How To Be Less Tense | GuoGu

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

0:18Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? We spend so much of our lives stuck in our heads in these toxic recursive loops, these poisonous curly cues of thought. This thinking, this mental activity, it really colors how we see the world. Sometimes it's rose-colored glasses, but more often, I'm sad to report, it's shit-colored goggles. And here's the thing, if you're unaware of how your habitual neurotic thought patterns are coloring your view, then you're completely owned by all of the nonsense in your head. So in today's episode, we've got a Buddhist master and an academic who's going to help us get out of our heads and into our bodies.

1:01Why? Because when you do that, when you get out of your head and into your body, which I know is a major cliche, but when you do that, you're not so owned by your swirling stories and your ancient grudges. And in this way, you can navigate the world more effectively and more successfully so that obstacles become opportunities. Guagu, aka Dr. Jimmy Yu, is the founder of the Tallahassee Chan Center and a professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at Florida State University. He's the author of several books, including The Essence of Chan, Passing Through the Gateless Barrier, and Silent Illumination.

1:38In this conversation, we talk about embodied experiencing, how words and language shape our reality, the practice of wonderment. We talk about body scan meditations, the importance of relaxation, and how to do it if you have pain, either physical or emotional pain, the four things you need in order for meditation to do its job, and how to carry all of this into your daily life. He gets super practical on this score. As always, there's a guided meditation that comes with this episode. It was designed by our Teacher of the Month, Christiana Wolf. It's all about short-circuiting your self-limiting stories, the ones that hold you back.

2:15FYI, these meditations are for paying subscribers over at Dan Harris. If you sign up, you'll also get access to our weekly live meditation Q &A sessions. Christiana is going to do the next one solo on Wednesday, November 12th at 4 Eastern. This is crucial. We usually do these Tuesdays at 4 Eastern, but this one time only we're skipping Tuesday and doing it on Wednesday because Tuesday, November 11th is a holiday in the US. It's Veterans Day. Also, very quickly, if you want to meditate with me in person, two events coming up. I'm doing a live taping of this podcast on November 18th in NYC. My guest will be the The comedian Pete Holmes was a dedicated spiritual practitioner, so it will be funny and insightful.

2:56It's a benefit for a great organization, the New York Insight Meditation Center. And then on November 23rd, I'll do an intimate Sunday afternoon meditation and Q &A session at a lovely little hotel in the Hudson Valley. It's called Troutbeck. If you want a nice day trip from the city or the suburbs, come say hi to me there. Links for both events live in the show notes to this episode. We'll get started with Guagu right after this. Guagu, welcome to the show. Thank you, Dan. It's a pleasure to have you here. So you and our senior producer, the brilliant Marissa Schneiderman, came up with an outline for this conversation.

3:32I told Marissa, and this is actually kind of a fun position to be in, I didn't fully understand the pedagogical flow, but maybe that's just an opportunity for me to learn. And so one of the major concepts you wanted to discuss was embodied experiencing. What does that mean? Thank you. Yeah, it's actually a response to what I'm witnessing among my students and what's being taught around. You know, when we hear teachings and we have so much availability of resources to tap into, people generally hear it, see it, read it, and they process it in their head. That's the default. and the default mode of learning the teachings or whatever is to think about it and that really prevents the teaching to do its kind of maximized effect and most people are so much in their head that they are disembodied so i began to focus on embodied experiencing so to be more in tune with the body to be in tune with the body so that one would ultimately be more in tune with the undercurrent feeling tone that actually shapes our experiences most people are not able to kind of tap into this undercurrent feeling tone so in order to be in the body i teach a kind of progressive relaxation and kind of training my students throughout the day to have specific moments time to tune in to the body and ground oneself.

5:21And all this is just to avoid the process of our discursive thinking to hijack all of our other sense faculties. like we have name label for everything that we're seeing and this filter is pretty much constant in most people so it's just a kind of a reaction response to what i'm seeing out there and among practitioners to be in the body to actually use other sense faculties sense organs Does that make sense?

6:27happening in your body, which is always in the present moment. Yeah. What's always in the body, that's the biggest, you could say, sense organ as a anchor, as a grounding. And then we can start using other sense faculties, hearing, like deep listening without adding containers and label to whoever's talking. And we can see and we can feel and touch. What I'm really trying to do is get people to slowly not be so hijacked by their own categories and notions and ideas to be more in tune with the body. I had this experience recently. I got back about a week and a half ago from a meditation retreat, a 10-day meditation retreat, and I was studying with Joseph Goldstein, who's a great meditation teacher, and he gave me this very humbling piece of advice that I think rhymes with what you're saying, which was when you're in the dining hall, in the dining room, where you're with a bunch of other people, try to be mindful of seeing.

