How To Stay Open and Curious Even When You're Exhausted or Annoyed | Sarah Ruhl

27:43Yeah, but I think that a lot of the curiosity previously was a kind of extractive curiosity. You know, I was good at getting people's stories out of them so that I had a good story. Right. But now it's more like, well, how can I be useful? Yeah. I'm not taking this thing too far. It's not like I can't walk down the street because anybody who's in distress, actually, if somebody was in distress, I would help them. But I'm not paralyzed by compulsive compassion or anything like that. It's just trying to get myself out of the mindset of what's in it for me. Does this person like me? What are they thinking of me?

28:21Blah, blah, blah. All the time. Yeah. And I will say there was something about the Bell's Palsy that divided my life into before and after in that before I got Bell's Palsy, I had a play on Broadway. It was up for Tony Award. It was nominated for Pulitzer. Like everything was going really well. There was a kind of sense of abundance. I had one kid. I had two more. I was in a happy marriage, blah, blah. And then I had the twins. I lost my smile. In my mind, I also lost a kind of identity. And everything had to shift. And why I was writing plays, I think, also had to shift. And it was shortly thereafter that I became a teacher.

29:03But I think what you're talking about, you know, the making art or doing a job without thinking of how it might benefit others. There's always a danger of solipsism, I think, in the writer's life. Yes. And again, because I am pretty utilitarian on some level, like my point is that this attitude, that's not my point, I'm stealing it from the Dalai Lama. This attitude is self-interested. Yeah. The Dalai Lama calls it wise selfishness. If you're thinking about other people's benefit, you will be happier. Yeah.

29:41Coming up, Sarah Rule talks about how to approach your life not only as a student but also as a teacher and unpacking the moment when the student becomes the master.

29:57I don't know if this is a non sequitur or maybe it follows lightly on many of the previous strands, but you were talking about learning from your babysitter. We have a long time, 10 year long relationship with our nanny, my son's nanny. I have one kid and her name is Eleanor. Although he started calling her as a tiny child, Nene. And now her whole family calls her Nene. Anyway, so Nene slash Eleanor said this thing to me early on when the kid would must have been like one and a half or two. We were at a, you know, in New York City, they have all these like kids club things. and all the other nanny's children were coming up to Eleanor.

30:40And they weren't doing that with anybody else. And I said, why is that? And she said, kids know where the love is. And I think about that all the time. And I think it's harder to become a vector of love if people can't see it on your face. And I don't have Bell's palsy, although it's in my family, but I have a resting bitch face. I really do. And I hear about it from my team a lot. I hear about it from my wife, the scowl that just comes over my face. And I'm not even in a bad mood. There's something in here that feels important. Am I making any sense? Yes. And I think people know where the love is.

31:17It's a beautiful phrase. And there's so many ways we know. It's the attentiveness with which someone's regarding us. It's that they stop what they're doing and they listen. I learned to make more hand gestures or to kind of murmur when I was listening. so people knew I was listening because I couldn't mirror their facial expressions. So there are a million and one ways that we know. We've talked about learning to orient toward the world as a student, and I still think tattoos would be helpful in this regard. Actually, a couple weeks ago, right at this table, I interviewed Ezra Klein, and he has a tattoo that says, Is That So?, which is a Zen expression.

31:54That's a great habit of mine. It is a student habit of mine. Is that so? That's very Ezra Klein. I like it. Yes, it is. Do you know him? No, but I listen to him. Yeah, he's great. So we've talked about approaching life as a student, but what about being a teacher or a mentor? We touched on it lightly, but you've gone through this process 15 years ago, right after giving birth to your youngest children and being hip with this Bell's palsy. You started to teach at Yale. So I'd be interested in hearing a little bit about that, but also to broaden it to like, how can we all approach our lives at not only as students, but also as teachers?

32:32Well, I started out as a substitute teacher. And it was interesting because my mentor, Paula Vogel, who was hugely influential and is sort of why I write plays, and she needed a sub. She was doing a play on Broadway called Indecent. And she called me and said, can you sub for me? And I was like, oh, I don't know. You know, I have these little kids. I'm just like, oh, there's a lot going on. And then I thought, I always say yes to Paula. If she needs me, the answer is yes. So I started teaching and I loved it. I found it utterly delightful. And then Paula realized she loved having more time to write.

