Lodro Rinzler on Meditation for Anxious People

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, 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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Lodro Wrinsler, co founder of M and DFL Meditation. He has taught meditation for twenty years in the Buddhist tradition and is the award winning author of seven books. Lodro has spoken across the world at conferences, universities and businesses as diverse as Google, Harvard University, and the White House. His new book is Take Back Your Mind, Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times. Hi, Lo dro Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me back. I'm excited to be here with you. Erc. We're going to be talking about your new book that is called Take Back your Mind, Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times. But before we do that, let's start like we always 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. They

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. The granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandfather says, a 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. Yeah, thank you for asking, And I have to admit you know our time together. I think, gosh, we first recorded

a bazillion years ago. Yes, you know. It always stuck with me when we started talking about this, and it carried through into this book that you just mentioned, take Back your Mind Buddhist Advice r Anxious Times, because it was this realization that I don't think many of us have, which is that there's a choice, and so many of us wake up in the morning and the first thought is what do I need to do? What do I need to accomplish? What stressed? Should I already be trying to,

like Matt, navigate my life as opposed to WHOA WHOA? Whoa? My mind doesn't have to be in that state. Could I make a different choice? And I think that choice that you present of like what do I feed on a given day, is really a beautiful one. So that conversation we initially had really did feed into the early chapters of this book. In particular, there is this opening where I say, Hey, if you were going to choose between happiness and stress, what would you choose? I choose happiness.

Oddly enough, this has a hundred percent success rate your question, But it's like, of course, with your choose happiness, and in that moment, you just made that choice the same as the two wolf choice, right, like, what are we

choosing to feed? And you know, coming in from a meditation teacher background, not surprisingly there's a lot of meditation, a lot of shorter techniques that are not necessarily formal meditations, but all of them are directed to how can we continue to make that choice instead of just reacting and

so spinning out into the anxiety of the day. Could we actually start to move our mind out from the stories that bury us in that state into the pressent moment long enough to then start to choose to feed the wolf that's actually based in happiness. I appreciate the work that you've been doing because it really is highlighting to people like, oh, I get to work with my mind, I get to choose how I live my life. And I started going on so long, I'm just very excited

to talk to you. But you don't get an email from your boss that says, hey, here's all the things I need from you. By the way, please be stressed out the entire time you do it. No one turning to us and saying you should be anxious, You should be stressed all the time. We do it to ourselves, and once we realize that, we say, oh, I can choose the other wolf right, we do it to ourselves. But a lot of times it doesn't feel like that

choice is there, you know, I'm sure you do. I hear all the time people saying, well, I'm trying not to worry about this all the time. I'm trying not to just let these thoughts spin in my head over and over and night. I feel like I try and stop it, and then boom it's right back, and boom it's right back. So I think that, well, on one hand, we have a choice of which we feed. As we know about thoughts, there's an automatic nature to them. We don't really choose them. They just sort of show up.

I'll let you respond to that, and then we'll sort of dive into some of the points of the book. Yeah, I'm happy to that's I mean, it's a great point, because I think one of the key distinctions here is again meditation teacher talking, let's acknowledge the length through which I'm viewing the world. All these like mindfulness techniques that are coming out and are in the news. He says,

Everyone's like, oh, that's stress reduction. Which is a bit of a misnomer because it makes it sound like all of a sudden, you don't have to pay your taxes. You know, your rent doesn't come do like there's no stress. No, that boss doesn't actually expect anything. There's stressors in our life, there's thoughts that arise around them, and the key distinction here is how long do we hold ourselves in that state the stressor causes us stress? My landlord says the

rent is late. That stresses me out. I need to figure out I'm gonna pay the those fine. How much time do we actually spend I'm going to actually be purposeful in getting my finances norm And how much time do we spend walking around the world completely blind into what's going on around is because all we're doing is having a conversation with the landlord in our head. It's not benefiting us, it's not benefiting anyone. The bill isn't getting paid, but we're locking ourselves in. At that point,

it's no longer a stressor. It's a state of anxiety. So that's the thing. Can we unhook ourselves from that state of anxiety? The stories, the NonStop stories we tell ourselves around head long enough to say, oh, I can deal with the situation at hand, I can actually relate to the stressor I can relate to the person front of me, I can relate to my morning coffee, can be present for all of it. And actually that makes it feel a little bit less of awhelming. Also, yeah,

I agree. I think I make such a distinction between useful and non useful thoughts in this sense. Right, Like, there's a point if we use your example about the landlord and I don't have the money to pay the rent, there is a point that the thinking about that is very useful. I do need to think about it because I have a problem that needs to be solved, and I'm gonna put my mind on it, and I need

to solve the problem. Where things tend to go wrong is that we go well beyond useful there's nothing else to solve, or we've we've already come up with an answer, but we continue to obsess. I often give this example of it. It's a meditation class example. I was in a meditation class ones and we started doing the walking meditation, and the guy in the front, you know, the sort of the front of the circle was walking so slow. I mean it would have been a great meditation skit.

