Dean Sluyter on Fearing Less

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dean Slider, an award winning author who

has taught meditation and awakenings since nineteen seventy. Dean leads workshops, talks, and retreats throughout the US and beyond, and has been featured in The New York Times, USA, Today in Style, New York Magazine, OH, The Oprah Magazine, and many others. He is also on the faculty of the West Coast Writers Conferences. On this episode, Eric and Dean discussed his book fear Less, Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, Anger and Addiction. Hi Dean, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, it's great

to be here. It's a pleasure to have you on. Your book is called fear Less, Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, Anger and Addiction. And we will go in to all that here in a moment, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's a very powerful story. I can see why you've used this as the central metaphor for for your program. Here, Uh, so many levels

to it. I want to go straight to a neurological level. Okay, we could approximately, we can identify the aggressive wolf with the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. And that's the branch of the nervous system, which, when it's activated, stimulates the fight or flight response that that you know, whatever is stimulus is out there. We feel, okay, I have to deal with this in a fearful way, get the heck out of here, flight, or I have to

deal with it in an aggressive way. Fight. Now we need that response. You know, we've got caveman cave woman nervous system still. But unfortunately, in modern life, every time the garbage truck goes by and you hear that roar, our cave person nervous system interprets that as, oh, there's the saber tooth tiger. So our sympathetic nervous system, our

fight or flight response tends to kick in inappropriately. So the way we balance that the good wealth, so to speak, is the parasympathetic system, and that's the branch of the nervous system that does just the opposite, gets us cooled doubt, gets us settled into the boundless, okay, nous of this moment as it is the the fact that from a bigger perspective, that we don't have to panic, we don't have to run, we don't have to take arms against what's going on. We can be in harmony with it.

And that parasympathetic system, that good wolf is the one that we feed through meditative methods. Physiologically, the meditative methods activate the parasympathetic system and tend to switch off the sympathetic system. It's a great way for us to go into this. You know, very early in your book you you describe that the book is essentially going to focus

on two things. One is practice, so some of the meditation practices that we can do, and then view, which is sort of a way of looking at the world. We're going to spend a fair amount of time on practice, I think, but I thought let's start with view. Let's talk about from your perspective, what is right view and how does it relate to specifically having less fear in our lives? Right right view? And we want to be clear here by view We don't mean view in the

sense of opinion. By view. We mean it quite literally seeing what's in front of you. That's what right view is. Right view is seeing actual reality rather than our thoughts

about it or are feelings about it. I think of reality as being what is laid out in front of us in each moment, and then all our thoughts and concepts are like a piece of tracing paper we've laid over it, and then we've drawn all kinds of stuff and made all kinds of notes and so forth, and and we're always seeing reality filtered through all of them. A wonderful example is from the Steven Spielberg film in

two thousand fifteen, Bridge of Spies. I cite this. I have a chapter about this in the book actually titled would It Help Uh? And that's the based on the true story of Rudolph Able, the Soviet spy captured in New York at the height of the Cold War, and he's now on trial for his life, and the Russians and the Americans everyone wants him dead because he's a very inconvenient person. And his lawyer comes in and explains all this to him. Fortunately, his lawyer is Tom Hanks,

so you know, probably things will turn out okay. Uh. But but in any movie, that's right, that's right, you want Tom on your team. So so Tom explains to him the dire straits that he's in and and uh and the spy was played by the wonderful um Uh. Mark Rilans won an oscar for this role, actually, and he digests this information for a moment and then he says, all right, And Hank says, you don't seem worried, and he says, kind of shrugs, literally says would it help?

And that's the best thing in the film. Actually, when Mark Ryland's walk, when people spot them on the streets, they say, hey, Mark, would it help? Uh? I mean that cuts through so much confusion. I grew up in a very political family, and I can remember my parents screaming at the at the TV news, goddamn Richard Nixon. Uh and uh. And even then I used to wonder, do they know Nixon can't hear them through the TV screen.

