A Buddhist Secret for Calm, Energy, and Handling Obnoxious People | Trudy Goodman

12:49Dan Harris:Yeah.

12:49Trudy Goodman:And I think I just am trying to, in a sense, make a little more accessible the idea of enlightenment or awakening or that this is not something that people should assume is only for other people. Because we all have the innate capacity for awareness. We have this. We're born with the ability to be conscious. And that is an amazing gift. Maybe one of the most overlooked gifts that we have is this gift of consciousness, that we get to have perceptions and be awake and alive and conscious. And the other thing that I think is also one of our overlooked human superpowers is that we can direct our attention wherever we want.

13:41Trudy Goodman:We're not really taught about that, how to do that. It's not part of our training. wasn't part of our parents' or grandparents' training to teach us how to do that. But that's also really important, especially when things are hard.

13:58Dan Harris:Let me just stay with enlightenment for a second. In the Buddhist sense, to the extent that I understand it, enlightenment is often defined as the uprooting of greed, hatred, and delusion. You're just no longer experiencing negative emotions. And wait, you're making a face like I might have put a footwork. I would just stop right there.

14:18Trudy Goodman:It's not that you don't experience negative emotions.

14:21Dan Harris:Right, right. You're not identified with them. You're not clinging to them.

14:25Trudy Goodman:Exactly.

14:26Dan Harris:Thank you. So we think of an enlightened person as she or he is floating through the world, pixie dust trailing from their rear end. And we think, well, that's not something that I can achieve. And what I think you're saying is actually right now, if you are in your body, pleasant or unpleasant or otherwise, you are not in the spinning stories of your head, which are...

14:55Trudy Goodman:They may be spinning, but you're not caught in them.

14:58Dan Harris:You're not caught in them. And that's an awakening right there.

15:02Trudy Goodman:Yes, it is. I know as far as that fantasy of tripping through the tulips, pixie dust,

15:11Trudy Goodman:some of the most revered meditation, we don't say masters anymore, meditation teachers in the world. And they're not like that. None of them. They're just not. I've met people who really are very awakened and the ones that I love are very honest about their experience, that they're still human. They have humanness. Somebody asked a late great Japanese Roshi, Maizumi Roshi, And he was giving a talk, and a man was in the audience who was just very, very drunk. He was very provocative, and he said, So Roshi, what's it like to be enlightened? And Roshi looked at him and said, Very depressing. And I love this story, because in that moment, he was looking at somebody quite troubled and it was sad.

16:15Trudy Goodman:Do you see what I'm saying?

16:17Dan Harris:My wife has a tattoo on her left arm that says right now it's like this.

16:21Trudy Goodman:Yes, exactly. So in that moment, that's what it was like.

16:28Dan Harris:And so in any moment, if we're in touch with what it's like, that's a form of enlightenment.

16:34Trudy Goodman:I like to use the word awakening because it's less fraught than enlightenment. Enlightenment has this once and for all quality. And some of the texts seem to promise that. And it can be really confusing. Jack gives a talk called Enlightenment's Plural.

16:50Dan Harris:Yes, I've heard that talk. Yeah. I've read the essay, actually.

16:53Trudy Goodman:So, you know, that to me makes more sense. So I like to say awakening because the whole point is to stay awake. And nobody, maybe outside of retreat, protected circumstances, could say that they really awake 24-7, that they never get distracted and unmindful, even for a moment. I certainly can't say that.

17:16Dan Harris:I can't say it either.

17:18Trudy Goodman:Yeah.

17:19Dan Harris:Let's go back to the beginning of this discussion. We were talking about trusting yourself, and you talked about your history of not trusting yourself. we established that the first step on this path is to hone your capacity just to be awake. I'm wondering, is that necessary but not sufficient? What is required after you've learned how to wake up a little bit in your life? What else might be required in order to have trust and confidence in yourself?

17:46Trudy Goodman:I think to be more ecumenical about it, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk in 2017. And in that, I was so struck by it that I actually took some notes of it. He said, what we really need is a revolution of tenderness in the world. We have to talk sequentially because we live in linear time, but it would ideally be together. that next step that you talk about to me would be infusing awareness with some tenderness or kindness or love. And if you really practice staying awake, it will come naturally because what you begin to see is, as I was talking about earlier, the humanness, that we're humans together, shared humanity, and those things that get in the way of our realizing our shared humanity, they tend to fall away somewhat.

18:44Trudy Goodman:And when you start to be able to see that, you naturally feel a kind of, I don't know, it's like a kind of compassion. Like, look, we're in this together. We were born in these bodies and we live in these bodies and we're vulnerable in these bodies. So we're in this together. and I'm at a stage of life where I can say, our bodies age. I could look in the mirror today and say, fine, let's stop right here. I'm good.

19:14Dan Harris:I'm good, meaning I don't want to keep changing or I'm good.