7:36And I did that, or I attempted to do it. And I just noticed how quickly I was seeing somebody and launching off into compartmentalizing them into, oh, what's their income? What do they do for a living? What are their political views? Do they have a ultimate Frisbee bumper sticker on the back of their Subaru? Like that's the I was just often these judgments of people so quickly, even when I woke up and went back to just noting the raw data of my visual senses. man the ego or discursive mind is so slippery and so sophisticated in its ability to just suck you back into your why is this person taking so long at the salad bar and really they're going to slice the bread that thin and on and on yeah we actually teach many different methods direct contemplation it's called a general name aside from embodied experiencing of seeing and hearing we usually teach seeing and hearing because these are the two most prominent ways that vexations afflictions judgments containers are stirred up you know by what we see and what we hear so it actually takes an active kind of proactive training of these other senses if you want to actually slow down or kind of bracket the monologue.

9:06Yes. That's kind of running. Yeah. I want to get to the practices soon, but before we do anything constructive, let's stay in the problem. Let's marinate in the vexations. You and Marissa, as I look down at this outline that you guys collaboratively prepared for me, there's this sentence here that the problem is that the nature of words and language is to discriminate, bifurcate, compartmentalize, put things in containers. And that's true, but I wonder also, aren't words and isn't our inner dialogue useful to some extent? Yeah, it's very useful. Words and language are not really the problem, but it's the ways in which we are dictated, shaped, and our whole well-being, sense of well-being is actually shaped by the habitual ways we are conditioned by words and language.

10:00So words and language themselves, they can be very productive. Sometimes we need to put a label to things, what we experience, in order to work through it. The point is, we have to expose the ways in which we tend to label things, the categories we tend to use. so this is a direct window into how within us manifestations of vexations afflictions arise so everyone's different so that process of exposing embracing it we have to accept because there's a history to why we see things certain ways then we can work through and then we can let go. Does that make sense? So exposing, embracing, transforming, and letting go.

10:57Because our perception shapes our experience. The degree of our suffering, like the Buddha taught, suffering, cause of suffering, it's actually shaped by perception. So what's the constituent of perception? Words and language. But words and language are very useful, as you know, be a journalist. So when we expose certain habit tendencies of seeing things, we have to use words and language to rephrase them. You know, ancient India thousands of years ago and just the general milieu and the different spiritual traditions. They tend to express truth, reality in apathetic terms, not this, not that it's inconceivable things are impermanent, there's no self but that's the ancient way so when we rephrase our tendency to see things in this example impermanence for example we could rephrase it as new beginnings dependent origination which I'm sure you're very familiar with what it really is talking about is relationships connections so words do matter whether it's apathetic or cataphatic and a positive way for any things carries with them certain feeling tones and these undercurrent feeling tone actually subtly even subconsciously shape our experience I just want to underline this for a second because I don't want to let this slip by.

12:46You're using this very specific language, which I think comes out of theology, apophatic and cataphatic. Apophatic is understanding reality through negativity. So in Buddhism, like even Nibbana or Nirvana is a kind of extinguishing or a blowing out. Cataphatic is understanding reality positively. So it's it actually you can describe the same thing with different words. Yeah. So compassion, for example, in the East Asian tradition, specifically Chan, Zen tradition, compassion is understood as actually the function of wisdom. it's not just ordinary wisdom it's actually selfless wisdom no self-referential agenda so compassion would be something of a cataphatic way of expressing things or Buddha nature Buddha nature is basically the nature of emptiness but it's just shining a light on the function how selflessness actually manifests interact with the world yeah please I just want to jump in and explain some of those terms.

13:58And please, I'm going to try to explain some of those terms to listeners who may be newer to the Dharma. And when I inevitably make a error, I would like you please to correct me. Because the most important thing here is that we give good information, not that I be seen as omniscient. So in the Dharma, in Buddhism, and in other spiritual traditions, but really in Buddhism, there's this idea of seeing through the illusion of the self. And the Buddhists, especially in the classical tradition, tend to phrase that in, to use the term you like, apophatic ways. You know, we are empty of self. We're selfless.