33:09And so she kind of kept taking a pause and I kept teaching. But I tell a story in the book about a dream I had before that first class where I showed up to class, but Paula was also there and Paula was talking and I just couldn't open my mouth. I couldn't speak. It was a classic teacher anxiety dream. It took me a long time to realize that I have my own stuff to pass on and give, that it wasn't all just funneled through Paula. But I think part of that was also being honest about the legacy I do have from her. And so teaching this class lessons from my teachers, I would teach Paula's work, I would teach Maria Irene Fornez's work, who was an important teacher to me, Chuck Mee's work, and then I would sort of change things up.

33:55Sometimes I would teach a former student's work because the more I taught, the more I saw students as potential teachers. And I think we're so obsessed with originality in this culture that we like to think writers are just kind of born in this like swaggering, like, you know, individualistic way. And for me, lineage is important in the same way that it is in the Buddhist tradition. What did you learn that might be applicable for the rest of us in terms of you write about how you had these imposter feelings that showed up in your dreams as you were starting to teach? Most of us are not going to become teachers in a formal sense.

34:32Can we start to think about ourselves as having something to teach? And how do we make that shift? And what's the goal on either side of that shift? I love the question, can we think about ourselves as having something to teach? It's just a really beautiful question. And again, I think it presupposes some confidence. You have to have a certain amount of confidence to think you have something valuable to teach. and I'm trying to think for myself what was in that reorientation because I had confidence as a writer I had a certain amount of ego as a writer but I didn't walk into the classroom being hugely confident that I had something of my own to teach and give that was separate from my teachers and that just took practice I think so for me it's partly a practice just do it just try it.

35:28I don't know. I'm flashing on when I first met Paula Vogel, it was at Brown and my father had just died. He died of cancer when I was, I guess, a sophomore. He was diagnosed when I was a freshman. And I was having trouble writing and reading. I was distracted. And Paula asked me to coffee. Again, interesting that it was outside the classroom. And I said, I'm having trouble focusing. My father just died. I was really close with him. And she said, you need to look at this grief indirectly. You need to not stare at it directly. And she said, write a play in which a dog is a protagonist. And I did.

36:05And it was about my father's illness and death through the eyes of the family dog who was just sad that he didn't come home. And that was my first play. And so when I think of what allowed Paula to give me that gift, part of it was that her brother had died of AIDS, and she knew grief, she knew what I was experiencing, and she knew that for herself, she needed to look at it obliquely, not head on. And I do think there's a love that animates the willingness to teach. That's why we have to have some boundaries around it, I suppose, because I do think love animates it. But it can also be a love for your art form, your love for what you do, wanting it to continue after you're gone.

36:53I don't know how conscious that is. I don't know that I would have used the word teacher, but I think about it in the context of parenting and also running an organization. So I have a team of like, I think maybe 12 people. And when you're a boss, and I'm sure you've noticed this on productions, you've been a part of like everybody, and this kind of goes back to Bell's policy, everybody is scrutinizing every movement of your face all the time. Right. And they're keying off of you. Like one of the things we talk about all the time is the old cliche about the fish rotting from the head. Like when there's a problem within the organization, my instinct is like, all right, well, how am I contributing to this?

37:31Right. You know? And so just being aware that as you move through the world, especially as a parent or a boss, you are teaching all the time whether you like it or not. Yep. So how do you want to do it? Do you want to do it with some love or do you want to do it the way I did it for most of my life, which is completely mindlessly? I totally agree. And, you know, it's like when you're with your children, say, and you're at the store and someone's being a dick to you and you're irritated and you're fed up and your instinct is to react and to be rude back to the person, say. And then you have these two kids in tow and you maybe stop for a moment.

38:08And part of it's like creating that pause to think, OK, what am I teaching? What am I teaching my kids if I yell at this person? Do I want my kids to learn that? And so, again, I think it's about like investigating those pauses. You touched on this earlier, and you write about it. One of the things you've noticed as a teacher is there are these, you know, when the student becomes the master moments where the student starts teaching the teacher. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah. Yeah. One of the most dramatic examples I have of it is my student, Max Ritvo, who was an astonishing poet.

38:44And he walked into my classroom. He was 20 at Yale. And he was so wise, not just brilliant, but wise. And that's bizarre in a 20-year-old. And then I learned that he had Ewing sarcoma, which is a pediatric cancer, and he had a recurrence when he was my student. And we became really close. He went back to Columbia to get his MFA in poetry. He sort of said, I want to write with all the time I have left. And he did. And I learned so much from him in that short time about how to write up against a terrifying illness that he had, how to love demonstratively and freely and boldly with the time he had left, and how to be open.

