How To Handle Your Demons | Vinny Ferraro

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

0:18Hello, happy Friday, everybody. The mind is a wild place. There's this joke. I don't know who who originated the joke. But one meditation teacher said something like, my mind is a dangerous neighborhood. I don't go in there alone. You know, it's just boiling over with all these different neurotic patterns and little characters that we've got. You know, for me, I've got like an angry character who I named after my grandfather. I've got a hustler, ambitious character who I named after a great grandfather of mine who was a crook. Seriously, he was a crook. And so there's so much going on internally, much of it very, very difficult.

0:53The good news is there are ways to boost your sanity quotient, practices that have stood the test of time and also are now withstanding a lot of scientific scrutiny. And today we're going to talk about how you can pick the sanest or smartest aspect of your mental repertoire in any moment and go with that instead of the more venal or unconstructive shit that may be happening in your brain. The technical term for this is alignment. You're going to hear about how to align from Vinnie Ferraro, who's an incredible meditation teacher, in a minute. But let me just step back for a second and give you some context.

1:33All this month on Fridays, we're highlighting golden nuggets from our vast archive. And we do it this way. We ask our staff members to think of some of their favorite moments from our long history here on this podcast. And what we're going to do is we're going to play you a member of our staff today. It's one of our ace producers, Eleanor Vasily. She's going to describe why she found the golden nugget we're going to play for you so compelling. And then we're going to play you the nugget, which in this case comes from Vinnie Ferraro and is about this concept of alignment. at picking what aspect of your mental repertoire you want to act out of right now so that you're not just, you know, acting out all of your childhood fears or whatever it is.

2:13So that's coming up. Before we go to break, though, I just want to say that there's a lot of cool stuff happening over on danharris.com for paying subscribers. We now have guided meditations for all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. Our teacher of the month this month is the brilliant Kyra Jewel Lingo. She's been creating bespoke guided meditations that come with our Monday, Wednesday episodes. Next month, our teacher of the month will be Vinny Ferraro. You're getting a little teaser of Vinny's brilliance today. The other thing that's happening in our world is that starting on September 2nd, we're now going to make our live video meditation sessions weekly.

2:48I've been doing live guided meditations and Q &A on Substack on video for, I don't know, the last 10 or 11 months. And it's been a little spotty. You know, I do it sometimes once a month, sometimes twice a month. Now we're going to do it every week. Why? Because our customers have responded very positively and also because I really enjoy it. Every Tuesday at four o 'clock Eastern, henceforth, live guided meditation, either with me or with our teacher of the month or with both of us. The first is on September 2nd at four o 'clock Eastern, and it will be with me and Vinny Ferraro. So go over to danharris.com, sign up.

3:22You'll be supporting me, my team, and lots of meditation teachers who we really love to support. Final thing to say, and then I'll shut up is that coming up at the end of October, I'm heading back to the Omega Institute in upstate New York for another meditation party. This is an in-person retreat with my friends, Seven A. Selassie and Jeff Warren, also Afosu Jones-Korte, another amazing meditation teacher will join us October 24th through the 26th. You can sign up at eomega.org. I'll also put a link in the show notes. Okay. Coming up, we're going to hear from Eleanor Vasili, one of our producers.

3:56She's going to talk about why this nugget from Vinny struck her so powerfully, and then you'll hear the wisdom directly from Vinny 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.

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5:40Hey, 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.

6:16that 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 Seben 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.

6:50And if you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one no questions asked. Hi, everyone. This is Eleanor Vasily, and I'm a producer here on the 10 % Happier podcast. For my staff pick, I'm going to be sharing a clip from an episode with Vinny Ferraro, who is a meditation teacher and practitioner. The episode came out May of last year, and that's actually right around the same time that I joined the team here. In fact, it might have been one of the first episodes that I helped edit. Vinny's actually been on the podcast a few times. He's both a staff favorite and a listener favorite, and once you hear him speak, you'll probably have a better sense of why.

7:32He has this great charisma about him, And he's also incredibly relatable. We have all different kinds of guests on this show. We speak with scientists and writers and experts in all these different fields. And a lot of our episodes also feature teachers like Vinny. And I'll be honest, don't be scandalized, but I'm actually surprised that I chose an episode that features a Buddhist practitioner. Before I started this job, I had a background in radio and storytelling, among many other things. And I had something that resembled a meditation practice. but I knew almost nothing about Buddhist teachings or the Dharma.

8:08But when Vinny opened up his mouth, you know, I thought, yeah, I can get behind this. The episode focuses on three core Buddhist practices that Vinny uses to navigate life, and I went with the first, which is the concept of alignment, loosely described as consciously choosing which internal mind states or parts of our existence to give life to. Essentially, it's about learning to choose which inner voices we actually want to follow. I re-listened to this part of the interview the other day, and I was on a walk, and I was obsessing about five different things all at once, and a lot of them were negative.