So in this case, one aspect of view is just seeing that that doesn't help, and that it's actually very right. View is always liberating. Right view is always liberating when when you see that that doesn't help. You realize, oh, I can stop doing that. I don't have to cultivate stopping that. I don't have to try to push down

my emotions. I just just let that go. I mean, a very similar thing everyday experience is sitting at the red You know, when you're sitting at the red light and you're in a hurry and you tighten your grip on the steering wheel, you're kind of straining forward in the seat as you mentally try to make the red light turn green faster. We've all done that. Now does it help? No? And the and the extremely good news

here and again this is a matter of view. Is is realizing that it never has helped, it will never help you. Can you can just invest hundreds of man hours or woman hours for the rest of your life and trying to make the red light turned green faster, It never will. Now, think of all the other kinds of red lights in your life, the things that other people do when you're going no, no, don't say that, don't do that. It doesn't help you. Can you can breathe out, you can let that go, And that doesn't

make you less effective in actually helping the situation. It makes you more effective because you're not burning up energy straining at this kind of unproductive response. Instead, you've got more bandwidth open to look around and see, Okay, what

can I do that will help. Yeah. I had my own version of that just a little while ago, because, as you know, I was late to this interview because I was stuck in traffic, and you know, I had that moment of frustration starting to rise, and then the you know, and then the realization like there's absolutely nothing that getting upset is going to do about this. And and sometimes I'm able to have that clarity of you and and and other times, you know, I'm not. Um,

I think we're all that way sometimes. I also, particularly like you quote another writer C. S. Lewis in the book about this, and I'm just going to read, um, just a short part of it because I think it's so useful. And and he's basically talking about the slaughter and the suffering of the World War Two giving way to the Cold War. And um, this is what he said in a letter to a friend. One mustn't assume

burdens that God does not lay upon us. It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor, whom it can help. And I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. And then it goes on to say a great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think

it is. That's so profound, it's sure as thank you so much for reading that. I just love that quote. You know that was uh and talk about having all the woes of the world that are do you know that was way before internet. Every time I pick up my phone, it's it's so easy to just swipe right and there's the headlines, here's the latest disasters. Yeah, he

hadn't even in twenty four hour news. It's so staggering it and it is one of those things that I think that good people today wrestle with, yes, which is I don't want to stick my head in the sand. I'm a caring person. There's lots of things that are happening in the world, but I feel like this is somehow eroding me. How can I respond to this in a wise way? So what are some things you might

say about that? Well, the first part is, and again this is a matter of view that uh C. S. Lewis has articulated so beautifully that the state of worry is not itself meritorious. The question is would it help? It doesn't. And you know, kind of the reverse of that is people feel if they're not worrying, then they're being flaky, they're not being conscientious, and that's just not true. They you know, if that were so, then the more worried, the more stressed you became, the more you would be

helping the world. And if if we think of the people who have really liked the great great political activists, you know, and I had all my life, as I say, you know, starting with the parents that I grew up with, all my life, I've been around political activists. Um, and if you think of the ones who have really changed the world, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr King right, people like that, Nelson Mandela, As soon as you think of them, you know that they were not coming from a place of

stress or worry or rage or any of these. Just you know, negative, negative toxic emotions that so many people feel their activism has to come from. You know that people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Dr King, they were coming from a place of great silence inside and really from a place of great love inside. And I think that it's no accident that they're the ones whose influence continues to affect the exactly I often think of.

Dr Stephen Covey wrote a book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which I think is a master work. Gets classified as a business book, but it's not really in any way, shape or form. But he expounds this idea of circle of concern versus circle of influence. And if you think of a big circle with a smaller circle inside of it, the big circle is your circle of concern, everything you're concerned about, and the smaller circles

the things you can actually do something about. And his point is the more time that you spend in your circle of concern, your circle of influence actually shrinks. And the more time that you spend in your circle of influence, the more it grows. And it it speaks to this exact same point, which is that if I spend all of my time worrying or being angry or railing at

the television or all of that. Then that dissipates the energy that I can put into my circle of influence, which is the place that I can actually make a positive change in the world. Right absolutely so, So you know, job one is you have to take care of yourself and um uh, you know you need to have the clarity and the balance and the groundedness and and the genuine compassion to help others. Otherwise you're you're not going to be making things better, You're going to be making