39:35in. Max died when he was 25, and we worked on a book of letters that we'd written back and forth, and then I made it into a play after he died. And part of what the play explores is when that friendship changes, you know, when it goes from teacher-student to friends to teacher-student swapped. I've always been very moved by those stories in Tibetan Buddhism where the teacher dies and the student of the master goes looking for the reincarnation of the teacher in a baby so that there's this unbroken lineage. There's some trouble, I suppose, with that system, but I still can't help but find it beautiful, the idea of it, that the student becomes the teacher and it just keeps going in this infinite loop.

40:24But again, it comes back to openness. I imagine there are some teachers who just are so embedded in their identity as the imparter of wisdom that they would never have allowed Max to teach them anything. That's really true. But interestingly, Max had a bunch of teachers who he flipped into students like pancakes. I mean, it was like me, Louise Glick, Lucy Brockbrodo. I think many of us had the same experience. There was something undeniable about who he was as a writer and his wisdom that you just thought, oh, yeah, you're a colleague. Okay, show me. He would also ask to read your manuscript. He asked to read my poetry.

41:02And at that time, I didn't share my poetry with anyone. That was like separate. It was my secret hobby away from playwriting that was mine alone. I didn't publish. And Max was like, I know you have poems. I want to read them and you should publish them. One of the questions you dwell on in the book is, can you be your own teacher? Where did you land on that? I decided that you can't. It's interesting. Someone asked me the question and my first impulse was, oh, yes, of course you can be your own teacher because look at all the autodidacts and look at books. And then I thought about it and I thought, no, the whole point of my writing these sketches of teachers is that we require the other.

41:44If knowledge is a social phenomenon, you need another person. Go and find another person. I'm just trying to think about how I feel about that. I mean, I think. Yeah, how do you feel? Well, I don't know. I'm going to think out loud. I mean, there is a thing where, you know, as you meditate, you are learning from yourself. Yeah. I also think one of the most electrifying pieces of wisdom for me in the last couple of years has been learning that my ability to be a mentor for others is something I can channel toward myself. So if I'm in extremis, like I don't like the elevators in this building where we're doing this, I can, you know, you got this.

42:22Right. I don't know if that's properly a teacher, but it is a relationship to oneself that is supportive. It seems like something about meditation and observing one's own mind, you start to develop a little inner teacher person that you can be in relation to. Yes, I think that's right. And then, of course, it raises the question like, okay, then who are you anyway? If there's a part of you that's talking to another part of you, where's the you? Is there some core you? And as you know, the Buddhist proposition is, it's a mystery and that there's a lot of healing to be had in just knocking on the door repeatedly and checking it out.

43:04Maybe that's what enlightenment is, is when you get to the point where you are deeply your own teacher. And so maybe for me, it's just feeling like, yeah, no, I'm still mucking around. I still need a teacher. I mean, it also feels like the little inner teacher person you're talking about who you've internalized in a way it's internalizing your own teacher. So you still got it from somewhere. All the words that just came pouring out of you are, to me, pointing toward porousness. Even if you're enlightened, you said maybe if you're enlightened, you are your own teacher. But the you goes into scare quotes through that sentence because an enlightened person is aware that there is no core nugget of themselves.

43:47And so what they are doing is opening up and being in relationship to reality. Yeah, that's beautiful. I'm just making it up. I don't even know if I'm right. You're talking to a guy who slept at a Holiday Inn last night. You didn't? No, I didn't. But you know those old commercials where the guy's performing brain surgery and they're like, are you a doctor? And he's like, no, but I slept at a Holiday Inn last night.

44:12Coming up, Sarah talks about what it means to have a meditation teacher, what she's learned from the venerable psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Epstein. We talk about synchronicity or signs from the universe. We contemplate whether everything is magic. And we brainstorm some book titles for my upcoming memoir. I'm really struggling with those titles.

44:39Another thing you talk about is finding a meditation teacher. And I hear about this all the time. In fact, reading this section of your book got me thinking about this idea that I've had for a long time, which is I want to create some sort of free online service that connects people to meditation teachers. Because there is no service for that right now. It's like all just happenstance. But can you tell your story of finding a teacher? Please do that first. That's so good. I mean, I had this insane experience where I had been working on a play, The Oldest Boy at Lincoln Center. And it was about a story Yang Zom told me where she knew people who had a restaurant in the States.

