How To Relax The Need To Control Everything | Rosa Lewis

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

0:18Hey gang, one of the most venerable spiritual cliches is the notion of being present. It may be a cliche and therefore slightly annoying, but it is also an incredibly important concept and skill, being awake and alive to your life during this limited period of time when you're here on this planet. So today we're going to talk about what being present actually means and then, crucially, how to actually do it. My guest is a meditation teacher and self-described mystic named Rosa Lewis. Rosa and I talk about why sadness and grief, which of course nobody likes, can actually enable presence. The difference between feeling sadness and getting lost in self-pity.

1:03Why the so-called dark night of the soul is a very normal stage in spiritual practice. Why, and this is counterintuitive, but why visualizing death can help you process the bad things that have happened to you, why saying no can be a spiritual practice, and much more. Before we dive in, I just want to say that if you want to meditate with me, I have two live in-person events coming up. On May 17th, I'll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. I'll do a guided meditation, and then I'll talk about how the practice can help you in this chaotic world. And then I'll take your questions. It's going to be great.

1:39You should come May 17th, 92nd Street Y. Then in October, I'll be doing my annual meditation party retreat with my friends Seben A. Selassie and Jeff Warren. It's a weekend thing at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's really fun. We teach a bunch of different styles of meditation. There's also time for Q &A and socializing and pickleball if you're into that kind of thing. Your meditation practice really can be improved by doing it in the carpool lane. So come hang with us. I'll put links to both of those events in the show notes. And we will get started with Rosa Lewis right after this.

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4:39Rosa Lewis, welcome to the show. Thanks. Yeah, really nice to be here. Okay, so so many questions for you. But the first one is you describe yourself as not only a meditation teacher, but also a mystic. And so I'd just be curious, what does that mean, actually? Yeah, I guess one of the most important parts of it is that there's a deeper aspect of reality than just the sort of logical, linear time, rational material world that is sort of focused on by a lot of humanity as the main aspect of experience. And And then there are these sort of deeper, more subtle realms of experience that are present.

5:28And time isn't always linear. There's different ways in which causality can happen. And there's a connection to something bigger than just us. So you could call that a kind of a divinity or a mystery or Buddha nature or something that has intelligence and a rhyme and a reason that isn't this sort of like just logical. linear rational material that we're in and i would say that being a mystic is kind of communing with those parts of experience being connected to them being open to them that being more the sort of baseline of reality and experience sort of like arising from there as its main source so in the subtitle of your book you use the word presence like being present.

6:18It's called unlocking the depths of being wholehearted presence for a mystical reality. I'm narrowing in on the word presence, because I think that's something that everybody gets being awake and aware right now, right here in the present moment. If I understand correctly, and I hope you will correct me if I don't, that really is for many of us the gateway into what you're describing in terms of a deeper level of reality or mysticism yes for me it starts there because otherwise it's just you're actually just adding ideas and concepts and going off into somewhere else it's actually yeah you go through the door of presence wholehearted is in there as well because it's about wholeness and feeling and embodiment and like showing up and being in the moment, committing to presence and committing to the full spectrum of what that can mean.

7:14And then as you practice and through meditation and other things, other aspects of experience, which I'm sure we'll talk about, what it means to be in the present moment can start to get broader and more expansive. So whether or not a listener understands exactly what you, Rosa, are pointing at when you talk about a deeper level of reality, AKA the mystical, whether we get that or not, it's important to know, like the only way to get it is through waking up right now. The only way to get to that state is by being awake and aware right now. Yeah. It happens by paying attention to your immediate experience in the present moment and being here with what is in your body, your heart, in your direct experience.

8:08So we're going to get to the how of all of this. And your book really lays out these like seven aspects of our present moment experience that we can kind of unlock and investigate. But before we do that, I'm just curious, like, how did you get where you are now? Like, well, how does one become a mystic? I think the wise ass in me that will never go away would say, you know, like just dozens of ayahuasca trips. So what's on your CV in order to get to call yourself a mystic? There are some psychedelics sprinkled in there. I think that psychedelics open things up, but it's more meditation and shadow work focused, actually.

8:49It's interesting because now when I look back on when I was a child and a young adult, there were a lot of elements of mystical experience there. but I was in a very rational paradigm. And so I was, I was sort of like discounting that and seeing through that lens. But my sort of experience of when I first started experiencing these things is, well, there was a few things that happened at once. One was I got a bad concussion and that just sort of like, it's kind of like opened my mind a little bit to what was going on. And then I sort of was listening to a few kind of like more spiritual things, Alan Watsi type stuff and having sort of like energetic responses to that which I didn't really have a bucket to put that in I was still in a very rational frame but just these sort of like big overwhelming emotional energetic kind of responses where I would hear something and it would be like a sort of transmission quality where I would kind of suddenly be in a very different experience and then you know sort of like synchronicities were showing up and things like that and then I did a group shadow work therapy retreat and essentially it's like a very embodied therapeutic modality that is about opening these different archetypes and letting these modes and ways of being flow through you more fully and my process was around opening up the lover archetype so deeper level of feeling and when that happened it really really transformed how I experienced the world for one I was like I'm allowed to feel these things I'm normally just repressing with more of letting that repression out.