The problem was that nobody behind him could move. I could just see everybody was frustrated and they were standing there, and so I finally was like, I just went up to the guy and I said, excuse me, sir. You know, if you could move just a little bit quicker, everybody could kind of walk. And I was really uncomfortable doing and I didn't know what to do. So then we sit back down to meditating, and I got thirty minutes to think about what I've just done, and I'm like,

gos Shire, you know, should I have done that? And within a couple of minutes, I went, you know what, I'm just gonna go up to him. I towards I'll just say I'm sorry if that seemed rude, here's why I did it. I hope it didn't upset you. I'll just set it right. That's that problem solved, except of course, that I continue to ruminate on it for twenty five

more minutes. All that twenty five more minutes after I decided my course of action to me was in that not useful thinking because I didn't cover any new ground. I didn't uncover a new solution. I just fretted, and I think that's kind of what you're speaking to here when you're making that distinction, and you know, I'll kick the dead horse early on in the conversation, which is meditation really does help us do exactly what you just said,

which is to acknowledge, Oh, I've become repetitive. I've gotten completely lost in what if thinking, what if they think this about me? What if they are going to complain about me? Whatever? And we acknowledge those thoughts and we come back into something a little bit more stabilizing, such as the breath, and we can return into the present moment i e. Reality, And that's really helpful for unhooking

ourselves over and over again. The more people say, oh, I've got too many thoughts to meditate, you have a hundred thoughts pop up in a meditation says you have a hundred opportunities to retrain the mind not to chase after every anxiety producing story that comes up. And for people that are like, no, I'm bored with this meditation, than thank you. In terms of like on the spot techniques, you just named something that's in the book, which is

we could catch ourselves. You know, we're in the shower, we're on a long drive, we're washing the dishes, we're doing these one of stories. At some point we can ask one of two questions. I find the question is this helpful? Is this helpful? Oh no, this isn't actually helping me, This is actually causing you more stress. Somehow. Becoming that gently inquisitive shifts us, It unhooks us again long enough to come back into the present moment. And the other one is exactly what you just named. Is

this useful? It's not useful. Maybe it's useful the first two times, but not the fiftieth time. Cool, Maybe that's any time done hook myself. What's the distinction you're making between helpful and useful? It's absolute semantis. People just themselves

into one or the other. I find helpful because if I'm not actually helping myself and I'm not helping anyone, then for me personally, it's like, but I think the useful thing is, as you noted, maybe the first couple of times we say okay, yeah, well here's how I'm going to actually respond to that person. She's we're gonna do. We're gonna go talk to that person after just clear the air, and then after that we say, well, now

it's no longer useful. So there there's an acknowledgment that, you know, maybe there is information from our emotional states that we can learn. There's a whole two chapters, I guess in the book around actually being with some of the emotions like anxiety or fear or worry or whatever might be in that scenario. Can we be with it, learned from it, and move through it. You do make a distinction in the book between stress and anxiety, and we sort of covered it there, but maybe we could

just go through it again. How you're using those two terms. The way that I talked about it is exactly what I was referred to before the sense of there's stress in our life, and unfortunately this is like the bad news. Atleas give the bad news, which is stress exists if we somehow magically maneuver our work situation so it's no longer stressing us out. All of a sudden, we notice that there's something going on in our family situation that's

stressing us out. Family situations doing well, everyone's healthy over there, Okay, how about our romantic relationship? And so there's always going to be stressors and then out of those stressors arise anxiety, which is us holding ourselves in the state of stress. It is again, no one other than us saying here's what we're gonna do. The brands of prom solving device, so the brand goes into overdrive and says, I'm going to solve for any potential situation. And yet I don't

know if you've ever had this happen. It certainly happened to me. You know, you have this conversation coming up with a business partner, a friend or whatever, and you play through, Okay, here's what we're going to talk about. Here's what they're gonna say. I know what they're gonna say.

