How To Handle Turbulence and Transitions | Phillip Moffitt

27:45Not what other people are telling me, but what matters to me. And I just started doing that at a very early age. And it made all of the difference in the world. Would it be safe to say that anybody listening right now could simply just, in a very healthy way, ask themselves the question without expecting specific answers immediately, but just get into the habit of asking themselves the question like, well, yeah, what do I care about? Right, right. And again, so with the core values, like I bring a commitment to kindness in everything I do. And I didn't start out with that as a big one in me. I started out with truth.

28:26I will be truthful. I will be genuine, real, sincere. That was my big claim initially. And then as I grew older, kindness became more important. And then I realized that if I'm not present, I can't exercise my value. So therefore, being present in this moment, and mindfulness here or not became important. And then I had this realization of the difference between my view. You know, we can have this wonderful view of how we wish to be in our values, but in this very moment, what is my intention? And I really learned to be accountable, which is not always pleasant, even after these decades of training with it.

29:14It's not always pleasant to be accountable because like righteous indignation, that's a very dangerous thing, but boy, is it seductive when we're feeling it. So, I have taken many long baths in the warm waters of righteous indignation and never cleanses. Let me just say one last thing about starting over. And this echoes something you said earlier. having a meditation practice which i often joke that meditation is where perfectionism comes to die because you just definitionally have to just start over because you try to focus on your breath or whatever it is you're focusing on and then all sorts of thoughts come barging into the room like kool-aid man breaking down the wall and you have to catch that and start again and again and so this practice of one, two, three, four, five minutes of meditation daily-ish can really help us in starting over in our lives when we get off track.

30:20Yes, it can. It really can. In that moment, you are pausing, which is sort of the next step of this process, where you have to stay in touch with ourselves in some way. And when we're in a transition, there's a lot of sorting out to do and then understanding of once you've sort out, you know, really what's right for you, what's your measure in this. We have to pause, in pausing, where we really catch up with ourselves, I call it the interrupt many times because we're interrupting this reactive mind that's, you know, where the nervousness is feeding on itself, right? And again, you can have judgments about others or judgments about yourself, and it's just a storm that's going on and on.

31:08There's a need to start over, but you're in the storm. So you can't go back onto the other side. Rather, you stop, you just stop. And bringing the kindness to yourself in this moment around this, I know I'm doing as best I'm able. I know what my values are. So let's just stop here. And what's going on here? You're catching up. You're recognizing I've gotten reactive or I've gotten afraid or I felt insulted and I'm acting out of that sense of worthlessness that's old in me or out of my, I'm going to show them. Instead of having them understand you more deeply, you're kind of slapping them back in a situation that you don't have the power to do with that.

31:58And so whatever it is, you stop and you come back to your values. You breathe, you come back into the body. The body is such a good signal, in many ways better than the brain, at signaling, whoa, I'm off. Because it gives you all sorts of signals if you start watching it. And in the midst of a transition, you can feel, oh, this feels wrong before your brain ever figures out what's wrong. So the pause is just really important. It is interrupting the reactive mind, And it's given you the choice as best you're able. I've used this over and over again. As best you're able to come back to your values and your plan.

32:45Oftentimes you've lost the plan. You've lost the thread of what you're trying to do. Coming up, Philip Moffitt talks about more mindfulness tools for happier and smarter transitions. and we do a little tour of the Buddha's noble eightfold path.

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35:54I do want to highlight that you have now taken us into the third of the five steps for managing transitions with maximal happiness and resilience. The first idea or concept or step is start where you are. The second, start over. And the third, and you've just been discussing it, is the pause that overcomes obsessive thinking. And essentially, I believe what you're pointing at is one of the core benefits of mindfulness, especially for a type A ambitious person, and I would put myself in that category, is the ability to respond wisely to the world instead of reacting blindly. and the pause is central to that.

36:33Yes, the pause is central. And again, I use that word interrupt because you're interrupting that reactive mind. You're stopping, you're reclaiming yourself. I'm using that word reclaiming, but you're stopping this mind that is feeding on itself. And it's just going one after another, after another, after another. It's not like the car's drifting off and you jerk it back in line. It's deeper than that kind of system. It's all in your inner wiring. And so pause, you interrupt. I tell people if they even three seconds is an interrupt. In 30 seconds, a lot can happen. And in three minutes, your whole system can reset.