45:22They had a little boy and someone came from India and said, we think your child is a reincarnation of a high mama or teacher. And I said, oh my God, what did they do? And she said, well, they sent him to the monastery in India to be educated. And so I thought about what would happen if it were a mixed marriage between a Westerner and someone brought up in this culture where that would be, you could freely give that without just falling to pieces. So anyway, we had a llama come visit us at Lincoln Center to talk about reincarnation, give us some context. And then a year later, I ran into him at Penn Station, and I had been reading the Asian journals of Thomas Merton.

46:05and I was on this very particular page and I kind of glance up and there's Lama Pema standing in his robes. He said, oh, hi. And I said, oh, hi. And he said, what are you reading? And I said, oh, the Asian journals of Thomas Merton. He said, funny, my teacher's handwriting is in that book. He's like, yeah, this page you're on, this is my teacher's handwriting. Thomas Merton met with him when he was in India, I guess. And I thought that is incredibly strange. It felt like, okay, so I clearly should be learning from this person. Somehow he was just deposited into my life at a train station. And then we took this ride together.

46:41He was going to a teaching. He was teaching in Vermont and I was going to New Haven to teach. And I remember him saying to me, and he didn't ask me about the Bell's palsy, but as we talked about, it's, you know, it's this implicit thing. And he just kept saying to me, it's always possible to smile. You know that, right? And in my head, I'm kind of thinking, no, it's not. Not for me. But he was saying it's always possible to smile. You'd think with a kind of mystical experience like that, I would be sitting at this llama's feet like every day to absorb whatever I could. Well, no, actually, I wish that that was the story.

47:16But no, it's like, yeah, you know, when he does a teaching, I'll come and I've done meditation with him, but I don't see him that often, as often as I should. But it was an incredible coincidence and kind of act of grace that I ran into him again. At this point, do you not have a formal Buddhist teacher? It depends how you define it, I suppose. I took refuge with a teacher, Jetsuma. Can you explain what taking refuge is? So taking refuge is really simple. It's just taking refuge in some precepts that most of us would agree are good, like not killing anyone. Have you read this teacher's book or any of her books, Jetsuma, Palmo, Tenzin, Tenzin Palmo?

47:54I think she's been on the show. She's a Westerner who lived in a cave in Tibet. Yes, she's been on the show. Oh my God. I just find her incredible. And she was giving a teaching in New York and I'd read her book. So I just went to the teaching and she was like, would anyone like to take refuge? And I hadn't been planning to, but I was like, oh, I would. So then the teacher just cuts a little piece of your hair and that's all that's involved. But she's not formally my teacher because she lives in India at a nunnery. I read her books and I listen to her talks when I can. I mean, it is an interesting question of what does it mean to have a teacher, a meditation teacher?

48:30I mean, in a way, I could imagine if you squint, like what you're describing with the gentleman you saw at the train station. He is your teacher. Like you go to his teachings when you can and you, I'm sure you read or listen to his public utterances or writings or whatever. And so you have a mixture of asynchronous and real-time teaching from him. And so you could, I think, fairly call him your teacher. I have a teacher, Joseph Goldstein, with whom I have a much more sort of integrated relationship. He's part of my life on a regular basis. But that was just sheer luck or karma or whatever you want to call it.

49:12And so I think there are probably gradations here. Somebody listening to this might consider any number of the teachers who come traipsing through this show, you know, Vinny Ferraro, Seben A. Selassie, Jeff Warren. They may consider them their teachers because they go to their retreats every other year and make it a habit to read their newsletter or whatever it is. So I think there are lots of ways to configure this. And I feel like traditionally what seems really useful is having a teacher who you're in touch with. Like, that's amazing that you're in touch with Joseph Goldstein on a regular basis.

49:42And you can say, oh, I was meditating and this thing happened. And what do I do? And then they can tell you what to do. I mean, traditionally, that seems great. Yeah, well, I mean, traditionally, I think people like lived with their teacher. And so it was super intense. They were an attendant for the teacher. Right. I'm sure Joseph would love me to be, you know, fetching his slippers. If he were here, he would make that joke. But we don't live in that world. Most of us don't live in that world. We're not at a nunnery. Well, and that seems like an important point to make because these classical relationships with Buddhist meditation teachers were like for monks.

50:20And we're householders and we're secular and we have our jobs and we're trying to absorb the wisdom that we can. But they're not these dyads that are in a monastery. Yeah, I think that's true. And then there are ways to fit it into your life. If you live in a big city, like we're in New York City right now, you can join the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and learn from Koshin and Chodo. Or if you are in L.A., you can join Insight L.A. and sit with Christiana Wolf once in a while. And so there are options for us. And if you don't live in a place or if you don't have the time to do that or you don't live in a place where that's an option, then, you know, see if you can find this is the tool I want to build.