That's I'm gonna here's my counter, and here's what I'm going to If I've ever spent you know, minutes, two hours playing and replaying and prom solving around the conversation, never once has it ever gone the way I thought of one. Never once did they respond exactly as I thought, and vice versa. So again, if it's not helping us, we need to actually start to rewire the brain and retrain the brain not to hold ourselves in the state of anxiety. I agree with so much of what you

said there. I think that idea there's always something, you know, there's always some stresser, there's always a problem to solve. The writer, she's not a Buddhist writer, but she's a spiritual writer. Mary O'Malley. She has a phrase that I ever since she said it and it's probably been five years ago, is never you know, it's just always with me. She's like, the mind is a problem factory, and I was like, that's my brain. Solve one and it just

cranks out another. Your description you were just talking about, Like I've got this conversation coming up with somebody. I'm just like, if I could just get through that conversation, I get through that conversation, I feel relief for a couple of minutes, and then boom, new problem shows up. I'm like, Wow, okay, better get to work on solving that one. So you're right, if if we don't manage then for me, if I don't manage my mind, I stay in constant problem solving mode, or at least figuring

out mode. Like the brain is just always trying to figure something out. And that's not bad, except that it does sort of take me completely away from moments of joy, peace and what's actually happening. Yeah, that's exactly it. So going back to this choice, if I'm in the shower and I'm playing out these subs at the moment I'm actually able to hook myself, I'm like, oh, it's nice in here, the warm water hitting my skin is it

feels nice. When we actually drop some of the stories that we keep ourselves locked in pain around, we find that there's this great, wide open world that we can appreciate, that we can actually feel some sense of gratitude contentment. But again it's it's like a two step process here. That's step one unhook ourselves from that story so that we can come into the present moment long enough to

step to start to notice and appreciate something. And there's also like multiple chapters and there around gratitude practices, appreciation practices, even just simple things that we can do in this moment. We could say, oh, I never really appreciate that piece of art that's hanging above my desk, you know, kind of just rest there for a moment, give myself thirty seconds of contentment. And it sounds silly when I say thirty seconds of contentment, and any mus don't even do that.

We don't do that when we taste the morning coffee. You don't do that. When we're climb into bed with our spouse. You don't do that while we're petting the animal. You know, mentally, we're not there. So if we actually want to live a very full and meaningful life, we

actually have to be present for absolutely. So let's talk about getting better at this, because again, I know a lot of people listening, a lot of coaching clients I work with, will say, yeah, I get it, Okay, yes, I need to move out of my thinking brain and my problem solving brain and be a little bit more present. So fine, I do that, and it lasts for about a quarter of a second, and then I'm sucked back into the anxiety and it just feels like I can't

get out. And so let's talk about starting to unwind that attern because I think it's unrealistic to think that you or anybody is going to offer us like, well, you're just do this one little thing and that problem is going to just vanish. Right, So how do you go about, you know, walking somebody who says, you know what, I've got no ability to direct my mind where do I start? What do I do? I guess the first

is to disavow them of that belief. And don't get me wrong, I have close friends who love my work, even by the books, but they're like, yeah, I can't actually meditate, thank you, you know, and they have a belief that their mind is too busy, that the anxiety actually does get to control their life. And it's the first that really is to say, well, when we just do that, do you want choose happiness? You want to choose stress? Thing? That person makes a choice, they say happiness.

So can we actually just look for a thousand different ways of choosing happiness? And it starts with that. It can start with as simple as like just verbally saying it, and move into any number of tips, tricks, techniques. You know. There's, for example, what I call in the book the hiccup meditation, which is not formal term, but it's just Okay, I'm super stressed, this angry email lands in my inbox. What

do I do? I close the laptop and I take three deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth. Again a thirty second situation, and yet it really radically shifts our focus. Now here's the thing, mindfulness, meditation, this whole thing where we could do it for twenty minutes whatever, where we notice the stories come up. We acknowledge when we come back that literally trains the brain. But along the way there's going to be little winds that we

need to celebrate. So even if we have those three deep breaths and all of a sudden we feel a little bit like the body's calm or the mind is a little calmer because of the thirty second intervention. Now we know we can have intervention. Now we know we can have times of relaxation that we don't have to always be in stress. So where do we pledge our mental allegiance. Do we pledge it to developing more stories around stress, or do we start to say, well, no, it's not a load row or an eric or anyone

saying here's how you're going to change your life. It's me. I just had that experience. You know. When we're coming out of the Buddhist tradition we talk about faith, faith is often referring to our own experience. I have a moment of relaxation while I'm practicing meditation, while I'm doing the three D press, whatever it is in that moment, it's me I've discovered that and I liked it, and I can go further with it. The faith is that I have an experience that I am confident existed that

I can go further. And if I had one moment of relaxation, maybe I can make it too. It's two moments of relaxation in a day, maybe I can make it five. And we just started to build our life in this direction. And again, the bad news here is that it isn't a quick fix. It's like a constant working and reworking with the mind. Sometimes it feels like we just wade into the ocean or trying to push back the tide of their own two hands. That's where we all start, don't get me wrong, And I get it.