37:19So what are the practical tools that you recommend for the pause? The first thing is recognize I'm choosing here. There's a choice I'm making to pause, to create an interrupt. So that is you returning to your values. That's also a positive stroke to this reactive ego. Because I'm claiming something and you're able to do it. Does that make sense to you? So there's a kind of self-induced dopamine hit. Absolutely. That can result from just noticing I've gotten carried away. I'm going to pause now. Yeah. It's not like you're instantly all cool. But you have paused. You have interrupted the selfing that's going on in that reactive mind.

38:12And that is a dopamine reward. And then when you picture yourself, this is like the internal speaking. you picture yourself returning to yourself. So you recognize that's a pleasant feeling. And again, it can bring respect for one person, for someone else, it brings relief. For someone else, it brings in the heart quality. We're each different and we're different in different transitions in our life at different times also. So that's one of the benefits. And then the body, you come back to the body. And then there is reorienting. You're reorienting yourself. You're reminding. You're reminding yourself what you're about.

39:01You're enhancing recognition, which is the kind of recognition that gives you choice as to how you speak or act. And from the Eightfold Path, you're coming back to wise view. Can you explain what that is? So the view is you have a vision as to how you want to live, going back to the values. In the Eightfold Path, which is the fourth noble truth, there is this evolving of a view of how you would want to live in this world in relation to causing harm, in relation to what is important to you, and all that. You come back to that as a view. and then in the Eightfold Path-wise intention is this moment.

39:46Am I acting from that view right now or not? Right now, this very moment. When people start to discover that, they can reorient themselves during the pause. I'm definitely not a Buddhist scholar, so I might be about to blow what I'm about to say, but just for anybody who's new to the Dharma or forgetful in any way as I am, The Buddha's first utterance post-enlightenment, allegedly, was to deliver the four noble truths that he, after he got enlightened, he went and found some old meditation buddies of his and was telling them about what he had learned. And he delivered it in this list of four things.

40:27And the fourth item on the list is a list within a list. And it's basically the Buddhist recipe or cookbook for a good life. And it's the eightfold path. It is. That's right. And the first entry there is right view or wise view. And it essentially is basically understanding things as they are. How am I doing? Am I taking us down the right path? You're doing fine. Okay. Things as they are and how they might be. And if we understand the way it is, then we have a wise relationship with that. It's that kind of the wisdom part. And then there's a behavior part, like wise work, wise speech. And then there's a practice part, mindfulness and concentration and wise effort.

41:16So, yes, there's three parts to that. And you don't have to know the four noble truths. You don't have to know the fourth noble truth to use the pause. But since we're going back and forth here, I wanted to include that. But sometimes Buddhist practitioners don't realize how much the Dharma works for the street of life. Works for the what? Street of life. They're living on the street of life. They're not living in a monastery. They're not living in a retreat center. They're living on the street of life where the opposites, you get knocked around. It's life's unfair often. So this middle path allows one to be empowered, but not become part of the problem of causing suffering for others.

42:05And if you notice that you're causing suffering, subtly or grossly, to be able to catch it, to pause, to begin again. That's right. To begin again. Sometimes you realize, whoa, I'm so far off, I'm going to have to start over in some way. from the very, I'm going to have to start where I am because I'm not just starting over. Is it just like, oh, I'm all together. I've gotten way off here in some way. There's a deep recognition and I need to attend to this. And I have a pattern of this. I don't want this pattern to go on. I will not be helpless, you know, like a puppet on the string of this pattern.

42:43I will not allow that myself. And again, that's that kind of coaching. It's kind of an affirming. It's a loving, kind relationship to yourself and letting loose of a lot of demanding. Like it's not supposed to be this way. It's unfair at times. It's very painful at times. But life is all of that. Life's not just sugar plums, you know. It's not. It's the opposites. And we got to relate to this realm of being here on this earth just as it is. We do. We really do. And if you start relating to that, people feel humiliated when it's such a misperception. It just breaks my heart. These people will come in and they're so distraught and it's such a misperception.

