Kevin Griffin

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. 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 today. Our guest on this episode is Kevin Griffin, Buddhist author, teacher, and innovator in the field of addiction treatment. He teaches around the world and is the author of two books, One Breath at a Time and A Burning Desire. He also recently released a CD of original music called laughing Buddha. Hi Kevin, Welcome to the show. Our podcast

is based on the parable of two wolves. And in the Parable of two wolves, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there is a great battle going on inside of us. There are two wolves who are always fighting. One is a good wolf, which represents kindness and love and peace and justice, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents greed and hate and self pity. And name your name your negative emotion.

And the grandson thanks for a second, and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So this podcast is really about how people feed that good wolf in their own lives. So I'd like to start the interview off by asking you what that parable means to you in both your life and in your work. Yeah, it's a wonderful, wonderful parable and um and quite relevant

to Buddhist and recovery principles. A certainly, addicts are pretty much all about feeding the bad wolf, the destructive wolf and um and from the you know, the Buddhist teachings are so much about karma, about what actions we take, and that that things happen as a result of actions.

That that's not you know, as in the story that you know, maybe the grandson was thinking that there was some magic going on or some intervention from some you know, spirits to to sort of control the outcome of that battle, and what the what the grandfather is saying is that, no, it's really your own actions, your your thoughts, words, and deeds that cultivate whatever qualities, um, you know are going to become dominant in you, in you and your character

in your life. And so that that's exactly what the Buddha taught and um, you know, there's a famous teaching where he says something like, whatever we think and ponder upon repeatedly, that will become the inclination of our mind. So in the same way, whatever whatever, if we focus on negative, hateful or selfish thoughts, we will become selfish and hateful people. If we focus on generous and loving thoughts, we will become generous and loving people. So, yeah, the

same teaching. One of the things in your in your most recent book that you were sort of discussing was very much that sort of same idea. I think you said something about, you know, when our mind is filled with thoughts of anger, we feel terrible. When we are filled with thoughts of love. We feel wonderful. When we let our minds go off into dreams and fantasies, we feel empty lacking. When we focus on what we're doing right now, we feel connected and complete. So I think

you know that does align very much. My question to you would be what are some of the ways that you you go about doing this, because the other thing that you talk about in the book that really resonated with me was the the idea of that as you think these thoughts over and over, they create a pathway in the mind, and the longer that goes on, that

gets pretty easy to fall into. And so for most of us who would be interested in the show like this, it's obviously because we have some challenge in keeping the good wolf fed and maybe have a history in in feeding the bad wolf. So I'd be interested in how you go about sort of undoing that that you know, groove in the record or or karma as they would say.

The starting point of meditation is to sort of try to ground yourself in your present moment experience, which we use the breath, which means connecting with the body, because that allows us to kind of detach a little bit from the mental process and and be in a place

of something real, which is our physical experience. It's not not something we're making up and then starting to uh observe thoughts that arise and to kind of question them or or look at them, um, you know what, see what they are saying, whether there's they're credible or whether they are destructive with uh, whether there's wisdom there. And this is a I mean to to develop this capacity takes time. It's a practice. We don't just sit down and close our eyes and all of a sudden start

to have insights. But we have to kind of develop this quality of observing, which is it's a capacity we all have, but it's kind of underdeveloped in most of us because most of the time what we're doing is just following our habitual patterns uh and are conditioned ways of being the ways we've always been, in the ways we've been taught to be and learned how to be, and all of that has to be kind of deconstructed.

So in a way, the meditation practice is a deconstructing of reality to try to see what is rather than what we believe is there's also practices that are specifically geared towards kind of cultivating positive mind states. So the loving Kindness meditation is very much focused on that and kind of kind of seeing the negative tendencies and trying to really let go of them and intentionally bring the

mind back to a more compassionate, uh kind thoughts. The Buddha also taught a lot about just um behavior, So the five precepts not to kill, not to steal, not to harm with our sexuality, not to harm with speech, not to use in toxics. Just following the precepts can

have a very transformative effect on our lives. UM. So that's more in line with the recovery approach, which is kind of I'm going to stop doing the things I'm doing because the things I do, the actions I take, actually then affect my mind, so they're there in a certain way. The Buddhist approach and the recovery approach are coming from different directions but kind of arriving at the same place. Um, the recovery is more of a behavioral approach.