A lifelong meditation practitioner, I've been doing meditation for thirty plus years, and only in the last few years I really really get serious and say, okay, not just during meditation, but in my post meditation experience, I eat the rest of my waiting hours. I got to really address this otherwise it's going to take over my life. And it's that it's like, once we make a real commitment, we start to notice how anxiety and all the what of

stories come up. And there's so many different modalities expanding beyond meditation, therapy, all sorts of exercises, journaling, things like that that can help take us from different angles of working with the mind and bring us into the present moment long enough to again choose happiness. I love that idea of what am I pledging allegiance too, because I do see a lot of arguing for our own limitations. There's a lot of arguing for why anxiety gets to win.

There's a lot of arguing. I see that in a lot of people. Instead of, like you said, sort of saying no, I'm gonna I'm gonna put my my allegiance, my faith, and my energy over here, that says, no, that's not the way it has to be. You know, it feels that way a lot of the time, but it doesn't have to be that way. And little bit

by little bit, I can reclaim the mind. And I think that for me, that's so much of it is just lots and lots of things where my favorite phrases is a little by little, a little becomes a lot, And so ten minutes of meditation here thirty seconds of reclaiming my mind here, five minutes of breathing here. I mean little by little, because most of us are not in a position where we go, well, I'm just gonna go away for three years to the monastery and train my mind, and I'll then have a little bit of

a steadier place to come from. We have to we have to carve it out a little bit by little bit, and to go completely different analogy. You know, if we are a vote and we set off from one dock and we're going to sail across the ocean, and the way that our momentum, the way we were raised, the way their schooling happened, are work situa, aation or living situation. All of that has come together so that we are on course to live in land of complete anxiety. But

I'm not saying turn the ship around. I'm saying we're turning this ship one degree at first, two degrees, and then what happens as we sail over the course of the ocean, we end up going to a dramatically different land. A friend and person who admire very much Dan Harris wrote the brilliantly titled book ten Percent Happier, Right like that's it's like ten percent less dressed out, ten percent more engaged in our life and in more present and

more appreciative. Like that's where we're going. If we took one percent of our day and said, no, I'm not going to chase after anxiety. I'm just going to hook myself a little bit, coming to the present moment, sit my coffee, take the doctor, walk and be like again, all this is in the book to where it's like there's ten thousand different ways we can beyond just a simple meditation technique that we could start to retrain the

mind to be present, not to chase after anxiety. That one percent today means all of a sudden, we're one degree in a completely different course than living our life based anxiety to degrees, and it goes over time. We turned into months intern in two years, and the people I've worked with over the last twenty years I've been teaching meditation now it's a situation where I've seen them over and over again. Say, for example, here we are

in the midst of the pandemic. I can't imagine how I would be able to handle this without actually having this established meditation practice. With that the ability to work with my mind, it would be completely overwhelming me. Which is actually a big part of what inspired this book, which is there's so many people who aren't working with their mind in any way, shape or from the mind is working them is taken over and it's overwhelming them.

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to explore two areas here. I want to talk about what you just mentioned a few minutes ago, this idea of I can't meditate, because I think that's a really important one. And then I'd like to explore some of the on the spot practices that you recommend. I mean, my obsession over the last couple of years has been um something I call spiritual habits. But spiritual habits is finding those on the spot practices things we do in the midst of our lives that allow us to change.

Not things that we have to take time away from and go do, like meditation, which is critical, but things that we do as we're going about our day. So let's start first with I can't meditate, my brain is too busy. Yeah, I think we have to start small. And there's also this part of the book which is uh, I keep saying, here's something that you can do. And by the way, if you go to a load room into dot com lash anxiety, you get like me talking to you through this. So a lot of times people

say I can't do it. And I watched the thing on YouTube and I put it down and just felt like too much to have supportive guides, have people that can talk to I made a commitment when my first book came out nine years ago that I was gonna respond to everyone who ever wrote to me about my books. And it does keep me ridiculously busy, but I still do it. People say, you know, Lord Romnt team, like

I'm the team books. Um, you know it's me. So when people are like I can't do it, if they've taken the time to read one of my books, I can take the time to actually help you guide them a little bit. I'm a bit of a tangent, but like I'm there for whoever is listening, wants to explore the book wants to actually learn these techniques. It's not like I'm just a podcast guest. I'm happy to engage.