50:57See if you can connect with somebody you can talk to over Zoom or clear out a couple days every year to go on a retreat with somebody. There are lots of ways to find a teacher in this regard, I think. Which leads me back to the question of presence, I guess, and what a quicksilvery thing it is. But, you know, there's these classic texts where a Zen master or these other masters, it would be their presence that would cause enlightenment. Yeah. Or the contemplation of their face, even speaking of faces. Or I've talked to people who've been in the presence of the Dalai Lama who say things like, oh, and his sheer presence, the compassion that he evinced did a thing.

51:36I don't know. Maybe you find that talking to these people on your show. There's an expression. I think it comes from an American teacher whose name I'm forgetting, who's a Zen teacher. Something about the soft sermon of your pores. And I think that's really true. Just hanging out with Joseph makes a big difference for me. I just see how he handles stuff. Yes. I was in distress like 18 months ago. I was in the middle of a really protracted business divorce separating from the meditation app that I started. And I had a lot of insomnia and anxiety and stuff. And I was at a really low point. And Joseph came to stay with us.

52:19He stays at our house once in a while. And I stayed up late talking to him about it. and I just felt totally better. Yeah, it's amazing. I listen to him sometimes when I have insomnia on some kind of app, not the divorced app, the waking up app. Oh, Sam Harris' waking up app, yeah. I'm increasingly kind of moving over to working with Sam. It's good. Yeah, it's really good. It's a really good app. Sam Joseph and I just recorded an eight-hour series on the Noble Eightfold Path that now lives on the waking up app. So next time you can't sleep, put that on. It's great. And Joseph Goldstein had this one bit of advice I found so useful about certain negative thought patterns.

52:58And he said something like intervening with just enough or dead end. Dead end. So dead end, I find really, I, in fact, when I was in this situation where I was separating from my business partners, Joseph, one of his key pieces of advice was when you're perseverating about it, dead end. Just drop that phrase into your mind because there's no more thinking that's going to be helpful. You've thought this through. Like at this point, you're just wasting your time. And I will say just, you know, not it's not just Joseph, because I have this incredible job where I interview hundreds and hundreds of Dharma teachers, either on Zoom or in person.

53:42And and they're a big part of my personal life. You know, I hang out with them. There's a kind of positive peer pressure that takes place where I'm just learning all the time. Like, don't be a dick. yeah don't be a dick yeah and in my in my world it's don't work with assholes yeah interesting yeah yeah i would imagine in entertainment i mean you're you're in a highbrow corner of the entertainment industry but yeah there's probably not a few assholes yeah i mean it's interesting because theater is i think of it as here's theater and there's poetry on one side which is where I started. And there's show business on the other side.

54:22And theater's somewhere in the middle of poetry and show business. And there can be assholes on either end. But yeah. Yeah, I'm sure there's some. One tries to avoid. I'm sure there are poets who are dicks. Oh, definitely. Speaking of being open, I have historically had a really closed mind about theater, specifically musicals. Oh. And you don't do musicals, I don't think. I'm working on a musical with Sara Bareilles right now. Sara Bareilles, good friend of mine, and has been on the show. I will drop some links to her. Those conversations in the show notes. I love Sara Bareilles. Amazing. Really great person.

54:53But you were saying you had a closed mind about musicals. And I have a friend, a new friend who I met when I was at TED a couple of years ago, which is an obnoxious sentence to say. But she's quite a well-known novelist. Her name is Maria Semple. She wrote Where Did You Go, Bernadette? And we were seated near each other at a dinner during TED and we really hit it off. And then the next year at TED, she came back and we literally just spent the whole time together. We just did everything together. And then she later moved to New York City. And so she's really into the theater to the point where she, I think, goes every night.

55:26Or she goes to something almost every night. And I've never really been in that habit. I lived, you know, 15 blocks north of Theater District and never went. And so she has been gently bullying me into going and has taken me to a couple of plays. And she took me to a musical recently. And I have historically really hated any plot where they break into a song. I just can't stay with it. What musical was it? So it was Sunset Boulevard, which won a Tony a couple of days before we were recording this conversation. And, you know, I had the same problems with it that I have with all musicals. And I really did enjoy it.

56:02And part of it was being Mr. Maria, who I think has she won't give me the exact number. It's like a person who collects too many cats, but it's more than 10 times she's been to the show. Really? And she was so happy and she loved the show. And I, yeah, there were, I don't know if you've. I haven't seen that particular show. Okay. So. But I've heard it's an amazing performance. There's a, something that happens that I won't spoil at the beginning of the second act. That is truly delightful. So there were moments in the show that I really, really enjoyed it. So anyway, Maria is my teacher in this regard, but it required some openness on my part.