Buddhism is more of a cognitive approach. I would agree that that that idea, you know, in in in recovery, you hear the idea that you, um, you can't think your way into right acting, you have to act your way into right thinking. And then you know, as you said, the Buddhist approaches is a little bit different. Um, I would be curious about. So the mindfulness piece is really about sort of just becoming aware of what's going on your head and and sort of seeing what's what's happening

sort of day to day, moment to moment. You know, I'm I'm walking, uh, you know, from one appointment to the next one, and I find myself in a you know, a negative spot or or you know, what sort of thing do you recommend in you know, I like to look for things that are bite sized that I can do, uh, just kind of as the day goes on and and I can do in real quick increments. Do you have any any thoughts on how to apply some of those Buddhists and recovery principles in you know, and again in

bite sized pieces. What's somewhat under emphasized in meditation teaching, but really is that the heart of meditation is connecting with the body and connecting with emotions through the body. So feeling what's going on. Sometimes just observing thoughts doesn't really tell us that much, and it doesn't It can be very difficult to detach from a thought because they're the beliefs are so sort of uh, deeply programmed, and we've sort of got a logic that convinces us that

they're true. Um, but if we can so, I've find that just connecting with the physical experience of a mood, for instance, allows me to release that in a way that sometimes just seeing a thought doesn't. So what I do is I breathe a little more deeply. I kind of softened my belly and kind of let out the breath in a slow, kind of almost like a side ah. And in that releasing a lot of times I find that I can actually release mood or emotion or soften it anyway, give it more space by just kind of

softening the body around it. There was something else you said in your most recent book that sort of really applies to what we were just talking about, and I

thought it was a very interesting, interesting piece. You know, you said the Buddha applied to penetrating intellect of the problem Andy apply to penetrating practice, And I think that's very interesting because it's it's kind of both, right, It's a it's I mean, I've spent a lot of time in my life reading books about meditating, which is not really, by any shot, the same thing as actually doing it. And yet there is also an element of, you know,

retraining how we think. And so I thought that was a really succinct way to sort of sum up that. It's it's sort of a combined approach. You can't have just one or the other. I think that sometimes meditation is portrayed as this, oh, just empty your mind, and first of all, that's very difficult to do, and most people you can only do it for brief periods. But

it also sort of misses the point. Um. Obviously, the yeah that you know quote you're referring to was in the context of saying, you know, the Buddha wasn't just walking around with an empty mind. He was a brilliant thinker, and and so bringing I don't think spirituality should be anti intellectual. Um, but as you say, there needs to be a balance. If all we're doing is thinking about it,

we're not really getting insight in the Buddhist sense. Is not actually intellectual in some ways, it's more physical, but fundamentally it's um experiential. So we experience, for instance, the truth of impermanence, or we experience the truth of suffering, or we experienced the emptiness of self, and in that experience there's a knowing, and that's what we call insight.

I practiced early in my practice, I sort of had this idea that at some point some great, brilliant thought was going to come to me because I was doing insight meditation. But it's another one of those kind of problems of translation that that in Western language when we say insight, were talked about thought, but in Buddhist teachings

that we're talking about an experience and an understood experience. Um. So yeah, that that kind of blend of intellect and experience and practice is really what I think makes for a mature practice. One of the things that you know, you hear in you hear in recovery programs is about having you know that that the key to recovery is to have a spiritual practice or two to be spiritual.

And certainly for a lot of people that's pretty straightforward, but you're certainly writing or an audience that is most likely struggling with with that concept of what, well, what does spirituality mean if I don't believe in a in a intervention this God, what does that mean? And one of the things you said was that, um, the first aspect of spirituality is the understanding that happiness doesn't come primarily through the material world, which is a very very

practical way of sort of defining what that is. Do you do you want to expand upon that a little bit, Well, yeah, I mean to start with I, I, you know, talk about that. I start I sort of define those that idea because because I do think that the idea of spirituality, people make it into too mysterious and exotic, uh an idea, and you know, people are like, I'm spiritual and or

I'm not spiritual and that. You know, it's just one of those again sort of language gets in the in the ay, everybody knows that happiness doesn't come from things except the people who have the bumper sticker that says, the person who dies with the most stuff winds. But everybody else knows this. I mean, this is I really don't think that's a surprise for most people. It's not that we don't know that. But the problem isn't what

people believe, but rather how we actually live. Many people have good values and good beliefs that they're not able to live by. Desire is a survival mechanism. If humans didn't have desire, they wouldn't reproduce and they wouldn't survive. Right, so survivals desire is not a bad thing in and of itself. The desire for stuff isn't a bad thing. The desire for stuff comes out of the fundamental desire

that I need to have food, clothing, housing. Those are just natural human cravings for comfort that allowed me to survive. But evolution and survival are just powerful forces that don't actually have any restraint on them. Civilization and spirituality are the things that we bring to those instincts to restrain them so that they don't you take over. Um, I agree with you. I think if we went out and pulled people, they would all say, yes. You know, happiness

is an inside job, right. It's kind of a it's sort of a cliche. But if you look at us, by and large, might throw me into the boat too. It's not. The default mechanism of most of us in our culture is not the way we live, and that's one of the things with this podcast. That I'm interested in is is how do we sort of remember or become mindful, as you would say over and over again, of of what our intentions are. You know, the root of the word that's translated as mindful is remember birth.