10:29Yeah, just more archetypal, imaginal, energetic, emotional things started to sort of come into reality. And then the more shadow work I did and the more I later started meditation, the more meditation I did, the more sort of these altered states and different parts of experience started coming in. so interesting so you're using some terms i'd love to hear some more about i don't know that i know exactly what you mean when you say shadow work or archetype or imaginal i think i kind of know what you're talking about young and stuff but especially for the listener who might have no idea would you mind just teaching us a little bit yeah shadow work it's a union in depth psychology and then specifically the type of shadow work i did is a it's a specific type made by a man called cliff barry but it's built on young's work and it's really that essentially there are parts of you that either from birth or through your childhood or also young adulthood it's like you will have learned that there are certain aspects of you that are not welcome or certain parts of you that are not certain emotional responses or so the type of shadow work that i've done with berries it has four archetypes so lover warrior magician and sovereign lover is really about emotions and feeling and that sort of realm whereas magician is a lot more about kind of like thinking and seeing options and being rational and being able to perceive what's going on so it's almost like these kind of totally different modes that we have or ways of being and a really common one in our society is that you will have essentially sort of shut down the emotional mode quite a lot and this was true of me as well and learn to feel less because emotions are not welcome and then to compensate you will think more and use your again inflated magician use that more and be extra sort of rational and see through that lens to avoid feeling and then the shadow work bit is that the lover the feeling is in shadow it's like not accessible to you it's not just like a free flow of feeling in your life and so you have to basically go back and revisit and sort of unblock that aspect of your being so that that can flow more freely you can be more in balance you can have more optionality in your range of how you experience the world how you show up which bits of your being are accessible and those four archetypes as well are good examples of archetypes being a kind of in this realm that's a bit less concrete and a bit less literal and a bit more sort of energetic things can get a bit soupy and archetypes are kind of like a way to gather a bunch of meaning and say like oh yeah the lover archetype it sort of gives people a sense of what you're talking about it's sort of like a packet of meaning and information where it's like oh yeah that's like feeling that's the bit of me that is embodied and soft and open and whereas the magician archetype it's more sort of mental and so archetypes are kind of yeah ways of pointing towards something that can be a bit fuzzy and hard to grasp kind of like a symbol i'm gonna say a bunch of words and then you're gonna tell me if the words make sense the point of the words is to just make sure i understand what you're saying because i think it's really interesting My understanding is that for a long time in many different traditions, we've had different ways of talking about aspects of our personality.

14:04The Buddha had a demon. He called him Mara. Mara was the embodiment of delusion and greed and hatred. In the Hindu tradition, they have inner avatars, like aspects of the personality. in later Christian tradition. And I think maybe even ancient Greece and Rome, they had either demons or daemons, D-A-E-M-O-N-S. And in modern psychology, we have the modular model of the mind where we have these different modes we go into, which either might dog us or we might have been told during our life are unacceptable. So we have various levels of health in our relationship with different parts of our personality.

14:45Speaking of parts, there's also internal family systems where we name our different parts and enter into conversation with them. So like just, we all know we have different aspects of our personality. And occasionally one of these aspects or parts or demons has the steering wheel. And occasionally other parts of our personality, we have no visibility into at all because we weren't ever allowed to, by the culture or by our family to have a relationship with them. And I think what you're describing here is that you learn through this work to just kind of like end the war with the various aspects of your psyche with which you had unhealthy relationships with or just total lack of visibility into.

15:27How am I doing? Yeah, yeah. Specifically with the shadow work as well, they say that the aim is to have a like a nice kind of conference meeting of the aspects and the sovereign can listen to all of the aspects and choose a way forward from there so that they're all present and all available i like that metaphor i want that for myself for my own fractious intracranial committee okay so thank you for your patience i've been letting me slash us learn a little bit more about you before we dive into your recommendations here. Just again, the book is called Unlocking the Depths of Being, a wholehearted presence for a mystical reality.

16:09And so in the book, as I understand it, and please, you'll correct me if I'm misstating at any step along the way here, but in the book, as I understand it, there are these like seven aspects of experience when it comes to like being present that we can unlock. Now, I'm not sure we'll get to all seven, but we'll do our best to work through some of them. The first is sacred sadness. So can you just talk a little bit about what that is? Yeah, I guess everyone knows sadness. And I think a lot of people know what sadness feels like to feel when you're disconnected from the world and it feels pretty bad and you don't want to feel sad.