All of these things are now like recorded and their live and we can actually talk about like someone's going to talk you through this. And it can start with five breaths, like we could just count five cycles of the body breathing. Maybe the mind wanders during that. We try it again, but it's just we've got to start with a bite sized thing. And as I talked about earlier, that's how we breed confidence. Oh I was able to be with my breath for five cycles. Five in breadth

of operas. Okay, no, I can move to ten. Now I can sit for ten minutes. You know. And often what happens with long time meditattion, so they look over their shoulder. They don't know how they've changed through from the last people to acknowledge it. It's almost like they're wading into the water centimeter by centimeter, and then all of a sudden they have no idea what how they're up to their neck in it. It's just this gradual change. I've seen it happen over and over again for many years.

I co founded a network of meditation studios that particularly the pandemic as have now closed down, called Mindful, and there are all these sorts of people and they'd come in with friends and I would say, what, you know, what's going on? How do you two know to learn? Because you know it's so interesting. We'll say. The guy's name is Ethan. Ethan here. You know, he was always such a jerk, and yet you know he's a longtime friend.

We go to lunch every Tuesday. And I know as they started listening to me more, he started following up on things and actually really caring about like what we had talked about, because he was sort of hearing me more. And as someone I was like, what's going on with you? Because I don't know just because you've been doing this meditation thing. And then of course he said, yes, I guess that must be it. That's the only thing that's changed. He didn't know that he was becoming kinder or a

better listener or any of it. And now she wants to do it right because she saw the change in someone else. So I do think that again, surrounding ourselves with people who are going to support us in these endeavors could be really helpful. It doesn't have to be a load of a rentler. It can be going to a local meditation center or meditation studio. It could be you know, there's so many online communities, including my own these days, that you can actually start to work with

a teacher and have someone hold your hand. And it's not like there's certainly not me, but many of the people I often refer how individuals over to. It's like there's some guru on the top of the mountain. Their individuals who are just a little bit further down the path than you, who might have been doing this and are still so close to where you are that they

understand exactly what you're going through. So if I walked into a room full of meditators of all ages and ranges and backgrounds, said, who here thinks that they're the worst meditator of all time? I would put good money on every hand going up and that if it's everyone, then there's no one right, So we sort of all have to be in it together. And I think that's why I'm pushing the community support and teacher support during all this. Yeah, I love that idea that everybody would

think they're the worst meditator. Ever, because you're in your head and you know, like, well, jeez, I am trying to stay focused on this thing, and yet my mind wanders anywhere from every two or three seconds too, you know, best case scenario, every two or three minutes. Maybe maybe it extends a little bit longer. But I think when we realize that that's what happens, but that's just the process,

then we can relax with it. And I think that's one of the biggest things for me with what change my meditation practice, and I've seen change a lot of other people's meditation practices, is to stop judging it and just to go, yeah, okay, so yes, I thought, you know, thirty five times in a ten minute meditation, because if we feel like we're failing, nobody likes to do something they feel like they're really bad at, like, you know, so I'm like, well, if I'm failing every ten seconds,

I'm going to develop an aversive relationship. And if I've developed an inversive relationship, it's gonna be hard to stick with it. It's exactly it. And I think there's so many areas of our life already where we're unkind to ourselves. Meditation in my mind should be a judgment free zone. You know, if we even look at like the classic definitions around mindfulness that are bandied about in the West, it's often that we are present to what is currently

occurring dot dot dot without judgment. So why are we judging ourselves in this practice? Like, there's actually a beautiful moment in meditation. That's such a giggy thing to say, but most people like, oh, this trains me to be present. It also trains me to be kind because this moment I drift off and I catch myself. What do I do with that? Do I say, you jerk? Why are you so bad at this? You're bad at everything? No surprised that you'd have your mind? You're not the person

that commending. Or do I actually infuse that sense of friendliness? Hey, it's not a big deal. Happens to everyone, generate thoughts all day long. It's what the mind does. Not a big deal. Come on back, relax. That moment is planting one of two possible seeds to come back to our our parable right, Like, am I planning the seeds for aggression towards myself? That will, ultimately, if I don't feel good about myself, lead to me causing harmon and causing

aggression towards others? Been there no that one? Or that I've gradually gotten better at over time, planting the seeds of deep kindness toward ourselves. And that's the moment that we say, oh wait, I actually have a deep well of loving kindness for myself. Then I can actually go and offer that to others. I love that. I think that's a great thing to really draw attention to. Is that that moment really matters? What do I do? How do I respond to my mind having wandered off again?