19:17Trudy Goodman:Yeah, I'm fine. I don't need to get older. I'm fine right here.

19:20Dan Harris:I'm as old as I want.

19:22Trudy Goodman:I'm as old as I want to be. I'm old enough to have a little experience of life, a little wisdom, a little tenderness. I'm good right here. But it's kind of like saying, I really want to keep my baby teeth. They're so cute. I don't want those serrated permanent teeth to come in.

19:39Dan Harris:The word that Stephen Batchelor, the Buddhist writer, who I believe studied the same Korean Zen master that you referenced earlier, the word he sometimes uses in this regard is poignancy.

19:50Trudy Goodman:It's a beautiful expression. I love that word. And I love where he uses it in that intimations of the sublime chapter. And I forget the name of his book.

20:00Dan Harris:Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist?

20:01Trudy Goodman:No.

20:02Dan Harris:Or Buddhism Without Beliefs?

20:04Trudy Goodman:No, it's even another one.

20:06Dan Harris:After the Buddha? Those are the three books by him that I know.

20:08Trudy Goodman:They're all good. They're all good. It'll come back to me.

20:11Dan Harris:After Buddhism is actually one of his books by...

20:14Trudy Goodman:It was before that one. But I think poignancy is a beautiful word to describe the bittersweetness of our existence as humans together. And I have this quote that I want to read because it has to do, again, with this sense of what is awakening? What does it mean? this is a quote from helen prejean and she is the one who the movie dead man walking was made about her she was a nun yes she was a nun and she said and i love this she said my whole faith now is making love present in the world and letting love be in my life what counts now is being with people especially those people who are most excluded death row inmates and their families that was her mission to work with the most excluded feared maybe hated people when i was talking earlier about just letting the self as a point of reference loosen up a little bit i think of that I think of, oh, how can I, you know, Sharon Salzberg wrote a book with the most beautiful titles.

21:23Trudy Goodman:It was called A Heart As Wide As The World. Like, how can I just embrace more and more and more of the good, the bad, the ugly, hold all of it in my heart with some tenderness? I feel like that's a really beautiful way to live.

21:41Dan Harris:But I could see a potential misunderstanding and perhaps even a potential pitfall in here, Because if you're saying that one way to trust and confidence in yourself is through increasing your love quotient, people who have low self-esteem can fall into sort of ruinous, toxic altruism where they're people-pleasing as opposed to having a healthy relationship.

22:06Trudy Goodman:Well, that's a huge pitfall is imagining that you're supposed to love other people more than yourself, put other people first. And a lot of spiritual teachings do actually encourage that. having healthy boundaries and knowing what is my limit where am i going to start to feel i'm overgiving and resenting it i mean this is an issue for every parent certainly to consider i'm coming back to a story from the buddhist scriptures the teachings and this is a story you probably know it about King Pasanadi Kosala and his wife, Queen Malika. I think Malika asks him first. It was kind of like, I don't know, it's a little bit of Snow White too.

23:00Trudy Goodman:Like, who do you love the most in the world? Who do you love the most? And he says, I think myself. And then he says, well, your majesty, how about you? You know, who do you think is the dearest one to you. And she reflects and she said, I would have to say myself. They're a little bit, maybe a little freaked out because it's not very romantic. And they go and they talk to the Buddha and the Buddha says, there is no one on this earth more worthy of your love than you yourself. He's not saying there's anyone less worthy. He's really saying it's okay to take care of yourself. it's not only okay it's really the foundation like trusting yourself so when i talk about love i don't just mean being selfless and that can devolve into being a doormat or overgiving which i certainly have done in my life and there's a lot of the spiritual teachings that kind of condition you to do that and that's where i think western psychology has a huge contribution to make where we really learn about how to be a healthy self.

24:14What does self-love look like to you?

24:18Dan Harris:Because speaking of pitfalls, one pitfall or misunderstanding when it comes to self-love could be narcissism.

24:25Trudy Goodman:Of course, of course. Self-love does not look like being self-referential in the way that I was talking about earlier, where you just, all roads lead to yourself, basically. You tell me something and I'll just link it right back to me and my experience. You know, what's that joke? How are you doing? How are you feeling about me? I forget it.

24:51Dan Harris:Something like that.

24:52Trudy Goodman:Okay, it can devolve into things like that. In some of the texts, they talk about self-cherishing as a really bad thing because they're really talking about being selfish and only thinking more always about yourself instead of about yourself and the other. yourself in a relational context, context of whether it's family or group or community or country or planet world, but yourself in a relational context. And I think of self-love as respect. Self-respect is probably a better word. Having self-respect. Because if you really have self-respect, you're not going to be harming yourself so easily. For example, people who fall into addiction.

25:38Self-respect is a helpful way out among 12-step and many other supports

25:45Trudy Goodman:for getting sober.

