How To Use Psychology and Buddhism To Handle Your Inner Critic | Amita Schmidt

29:25Okay, so I'm working through these really helpful notes that you and Marissa put together. And so we've just kind of gone through the first section, kind of talking about the IFS perspective. and then you have a sort of transitional section here where you're talking about moving from psychology, IFS being an example of psychology, to the more spiritual. Can you just say a little bit more about this piece? Yeah, I think that it's super important that, you know, we're all carrying some kind of pain or tension that before you look at transcendence, you have to relax your parts and your pain and tension, you have to look at where does it hurt?

30:06You know, you have to bring compassion and inner generosity and kindness to the places we might have some pain, not just like, hey, let's go to emptiness or let's go to awakening. It's so important that we look at the areas where we're carrying pain because we're all carrying some kind of pain often. So you're using this tend and befriend and working with parts or just bringing inner love to your system through psychology to help calm the system down and create safety for your body and mind. And then you can start looking at more of the transcendent principles. If you didn't really do that first, it would be a bit of a spiritual bypass.

30:47It's important that you kind of do both. This is where the word self gets a little tricky because we're using it, or at least the way I'm thinking about this discussion is in my mind, I'm using the word self in a bunch of different ways. So there's the self as it's used in IFS, where you're calling it the wise self, or Richard capitalizes the self. There's the way we talk about the self in normal conversation, where it's just like we're referring to ourselves, self-compassion, self-love, self-loathing, whatever. It's all referring back to this individual. And then there's self-transcendence. This is where we move from the psychological to the spiritual, where you actually start to see that this reference point of a fixed and separate I is, when you pay attention in the right way, revealed to be an illusion.

31:44And this can be very healing. It can make all of your stuff less personal, less monolithic, more attractable, more workable. And I think what you were just saying right there is we need to start on the level of reality that is easily comprehensible to most of us, the sort of psychological level that most of us sort of innately understand. We need to start by calming the system, by bringing love to the obnoxious parts of our inner repertoire. And once we've done that, we can move into the sort of advanced level where we're looking at it through a spiritual transcendent lens, where we're starting to tap into this somewhat esoteric truth that the self is an illusion after all.

32:29Yes, well put. Thank you. I always like the gold star. You do so well at reframing. This my whole life is all I do is I talk to people like you and make sure that the people listening truly get it. It's like some sort of intermediary. So is there more to say about this movement from psychology to spirituality before we move into like transcending and how it's done? Well, I would say the overarching piece is really just knowing who you are. So often, you know, there's these blocks or pain points in our psychology. So we're kind of undoing those. And then spirituality is more going even deeper. Well, maybe we're not even this identity of self.

33:25It's this developing more flow and connection with the truth of who you are. You know, you're not the pain body, you're not your trauma pain body, but then you might be willing to, not everybody wants to do this, but you might be willing to go further and say, well, gosh, am I even the ego self? What am I? It's not a question many people ask, but we probably should be asking it because the body and mind's going to go. And what's still going to be here? I work with a lot of people that are nearing death in their 70s and 80s, and they really want to know this question when my body and mind goes, what's still going to be here?

34:07And of course, whatever that is, is here now. How do you answer that question? well i kind of have them look in the here and now so you know think of those air puppets in front of used car dealers oh yeah i love those if all of a sudden we're like these air puppets right dan if the air gets gone from those air puppets this is our body and mind gone right well something's still here, right? I have people look, because it's not my answer, it's what you see. I mean, what would still be here? Is it like awareness, a sense of presence? Just to feel what might still be here when the body and mind's gone.

34:57Something will still be here. Maybe it's a more universal presence or awareness. I mentioned this earlier, but the word awareness can be, I think, for some people, a bit of a stopper. Like, what does that mean? Culturally, we use it as like drug awareness or workplace safety awareness month, mental health awareness month. But in this context, awareness refers to the knowing faculty of the mind, the fact the lights are on at all that we are. There's something that's hearing the sound of my voice right now. There's something that's, if you have working eyeballs, seeing whatever you're seeing right now.

35:38Some mysterious something or not a thing at all is taking delivery of these sensory packages. And that's what you mean, I think, when you're pointing to awareness. Yeah, and you could call that maybe pure awareness. Like what animates our bodies? What's breathing your lungs right now? What's beating your heart? What's growing your hair? Those could be pure technical things, you know, right, cells. But what is animating the trees and you and me? What's making all this happen? The whole thing is like a giant air puppet. What's doing all that? You know, maybe that takes you to a more numinous presence.

36:21But I call it pure awareness because often, Dan, what we do is we identify my awareness, Dan's awareness or Amita's awareness. And then we personalize it in an egoistic way. But I think there's something called the awareness that kind of is animating all things all at once. You know, whatever's breathing you and me right now is breathing everybody across the globe and breathing animals and the whales in the ocean. It's breathing everything at the same time. Like, what is that? So, and I say this in a good way, this conversation is now veered into the weird. And I love it. I'm here for it. But let me ask a sort of a grounding question, which is this notion of awareness.

