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That's helixleap.com slash Tim with Helix better sleep starts now. Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year
anniversary which is insane to think about and past one billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best. Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I
consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together and for the bios of all guests you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo and now without further ado please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up Elizabeth Gilbert the number one New York Times
bestselling author of 10 books including Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic. Creative living beyond fear which together have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide and her latest book City of Girls. You can find Elizabeth on Twitter at Gilbert Liz. I thought I would begin with the alpha wolf if you don't mind for those who don't know this is a moth talk slash presentation story slash tear jerker slash laugh out loud at moments tail and I saw that raise birthday her 60s birthday
was just a few days ago. Could you speak to who Ray was a little bit of context and then how to how you prepared for that there's quite literally nothing I would rather talk about than raise. So you started in a good place for me so Ray a laus was quite simply the love of my life. She and I were friends for 17 years I was married for most of that and just very slowly and very quietly
over the years fell in love with her. She was a lesbian Syrian Detroit raised rock and roll hairdresser filmmaker author musician who had always wanted to live just right on the edge of life.
She had been a speedball heroine junky on the Lower East Side New York City in the 1980s was in Rikers Island was in Bellevue was in various rehabs and rehabilitation was homeless was oh god she'd had such a story life and then she finally put it all down and she spent 19 years clean and sober and when I met her she was on the other side of that recovery and she was the strongest most extraordinary person I ever met and as I said in that speech that I gave in that
talk that I gave at the moth about her which I shared a year after she died. She was the most powerful person in every room that she ever walked into and I adored her she was my guide she was my teacher she was the rock the ground underneath my feet she was the one person in the world who always made me feel safe and she didn't just make me feel safe. The feeling that everyone had when Ray walked into the room was oh thank god Ray is here everybody's safe.
You know that's what the alpha is right the alpha is the person who keeps the entire pack safe and because she was the most powerful person in the room what I always knew when she walked in was not only would she make sure I was okay if anybody was praying on me in any way she would make
sure the predator was okay dude like she had everybody under her wing to make sure that people were all right you know I'm she just had this way of handling humans like nothing I've ever seen in my entire life and I absolutely adored her and I was a loyal wife and I loved my husband and the
three of us were really good friends and there was no way in the world that I was ever going to cross that line I just kept that love very quietly in my heart and we all just had a beautiful life together until the day that she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer
and I got a phone call from her saying that she'd gotten this diagnosis and that they said she had six months to live and from that point forward it was no longer possible for me to keep that love hidden and very swiftly after that I had a conversation with my husband and said I need to go
and be with Raya and no one was surprised he wasn't surprised by it he'd seen it for years and he very in one of the greatest acts of courage and dignity I've ever seen anybody do he very graciously stepped out of the way and we separated and I went to be with her and I was with her
until the end of her life so that's who Raya was and that's who she was to me as for that speech that I gave at the moth that talk what I was challenged to do in 12 minutes was to try to get over the net who that person was the most epic human being I'd ever met and I decided the way to do that
was to tell a few stories about the experience of her death and dying which were mostly based on ideas that I had about how she was going to become very helpless and I was going to have to be her hero and protect her versus the reality of the situation which is that she never became helpless
she remained the alpha in the entire situation she was a really hard patient to take care of for that reason she absolutely refused to cooperate with my version of some airy fairy soft hippie dab that I wanted to give to her and instead she died the way she lived like the badass
fierce unrelenting warrior that she was and it was brutal and it was beautiful and she never stopped taking us by surprise right even up till the last second and the point is going to come where that truth is going to become bigger than your plans and that extended into the way that I
tried to manage I'm using air quotes now managed Raya's death I also went into her death with a plan we're going to have it in lightened death we're going to have a real hospice death we're going to bring grief bereavement experts in here to talk I mean I laugh now because it's like you know
it's just Raya like who's such a biker chick it's like you're going to bring a fucking grief bereavement expert in here like to talk to me you know like giving a break I'm going to go down watching football eating chicken wings and smoking you know like this is like I'm no interest
in that so she just way laid that plan completely and died on her own terms from just thinking of something that a hospice nurse said to me because we were cracking up one day I can't remember what it was about but there's a lot of anybody has ever been by it you know there's a lot of humor
that shows up and it is literally gallows humor you know it really is like I've got a picture of me and Raya's ex-wife and Raya's ex-girlfriend who were the two women who showed up like champions at the end of her life to help to take care of me and help to take care of her because they
they loved her so much it was also just such a factor of what a boss Mac Daddy Raya was that she had like every woman who'd ever loved her came back to take care of her when she was dying you know and to take care of each other and there was a lot of laughter between the three of us about just
like handling this force of nature as she was dying like can we survive it right she's the opposite of a good patient you know and so there was a lot of humor in there and the hospice nurse was laughing with this one day and I said to her it's amazing that you can laugh given the line of work
that you're in spends her life working with people at the worst most painful parts of their lives at the end of their lives and she said we have a little motto we say if you can't laugh at death get out of show business you shouldn't be a hospice nurse if you can't let you won't survive
and I'm sure that's you and I are talking right now in the midst of the COVID crisis and I've been thinking about that I've been thinking about the nurses that I know and I'm imagining that you know there's some dark ass humor happening in those hospitals right now there has to be in
the same way that soldiers would tell you about the humor that happens when you're under fire like there absolutely has to be or you you simply won't be able to survive it so I will say that the humor is there in those moments I mean right after Ray had died I mean we had been through such hell
with her and her death was not as I say it was it was brutal you know one minute after she took her last breath her last horrible breath Gigi her ex-wife stood up brushed off her hands and goes okay so that's
done I'm gonna be on the next flight out of here like it's two o'clock you know it was hilarious but it was also just like what Ray would have done you know okay you guys good we good we done here you know we just all like rolled over laughing in the middle of our tears you know and I feel like
that humor has to be shot through the entirety of your life or else you really are not gonna make it through earth school because earth school is a hard hard school and it's a hard assignment and and I I think the humor is quite literally grace let's pair stillness with awe for a moment I've
also read that there are times when you'll love a sentence so much that you read that you'll start clapping by yourself where you happen to be reading and I would love to know what type of writing what writers have done that for you if you could name even a few of them and what it is what are
the ingredients that lead to that one woman standing ovation often in the backtops well they say that great art has to contain two features it has to be both surprising and inevitable so that's great that's good that's good yeah that's paradox is that you have to go oh my god I didn't see
that coming and that is the only way that could go I'm thinking of the ending of breaking bad that whole show but like the last moments of breaking it spoiler alert yeah so I love you've had many years to watch it now people I won't tell you the ending I will just tell you
that I also stood up and applauded at that because it felt both surprising and inevitable so that's the feeling you want your whole nervous system to kind of be like oh my god I didn't know that could be and yes of course you know it had to be and now it's rearranged my DNA in a certain way where I can't be the same now poetry tends to do it the poets have this amazing ability to to put that into such a tiny space where it's like the encapsulation of inevitability and surprise so I'll
give you an example of one piece that I love which is a poem by T.S. Eliot called East Coker that has gotten me through some of the darkest times in my life some of those moments in your life where you don't know what to do right where a human being and this is where I think human life gets
really interesting what happens to people when they reach the end of their power because especially in this culture where we live in a culture that says you should be able to power through anything life is it will very generously remind you that you cannot and it will very generously break you
at times and very generously show you as we're seeing right now in the covid virus we're like oh actually there's a limit to our powers here and it's very humbling and what do you do when you're at the end of your power so the poem East Coker is one and it gets me every single time how do you
use both cocker C-O-K-E-R C-K-E-R yeah East Coker and there's a part of the poem where T.S. Eliot writes wait without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing there is yet faith but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the
waiting wait without thought for you are not ready for thought and so the darkness shall be light and the stillness the dancing that's a stand-up and applause moment yeah that is a stand-up and applause moment and sometimes when people I know are grieving or they're stuck or they're broken
or everything has been taken away I will give them that poem because that says what I don't know how to say better than that which is right now you're being asked to wait without hope for anything that you hope for would be the wrong thing and wait without love anybody who's been going through
a horrible break I'll give them that poem like you're being asked to wait without love right now because love would be love of the wrong thing and anybody who's a beginning meditator I give them that poem because of the line wait without thought for you are not ready for thought you don't have the wisdom right now to have the correct thoughts so you need to wait without thought and then you will see if you do that and they're still safe but the faith is in the waiting the faith is in waiting
without hope waiting without love waiting without thought that's the definition of faith sitting in the darkness in that waiting and then you will see how the darkness becomes light and the stillness becomes dancing but only every time in order to have it you've got to give up hope and you've got
to give up love and you've got to have faith only in the waiting so that's a line that makes me applied another author who gets me is another poet who gets me is Walt Whitman and Walt Whitman saying describing himself in a song of myself describing himself as standing both in and out of the
game watching and wondering at it and also being involved in it that description of he watching himself walk through life both in and out of the game is again something that I think of as the highest point of enlightenment can you engage with your life can you be involved with your life can
you feel all of the feelings can you fall in love can you lose can you fail can you grow can you succeed can you buck up and also watch it from a little bit of a detached distance and marvel at the game itself so that line gets me and then as far as fiction writers go I'm so in love with Hillary
Mantell who wrote the Wolf Hall trilogy about Henry the eighth and won the Booker Prize for the first two installments of it and then the third one just came out and the way that I've been describing it to people is imagine if all three godfather movies were as good as the first two
imagine if godfather part three was just as good as one and two that's how good Hillary Mantell is that the third installment and I'm reading that right now and I'm just it's just a bow down moment you know as an artist there are a lot of writers who I look at their work and I admire
them but I see how they did it because it's almost like a carpenter looking at another carpenter's work and being like oh okay see how you did the joints there and you hid that hinge there and that's cool I see it well done you know and then there are people I look at their work and I'm like I
literally don't believe that you're human I don't understand how you can even do this and that's how I feel about Hillary Mantell writing about 16th century England in a way that is so intimate and so you cannot read that book without thinking this is exactly how it happened and I don't know
how she doesn't I'm happy to never be able to do that I'm just lucky to live on earth at the same time as somebody who can I would push back a little bit and I would say that you have a rare ability to blend readability with wordsmithing sentences that are very memorable and really
strike a chord I don't think that is easy to do and I would say Kervana is one who comes to mind but it's not easy to combine those two things and it made me crack a smile when I was reading about you appreciating sentences the quote from you at the end of this portion of the interview was
it's part of the reason that the arts are around to remind us that we're not just here to pay bills and die that we're also here to get excited and feel wonder and to feel awe that's easy to read but it is something that makes me go fuck god damn you're totally right I need more
wonder and awe I'm paying too many bills so I do want to applaud that ability and I'd love for you to speak to what else you've learned from Martha Beck what are some of the other things that have really stuck for you I'll give you one more Martha Beck line that I love
she says there are certain moments of your life where you're standing in front of a bonfire and you have to jump you just have to jump into it and you have to be willing to burn away everything that you've been taught and everything that you're afraid of and just do it and she said and I
remember her telling me this was such a glee she goes it's such a cool moment that you're in and she said this to me as I was leaving my marriage and going to be with Ray she said that these bonfire moments are so fantastic because there's only two things that can happen when you jump into a bonfire
one of them is that you find out that it wasn't actually a bonfire that you were afraid that it was going to burn you to pieces and it actually didn't it wasn't as scary as you thought you did it you took the leap it turned out to be kind of like warm and soft and easy so it was no big deal
the other thing that can happen is that it is a bonfire and you are incinerated and your entire life is incinerated by it and that's even better because then you get to be reborn as a phoenix on the other side completely new so either way you win so there's no reason not to you either jump
in and find out it was nothing or you'll jump in and you'll be destroyed and that's awesome too when I say Martha doesn't play by the game that's what I mean like that's what I mean about she's not even in the arena that we would call any sort of normal way of living and that reason she's then one of the top three most influential people in my entire life. You're like Martha do we go
left left right or straight she's like we go up you're like what? How do we do that? That's incredible let's talk about the integrity check that sternum to naval aerial have to come up with some sort of pranium like label that makes it a little easier to their confidence I think is it's a better compass there we go that's where it's located yeah when you do say an integrity check and I had read that when rayo was sick for instance you began deleting or archiving emails without responding as
a bit of a treat to yourself and okay deleting goodbye and when you say now check in with yourself and decide to say no to something let's just to make it easier make it concrete via email you get an invitation from a friend you do actually really like with something that could plausibly
advance your career or be fun but you check in with yourself and it's like no this isn't a yes how do you phrase your nose or declines do you have any particular go to language that you like to use I just want to make sure everybody knows that this is not easy I don't want to have any illusions
for anybody that this is simple and the closer the relationship the harder it is the closer and more intimately I'm involved with somebody the more stakes there are for me and the harder it is for me to tell the truth and that feels like it should be you know there's a paradox the people
you love the most should be the people that you're able to be the most honest with well no because they're the people who you want to hurt the least that's where it's really really hard there's a couple layers of it I now treat my inbox like it's my home because I think it's an extension of my
home so if somebody walks into my home uninvited and announces themselves and doesn't say how they got a key and asks for something I delete that email I'm just like I didn't invite you in there are proper channels you know what they are I don't know how you got my personal email and I just
delete it and if I feel a sense in my sternum of offense of feeling like this person has taken the liberty I don't believe that I owe them anything I don't believe that I owe them anything any more than if I came down to my kitchen and saw people sitting at my table who I didn't know
eating breakfast I wouldn't believe that I owed them to make them a cup of coffee I'd be like get out of my house like you're just a veer I don't even think I owe them a polite response I owe them nothing I didn't ask you to come into my house I don't know you anything so that's the
easiest those are ones are easy and I now treat myself to doing that I mean I do that every day I clear my inbox out very quickly now and then it's very I'm entertained when they come back later and they're like just circling back and I'm like yeah just deleting you again circle back as many
times you want you are not coming in so that's simple if it's just bumping this up excited are you yeah bumping you and I'm just it's like whack-a-moles it's like I can do this all day delete delete delete if it's somebody who I care about if it's something that I'm interested in but I'm just not
going to do it because I don't want to I will write back and say thank you so much and I'm really honored that you invited me to this but I'm not going to be able to do this at this time and I don't feel and you take it for reason I think a simple no is really really good and the reason
sometimes the reason it's good not to give an explanation is that if that person is an expert manipulator as many of us are that explanation will not suffice so it won't matter what you give as an explanation because they can come back and be like well we can do it by audio you know we can
do oh if you're oh well we can do it a different weekend just no and I learned a lot about this from my teacher Byron Katie who who teaches an amazing thing called the School for the Work she's a whole nother another being who's not not at all living by the rules extra
cholesterol for sure she is extra terrestrial she is not she is the only fully enlightened human being I can I believe I have ever met and as such she does not have any trouble saying an honest yes and I'll know to people just to underscore that because I did a an in-person
training with her I mean literally no hesitation no struggle no conflict it's bizarre and mesmerizing to watch and she loves you she loves it there's also no hostility so no offense no hostility something came up to her to event handed her a book that they'd written which people do
to me all the time too so I really marveled at this they said I wrote this and I want to share it with you and she said oh sweetheart I'm never going to read that she said true it's just true I've never made that and I'm like oh my god I didn't know you could say that so that's amazing