56:37I will have to get you two tickets to Eurydice before it closes. Yeah, so Eurydice, we're recording this at this point when people are listening to it. It will have been closed or moved. What is Eurydice about? It's the story of the Orpheus myth told from Eurydice's point of view. So you follow Eurydice to the underworld, and in my version, she meets her father there. And at first they don't recognize each other because the idea is that you've forgotten language and memory in the afterlife once you dip yourself in the river. And then somehow the father has held on to some language, and so he recognizes her and reteaches her language and memory, and they come to know each other again.

57:20And then by the time Orpheus comes back, Eurydice isn't totally sure whether to go with him. It's a modern retelling of that. Yeah. I key in on the fact that there's teaching that happens. There is teaching. And my father was a wonderful teacher for me, I will say. You mentioned fortune cookies earlier, but you having a fortune that was resonant in some way of bringing forth that which is inside you that will save you. Your father in your freshman year at Brown, I think, got cancer. And it definitely stuck with me that I think he was my age. He was 53 or something like that. And you went out to dinner and he got a fortune cookie that was blank.

57:59Yeah, it was awful. He had just had this diagnosis and he took, you know, me and my college friends out and he opened his cookie and it was blank and we all just kind of looked away. I hear in your stories an openness to something else. If openness is a through line, if not the through line, you have a kind of openness to synchronicity or signs from the universe. Yes. Which is an area where I have some, I don't know. I mean, I have some openness. I'm moving from absolutely don't make too much of coincidences to maybe there is something there. But can you say a little bit more about your openness in this regard?

58:38Well, I think most artists that I know maybe are more open to synchronicity and coincidence than scientists. And I'm married to a scientist who kind of goes, oh, he can always find an explanation for the amazing coincidences that I bring to him and share with him. But there's one story in the book about a dream I had. Sometimes dreams, I think, are kind of portals into a time-space shrinkage or tesseract, like in Wrinkle in Time. And I have a friend, Polly Noonan, who is a dear, dear friend, a collaborator. And I had an opera version of Eurydice that was happening at the Met, and she was coming out with my mother to see it from Chicago.

59:19And I had a dream that night that she gave me two$2 bills for luck. And we had a whole conversation in the dream about labor and friendship and luck and whether it was strange that she'd given me money for an opening. and we talked about inequality in terms of some artists making money, some artists not. It's a whole interesting conversation about it. And the next morning, I said, Polly had this crazy dream about you last night that you gave me two$2 bills for my opening. And she just texted back, what? And then she showed me a picture of the two$2 bills that she had gotten out of a bank in Chicago to give me.

59:58And I was like, oh, well, message received. And I don't know how to explain that. Precognition. Maybe your Buddhist practice has really progressed because allegedly you get superpowers the more you're honing your ability to concentrate. Well, we don't really want them, do we? Because gosh, there's so many things I don't want to know about. I'm happy to know about Polly's$2 bills, but I'm sure there's things on the horizon I don't want to know about. Exactly. But there may be, there are things on the horizon that you would be psyched if you learned to. That's true. I guess I don't know how to explain the$2 bill dream, and I'm sure your husband would struggle to explain it too.

1:00:36I think where I've come on this is that, like, looked at through the law of cause and effect, which seems non-negotiable. Like, yes, everything that's happening right now is happening because of a huge ocean of causes and conditions. Yeah. Well, then everything is magic. and that it can't explain the two dollar bills but it can wake you up yeah that's beautiful i love the idea that everything's magic i also think about art for example i always thought like showing a coincidence in a short story or movie was sort of silly because it's art so of course you can have a coincidence because it's manufactured and i remember feeling that very strongly as a kind of smug 22-year-old or something like seeing I don't know it was like a Raymond Carver short story that was turning into a movie and saying I don't like it it's based on coincidence of course they can have coincidence because someone's making it up but now that I'm older and maybe more humble and maybe more curious I think oh he's demonstrating a different kind of very similitude, which is what you just said about everything being kind of magical.

1:01:56I would be remiss if I let you go without talking about Mark Epstein, who you write about in a veiled way. Dr. Mark Epstein, for people who have never heard of him, is quite a well-known Buddhist psychiatrist. It's very hard to get in as one of his patients, but you managed to do that, and you've seen him for about 10 years. And you talk a little bit about what he taught you, And there was the thing he said to you that really landed with me. I hope you'll know what I'm pointing at. Yeah. Can you tell us? And Mark Epstein is just the most wonderful writer and psychotherapist. And I remember talking to him at one point about, I was saying something about, why is it that there's so many Buddhist practitioners that seem to just get more and more angry?