43:34They're comparing to a perfect or to the story or still to someone else's story they put on them that they're dutifully trying to live out. so so i think what you're trying to say there and i'm going to project some of my own stuff onto it is when you have a transition thrust upon you you get fired or you get broken up with or your project that you launched is a failure quote unquote it's easy to compare yourself to your friends instagram profiles where they look like they're doing nothing but winning all the time and at a party that you're not invited to. And that kind of story is incredibly painful.

44:17Yeah. Things not turning out the way we want them. It seems like just all bad news. But if we stick with that and the pause really helps, starting over really helps, starting where you are, all that really helps. We start to have a clarification of our values and we go, I'm not going to be defined by that. Who cares what party one goes to? That affects the ego, but it doesn't affect the inner life. I do want to double click on the, when we were talking about how to pause, you said listening to the body or being in the body is really helpful. Can you just, to be a little cute, put a little meat on the bone there and talk about, So this is kind of one of the ultimate contemplative cliches, you know, listening to your body.

45:10Like, how do you actually do it in your view? Well, let's start with a word, felt. The felt sense. The felt sense is what registers somewhere in the body, moment to moment in our lives. There's very few things in our ordinary consciousness that doesn't have a mirroring in the physical body. And through one of the sense gates, it's not always the physicality itself. It could be in terms of like a smell or a taste or the vision, something changes in the vision. They all, all of these, you know, we're this complex, beautiful, amazing system of that. And so the felt sense is what we're orienting to.

46:00We have our ideas, our perceptions. Many of those we interpret as from the concept we have, not from our actual immediate experience. So, oh, here I am screwing up again. I always screw up. That could be seeing a pattern, but it also could just be a reactivity where you're pulling your whole life into this one view of yourself that may be sometimes true, but not always. But now you're reifying it. You're making it the truth, the truth, big T truth. Then you ask, okay, how am I feeling in my body right now? And oftentimes in feeling in the body, you come back to a more balanced perspective. The felt sense of it.

46:49And the ego can be upset in terms of the emotions, but actually you don't feel that bad, even though you're upset emotionally. But if you go, okay, is my knee hurting? Is my back hurting? No, well, okay, is my face relaxed? Oh, yeah, my face can relax. So you break up the falseness of the overreactivity by feeling it in the body. And another way you have that embodied experience is through feeling your own earth element in your body, your own fire element. You're seeing the elementary nature of our experience. And then something that's upsetting, you go, boy, look at the fire I have around this.

47:38Woo, I've really got a lot of fire. Huh, is this serving me or not? Again, the solidity, the seemingly never stopping of a reality, you're interrupting it. You come back to a balance. I don't mean to make this sound easy or something like that, but I do really have your listeners know how we can all do this much more than we are doing it. Very few exceptions of people that are beyond in that, that this reclaiming of ourselves. I've mentioned this word as best I am able. I've mentioned that phrase a lot because that judging mind, that comparing mind, it's a tyrant. It's a tyrant. And it may be judging if not even our own opinion, but what we inherited, we were told as children, or it just got conditioned in and you're neurotic about it, you're compulsive about it.

48:38So as best I am able pulls us back into a kind of inner dignity. And our integrity is that we actually are doing as best we're able. And when we aren't, then we can own that. We can do that. It gets out of all that judging and comparing and gives you a larger perspective during these transitions. I've seen this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. You don't have to be anything special. It's that if we arrange our noticing, our mindfulness, the way we're understanding the experience, things correct themselves sometimes. It'll surprise people. I love what we're talking about. I would describe what we're talking about as kind of like mindfulness 101 or meat and potatoes mindfulness.

49:29And, you know, this especially this aspect, this the pause, because our emotions can seem so monolithic. It seems like the anger or jealousy or sadness that's speaking to us in our head is like an anchorman definitely telling us the truth, capital T truth. But actually, if we pause, it can be through meditation, deep breathing, taking a walk, whatever it is, you notice that all emotions have a half-life. Like the anger is only going to stay in you if you don't drown in it or or feed it or compartmentalize it and deny it. Like if you just let the anger be a non in a non interfering mindful way, it will come and go.