and she said it so lovingly like oh no no I'm no interested in reading that so she teaches I don't know if you did when you took her training did you do where she teaches a simple no and she does the training and how to get a simple no I don't think we actually spent much time on that so I
would love to hear you say more we we worked on the emotional one pages and the turn arounds we did a lot on the turn arounds which is probably we could do it whole episode just on that everybody look up by her Katie and if you have the means and if you have the chance to ever take
her nine day school for the work it's the most important thing I've ever done for myself so oh wow say that quite simply but she has a whole day in the nine day school for work which is about the simple no and the simple no is ways to say no and it always begins with thank you and there's
never a but because she feels that the word but is very cruel and it's just an and so it's thank you and no and that's it that's a simple no and then if they come back you can say well hold on just to pause for say is that literally the phrasing or is it just yeah okay no yeah that's it that's
it and it just it still makes my stomach it because I'm like oh my god you can't just do that you've got to give you got to like do the dance and she's like you don't have to do the dance and she's the new taught me if the person is a good enough manipulator it doesn't matter what you bring
they're gonna manipulate it and the beautiful thing about a simple no is that it gives in the Jiu Jitsu game it gives somebody no weapon that they can take and bring back to you they can say you're being incredibly selfish and you can say I hear that and you might be right about that
that's another one show says you might be right about that you might be right about that and no and you just keep adding and no after the statement so then there's but you know what I really I need you to do this I'm desperate and you say I see that I see your desperation and no
and one other thing she'll add is you can say if I change my mind about this I'll let you know and no and that's been a game changer for me so I just did one last week somebody who I have a professional relationship said I want you to do this one hour video interview to promote
this thing that I'm doing and old Liz would have thought I owe her that because she did this other thing for me that time and I checked it in with my inner compass and I was like nothing in me wants to do and so I just wrote back to her I said I'm so sorry and I'm not going to be able to do this at
this time and she wrote back and pushed in and said oh let me clarify I wasn't clear about why we need it we really need it because right now it's really hard for us to sell things because of COVID-19 and that's why we need it and I wrote back and said I hear you and I understand you and no and it
goes away they don't tend to come back at third time you know it really does just stop and let it sit at the no the more words you add after that more entangled you get but again I want to make clear it's hardest closest to home and it's hardest with family and with family I find if I
anticipate that I'm going to be asked something I really have to practice I really because it's scary and I have to really practice and be like and just practice saying I'm not doing that right now I'm not coming this year and I'll say a thousand times I thought just go for a long walk and I'll
just practice it and practice it and practice it because as I say the closer the people are to the more difficult it is as a bit of a personal digression here I was working on a book an entire book about saying no this past summer and the great irony of course is that I came up with all the
reasons why I shouldn't write the book and the process of putting it together but what I noticed as I was practicing different ways of saying no is that it's an incredibly clarifying exercise because it in a sense it kind of brings to surface the true character of many people you know
or people who are attempting to reach you and what I found surprising and maybe I shouldn't have found it surprising is that many of my close friends who I anticipated might be upset would respond with dude good for yours for respecting your boundaries that's a great line like right
rock on and they got it and they're just like oh I wish you'd I could say that more myself like good for you and it was the bonfire that wasn't a bonfire in those cases uh-huh did you ever run into a bonfire that was one oh for sure absolutely and then I'm like oh wow
because if you what I like about what you said about the or the sort of jiu-jitsu analogy is that if you provide really specific reasons for why you can't do it and you elaborate you've just created a potential negotiation right but if you don't provide that grip that toll hold
then one of the few responses someone can give you if they're upset and still want to push is some type of personal ad hominem attack or an accusation and then you're like oh wow okay now it's that kind of party okay this is good to know before we're on stage having a public tiff at
God knows what I mean this is valuable information so there were definitely some bonfires and basically people to self-immolated because I was like oh wow you've just proved my internal compass to be extremely accurate and right this is the reason and here is the reason
I'm not working with you yeah yeah but you don't even just say that you just know it because the body knows first the body knows first but only always only always one of the things that Martha says that I love that she's like because culture and civilization have overwritten the software
system of the body so much and told you that you don't trust that what you trust are the rules and the mores and the fear-based scarcity-based grasping this is how you have to act this is what you have to be in order to be safe and meanwhile our bodies like you know you're working
with that no you grow or on the opposite side like yummy like that's I want to be over there I want to be with those people you know I don't want to be with these people and if you think about it the wisdom of the body is so incredible to how many people do you know who said I knew the
night before my wedding that this was a mistake how many people do you know said that and yet why did you do it because you were 29 and it was time to get married because you'd been raised in a culture that said this is what you do now because the invitations have been sent out because
300 people had gathered because you family spent $30,000 on the wedding like whatever the reasons were you knew somewhere in that sternum area you knew and how much you had to drink that day in order to override that whatever you had to do in order to shut down that compass that was saying uh uh
it's brutal that's the work of the second half of my life I can say that now but I'm 50 that the only thing I'm interested anymore is that just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by AG1 the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG1 it simply covers a ton of bases I usually drink
it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road so what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins probiotics and whole food sourced nutrients in a single scoop AG1 gives you support for the brain gut and immune system so take ownership of your
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and now jack cornfield one of the key teachers to introduce mindfulness practice to the west author of 16 books including bringing home the Dharma and seeking the heart of wisdom and a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and spirit rock meditation
center in California you can find jack on instagram at jack underscore cornfield jack welcome to the show oh thank you Tim pleasure to reconnect I have wanted to have you on the show for some time now and you've had certainly a tremendous impact on my life both through your writing and
through firsthand in person interaction which I think we'll touch upon but first I wanted to ask you a complete non-sec order from that which is something that our mutual friend Adam Gizalli suggested I ask you about and Adam for people who don't know him is an incredible PhD MD neuroscientist
based at UCSF and he suggested that I ask you about hang gliding and I have no idea why he suggested that but I'm going to start there and if it doesn't go anywhere we can change direction but I figured we would just start with that and then we're going to rewind the clock but why did he suggest I
ask you about hang gliding well it started many years ago when I cross country with a friend who had a hang glider and we would stop periodically and go off different hills and it was fantastic and then I wanted to do paragliding and started to learn it now because everything is developed
in paragliding is a lot more official you need a license which I don't have but one of my favorite things is to tan in paragliding go off the top of places like Grindelwald in Switzerland where you can take the ski lift up to 9000 feet and then jump off and float silently like you're a bird
among the clouds the birds actually do come by sometimes and like check out what's this big bird flying up here you can catch thermals and go way up above the glaciers it's one of the most thrilling and delicious experiences that I know that's incredible see you first experience that
at what age probably in my you know late 20s and did some and then sort of put it aside and then I was traveling and teaching in Europe and I saw a sign for paragliding and I said oh gosh I really want to do it and started and now each time I go where there's high mountains and paragliding that's one of my things that I love doing most of you will have these dreams once in a while if you're lucky a dream of flying or maybe in your meditation you have this sense of not being limited to your
body and this is the closest thing that I know because it's absolutely silent and you're floating there it's quite fantastic and this is something you still do I hope to do it next summer when I'm back in the Alps and how old are you now 72 72 good man well we're gonna then go back a bit in
chronology and ask about childhood I would love to hear you describe your childhood what were you like as a child what was your upbringing like well first thing to say is I remember when I got to Dartmouth College in 1963 and I called my mom from the pay phone in the dorm sometime in that
fall I didn't call very often but you know how it is and I said mom I said guess what there are a lot of other really fucked up families decide on ours so that's kind of where we start so I dream brothers and my father was a mixture of a tyrant and then a really abusive person and a
brilliant guy I was born on on the marine base toward the end of world war two and they didn't send him overseas to do they put him in the medical part of the Marines because he tested so high on their tests that they you know okay we're gonna use him for something so he was brilliant in
certain ways he was a biophysicist who helped design some of the first artificial hearts and lungs worked on the space program but also did other kinds of weird stuff like work for the army biological weapons people not making biological weapons but trying to design things that were
kind of computer biological interfaces all kinds of creative stuff but he was they had mental problems and so we didn't know in the carpool then whether we're going to get Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde he would come in and you know either he could shout be abusive throw my mother down
the stairs rant chase after us try to hit us whatever or we'd get this interesting creative person but we hardly ever had people come over when he was around during the daytime is the way we would because he never knew what you would get and so our family life in my family life in
some way was also there were great parts of it because I had my brothers and we were like our own gang we moved all the time but we had each other and because he was wacky as well as smart my father either quit or got fired every year or two and then we would go from one place to
another I went to I don't know hate schools by the time I finished high school so my childhood partly it was the happy things of rough housing and being a boy with three other boys and adventures and then in the basement my father had all kinds of scientific equipment he had all this stuff from
World War II this huge radio from a battleship that you could tune into a thousand different shortwave stations around the world and projects he was trying to design stuff and so we learned from him you could pretty much take or design or do anything in the physical world and at the same
time I felt like my whole childhood was also colored with the fear of his violence and his unpredictability and I became kind of a peacemaker in the family we all sort of had our roles and now I do it as a profession right trying to kind of make it a little smoother between my parents
so they'd kill each other and each of my brothers had their own strategy my twin brother who was a lot bigger and much more outgoing played football which I certainly didn't I was skinnier and you know I was in the orchestra and he was the football player I remember when he first got in a
fist fight with like dad because my father was abusing our mom my twin brother had been as young men sometimes too that's probably 13-14 and he was pretty big and he was looking in the mirror making muscles in the mirror to see how strong he'd become anyway he just got into a fist fight with
my father and I was both thrilled and terrified but it worked in some way because of the abuse settled down quite a lot after that so that was his his strategy was just to get angry and then later kind of to go his own way somewhat more although we're all all have been very close as brothers
so there was that at the same time there was a lot of interest intellectual interest so we read and learned about all kinds of things both my parents were really interested in the world around us so it was sort of this next thing of the gift of being together with my brothers and a mom who
was basically pretty nurturing although she kept trying to believe him and never got it together I think it was too scary in the 50s to have four boys you know no job and so we were in the middle of this and the kind of healing that it took it took a long time to do the inner healing work
from the pain of my family and I remember when I became a Buddhist monk and I was sitting these first years with my teacher Ajahn Chah in the forest monasteries of Thailand on the border of Thailand and Laos and I was sitting quietly and then some of these memories or energy
would come where I remember one monk who had a pot near mine and the forest did something that annoyed me and I just got enraged inside and I said when I went to the teacher and I said I'm really getting angry here and he smiled he said yeah where do you think that comes from
or something like that and I said well I don't know I said I thought it was a peaceful guy it was never going to be like my father I won't you know I'll be peaceful but it turned out it just stuffed all that stuff and so when I told it my teacher about it he said good you should go back in your hot
it's the hot season you got a little tin roof and close the doors and windows and put all your robes on and if you're going to be angry do it right sit in the middle of that you know and sit in the middle of the fire and don't be so afraid of it because you're afraid of it you're just going
to keep stuffing it and on the other hand or if you're afraid of it it'll just explode there's another way to be with it and so that was the beginning of some healing just to realize that I could actually tolerate the suffering and the energy that was in my still carried from trauma in my body
and heart so we're going to absolutely come back to Ajahn Chabhik because I have many questions on that chapter in your life but just so that I can create the proper visual in my own head so you sat there in your hut in the sweltering heat with all of your robes on were you angry in
silence were you yelling well I was I was pretty much angry in silence and that's an interesting question you know in the monastery the culture was not much that you would yell you could go somewhere out the forest in yell it wasn't decorous or something people were with the hell's wrong
with that monk so mostly I was sitting in silence and then scenes would come and I would realize wow I thought I was peaceful in every cell of my body I also carry both the pain and anger by childhood and my father and just the anger that comes with being a human being and human incarnation
and I was never going to have that but of course there was and it lasted you know this was I had days of and and actually much longer weeks or months of waves of this coming and learning how to be present for it and not get overwhelmed by it so I want to backtrack
and then connect those dots between childhood and ending up in Thailand you mentioned Dartmouth earlier and from what I've read at least you were initially premed and then ended up Asian studies could you describe that experience in Dartmouth or how you went from premeditation studies
well you know we all get turned in these mysterious ways in our life we think we're going in one direction and then something happens unexpectedly and a gateway opens so I was coming from an organic chemistry class to the class that I'd signed up for out of interest on Asian studies
race, race and philosophy or something and it was an old professor and Dr. Wingsit Chan who'd come up from Harvard he was kind of emeritus there and he even sat cross-legged sometimes you know on the front of the room and would talk about Lao Tzu and Taoism and they talk about Buddhist teachings
in how the Buddha taught suffering and its causes and its end and that really all of a sudden I sat up and said there's an end to suffering and he said oh there's all these teachings and practices where you can transform your heart and mind and I became thrilled about it and realized that
whatever impulse I had to go to medical school probably part of it came from wanting to heal my self and so I started to take more and more courses and then it was the 60s and I became a card carrying hippie card carrying LSD taking hippie as a matter of fact and at the end of when I was
getting ready to graduate there was still the draft and I thought well I'm definitely no one want to go over and kill people in a war that I've been protesting against so I decided to go into the Peace Corps instead and ask them to send me to a Buddhist country where maybe I could find a
one of those old Zen masters that you read about and got assigned to Thailand and when I got there you could kind of request where you went and I said send me the most remote place you can I wanted adventure but I also wanted to kind of reading all those old Zen stories I wanted to see
if that still existed you know and there were little detours like being in hate ash gray in the summer of love and things like that that definitely they changed my life also in a very deep way because for at least for a time there was a window when people were just giving things away
there was such a sense that the world could be transformed some of it as we know very very naive but in the other hand it also felt like a greater sense of brotherhood and sisterhood than I had ever known except with my own brothers who I love a lot we've done a lot of things together
and I started to feel like there are other ways for me and for the world to be and live and that was also very wonderful you mentioned a three-letter acronym that we're probably not going to spend too too much time on but you and I have had quite a number of conversations where I've wanted
to ask you about some of your experiences with psychedelics including LSD but we've never really gotten into it so I figure why not do it in front of a few million people the LSD at that point your experiences with that did that inform your decisions at all to then go into the Peace Corps and
end up in a room area it did and I've written a little bit about it and you know a couple different of my books chapters and books I've written because most Buddhist teachers and Hindu teachers of my generation also started with psychedelics you know myself and almost all my colleagues you know
in the spiritual industry that I'm in that was a beginning and for me it showed an incredible possibility that all is created out of consciousness and the possibilities of inner freedom and basically I was able at the best of it to see my body and my personality and my history and
realized that that's not who I am to become much more the conscious witness of it all to see yes birth and death and to go through those kind of death rebirth experiences that can happen at times in a deep session with LSD or death of ego or sense of self or removing and realizing wow
there's a freedom and a life force that's what we're made of and that profoundly influenced my interest in spirituality also interested in what the world can be now just a few days ago I was on Maui with my beloved wife Trudy and we were visiting spending time with Ramdas who
for listeners that don't know was the author of this bestseller in the 60s called Be Here Now and now he's in 86 in a wheelchair but Ramdas who had been at Harvard University and one of the early explorers of LSD before he went to India and became a spiritual teacher in the living room while we were there two days ago Roland Chishar who is one of the senior professors in psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Oh, Roland Griffiths rather.