25:47Dan Harris:The self in the Buddhist context is such a tricky notion.

25:52Trudy Goodman:So tricky and everybody gets their knickers in a twist about that one. Because self, subject, object, they're kind of one thing at a certain point with perception, But this is getting into the weeds. I don't think we have to worry about it. The sense of me is not going to go away. It's just, is that always in charge of everything I do? I'm not trying to annihilate myself. Does that make sense?

26:19Dan Harris:It does make sense. And I think that is a, this is becoming a theme. Another pitfall or misunderstanding of the Dharma is a self-annihilation.

26:27Trudy Goodman:Yes.

26:28Dan Harris:It becomes a kind of self-hatred. It can become that.

26:31Trudy Goodman:And listen, again, one of the things I've worked with thousands of people, both as a psychotherapist and a meditation teacher, because at this age, you know, I've been doing this for 50 years. And so practicing and studying and then later teaching, if there's one thread, it's people are so hard on themselves. And self-hatred is always a possibility. That's where I think the loving kindness practices and the joy practices, you know, really deliberately cultivating joy. What is it Wendell Berry said? Be joyful even though you've considered all the facts.

27:07Dan Harris:I love that. That's really good. I'm writing that down.

27:10Trudy Goodman:Yeah, it's from, I think, the Mad Farmer. He says, put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Hear the songs that are yet to come. This is my favorite part. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. And I think that's one of the ways that we can steady our hearts in uncertain times is to cultivate joy. These little moments, the moments of laughter together, the moments that Thich Nhat Hanh called the non-toothache. How many times are we grateful and happy that we don't have a toothache?

27:57Right?

27:59Trudy Goodman:And then he also said another important thing in terms of steadying the heart in uncertain times. One of our Insight LA teachers, Insight LA is the non-profit that I founded here in Los Angeles. One of our teachers, Lian Chi Tran, is Vietnamese, and she came on a very traumatic boat to escape from Vietnam. And Thich Nhat Hanh always said about the people who had to escape in those boats and pirates and storms and very vulnerable and overcrowded, and he always said if one person in that boat could stay calm, everybody in that boat had a better chance of survival. Our boat is small here in this world, but if we can just stay calm and appreciate the non-toothache moments and cultivate joy, I do believe we're really helping the world.

29:01coming up trudi goodman talks about intuition how to know if you're listening to yourself

29:07Dan Harris:the power and importance of community and the importance of getting out of your own bubble and differentiating between your opinions and your values

29:22Dan Harris:i'm curious about how that redounds to trusting yourself would the mechanism be there that if If you're calm, you have a regular IV drip of joy, that you're less caught up in the culture's messages to you about how you shouldn't trust yourself?

29:40Trudy Goodman:Yes. Yes. And you're better able to discern what's actually going on. And you're less distracted. I want to talk a little bit about intuition because that's very linked to trusting yourself. And I was at a gym in a class. The teacher said, let's go. We were going to do these sideways leaps, like preparing for snowboarding. I mean, I was already 75. I was not going to go snowboarding, but I loved the class.

30:07Dan Harris:Just to say you don't look 75.

30:09Trudy Goodman:Well, I'm not anymore. I know. I'm 79 and three quarters. You know, the older you get, and who knows, by the time people listen to this, I might even be 80. But it's like kids. The older you get, you start counting three quarters. so she took us outside on a cement sidewalk to do these leaps and as we went outside I heard a distinct voice in my head that said let's skip this one and I wanted to do it and I was going really fast and my foot caught in a little crack in the sidewalk and I slammed down and broke my back every time I override my intuition it's a disaster for your intuition to talk to you You need to trust your perceptions and be listening a little bit.

30:59Trudy Goodman:By listening, I just mean being present. Because I was distracted by, oh, yeah, let's go. I mean, it was not a subtle message. I do not always hear voices. That was maybe one of the only times, a few times in my life. But there was another time. And I'm telling this story because when I emerged from my last divorce, and yes, I have had more than one. When I emerged from my last divorce from somebody I adored, a wonderful Zen teacher, we were co-teachers, our lives were completely entwined, but there were problems toward the end of our marriage and I had intuitions about them. But when I would talk to him, he would look me in the eye and talk to me and he was so clear and I loved him and it didn't cross my mind that he was lying to me.

31:53Trudy Goodman:But he was. He felt he needed to. I'm not judging or explaining or excusing. That's not the point of the story. The point of the story is I overrode my intuition. And so when we came apart, when we went apart, I thought, how am I ever going to trust myself again? Over and over, I just steamrolled over my trusting my intuition. and how am I going to choose a partner ever again? Certainly, this is the end of my love life, blah, blah, blah, my mind telling me all these very sad stories. And I'm sharing this because I think a lot of people might wonder, how do you discern that inner voice from fear?