8:46And there was something powerful in the way that he described it that offered a respite in shifting from what might have been one mindset into another. And I think it's incredible to be reminded that we have some agency when it comes to what we spend our time focusing on. We do have some choice in the narrative that we create in our minds. That's a topic that we're going to get into a little bit deeper next month. I also kind of love this term that he used about the subtle violence of self improvement, which I am absolutely against. I can also get behind anyone who is empowering listeners to become, in Vinny's words, more unfuckable with.

9:27And side note, there's also an X-Men reference in there. So for this self-described nerd, that's also a win. Anyway, here's Vinny. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you, Eleanor. Just to say that thing from Vinny really stuck with me too. Okay. So now let's hear the part of the interview with Vinny Ferraro, where he's talking about this concept that might seem a little mysterious at first, but stick with him. I promise. I promise it will make sense. What is alignment? Yeah. So when we start sitting, we see how much is going on inside us, right? There's just so much to choose from, right? So many parts of our experience, right?

10:04There's our conditioning, there's the thoughts, there's hopes, there's fears, there's the characteristics of defilements, right? Everything is like one moment away. And so we get to choose, well, what do I actually want to give life to? What do I want to actually follow, right? If the two components of mindfulness are seeing clearly and responding wisely. So am I seeing clearly all these different parts of me that are up for grabs in this moment? Then I say, okay, if I walk in this direction, where will that lead me, right? Is this wise? Is this kind? Is it generous, right? So it can have all of these different flavors.

10:42So are we aligning with that which is wise within us? That's the short answer. I want to encourage you to give long answers here. Okay, cool. But I'm going to prod you because I think this is fascinating. We all have just tons of stuff going on internally. If you just turn the laser beam of your attention inward, you will see you probably won't like what you see. There's just a lot of chaos and random thoughts and homicidal urges and whatever or desires. There's just lots of stuff in there. And there's beautiful stuff in there, too, of course. And you're saying, you, Vinny, are saying, I try to check in regularly and figure out of this whole menu of mind states, which one do I want to go with?

11:30Am I restating you with some degree of accuracy? That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, we get to decide with some mindfulness, with some practice, we can decide what we align ourselves with. In the beginning in my life, I received thoughts as commandments. They had the power to animate me. My thoughts were my reality, and they caused immense suffering. So then we get to decide with some practice, like, oh, well, what part of my personality is operating right now? You know, throwing out these marching waters. I don't know if you've ever seen the X-Men movies. You know those ones? Of course, yes. Yeah, yeah.

12:10So you remember Magneto? Magneto. So he has the power to completely control metal, so he can walk off a roof. And as he does, every one of his steps are supported, right? This is a perfect illustration of my understanding of the Dharma, right? How each moment is conditioned by the next. And so, you know, if I walk in the direction of the shadow worlds, they open up before me right and when i'm able to take refuge and maybe like i'm more wholesome or more like the boundless qualities of uh the natural radiance of the unobscured heart is what the buddha kind of called these uh brahma viharas when i walk in those beautiful directions those energies inform the world i'm kind of inhabiting and in some way co-creating like so that's what i'm saying when i say well what do we align ourselves with it's like what do i want to give life to does that make sense it does it makes complete sense just to you know if anybody's new to the dharma when you talk about the brahma viharas i might might be worth spending some time there this is you know for people like me who just kind of have a anti sentimentalist conditioning i think both of us are probably gen xers and that was like the age of irony and we're nihilistically sarcastic and all this stuff.

13:33So when our kind of, well, certainly for myself, my kind of mind encounters an idea like the Brahma Viharas, which translates, I think, into the divine abodes. And that kind of language often, traditionally, I found that a little repellent, but it's really interesting, this idea, these divine abodes, there are four of them, loving kindness or friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy, which is like the opposite of schadenfreude, just delighting in other people's happiness. And then finally equanimity, which is just the ability to stay cool no matter what's happening. And, you know, if you can set aside some of this sort of grand language, what the Buddha is saying and what you're now saying more recently is that these are skills that can be developed.

14:21And I can see these capacities in my mind and like Magneto, create a pathway, a sturdy pathway to go in that direction instead of the more noxious alternatives. Yeah, well, we've seen the limitations of the mind, right? I mean, I certainly have. I've seen the limitations of taking my psychology to be a reality, right? Because even though a lot of my stories are based in fiction, in this inner narrative, the suffering they deliver is real, right? So we have to take good care of what we let the mind dwell on. We have to have some kind of, maybe we can call it discipline or it's a better word for it, when you brush your teeth every day, right?