things worse. It seems like there's been at tension and this has existed in lots of people for many years between how much of their time needs to be spent in contemplation versus in action, you know, in activism and again to your point, looking at someone like Gandhi, who um, I don't remember the exact numbers, but apparently spent several hours a day off on his own in prayer or so. I think it's one of those tensions that runs through people in the modern world who are really trying to

live a good life. Is how do I balance those two elements? Right now? That really brings things into my wheelhouse, which is that I've functioned as a meditation teacher since oh my, since nineteen seventy now, uh, and I've had the incredible opportunity to teach all over the country and in a few other countries and all different kinds of people. I've worked for years with kids at a top, top prep school. I've worked with kids at ivy league colleges.

I've worked with prisoners and maximum security, and with corporate executives and creative artists. So I've had the great opportunity to find out what works and to find out how to share the skills of meditation in a way that practical people living in you know, the actual world, not living in a story book about about India in the Middle Ages, but living in America in two thousand and eighteen.

How can actual people integrate meditative practice into their lives in a way that they really can do it and it really will do it, and that it's really a fact to now. The key that I've been fortunate enough to learn from my own teachers is to take a natural approach to meditation. I wrote a book actually with the title Natural Meditation Um. Usually when people hear the word meditation, they think of trying to control the mind. I mean, when I meet someone at a party, they say,

what do you do? I'm a meditation teacher. They say, oh, I tried to meditate, but it was so hard. I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't clear my mind, that I couldn't make the thoughts stop coming. And that's the really kind of most widespread conception, I would say, misconception about what

meditation is that you're trying to control the mind. Now here's the problem with that approach, and there's no way around this problem if if you take that approach, which is that any effort to create a non agitated state of mind is itself a form of agitation? Are right? Okay, I'm gonna try real hard to just be. It's a

contradiction in terms. So the approach and natural meditation is we start by noticing how the mind naturally works all the time, and what the mind naturally is doing all the time is seeking happiness, it's seeking fulfillment, it's seeking that moment you know, after you you drink the tea and you say ah, and you go through whatever you need to go through. You you buy the tea, bags and you boil the water and you pour the water in the kettle. All that it's all aimed at getting

at that moment, to that moment of saying ah. Everything else is a means to that end okay. And it's because we're built that way. The mind is seeking that sense of that sense of just o kayness, nothing else that needs to be done for me to just bask

in this moment. The mind is seeking that all the time. Now, the good news, as all the stage is, whether it's the Buddha or Jesus or Shankarra or Louts or Socrates, the Balsamtov, all the stages in their different language, say one way or another that there is an awe that never ends, that's not dependent on outer circumstances, and it's your own inmost core of being. So all we need to do is get the mind turned just a little bit turned in that direction and let go of all

our effort. And then and then the mind's natural gravitation toward that happiness, towards that piece and that silence, that gravity just pulls us within. So when I lead meditation, and I do this in workshops all over the country, um and also I have a actually we have a group that meets here in Santa Monica usually every other Tuesday night, and now we broadcast that live on YouTube. That will be tonight on YouTube. Actually, so what I do is simply I gently guide people, show them how

to let go of effort, and then the gravity takes over. Now, when you practice in that way, it doesn't take a whole lot of time out of your day. This is coming back to your presenting question here. When people think, and you'll hear this a lot from people, oh yeah, meditation has really changed my life, but you have to

practice for two hours a day. Now. The reason you hear that is that the way most people practice meditation trying to concentrate, trying to control the mind, that's very strenuous. It takes a lot of effort. So they're sitting there for an hour and forty five minutes beating their head against the wall, so to speak. And then finally they get so tired, the mind gets so exhausted trying to do this unnatural act of concentration that finally the mind

gives up and it finally just sinks. And then that last fifteen minutes is just ah, there, it is so what fortunate well I've learned from my teachers is how to skip the first hour and minutes, go go straight to the to the just letting go and sinking part.

