Koshin Paley Ellison

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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Since the Coach and Paley Ellison, who co founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which delivers contemplative approaches to care through education,

direct service, and meditation practice coaching. Is the co editor of Awake at the Bedside, contemplative teachings on palliative and end of life care. He received his clinical Training and Mount sin I Beth Israel Medical Center and the Young and Psychoanalytic Association. He began his formal Zen training in Cohen is a senior Zen Monk, Soto Zen Teacher and Young and Psychotherapy Wolf. Hey, everybody, A couple of quick things.

One is, by the time you listen to this, we will have celebrated our third anniversary, so three years of doing this show with a new episode every single week. So thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it. Secondly, I wanted to give more details on the one Feed group coaching program. The program will be limited to ten people per group will meet virtually once a week. The first part of it will be some education and teaching for me, and then the second part will be questions

from you. The group is focused around making a change in your behavior, specifically starting a new behavior. So if you're hoping to exercise more in the new year, if you're hoping to eat better, if you want to start a meditation practice, or spend more time with your children, or whatever the behavior is that you want to start this year. It will ensure that the changes you're making become a part of your life and stick and don't fall off like a lot of New Year's resolutions do.

The program is a hundred dollars. In addition to the formal part of the course where I am talking with you guys, we're also going to do some things where we pare people up as accountability partners that you can get some help in keeping these behaviors going. So there's a great chance for you to start a new behavior and make sure that it sticks through the new year. Just send me an email air at one you feed dot net and we will talk with you a little bit more and get you signed up. So hope to

talk with you soon. Bite And here's the interview with Coach and Paleolison. Hi, Cosh and welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to have you on. You are the editor of a new book that came out called Awake at the Bedside, contemplative teachings on palliative and end of life care, and so we're going to spend a good portion of this interview kind of talking about your experience taking care of the dying and how your Zen practice has influenced that and

vice versa. But let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there's a great battle that goes on inside of all of us between two wolves. 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 grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he 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. I love this parable very much, and I think that for me, what's most moving about it is the grandfather and the grandparents spending

time teaching the grandchild. And you know, almost more than the parable itself, the value of spending time together and really using that time to pass on what is helpful and of use. So it's so moving to me too,

before we even get to the wolves. Just the setting of the parable for me is the heart of what is so missing and many of our relationships that you know, the incredible epidemic of isolation and loneliness in our culture now that is, you know, has these morbidity rates that are being shown in these new studies about that basically it's more unhealthy than smoking and overeating. You know, they're

finding that people's loneliness. So the story of the tenderness between the grandfather and the grandchild, to me, is tells of a different kind of relationship that is possible and is necessary, and to me, in that relationship itself is feeding the wolf of tenderness and compassion. So those are my first thoughts. Well, it's interesting that that's what you targeted on because your journey into you know, what you do,

really was because of your grandma. Right, do you want to tell us a little bit about that at It's a great place to sort of frame the conversation or

to start the conversation. Sure. You know, my grandmother was a Hungarian Jewish lady and who had her parents had immigrated here early in the century, and I didn't know her that well until actually I moved to Brooklyn where she lived, and we've spent a lot of time together, and when my grandfather died, I you know, there's a lot of pressure from my aunt Carol and my father to move from Brooklyn to where they were living and move into an assisted living And my grandmother was a

incredibly vibrant woman and was working as an office manager for a very busy law firm at the time when she was eighty two and loved it more than anything, and she was beloved at the law firm. So when she was getting all of this pressure from her children, who loved her very much and very much a thing of our culture that you know, someone's older so that they should be an assistant living, she didn't want to

do that. She wanted to live where she had lived her whole life, with the beauty parlor and the local diner and her neighbors and her friends, and she really was so embedded in the community and she couldn't even imagine giving that up. And so she and I made a pack to take care of each other, and I would look after her and she would look after me. And it was really the first time that I had made that kind of commitment to someone and really realizing that this is it for the long haul, and we're

going to be completely there for each other. And so it was extraordinary. Um things happened, you know, from mostly just spending time with her, to grocery shopping, to doctor's visits, to emergency late night rides and ambulances to the hospital, to pneumonia in the hospital, to finally moving in with her into the hospice where she and I stayed the