37:12How is any of this relevant to the stuff we started talking about, which was the easily comprehensible, although painful reality of the fact that most of us have an inner hectoring voice who's kind of a dick and we want to, you know, not be so owned by that voice anymore. So this awareness piece that we're talking about now, how is that relevant to where we began? Yeah, because ultimately the inner voice you're working with, like what's on the canvas and the inner voice is mean, a heckler, but we're now we're looking at the canvas itself, the blank canvas you know your awareness itself is never an asshole pure awareness it doesn't even have any thoughts it might seem like it does but if you look more carefully awareness is almost like just the pure canvas it all happens on the movie of you or the blank screen you know Rottman or Maharshi used to talk about you're this empty movie screen that then the movie gets played on.

38:14So we can change the movie and get better characters in your movie, you know, the inner heckler, but we can also look at, well, what's here that is the screen of it all? And that just takes you deeper because then none of these things apply. When you're just that pure awareness, Dan, where's the heckler? No place. But what is still there? Maybe it's just presence. You know, some people might call this soul, which probably is a terrible word for your podcast, but it's kind of where you're free of all these components. So think of it like layers. You know, you're solving the places where your psychology is kind of mucked up because you got some mean parts in there, and then you go down deeper, and you're just maybe kind of this loving kindness, but then you go down deeper, and maybe it's just, I don't want to say emptiness, but it's just something more universal there, right?

39:13That's not about our movie. Maybe it's a universal movie we're looking at. I don't know if that answers your question, but we're moving away from fixing our movie to more like, well, what is happening here? Yeah. Moving away from content and toward process. This movie analogy, I've heard, I just spent some time with the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein and he uses it a lot too. It's like you look at a movie and it seems like, oh, this is happening. This is a real story. But actually, if you look at it critically, there's nothing happening. It's a bunch of light and shadow on a screen, 24 frames.

39:55You can easily break it down to 24 frames per second. And then we move away from like, so it's important to start with offering love to your parts. But what you can do on an even deeper level is put the whole movie through a cheese grater where it's like, yeah, none of this. I don't need to take this as seriously as I've been taking it. It's kind of like what you said at the very beginning of this conversation. My depression is empty. As soon as I see that my depression is as solid as a movie that's playing on a screen, then the caboose unhooks from the train. Right. So think of it this way. you know, it's almost like that voice talking, whether it's saying good things or bad things to you or about you, but then you're here.

40:39You're just here, right? And we often think, you know, we get involved with two voices talking, but there aren't two minds. There's the voice, the mind that da-da-da-da-da, you should do this, you shouldn't do that. But what is just here, no matter what. Voice is here talking trash to you or not, right? But you're just here. The voice might come, it might go, might come, it might go. What is always a constant that's just here, irregardless of the voice, irregardless of your psychology, irregardless of happy, sad? what about you is unchanging is always here and then in a way that can tell you more maybe about the secrets of the universe that's always just here with everybody this is also fascinating let's talk about some initial practical tools and you list some in this document that i'm reading off of that was given to me to prepare for this interview one of them is labeling what is labeling and how does it help with what we're talking about here?

41:50Yeah, labeling is just simple mindfulness naming. So like you already did it, that, oh, there's an inner critic, there's an inner heckler, you know, whatever you want to call it, you're making a mental label of it. What that does is the minute you label it, A, you're not caught in it. You're in awareness itself. So it's kind of a cheat code to just go to pure awareness because the label itself has you go to the awareness. you're not lost in that emotion. Think of it like the turbulent emotion is like a turbulent river and the minute you label you're like up on the bridge looking down at it going oh there's the inner critic and they've actually shown that labeling in a study with Lieberman in UCLA in 2007 that labeling moved it to a different part of the brain where it was easier to process it.

42:40They had MRI imaging. And when you didn't label it, you were stuck. The inner heckler, you were stuck in the amygdala, which is kind of your fight or flight brain. But when you labeled it, they immediately moved whatever motion you were dealing with to the prefrontal cortex, which is the reasoning area of the brain. So the labeling really works to help you process it with a different part of your brain. And so the labeling that you're talking about, I just want to be clear, is this something that many of us who've meditated know about mental noting, where you might use these little whispers in the mind to note, oh, that's hearing, that's seeing, that's desire, and then you go back to your breath or whatever.