And that's how I teach meditation. What I thought was interesting about your meditation, and knowing a little bit about your past and your teachers, is that the style of meditation you describe, the natural meditation right, sounds very much like something I learned from Adi Shanty, like the way he recommends a meditation. But when I first heard natural meditation, I thought this guy might be a t M guy, because that's the way transcendental meditation UM is often described.

It's natural, It's just natural. And I think based on UM, what sounds like some of your previous work you you did do transcendental meditation, is that, Yes, I learned and practiced uh TM, and I became a TM teacher and I worked in the TM organization. I taught probably a couple of thousand people TM and all over the country

for for several years. So you're right, the basic principle of effortlessness is there in TM, but it's not exclusively there in t M. And one of the reasons that I eventually went my my own way uh and and stopped teaching through the TM organization. Um. There were a number of and by the way, I still have some of my best friends are our TM teachers. UM. But I personally had to go my one was because they

started charging I thought too much money. Uh. And you know, the the original idea was let's share this with everyone. And secondly, there's a tendency there to feel that TM is the only form of effortless meditation, that that we've got a monopoly on it. And in fact they're right that most meditation is taught in terms of effort and concentration, but not Allso once I had to go my way from from TM, that really form the direction of my search. And I found oh here in within the Tibetan teachings,

there's this Tibetan teaching called so chen or um. It goes by by other names in other schools of Tibetan Buddhism um Haamudra or a Ti yoga. And oh here in certain schools of the Indian uh philosophical teachings of Vita, here's that that vein of effortlessness, of just being as well. So what I've done is to educate myself as much as I can in those traditions and try and okay, what's the essence? What did they all have in common?

And it's all this teaching of letting go, of just being and again being in America teaching in two thousand and eighteen. I always acknowledge that my my debt of gratitude to those traditions. But we teach this in plain American. You don't have to learn sanscrit and you don't have to uh chant mantra, Tibetan mantras or so forth to in order to practice like this. You can if you want. I love my seeing mantras in the shower every morning. But as I always say with especially with my guys

that I were within prison, everything's optional. Thank you. That was helpful. I was just curious about that evolution for you, because I could kind of see where it started. And that's you know, the term natural meditation has often been in my life. UM. I tried TM in UM in nineteen seventy, UM, which sounds like about when you started teaching it. I was um just experimenting, and I was amazed I could find any kind of meditation in Columbus, Ohio in nineteen seventy. So let's talk a little bit

then about natural meditation. Um, I just want to read something you wrote, and then I'm gonna let you just sort of talk a little bit more about it. But you describe it like this, we'll be hanging out in tasklessness. The Italians have a lovely expression for this. I'm gonna probably pronounce this because I can't speak Italian, dol se far niente. Okay, don't don't and you have to. You have to. You have to wave your hand. Yes, there

you go. Don't sweet doing nothing. And then you also go on to make this analogy, and I thought this was a really useful because you're saying that if you leave the mind alone, it's going to settle by itself. And you say, think of leaves falling from a tree. They tell the whole story. A falling leaf will reach

the ground in a percent of cases. And then a little bit later you say, but rather than a leaf falling to the ground, most people approach meditation like they're pushing a boulder up a mountain fighting gravity, rather than using it grunting away at whatever task they've set themselves. And I think that's such a great way to sort of frame up the way you think about this. And now I'm wondering if you could talk just a little bit about the practice of natural meditation. So listeners are

going to be intrigued by this. They're gonna hear, oh wow, that that all sounds great. Boy, I have been, you know, it does feel like I'm fighting my brain every step of the way. Deems probably onto something here. What do I do? And you can't teach all that in a in a five minute answer to a question. But I'm wondered if you could point in the right direction. Right. Let me mention, by the way, that there's a page

on my website. My website is Dean words dot com and there's a page they're called meditate now where I have guided meditation audio tracks and anyone can stream them for free. And uh and in those tracks you it's you know, ten minutes or fifteen minutes, and I'm just walking you through the thing. I'm guiding you the same way that I know guide the groups and guide my workshops. So we're going to talk about it in principle right now.