14:40And what you're saying is, well, once you get out of your own head or see that the self isn't as real as we think it is, you can phrase it in a cataphatic way, which is compassion, which is the activity of emptiness. Once you turn down the volume on your ego and you're not so insorcial by your discursive thoughts, oh, you have more room to pay attention to other people's stuff. Excellent. Well, you know me well. I'm always looking for the gold star. Do you want to take a shot at Buddha nature, another technical term? I mostly know Theravada, which is the oldest school of Buddhism. and Buddha nature doesn't really show up there much, but it's essentially the argument that we are inherently good.

15:33And the analogy that's often used is like a golden Buddha statue encased in mud and the world and our habit energies and the karma from past lives, if you believe in that kind of thing, encase our inner Buddha nature, our inner golden Buddha in this sediment. And the practice is about clearing away and bringing forth the benevolence that can shine forth from beneath the karmic residue. How am I doing? Gold star. These are all languages. So, cathatic, catathatic, you shouldn't get too stuck on them. And the process is exposing the ways in which we tend to Rain things. You know, like, there are all kinds of ways.

16:25Like some people are kind of fighter type. Some people are self-defeated, so maybe they always blame other people. Or they feel, you know, I'm not good enough. I can't do this. I don't have the skill set. So exposing that and understanding that they have a history, embracing that, then we can work with it. So words and language, getting back to your original question the words and language are not bad it's the habit force that manifests that we have to expose and transform because once we expose embrace then the work is actually transforming then we can be free from that is what you're saying at least partially that if we can learn and you will teach us soon how to get into the habit of embodied experiencing throughout the day, breaking up this hitherto nonstop stream of discursive thinking.

17:26If we can get into that habit of having regular circuit breakers on the nonstop thinking, that we can create newer, more positive, more cataphatic ways of talking to ourselves and thinking about the world that can create a virtuous cycle? Yes, including talking to ourselves, but also just experiencing new possibilities, experiencing new ways. So the more rigid our containers are, meaning the more rigid we can identify with that which we've always known, the words and language and so on. So much trust in that. The more we allow them to be more porous, then could be, could be not. Maybe, maybe not.

18:21Exposing that, then new possibilities are able to come. So there are practices, and we have to work on the practices that we can do to facilitate that. We'll be 10 % happier if we do. Yes, I always say that the 10 % compounds annually. But I do want to do my little restatement thing to you again, because I think this point you're making, I want to make sure people get it. First of all, I want to make sure I get it. And then I, by extension, want to make sure everybody else gets it. if we are not so stuck in our heads, we are injecting into our days, these moments of dropping into our bodies and really experiencing the raw data of our sensations, not only might we, you know, not be so stuck in our heads, and we start to learn to not take our ancient neurotic thought patterns so personally or seriously.

19:23I sometimes talk about the co-arising of visibility and risibility, which is a fancy word for laughability. It's like as soon as you start to see with some mindfulness, you know, the types of thoughts you've had your whole life, they become ridiculous and in a nice way. And there's, I think what the last point you were making, which is what I'm building to in my clumsy cultish way here, is that we develop a kind of intellectual humility in the Zen tradition might be called beginner's mind, where we're less certain in a very helpful way. Is that the point you were trying to make? Yes. Less certain would be something like apathetic.

20:04Not only less certain, but also positively more engaging, like allowing things to flourish. Yes. Like, for example, if I have certain idea, if I see someone dress some way and have some fixed idea, start this monologue, if I allow that chattering to subside and be in the body, it's actually compassionate to allow that person to be without my container. So you could say less certain, like, this person could be this way, maybe not. Maybe so, maybe not. Or you could just say it positively, that person can be the way he or she, the way they are. It's accepted. That kind of wording or perception exudes out through you that when you actually connect with the person.

21:03It's a completely different experience. And that person may not even know it. That person may not even know what you're thinking, but they feel, they're seen, they're heard, they're accepted. It's very, very subtle. That's what I'm talking about, this undercurrent feeling tone that shapes our reality. So it's not really up here like my reality, only everyone's walking around their own reality actually has an effect on the people around us. I think it was Maya Angelou that nobody remembers what you say. They remember how you made them feel. I studied for a while with some Zen teachers who I'm still very close friends with, and there was enormous emphasis on spontaneity.