And Roland, excuse me, Roland Griffiths and Roland laid out all the research that's happening now on the psilocybin that he's been doing and its success for people, terrible cancer patients all losing a great deal of their the fears that they had working with people with severe depression
and it was a beautiful session because you could hear how these sacred substances and these mind-altering substances when they're used in the right context can really transform human beings and NYU Johns Hopkins there's a whole series of studies that are happening now that are finally bringing it back into the mainstream. So I'd love to underscore just a few things that you mentioned. Number one, Ramdas for those people who want to do additional reading formerly known as Richard
Albert if I'm getting that right. Yeah, also has a fascinating story coming full circle with psychedelic research beginning I guess at Harvard in some respects so it makes sense to me why Roland's research would be so meaningful to him and a number of other just quick comments for people.
Number one is if you're interested in looking into these psilocybin which is considered the active psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere have actually been involved with crowdfunding and funding myself some of the research related to
treatment resistant depression at Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffith says the senior investigator and I'll be posting some updates to that but fascinating work looking at everything from and this is also as you mentioned NYU and at other very well-regarded universities alcohol addiction nicotine
slash tobacco addiction as you mentioned end of life anxiety and cancer patients the implications are really profound and the data very very promising and I wanted to also mention to folks who are perhaps saying to themselves well I'm not interested in taking psychedelics myself that there
are people I know good friends of mine who do not currently use psychedelics but had the ego dissolving experience of a non-ordinary reality through psychedelics that then led them to become or contributed to them becoming very very diligent meditators and Sam Harris who is a PhD in neuroscience
and thought of are very well known as an atheist or you know one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse along with Richard Dawkins and others is a very close friend and extremely diligent meditator and he's he's written about how his psychedelic experiences which were in
some respects very some of them uncontrolled and you really have a coin flip there in terms of which direction you can go but showed him possibilities within his own mind that then led to a very very I'm not going to call it devout although I should just a bathroom maybe is a diligent practice so
I don't want to take us too far off the rails but you go to Southeast Asia. Well I went I'm really just want to say one more time before we move on because we are talking about this it turns out for those who are listening that sat and setting and intention are extremely important
if one uses these psychedelics like psilocybin or something to set the intention to learn to open to have a quiet it's not as a party experience absolutely brings your attention inward and then all the kind of discoveries become right in front of you but the other thing is that whether
it's right for somebody to use psychedelics or to use meditation these are all invitations to step back and see the mystery of your life because we tend to live in the daily minutiae and checking off our list of tasks that we have to do in completing them our worker or you know
or eating or all the kind of things that make up a day and we go on to automatic and whether it's meditation and difference or other spiritual disciplines or for some people it also can just be that they have what in Greek is called a katabasa below you know somebody close to them gets cancer
or or is dying or they have some accident or something and all of a sudden you step back and realize whoa life is uncertain the way I've been taking it it's not just checking off the list this is a mystery human incarnation and what am I going to do with it and wow look at this how did
I get in this body look at plants and trees and language the air coming out of your mouth that you shape it different ways and it vibrates a little drum in the ear of someone else and I can say golden gate bridge and they can envision it and you start to realize that all of it is alive and
made of consciousness and then the whole sense of who you are and what matters begins to shift and you start to realize that life is not just getting through the hoops but it actually also can be a celebration of the heart of something that you have to bring to the world that you come out
of life and my friend Malodoma Somme who's a west African shaman and medicine man also true PhDs a kind of remarkable guy he says with the dog raw people in west africa that he's from that they say that every child comes into the world with a certain cargo is their metaphor like the
cargo ships that apply the rivers of west africa and that they're given gifts to bring into the world and that we have bf's to bring to this mystery which include opening to it and as we do love grows connection grows in a whole different way of being in the world happens that we need so much at this time so that's a little interlude there before we move on to your next question.
I welcome as many interludes as you would like to interject and I wanted to just ask you to say one more time that it was I believe Greek word for Gotha boss which means a blow it's like something comes and it just sets your life spinning in an entirely different direction right like a catalyzing
event and that that's exactly I've had a few of those recently that I'd like to selflessly ask you about later but so I can bookmark just so I can bookmark this name Stanislaw Grough if I'm saying that correctly that's correct when just when did you meet him roughly what age or what date just
so I can come back to it because this is another thing I've been meaning to ask you about for a long time and get into but I haven't had the chance there's two things to say when I came back from the monastery and now it's you know I guess the year that I connect with Stan was maybe 1973
I made two really important connections I came back and started a psychology graduate school who was in Boston and first really important connection happened when I went to a meeting of the Massachusetts Psychological Association and there was this guy who looked like he didn't look
just like the straight psychologist and in turn that he'd just come back from India not long before named Dan Goldman who was a graduate student at Harvard and he'd projected on the screen this Tibetan wheel of birth and death that you see in the Tibetan Tonkas that normally would be
taken as some kind of primitive iconic symbol and he said no this is a psychological diagram the Buddha was actually more than anything else he was a scientist of the mind and a profound psychologist and here is how craving turns into contentment and here's how aggression can be transformed into
powerful energy to heal yourself and others and he was going through this diagram and I went and I talked to him and he said oh you you come back from the monastery you've got to come over and so he took me to David McClellan who had been the chairman of the
social science and psychology department at Harvard at that time the one who hired Tim Leary and Ramdas and then Blader had the fire then for their LSD work and his house he and his wife Mary were Quakers his home was a kind of Suare where Ramdas and Tibetan Lamas like Chobium Trumba and I
think Christiana Murty and various spiritual figures would come people were going to Indian coming back and I connected with this whole group of folks who now been friends for 45 years the richy Davidson was another that I met there who's now one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the
world on studying contemplative neuroscience and effective emotional neuroscience it was a whole collective of people Dan Goldman who wrote emotional intelligence that's told 10 million copies and many others and then I got a job working for an excellent like growth center in Boston at that
time because I was excited and all the new Gestalt bioenergetics what are the things that are transformative here and they asked me to help set up programs and I thought well who do I want to meet so I set up a program with John Lilly and I set up a program with Stan Groff who was still at Johns
Hopkins and married at that time just married to Joan Halifax Joan Groff and we became friends and so we have stand and I have not worked together for 45 years I've went out to join him that excellent for many many years spending many months together helping during his development of
the whole tropic breath work that's this powerful breath transformation and he has been a partner in a in a heart friend for exploration and we've traveled we've taught in Russia and in places in Europe and various places around the world so this is definitely a path that we're going to come down
and dig further into but I'm going to steer us to Ajahn Chab because I want to know how do you land with the Peace Corps and remote well what most people would consider remote corner of the world and end up finding a living master how does that actually happen I don't know but I assume you
didn't speak Thai at the time I did actually because the Peace Corps and then I had to learn Lao I did because the Peace Corps at that time it was a very early in Peace Corps had really good language training they borrowed it from the Monterey Language Institute so you know initially I didn't
speak that well but because I'd also studied Chinese at Dartmouth it came more easily and I was there working in these in the health rural health department on tropical medicine teams mostly malaria but also typhoid and teams going out to different villages and taking drawing blood and
giving out medicine and things like that and then somebody said there's a western monk in this province we heard about you want to meet him I said of course I do so I I went to this little mountain and walked up two thousand steps to the old Cambodia temple ruined at the top and there was this
very interesting guy who had just finished a couple years before the first Peace Corps I think in Borneo and then got interested in Buddhism and common ordained as a monk and I talk with him he's now he's named Ajahn Somato is his monk's name because he's still a monk and he became
quite famous in Thailand and then became the abbot of a temple in England and I just became friends with him and he said oh I found a really fine teacher he said you know a lot of them they kind of take you to your western and they treat you special he said this guy doesn't treat you any
differently than anyone else he just wants you to do the work you know and learn the deepest way you can and he's in this forest jungle and I said I'm going there so having heard that I went like visited Ajahn Cha and he was a little bit like the Dalai Lama he was funny and wise and very warm
hearted but also very strict and very demanding but he did it in this loving way and I thought okay this is the real deal this guy looks like what I was reading about in all those end stories I read that he said to you and I'd love for you to tell us when he said this to you I hope you're not
afraid to suffer if that's true when did he say that and why did he say that so I'd visit him a number of times and told him I was going to become a monk and then I ordained in a village where I was living in the Peace Corps people wanting to do that was a beautiful ritual and then after
some days made my way down to his temple that was his opening gamut I'm walking into the gates and I see him right now I'm here and he looks at me you know kind of leans back a little little skeptic he said all right I hope you're not afraid to suffer welcome it was like you know you didn't come
here just to kind of do some interesting cool anthropological experiment or something like that if you're going to do it we're going to put you through the training and he did but you know there was like this little smile as he said it like okay are you up for it all right dude come on in
and what did the training consist of what were some of the first things that you had to do and then what was this suffering that he alluded to what were some examples well that was some examples okay so of course the first training was just how to walk around and not have my robe you know fall on the ground and embarrass me and everyone oh they come so they all loved it oh yeah all right look at the western he's he can't even chew gum and wear his robes right or whatever so part of it was
just the unfamiliarity of it culturally and otherwise there were the two kinds of suffering the big suffering of course was being alone with my own mind I mean there you go you know having to do hours of meditation when I didn't know what hell I was doing and then as I talked about with anger
or fear or confusion or you know all those kind of states learning to deal in a very conscious and mindful way and then more importantly in a compassionate way in a kind and loving way with all the energies that make up my humanity and our humanity and that means when you sit and you get
quiet anything unfinished in your heart will also come up all the unfinished business so you know relationships that I'd had that ended badly in college or certainly stuff from my childhood and family dreams that I carried things will fill the nut all that comes up it's yeah my friend Annie
the Ma you Merston writer says my mind is like a bad neighborhood I try not to go there alone and there's some way in which in community sitting together with others in meditation and then sitting in my heart it was really facing myself and my full humanity that was probably the most
difficult thing because then you get insanely bored or insanely restless and then how do you deal with all those energies normally when we're restless or bored what do we do we over the refrigerator you know go online or something because we can't be with our own loneliness or our own fear so
that was the inner and then there's outer ones but in the outer one yeah the outer ones were things like getting up the bell would ring at 3 30 in the morning and I'm not an early riser by nature I go oh god here we go and we walk through it was actually very beautiful then we'd walk through
the forest at night either by moonlight or sometimes you'd have a tiny little flashlight and then one of the forest monasteries where there were a lot of cobras we'd have a little stick and you'd tap the path so that the snakes would know you would feel you coming and move out of the way
wouldn't step on them and then we would sit silently for a couple of hours and then do an hour chanting on a hard stone floor mind you we're everybody else being comfortable in my body was killing me and then at least once a week we would sit up all night with the teacher and he would
sit there comfortably meditating maybe talking with another colleague that it would come and we'd just be sitting and meditating and he would kind of peek over it as like how are you doing I go to hot it's been for four hours when he's he's going to let us go back to sleep and he didn't
you know so seeing up all night it got very cold in the cold season and it got insanely hot in the hot season and somehow learning to live extremely simply with a set of sandals and a set of robes and an arms bowl and then you would eat what you got offered in the village and we would share it
in that monastery with others around us and sometimes you'd get nice food and a lot of times in the dry season you'd get really really skimpy food and there wasn't that much to eat and so picture a day where you get up at 3 30 in the morning you sit for a couple of hours in meditation
and do long then an hour long chanting on a stone floor then it's getting dawn and you walk barefoot three miles five miles ten miles with an arms bowl and a handful of other monks and get your food and come back whatever you've been offered and that's the food for the day and then you
go back to your meditation or to the work of the monastery of sewing robes or drawing water from the well and it's muggy and 105 degrees hot season then you go back and you join in the community for more meditation and then the teacher's boss and say how are you doing you know and then other
kinds of practices for example we had a charlground there and so a what ground a charlground which is where a cremation ground where people bodies would be burned and so on occasion would go to a cremation and then sit up all night and contemplate death look at the
body and then watch as it burned and then do these meditations where you would reflect on well this is going to happen to the body that you're inhabiting as well who do you think you are do you think you're this physical body made of hamburgers or you know lettuce or whatever you have in the
eat is that you are you hamburgers and lettuce you know or or are you your feelings or you your thoughts who are you really born into this body like koa so anyways and the alms bowl so you'd be did you eat whatever you gathered in one meal was it spread throughout the day one meal you eat one
meal a day which makes you very easy to makes your life easy and it's the same at that monastery things were shared there was other monasteries I stayed in where you would just eat what was putting your own bowl and you didn't have to eat everything that was given to you there were some
things that were you know in the dry poor season there would be curries that were too hot for me to eat because they use the chilies to kind of preserve the food preserve preserve the food but you know when it was a really poor village or something you know they would have to make curries out
