Are You Overcomplicating Your Life? | Kaira Jewel Lingo

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:19Hey gang, it's the start of a new month. So that means we've got a new teacher of the month. You might ask, what is this teacher of the month thing of which you speak? Well, it's really for paid subscribers over at danharris.com. We now bring in teachers of the month to craft and record bespoke guided meditations that come with every full length episode on Monday and Wednesday. So the idea really is to address what I think is one of the biggest problems in personal growth, which is that you read a great book or you listen to a great podcast and you feel inspired and then you get just sucked back into the habit patterns of your life.

0:55So what I want to do, what my team and I want to do is have these guided meditations that allow you to pound the wisdom from the podcast conversations into your neurons in an abiding way. We often compare it to the lecture lab model at universities and colleges where the podcast is the lecture and the guided meditations are the lab. Okay, so it's August. We've got a new teacher of the month. This time it's Kyra Jule Lingo, a fan favorite. She's been on the show many times. I asked our director of content, DJ Kashmir, to do a kind of background informational interview with Kyra Jewell about her life story, which is a fascinating one.

1:32She grew up in a communal religious community in Chicago and then went on to become a nun in the Plum Village Zen tradition. And now she's on her own as an independent Dharma teacher, and she's actually looking to eventually create a retreat center of her own. So before we get into Kyra Jewel's background, I want to tell you that I will be going live on Substack for a meditation and Q &A for paid subscribers on Tuesday, August 5th at 3.30 Eastern. This is a solo live, no guest, but I believe we will be doing a live guided meditation with Kyra Jewel later in the month. So stay tuned for that. But the next upcoming live is on August 5th.

2:09Kyra Jewel Lingo in conversation with DJ Kashmir right after this. I've been a fully adult human male for many decades, but I've never really focused on shorts as something you can wear and actually be stylish. I'm trying to up my shorts game, especially as my family and I have a big beach vacation coming up in the next couple of weeks. And one of my allies in this endeavor, my primary ally, is Quince. I was on the Quince website last night, and I was picking out some awesome shorts, some linen shorts to wear at the beach so I can look good and stay cool. If you listen to the show regularly, you know about Quince.

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3:48Hey, it's Dan. I just want to tell you about something I'm really proud of. The new community we are building over on my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. Here's something I believe with no reservation. Taking care of your own mind is not selfish. It's actually essential if you want to show up for the world, if you want to deal with the various emergencies on the planet right now. There is, in fact, a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. In other words, taking care of your own mind is good citizenship. I think about it like an upward spiral. You train your mind. That makes you happier and less reactive because you're steadier.

4:25That improves your relationships with everybody around you. And because relationships are crucial to human happiness, you get even happier, then your relationships get even better and up you go. Our mission over at this new app is to guide you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers like Seven A. Selassie and Joseph Goldstein and on and on. Also, add free access to our full podcast archive, exclusive live stream events where we guide meditations and take your questions. We do those every week and much more. Head on over to DanHarris.com. You can try it for two weeks free.

4:59And if you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one, no questions asked. Kyra Juolingo, welcome back to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here again. It's great to have you again. I really always look forward to getting to talk to you on so many levels. It makes me happy. I learned something. The audience learned something. So thanks for saying yes. And thanks for being our Teacher of the Month this month. Thank you. Yeah, you always ask such good questions. Well, all right, no pressure. Let's see if I can follow through on that. Yeah, I would love to start with giving folks an opportunity to get to know you a bit and hear your story.

5:39And if I understand and remember correctly, you actually have a pretty remarkable path to where you are now, right? So you're this sort of eminent, beloved meditation teacher. But there's been stops along the way, ranging from, I think, your dad's work with Martin Luther King, to you living in a Christian commune in Chicago, to a few years spent above a bar in Nairobi, to a decade and a half as a nun in the south of France. It's quite a story. So do I have those beats right? And can you kind of connect the dots for us? Pretty well. Yes. So I was born and raised in Chicago, my first part of my life, to an interracial family that had chosen to live in this family religious order, a Christian community that was living and working with the poor all over the world, doing human development, village development work.

6:36Yeah, so my dad had worked with Dr. King in the civil rights movement as a white Southerner, organizing white Southerners who were sympathetic to civil rights. My mom, a black woman who grew up on the west side of Chicago in Evanston, they both really had a lot of passion for spiritual seeking and social change. So that was transmitted to me very young. And yeah, as part of our time in this community, I spent four years in Kenya, in Nairobi, on the edge of Nairobi in a slum known as Kawangware, where our community had two stories above a bar. So I lived there for four years, and I really appreciated that time.