But people can get the direct experience by going to that page on my website, wonderful, and I'll link to it in our show notes for sure. Perfect, thank you. So yeah. Tasklessness. The thing is, if you set yourself any kind of task in meditation as meditation, then um, there's something you're trying to accomplish, and you're creating more agitation by by trying to create a non agitated state of mind. Your any effort, any effort that you expand, is a form of agitation, So you wind up chasing

your tail. If I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me, well, I tried to meditate, but it was hard. You know, what I want to tell them is no, no, no, you tried to meditate, and therefore it was hard. What I do is I point out to people that there's a delicious, effortless natural nous to the way we're experiencing things right now. Right now, people who are listening to this, they're hearing the sound of my voice. They are feeling perhaps a chair or

a couch or an automobile seat under their butt. They're seeing whatever shapes and colors are there before their eyes. And all of this seeing and feeling and hearing happens completely completely automatically. They're not expending any effort in order to have the awareness of the sounds and the and the smells and the tastes and all of that. Also, thoughts are there. Also feelings are there, and the thoughts and the feelings come and go, just like sounds or

or shapes coming and going. There's nothing special about them. They're just you know, in Buddhist psychology, thinking is considered to be the sixth sense, so you have hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, thinking, So thoughts, thoughts are just objects of experience passing through the scope of our experience, the scope of our the porthole of our awareness. Just like sounds. There's nothing special about them, and there's something very liberating and knowing that, Okay,

a thought is there. It's just like a sound being there. It's just like the texture, the temperature, the air being here. There's nothing special about it. It's there's nothing I have to do about it. It's kind of like sitting by the side of of the lake and you know, you see the breeze blowing the trees, you see the ripples on the lake coming and going. Stuff is just slashing around and we're just sitting there letting it be. There's

nothing we need to do about it now. If we just sit in this easy way, another thing we may start to notice is that as all these things come and go within our awareness, there's one thing that does not come and go, and that's our awareness itself. Awareness itself is like open space, right, So if we have objects here and think of the space of the room

that you're in. If we happen to move the teacup to a different place on the table, or we move our guitar from one corner of the room to another, the objects are moving through the space, but the space is not affected. Space is always open, it's always free,

it's always space. So our awareness is like space, and all the different experiences that we have, all the things we're aware of are like the different objects that sitting in the space or moving through the space, and space has plenty of room for everything, and space is not affected by anything. You know, if I move the teacup to the other side of the table, it doesn't damage the space, it doesn't improve the space. So in this way we can start to notice our awareness itself and go, Okay,

I can just rest in this awareness. I can just rest in this openness. In this openness, I can just rest in this natural spaciousness and let everything come and go within this space in its own natural, frictionless way, and know that I have no role in it. I'm just the observer. I'm just the witness. Really, I am the space because what is that, that's the awareness. I'm

the awareness that's aware of all this stuff. And just remain like open space, just allow spaciousness to be there, and whatever is there coming and going within it, let it come and go within it. And I've actually done some practices very similar to what you're describing, and was startled by the fact that actually, some of the time, for sure, there was a true settling. I was like, holy mackerel, I'm just leaving my brain alone. Yes, so you yeah, you did not do anything to make settling happen.

There's nothing you can do to make settling happen, because any effort is going to be non settling. So and in fact, often it sneaks up on people when you lead them in this natural way. It sneaks up on them and such so naturally and kind of organically and incrementally that uh, you know, when I ring the little bell to signal the end of the meditation. People go, you know, they may startle a little, and I tell them take the time, opening your eyes, and then they

raised the hands. They go, boy, how long was that? And often they have no idea. Was it five minutes? What was it an hour? And that's because you've just settled deeply into the place, which is really where there's no time, there's no space, there's no cause and effect. You're you're truly off the grid, You're truly out of the matrix. Sometimes people practicing in this way, you may be practicing at home and feel, no, nothing's really going on here, you know, I'm kind of wasting my time.