last six weeks of her life. It was a time of talking about storytelling of her, telling stories of her own life and what she's learned, And in particular, I think, you know one story that probably changed my life more than any other is that, you know, one night she woke me up in bed and was crying and I said, Grandma, what's wrong? And she said, oh, you know, I'm so ashamed of myself. And I said why and she said, well, I realized that I didn't fully love you. And I

said what do you mean by that? And she said, well, there are parts of you. That Buddhist thing, that then thing really scared me and I never really understood it. And I realized that a part of my heart contracted from you. And I'm so sorry because I can't believe it took me seven years. Such I truly love someone is to love all the things about them, even the

things you don't understand or like. And I realized too that I was not very curious about it, and that way, I also wasn't curious about what was most important to you. And for that also, I'm sorry. So that, you know, was one of the most incredible teachings that stays of me every day. You know, where am I contracting? You know, from fully loving where I am because it's so easy, I think, to pull away from what you don't like and what's challenging, and what is the adventure is when

you go towards and with curiosity and investigating. Yeah, a lot of what I have seen a view in interviews or various snippets here and there. You talk a lot about how much our ideas and our opinions and our preferences get us into trouble or take us away from from intimacy with people. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that and maybe some examples. Yeah, I would say it's the heart of you know, these are not certainly my ideas, there my experience, but you know,

shocking many but the historical. But I was very clear that we get into try double because of our version, right, and we were aversive to things. So if you're a person, you have a version, right and in my experience that, for example, I used to not think of myself as a very sad person at also and not thinking of myself as an angry person. And I always wanted to be a nice person and to be liked and to

be pleasing. And I realized that I had relegated myself into it little itty bitty room and that I was not fully living. And so when I had been practicing and practice for about I don't know, fifteen years or so, I started volunteering and doing chaplaincy training after my grandmother died, and that's where I really saw my preferences really at work, my habits, like the kind of people that I would want to go see or the people I would spend more time with. And for example, I really found that

anyone who is kind of angry, I avoid it. And it was a huge learning for me to realize that it was my own anger and my own frustrations of my own, you know, murderous feelings that we actually we just all have, you know, it doesn't mean we act them out right, but to really learn how to do that.

And I'll tell you a brief story about I've got so into really investigating anger and letting my patients in the hospital teach me about anger and what anger is about, that I became the person that the team would send to really angry people, which is so ironic for the

person who identified as not angry. And this one woman they found very difficult on this isn't on impatient oncology floor, and that she was not following medical advice and she was throwing things at people and cursing at them, and they said, oh, coach, and maybe you should see her,

that would be good. And so I went into the room to see her, and immediately she's swearing at me and throwing things like that little kidney shaped thing that they have, and you know, even throwing her own pillows, so she didn't even have pillows, and so I was dodging them very lightly. And then I just stayed there and she said, well, what are you still doing here? And I said, well, I'm so curious about why you're angry.

And she said, she paused for a moment, said really, And I said, yeah, Can I sit down and I would love for you to tell me about how you are so angry? And so I sat down and she began to tell me the story about how she had taken care of her two parents. One had Alzheimer's and the other one had Parkinson's early onset, both of them and for twenty years she had taken care of them in her home, and within the past year of when I met her, both of them had died, and she

felt like that was the beginning of her life. She was now in her late forties and ready to live, and she was diagnosed within a year of stage four ovarian cancer that had metastasized all over her body and her bones, and she was haste and it was so normal.

So to me, the beauty is when you can realize that the people are really angry, maybe they have good reasons to be angry, and if we can just hear them, if we can hear ourselves and not get caught by the feeling, but to be curious about the feeling, So like learning how to feel the feeling without becoming the feeling. I think that's really interesting though, listening to the angry and with some people that tends to help them, and it seems with other people it seems like the litany

of anger is sort of endless, is your perspective. Just they can be angry as long as they want to be angry, and my job isn't to change that. Well, my job is definitely not to change anyone. And you know that's as a chaplain or as as end teacher, or as a friend. I'm more interested in just being with people. Some people are just so wounded that they are just howling and part of me, you know, I don't know. I can't say this is always the case. I think that it's difficult for someone to move until