7:22And yeah, then found myself back in Chicago for junior high and then Atlanta for high school. We had left the community by then. After college, felt really drawn to Plum Village, to the community of Thich Nhat Hanh. Because of how I think I grew up in community, I really, throughout my high school and college, I was really, really wanting to find a teacher, wanting to find a community, wanting to find a way of living that made sense to me. Because having been raised in a countercultural community where everyone was living in voluntary simplicity, I remember feeling very young that material accumulation wasn't the way to happiness.

8:08that wasn't going to be my way of defining success and well-being so when we left the community I found myself very adrift and just like nuclear family living where everyone's out for themselves and trying to make it materially just never felt like anything inspiring for me for like my whole life to put my whole life into that so very quickly like in college I was like asking these questions of like, gosh, I'm getting a great education here, but I'm not learning about spiritual. Something's missing. So that really led me to Plum Village and to Thich Nhat Hanh. And yeah, I spent 15 years as a monastic and became a Dharma teacher in that tradition.

8:55And basically at age 40, decided something else was calling me and felt that I needed to return to lay life, and that's 10 years ago now. So I've been teaching as a lay dharma teacher and mentor and becoming an author, all these things. A lot has happened in these 10 years that I feel like I have different lives in one life. Yeah, and then I was able to also really delve deep in the insight tradition, and that's really been a gift to be a student and teacher in both. Can you say more about voluntary simplicity? What did that mean? And why did you think it was the way to go? I could imagine someone in your shoes hating that and wanting an Xbox or something.

9:47This is a bit of a detour, but I think it'll make sense. I was listening to Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, who was talking about, it was kind of just a theory, right? It's not proven, but she was talking about how there are hormones and neurotransmitters that operate when we are really connected and we're deeply embedded with other people. who we feel we belong to, and that that's serotonin, right? That when we're really deeply satisfied in the ways humans can be, that's this deep, fulfilling kind of happiness and well-being. And she was saying that modernity tricks us into thinking that dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, cortisol, all, that those things give these quick highs, but then ultimately leave us feeling worse.

10:47But that's the promise of modernity, of accumulation, of fame, of wealth, of all the external, right? And this separation from this community and base of belonging, this knowing ourselves to be completely interwoven with the world around us, with the species, right? The air, or the water or the soil. And it's addictive, right? We keep going for these hits of pleasure and then, and so that's just one way to answer your question is that I think, you know, it was an imperfect community in many ways, but I felt a sense of meaning and belonging and that people were doing things that were quite risky.

11:34I mean, people left a lot of, my dad got kicked out of his family for marrying my mom and for choosing this totally incomprehensible, why would you throw all this away and live in this community where you don't get status, you don't earn wealth? And my mom's family was more understanding but had a very hard time understanding why she was living this way. So all these people were choosing what can be called downward mobility. There was this real sense of spiritual family. And even today, even though the residential aspect of the community ended in the 80s, there are people who are family to me from this community who I still connect with regularly, and they're like extended family.

12:22And we all did this sort of quasi-monastic living together. So for me, the voluntary simplicity was people not earning personal income. So everyone got a small stipend that covered very basic things. And if you worked outside of the community, you gave your money to the community. And many people didn't work outside. They did the work of the community. So everyone got the same stipend. We lived on in-kind donations. So we had not very great food, frozen fish sticks and cardboard fake bacon. Before plant-based bacon was even popular, we were eating that because it was inexpensive. Anyway, but we had amazing experiences where like everyone who was in the sixth grade, we had a sixth grade trip where we went for three weeks camping to the Cascade Mountains, and we did Tai Chi every morning, and we had to spend 24 hours on a vigil solo.

13:28And I was 12 turning 13, and I spent 24 hours alone in the wilderness. You learn things. One of the things someone who raised me said was that the teachers, because we went to public school, the teachers always knew who in their class was from this community because they were the ones who kind of communicated the needs of the class to the teacher. Like they were in tune with what the whole class was wanting, needing, and tried to communicate that to the teacher. So like there were just a lot of other skills got developed because for most of my childhood, I was around at least 20 to 60 kids, and I was only with my parents one night a week for family night.