You know? And it's so funny. I've I've said this on the show many times. I know that I heard meditation teachers were saying, your mind's going to wander, not a big deal, Be friendly to yourself, bring it back. I know that's what they were saying. And yet I don't know why it took me twenty or as I feel like, to really get that message, to really get that that moment that my mind wandered, the more friendly I could be to myself and the more relaxed about

it I could be the better at what was. I almost feel like we can't go too far in stressing that I'm with you on that, and you know, maybe even to answer the other question that you asked about. So I have short practices. You know. One of the things that's in the book is just a mindfulness of emotions practice, because often when we feel something like anxiety, stress, fear, whatever it might be, we started to say, oh, something

wrong with me, I'm bad. Now, these are emotions that come up, and we could actually learn to be with them that we're not somehow broken or bad, are or wrong for feeling what we feel. And this particular phrase was bandied about by Joseph Goldstein, who's one of the hunders Insite Meditation Society, wonderful organization here in the West, and he says, um that when we noticed this, we can just say it's okay to feel this. So the instruction, if I may, is to drop the story, feel the feeling.

And by that it's like, oh, you know, here, I am raither in the meditation practice. Or let's say, actually, perhaps more accurately, since we're talking in this realm in my day to day life, and I'm either beating myself up or feeling bad, I should have said that thing last night. Oh God, I feel weird can I drop the story and actually come into feeling the energy of the feeling itself, can actually feel it in the body

and just rest with that. When we aren't throwing fuel on the fire of our emotions, it tends to just naturally burn out. And that's how we do it. The fuel, of course, is the stories that keep us locked there. What if I do this, But what if maybe I should tell them that we drop, that we feel the feeling. The fire naturally just does its things like holding our hands to the warmth of it, feeling it as opposed to add in fuel. So that's one I'm just even

acknowledging on the spot. It's okay to feel this, dropping the story, feeling the feeling, That's a really important one terms of offering ourselves a sense of kindness. M One of the greatest loves of my life that I've had forever besides Chris is reading great children's books can open up new worlds for discovery, and with Literati Kids, your child can explore uncharted places every month with spell binding stories handpicked by experts. Literati Kids is a try before

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So I love to get folks like you on and explore these things in a little bit more depth. Because drop the storyline, feel the feeling. We all get it and like why it makes a lot of sense. The challenge that I have in my own life with it sometimes is it's like I try and drop the storyline,

feel the feeling. I drop into the feeling for about a quarter of a second, and then boom, I'm back up at the story and then I'm down and I'm you know, and it goes back and forth, and maybe sometimes I even managed to stay in the feeling a little bit, but when I come back up, the story is still They're just doing its thing. Is it just that the fuel takes a while to burn out? And this is something we have to just back to that word of practice. We just have to keep trying. It's

exactly it. Yeah, And I think I don't get me wrong, I wish that we could wave a magic wand and all of a sudden say, this makes the story disappear. Anyone who says that though my experience is not accurate, I was gonna swear on your show, I'm not gonna do that, but you know it's not accurate. We do have to gradually retrain the mind. We spend decades, many of us saying I'm just gonna let the mind run around like a wild animal. And now we're trying to

tame the wild animal. Were trying to say, you know, it's one back, let's let's come on inside, let's get warm, you know, like it's it's hard because the animal doesn't know what we're even talking about it first, but we say, you know, come on, if you would treat At some point they say what I like treats and they come back in and and they run off and they do their wild thinging come on, and you know, so we're

actually going back to what we're talking before. We really do have to be quite gentle with ourselves, like there's no whipping the mind is to shape. This is not a book about beating ourselves up to the point of mind submitting to us. It's it's actually just befriending ourselves. It's just been really kind to ourselves and to the best of our ability, moving the mind in the direction that actually feels like what is that treat? You know?

First almost it's like a gratitude practice every morning when I wake up, before I put my feet on the bed, before I look at the phone, before I do a thing, I just rattle off some of the things I'm grateful for. And it's the world's shortest contemplation practice. It's a minute. But what am I grateful for? I sit with that question. I noticed what arises from within my own mind. Sometimes there's a few things. Sometimes there's many. Sometimes I'm surprised.