of field mice or field mice or bats or bats or you know I remember eating there was a curry that was made out of basically grasshoppers that had come spread through and there was this whole big insect wave of insects that were eating the crops and they collect the mall made a
curry out of them so you know okay this is this is what you got for your food today dude I think I might take the grasshoppers over the over the bats I but yeah well yeah but it's really highly spice you can't tell what it's mystery that's true we all have mystery meat middle school anyway this was like mystery meat on steroids exotic mystery meat what was the longest period of time that you spent in silence during that time in Thailand well then I went to a Burmese monastery because I wanted
to do this very intense meditative training and I spent about 500 days so less than a year and a half in silence with the exception that I would talk to the teacher every couple days I'd have a little 10 minute conversation about what was happening my meditation and the rest I was just sitting and
walking 18 hours a day when I could or were so sleeping a little bit and I remember at one point it was relatively early on I've been sitting and walking and pushing it as young men do you know I'm going to get enlightened and all of that not moving sitting with a lot of pain which is also part
of what happened at the forest monastery sitting on a stone floor for hours without moving really had to learn how to deal with your own physical pain and I was exhausted from sitting and walking in like a little hot that I had for that long retreat and after a couple months I thought I'm really
tired I got a lie down but then I thought well but I'm not going to nap for very long because I'm on my way to enlightenment whenever I'm going to do this right so I said all right I'll lie down on the wooden floor rather than on the little map that I had and that way it won't sleep so well
and I'm lying there and then I wake up and I get up and I walk very slowly doing this mindful slow walking to the end of the hot and look out the window toward where some of the other monks and the teachers live some way down through the trees and then I turn around and I start
walking the other direction in this meditation hut that I had then he could walk probably it was maybe 15, 18 feet long as long and narrow and I see this body lying on the floor and I'll always suddenly go oh that's me and I realized that I'm having that out of the body experience
and what had happened is that I was so intent I'm not going to sleep long I'll get up very soon that intention was really strong but my body didn't want to get up so I got up but it wasn't in my body and I walk very slowly and I peered down on my body and I turned around and walked the other
I walked back and then the second time I walked back I got closer and then I fell into my body and I woke up I said oh wow that's interesting but what I saw out the window wasn't just like a dream because I was watching you know my teacher and talking to these other monks and then I got up
again and that's exactly what was happening and that was the first of a series of all kinds of very interesting experiences that happened but what would other examples of those types of unusual experiences be and was it your time in Burma that found you experiencing these for
the first time? First of all the first experiences even though I had experiment with meditation back in college and so forth were experiences again that came through psychedelics and so I was familiar with all kinds of weird and powerful and mysterious or mystical kind of experiences
but there's something about learning how to navigate it without taking a substance and learning that your own consciousness is the field that you can learn to navigate first all the personality and emotions and history and so forth but then you start to realize that you're
bigger than that that who you are is not just your thoughts and feelings in your mind and so whether it's out of body experience or the experience of vastness of becoming the sky within which everything arises and passes or the experience of profound silence or of the void where you
enter a stillness before experience even arises or the experience of luminosity where my body would dissolve into light their time sitting as you get concentrated in somebody or concentration builds that your whole body and mind open up and you know first you get the elements your body can feel
heavy like a stone the earth element or can feel so light that you have to open your eyes and make sure you're not floating because it feels like you're floating in the air or it can be filled with fire and you feel like you're in the middle of a raging fire or it can get icy cold you know or
all kinds of vibrations and Kundalini energies and shock res start to open and sometimes it's pleasant sometimes it's not you know as deep energies start to move through your body they also kind of push open the places that are held closed so that when your heart starts to open in deep
meditation sometimes it feels like you're having a heart attack they're physically painful because all the things that you've held around your heart to protect yourself start to loosen or when the energy hits your throat and it starts to open weird sounds come out you know and then
you get to visions that come in the brow chakra and you start to see all kinds of colors and visions and hear things that all possibilities of the play of consciousness can start to open after both period of silence but also with really deeply training attention when concentration.
So these experiences just to put them in or at least part of what you said in context for people listening there are a number of things you mentioned but one in particular that opening in the chest that I experienced in the 10 day retreat done at spirit rock for which you are one
of the the instructors of the lead instructor and it was an incredibly powerful experience and listening to your description of some of the feelings it makes me want to go to the jungle and spend time doing this type of training however the 10 day retreat as you know from first-hand
observation and interacting with me was incredibly difficult for me and terrifying it a number of points where I felt like I had crossed a boundary into maybe even madness where I was fearful I wouldn't be able to return from so I'm curious to know during that period of time in Thailand
and Burma could be afterwards as well but when you were in the jungle and doing this very intense work were there any particular points when you wanted to quit to go home how did I absolutely I mean and I remember I got what I think was malaria I really high fever and I was sick as a dog
and I'm lying in the bottom of my little hut there high fever and shivering and Ajahn Chau came to visit me and in the Lao language and he was also funny and quite blunt and the Lao language is a very straightforward kind of the sentence structures are fairly simple so he looked at me and he said sick huh and I said yeah and he said hurts all over huh I said is here to us he said hot and cold yeah he said makes you afraid I nod he said makes you want to go home and see your mother doesn't it
and I'm nodding there and then he looked at me and he said you know this is the jungle fever this is malaria we've all had it but now there's some good medicine I'll send the medicine month over and in a couple days you'll be fine and then he looked at me and he said you can do this you know
you can do this so I mean that was an example of wanting to show home to him what am I doing you know what kept you going I mean I don't want to interrupt but it's like what kept you going for I'm imagining 500 days of silence I could barely handle 10 days you know Tim I mean what's
kept you going what keeps any of us going about things that we care about I had somehow I don't know kind of wacky but I think also important kind of passion to say I want to understand or I have started down this road and I want to see where it goes and I think all of us find at a certain
point in our life that they're or for lucky that something really matters and you've done it in your work and your travel you want to explore what your human capacity is and I read these old zen stories and I want to see if this is true I want to find out and then as I started things started
to happen like that out of the body experience and rapture and changes in openings and I realized there's really something to learn here but there are a couple of the things that I want to add to this one of them that's the most important is that it turns out that it wasn't and it isn't so much
about the actual experiences so Ajahn Chow my teacher talked about how in his own training for the first eight years in the jungle he had been a very argument meditator and had all kinds of insights in dissolving and samadhi and john x experiences all kinds of samadhi is a week and
samadhi is a yeah or a certain how do you pronounce samadhi has a lot of meanings as a word but it it can mean profound states of concentration in which the mind dissolves into light or into joy or bliss or becomes absorbed with any one of all kinds of states so we went to the most famous
teacher of that time another Ajahn Ajahn man and told him about all these experiences and the the master looked back and said Chow you missed the point these are just experiences you know it's like going to the movies and you have a romantic comedy and you have a war movie and you have a
documentary and you don't have you know a Disney movie he said they're just movies on the screen some pleasant some unpleasant the only question is to who do they happen turn your attention back and ask look to see who is the witness of these what is the consciousness that is knowing these
ever changing experiences this is where your liberation will come he said become his language if I translate it is the one who knows become the knowing rather than the experiences and then you can tolerate anything and you can respond with love and understanding because you rest in the
timeless consciousness which is your true nature so part of what I also learned in meditation and teach is that it's not so much about the experiences oh I want to have this or that experience but it's this profound turning back to ask who am I what is this consciousness itself
and that was born into this body that will leave it we can talk about death at some point if you want what is this mysterious consciousness itself so there was that and then that I've also had the opportunity of being with a few other teachers and one of the people that I was very close to
and inspired me profoundly was a Cambodian monk named Mahagosananda who was the Gandhi of Cambodia and when I met him we were living and training together in a forest monastery in Thailand and it was during the time that Kamer Rouge came to power and eventually killed two million
Cambodians in a kind of genocide he survived because he wasn't in country but all 19 of his family members were killed his temple burned all the Buddhist texts and so forth were destroyed and when he was able to he went to the refugee camps refugees were pouring out of Cambodia by the hundreds
of thousands and he went to the refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Cambodia and I was able to go with him at certain point and he decided to open a temple in the middle of one of the biggest refugee camps here's 50 or 100,000 people these tiny little bamboo huts and got permission
from the UN HCR I commission her refugees and built a platform with a little roof over it and put an altar with a traditional Cambodian Buddha on it and so forth but it was a camp with the Kamer Rouge underground lots of them and so they put the word out that if anyone went to be with
this monk when they got out of the camp back to Cambodia they would all be shot so we wondered who would if anyone would come and went through the camp the day the opening day with a big kind of temple gal ringing it and 25,000 people poured into the central square around this little temple
my god and he Mahagusa Nandasap there and he was a scholar he spoke 15 languages and he was a you know extremely kindhearted human being who would suffer enormously and had transformed it into the kind of compassion that we think of with the Dalai Lama or something like that in fact they
became friends and Gosunandhavi came the head of all of Cambodia and Boozim but there he was at this point she'd been looking out at 25,000 people who had suffered immense traumas and you could see there was a grandmother and the only two surviving grandchildren that she had or an
uncle and one niece and their faces were the faces of trauma and of survivors and I thought all right what is he going to say to them and he sat very quietly for a long time just in their presence and then he put his hands together in this kind of modest way and began to chant in the microphone
yet a sound system in Cambodian and in Sanskrit or Pali the Buddhist language one of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed this is the ancient and eternal law and he chanted it over and over in Cambodian and in
Sanskrit Pali and pretty soon the chant was picked up and in a little while 25,000 people were chanting this verse with him and I looked out and they were weeping many of them because they hadn't heard their sacred chants for years but also because he was offering them a truth
that was even bigger than their sorrows that hatred never ends by hatred but by love alone is healed this is the ancient and eternal law and they were sitting in the middle of the the healing energy of the Dharma of the teachings of the heart that can liberate us later on ghost Sonanda who was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times spent 15 years walking through the killing fields and the mind areas and so forth leading people on foot back to their village and he said to the refugees you can't go back in a bus or the back of a truck or something like that you have
to reclaim your land with love and so he would lead a thousand people and he'd be in the fraught with a bell and a gong and a few other monks and the whole way back they would be chanting the chance of loving kindness so that by the time they got to their village whatever had been destroyed
there was the sense that they were reclaiming not just the land but they were reclaiming their own hearts that's a beautiful really beautiful story and it prompts me to ask a question that I struggle with answering myself and it's also a question many of my friends have asked themselves
and I'll take a stab at it how do you decide when to do deep inner work and take an extended period to do that versus being in the world and trying to impact others and the world and to just provide a little bit of background on that I have friends who are building businesses or building
careers of some type or families and I at this point do not have wife kids or company to build at least with a large organization and I've come back from various experiments sojourns experiences over weeks or months and shared these with them and they've expressed this longing this deep
yearning to do something similar and then they ask this question like how do I how do I best decide if and when to do the deep extended work versus being in the world and I know it might be a false dichotomy you might not have to choose but I'll talk a little bit more just to fill the space
but I had this experience personally not long ago when I was in South America and had someone telling me in Spanish which was not their native language this indigenous tribe but this apple this mayer effectively who worked a lot with different plant medicines and he said that he recommended
one 15 month diet very very strict 15 month period with many different restrictions no sex no alcohol no pork etc to develop certain capacities and to practice in effect I mean at certain types of meditative practices so I struggle with this myself as well how do you suggest someone think
through so did you give up sex in pork I've done it for sure periods of time I've not a year and I have done it for weeks at a time but not for 15 months but what appealed to me about that definitely not the lack of sex and pork I like both of those things it was he said that's something you only have to do once in your life and it opens doors and creates opportunities that are difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise so of course that's very tantalizing but 15 months is a really
really long time to opt out of everything else and I'm not saying it has to be 15 months for some people as you know setting aside even 10 days to do a silent treat as hard and I know there are things that they can do on an ongoing basis like morning meditation and so on but for those who are
really drawn to this extended deeper work how do you think about and that's why it goes an under brought it up for me because he'd spent so much time outside of his country and then went back and was really on the ground doing work with locals how do you think about that or
suggest someone think about it first my answer is yes you know because all of the things that you say are true that yes most cultures encourage at some point even beings most wise cultures even beings to step out of their ordinary roles and their ordinary routine whether you go to the
mountains or the ocean you know or a temple or a change how you're living so that you can open up to the mystery and so that you also can open up to love because what I saw with my teachers and Gosananda was one of our children, another is that they were able to love no matter what it was