50:18And then you can make a sane decision on the other side. It's incredibly useful to have that pointed out. Yes. And we're all capable of it. It's not like you've got to be somebody special. So, you know, one thing that I have done with, again, this is people in my life balance work of working with transitions, I will give them a stone to carry in their pocket of some kind. And when they're in that reactive, they're supposed to put their hand in the pocket and fill that stone. And it's a talisman. It's a grounding. It's like, oh, this is a solid way to come back. their attention goes to the stone and all that relationship with the stone and it interrupts the soap opera that's going on in their heads.

51:09Coming up, more tips from Philip Moffitt about managing transitions with maximal skill and happiness and resilience.

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52:02Okay, so step one was start where you are. Step two, start over. Step three, the pause that overcomes obsessive thinking, that counter-programs against the soap opera, as you just said. Step four, and I love this, and this is something that I think we don't think about enough, or at least I certainly didn't think about enough for much of my life. Step four is recognize your motives when you're making a change. What do you mean by that? We are presented with a situation of our making or someone else's making that we're having to make a change. And what we're doing, where we live, what we can do because it's a health change.

52:46It's a relatedness to a person. And so there we are. We're presented. We would assume that when we are responding to that, it's with the best of motives. But if one looks closely, it's a mix of motives. It's a mix of motives so often. So if we've talked about this newly teenage daughter who's declaring a new level of independence, you know, dad would think, oh, my motive. My motive, of course, is I just want to help her stay safe and all this. But in fact, there can be a motive. What happened to my authority here? Or what happened to I was the greatest dad in the world, and now it feels like this.

53:34And so we can have a lot of different emotional motives that some of which we don't recognize and some of which we look at were clearly not serving in this situation. So there is this clarifying of the motive that we want to go through, which then leads us back to our deepest values. And the same in terms of a situation at work, you're going to show them, right? How did you know? Just by chance. the motive that has some good aspects to it but it really can start turning you into a different kind of seeing the world from this showing them you know not not being open to the world being guarded in a way that is way over compensation i love this aspect of your teaching i love all of what you're saying here but in particular i love this because I don't think it's a this is an inventory I'm not sure most people do.

54:38And I have been pushed in recent years to do this on occasion. I found to be immensely helpful, although often humiliating, but embedded in the way you're talking about it is a permission to have crass motives and to recognize that for all of us. And Joseph Goldstein, my meditation teacher, our mutual friend, he talks about this a lot, that motivation is always a range. And this is where mindfulness is so helpful that you can, if you can see clearly, take the inventory, get a sense of, okay, yeah, on the high end of the range, it's about sticking to my values, standing up for myself, whatever it is on the crass end of the range, it's bloodlust or something like that.

55:22And just to see it clearly and then choose to emphasize the motivations that align with your values. Yeah, there is abandoning of the ill motives as best as one is able. It can take you, if you feel betrayed by someone, it can take years before that works its way out of you. And I'm saying this because people give up on themselves way too soon about motives. the motives of all of these conditions formed over many many years and it's not realistic to think oh i see that's where they're wrong and suddenly they're gone but they do start lessening and moreover when you recognize them you can stop acting from them temporarily even if you go back yes you know but in this moment you can choose not to do that and it's those moments that does one individual moments create the conditions for this larger change yes and in my opinion the permission structure that you're providing here is so important i'm going to make a reference philip to something that you already know but i'm going to explain it to the audience in the dharma in buddhism we talk about the second arrow there's a parable in the buddhist texts about a guy who's walking through the woods he gets hit by an arrow and he goes into this whole internal tirade about why am I always the guy who gets hit by an arrow?

56:48Now I'm going to be late for dinner, blah, blah, blah. That tirade is the second arrow inserted voluntarily. And I think for many of us, when we get a whiff, often at an oblique angle of our motives, especially the crass ones, we insert a second arrow of shame. Like we're a bad person for having these feelings, But we're all selfish. We all are capable of all sorts of darkness. The answer is not to deny it, compartmentalize or even to feel bad about it. It's to see it clearly and not be owned by it. And that's, I believe, what you're pointing at. Yeah, to see it from your values and feel it in your body.