21:45I think about this like when I was a kid, I would notice that there was some age where a child would go from completely spontaneous, every little kids, you know, every reaction was totally authentic. There was no filter that they were running things through. And then at some point the world sets in on them and they become kind of self-aware in a not helpful way, quite an apophatic way. And then the spontaneity is gone or diminishes. And there's a certain emphasis to the extent that I understand Zen at all. But I think the whole Dharma is shot through with this idea of as you turn down the volume on your constantly compartmentalizing, judging mind, there's this availability, spontaneity that is kind of like getting yourself back to the best version of childhood.

22:40Does this make any sense what I'm saying? Yeah, perfect. Perfect. I would just say that the spontaneity is different than how ordinary people say spontaneity, like no filter, vexation, just spread, contaminate everything. Not that kind, right? We know that. So it's a kind of authenticity, free from, free hatred, ignorance, what the Buddhists call the three poisons. So absence of that, there's a kind of innocence and this kind of curiosity. That is what I actually call the practice of wonderment. Practice of wonderment. Curiosity. and again our brain is wired to identify problems, threats that's how we survive as a species it's all good but sometimes when we feed into that with our habit tendencies of perceiving things in a certain way and we believe in it so much then it really just stresses itself so we really need to cultivate this practice it's connected totally to embodied experiencing.

23:56It would be like the next step. That is the practice of wonderment, the curiosity. Because the amygdala, contacting hippocampus, pituitary glands send out stress hormones, that whole mechanism can be shifted. So if we experience something, instead of seeing as threat, we can train ourselves to not know what is it. How is it automatically our experience shipped to another part of the brain, which is problem solving, instead of fight or flight, you see? So that cultivation of innocence, nonjudgmental, curiosity, wonderment, that all comes from this diminishment of our identity with these containers, labels, words.

24:50and the words that come out, not that we don't have anything to say anymore, the words that come out doesn't come from that place of threat, stress, problem, obstacles. How do I get over this? How do I overcome that? It comes from another place. As you cited, the beginner's mind, that kind of innocent. I love this stuff. So just to pick up on your word of cultivation, or as you said before, practice. Let's talk about that. You've mentioned progressive relaxation techniques. Can you sort of walk us through it? Sure. So like anything else, if you want to learn to play ping pong or tennis or something, we first have to maybe practice it against the wall and then with a live person.

25:44And then the more skilled the other person is, you actually learn faster. Similarly, we have to start with seated meditation. Not too much stimuli. We're kind of grounded. So we begin with seated meditation. And after this, I'll talk about daily life. So seated meditation, we have to always build a good foundation. And that foundation is a kind of priming, like priming a canvas. You have to kind of put a primer on it. then you can paint down. So priming first the body, and then tapping to the undercurrent feeling tone, dial it in to a particular feeling tone, and then use the method, whether it's meditation on breath, loving kindness, or any other method.

26:39So progressive relaxation is a way to relax the body and actually feel grounded. So we start with top of the head and trickling down the forehead and landing at the space between the eyebrows. That's the number one most difficult part to relax in the body. So in order to relax this part, unlike other parts, we have to tense it up and then release. So we raise the eyebrows up and then do that a few times so you feel the tactile sensation of that palpable sense of release. Then allow that sense of release to the eyelids. A lot of tiny muscles around the eye sockets and then the eyeballs. The eyeballs is very important.

27:39We treat the eyeballs like muscles. So we're not using the sense faculty of the eyes. Right now, we're just amplifying the sense faculty of the body. So as you know, Buddhists talk about five senses. Eye, ear, nose, tongue, body. And then they add on mind as a sense faculty. So we're not using eyes, ear, nose, tongue. we're using the sense faculty of the body. So when we relax the eyes, the default is start using your eyes. If you see darkness, if you see sparkling lights, that means you're using your eyes. So you have to actually see if you can feel through the sense faculty of the body, tactile sensation of the contours of the eyeballs resting.

28:41Even the very soft but sense of weight of the eyeballs resting in the eye socket. This will automatically start to amplify and heighten our ability to tactile sensations. So relaxing the eyes without using the eyes. It's very difficult, but we can train to do that. once we do that allow the sense faculty to roll down the veins of the cheeks and follow the jawline from below the ears to the chin and then tuck in the chin a little bit like a meditation posture and then go to the lips and for the lips we can wet our lips if we want but what we want to do is a gentle smile just like that muscle memory, gentle smile.

29:38If you're sensitive enough, you would have sensed a subtle shift in your feeling tone. It's all good. And that will actually relax the facial muscles even more. After the face is done, we go to the scalp. So relaxing the scalp from the front all the way to the back, opening all the pores. See if you can actually feel the fullness of the air. Now, my head is shaved, but maybe for people with hair, they can't feel this, but they could see if you can feel, for example, the air. See if you can feel the weight of your hair. And then sweep back to the back of the cranium. Amplifying the sense faculty of the body.