really because they inhabited consciousness in a very different way than just a small sense of self there was something a possibility that we could live with forgiveness and love and be really as active in the world at the same time so they're not separate and that's sort of what your question is how do we live in the world and at the same time you know what trainings and how do we connect with something deeper and part of it is just intuitive you know Tim if you have no more you know or young
children and so forth it's not the time to go on a longer treat your kids are your practice and in fact you can't get a Zen master who's going to be more demanding than you know an infant with collic right or you know or a teenage you know certain teenage kids but with the young ones you know
your Zen master might say you've got to get up early in the morning and you know once in a while you might roll over the kid is crying and sick you have to get up your family needs tending and you know if you're even vaguely a responsible and caring parent as you that becomes your practice
and if you think well the only I could be in the greats and temple of Kyoto or in Ashram and India are down in the Amazon with Tim taking ayahuasca or whatever the plant medicine they give you know your kid can be like ayahuasca on steroids okay you want to face yourself and your own
limitations and your own you know you want to look at the small sense of self and find out how to live with a freer and bigger spirit here we've just hired someone to live with you and train you full so it's really and that's an important thing but what makes it work is that you have that
intention not just to soldier through it but to say let this be a place where I awaken graciousness and inner sense of freedom and peace as things come and go where I awaken the possibility of presence in pleasure and pain and joy and sorrow and gain and loss and all that
changes that I find an inviolable or a timeless place of becoming the loving witness of it all becoming the loving awareness that says yeah now I'm having a family experience and this is the place to find freedom because freedom is not in the Himalayas or in the Amazon the only place it's found
is in your own heart exactly where you are and that's what goes in on the Todd and wonder what Ajahn Shah that's really what they wanted to communicate now that being said if you have an opportunity and you're drawn to it like somebody you might do you know Jack Dorsey I do know Jack
yeah so Jack just did his first 10 day meditation retreat good for him and he tweeted about I wouldn't say it otherwise but he tweeted about it and it was you know one of the top transformative experiences of his life and it's not to say 10 day retreats or the
be all an end all they are they're very powerful and compelling even if you have a company or even if you have a family there might be a period of a week or some days where you can in fact get away and step out of those roles and turn inward and that can be tremendously valuable so I think both
are important you just have to listen what when the time is right there are so many things that this brings up the first though is just a housekeeping for people who may not recognize the name Jack Dorsey that's Jack at Jack I believe it is on Twitter of you might then wonder how did he get that
user handle well he is one of the people behind Twitter so he is of Twitter and square fame among many others fascinating fascinating guy so people can check him out the comment on the infant being the full-time trainer working with you 24-7 reminded me also since you mentioned
Ram Das earlier of a quote of his that I like and I'm going to paraphrase I'm sure but if you think you're enlightened go spend a week with your family yeah and which I think is a fantastic one and that's part of the reason and you know some of the backstory but we all have I would imagine
we all have tough things that happen to us experience traumatic experiences as children have a lot of triggers related to family members typically and for me the forced break takes a number of different forms but that includes a trip every six months an extended trip of two to four weeks
with my parents and my brother when he can make it so that's only after being introduced to meditation something that I would even consider as a practice and the last point I'll mention just out of my personal experience is there's a piece of paper I have in my wallet and I've had in
my wallet for a few years now it's getting a bit worn down it's a piece of construction paper an ex-girlfriend gave it to me who knew me very well and it says the task that hinders your task is your task beautiful beautiful and that's a good reminder for me that I wanted to ask you
two questions that are personally important but also may apply to other people the first is the question that I believe you mentioned Ajahn Chah perhaps others have indicated is the question versus the experiences or movies of these say out of body experiences and so on to whom do they
happen right to whom do they happen is this a co-on like what is the sound of one hand clapping where there isn't really an answer you're expected to arrive at is the value in contemplating the question more than any answer yes both no because yes both and no yeah because it is it's a profound
contemplation for us one of the great questions of you meeting carnation who are we how do we get into that how do you get into this body with the wiggly things on the end of your limbs you know and the little bits of claws that you have left you know as nails in a vestigial tail and a whole
one end into which you stuffed dead plants and animals and lug them down through the tube I mean the whole incarnation thing is really pretty wild so who are we and then what are what are we make meaning of it this is a lifetime question and that way that it's a co-on but in another way it
also actually does have any answer and the answer of course has to be found by each person the answer to point toward it it's very clear that you're not just your salad and vegetables and hammer your body and you're not just your emotions I hope because they're always changing and your
thoughts good God I hope you're not your thoughts um so you start to realize all right what is there then what is this self who am I in neuroscience you know there was a time magazine issue on modern neuroscience where it said neuroscience has searched throughout the brain over many decades now and come to the conclusion that they cannot find the self-located anywhere in the neural mechanisms of the brain and that it simply does not exist but what does exist is a sense of self that's built
out of a sense of identification with our thoughts and body and so forth it's all wise and appropriate we should be but we also know that it's not the end of the story and you know it from walking in the high mountains or listening to an extraordinary piece of music or making love or taking some
sacred medicine you know or sitting at the bedside of someone when they die that mysterious moment when spirit leaves the body or when child is born we have these moments where we open to mystery and realize that who we are is not just our personal history or our body and emotions that we
become the consciousness itself the witnessing awareness that we are the loving awareness that was born into this body and that becomes actually a direct knowing a direct experience so there is a a way in which we also can come home to ourselves and it brings a tremendous sense of freedom and
well being as all the movies of ever changing life happen to us so that's why I said yes and no and both and I just a little aside thinking about you going back to your family is it practice in twice a year as you're doing I just want to remind you and the listeners that Buddha and Jesus
both had a hard time when they went back to their family so you know don't think that you know there's something wrong with you it's just part of it so that's why they call it nuclear family okay anyway there's another I guess it's a word more than a question that I'd love to ask you
to define and that is compassion or compassionate when you use that word or those words what do you mean exactly what would you like it to mean for people I would like to distinguish compassion from empathy and I'll use a simple illustration if you're on the playground and you see a kid being
bullied and you feel oh that must feel terrible that hurts right that's an empathy and empathy can be useful it also can be you can get overwhelmed by empathy if you don't know what to do with it but there's some way in which you start to feel resonating you because we are not limited to these
bodies we are actually an interconnected system of consciousness and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute but we all know whether it's mirror neurons from neuroscience or the feel the presence is you know scientists like Dan Siegel talk about extended presence that we can feel
empathy with one another someone says someone's angry someone's hurting compassion is the next step you see or recognize you feel and then you care you care about it and you want to if you can do something that helps so that you see the kid being bullied and you realize I want to tell the
teacher or the principal or I want to just walk over there and say something or intervene to help stop it and so compassion it's called the quivering of the heart when it wants to move to alleviate the suffering of yourself because you can have self-compassion it's very important or those around
you and it's born into the earliest studies of the infants you know at Yale in various places like that show that even very very very small children have this resonance and this kind of care and so it's not shut down in us where are species that's interconnected and we care for one
another and this is your birthright this natural natural compassion and through practice and meditation you can reawaken it you can extend it and it can become your way of living and moving in the world as a little aside and I'll just bookmark this one just got back from a conference
with our dear friend Adam Bisalea our mutual friend Richie Davidson who's another of the most famous neuroscientists especially in this area and a number of other some contemplatives and neuroscientists and some technologists from the valley and VC talking about how to build
compassion into our interface with the technological world compassion tech starting from the very simplest things of projects like can you build a fitbit for compassion where instead of your body where you can either note moments of care around you or in yourself or be prompted to care for
yourself you know or when you say to Siri or Alexa you know I'm feeling lonely or and so forth what kind of response do you get from the algorithms and all of that because in the UK England just appointed their first minister of loneliness for the country and I think it was a joke
but it's not like an old Beatles song on the lonely people they're 10 million lonely people in England they've estimated and it's you know it's for isolation and loss of capacity and health and all kinds of reasons that loneliness makes things way worse but there's some way in which
compassion is that which connects us and it's a beautiful thing even if you walk down the street and you see someone you know who's struggling and so forth doesn't mean you have to fix the whole world that's not your job that would be egotistical but you can reach your handout and mend the things
that you can you can tend the things that you can and you can do it not because oh you pity them those four people but because they're your family you recognize that we are common humanity we're in this together I'd like to build on that and preface it with a comment on the text he
mentioned collaborating with Adam and he's discussing the potential of combining or utilizing technology to help people to develop and harness compassion and some folks listening might be like oh come on that's so pie in the sky but I'd like to point out that you've already collaborated
successfully with Adam on software like Metatrain MEDITR AIN which was one of the tools Adam has used in his end of one or end of two experiments in rejuvenating his mental capacity to I want to say in his 20s and Adam's Adam's one of those guys you can't tell if he's 28 or 45 he's just a
silver fox always looks young so I don't know how old he is but he's not 22 but the Metatrain was one of the tools that he utilized I don't remember the the name that he used for this run of experiments you might know the training that he did neuro man or something like that was very
very successful so you already have a track record of collaborating successfully with neuroscientists and technologists on the compassion front I'd love to use that as a segue to loving kindness and by way of personal example I failed well failed is a strong word I quit I stopped meditating after
many many attempts had a very absurdly high number of false starts over many years and it really stuck after a number of experiments and experiences I had doing three or four day trainings with say transnal meditation and having the social accountability being accountable to someone
else is very helpful but another turning point was experimenting with loving kindness meditation and I think in part it succeeded because it took the focus off of me me me me I I I and allowed me to focus on others but I'd like to read a brief paragraph from a profile of you in the New York
Times is from 2014 and feel free to correct anything that is incorrect but I'll give it a read first and I quote in the west cornfield says quote we encounter a lot of intense striving ambition and a lot of self criticism self judgment and self hatred and quote concerned he initially turned to the
Dalai Lama for advice but self hatred was such a foreign concept to the Tibetan Buddhist that he wasn't able to offer an e-real insight over time cornfield and his colleagues began to believe that Americans needed particular meditation practice closely linked to the concepts of self
forgiveness and loving kindness a training in the unconditional acceptance of imperfection without such a foundation says cornfield meditation can easily become and this is the part that I underline and start without this foundation says cornfield meditation can easily become yet another form of
striving quote another thing you do to make yourself better and quote instead of a path to true contentment could you please describe for folks what loving kindness meditation practice looks like and elaborate in any way that you feel might be useful or helpful for folks yeah that meeting which
was some decades ago with the Dalai Lama yeah he didn't understand when we talked about self hatred he couldn't even there's no word for it that way back and forth with this translator what does this mean finally you look up he said hmm but this is a mistake why would anyone do this but
then he asked how many of you there's a group of us who were teachers that have experienced this and almost everyone raised their hand so we see that when people begin in our culture in the west to meditate or to turn inward really that it's very common to encounter a lot of self criticism
self judgment or even self hatred and you know there are all the causes from our these are all kind of conditioning that we got from from our childhood our education and so forth but what it means is that you're sitting there saying I'm not doing your right I'm no good you turn the
meditation into one other one of the thing that you don't do right because you can't control your mind the truth is that you can't control your mind easily that's not the point there's a different way of approaching your mind which gives you tremendous capacities but it's not oh I have to stop
by thinking or I don't want to have these feelings and I hate having all these judgments I don't want to be so judgment lilas well I hate this judging mind what is it's just more judgment so instead as you become first able to become the loving witness the mindful loving awareness
that says oh this is the judging mind and it's been trying to protect me thank you for trying to protect me I don't need you now thank you all of a sudden there's a distance from the painful or destructive or self critical thoughts simply by witnessing the with loving awareness and acknowledging
them this becomes the gateway to the practice of loving kindness and self compassion and very often people can't do it for themselves they feel that's too much of a stretch like why would I wish myself well it feels egotistical and so the way that this practice begins skillfully for such folks
is instead to think of someone that you really care about a lot and to picture them remember them put them in your mind's eye and feel the kind of well-wishing you would want for them you know may they be protected and safe or difficulty may they be held in loving kindness may they be well
healthy strong and you wish them that may they be happy and you do this for a time a kind of inner well-wishing and also maybe you feel as you think of this person that you care about if you let yourself also turn into the measure of sorrows they have the struggles that every human being
has you know and it tenderizes your heart as you think of them because you don't want them to suffer you feel the kind of rising of compassion and care so may they hold themselves in compassion may they be safe and protected and well and you do that with one or two people that you care
about for a time and then you can imagine even as I'm describing this and you following your own heart you can imagine these two loved ones looking back at you with the same kindness and saying just as you wish us protection and safety and happiness and well-being and you know and compassion