14:15So it was this giving up of material gain and accumulation, but it was also, you know, an orientation to communal living and being with others. And every meal would start with a song and a reflection question, and everyone would give some kind of response to that question. And I just remembered, I remembered adults caring what I thought and genuinely asking me things and like having real conversations about real things. So the meaning of all that for me was like, I remember when we lived in Kenya and we lived in a slum, I saw the inequality of how people lived in the U.S. and how people were living in Kenya.

14:58I heard about how the U.S. gave its maize that it fed to cows to people in Kenya. And I ate that maize. I liked that maize. It was very chewy, but it was like all those things were registering. And I remember when I went back to the US, we didn't have a TV in Kenya. All we had was a radio and a tape player, a cassette player. And I remember going back and seeing people's homes where there were three TVs in different rooms. And I just remember at eight or nine or 10, just knowing that wasn't necessary. I just know we lived happily with no TV. And then here you had one house with so many TVs and just the little girl me, it was like, why?

15:44Why do you need that? That kind of critique, that ability to kind of stand back and question. I think it was because I lived in a community where where that was the purpose of that organization was to kind of stand outside the mainstream and sort of say, there are other ways, there are other values, there are other things to base your life upon. So you've had these distinct periods living in community and then for a while in high school in college, not. And then again, in community as a monastic. And then again, around the age of 40, not. And you just described very beautifully a lot of the upsides of this simplicity and this communal living.

16:37But of course, in this moment, you're choosing something a little bit different, at least from the outside looking in, from what I can tell. You're sort of back in the real world. do you feel like you've been able to find some center of the Venn diagram to bring lessons from all those years of communal living into a life where you have to have a cell phone and pay taxes and all of those kinds of things? Yeah. I think it's a lot harder when you're just two people and a dog in a household. And that's you right now, two people and a dog. Me and my partner and our dog. And yeah, I think we often have conversations about how much more simple we want to live.

17:25And it's so easy to accumulate. It's so much harder. Like as a monastic, we moved every three months. You had to change rooms or you were always being sent to different centers. Like you just couldn't accumulate as much because, well, you only had your bed box to put things in and your desk. You didn't have much space. And it was in our vows that we were meant to live very simply. Because we don't have a lot of community around us, if you lived in closer connection with others, you would borrow things more or share. But here, it's like each family's in their own very separate house, and so you have to have everything that you want for yourself.

18:11I find it much more complex to live that simply, but it's a conversation we're always having. And the next phase of our life that Adam and I are looking to is really starting a center where we can practice more monastically. We'll live in a house as a couple, but we'll be creating a space for people to come practice engaged contemplation. So meditation, prayer, and how to be really responsive to the needs of the world. And so we're crafting our life now, envisioning it in terms of what we know supports us and what we don't want to carry with us from this house, for example, just how to really keep things simple.

19:01And we ultimately see ourselves living out the majority of our lives in some kind of community where people are coming to practice with us. And whether it's for the day, whether it's for a few days or a week in deep contemplation, in silence, on retreat, but we'll be sharing more of our lives. we haven't figured it out but we're we're figuring it out yeah I want to get to your meditations in just a second but I do have one more question on this living simply living communally peace listening to you talk I have to admit there's I feel a sense of I feel a whole bunch of things that aren't necessarily positive you know there's like some longing there's some FOMO There's some frustration.

19:59My wife and I live in a city. We have two kids and we've had brief moments of feeling like what it could feel like to live a life closer to the one you're describing. We took the kids on a family meditation retreat to one of Thich Nhat Hanh's monasteries a few months back and it was this idyllic week. They're running around on a mountain and they're playing with strangers, but it's totally safe. And you're not worrying about feeding them five times a day because somebody else is worrying about that and on and on. And when I came back from that, I mean, when I was in it, it felt like heaven. And when I came back from it, it just felt like grief because the conditions of my life are not such that I can, in this moment, you know, I mean, I floated it.

20:50I didn't get very far, but I did, you know, a test balloon of like, can we just move to the mountain? But, you know, there's for a thousand reasons we can't right now. And I feel like what I'm hearing you say is that it has been hard to apply these lessons and you're therefore trying to build this fifth chapter that is like an in-between place where you will be more on the land and more in community. And that sounds amazing for you. And I'm selfishly wondering if you have any advice for me or for others who might feel like, you know, drawn in some way, shape, or form to some of what you're describing, but it feels, you know, inaccessible for whatever reason.