57:32And you go, I don't want to continue this insofar as I have choice. As far as I have choice, I don't want to be motivated by that. There's one sutta in the Buddhist text where the Buddha is saying motives that are healthy motives bring healthy results, positive results. Motives that are negative, that are unhealthy, bring negative results. and in between those two are mixed motives, which bring mixed results. And for most of us, maybe we're in that mixed category, but we are able to be slightly steadily moving to more and more wholesome motives. We are not taking identity. We're not, oh, I'm a person of healthy, wholesome motive or unwholesome motive, but insofar as I have choice, I choose to have wholesome motives.

58:24And if this was a chance to let loose of this motive right now, I'll let loose of it. But you don't think, now I've got to keep trying to only have wholesome motives. No, just make choice, just gentle choices over and over, over and over. No hurry. For me, it goes back to what you said earlier about the internal committee, this fractious intracranial committee that we all have these, you know, the jealous part, the angry part, the well-intentioned part, the generous part, all of these different modes that are available to us, many of them horrifying. So when I think about motives, I think about the inner committee and I think about relating to all of these parts with with my coach, with my inner coach.

59:14Like, you know, I can talk to myself. Yeah, dude, you're you're greed monger, your inner greed monger has reared his head here or your inner rage monster has reared his head here. But you're good. Like this is an ancient neurotic pattern that's been with you for a long time. It's it's the organism trying to protect itself, as Jack Kornfield says. But you don't need to be owned by it. And you're not a bad person for having it. It's all good. Let's get back to some sanity and move from our values. Yes, indeed. The recognition is a recognition of kindness towards yourself. You're not seeking fault.

59:53You're seeking to see what is harmful. And so you see, there's a positive in the recognition as opposed to condemning oneself. Condemning does not bring about change. We can be ashamed of ourselves in a moment, and that's okay. But if we start to create an identity, I am a shameful person, which you could easily have gotten on your childhood, and that gets triggered, that's not helpful at all. That's not helpful because that's a shutdown. There's no movement in that shutdown state. It takes all the air out, everything. So just kindness, but a clearer, I wish to be responsible as a human being to my values.

1:00:38That's the one choice I have, because all sorts of things are going to happen to each of us that we would not prefer. But how we relate to them, that's our little bit of freedom. To me, that is freedom. And so you're in a circumstance, not you're choosing it all, and you see that if I'd done something a year earlier, I wouldn't be in this situation. But here I am. And so then right there, right there in this moment, how do I reestablish through starting over, getting back to living my values right here? And it doesn't matter that it's a bad situation or a good situation. You're staying on your through line here towards living a life that you're in harmony with.

1:01:25not in some sort of syrupy way, but in relation to harmony with the way it is in this realm. The opposites, gain and loss and all of this, as I said before, that's the way it is in this realm. And so many people lack that perspective. And instead of it, their idea of perfection or if something's going wrong or if something's wrong with them, that they have suffering. But the suffering is the coin you pay to get to live in this realm. Well, you're doing my job for me because you've brought us to the fifth aspect of the Philip Moffat recipe for handling transitions with maximal grace. And that is, and I did spoil this a little bit earlier, but the fifth entry here is noticing, reacting versus responding in times of transition.

1:02:20Can you hold forth on that one? Yes. First of all, once again, you've got to be present to participate in your own life. That's the mindfulness requirement. Again, I call that being available to your life. Through mindfulness, you become available to actually experience what's happening in your life. Because you're available, because you're willing to see, to feel the good and the bad, then you're also able to respond because you're there. If you run away out of frustration, anger, helplessness, then you're not there, so you don't get to affect your life in that moment. The way you can notice whether you're able to affect is if you're caught in reacting.

1:03:10There's so little choice. There's so little choice in the reactive mind. It's quickly interpreted and it's justified itself and off it's going in its reaction. And again, many times these reactions are from old habits, those committee members we've talked about and so forth. And the responding is where you've got some space around the experience. You're angry or you're afraid or you're embarrassed, but there's this knowing, oh, I'm angry. Oh, embarrassment. Wow, look at this. I've not been embarrassed this long. In a dozen years, you know, you're in relationship to your experience as you're having it.

1:03:53I'll say that again. You're in relation to your experience as you're having it. And that gives you the choice to respond because there's space in there. You've not taken birth in the experience. You've got space around it. So you're both having the experience and you're observing it. To go one step further, this takes some practice. You can get to the point that you are observing the experience from within the experience. So if you're embarrassed, you're not just, oh, embarrassment's happening in one part of you and the observer's somewhere else. No, you're feeling the felt sense of embarrassment, and you're knowing it simultaneously.