they gaze at you and they say you too may you be safe and protected and may you be filled with lusts tender compassion for yourself and kindness may you too be healthy and well and may you be happy they want you to be happy I think about when I'm doing this I'm visualizing some love ones and
I know that as I do it I can feel they want that for me and then finally as you feel that from these loved ones you can put your hand on your body or your heart even if you like and take it in and then begin to realize that you can wish this for yourself may I hold all of the joys and
theros of my life with tenderness and kindness may I hold my struggles with compassion may I be filled with sputting kindness and loving awareness may I be safe when protected may I be well strong or healed and as you repeat these simple intentions that have been done for thousands
of years it's as if your cells are listening and this is the research of people like Liz Blackburn and the Liz Eppel who Liz Blackburn got the Nobel Prize for discovering the telomerase and the telomeres at the end of the caps and the DNA it turns out that your cells listen
to your heart and to your intention that consciousness affects your body and little by little even though it can bring up its opposite I hate myself I've never been good enough and you see all those and you say thank you for trying to protect me I appreciate that may I be well may I
be safe may I be held in love and little by little like water on a stone it starts to soften the places that are holding your lack of self forgiveness your lack of care and loving kind of starts to grow in you and it's a very beautiful practice there's lots of places you can find it on
my in my work and teachers like Sharon Salisburg and Emma Trotron and Tara Brock and so forth do you have any guided loving kindness meditations or audio that you can recommend people listen to I do thank you go on my website checkcornfield.com I think they will be on there I do know for sure
I have a whole series of great programs with sounds true sounds true.com that include meditations on the mind vastness of sky meditations on compassion and loving kindness and I did a book one of the books I've done is called a lamp in the darkness and it contains I think eight or
nine different guided practices that you can get either with it on a CD but nothing get it is a download basically and sounds true also has that and has a compassion practice and a grounding practice and a vast sky like mind practice and so forth so you can look for all of those the
beautiful thing is that you can learn this and I was a couple of years ago invited to be part of the first White House Buddhist leadership gathering there were 120 Buddhist leaders from around the country from different communities I don't think that's going to happen again very soon but
there it was one good hope and most of the communities did beautiful things that were involved in suit kitchens and tending the homeless and projects to support healing for whether it was malaria or other other diseases in different other parts of the world and so forth all kinds of
great stuff and certainly meditation and when I got to talk which was kind of a summary talk toward the end of it I mentioned that in this historical record whether it's true or not the text and so forth describe the Buddha meeting with kings and princes and ministers and so forth and
probably if the Buddha were or around now you go to the White House if you were invited certainly would have met with obama and from nose and owl and he had advice about wise society which he would give to leaders and he'd say if you can train your people to meet one another with respect
to listen with respect to differences and to come together peacefully listening to one other then your society will prosper and not decline and if your society tends the vulnerable among them the the young people the old people those who are sick it will prosper and not decline and if your
society tends the environment around it in a healthy way it will prosper and not decline these are principles of compassion and wise society that you could read perhaps in a number of great traditions from the Eroquo Nation or from the Taoist sages but here's the beautiful piece
yes these are good things meeting in harmony and discussing in harmony and being respectful for one another and so forth there are practices that you can teach and learn that develop this capacity so that in our elementary schools now you know through organizations like Castle which
is a consortium for a social and emotional learning that's worked in you know 10,000 schools kids learn social and emotional learning they learn compassion and it changes their lives they're better academically and all these kids carry the trumbles of our times they hear the news
they see the tramble even in their own family to teach you how to stir your own heart from when you're young and then these capacities are now being incorporated as we know mindfulness-based stress reduction in clinics and hospitals and businesses and there's the mindfulness teachers when the C.L. C. Hawks won the championship or the Chicago Bulls and the LA Lakers when there were championship teams they had a they had a meditation coach a mindfulness coach George Mumford a good friend
and that these capacities can be learned wherever we are and they transform our life it's not just by accident or that you have this beautiful experience on the mountains or making love but you can make that alive for you through these trainings every day every part of your life. Jack there was a question I was planning on asking at some point anyway and I think this is a good segue which is how can you get a busy person hooked on mindfulness practice you know it would be a first step or how
to start and since we're talking about loving kindness I would like to give a bit of a hard sell for loving kindness meditation is one option because I recall perhaps it was two years ago I was really beating myself up and for people who don't know this about me I've spent the majority of my
life being my own worst enemy in terms of inner dialogue make extremely brutal and hypercritical and load some of myself in so many different respects and I was going through a particularly intense and difficult time with that inner critic just ruthlessly beating myself up and at that
point another friend of mine chaed man 10 who created the search inside yourself classic Google he was a very early on engineer which became the most oversubscribed class for employees at Google recommended that I take a look at loving kindness meditation and I didn't have any particularly
sophisticated approach to it but I decided with nothing to lose and that I was having so much trouble during that period sitting still and trying to focus on say the breath or anything like that that at night this was happened to coincide with book deadline probably not pure coincidence so
that my beating myself up was exacerbated during that time that was a few years ago and I began at night in my case when I would take a shower at night or sit in a sauna I very often go to hotels to write which is something Maya Angelou and a few others that convinced me might be a good idea
that I would consider two people just like you had mentioned two people I really cared for and wished them well that's all I did and chaed had said to me man usually what I would call him that at one point a woman in one of his classes had done this for one day at work every hour on
the hour she would just look out of her office and wish someone well that she could see in her mind's eye for 60 seconds or so and she said it was her best day of work in seven years and I found that unbelievable so I decided to try it myself and that week of just spending maybe two to
four minutes at night before going to bed ended up being one of the most blissful weeks in memory certainly at that point in several years it was really profound and I couldn't pick out any other variable that had changed so for me I just want to for people who are listening and saying ah you
know what I'm type a driven super hyper competitor this doesn't apply to me that it very well could apply to you and that by taking a little bit of the harmful edge off you don't automatically remove your competitive edge and in fact I would argue just as you mentioned that the bowls and so
on used to have or still do it used to have a mindfulness coach for competitive advantage that it can be another tool in your toolkit and doesn't take you out of the game so to speak it just makes you more aware of the games that you're playing so that's a long sort of informational sales
pitch that I wanted to just make sure I got in because I discounted a lot of these practices for a very long time because I thought it would at best be a waste of time and at worst take away some of my skills or tendencies that allowed me to get to where I am so that is more of a confessional than a question but I would love to hear your thoughts any additional thoughts on loving kindness meditation but also any additional thoughts on how if you wanted to get a busy maybe even impatient person
hooked on mindfulness practice what first steps or approaches you might suggest so a lot of different questions sort of woven into what you said and the first is that there's a kind of misunderstand standing in our culture that love is a weakness and it's not there is a way in which it's the force
that can probably the only force that can meet the level of aggression or violence and other such things that are happening in you know in the world it's the power that lets mothers lift cars off their children or to let somebody like Dr. Martin Luther King stand after his church was bombed
and children were killed and say we will meet your physical violence with soul force we will not harm you but we will love you so deeply that we will not only transform ourselves but we will transform you in the process and so the notion that love is somehow a weakness I think we do
everything out of love we want to be loved even in our you know ambition and our desire for success underneath it is you know we want to be well we want to be find our happiness and that's part of love so it's it's actually a power and my colleague and friend
Wes Nysker went to interview Gary Snyder a couple of years ago Gary is a Pulitzer prize-winning poet and environmentalist for 50 years when writing about bio-regionalism and one of our great kind of elders in this environmental movement he said Gary what do you have to say to us now that
oceans are rising the world climate is changing hotter and hotter the species extinction and Gary looked back and he said don't feel guilty if you're going to say that don't save it out of guilt or anger or fear those are the very things that are actually making the world worse save it because you
love it because it's part of you because it and that is the power whether you're starting a company but also it's not just that you you know some vision okay now I'm going to become this wealthy playboy or whatever you know zillionaire then what is your life mean for you and what do you
really want and when you listen there is something in you and it's part of your birthright to both be able to give your gifts but also to love and be loved in return and it turns out that it's a power so then what you talk about is that it doesn't take much to begin the training and you're you know
two minutes or four minutes in the evening or this woman at her work taking once an hour 30 seconds or a minute to look at somebody there and offer a well-wishing can transform everything for people who want the practical support because it is hard to do on your own if you go to
soundstrew.com and look up the programs that I have first there's a 40 day program called mindfulness daily which is 15 minutes a day or 12 minutes a day to depend on the segment that both gives instructions in mindfulness loving awareness and loving kindness practice and it's 12 or 15
minutes a day and by the end of those 40 days you really have learned the inner skills and then it builds up there's a then a deeper training called power of awareness and for those who are interested we're about to open an online teacher training for people interested in mindful
passing along mindful listen loving kindness to others. Jack just interject for one second for people listening I will also link to all of these resources in the show notes which you can find at tim.blog.foretslash podcast so you don't necessarily have to remember all these things you can go
to the URL and we will have direct links to these resources. Sorry to interrupt Jack just wanted to mention here for people listening and with it then there is also the programs there there's one called guided meditations that's you know a download it's like ten bucks or something and it has
a loving kindness practice compassion practice of forgiveness practice I think it may even have a joy practice and it's really helpful to have guided meditations at first because otherwise your attention we have a very short attention span in modern society Albert Einstein at least according
to science if you come American said if you can drive safely while kissing a girl you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves and we are in this kind of multitasking world with our devices and we've forgotten how to tend our own hearts we've forgotten how in some ways to
really be present for one another and it's more important for our own life and so getting guided meditations is tremendously helpful and doing these little mini practices that you talk about one minute two minutes several times a day can transform you I was just going to mention to people also
if you look at behavioral change if you look at bj fog formerly the persuasion laboratory at stanford you look at dietary change any of these things doing less than you think you're capable of doing is a really good long term strategy I mean in terms of starting off rigging the game so that
you can win in the beginning so that your past fail mark in your mind is a really really low hurdle so I just wanted to reiterate guided meditation don't whitenuckle in the beginning like make it beautiful easy as possible the same principle from ancient you know text say that you start in
the easiest way for some people kindness for themselves seems impossible but then you pick a child you care about or someone else or even when you do go to yourself you think of yourself when you are a innocent child and wish yourself well the game is to do whatever naturally opens the
gateway whatever is the easiest for some people is their dog you come home and the most non-judgmental being in their life wags its tail and loves you and it doesn't care you know what's going on in your head so you take the avenue that most naturally opens your heart and then you do this just a
little at a time as you said and it doesn't take long but the other thing that's important is that sometimes as you do it it can actually display or show you the hypercritical nature of your mind the shame that you carry the self judgment or self-loathing and so then you say well what do you
do then or it brings up its opposite is that's the place that you just breathe and hold all that stuff with kindness because this is our humanity and we all have some of that and the point isn't to get rid of it or judge yourself or having it or try to fix it it's almost as if you put your hand
in your heart and you say you know this is like mindful self-compassion of deep training this is part of the measure of struggles that I've been given like every human being these things have tried to protect me and now I can hold them with tenderness and say all right you know thank you but I
don't need your help anymore I can be kind to myself and in that way you're not trying to fix yourself or perfect yourself if anything you're trying to perfect your love this is jack I wanted to give you a credit for help that you gave me and also tactical advice that you gave me during
the 10 day silent retreat what you give me a lot but I wanted to I want to highlight one that's related to what you just said I was going through a very very difficult time particularly days 7 8 9 and you gave me the advice that you just mentioned and there's one component I want to really
underscore for people and that is when you're for instance trying to do loving kindness meditation and instead you get the opposite or you get this self ridicule who are you to try to meditate in this self-indulgent way this is ridiculous or this voice starts to pop up that is angry or hateful
whatever might be the process of not simply dismissing it or fighting against it but recognizing it as a coping strategy that helped you in the past in some way that you developed because in my case you know the rage was a fuel that without which I probably would never have left
long island right friends who later overdosed on opiates and so on so it was a gift in a way and a tool and as you said you can thank that response or that part of yourself and then put it and I remember you recommended even visualizing and please correct me if I'm wrong or elaborate but
visualize taking that part of you that is a coping strategy thanking it and then putting it say on a shelf where you can use it later if you need be along with say other icons or figures who whether it's Buddha or other that you recognize as wise and then continuing with the meditation so
that thanking that part of yourself for the function that it once served even if it is not serving you now was such a key insight for me that then helped me to manage my internal states or observe and appreciate my internal states for the next several days where I really felt like I was lost at that point so that was a really direct tool that helped me tremendously.