21:33Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing that. My heart is just so with you and like the, yeah, the contrast of coming back home. And I just really want to say, I think we really need to take the big picture and see that our society isn't structured well. We live in a society where it's very hard for families, for couples, for individuals to get their needs met on all the levels that we need to meet our needs. I think it's helpful to just name that. That's the world we live in, right? And so, unless you are in a larger structure that's going against the stream, it's just not set up for optimal well-being because of how isolated we are.

22:29So, I think if it softens a little bit the pain of like, why is it so hard to live the way I want to live, it's because we live in a society that isn't set up for that. So, it's not personal, it's not something we're not doing well, it's not like, oh, if I were just more clever, I could figure this out. No. It's just not set up that way for any of us. I mean, that is why I admire my parents and the people that they formed this community with, because that took a lot to decide, you know, I'm not going to march to the beat of modernity completely. And I think there are ways to gather with others and create pockets of resistance.

23:14I think we really need to see it as resistance. But really like pockets of resistance where we are asking really hard questions of ourselves, right? Like our society sees us as a resource to exploit in this attention economy, we are like being mined all the time. It's actually, you know, very violent, you know, but we're like being exploited every moment. And so, how do we say no to that? How do we wake up to that and not feed into that? Because of our desires, because of we want things faster, simpler, easier. For what? I think we really need to have some deep ontological explorations of why are we here?

24:09What is our lives supposed to be as humans? And be around other people who are willing to have those kinds of courageous explorations with us and hold us, challenge us. I really appreciate your sort of exhortation to start with, you know, just normalizing that that living isn't easy in this world and that that's not a personal failing. And I also really appreciate your sort of fierce clarity around what it might take to push back against that. And also want to, before I let you go, you know, one very small way that I think we've been thinking here on Team 10%, thinking about trying to push back against the stream is just trying to come up with realistic ways for all of the folks who listen to the podcast to feel a little more connected to their practice and to each other.

25:08And that's why we reached out to you and others this year to try to start a teacher of the month where people can feel like someone's holding their hand through their practice and they're doing something alongside others. And, you know, starting tomorrow, I'll be among many thousands of people who have you in my ears in the morning. And so I just wanted to invite you to take a second before we go to just say a little bit about these awesome meditations that you've put together, what that process was like, what you hope people get out of them. Thank you for setting that context up for me because it makes me feel more connected to everybody who'll be listening.

25:48So that's, yeah. It was really lovely to be, you know, for you all to sort of share, here are some of the topics we'd like to have the meditations on. And so it gave me a chance to also explore new territory as far as, well, for one thing, it just made me realize you could have a meditation on anything. So it's the territory is so vast and that it's fun to kind of stretch and see, oh, how would I do a meditation on spiritual friends or some of the things I had done meditations on already. And so those felt very familiar, like taking care of strong emotions or, you know, how to hold stress or some fear around making a decision.

26:36But then it gave me a chance also to dig deeper in things that I have already offered meditation in before, like the open awareness or choiceless attention. But then to kind of see how other teachers have offered this and kind of blend different styles. So I guess I really, I hope that it does feel like we're practicing together and that there's this sense of being accompanied from one meditation to the next. And I think there's some kind of thread between them, which of course will reverberate with the podcasts that Dan does. But yeah, I really hope that they're helpful and that they allow people to feel that they can expand their heart and leave some of their worries and thinking, you know, let go of some of that and just really touch into the goodness that really is here.

27:40well I'm super excited that one of the highlights of my week this week was when you sent me the drafts and I got to get a sneak peek and they just they just really are excellent and appreciate you for doing them and for coming on so yeah thank you thank you thanks for the opportunity

28:06Thank you to Kyra Jewell and also to my man DJ Kashmir. Don't forget, I'll be going live on Substack for a guided meditation and Q &A sesh. That's only for paid subscribers. It's Tuesday, August 5th at 3.30 p.m. Eastern. And again, a reminder, Kyra Jewell is our Teacher of the Month for August. You can hear her all-new companion meditations throughout the month. with your paid subscription over at danharris.com. And stay tuned for more bonus content on Sundays from Kyra Jewell right here on the main podcast feed, including a sneak peek of one of the subscriber-only meditations and a Frequently Asked Questions segment.

28:41Finally, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. 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.

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