1:02:38Like you think you practice meditation, why are you so angry? And it doesn't seem to be helping. You're getting worse. he made some kind of joke about how one thing that psychotherapy and buddhism have in common is that neither of them work some kind of joke like that and i kind of that's a very marked yeah and i kind of said well so what's the point then if neither of them work and he said the point is lightness that that was the goal of both i thought that was so beautiful it does undermine the assertion that they don't work. Yeah, it does. I mean, and I think about his teachings and one thing that he's taught me that I really didn't understand when I first met him was leaving an emotion alone or leaving a thought alone.

1:03:31I really didn't understand it. And when I'd done therapy in the past, there was like this excavation process. You just kept poking at something, like poking at this wound like poke poke poke poke poke and it was like it wasn't getting better i just felt like i kept poking at it and mark had this amazing ability to kind of step away and not touch it and when i first encountered this method i thought wasn't that a kind of denial and it took me such a long time to be like oh right it's sort of what you're doing in meditation when you have a thought and you acknowledge it and then you let it float away I wonder if what Mark's teaching in that regard is a cousin of dead end.

1:04:15Yeah. The lightness thing definitely resonated with me. And Joseph, who is also a teacher to Mark, talks about one way to understand this hard to understand concept, especially for beginners of enlightenment, is lightening up. And I've thought about naming mine. I've been struggling a lot with like, when am I going to call my next book? I have a wise ass title that I really like But people hate it I'm good with titles Okay well the wise ass title is me a love story Which I think is funny And when I say it to people they tend to laugh Because they're being polite or they're with me And I say it in a funny way But it does carry the distinct danger Of being misperceived as a book About narcissism Which is not And I've thought about a subtitle that very clearly says This is not a book about narcissism Which might solve the problem But Lightening Up is also very much on point.

1:05:10It does capture the spirit of the book and that as you pull your head out of your ass, as you start taking yourself less seriously and personally, you are lighter, more available. And I think that's what Mark is pointing to in his comment to you. I like both titles. Yeah. I mean, me, a love story. I mean, I think the thing about lightening up in humor is humor doesn't end run around linear thinking. It's like something's funny. It's funny. And I do think there's a kind of philosophical undergirding of comedy for me that has to do with that, that you, when you see that something's absurd, it is a kind of, not enlightenment, but it's delicious.

1:05:53Yes. And it's hard to teach, actually. But when you do see those great meditation masters, they are fucking hilarious. Yes, they are. And they're amused by life constantly. Yes. And it's like those Zen cons where you just go, oh, like the juxtaposition is funny and absurd. And you do a little tesseract between ideas. I like your Mia love story, but it's snarkier than lightening up. Yes. Snarky is actually what I want because I want the title to have a wink, you know, because I think that is the only – I'm not a teacher, right? I'm not a proper teacher. Yeah. And so for me, the value add is I can make you laugh.

1:06:32Yeah. So I lean toward titles like that, and it feels like the right title for this book. Yeah. But I could live with lightning up. I've also thought about Contact High. This is a book about love. Yeah. It's a book about love. Yes. All kinds of love, not just romantic love, including self-love. I see. You could call it a book about relationship to life. It's actually not, there is a huge through line about openness, which is the through line of this discussion, I think, because we tend, and the Buddha talked about it a lot, we contract around our views and ideas, and that cuts you off from real relationship with life.

1:07:11To me, that's what your book is. That's what comes screaming through in the parts of the manuscript I've read. It's like, how can you orient yourself to a world where you don't think you know everything? Yeah. I was at this teaching in Ireland and it was on Meta and the teacher said something that maybe you already know, but I thought was so useful in terms of that thing about how love fits into a meditative framework, that it's not cold and detached. And she was saying it's like how the sun has both light and heat. And she was saying, so like this practice is supposed to, you're supposed to get warm here.

1:07:51Then the light part is your understanding and your insight, but you're supposed to. And she went like that. And you're supposed to get. She put her hand on her chest. She put her hand on her heart. I'm writing that down because I had not heard it before. And I think that's exactly it. And I had some decent amount of clarity in my meditation practice. but no warmth or very little warmth. And so turning up the volume on warmth, it's totally changed my life. Yeah. And that's an overused phrase. This changed my life or whatever. I hear it a lot in my line of work. This is a genuine change. Like I would argue that this is the thing to learn.