Yeah thank you for bringing it up because it's so important for people when we come to that hypercritical shame place we feel very vulnerable and we've been identified with it and because you needed it I needed these things for survival and if you try to get rid of this stuff you just
end up in a fruitless battle against yourself and it's just more judgment so what you described as saying thank you for helping me survive I appreciate it let me put it on the shelf or the altar I'll put it in the lap of the Buddha or whoever you know the goddess of infinite compassion
you hold it for me if I need it I'll pull it back and that sense that this isn't who you are it doesn't describe who you are it isn't who you are it was a strategy because we're vulnerable beings and you were tender as a child and you had to make sure you could survive thank you for
that and now I have a different capacity and let me just talk about that capacity a little bit because the capacity for presence and the great heart of compassion that's said to be your birth right is a really mysterious thing talk about identity and when my youngest brother's wife Estha
was dying of cancer and she's just a beautiful being and I spent quite a bit of time with her and with my brother she was close to dying I've gone home to sleep and I want to get up early and hurry back because it was very close and I got my car I had to stop at the drugstore to pick up
a prescription hurriedly running dashing through the aisles and so forth and I'm at the check out counter and all of a sudden my whole body relaxed and I thought oh Estha died and I got out to the car and I called my brother I said how's it going he said oh Estha died a few minutes ago
and I said I know he'll all be there shortly we've all had these experiences if I ask in a room how many of had this particular kind where you knew someone died when they died you know a quarter of the hands will go up why is this it's because who we are is not this body we are the consciousness
itself and so with all these practices what they allow us to do is to step out of what's called the small sense of self or the body of fear and reconnect with the field of connection of interdependence of compassion and to take our history and to honor it but not be bound by it
one of my favorite stories is a Ramdas again this wonderful spiritual teacher in the early years when he came back from being with his guru in India he was sitting up there and teaching you know devotional practices and meditation practices in the adabird and white robes and
and beads and he's sort of in the guru outfit and a woman in the front row raised their hand and say Ramdas Ramdas aren't you Jewish what's with this Hindu stuff and Ramdas said well yes I am actually I was bar mitzvah it is as I was too and there are many things I love about the Jewish spiritual
tradition the generosity of it the kabbalah all the great teachings on the many stages and states of consciousness the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters and then he paused and looked at and he said but remember I'm only Jewish on my parent's side and there is something both withy which
he was but also profound about it because we are not just our parental history or the historical circumstances of this place and body that we were born into and something in us knows this so that when you look at the there's a wonderful book that came out last year the year before called the
Book of Joy which was a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu and both of them have marvelous laughs I think people go to hear the Dalai Lama by the tens of thousands not just for the Tibetan teaching some of which are actually hard to understand or even the fact that he's
the Snowball Prize winning world figure I think people go to hear him laugh that somebody who's carried so much suffering from the loss of his country where he can't return and the burning of temples and texts and all those things and he and Tutu had a week together when they were asked
and this created this book how can you be joyful how can you laugh like this when you live through apartheid and the death of so many people around you and Dalai Lama I mean they banter back and forth and like brothers and Dalai Lama says so much has been taken from me you know they've taken our
sacred texts they've taken our ability to make prayers in public they've taken so much of our culture why should I let them take my happiness and then Tutu starts to laugh and giggle and say you know I've been through so much but I am not going to let myself live in that place I'm going to let
myself live in that which affirms life and in a kind of profound joy that we made it we're still alive that we can contribute that we can be here in this beautiful and this shift of consciousness is what's needed for the world because we look honestly no amount of technology alone is going
to save us nanotechnology and space technology and biotechnology and worldwide web internet computer or super computer technology is going to stop continuing warfare and racism and tribalism and environmental destruction those are happening based on consciousness of the human heart and so we're
now you know these we've made these enormous developments outwardly where you have the great library of Alexandria and your smartphone in your pocket along with a million you know cat YouTubes or whatever but there it is it's all in there and then what we need is collectively
to develop a transformation inwardly of our inner life that is parallel to this enormous outer transformation the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff some years ago said we are a nation of nuclear giants and ethical insurance you know or you know how old humanity is but it's
time to grow up so that this work that we're talking about is both individual but as you learn to meet your own life with greater understanding and compassion it empowers you to move through the world in a different way and to help others do the same and then you get the kind of joy of
tutu and the dilemma that you're somehow part of an awakening that humanity now needs more than ever Jack I'd love to ask you these interviews are always driven by some self-interest I always have some issue or challenge or problem that I'm trying to figure out so I reach out to someone like
you to help me do it but I record the conversation as we chat it about before we hit record and you know this already but the last several years have been very very important for me in terms of addressing certain traumas in the last eight weeks in particular have been transformative in a
lot of beautiful ways and the duration of periods within which I don't berate or attack myself have become longer but there are still times when the wheels fly off the car and this last week has been one such example and I tend to when I make a mistake or feel like I'm backsliding or relapsing
to compound the problem by beating myself up then I beat myself up about beating myself up and you know where that goes so let me paint a picture so I found out recently that my Japanese host father and I've been in touch with this family since I was 15 I'm very very close to them 40 now
and I found out that he just was admitted because the host mother sent me an email to the hospital with liver cancer they don't have the details yet I just sent a follow-up email they don't know what the prognosis is exactly but needless to say the worst-case scenarios are certainly being
conjured in my mind or the potential of those and then simultaneously have been contending with and I believe you have some experience with this contending with a what should be a very simple construction project of a cabin up in the mountains and it has been delayed and delayed
and delayed and there have been cost over runs and cost over runs and promises made promises broke and expectations set expectations missed and a friend of mine called with a whole new slew of problems yesterday related to this place and I lost my shit for lack of a better term I mean
there are many other things going on simultaneously but I got really pissed and I was like you know what this extending the olive branch being understanding can't gambit is not working with these people like I need to take out the baseball bat and like pull old Tim off the shelf who was just this
like juggernaut head through brick walls and be like listen fuck face like if you don't do a bcd and e here well these are going to be the consequences and then I'm like well wait I'm supposed to be compassionate but how do I not be a pushover and it turns into this big dramatic
play inside my head and then I wait this is going to end soon I'm not going to keep going but what I then often do is self-medicate with caffeine and I think it's a way of feeling productive without actually being productive and it also creates so much volume on the noise I think I use
it to tune out a lot of feelings so when someone relapses or has this kind of experience what do you suggest to them I mean is there a particular pattern interrupt or approach that you found helpful for regaining footing oh say there's a number of things to say first of all you could
call it relapsing or you could just call it yeah being human the most beloved poet in Japan was a Zen master named Ryokan and there's a two line verse of his that I particularly fine-fitting for this where he wrote last year of foolish monk this year no change you know
and you can sort of feel the humor and the tenderness in it and there's a way in which you see your personality the point you know you have a body you have this particular body of your born and you can transform it in certain ways within the limits of the body that you were given
and similarly you have a personality and anybody who has a number of kids realizes that you don't come in tomblerasa that you actually this kid is born and has this kind of temperament so you have a personality and just like you don't want to look too closely to the body sometimes you don't
want to look back closely to personality either you know it has its foibles and its fears and all of that and so you start to kind of look it and say oh now there's a really good example of how neurotic I can get thank you thank you for reminding me you know and then you get a little sort of
like the keeper of the zoo a little more tender with those kind of creatures it's bringing in the non-judgment or loving kindness for the way that you actually are and not your ideal or bringing compassion you could say yeah this is a tough one and this triggered I got triggered so what
now the other thing is that I have the same experience when we had a big remodel of our house when I was some years ago raising my daughter and in my first marriage and we were supposed to go and teach and travel in Europe and this guy who is a good contractor but you know everything of course
gets more expensive and you have to do this and it's kept getting slowed down and I said you are going to get this done so we could make these decisions for one to Europe and it's not happening you've got to hurry up I do that like three or four different times and it doesn't happen finally
I go in I get pissed and I say listen you said this in our contract was going to be done by and if you don't fucking get this done by the time I'm gonna pull your ass in court and sue you because I need this done and I'm not gonna pay you the goddamn money you look at me and he said oh you really
want this done don't you I said yes next day there's a huge crew it starts to get fun and I realized okay what I've been sort of talking meditation speak yeah nice get it done he was a fucking contractor and I just had to see I had to speak contractor ease get the goddamn job done or I'll
haul your ass over okay I get I get it yeah I'll send a team over and that's all it took so there's something playful about that as well it's not that you can't I've seen the dial on I get angry at people it's not that you can't use that power and that understanding when it's
necessary to get to be very strong or forceful and you don't have to judge yourself unless you hurt people and then of course that's the misuse of it but it's just it's part of being human is there something you say to yourself I don't know you are certainly in person and any with
any contact I've had with you one of the most compassionate people I've ever met and I don't use that word very much but you're presence of listening and being with someone is really incredible I don't know how much of that is intrinsic versus trained but for better for worse
you're coming out of the womb I've been very impatient since day one so I worry about I can get it seems like my default is speaking contractories to more than just the wayward contractor who's putting off work is there some when I feel that the sensations of anger beginning to bubble up
is there something that you would suggest as self-talk or just a temporary pumping of the brakes to make it an informed decision versus just a lashing out well I could give you an answer but in a minute I'm going to guide you in a little practice perfect so that you can find the better answer
first I just want to say that that anger you know yes it's your habit or maybe your temperament that's energy and there's nothing wrong with energy you know it's the power to let you do all the kind of things you've done in your life that are tremendously creative or resourceful or daring
or whatever kinds of things so you want to respect okay I'm getting filled with energy and you you know might be then you want to lash out but first you want to respect that energy wow let me feel this in my body whoo anger how big is it whoo okay then your question is then your question is
what can I do to modulate it I could give you you know okay take some breaths ground yourself look at that other person blah blah blah but instead as we're talking let yourself picture a circumstance recently it might have been with your you know the contractors doing your
cabin or something else you know that uprising of the injustice of it and how right you are and how you're going to get this goddamn thing done and how you have to be hard and strong you feel all that and feel the energy in your body first thing is just remember what it felt like and now
you're becoming the kind of mindful loving witness of it and saying wow this is a lot of energy so can you feel that remember that oh yeah oh yeah okay now next step is that the wisest figure you can imagine maybe it's the Buddha or doesn't matter some great master martial arts master
you know who's mastered themselves as well as there are comes to you and let yourself imagine somebody's going to teach you how to manage this powerful energy and see who appears somebody appears to you and first they look at you and they smile and they say yeah this is the big energy
and they appreciate you so instead of saying oh you're a doofus you know they say oh yeah you actually carry some powerful energy and they acknowledge that they bow to you yeah and you got it all right and then you say yeah but how do I manage this when it takes me over and so this
and master wherever comes reaches under their robe and pulls out a gift for you which is a clear symbol of exactly what you need in that moment to help you regulate it so that you can keep the energy but do it in a way that doesn't cause harm to you or another and this clear symbol you'll
be able to see it's just what you need so let yourself picture the gifts that they put in your hand and let yourself imagine see envision picture what it is and if you can't see it clearly hold it up to the sunlight you'll be able to and then let me know what you get you want me to tell you what
it is yeah yeah all right so the person who came to mind for me I went through a few was the creator of judo fastening in and I named Jigo Rokano really small okay small guy who who who yes who could who could throw all the big guys and smile at the same time right exactly changed a lot also in
Japanese government fascinating guy the symbol I don't know why this is to be honest but it's a pyramid the size with with with straight edges about a little too big to hold in your palm that is blue it's like almost a mixture of Scott pure sky blue like a blue bird blue with a bit of
electric blue mixed in and it's sort of a smoky vapor that's floating around inside this glass pyramid I have no idea why that's the case but that's what came up all right so we'll say with it and then there's one more little piece so he gives you this pyramid free associate a little bit on
what it might possibly mean because these symbols are like dream images and they come from a deep place in your side key and this pyramid has a message for you this blue pyramid just guess what it might be I think it's very very stable it's an extremely stable structure and for me it also
I could imagine it representing power also it seems like a very powerful symbol in many different cultures certainly yeah the blue is a little easier for me it's a very cooling soothing color where certainly red is the color I would associate with a fire with the
right high resonance anger energy would be more of a red fire element so the blue would be a cooling or countering balancing force for that all right so now what I want you to do is imagine taking this blue pyramid gift which represents a kind of extreme stability and also a kind of
power and cooling that's given to you by jicaro cano and taking this into your body so that there you are filled with this energy and anger you know the this huge wave of you let that be there and you take this pyramid in and you let that energy be inside this stable grounded
place of power and feel what it's like to be inside this blue pyramid with this energy and feel how it affects it just notice as if they're you're in that circumstance and now I'm remembering I am the blue pyramid and what does it feel like the most noticeable thing I wonder of course how
much of this is the actual visualization versus the timeout right that I permit myself to have but there's very often a tightness on the left side of my chest right by the sternum and I feel when I start getting wound up and that is absent after taking this gift and then
visualizing it being incorporated that's what you're practicing you know and then you know that's very well and athletics that yes you practice things but other times you also practice envisioning whether it's playing piano or whether it's you know some some Olympic training that some
of the times you just do it through visualization and it activates a lot of the same neural circuitry so here you're starting to get the feeling of what it's like to be in the middle of this upwelling of anger and so forth and then taking a couple of breaths and feeling the blue pyramid
and the connection with the earth and the stability of it and the power then of that presence that cools you and allows the anger to be there but not in the same uncontrolled way now there's one more thing and that is if you imagine again jigaro kano I believe you said his name is you got
it he comes up to you after giving you this gift and he touches you kindly on the shoulder and he has a few words of advice of how to handle this powerful energy that comes up in you because he knows all about it and what does he whisper into your ear kindly well you whisper this came to
mind immediately he says then you'll go zen you'll which is you know I still have this actually there too he has many famous quotes but he has what you might consider proverbs short aphorisms that I've actually carried with me since I was 15 but they're packed away somewhere I have two of
them are on cloth and the first is stomere bak kanara the tatsu means basically if you if you work hard you will achieve you will reach your target it's not the best translation but that's the idea the other one is zen neokosen you which is effectively the most efficient use
of energy but it could also be the best slash most benevolent use of energy it's a principle of judo but it's something that he applied to everything including education so it would be that very short bite-sized aphorism which is and I'm sure some scholars probably disagree with me but roughly
translated here at least as I take it is the maximum or most efficient use of energy so take that in take his intentions zen you go zen you the benevolent and efficient use of it seal the pyramid and now your assignment is that the next five times that this comes which you will maybe tomorrow
or next week or so forth bring in the blue pyramids stable powerful cooling so the energy is still there and then you hear his voice says and you'll go zen you'll and you go oh yeah I can use this but I can use it in a benevolent way and try it five times then text me let me know what happened
because now we're closing the loop if you do it and see now you now you're responsible if you agree that you're going to do it it sort of gooses the game a little bit you go okay now I better do it because I have to let Jack know where you know what happened let me know what happens well I'll
be able to use it this week because I'm flying out to the site of this cabin to meet with everybody and see what that's going on so I'll have at least five opportunities to do that you have you're having your zen training ahead I mean the other thing that it's great and then that you can hear
in this rather than by giving you a cookie cutter answer is that we actually have the wisdom that we're seeking or that's a veil we have it in ourselves I mean you didn't have to fly to Kyoto and get in your time machine to go back and see Jigaro Kato you know or whoever
it happens to be the Dalai Lama or whoever happens to come to you the Buddha or some other great figure that actually the goddess of compassion that we carry that wisdom in our own heart and part of what these contemplative trainings do is they give us access just by taking a little pause it
didn't take you 30 seconds okay he appears what do I do here's on my body would feel what perspective should I bring oh here's decision and benevolent use of energy okay now I remember so these answers for the questions of the psyche and the heart don't require going somewhere they
ask us to quiet and begin to listen and as you do you discover your own inherent wisdom and your own compassion as well because the benevolent use that he offers to you where does that lag it lives in terror it lives in you one of the reasons I've wanted to have you on the podcast