30:25And then throw down the neck. And with the neck, we rotate the neck. Both directions, rotate. Now we begin to zero in on the skin, muscles, and tendons. Especially when you stretch, you can feel the tendons. All the fibers relaxing. And then we arrive at the second most difficult area. First is the space between the eyebrows. Second, shoulders. A lot of people hold a lot of tension here. And just by tense posture, it causes an injury in the shoulder. It's like rubber band. If you're used to tensing up and then it relaxes, the rubber band doesn't know how to relax. It relaxes, it feels like it's stretching even.

31:17It feels painful. That's because most of the time the shoulders are like this. so the rubber band loses its elasticity. I've been working on a computer, so this is the second most difficult part. And the same way, for these special areas, we want hands up, inhale, exhale, let them drop. Do that a few times, and zero in on the embodied experiencing of release. sense of release. You can almost sense the center of gravity, the weight, which usually for people is up here, when it releases, drops down, sinks down into the seat. From there, you want to relax the arms, skin, muscles, tendons, biceps, triceps, and then wiggle the elbow a little bit, make sure the arms are relaxed, forearm, wrists, palms and fingers.

32:34Now palms and fingers, a lot of nerve bendings, a lot of capillaries, so you can actually get a good sense. In the practice of progressive relaxation as a way to prime the body for meditation, I teach my students to put the hands on the lap, not folded yet, so they get a good sense how to relax. And then after the arms, go to the chest. How to relax the chest? See if you can feel the subtle rise and fall of your chest following the rhythm of your breath. So you have to refine your awareness. And now zero in on the exhalations to see how is it affecting

33:32now you can tell that when you exhale there's a sense of bodily weight sinking down to the abdomen see if you can feel that there's no words no labels just embodied tactile sensations and then allow it to sink to the abdomen and now see if you can feel this is the third most difficult area to relax. The abdomen. But see if you can feel the subtle rise and fall of the abdomen following the rhythm of your breath. For people that have difficulty experiencing this, raise one of your palms over your tummy. because there are so many capillaries, nerve endings in your palm. You can definitely feel the subtle movements.

34:37So now you can use your exhalations. Exhale, sink, release. You sense the movements. And now we go to the back. upper back from back of the neck to the shoulder blades, the upper back. And if you're attentive enough, there's actually subtle movements there as well, following the rhythm of your breath. Back of the shoulders. And then move it down. Next exhalation, drop it down to the mid-back. movement's there as well. In fact, your whole ribcage is naturally expanding, contracting. This is one of the reasons why when we do seated meditation, even for those who sit on chairs, they should not lean their back on the back of the chair.

35:44They can support the lower back roll of towel over there, but the back should not be pressed against something, preventing the natural flow of oxygen, the natural movement of rise and fall. Okay, next exhalation, drop it down, lower back, right down to the buttocks, the seat. in fact at this time we should be able to experience the sense of bodily weight resting on the seat and now at this time in order to make sure the upper body is completely relaxed without any extra tension anywhere we can sway the body from left to right. Allow the swaying to come to a stop. Let the body find that center point of gravity.

36:53Like one of those Daruma dolls. Blow up doll with sand inside. Just way come to the center. And then sink there. Same thing with front and back. Find that center access point. Allow the swing to come to a stop. Perfectly, naturally, upright. Body weight completely grounded, rooted to earth. At this time, we can place the hand in the meditation posture. Fold it. Palms up. Thumbs gently touching. Upper body. Light as a feather. Lower body, rooted. Sense of palpable. Sense of weight. And continuing, relaxing the hips, thighs, and knees. Use your mind to touch those areas. Just to check there's any tension.

38:06the calves anchors and feet once the body is primed now the defense mechanism is dropped now we can access the undercurrent feeling tone in this moment in traditional Buddhist language don't grasp don't reject at the phatic, right? The cataphatic way is, what does that mean actually? Don't grasp and reject. Greed, aversion. It actually means content. Tapping to that feeling of contentment. What is that like? I-A-G. It's all good. So just like the body, we have to prime the feeling tone. spend a few seconds to just soak it in feeling tone then use the method so once the body is primed heart content then we avail ourselves to the meditation object so that actually shapes the whole experience the feeling tone is like an undercurrent mood or an attitude that non-verbal.