1:04:40That makes life so different. It makes life so different. We're all capable of that. We live in an alienation from ourselves so much that I do not see as necessary. And again, I've seen so much of humanity by now, and we don't recognize the possibility, and we've not had sort of anybody help us entrain ourselves to this new way of relating, which is a responsive way of relating. Even though it really still feels bad, people hear this, they think, oh, then I won't feel bad anymore. No, this is a situation where you feel bad. But you just feel bad. That just in front of the feeling bad, just in front of suffering, just in front of defeat, is a game changer.

1:05:34It is possible for people, and I hear this from people in my little sub-stack community sometimes, that there can be confusion here around, like when you say don't be attached to emotions, do you mean detachment? What do you mean? And I think you're pointing here at the middle path. Like there's, we often, when we have a strong emotion, We either feed it, you know, get owned by it. We're totally in the anger and we're acting out of it or we deny it, compartmentalize it, try to shove it down. But what the Buddha talked about was, again, the middle path of where you're actually allowing it to be there.

1:06:13but with an investigatory capacity, an investigatory, warmly investigatory mindset of like, oh yeah, let me check this out. How is the anger showing up in my chest? What kind of thoughts am I having? Watching it come and go, watching the meteorological conditions come together and then fall apart. And then when it's over, because it will end, because everything ends, then you can respond wisely instead of reacting blindly. Am I restating this with some fidelity? Yes, yes, you are stating it with fidelity. I would add to that, as we first start learning to do this, it is after it's all over that we kind of have the perspective.

1:06:52But more and more, you could be in the middle of it and have that perspective. In the middle of it, I mean, you're still caught in your anger, but you're now witnessing in real time your own anger. And then as you do that for a while, you start to realize, I got choice. I can do an interrupt. I can pause in the middle of my anger. I can be really setting my teenager straight and stop right in the middle and go, sorry, just got a little bit of overreaction there. I love you. Just, you know, sorry. The interrupt can happen in the middle in that way. And then in time, in terms of the patterns, you start to recognize the pattern.

1:07:38You can hear these words forming in your brain, and you go, ah, no, no. You start to have choice on the front end of how you're conditioned. Because they are just tendencies of mind. They are not who you are. They are trained tendencies. The other thing I'd say about this is this event, which the Buddha stressed in another teaching, that's Foundations of Mindfulness teaching, about recognizing pleasant and unpleasant. This is the other way in transitions or any time in our lives that we get defined by pleasant and unpleasant equally. And we can be very unskillful in relation to pleasant, or we can be very unskillful in relation to unpleasant.

1:08:27Feeling yourself being swept up in that pleasant, watching, wanting to hold on to it, starting to imagine having more of it and going, oh, I don't want to live that way. I don't want pleasant and unpleasant to be commanding me. The middle way is that you don't get called in either. That makes the pleasant, by the way, more pleasant because you stay with it. And it makes the unpleasant less unpleasant because you're not exaggerating it. So just to fill that in a little bit, and please, I'll say some words and you'll jump in and correct me where I mess up. One of the Buddha's most famous discourses or speeches is called the four foundations of mindfulness.

1:09:06Basically, here are four ways to be mindful. And one of them was be mindful of the body. Another is to be mindful of what are called in the language of Pali, the Vedana or the feeling tones, which are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. So if you can just pay attention as objects, sensations, thoughts are rising in the mind, is this pleasant? Is this unpleasant? Is this neutral? If you're unaware of pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, it is a hatchery of reactivity because you're just going for the pleasant, trying to avoid the unpleasant and numbing out at the neutral. But if you're mindful of them, that's a great way to short circuit said reactivity.

1:09:49Agree or disagree? Oh, totally. That's the whole teaching. That's the whole teaching in that way. And again, we don't fall into judging ourselves because we are pursuing the pleasant. We all want good things. Like for our children, we want them to be safe and get a good education and all of that. It's letting the pleasantness in a moment or the pleasantness of the whole idea cause you to be unskillful or get trapped. For my own life, I came to a point where I've said and could live it that I'm not going to measure the success of my life by how many pleasant moments there are versus unpleasant.