Sometimes it's very basic things. I'm healthy right now, there's a rouful from my head. There's quiet in my home right now. It doesn't have to be, you know, something hyper specific, that's you know, we're we've always want to know. It's just starting the day by being present long enough to appreciate what's right under our nose. And then what happens when I swing my feet over there and they

touched the floor. I actually I am already starting my day, not from a place of stress, from a place of appreciation. So simple things like that that are in the book as well. So let's talk about a couple more on the spot practices. You've got a couple more you could share with this along those lines. Another question I think is really helpful. What can I enjoy right now? You know,

we're going through a day. You know, we're sort of bousing between this meeting and that meeting and this thing, and then there's a gap, and it could be the simple gap of you know, when we get off the line today, there's going to be a gap, and it becomes what can I enjoy right now? Can we train the mind to just ask that question again? You're looking

over at this painting that's above my desk. You know that my wife and I got, and it's something that we saved up for, and there's something really sort of sweet about having like a grown up piece of art work here, you know, and there's deep appreciation for the whole experience. It's that simple. Well, there's flowers over there, there's fresh flowers. They perk up the room. They uplifted me.

I feel blifted looking at them. So what can I enjoy right now is a really important question, particularly for those moments that are as I'm saying like gaps gap moments like I'm in an elevator commuting, you know, I'm in the waiting room, well before the doctor calls you in, whatever it is. Those are moments that we could just start to notice, what can I appreciate right now? What kind of enjoying right now? That's a really helpful one in my own experience, alongside the what am I grateful for?

And then there's one that I probably should have mentioned for the people who are still like this guy's you know, full of it and you know I can't actually ever meditate or any of it. There's a practice in here called the thought party, which I love, which is um so I think I was introduced you when I was eighteen years old, and it's the idea of not trying to stop the thoughts but actually to invite them all in.

It's like to get it to the point where it's almost extreme where we're sitting like and again, you could be in the waiting room. This doesn't have to be a formal meditation, but we're like, oh my gosh, someone so said this, and I'm gonna do that, and then after this, I've got to do that thing, and then all of a suddenly say, let me invite in all the thoughts, let me see if I can think every

thought that could possibly think. And it becomes very very very very very big, and there's someone it pops because it's just like, it becomes so ludicrous that we start to develop a sense of humor about it. And that's been my experience, has been the experience of any number of meditations students that I work with, that if we get to the point where we say I'm just gonna make it really, really really big, at some point it

becomes ludicrous. My favorite example of this is when I start talking to someone around work and they say, oh, if you know, sort of drop the ball on this project, and there's so much anxiety around it. Okay, let's been this out, let's do it. If they are mad that I dropped the ball on this project, then not going to get a bad review? What happens if you get a bad review. I get a couple of bad reviews, I'm gonna lose my job. What happens if you lucy job,

I'm never gonna get another job like this again? What happens even never get a job, Well, then I'm gonna lose my mortgage, I'm gonna be destituted. And it always ends with people living in a box on the street. It could be I, you know, sent an email late at night and my boss is gonna be bothered them and it ends there, you know. So it's like at some point we almost have to laugh and be like, oh,

this isn't reality. So we make it big enough so that we realize how far we are from reality, and then it pops and then we can come home to reality again. So that's another one that I think could be helpful for people that are like I have too many thoughts to meditate, think all of them, bring them all in, and then they come back home to reality. Feel the breath for a moment. See if that's helpful.

One of the notions that really underlies Buddhism as a whole, but is particularly important in Shambala Buddhism, which I think is at least the path that you spend a lot of time, and I don't know if you would describe yourself as part of that path. Now, is basic goodness? So explained to us what basic goodness is and how does it help us in dealing with anxiety? Yeah, it's

a great question. This term basic goodness is really profound, and it's something that was developed by children trump or a bishet who is a tobent Buddhist teacher, and it's you know, very well known from bringing these teachings here to the West. But we look at other traditions, even within Tibetan Buddhism, for example, we could sometimes say, oh, this is Buddha nature, the fact that underneath all of these stories were inherently awake. That's just who we are.

The Buddha didn't attain some sort of enlignment out there. He just discovered that he was already wakeful and developed a relationship to that. We two can do that. And then the famous contemporary of drunk Mbichase Zuki Roshi, would refer to it as universal nature or original mind or you know, perhaps famously known in his book n Mind Beginner's Mind. It's the sense of complete openness and wakefulness that is inherent to all human beings. So that's what

we're talking about. But I do like the term basic goodness because basic is not sort of um swearing apologies, like it's not like a basic bitch. It's not like, you know, we have this term here, it's like, you know, it's not uncouth, it's a sense of fundamental it's foundational to who we are. It's inherent, primordial innate to who we are. So it's a part of us. And the goodness is not a good versus bad star wars thing, right, that's not what it is. It's wholeness, completeness, like we're

basically okay. And I think most of us walk around and saying I'm not basically okay, I'm basically messed up. So this view can be really radical and profound for people who may not have contemplated this possibility before that inherently I'm okay, I'm not basically a mess We can mess up at times, we can be completely blocked from our goodness, our basic goodness are put in nature and act confused. I have, Lord knows I have. I've made