32:34Trudy Goodman:Is it the voice of fear or is it trustworthy intuition? What I did was I started to just listen. and if it meant suddenly veering off my path to stop at a coffee shop because I had that random idea, I did it. I listened. I had a dream about some cousins that I hadn't seen forever in a job. I called them. I visited them. I think we were all wondering why I was there. but the point was to listen to that impulse because it wasn't a fearful one it was just my way of signaling and other people you can try this signaling I'm here and I'm listening to the messages that are appearing in my consciousness and not long afterwards I was visiting teacher a resident teacher for the Santa Fe insight meditation community and I was invited to teach, co-teach with my beloved colleague, Phil Aronnell, with whom I founded this Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, the first one in the world, and we really were close.

33:46Trudy Goodman:The conference was in Marco Island, Florida, and you had to fly into Fort Myers. So I was at that time living in New Mexico. We met, he was from Boston. We met in Fort Myers. We drove down together. We taught for the week with a couple of colleagues, and then it was time to drive back to the airport and I didn't want to get in the car. I didn't have a premonition. You know, I just had this feeling, but because I was doing this practice of listening to my body, which my body didn't want to get in the car, I didn't get in. And you may have guessed the end of this story, which is really tragic. I had to drive back with another colleague.

34:26Trudy Goodman:It was inconvenient. He said, well, I'll go with Phil. You take my rental car.

34:31Dan Harris:I said, I can't.

34:32Trudy Goodman:I'm not on the contract. So he grudgingly stayed with me. I think I just made up. I just said, well, I want to go for one more swim before we go back to winter. And Phil was killed in a head-on collision on the way to the airport. I would have been sitting right next to him, a truck crossed the median and just plowed into the oncoming traffic, driven by a 15-year-old without a license. So I feel like trusting my intuition literally saved my life. And I think that's maybe to come right around the beginning of this conversation, maybe that's why I place so much emphasis on trust.

35:15Dan Harris:A moment ago, you talked about the fact that some people get hung up on like, how do you know if you're listening to yourself? How do you know you're not just listening to the fear voice. I haven't read it, but there's a book called The Gift of Fear that some female friends of mine have referenced to me because apparently in this book, it talks about the fact that sometimes our bodies are trying to...

35:37Trudy Goodman:Oh, listen, fear is our friend. Okay. Sure. And part intuition can reveal itself as fear too. You know, if I'm, I don't know, I mean, what is the classic example in a dark alley alone, and I feel fear, I need to look behind me. I need to look around, right? It's our warning system. So I'm not saying don't have fear. I'm just saying sometimes the messages that we might be hearing might be fearful thoughts as opposed to trustworthy intuitions. That's the distinction that I was meaning to make.

36:14Dan Harris:Just to complicate this even further, sometimes what may seem like intuition is in fact bias and bigotry.

36:22Trudy Goodman:Yes, it is. And that's again where I think these practices of awareness come in so that we can begin to notice when we have those kinds of biases. And sometimes we can't. They're invisible to us because of the way we were brought up or our conditioning in different ways. And that's why we need community. That's why we need each other. I need you to say to me, you know, I think that thought or what you're saying is biased. I think you're expressing a certain kind of bias here or prejudice or judgment or something that might not be so wise. We need each other. We need each other for so many things.

37:07Trudy Goodman:Community is power. We're very vulnerable and powerless without each other.

37:14Dan Harris:I think of what I'm hearing you say to bring it back to the central theme of this conversation is that in an interesting way, this is a bit of a bank shot, but in an interesting way, having a good community, a healthy community can help you trust yourself.

37:30Trudy Goodman:Absolutely.

37:31Dan Harris:Because they're calling bullshit on you. Yes, exactly. Once again, you've said it faster and probably clearer.

37:40Trudy Goodman:But listen, Dan, I really appreciate you because I have intense ADD. My mind is like a fountain of ideas. And so to have somebody corral me and sum it up is the big fat gift.

37:55Dan Harris:Oh, we should do more of this. This is like the only skill I have. So we're a good match. I need to keep you with me every time I have to give a talk. I do actually want to go back to something you said a while ago, and it's kind of linked to community. And I'm not sure I'm going to recapitulate it accurately, but it was something about how being loving, having good relationships can loosen the grip of self in a way. Yeah. Which I totally agree with. And then I was thinking, okay, well, that actually could help with trusting yourself because you're loosening a grip on the sort of less healthy aspects of self and better able to hear the sort of truer, more honest aspects of yourself.

38:43Dan Harris:Am I in the neighborhood of accuracy? Okay.

38:45Trudy Goodman:Definitely. And one of the things I wish is that as a community of humans, that we would be more, not just calling each other on our bullshit, but listening to each other and being curious. Why do you believe this bullshit? I think it's bullshit. You really believe it. I'd like to know more about that. what it means to you. Because without dialogue and conversation, I don't see how we're going to make peace in this world. And we need to. We kind of urgently need to. So I feel that's also really important. And it's one of the factors of awakening. You know, we have these seven factors of awakening.