And then suddenly the phone rings you forgot to turn your phone off, or the cat jumps in your lap, and you go, uh no, no, no, no, I don't want to come out of this right now. I guess I really am settled. So let's talk about the times that that is not the experience. So, you know, I love that that idea of that thinking is a sixth sense, because I do really think that is. I think it's true, and I think it's a it's a great way to

look at it. However, for a lot of us, it's as if like all our other senses are blind or deaf or whatever they are, and so our sixth sense is so hyper developed that thinking sense is what dominates. And again I know you're going to object to the word effort, but that if we don't work on a redirection,

often we sit right in there. And and sometimes that what I think about with the open space, right, that awareness is our is our open space, um, and that we can rest in that awareness and that these things come and go. And you made the analogy of in the room, like if I've got this teacup here and I move it over there, Sometimes it seems like thoughts aren't a teacup, that they are the size of the

room itself. Yeah. Yeah, Or it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex stomping through the And so to your point, I think it's I think it can't be stressed enough. That thought is not going away, right, That's what our brains do, and it and it doesn't write, and thought doesn't have to go away, just as the mind. The the eye doesn't have to stop seeing colors, and the ear doesn't have to stop hearing sounds. The mind does not have to

stop entertaining thoughts. I mean, do you think that the Buddha had to say, oh, no, I'm seeing colors in this room. I got to close my eyes in order for me to enjoy my Buddha hood. No, uh, it's it's it's compatible with everything you know. But in giving meditation instruction, I don't tell people, okay, just don't do anything.

You're absolutely right. When we're in that situation where it's just okay, we noticed things are just easily coming and going um uh, then then find there's nothing we have to do. Just rest. Is that open space now when the the when whatever is going on, the thoughts of the feelings, whatever is going on, seems so intense or so engaging, it seems like the Tyrannosaurus rects brand paging through the room. Then there's one more instruction. First of all,

a couple of things not to do. The thing that what what most people will try to do at that point is find some way to slay the tyrannosaurs. You can't it he's bigger than you or or else. Run away from the tyrannosaurs. You can't. He will outrun you. Okay, So here's the third thing, The third way is just when you feel you're you're resisting something, or you're deeply engaged with something, or you're struggling with something, a thought

of feeling, whatever it is. In meditation, simply this, relax your grip, relax your grip on it, and then relax back into yourself. Relax back into that open space of awareness, and then don't worry about whether it continues to be there or not, because no matter how big or intense or troubling or whatever the thought or the emotion is, it can't do anything to you unless you're gripping it. We think it's gripping us. We think, oh, the tyrannosaurs

is gripping me. It's if you experiment around a little bit with this, you'll find and this is a life changing discovery. It has no power to grip you. Only you grip it. And once you realize it's you gripping it, then you realize you have the power to relax your grip. I used to say let go, and you hear that a lot in you know, the meditation world, in the spiritual room. Just let go, just let go. That's valid, but it gets misunderstood. I don't say let go anymore.

Because people here let go and they think, oh, the thing has to go away. Let's say I'm trying to let go, but it keeps being there. No, that's not letting go. That's like requiring it to go away, which is a form of holding on. So what you do is, you know, like, right now, I'm taking a ballpoint pen, I'm gripping it hard. So this is me, This is my mind and meditation where I'm starting to engage with this thing, struggling with it or or resisting it or

whatever it is. Now, if I relax my grip, it doesn't matter that it's still there, because now my hand is open to the whole space of the room. And in fact, once I since I've relaxed my grip, eventually the thing's going to fall away of its own accord. But but that's none of my business. It doesn't matter whether it falls away later or sooner. I love that relax your grip, recognizing that, you know, feelings might not be gripping us, we're gripping them. And I think that

let it go. The way I've learned to think about it is let it be, like you know, because because they let it go sort of assumes to your point. Like I remember, like early I was, you know, I was UM in a a for a number of years, and that was such a big thing early on in my recovery. Let it go, Let it go. You just gotta let it go. And so I would try and let it go and it wouldn't go anywhere, and I would think I'm failing, you know, I'm failing. And I just realized, like it was just I can't I can't

control whether it goes or doesn't go. I can just control my relationship to it or my gripping or or not gripping of it. Right, there's a related principle. And actually I have a chapter about this in the book UM titled Relax at the Moment of Contacts and UM. And this came out of this is a I think a wonderful story. Really years ago, I was practicing I kid,