many mistakes, but that's not who we are. And in those moments, can we say, oh, I can acknowledge it. I can say I don't want to do that anymore. I can say, can I even hopefully make some sort of reparation in connection to these people who have fine good None of that negates our basic goodness. And this is is horrible for most people right now because they're like, well, surely you don't mean that you and on people basic, but surely you don't mean this politician has basically, surely

you don't mean this person who committed this atrocity. And the unfortunate thing, according to the Buddhist view, is that we actually all possess basic goodness and some of us just act really, really really eving confused. So we can't, unfortunately control who has complete access to their basic goodness who's blocked from it. But we can work with our

own minds and hearts. And that's the beautiful thing that on one hand, yes, we're treating the disease of anxiety in this book and this conversation, but in the other it's like, what do we find underneath the stories that keep us loft in anxiety? Own goodness, our own wholeness. And again, this is not a low driven by saying

this is what you're gonna experience. Here's a philosophy. When we are able to relax with ourselves in the moment, maybe this during meditation, maybe we're just there with the breath for a moment, we say, oh, I feel okay, I'm a whole, complete good in this moment. That's it. It's not you know, I'm shooting laser beams out of my eyeballs. I'm just a whole, complete good in this moment. Then you know it for yourself, and then you can

develop more and more of a relationship to it. As far as I found in my limited experience with these teachings, the point that we started on the path is that moment where we say, oh, I can actually relax, I can be with myself and who I am is basically good.

And then the entirety of the path going forward is can I develop deeper relationship and confidence in that experience and be more in touch with that as supposed to, more in touch with my anxiety and the fruition that would be that we would leave to life living and interacting with people through that lens. I would agree with you. That's my understanding of of the path. Also, I'm more

of a Zen practitioner these days. But the same thing, Yeah, everything you said there is you know, it's that's that basic idea. It's already here. What we're seeking is already here. It's rereadings in my beginner's mine, the other day and Suzuki Roshi talks that we're not attaining enlightenment, right, We're not attaining Buddha of nature or any of it. It's sort of like saying, I'm going to go attain a box of cereal from the grocery store when my coupverards

full of it. You know, it's right there, it's already here. I don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to get anything. I'm actually already, it's already. You're waiting for me to die. Yeah, the spiritual teach your audio. Shanti once did this thing one of his retreats I was at, and he said, all right, I can't remember whether he had a stand up or not, but for the purposes of it, let's imagine everybody stands up and he says, okay, now take one step closer to yourself, and you suddenly

realized like, well, I can't. I I'm as close as I can be. I'm here because everybody's prepared to move, and all of a sudden, tork closer to yourself, You're like, well, you know the end. Then we talked about the backwards step. You know, the backwards step, which is just stepping inside instead about beautiful. As I mentioned before, the book is called Take Back your Mind, Buddhist Advice for Anxious Times, And not only is it something that you are publishing yourself,

but you're also doing something special with the proceeds. Say a little bit about that. Yeah. So the beauty of this going through the new imprint that I'm founding with some colleagues called Dharma Club Publications, is that we can actually determine where the proceeds go. And I think sometimes when you go through a larger publisher, I'll just say, often, uh, you don't often realize that the author gets very little of the proceeds and it goes to everyone that generates

the book, which is totally fair. But our current situation, you know, with the pandemic, we want to get this book out very quickly, and we wanted it to help the most people. So part of that is that all of the proceeds, which is, you know, everything that is not going directly into the production of the book, the vast majority of every dollar that's spent when someone buys it goes to one of two charities that split between

the two. The first is the Feeding America Organization, which is food banks around America for those who are in need. And the other is the Loveland Foundation, which is a really wonderful and beautiful organization that is committed to offering therapeutic support to black and brown women girls. This is a funny story that I reached out to both organizations.

I said, you know, I would love to offer the proceeds from this book so that when people buy it, they're helping others in additions helping themselves, and both organizations were delighted and small world situations that the currency secutive director of the level And Foundation had read The Buddha Walks into a Bar a number of years before and got inspired and got into philanthropy and then as this organization and never would have predicted that one. But I

think it's a really sweet story. So I'm hoping that similarly, this book has ramifications that actually do really help people, both the readers and then hopefully we can raise a lot of good money for these excellent organizations. That is a great story that is really wonderful. Well load Grow, thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's always a pleasure. I think we've had two full interviews and you've come on a couple of times for

our little, short, little moments. I'm happy to have you all. Always enjoy talking, so thank you so much. Hey, my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are

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