1:10:30That's how I'm going to measure my life. Because I saw for myself that pleasant and unpleasant are like puppets. You've got a puppet on a string. If it's pleasant, you pull this way. Unpleasant, you pull this way. But what about me in that? What are my values in that? I'm just like some Pavlov dog, you know, being trained to respond to the stimulant. That, again, is a kind of reclaiming. We're reclaiming for ourselves our own sense of inner choice based on our values. This has been a great pleasure, Philip. Two questions I often ask at the end of a conversation. One is, is there something you were hoping we would get to that we didn't?

1:11:13no i would not say that we've really we've i feel like we've covered the waterfront great uh the second question is can you please remind everybody about the books you've written the various websites you've got we'll put the links to all of these in the show notes but to the best of your ability can you just plug away okay i'll plug away so my books the first one i would mention is Dancing with Life, which is about the Four Noble Truths. And it's from the point of an old text that says there's 12 insights in the Four Noble Truths that each is to be understood. And it's very, very interesting. I learned this from my teacher, the Vedible Ajahn Sumedho.

1:12:01It's very, very interesting. And I have endless examples of daily life. So I bring all those teachings into our regular life, not our retreat life, but our regular life, which I call the street of life. There's also a 52-week Dharma Wisdom website. That's just one of my websites, Dharma Wisdom, where you can sign up for excerpts every week, a little small, like a paragraph size excerpt from the book, and then a half a paragraph reflection on it. DharmaWisdom.org. dahmerwisdom.org. The second book is Emotional Chaos to Clarity, and that's more about mindfulness and all of these different ways. And it includes things like understanding the difference between the experience you're having and your interpretation.

1:12:54And mindfulness frees you from that interpretation, that compulsive interpretation. Many different chapters on lots of good subjects, and very much for everybody. No Buddhism required in any way. And then the third is a book called The Nine Dimensions of Consciousness, The Nine Bodies of Consciousness. It's about these different capacities of consciousness that we have that we utilize all the time, but we don't know we're utilizing them. And the effect of starting to deliberately cultivate being familiar with those different dimensions of consciousness. That has proven to be much more impactful than I thought it would be for everybody.

1:13:38I thought it was only for senior meditation students. But it turns out everybody, that's kind of a mystery to me why that's true, but it is. And there's a lot of my teaching now is through this organization that's an online Dharma organization called Dharma Ground. They put on a lot of online retreats and they're all for free. There's no, nobody pays any money. You give donation at the end if you want to at the end, but there's no. So that's a way to get to know your meditation. And in those retreats, I teach what is a new seven years old offering on my part. I call it natural arising practice method.

1:14:22And it's just like I was saying today, this all can just happen. There's no hurry. and just orientation. So I have all these preliminary practices we do, and then we turn to the four foundations of mindfulness and the four noble truths and so forth. And I think some people would really like that. And the other thing I would say, and this is a lot saying, on Dharma Wisdom, there's so many articles about the difficulties in life. And so pick your difficulty, and there's probably an article there for you that I've written over the last 25 years. Philip Moffitt, thank you very much. Great to talk to you.

1:15:03Thank you. It's really nice speaking with you. Likewise.

1:15:10Thanks again to Philip Moffitt. Don't forget this episode comes with a guided meditation specifically designed to help you manage the inevitable ups and downs, the inevitable changes of life from a place of some measure of equanimity. It's called Start Here, and it comes from our great meditation teacher of the month, Vinny Ferraro, who's doing custom guided meditations for all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. These are only for paid subscribers over on danharris.com. Paid subscribers also get live video meditation and Q &A sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. The next one is coming up on September 23rd.

1:15:48I'll be doing that one. And if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got a couple of events coming up, as I mentioned earlier, one of them on September 21st at the New York Insight Meditation Center and another at the end of October, a weekend-long thing at the Omega Institute. That's another installment of our ongoing meditation party events. I'll put links to both in the show notes. And finally, and really finally, going back to Philip Moffitt for a second, there's a worksheet that is freely available. It's called the Core Values and Essential Intentions Worksheet, and it's available on the Life Balance website.

1:16:19There's a link to that in the show notes. finally thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard on the 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 cashmere is our executive producer and nick thorburn of the band islands wrote our theme

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