43:27So when you're talking about labeling, are you talking about in a meditation context? Or I'm just walking down the street, I pass a reflective surface and my inner critic says, you look frumpy today. And then I just quickly note, oh, that's the inner critic. Or are you talking about both? No, I would say this is more daily life. So perfect analogy. Yeah. Oh, inner critic. You know, I had a very mean and cruel father. So I used to joke and I'd just say my dad's name. because then I just go, oh, that's his voice, not me, because it wasn't me. Your inner critic isn't you, and that labeling helps you see, oh, it's not me.

44:06And it's not to blame anyone from our past, but for me, it just helped me go, this is not even my voice. It just comes online. And maybe you had a really mean coach, and you might joke it's his voice, right? But again, it helps you move away from it and get some breathing room and some space. And then you can have a choice how you want to respond to that voice. Do you want to believe what it says or do you want to say thank you and no? Several years ago, I interviewed a very interesting woman named Sonia Renee Taylor. And she said, I wrote it down and I have not forgotten it, that when she notices self-criticism in her own mind, And she reframes it as the voice, in her words, the voice of the system, meaning the culture wants us to be self-critical because it gets us buying the next thing or swiping to the next video.

45:02That's the engine for the worst parts of capitalism. So if you can just reframe, oh, yeah, that voice that just said you look frumpy is my internalized Madison Avenue trying to get me to go buy some new clothes. Yeah, and you could even use, because we're so into AI now, what if it was Siri saying that to you? Hey, Dan, you look like crap. You know, you'd be like, hey, stop. Your inner voice is the first AI. The mind is the first AI. So take it with a grain of salt, just like you would AI. I mean, now people are really giving a lot of credit to AI, that it might even be sentient or something. But just do it like an AI voice.

45:44If it was a Siri chatbot, you'd be like, eh, get a life. Literally, because they're not alive. Right, but our mind is like AI. Your original nature that's just here, and then it comes in da-da-da-da-da. If we start treating the mind like AI, I think we might be able to get some space from it before we start projecting our own stuff onto AI, it's good to see that our mind is the original AI. You just talked about getting some space from it, which is really important. It's at the heart of all of this. Another technique that you recommend for getting some space from your inner critic is to think about, well, I'll let you describe it.

46:32You're using the analogy of an airplane hanger. Can you talk about that? Yeah, well, it's moving back from it, labeling it, seeing that, you know, the voice is no different than any sounds. It could be the same as a bird sound. It's just blah, blah, blah, right? And the more you can back off and give some space with these voices, then you might still have the same inner critic. Let's say it's like a couch. but if you're in a really small room of Dan and you've got this tiny studio apartment you have this big couch of the inner critic and you have a big easy chair of your anxiety part Dan you're going to be bumping into those chairs all the time your psyche is going to be running into them but we put them in a big airplane hanger the same couch of inner critic the same chair of anxiety how often are you going to run into them you haven't gotten rid of anything but there's so much more spaciousness in who you are that mind that's you know the big sky it's fine that the anxiety or inner critics here because you there's more of you here a spacious awareness there's just more presence there's more love so then the couch of inner critic and the chair of anxiety can be no big deal it's just no big deal coming up Amita talks about how acceptance and surrender can soften your resistance and help your difficult patterns fall away and she goes over some simple pointers for sensing what she calls aware presence beneath all of your mental noise.

48:32How important is, here's another A word, acceptance in all of this? Yeah, I think like I said with my depression, when it fell away, I think the final step was just surrender acceptance. Because we're fighting, you know, they have that old saying, what we resist persists. because we're fighting it, then we're creating another part that's wanting it to go away. You see this a lot in addicts. I want to stop doing this, eating this compulsive eating, right? And yet the compulsive eater part, and it becomes this paradoxical struggle. And when you can just let go and ease up on the whole thing, and that wise presence can be here with it all.

49:16Okay, however long it takes, whatever it takes, this is my path. and you're not fighting that path, then it can really fall away. Acceptance is kind of like a softening of all our parts so that we can just relax into what is the truth versus thinking we know this part shouldn't be here or we shouldn't be doing this or if you're just relaxing in that whole process via acceptance. It's a willingness. I'm just willing to be here with whatever is, however long it takes. And there's something about that when you make that vow and that frame of mind that really can transform things. I don't completely understand it, Dan, but it's acceptance is very transformative.

50:09it is. Let's get back into the weird stuff for a second. The fundamental move, as I understand it, that you're calling for us to make is to kind of pull the rug out from the whole system, to call bullshit on the whole movie and really inhabit this awareness, to go back to that word. And so So I'm curious, any further thoughts on how we can do what you're describing? Yeah. Well, it's important to probably try it right now. I call it an aware presence or awake presence. It's not a belief. It's not a thought. That's your mind co-opting it. It's just here. Notice it doesn't take a lot of effort for you and I just to be here right now.