39:27Trudy Goodman:Mindfulness is the fulcrum. And then there's these sort of energizing aliveness ones on one side, which would be joy and effort and investigation is one, curiosity, right? Interest, joy. And then there's the calming ones, you know, tranquility and calm and equanimity. And equanimity contains wisdom because equanimity, I mean, the root meaning of equanimity is looking upon that bit of space between the skull and the brain where you can observe your experience, witness. And that witness consciousness, we sometimes call mindful awareness, loving awareness. Different traditions have different names for it.

40:14Trudy Goodman:But it's really key to being able to catch ourselves and also be honest so that if you call me out on some bullshit of mine, instead of getting defensive, I have a choice. I could actually get curious and say, maybe that's true. Maybe he's right. And then look into my own mind and see, could that be true? Could that be right? It's just another way that I feel being present and awake and helps us be in relationship with each other. And certainly having some kindness or being disposed towards some tenderness also helps. Because I'm not ready to pounce on you when you say something I don't like.

41:10Dan Harris:You pounced when I started just stating the truth of enlightenment slash awakening earlier.

41:15Trudy Goodman:Did I pounce? No, you didn't really pounce. I didn't really pounce.

41:18Dan Harris:In your defense. You're taking us somewhere maybe a little counterintuitive and maybe even somewhat discomforting for some listeners. I think that's where you're taking us because we're talking about trusting yourself and we live to state a truism in divided and polarized times. It seems like partly what you're advising us to do as part of trusting ourselves is to re-examine our opinions and views.

41:47Trudy Goodman:Well, to have the confidence to be curious about someone else whose opinions and views differ from ours and whose opinions and views we might hate or strongly disagree with. I was at a neighbor's house. I had listened to a political commentator that I don't agree with at all.

42:09Dan Harris:You're willing to say who this person is?

42:11Trudy Goodman:Okay, so I was listening to Tucker Carlson.

42:14Dan Harris:Okay.

42:15Trudy Goodman:And I then was so interested in what he was saying that I subscribed to his newsletter thing. Because I thought, I never hear people in my bubble, due to the algorithms and the social connections, I never hear people believing the things that Tucker Carlson believes. So I said to my neighbor, have you ever listened to Tucker Carlson? And she said, why would I do that with a kind of sneer? Which could have been me another time. But I thought, we need to actually get curious and try to claw our way out of the silo the algorithms put us in to hear what other people are saying. And even if it sounds outlandish to us, to realize, okay, a lot of people believe this.

43:14And then can I talk to some of them?

43:18Trudy Goodman:Can I listen? Can I be open? I know that if we exchanged pictures of our kids or if we talked about what it was like to lose someone we loved, we would be completely on the same page. So how do we drift so far apart? Or more importantly, how do we get back together?

43:41Dan Harris:I've had a sort of round trip on this same issue, just to tell a little story of my side. I really fancied myself to be a quite even-handed and fair-minded journalist and spent a lot of time in interviewing everybody from cult leaders to terrorists to murders to people who are on a completely different side of the...

44:05Trudy Goodman:Many people you disagree with.

44:06Dan Harris:Yes. And I thought, I think with some justification that I treated everybody fairly. I think that's not totally untrue. And but Trump undid me. And I realized when Trump appeared on the scene that I was, I had lost, I think objectivity is an unattainable standard, but I had lost some sort of balance. So I really, I went on a mission in around 2016, 17, 18, 19 to just, I never really got into Tucker Carlson, but I started listening to one example would be Ben Shapiro, who's a very popular right-wing podcaster. I, in fact, got so interested in him, I went and interviewed him. And I still, to this day, retain this practice of listening across the spectrum.

44:57Dan Harris:But at first, it was really disorienting. I felt like a kind of self-gaslighting.

45:03Trudy Goodman:That's a great expression. I like that.

45:05Dan Harris:Yeah. And that's really what it felt like. And it was bumpy.

45:08Trudy Goodman:That's ignorance, delusion, self-gaslighting would be part of that. Yes, yes. But I want to hear the story.

45:15Dan Harris:Well, there's not that much more to it other than that eventually what I came to see is there's a difference between your opinions and your values. And so I got much looser around my opinions on the issues du jour, but much more confident in my like, nobody's going to talk me out of my view that cruelty is uncool.

45:35Trudy Goodman:Same here. nobody's going to talk me out of the idea that you know a drug addict shouldn't be in charge of the treasury i believe that and i'm not going to unbelieve that but i still want to learn i still want to it's a life co-on right now it's really a huge question how do we come back together and relate to each other when cruelty is happening.