1:08:28Which Sharon Salzberg, I think is very good at teaching also that part meditation. She is the master and she's a huge influence on me personally. And without her, she was really the first to emphasize this aspect of the Buddhist teaching among Western teachers, because it was really about like the light, the clarity, the seeing your own patterns with some mindfulness. And she was the one who really emphasized M-E-T-T-A, which is the ancient word for loving kindness. One last thing I want to ask you about from the book, you talk about learning both from a teacher who rejected an idea of yours and also from critics who've criticized your work.

1:09:14So basically seeing, and this goes back to the beginning of the conversation, obnoxious or difficult people as having something to teach. Yes. I tell a story about an art teacher, an elementary school art teacher who had this assignment where you're supposed to make a beautiful drawing. And I thought I made a beautiful drawing and out of crayon. He was a cranky man. And then he said now he wanted everyone to paint black paint over it and take a safety pin and make a pattern in the paint. And I was like, every part of my being was like, no, no, I like my drawing as is. I'm not doing your assignment.

1:09:50And I think he made me. He compelled me to draw black over it and then do his assignment. I hated it. And so for me, the lesson there was actually not to take an assignment that you hate. I suppose the non-attached view could have been, oh, maybe you learned something from not being attached to your first drawing. But the already fairly strong ego in me as an artist was like, no, I reject your assignment. The tricky teachers, sometimes all we learn from them is how to get through and how to not have a toxic teacher ruin our enthusiasm and our joy for the task. And sometimes relying on your own resilience and well-being while getting through the bad teacher is all you learn.

1:10:40But that's no small thing. No, I mean, I think you say quite directly the lesson you've learned from rejection is persistence. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and Paula Vogel had this amazing teaching on rejection that felt like an inoculation against rejection. And I tell students this all the time because being a writer is negotiating a relationship with rejection. And so Paula would say, okay, take all of your rejection letters and put them in piles. This is back when we had actual paper rejection letters. And she'd say, okay, this one is a xerox one it acknowledges receipt of your work that's one pile now the next pile is it has a signature now lick it and see that it's been signed and she'd say only let's say 10 % because it's your podcast only 10 % get a signature so that's really good if you get rejected in that way so that's a good rejection then there's another letter that says it's signed and it says we want to read your next play and we want you to come in and talk to us she said no one gets that that's really special if you get that that's like one percent or less so if you get that don't fixate on the rejection think instead of the gradations and actually that you're making progress and that changed everything for me in terms of how i perceived rejection and i started as a poet and in a funny way i think if someone like paula had given me that sermon about rejection in poetry, I might have just stayed a poet and not crossed over into playwriting.

1:12:14But because Paula was modeling not just the content, but how to survive as a writer in the world, I felt like, okay, I can do this thing. Courage. Courage, yeah. Two questions at the close. One, is there something we should have talked about that we didn't? Hmm. Now, it's funny. I always say no to that question because I sort of think what we talked about was delightful and we didn't need to talk about anything else. Second question, remind everybody of the name of your most recent book and any other works that we should know about some sort of website where we can get everything, social media, anything.

1:12:56Just plug everything, please. Okay, sure. The book is called Lessons from My Teachers from Preschool to the Present. I have a play, Eurydice, that maybe is running at Signature, maybe it's not still running at Signature. I have a musical with Sarah Bareilles I'm working on based on The Interestings that should be coming to you at some point. Based on the what? It's a book called The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. I love this book. And what else am I supposed to say? Oh, I do have the horrible dreaded Instagram. I am on Instagram. I have a website, www.sarahruleplaywright.com. Yeah, that's it. Thank you for doing this.

1:13:32Thanks for having me. Pleasure.

1:13:38Thanks again to Sarah Rule. We mentioned my past conversations with Sarah Bareilles. I've put links to those in the show notes. We also mentioned Jetsun Ma Tenzin Palmo, with whom Sarah Rule took refuge. I put a link to my conversation with her as well. Don't forget, if you want to practice beginner's mind, we've got a bespoke guided meditation that comes with this podcast. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, 7A Selassie. It's available for paying subscribers over on danharris.com. If you sign up, you get all of the guided meditations that we're putting out on Mondays and Wednesdays, plus our live guided meditation and Q &A sessions, which we do every Tuesday at 4 Eastern.

1:14:16Also, as mentioned, I've got a live recording of this podcast coming up on the 18th of November with the comedian Pete Holmes. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to come to that. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.