for so long is that for me you represent a very wide spectrum of tools you have developed toolkit that has enabled you to work with everyone from the seekers of say the Buddhist along the lines of the Buddhist traditions to say adolescents or cutters to war vets with PTSD missing
limbs and so on you've worked with a very diverse set of students and patients maybe even in that leads me to my next question which is after these experiences abroad why do you decide to come back to the US period and then why did you decide to go back to school and study clinical psychology
so after the first five years in Asia there were two other Westerners who would become monks it was a handful and some were going to stay for the rest of their lives I'd learned a lot and so that was kind of a choice am I just going to stay and I realized no I want a family I want a lover
I was a young man after all and just the celibacy for those years was actually pretty hard I want to see if what I have learned really translates into the life back home I don't want to just leave it and so I was some wrestling but it became very clear to me that I wasn't fit for the
monastery for the rest of my life I had other not only other desires but also and longings but also were real interest to say does this work elsewhere so I came back and thought well what can I do I got a couple jobs and right away and of course what I knew how to do is be a student but I was
now a student of the mind and the heart and I thought well how do I learn more about what happened to me in the monastery oh I'll study Western psychology and so that started me on that particular path and I learned a lot of complimentary things there's some very good trauma work in the west
that I've learned about that really enhances the compassion and loving kindness and mindfulness things that I learned in the temple and now I've done a lot of years of teaching these to Western psychology together these principles that I've learned are spreading so widely in Western
psychology I went to the largest therapy conference in the country in December and down in Anaheim and David talking you know here's a room full of 3,000 or 5,000 people and I ask how many of you have some experience of meditation or mindfulness practice and the majority of the hands went up
and that would not have happened you know 20 or 30 years ago so Eastern psychology is now becoming more invisibly woven into the understayhandings of clinical psychology in the west and it's beautiful now I want to say something else you know when you talk about working with a variety of population
yes people in prisons yes that's or kids coming out of gangs but also CEOs and there's a dialogue that Bill Ford and I did he was that that time the chairman of Ford Motors he was actually the CEO perhaps both for that but then he was he's the chairman of Ford Motors and he talks about it too
it was in 2008 I guess when the auto industry was just about to melt down he called we had some contact he's a meditator and he said you know I'm going to lose my grandfather's company and maybe the whole industry on my watch and it's hard to sleep what can I do and we did loving kindness
practices and mindfulness practices together and so forth and I gave him some practices that he could use and it turns out that at whatever level you're on whether you're incarcerated or whether you're a CEO or whether you're a returning debt that these inner capacities that we have to be
present without getting lost to bring an understanding attention to these energies just as you were doing with anger in ourselves are really really liberating and sometimes what's needed like for the vets or the people coming back from the war is also a kind of forgiveness practice in
trauma work and we'll come together and you know they'll say things like I can't tell you what I saw because in fact people don't want to hear the horrors of war they can't tell the story and if they do often they re-traumatize themselves and the people around them couldn't bear it but there's
something worse because they'll say I can't tell you what I had to do and so it's locked up in their hearts you know and then what do they have they can drink or they can distract themselves or get in blind rage as periodically but if you get a room of returning combat vets and hold it with
a proper space of understanding and compassion not only can they tell their stories which they've never told but they can listen to one another and say oh yeah I've been there and all of a sudden they're not so alone anymore and that release of the weight on their heart so there's a social
dimension to trauma where we need to tell the story helps them release also what's carried in their nervous system and in their body and there's some some correlation between those two together that becomes very powerful and we need that we need I do a lot of teaching of forgiveness practice
and self-forgiveness those are also on those guided meditations that I teach and for a lot of a self-forgiveness like self-compassion becomes a very very important way to liberate ourselves from what we had to do to survive in the past so that we're actually free in our life how do you set the
stage for instance with those vets what do you say to them or what exercise might you do that opens the door for them to share these stories so a couple of images one with gang kids and then one with vets for gang kids who come in or these kids were trying to get out of gangs and
might come with a mentor or something like that to some events we've had you get these guys and they're you know their hoods are up and their hats are on backward and they're leaning back and saying like come on man you're gonna teach us meditation you're gonna teach us give us some
poem stories or this is better we're out on the street people got nine millimeters you know you got to give us something better than that so we try to make a setting that honors who they are from the very beginning and say well we can't talk yet about the real things that we came here to do
because there are too many people in this room who have not been acknowledged and not been respected so would you go out in the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person you know who's been killed and we light one candle and put it in the center of a table say bring it back in and
say their name and put their stone by this candle the simplest possible ritual and these guys and sometimes gals will come in and their hands are full of stones no young people should know that many dead people and they'll say this is for Tito and this is for RJ and this is for home girl
and pretty soon there's a mound of stones and the names of people they've lost will work put into the fabric of the air of that room and their hoods are no longer over their heads they're sitting up like okay this is the place where we can talk about what's really going on so there's something about making whether it's through the simplest ritual or making a container in which people realize that this is a safe place to talk about what we've never done before with the vets one of the
things that Michael Meade released our Dregus these guys from Mosaic Multicultural Foundation that I've worked with for years and are really wonderful Michael who's a you know a great drummer and a storyteller and mythologist who's also been working in prisons and with vets and gank hits for
years they'll say let me tell you an ancient story of returning warriors and he has a handful of stories from Africa or Tibet or the Mayan tradition about warriors coming back you know with their hands covered with blood and you know their eyes have sealed with the martial energy that they
would that they can't stop the violence because it's taken them over and here's a myth or a story that tells about how ancient warriors were brought back into their community I'll tell you the myth if you want to hear one of them oh yes please so here we are you know and there's these vets and
already stories have started to pour out about I can't tell you what I saw I can't tell you what I had to do and Michael stood up and he said let me tell you an old Irish story of an Irish warrior named Cocoolaine or I'm not sure how his name is pronounced something like that then he was the most
fierce and famous of all Irish warriors and the Irish warriors were madmen because they would go out they'd paint their body then they'd go out naked and sometimes you just see them coming and run the other way but anyway there was some rauding king and army that had come to threaten their
area and so Cocoolaine went out and almost single-handedly chased them and defeated them but then he was coming back to his own town in a chariot covered with blood and his eyes blazing bearing down in his own town still possessed with the violence of war with the god Mars and they were
all terrified he would come and do violence there too and so they were like what can we do what can we do and they went to ask the old wise woman in the village and she said three things and so the first thing they lined up all the women in the village who bared their breasts and this slowed him
down because if it reminded him of his mother's milk or something and because he was slowed down then the second thing they did was take a rope and tie it around him and put him in a huge cauldron of cold water which hissed off his body and then they filled it three times with cold water
and finally his body cooled down and then the third thing they did is they took him at stillbound and they lay him on a carpet in the court of the local king and they sang to him the stories and myths and songs of warriors who had protected the kingdom and then come back and released the
violence and the fears that they carried and planted their crops again and love their families and resumed living in harmony with the community from which they came and they told the ancient stories and sang the songs for three days and nights and when it was over co-coulding
eyes open they let his they untied him and he was back as a normal human being again and after Michael told this story to vets who'd been telling terrible accounts of things that happened in this room a hundred men stood up and we'd been working with a simple African chant a song that was really
an African chant of a prayer you know earth hold me for this living is hard we all sang to the vets together for a long time as if we could sing them back into their bodies from this as if they were lying there in the court of the king so this is in you ask the question how do you make a
setting that allows people to truly feel that they can tell their stories and be held in compassion whether it's the grief of these gang kids that no one's really given a place to give voice to you know or the that who says I can't tell you what I had to do that's very powerful and it makes
me also think back to conversations I've had with Sebastian Younger who is a wartime journalist as co-produced and shot a number of really hiring documentary films including Restrepo and most recently wrote a book called Tribe that touches on some similar topic area and leads me to ask you
are there any rights of passages or rituals that you feel would be useful for every man or woman to experience and this is something that I've felt a longing for and a lack of since my teenage years I'm not Jewish did not have abot myths of bar mitzvah I don't know if that serves that purpose
in the Jewish tradition necessarily but are there any rituals or rights of passage that you think we could use in let's just say the United States that would be helpful to whether it's a specific population specific group or you know anyone so what you're talking about is a really big subject
it's a subject of initiation and unfortunately bar mitzvah at least when I was was a relatively lightweight and meaningless thing you get up there and you recite your Hebrew portion of the Bible and now you're a man and they give you a bunch of presents and there wasn't a lot of
meaning in it the problem that you raise is that of the lack of initiation and what's true is that it's been forgotten in our culture one of the few places you get initiation is going into the military that's an initiation but a lot of these gang kids for example they're trying to
initiate themselves which can't really happen you need elders and you needed in a ritualized way but they'll go on that you know if you're in the Musa'i tradition in East Africa and the Messiah people as everybody's heard you know a young man at a certain age of 14 or something will go out
and kill a lion to prove that they're now an adult member of the society and that they're brave and that's part of their initiation their initiations for young women as well and it's not just an Africa the Mayans had initiations and in Thailand when I lived there back starting in the 1960s
at that point almost every young man and many young women when they reached the age of 1920 they became a mouk for three months or for a year and lived in an austere way and it was part of their initiation to learn both the inner life of themselves and also a kind of discipline we don't
have it and because of it you know kids are trying to initiate themselves on the streets by shooting somebody or doing something you know that shows that they're brave but it's not a lion it's another person or it's trying to get the attention of the others and say prove how powerful
or strong they are so we desperately need these and we need them built into our education and to our psychology and I can't give you a simple answer but one of the people who has the most intelligence about this is a man a colleague of my name Michael Mead and if you look at Mosaic
Multicultural Foundation his writings on initiation and what's possible here and the things he's led are very very inspiring so that's a place that I would look that's a good stunning point wonderful I will certainly find that well Jack I think we could go for hours and
hours and hours and I always love chatting with you and I'd love to perhaps even consider doing a part two sometime but given that we've already gone for two plus hours I want to ask just a few more questions and I'll actually start with just reading something very short which is from your
2017 year-end message I think this is just to inject some more optimism into our conversation which we've already had plenty of but this is just a small portion of your year-end message Martin Luther King Jr. describes our collective journey with hope quote the arc of the moral universe is long
but it bends towards justice and quote and Pablo Nareuta explains further you can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming renewal is happening this is back to your voice take quite a time to listen to your heart to meditate and to rest amidst the great turnings feel the
renewal of spring they can be born in you align yourself with goodness let yourself blossom like a lotus or whatever unique flower you are shining in the world offering tiny seeds of love amidst it all blessings to you in 2018 jack and I want this note to then lead into and certainly welcome
to comment on that but which book you would recommend of yours people start with or where they start with all of the many materials recordings readings that you produced because you're a fantastic writer and a prolific writer you've some of my favorite book titles I've ever heard by the way
including after the ecstasy the laundry which maybe we could touch on but where would you suggest people start of the many things that you've written and shared with the world and if you have any comments on that year-end message you're welcome to share that as well so for books if you want
something simple I have books like you know an introduction to meditation that sounds true publishes or I have a little book called the Art of Forgiveness loving kindness and peace which is very simple stories and practices if you want something that's richer and fuller then you could
look at one of my bigger books like a path with heart or the wise heart the guide to the principles of Buddhist psychology and again I think lots of stuff online and soundstries particularly good place to go along with my website then and that 40-day mindfulness mind-holic daily which is
like 30 bucks or something is a really wonderful way to start in terms of what I had written about the trusting heart one of the greatest Zen texts from thousand years ago says to be awakened or enlightened is one with the trusting heart and mind and that doesn't mean that we won't
go through hard times we always have and we will again and we are now in many ways but that we also have born within us the capacity to meet these difficulties with understanding and with courage with compassion and to transform them and in that way one of my favorite recent books
is called the Better Angels of our Nature by Stephen Pinker and he's a remarkable professor at Harvard Anthropologist's historian talking about the growing consciousness of humanity in spite of the kind of wars and conflict and environmental things there are so many good things that have
happened that he charts over the last few centuries of the development of certain abilities for peacemaking there's actually less war than there'd been respect for women the reduction in child labor all kinds of things and in that same regard there's a wonderful book called Barry that
Chains which is about the ending of slavery in the British Empire starting with this handful of men who met in a British tea shop or printing shop and spent 30 years riding around the country bringing ex slaves who were well spoken to talk about the middle passage and the you know the
horrors of slavery and so forth and even though the British Empire's economic engine was built around slavery and sugar by the end of their work 30 years the British parliament outlawed on slavery in the British Empire you know decades before it happened in the US and the Quakers were
a big part of this and the Quakers famously wouldn't take their hats off for the king but when what is his name Thomas Clarkson who was the center of this group trying to end slavery and going everywhere to do it when Thomas Clarkson died all the Quakers of the England took their hats off
because he'd freed so many spirits and so many lives we have these amazing possibilities as human beings and we're just growing into them now culturally and it's about time they are possible and we each have a contribution to make and Jack I'm going to ask you one more question before we
wrap up with just letting people know where they can find you on social media and elsewhere the website and so on but last question is one I like to ask this is metaphor but if you could have a short message on a billboard in other words get a message out two millions or billions of
people could be a few words one word a phrase a quote of yours a quote of someone else's what might you put on that billboard well the two things come to mind one is a question that when I sat with people many times at the end of their life that they then ask of themselves silently or out is
did I love well because in the end what matters really the billboard would have a question rather than a statement and it would have a question something like how could I love myself better so that it actually it's not that I'm going to tell them something they already know this but I'm going to
remind those who read that there is something that's asking to be awakened in them how could I love myself and this world better then you go well gets in the way of that and how could I love that to how could I love myself in this world better well Jack I want to of course thank you for your time
today but beyond that I want to thank you and this is very very much from deep in my heart thank you for helping me to learn to love myself better and quite frankly to see something in the first place that is worth loving that's not where I've spent most of my life so it's turned into if not my I
hesitate to say my top priority because I'm I worry about sounding self indulgent but it's become one of the most important and fruitful tasks in my life is asking that question how could I love myself better or how can I learn to love myself better so thank you very very sincerely for that
and that the words don't do it justice but that's the best I can do right now remotely is to put it into words so thank you for that thank you Tim this was a pleasure to do and why I see you and I know is it as you tend your own heart in a wise way then it makes you available to bring the gifts
the many gifts you have to the world you personally and others but to do it in a way that's on the carrier wave of connection and love and it transforms everything so thank you to well Jack I you know I'm looking at a text third of ours and I'm feeling the necklace around my neck which is
really a thread a red thread that was used to close the one of the elements of the closing of the 10 day silent retreat and I shot you a text not too long ago asking what the three knots meant because I'd forgotten and this is what you wrote back first knot equals refuge in whatever you hold is most inspiring and sacred second commitment to compassion for self and others third following your highest intention and the intention that I've said at the end of that 10 day retreat was to learn to
love myself so I could love others more fully but I've realized it maybe what it is is learning to love myself so I can help others learn to do the same and you've been an integral piece of that and I just love that I have the opportunity to introduce you and your work and these traditions
to more people and I will certainly be linking to where everyone can find you online but are there any particular best places just to reiterate where people can find you and I'll link to these in the show notes jackhornfield.com and also look up jackhornfield on sounds true.com for those programs
that I talked about and then spirit rock.org which is our great meditation center in the bay San Francisco Bay area absolutely stunning stunning beautiful location worth visiting just to bath in the scenery but many more reasons to visit as well well jack thank you again and thank you thank you Tim it's a pleasure and to everybody listening you can find show notes links to all the resources books and everything that we discussed at tim.blog4tslashpodcast and until next time thank you so much
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