46:09Dan Harris:Yes. And even more sort of acutely for this discussion, a life koan is how do you retain your curiosity about people with whom you disagree without taking off the table your right to say, this is wrong. Yeah, this is, I'm not down with this.

46:28Trudy Goodman:What happened?

46:29Dan Harris:Yes. In some ways, to take it back to trust and self-trust and self-confidence, like this is a bit of an advanced practice, I think, is like you need to have a little bit of a foundation of self-trust before you.

46:42Trudy Goodman:Before you venture into those waters. Yeah. Absolutely.

46:45Dan Harris:Before you start ingesting a bunch of.

46:47Trudy Goodman:Absolutely, because it's very convincing. And again, this has very much to do with the algorithms and what we see. People say, well, I've done my research, but the research that they did is flawed. This is where science is really important and scientific method is really important. We have the ability today to merge the practices of the heart and awareness with science, because lots of things are being known about the brain and learned about the brain. Those are real things. For example, we know that power, a lot of power, damages certain parts of the brain, the empathic centers of the brain. Dr.

47:39Trudy Goodman:Kelly, he's proved it behaviorally. And then I have the name, I forget the name of the scientist who's proved it with neuroscience. This is very, I think, important, wonderful research. I also don't want to end this without doing a little bit of practice of some kind together with people. I know that people who are listening or watching, you know, they might be in their cars, they're going about their day. they're not necessarily going to stop and close their eyes and meditate. But I think I have a practice that people can just do wherever they are.

48:15Dan Harris:In a free range style. You want to describe it?

48:18Trudy Goodman:Well, why don't we do it?

48:19Dan Harris:Let's do it.

48:22Dan Harris:Before we do it, though, let's sneak in a quick commercial break. After the break, you will hear Trudy lead us in a guided meditation that you can do wherever you are, eyes open or closed. We're also going to talk, by the way, after the break, about the connection between forgiveness and trusting yourself.

48:43Trudy Goodman:So first, I want to encourage everybody to take just three deep breaths. I'm going to close my eyes and do it. You don't have to close your eyes because I don't know where you are at this moment. I'm just going to relax my body. One. Two. I'm just breathing in the aliveness of this moment and breathing out any tension, letting myself relax with that out breath.

49:22Trudy Goodman:and then taking a moment to just enjoy the feeling of being present and a little bit relaxed and notice if there are feelings of heaviness or tension or any kind of sadness or difficulty that you may be holding in your body to just notice that you can do it. You can do this any way that you are. And then see if you can kind of relax around that a little bit and name it. Oh, just gently acknowledging, oh, this is sadness. Or this is worry. Or this is grief. This is anger. just making room for it to be here. Because when we make room for us to feel our feelings fully, they will change. They inevitably change because everything does.

50:32Trudy Goodman:And then just for a moment, breathing in some kindness. Imagine your breath as you breathe. We don't have to be sitting still like we are, but imagine your breath as your most loving, faithful companion. After all, it's always here for you. And just letting your breath, the ebb and flow of your natural rhythm of breathing.

51:07Trudy Goodman:just breathing in that trust that your breath will always be here as long as you're alive and breathing out that sense of connection kindness compassion compassion, maybe sending out your breath to everyone who's suffering at this moment in this life. And if that's you, remembering you're not alone in this. and then once again just breathing in and experiencing the breath as loving you, taking care of you even gently caressing you a little bit when you can really sense and feel it so you're breathing in the caring of the breath You're breathing out some caring for this life, for anyone who's suffering, for yourself.

52:20Trudy Goodman:And then finally, call to mind a moment of joy or pleasure. It can be a little moment. Somebody gave me a kind smile earlier today. I loved it. It could be the sunrise. could be the sound of raindrops or you heard somebody laughing children playing whatever uplifts you

52:47Trudy Goodman:just call that to mind and just remember joy

52:56Trudy Goodman:remember joy because when we talk about these moments of disconnection with ourselves, with each other with our country, with our leaders whatever it might be. I think we're being asked not to turn away in frustration or despair, but to hold each other close, to take this moment, can be any moment, to just take a deep breath, breathing in the caring, the love that is available to us if it's only the breath being our most faithful companion. And then just breathing out, relaxing, and opening to connecting with others. That's a practice that I want to offer just to remember that joy and love, they are always here, even though they may get so buried by our distress.

53:56Trudy Goodman:Yes. As I use the word disconnection and thought that came up for me is that like we have like a culture wide separation anxiety that's happening right now.

54:08Dan Harris:We're disconnected from ourselves. We're disconnected from each other. And given that connection is the sort of apex of what it means to be a human, it is the essence of what it means to be a human. And that is a recipe for disaster on a micro scale with the epidemic levels of individual anxiety and depression. And loneliness. And loneliness and a macro scale with the vision that we're seeing in the country.

54:38Trudy Goodman:Yeah.