their cry has to be fully heard and received. And I think that some people who are really angry it just that no one has really ever fully received their anger. I can't say that that's true across the board, but I know that has been really important for me and my own personal life, you know, in my own anger and frustrations and hurts, like I've really needed just for

someone to receive it. But we all know what it's like, probably to have people who want to change us or make us feel better, or to do something to us. And we all perhaps have had an experience, even for a moment, of someone who could just be with us just as we are. And receive us with a whole in our where we are. My grandmother was that person

for me consistently. You know, she had a huge gift of really receiving people, and when you were with her, you felt like nobody else was important, and she didn't try to make you feel better. She was just so

interested in what you were experiencing. A great teacher. Yeah, I had a conversation with a body earlier today that's a little bit similar to this, and we were talking about how he sort of knows what the right answer is, you know, whether it be going to see a therapist or a spiritual teacher or just a friend, like he kind of knows what the right answer is. And I said, well, to me, that's not really the point, right And the point isn't that someone can give me advice that I

can't think of myself. The point is there's something healing about that connection with another human that helps. Even if what they turn around and tell me is something I already know, there's still some I always get some benefit in reaching out and to what you said into being heard so important. It's I feel like that's the one thing that's so lacking in our culture. And you know again goes back to the parable, you know, the grandfather

and the grandson, and wow, how special that is. And I have a friend to Roni Lowdog, who's this incredible integrated medicine physician. The person and her first question, some primary care doctor is always in the first consultation. She says, Okay, so let's have a really serious conversation about who are the five people who would drop everything if we needed them to come here to be with you. And I want you to tell me about those people because we're

in a web of relationships. But she said, what's happening more and more is that people can't even come up with one. They think like, oh, my sister will well, I don't know if she would come. And so I think that kind of fracture is what needs the most addressing.

And to me, that's what you know, working with dying people is so amazing, because I've never met a dying person who said, I'm so glad I closed myself off all those years that isolated myself, And you never year a dying person say I'm so glad I buried myself in my work and didn't nurture relationships. I'm so glad you know, never hear those things. What you always hear is that it's about relationships and how well they loved and who loved them, and who knew that they loved them.

You know, it's been so amazing how simple it is. But we're so distracted that we forget what's the most important thing. It's extraordinary. Part of what you do is you train people to be involved in in palliative care how to sit with the dying. And I have a question for you related to that around um. A good friend of mine is a nurse and she works in clinical trials for cancer, which pretty much means the people that she gets to the people that everything else failed for, right,

and they're they're given a last shot. Right. So a great proportion of those people end up dying, and I know it takes a toll on her. I'm curious just how you would Again, it's you know, you're not going to teach somebody in three or four minutes, But where would you tell that person to start with finding a way to remain open, to remain caring and yet not just be a you know, a basket case about it.

It's the critical question, you know, as talking to one of our board members this morning about the same thing, like how can we support these people who are off in the field and doing the work on the ground. And you know, our center is really based on three things that we feel like I have to do with the medicine for that which is we have study programs, direct care programs. That the third prong is meditation in the SONGA, so having a meditation practice in a community.

So you know, I don't think that someone has to be Buddhists, but to have a community, you know, where there's some kind of contemplative practice. So what I would encourage everyone to do is to keep learning, keep yourself learning and nurtured in that way, m to keep training, keep learning new things, and to care and to me, you know, in modern health care as it is at the moment, there's a lot of focus on self care, right, and so they often will tell people like your friend, oh, well,

I hope you're doing your self care. But I think that is a real deprivation because I think my understanding, in our center's understanding is that it's just care. There's no self care, because if you're not nourishing yourself, that is going to inform how you care. For others, so including ourselves and how we care. Um is crucial, and community and those three things are to me the most important and they keep us not perfectly of course, you know,

because but we will. I think it really helps us to maintain a sense of resiliency because we feel supported, we have people to turn to, we can keep learning, and we can keep really checking with ourselves like how are we caring and so to keep those as alive questions to me are parts of the recipe of resiliency.