16:46Sacred sadness is really feeling sad and feeling connected and feeling that sadness is a deep connective force that connects you more deeply to yourself to the world to others can open your heart can make you realize what's important in life and the reason it's first is because I found that with working with people it's like opening to grief and specifically grief that has a connected feel to it it's like that's a kind of prerequisite for opening to anything mystical. There's a kind of open-hearted willingness to be moved by life and the feeling that that is beautiful. There's not a kind of control where I'm only orienting towards good stuff.

17:36In Buddhist terms, it's like the craving and aversion of just trying to make things different, trying to get to the good stuff, avoid the bad stuff. And when people can get a bit of a flavor of sacred sadness or just opening to their grief more and like feeling safe in that and like, ah, it's actually, this can be beautiful. This can be, it's still sad and it's meaningful. And it's, then that just opens up a doorway for something. Yeah. A kind of presence with less of that craving and aversion happening. That actually makes complete sense to me that there's something about allowing in the sadness that most of us spend a lot of time medicating away, either through actual medication or through scrolling or gambling or shopping or whatever, binging on Netflix, not against any of those things, but if taken too far, you're actually just closing yourself off from like a really important part of life and doing the hard thing of letting it in.

18:38I think you're saying is a foundational aspect of, you know, living a more vibrant life. Mm-hmm. Yeah. A couple of things that help people with it is that I think in the book, I say open the heart requires an equal measure of beauty and heartbreak or something like that. And I think art can be a way to do this in a way that's safer. So I recommend one of the exercises is listening to sad music and having a cry or also watching a sad film can do it. Just something where there's like that feeling of like the beauty of it is still present as well, can be a way for people to sort of like ease in if they want to sort of dip their toes in the water a bit more with it.

19:21I'm a big fan of using aesthetics, beauty art to feel more. That is, I think, pretty readily accessible. If we were to go one click deeper into the less accessible, what else would you recommend in this zone? I guess there's like that moment of just when you I'm going to cry. There's a sort of moment of like, if I open to this, I'm just going to get so overwhelmed by the depths of this sadness. It's kind of like you really let go and you're just, it's sort of like a fear of destruction from it. And it's almost like you do just let yourself be completely destroyed by it. And you sort of cry so deeply that you really hit the thing and then you feel it release afterwards.

20:06And I think there's that process where you're just really like getting into this really really getting into the sadness and really letting it letting it rip and again like staying with the present moment experience so one thing i have as well and for each chapter is a kind of you can sort of get an inflated version of sadness where it then start to wallow and self-pity and stories about the world being terrible and it's not about going off into that it's about the embodied experience of like letting it through with tears with the direct experience in the emotion. If I'm understanding you correctly, it seems like the former could prevent the latter.

20:45I'm embarrassed to admit I've actually never really done what you're suggesting here, although I find it very attractive as an idea, as somebody who's not, doesn't allow himself to be super emotional. And I'd say that as a weakness. But if we, next time we're sad, like take it all the way, like really let it in, then you're allowing it to move through as opposed to this kind of ambient sadness we might have by looking at the news, for example. And we never really work it all the way through. We're just kind of stuck in this sadness, rage cocktail. And then many of us feel like subconsciously or consciously the need to kind of performatively be morose all the time as if that's going to help.

21:30But in fact, we want to let the emotion move all the way through so that we can have the space to like take effective action depending on what our power and capability is again i'm going to check in am i reacting in an accurate helpful way yeah it's like there might be a backlog there's almost always a backlog for people that sort of needs to be felt but as that opens up it just becomes more and more kind of spacious and yeah helps build presence build capacity to be here both because the sadness is sort of a part of what's allowed to be here and then also because there's less sort of backlog that's sort of trying to be avoided or carried or moved around perhaps a key word that you just used right there is allow because we do spend a lot of time fending off quote-unquote difficult emotions such as sadness yes and i think there's something here which is i really like that actually i think all of these seven aspects are essentially about allowing equality to come forward it's not about like creating an experience or needing to get somewhere or having experience show up in a particular way it's just kind of feeling into a part that is likely to be repressed and giving it some space and letting it come through okay so very practically the next time we're sad let it rip i think is what you're saying yes and if that's difficult for you find some sad music to listen and feel along with and see if that helps it feel safer and evokes some tears or a bit more feeling.

23:16And again, so whether we're letting it rip just because we have the capacity in the moment or we're going to help midwife the full birth of the emotion with some sad music, in either case, the pitfall of the path would be wallowing in it. And so I think it might be worth you just clarifying again how we walk that line between taking it all the way and not wallowing yeah so the key is it's the presence where we started and it's staying with direct sensation and emotion in the present moment and so if someone has like an embodiment practice that might be easier to do through the door of really feeling the sensations in the body if someone's more of a meditator it might be like or of a past in the meditator kind of like noting the sensations as they come or just something that if you're drifting off just like staying with the body is the clearest way to stay with the thing that you want to be staying with so if you find yourself getting stuck in stories of i really been screwed by my family and i'm like this I'm always going to be like this or nobody's ever going to love me.