54:38Dan Harris:And so that practice was kind of like a remedy for separation anxiety.

54:43Trudy Goodman:It's remembering.

54:44Dan Harris:Yes.

54:45Trudy Goodman:The classic definition of mindfulness is remembering. You know this. And how do we remember? We have to put down our devices for a minute, maybe a few minutes. Walk outside. Look at the sky. Stand under a tree. If it's not too snowy, lie down for a minute on the ground and just feel the energy of the earth. I mean, really, it's our birthright to be part of nature. And nature is an ally, and it doesn't have to be the wilderness. You know, it could be in the city. Just being outside for a few minutes, looking at the sky is usually possible, even in New York. There's some slimmersome sky that you can look at.

55:33Trudy Goodman:There's a little something poking out of the sidewalk. Soon there are going to be tulips, you know.

55:39Dan Harris:Duncan Trussell, the comedian who has his own podcast and has been on this show, calls you Trudy the Love Barbarian. What does that mean?

55:47Trudy Goodman:Okay, so Duncan did something really cool. He took his podcasts with several spiritual teachers, and he, in connection with a colleague and Netflix, they made a series called The Midnight Gospel, and it's cartoons. Episode four features a character called Trudy the Love Barbarian. She carries a rose in her mouth, and anyway, she can be very fierce. And it's so fun because I got to be the voice of Trudy the Love Barbarian. And the dialogue is from our podcast that we did, Stuff I Said. So, you know, I'm riding along on my horse. And then I'm saying these things about forgiveness. And then I slice the head off somebody who's an opponent.

56:35Trudy Goodman:I mean, it's just fun. It's fun. Some of it's like 14-year-old fun, but it's fun. I have to say I loved doing it. And I want to put this out because doing voiceover, you don't have to worry about hair or makeup or anything. You go in a booth and you act and they tell you what to do. Scream. No, louder. You just do it. It's so fun. So I want to say to anybody watching or listening, if you need a voiceover artist, I'm here. And I would love to do it. And, you know, it's kind of fun, like discovering late in life something that you're good at that you had no idea ever that you would be good at it.

57:22Trudy Goodman:It was great.

57:23Dan Harris:I feel guilty. I've never watched it. I do need to.

57:26Trudy Goodman:Well, I have to feel even guiltier because I didn't watch all of it.

57:31Dan Harris:I just watched your bits.

57:32Trudy Goodman:Well, I watched up till my bit.

57:34Dan Harris:I see. I see.

57:35Trudy Goodman:And then some of the graphics were so graphic. And I just thought, I'll listen to more later.

57:45Dan Harris:yeah and then they put out a new show you started binging that and there you go you talked about forgiveness there and i'm just this might be a good place to end it or maybe it's not what connection if any is there between forgiveness and trusting yourself that's a really interesting question let's see right away i would say that forgiveness is very

58:07Trudy Goodman:tricky. Everybody wants to forgive because it feels good and it's just more uplifting than having revenge fantasies and grudges and hate and stuff like that. So the tendency is to want to jump to forgiveness because it feels better than feeling the feelings that often come with being hurt or betrayed or feelings of anger and revenge fantasies and all that stuff. So I wanted to say that when you trust yourself, you're going to be able to trust the importance of feeling your feelings fully and not jumping over them to forgive too fast, too soon, before you're ready. You can trust that the anger is there for a reason, like fear, like other emotions.

59:06Trudy Goodman:They're not there for no reason. Trust they're there for a reason, that it's okay to feel them. They're not going to overwhelm, flood, and destroy you. You can feel them. And through the willingness to just let them be there and have their being, they change. They inevitably change. I mean, I could work with you right now and demonstrate that if you want. I don't know if we have time. And then, then you can ask yourself, am I ready to forgive? Some acts are unforgivable. You can't forgive them, but maybe you can forgive of the person who did them because you understand they wouldn't have abused you if they hadn't been abused and they wouldn't have been abused if their parents, you know, these things cascade down the generations and you can have some empathy or compassion on.

1:00:06Trudy Goodman:But forgiveness, it's tricky. It takes some time and some care to not do it too fast. I know for me in the past, I wanted to be a spiritual person. And so I wanted to forgive because that's what a spiritual person would do. But that was so toxic because I was enraged. Then you're gaslighting yourself, actually, to use your great expression.

1:00:34Dan Harris:You're 79 and three quarters as we do this interview. How proficient are you at this point in trusting yourself, given your history of not trusting yourself?

1:00:45Trudy Goodman:I'm much better at it. I'm much better at it. I also recognize the patterns of self-doubt so much. And it came up for me, actually. I wrote an email to somebody where I became vulnerable in the email, and I sent it. And it was somebody I admire and respect a lot. And then afterwards, I had this sort of wave of shame of, you shouldn't have pressed send. and all that self-talk of doubt. But I recognize it. It's so familiar. The feeling is familiar. And I just thought, no, it's okay. Trust yourself. You did it. And sure enough, I got the most loving email back. But that sort of spinning out, it could have lasted for hours before.