it's a beautiful, very graceful martial art. It's a non fighting, non conflict of Japanese martial art where when the other person attacks you, uh, you joined the direction of the attack and you go, okay, you want to rush in this direction towards me, I'll just help you fly across the room. I'll just help you keep going. And I was in the dojo one day. I was practicing for my next promotion test, and the particular thing I was practicing is where three guys, one after another, all attack

me and try to tackle me. And I'm supposed to be just helping usher them across the mat, and instead I kept winding up grappling with them, and then the first one would pull me down and the other two would pile on top of me. It was a complete mess. I was getting more and more frustrated and got up, dusted myself off of getting I need to do this again. And suddenly I hear the voice of my my instructor. He's across the room and he calls out, dean, relax

at the moment of contact. And it came as a surprise to me because I was so caught up in in tensing that I didn't realize I was tensing right. There's a catch twenty two there. That's why sometimes you need outside intervention. You need that. In this case, I needed the teacher to point that out to me. So the next time the guy rushed me, instead of tensing up and my shoulders rising up towards my ears and

my you know, my my gut tightening up. Instead, I relaxed and as the guy and I did exactly the same thing with pivoting my hips and using my arms as I had before, only now at work. Now we the guy just went flying across the room, and the next guy and the next guy. Now, most people are never going to practice i q do in their lives.

But the real i q do is life. The stuff that's coming towards you can be the whatever it is that makes you fearful, whether you're afraid of flying, or afraid of public speaking, or afraid of you know, asking that nice attractive person out on a date, or it could you're you're probably the thing coming. Yet you could be rage, you know, at the driver on the road that's cut you off, Or it could be if you you have a problem with with drink or with drugs

or anything any addictive cravings. When the the that craving is coming towards you, that rather than do what we've done before, which is just automatically tense up when we have that encounter, do the opposite, very deliberately relax at the moment of contact, just let the thing go past you and It's so simple, but it's really powerful. Yeah, that is such a great story that you tell. And I that's such a great catchphrase, relax at the moment

of contact. And you describe another version of that in your own life, which I've burienced often. Um, you say, I once spentner winner in Southeast Iowa, and I will say I've spent an entire lifetime of winners um in Ohio. But that that idea of you know, we get cold and we just tense up. Our shoulders are up, our

whole bodies tight, We're just clenched against it. And you know, for me, I just found like when I when I just relaxed into it and stopped the resistance of it in such a way, you know, the experience of it changes. I'm still cold, but I'm not miserable in the same way. And I thought that was another example that you use that that I've certainly experienced in my own life. So interesting the way you put that, Okay, I'm cold, but I'm not miserable, And that recalls a saying that you've

probably heard, which is pain as mandatory, suffering as optional. Yeah. We interviewed shin Zen Young on the show, who you probably have at least heard of through your meditation travels.

But he wrote out this equation, you know, um, suffering equals pain times resistance, and it has lived with me just constantly, and I it's a lesson I learned over and over and over again, is that you know, yes, I mean like I have, I have back pain, and you know, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse, but it's always worse when I am like resisting it, when I am really like fighting it. It shouldn't be here. It

shouldn't be this way, you know. I just I find that that non resistance is and it really gets to the heart of your meditation method, right, it's the non resistance of what's happening in the moment and just knowing that whatever is happening in the moment is is here. There's nothing. I once saw what I felt was the perfect complete meditation instruction on the side of a carton of Tropicana orange juice. UM. It said, nothing added, nothing

taken away, not from concentrate. That's great. Well, that is a great place for us to wrap up because we are out of time. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation and we're going to talk about. You mentioned the idea of on roads to meditation, ways to sort of go into meditation, and boy, that has been something over the last year that has fundamentally changed my meditation practice is having some of those, and

you've got some great ones. So we're going to discuss those. Um. I'll have links, as we mentioned in the show, notes to your book, to your homepage all that. But I've had a great time talking with you. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, it's really been great. All right bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot

net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.