24:31Like those are thoughts about the past and the future. And what you really want is digging deep in a kind of gentle, investigatory way into like what's happening right now. Yeah. All right. This is my new homework assignment.

24:50Coming up, Rosa Lewis talks about how to reconnect with the natural sensitivity that you had as a kid, but may have armored over as you've become an adult.

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27:28Well, let's move on to the second of the seven aspects that you talk about in the book, and that is sensitivity. What do you mean specifically by sensitivity? One thing I've discovered from working with a lot of people one-to-one and in groups is that people experience the world very differently. And there's a way that it's important to include that because otherwise people are often trying to be someone else or something. There's a sort of move away from your own sensitivity, your own. One way I use to help people to get in touch with this is the way that you've always experienced the world since you were a kid.

28:09and it's sort of like it's a very small part of you and it's just before you get to the point where you have intellectual overlays and ideas and strong desires and all of these things that are sort of maybe bigger and stronger and layered on top it's sort of like a small receptivity that can listen and notice what's here and be present with it and sort of receive. Yeah. And specifically your unique sensitivity, like what does that feel like for you and to be you and to what other things that you're picking up on and just sort of validating that, finding that and validating it and exploring it as a topic, really.

28:57so for you the term sensitivity is kind of and i just want to make sure i understand this because i think it's interesting especially when you invoke like how we were as kids like there's some kind of factory setting for us of how we experience the world how open our aperture is maybe it can get papered over it can get paved over by the events of our subsequent life but by sensitivity i think you're pushing us to like get back in touch with this original stance yeah and it has a strong sort of like it connects to the quality of innocence as well of just this sort of original natural kind of been there since you were a kid just how you receive the world before it gets gunked up with a bunch of stuff.

29:55Again, I find this very intriguing. I kind of like the childhood version of myself better than I like the current version of myself. So what very practically can we do to get back in touch with that? Yeah, so there's a exercise in the book and it starts with just building some safety in the different aspects of yourself. So one thing that pulls us out of that kind of sensitivity is that it's just not safe for the naturalness to sort of be itself. There's a sense of having to put on a posture or a mask or a defense, and they get stacked up as we go through life. So it's sort of like getting into a safe place, like a place where you're meditating and you know nothing's going to come get you or you don't have to be a certain way.

30:40And then sort of letting that infuse and then spending some time. the question yeah what's what's the way of being that's been there since a kid is a good way there's a few more questions as well in the book but like just sitting with that and trying to feel into are there specific aspects of experience that I feel or focus on or sense and then that's the sort of individual thing and then also we do on retreats I've sort of worked with this quite a lot where again it's the allowing thing often people are like for some reason have learned that they're not allowed to see what they can see and actually if you start saying to people i would just describe what you're seeing sit in partners and just describe what you're seeing in their emotions or describe what you imagine their inner world might be like or you can actually see a lot more than you think you can see there's like a lot more sensitivity there but we've sort of learned not to include it because it's not polite or for many reasons i guess but But so you can also do it in sort of pairs or small groups and explore it.

31:47So in the pairs, I want to get back to the individual practice in a second, because I have an advantage over you because I have that actual words in front of me. So I'm going to read them back to you. But I'm just curious about the pairs thing. So you're sitting there and saying what you can see about the other person. Yeah. Like, how do you stop people from being dicks? Because I would be like, oh, I can see you have terrible taste in clothing or whatever. I don't know. I mean, I probably wouldn't genuinely be a jerk, but I mean, I might say things that don't land well or want to say things that don't land well.

32:19Yeah. So I guess in the context of a retreat, we'll have a pretty good sort of baseline setup where it's about letting people have their experience and not taking it personally and kind of sharing what's coming up and having a bit of space for people to correct. You know, if you have a projection about me and it's incorrect, I would have space to say, oh, it doesn't feel true for me. This actually feels true or, and just make, yeah, much more space for there to be a sort of group experiment and a sharing and a high openness to what that could be as the sort of foundation of where we're speaking from.

32:56Feels interesting, slightly dangerous. Let's go back to the individual practice. It's called the trusting experience meditation. And again, this is to help us, you know, get in touch with what Rose is calling sensitivity. And so there are three steps to this process. I'm going to walk through this, Rose, and then I'll let you just hold forth on the other side. So it starts with some affirmations, like some things you can say to yourself. And this is the safety part you were talking about before. You know, your experience is welcome as it is. It's safe for you to see the truth. Shadows and dissonance are welcome.