1:01:38Trudy Goodman:I could have beat up on myself for quite a while. That doesn't happen anymore at all. The practice works, and I'll borrow a phrase from wonderful 12-step programs. It works if you work it. We have a responsibility to work it. And I feel we have a responsibility thanks to our human birth. It's very precious to be born a human being and to have this consciousness.

1:02:06Dan Harris:another thing that is said i think by the buddha about this practice is that it's good in the beginning good in the middle good in the end so even somebody listening who's just learning how to trust themselves great yes it's great and it will bring benefits at any point along the path it's really great i have two questions i usually ask toward the end one is is there something you were hoping that we might get to that we haven't gotten to?

1:02:39Trudy Goodman:No, maybe just how happy I am to be here doing this with you. You know, I didn't know ahead of time what it would be like, and it's really, really nice.

1:02:50Dan Harris:Thank you. Likewise, and you had to take an hour and a half Uber to get here. I did. We're going to have dinner afterwards, and so I'm grateful to you for dedicating this amount of time to do all this, so thank you.

1:03:01Trudy Goodman:Well, I remembered that your talk was the only meditation and mindfulness talk that my grandson ever liked. Am I allowed to say why? Yeah. Because you dropped the F-bomb in that talk. I can't bring myself to say it when I was on camera.

1:03:19Dan Harris:You said fuck.

1:03:22Trudy Goodman:And he was 12 and he just loved it.

1:03:26Dan Harris:It's funny. I have a 10-year-old and he hears me swear so much that he doesn't think swearing is

1:03:31Trudy Goodman:cool because daddy does it daddy does it it's embarrassing and it's wrong yes but for owen sitting in the front row and you being up on a stage at ucla to say it liberation freedom yes

1:03:49Dan Harris:well i'm glad i could give that to owen um so yes i would ride an hour and a half to see you Thank you. Final, final question. Please just plug Inside LA or any other stuff that you're doing in the world or have written or website or whatever. People who want to get more from you, how can they do that?

1:04:09Trudy Goodman:I have a website. It needs updating. I would like it to eventually just have all my work on it offered for free for everybody to use. And that's my aspiration for it.

1:04:23Trudy Goodman:It's things on it and some guided meditations and blogs and stuff like that. I do want to plug Insight LA.

1:04:32Dan Harris:Please. It's an amazing organization.

1:04:33Trudy Goodman:Wonderful, wonderful place to learn mindfulness and self-compassion and meditation retreats they offer. And I have to say, I have mentored many of the teachers there and they're wonderful. There was not a bad apple in the lot among the people that I had the honor of teaching and uplifting into there. I always wanted Inside LA to be a platform for other people to grow and become teachers. I didn't ever want to be the queen of it. It's not my nature. I find that embarrassing. So Inside LA, my website, I'm working on a book. I don't know, at this rate, it might be published posthumously, but when I say that, Jack gets really mad at me.

1:05:21Dan Harris:Will you come back on when the book comes out? Yes, I'd love to. I'm planning to come to your 80th birthday party, which I got invited to. Thank you.

1:05:30Trudy Goodman:Maybe we can even do a conversation with me, you, and Jack.

1:05:34Dan Harris:That would be super fun. Okay.

1:05:36Trudy Goodman:Yeah, Jack and I just put out a course on relationship. That was fun, too.

1:05:42Dan Harris:Where is that available?

1:05:44Trudy Goodman:That would be available on my website and on Jack's website, jackcornfield.com. Okay.

1:05:51Dan Harris:I'm going to put links to all of these in the show notes for this episode so people listening can go check all of this stuff out.

1:05:58Trudy Goodman:Okay. And by the time this comes out, I'll make sure it's on my website.

1:06:03Dan Harris:Good. This has been a delight. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

1:06:06Trudy Goodman:Me too. I've enjoyed it so much.

1:06:12Dan Harris:Thanks again to Trudy. She's amazing. Always love talking to Trudy. Don't forget that if you're a paid subscriber over on danharris.com, you will get a custom guided meditation with this episode. Today's guided meditation comes from our teacher of the month, 7A Selassie, and it's all about how to cultivate the skill of trusting yourself. The meditation itself is called How to Listen to Yourself. Also only for paid subscribers, weekly live guided meditations and Q &A sessions every Tuesday, 4 o 'clock Eastern. The next one is 7A along with DJ Kashmir. I'll be skipping that one, but you'll get Seb and A and the executive producer of this show, DJ.

1:06:50Dan Harris:And by the way, if you want to meditate with me in person and with Seb, come check out Meditation Party the weekend of October 24th at the Omega Institute. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.