we all come with it that you ask the question it means you're already there what we build is the motivation and the practice
to heat it and to heat it so much that it becomes second nature and then to heat that so much that becomes backward belongs which is first nature it's so intimidating but I really I'll try it I hope so I hope it's little less intimidating you know it's intimidating because we are intimidating
meeting ourselves is intimidating that's the thing that's we find out it's like turns out none of that other stuff and we spend a lot of time fabricating things to be intimidated by but it turns out that the most challenging thing is to turn around and just meet ourselves where we are yeah yeah
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams you can find her online at Revangel.com if you visit you'll find audio recordings of instructions for point meditation also on November 16th she's holding a half day sitting meditation zoom you can join her home
if you want more information you can also find it on her website Rev thank you thank you that's our show this week if you are getting any value please consider signing up for incognito mode you get ad free episodes of the show as well as occasional bonus episode mainly you vote for our existence
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