15:08A habit, a practice. Yeah, a habit or a practice, right? So we can see, oh, thoughts on this inner judgment, right? The inner narrative is strong. And it comes factory stock with this biology that we've inherited, right? And if we look closely at that judgment, it doesn't really lead anywhere. And sometimes even as our awareness grows, we start to practice, the judgment grows. So it's like, wow, hold on a second. I know the subtle violence of self-improvement, right? I know about trying to hate myself into becoming a better person. Didn't really work. And maybe the problem wasn't like a lack of sincerity, but the limitations of anger, fear, or shame as far as like transformative, right?

16:01So the Buddha was, I believe, asserting that the no that comes from love, that comes from care is way more transformative than the no that comes from those other afflictive energies. So with that in mind, we kind of offer ourselves a pardon. We say, okay, however I am, I've come by it honestly. And that conditioning is actually not who I am. So the Buddha kept coming back over and over to this, what is I, me, or mine? What is I, me, or mine? And he was like, not this, not this, not this, not this. But he did say, and I like you used the word earlier, sturdy in terms of the refuges that these heart qualities, the reliable refuge, that they are a reliable way to receive experience.

16:54That even if it's painful, I can meet that with compassion, right? It's not some just pseudo spiritual bypass. I'm like, oh yeah, it's all love. It's all good. It's like, How would that ever contribute to wholeness, which is what I think the Dharma invites us into is wholeness. So it has to hold all of it, the difficulty, the beauty, the generous, and the equanimity that holds the whole thing in gear. Say more about that. The equanimity holds the whole thing in gear. Well, you know, without equanimity, love and kindness can become very saccharine, right? That over-sweetness. It's not actually authentic.

17:34It's not real. Or the compassion can just be kind of like over sentimentality. So equanimity is near to all things. So I like that because it gives us that balancing quality so that we're not overly anything. Near to all things, meaning it allows you to be up close with stuff that normally you'd armor yourself against? That's right. That's right. I mean, in the prison, we talk about it as being, you know, unfuckable with, you know, unshakable, right? Like you remember who you are, right? So you don't have to engage in every fight. You don't have to, you know, defend your honor in all these different cases.

18:22You remember who you are, right? So we talk about flashing our basic goodness because that's the real danger when we forget our own goodness. At least it was for me. Flashing your basic goodness. What does that mean? Well, you know, in the prisons or even in schools, you know, you talk about flashing on people. And that means you're going to flash some anger. So we talk about flashing our basic goodness. So that means that I remember there's goodness in here and that I'm not determined by your thoughts of me. Actually, your thoughts of me, Dan, are none of my business. You know what I mean? So we stay rooted in that there's goodness here, that these four heart qualities that the Buddha laid out, they're immeasurable and they're boundless and they're incorruptible and untarnishable.

19:14And it doesn't matter what happened to us or what we've done, that those things are still there. And so I really like that as somebody that's gone through a lot in my life and really lost my own goodness, lost connection to it. and then all kinds of things come out of that desperation. That's the real danger. Even after everything you've been through, and this is interesting to me and I like asking people about this, do you believe that we all have the capacity for goodness or do you take it a step further to say that foundationally we are all basically good? Yeah, that's a very difficult question.

19:55I could only answer from my experience of myself, which believes that there is no part of me that's beyond redemption. That no matter how lost I get, and that's all I'm doing when I go to the prisons, right? I've been going into prison since 87 as a visitor. Yeah, that was a bit different earlier on. But it's like all I'm doing is reflecting value. I don't give a shit whether they know what meditation is. I want to go there and remind them of their value because I feel like that's the most important thing. And it's a very dehumanizing system. So it's meant to squash that out. And so when I go there, that's all I'm reflecting back.

20:44Everything is an excuse to connect. Right now we're connecting. Oh, the premise is we're going to talk about mindfulness or Buddhism. Cool. Killer. Doesn't really matter. Right. So when I go there, that's what's on the forefront of my mind is, can I be in relationship with these fellas and can I reflect their goodness back to them?

21:08Thanks again to Eleanor. Thanks again to Vinny Ferraro. Don't forget, Vinny and I will be doing a live guided meditation on September 2nd at four o 'clock Eastern. That's a Tuesday. That is the beginning of our guided meditation sessions going weekly every week at Tuesday at 4 o 'clock Eastern. We'll be doing live guided meditations and Q &A. The first one is with me and Vinny. I'm really excited about this new feature. I love doing these things, and you guys seem to love it. So that's available for paying subscribers over at danharris.com. Also, Vinny is going to be our teacher of the month for September, which means that he'll be producing guided meditations that are customized to all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes so that you can pound the learnings from the podcast into your neurons.

21:52Those meditations are also available to paying subscribers at DanHarris.com. And finally, if you want to take your practice offline, don't forget that I'm doing a meditation party in-person retreat at the Omega Institute last weekend in October. I think it's the last weekend. Anyway, it's October 24th. And you should come. Eomega.org or just click the link in the show notes. Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on 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.

22:26Marissa 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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