So sati is the word we translate as mindful s A t I. This is in the Poli language, the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures, and the root of that word is in memory and remembering. So I absolutely agree with you and see the challenges being that very thing, which is to remember. It's the starting point is to remember to be present, you know, from a loftier idea is to remember who we are, but to remember your intention.

I'd like to just touch on a couple more things, and then I think we can we can wrap up one of the ones. And this is again sort of getting back to creating our own reality and using thoughts that are beneficial or skillful towards us. In your in your book, you tell a story about you were a guitar player when you were younger. You're still a guitar player, but when you were younger, you were a guitar player.

You learned to play some chords, and then you saw somebody play lead guitar and you somehow in your mind thought that you would be unable to learn to play guitar like that, like it was, it was, it was, it was a state, and you didn't even try because your mentality was that you were not a lead guitar player. So I'd like you to maybe spend a minute and explain a little bit more about that. Yeah, obviously it's

not really about playing the guitar. It's about beliefs and limiting beliefs, and and you know that there's this whole sort of idea, and it's sort of a new Age idea that we create our own reality and that can turn into magical thinking, right, and that if I just think about it enough, it will happen. You know, I'll just win the lottery because I think about it. And

I don't really go to that school of thought. But it's the idea that we create our own reality is coming out of I think some spirits as I would call this spiritual principle, but it's not even that spiritual in a way, which is just that if we believe something, then we act on that belief. If I believe i'm not capable of something, then I don't try to do it, and in that way, I create my reality because I'll

never learn if I don't try. I mean, you know, it's kind of one of those things your grandmother probably tells you. You You know, hey, you're never gonna get any if you don't try. But but yeah, I mean, it's one of those things that I think, again, we need to and I need to investigate in myself to see what my beliefs are. You know, our beliefs are don't come with signs and you know, lights around them. We live out our beliefs and unconsciously a lot of the time.

So we have to really investigate ourselves to see what what is that we're believing and then question that and is that a helpful belief or not? You know, And it can go the other way too, you know that. Oh. I mean I also had this kind of delusional belief that I was going to be a rock star, but I didn't really do anything to make it happen, you know.

So it's not enough to have a belief. We need belief in action, right, which gets back to that earlier discussion sort of about you know, insight and practice, and you had to. You had a quote that made me laugh where you said, you know, to think that sitting on a pillow will make you a rock star, get you lots of money, solve your drug and alcohol problem, and cure you of depression is to be very confused

about cause and effect. And I think that you when you're talking about the guitar is sort of you were saying that that's the lack of a lack of a belief in really in cause and effect, because cause and effect would say if I work at this, I will get better at it. That's a fairly you know, it's sort of a fairly straightforward rule that that is true. And and to sort of say, well, I could never do that is simply a sort of denying that that

basic piece. And it think a lot of it just simply has to do like you said earlier about putting in the effort. It's a lot of magical thinking is a whole lot easier than um, than than true practice and discipline. People have the same problem around meditation, like, oh, I tried meditating, but my mind kept wondering I can't do it, and you know, I said, well, you know,

it actually takes a lot of work to become. Uh, I'll just use the term a good meditator, although I don't particularly care for that term, but you know, to become a successful meditator and to play lead guitar. Yeah, it's gonna take a few years of practicing hard. We're

not very patient, you know. We want it now. That's why we get loaded, because you know, I can have the same experience that I have on marijuana by meditating, but it takes a lot more work, you know, Um, And and addicts are impatient and we want it now, and uh, you know, we really don't want to put in the work. Plus probably a lot of addicts do have sort of self esteem issues and don't really think they can do it whatever it is anyway, So you might as well just get loaded and imagine it. You

know it'll be just as good. Well, UM, Kevin, thank you very much. UM. I really enjoyed talking with you and you know, learning about about sort of how you approach different things. Is there any last things you'd like to leave us with? Um, mostly you know, self promotion. Uh. If people are interested in my books or my music or my teaching, my website is Kevin Griffin dot net and uh, there's links to all of that stuff there. I have my schedule, you know, I teach pretty much

year round. People are interested, they should check those things out. And uh, thank you, thank you very much, really nice to talk with you, all right, take care of thanks, all right, you guys. Bye. You can find out more about Kevin Griffin and this podcast in our show notes at one you feed dot net slash Kevin