And but I think what's happened so often, and you know, we train clinicians across the country and what we hear constantly is that people are isolated and that people are stuck, they don't know how to keep learning, and that they feel that self care and care are two different things. So it's like there's a will breakdown. And yet you know, as there's a wonderful zen expressions as you know, fall

down seven times, get up eight times. So like I think we just have to learn to be a bit foolish and two realize that we need each other and we're not going to do it perfectly, and we do the best we can, and we need to stretch a little bit for people that are outside of the Zen tradition, can you point to the relationship between a meditation practice and being able to care for sick and dying people better? Can you connect those dots for people who may not

have the perspective on that. So for us, when we started our center, we came up with the term contemplative care. Um. So the contemplative care is given by someone who has a contemplative practice and that maybe a yoga practice, a prayer practice, walking in nature practice, whatever it is. Hopefully that has some kind of community in it and that they see there caring as a practice that they're trying

to learn how to show up for. So, even if it's a physician who has an average three minute visit, how they embody themselves in those three minutes. So they're using their contemplative practice as a way of like staying with their breath, staying open and receptive to me, it's all a practice of generosity, like learning how to practice generosity,

which is giving and receiving freely. And so that is an encounter in a relationship like in the parable or with a nurse with a patient, or with myself and my favorite barista at Starbucks. Now it's about how do you show up in relationship. At one point, I hear you say that you say at the Zen Center, we start with three important teachings for service, beginner's mind, witnessing, and loving action. Can you kind of walk me through those three and and frame that up sort of in

terms of what we've been talking about. So beginner's mind is easy to say and challenging to do. It means that I know it's sounds good, but it's this experience when we're not you know, dragging all of our big black bag, as Robert Blige says, you know, into the room. We're actually not having a toolbox which will end up

tripping over. We're trying to practice like coming back to our breath, in our belly, having a soft belly and an open shoulders and almost like transparent Torso, so this ability just to like really be rooted in yourself so that you can really look at and listen to with your whole body what's happening. So the beginner's mind is that you're not trying to be an expert because you've never been in that situation before ever, and neither has the other person but we tend to make a lot

of assumptions and fill up the space for me. It's the beginner's mind and also a very quick story that I love very much about it. It's a Western academic professor went to see his Zend teacher in Japan and he wanted to know all about Zen and the teacher said, oh, let's have some tea. And while there the Zen teacher was serving tea, the professor kept asking lots of questions

about what is everything? What is that? And the then teacher kept pouring the tea until they overflowed the cup and was pouring all over the table, and the guy was saying, like, what are you doing. You're crazy, and the Zend teacher said, no, that's your mind. There's no space, everything overflowing, no room for anything fresh. So the beginner's mind is that kind of not so full cup. You know. Once we can cultivate that, you know, which is a

constant cultivation. We can bear witness to what's happening. We really take and like, wow, check out what's happening in this room. There are flowers, or the person looks like they're wincing in pain, or the homeless man on the street and how is he doing today? You know that we can actually arrive where we are. And to me, that's bearing witnesses to also bear it, to also receive the joys and sorrows, and it's intrinsic to compassion. To

really bear it. I think we have to first bear it, and if we can do that, then we can actually do loving action, which is the third part of our work, which is to be loving flows from compassion. So it flows from compassionate action like what actually needed here, or like the story of the woman oncology floor. You know, wow, I think what was most compassionate is that she just

needs someone to stay. She's testing. What I was able to see when I was bearing witnessed to her was that she was testing who's going to stay and really hear her. And so to me, the loving action in that case looked like staying and being curious about her sorrow and anger. I've heard you use the term operationalized meditation. I don't know if you just made that up one time on another interview or that's the term you actually use, but I heard it and I thought it was interesting.

So now you get to explain it. Well, that comes from the chaplaincy world where they talk about operationalizing your spirituality, and to me, what that means is how do you put it into action? So, for example, in zen meditation, we focus on a place called our horror, which is about two inches belower belly button, and we focus on our attention there. So it's a great way of using concentration and spaciousness. And so when you operationalize that, so

you sit on the cushion with that awareness. But then what about when you're in a relationship or you get off the cushion and you go on the street and someone falls in front of you. How do you return to the place that's soft and grounded in yourself? How do you operationalize that practice so that you can actually use it in relationship? Because to me, the beauty of any kind of spiritual practice is how does it help you become more intimate with who is in front of you,

including yourself? Excellent, Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on. It's been a great conversation and and thank you for the work that you do. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, take care 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. You can learn more about since a co and Paley Allison and this podcast at One you Feed dot Net Slash Cotion