50:57Just feel that. We're just here. And your awareness or your tension awareness, tension's a little different than awareness, but it's just here. So notice this is not a belief, this is not a thought. Your aware presence is just here now without any effort. So right here, visible in the here now, you can see it. Now your inner critic might come in on top of that. but before any voices come in just notice you're just here again like that movie screen before the movie starts playing and it doesn't take any belief it's not hard to find it we make it complicated in the mind tries the ai mind tries to come and go well let me tell you about you know when you're doing an ai search now it's like well do you want more about this so here we are we're just here and then the mind comes in and tries to go, well, let me tell you more about this aware presence.

52:00And that's fine, but come back to the simplicity of it all. It doesn't take any effort just to be. I agree. It doesn't take any effort just to be. That seems readily comprehensible. help me connect that insight to working with the inner critic. So your presence is just here, then a voice arises. And whether you want to call it that wise self we talked about, or just your Buddha nature, just that like seeing, aware, then you're meeting that critic. I mean, there's two levels to this. you can meet it with that IFS type wise self, or you could just meet it like the Buddha did with, oh, this is just empty.

52:56There's nothing here. And then the voice will just fall away. So when the inner critic comes up, it's like a thought form, right? And then you meet that with awareness. And either the thought forms, you can just meet it with pure awareness, or you can meet it with compassion, connection, like we talked about earlier, what's it trying to do, how's it trying to help, or you can just meet it with kind of a pure, empty awareness that just is like, doesn't even have to do anything with the inner critic. The inner critic will arise and pass away on its own in the spaciousness of you. and so if I understand you correctly you're saying look in these moments where you notice the inner critic I think this is true for any difficult part of your personality but we're really focusing here on the inner critic there are two really healthy options one is to greet it with love and compassion and warmth to ask what are you afraid of it's such a great question to be in dialogue in a warm way.

54:10And then the other move would be what I think in Buddhist circles is often referred to as wisdom, which is another funny word because I think people hear that word and just immediately imagine like Dumbledore or something like that. But But wisdom in this sense is really seeing it from a perspective of depth where it may seem solid. The voice that tells you, hey, you look like shit today may seem solid. But actually, if you pull back to the airplane hanger perspective, it's just this little quantum burst of energy in the mind. it is, as Joseph says, of thoughts, little more than nothing. And when you view it in that light, it just kind of self-liberates.

55:00It just fizzles on its own. How did I do there? Is that my close? You did perfect. That was perfect. I would add an analogy to that that's kind of a common analogy. So whether it's the noise in your head or you and I were making a lot of noise, screaming, yelling, right? It's all going to default to silence. You and I could scream and yell, so kingdom come. We all could. And guess what the default is? Silence. So that voice could yell at you as much as it wants, but eventually it's going to come back to this pure awareness, like you just said in that second part. It's going to default to silence.

55:44I mean, you could see a great example of that. Everything defaults to stillness, even though it might not sound like it. You could be at a loud party. It doesn't seem like it. Your mind can be like a loud party sometimes. But this is kind of like what Joseph's saying. It's all going to rise and pass away, and you can just wait in that space where it all passes away into, right? I heard once a nice analogy too that inner critic, it's like one person in an empty stadium with a microphone. And I really like that because the stadium is just this huge empty space of you, Dan, right? But this one dude, he's got a microphone and kind of like the Wizard of Oz.

56:30It sounds like he's taken up the whole stadium. So I like to think of both of these practices like taking away the microphone. I love it. Okay, so just to reset, we've worked through your sequence of tend and befriend and then transcend. It's very compelling. What would you describe as the end game here? Is it these are just good tools to work with our stuff as it arises in the moment, or we can just make it all go away? we can get the caboose to unhook from the train the way you described after 20 years of intense effort. Great question. What is the end game? It really is what you want it to be.

57:17It's like an awareness video game. You can go to amazing levels here. You can just decide to transcend your depression and your anxiety, or you could go to complete freedom, you know, full awakening. It's up to you how far you want to go in the game. The very end of the game is truth, love, peace, joy, 100%. It's tricky because I think the end game, you see people that have really walked it all the way through to the end, like Ramana Maharshi or maybe even the Dalai Lama, They just exhibit truth, love, peace, joy, truth, love, peace, joy. That's all there is in people that are really walking the talk, who have really done the psychological to the spiritual 100%.

58:10I mean, they're just free, free. And then that manifest in is truth, love, peace, joy just over and over and over again. Toward the end of every interview, I ask two questions. One of them is, is there anything you were hoping we would get to that we didn't? Nope. I had no idea what would happen. I just wanted to connect with you. I just wanted to connect with who you were. Yeah. Well, thank you. And the second question is, you know, people want to learn more from you. How can they do so? What have you, you know, do you have a website or do you have Dharma talks? People can go listen to any other materials that you've created that we should know about.

58:52Yeah, there's probably about 20 years of Dharma talks on Dharma Seed, and they're all free there. I've got some on Insight Timer as well. Let me just jump in on that to explain what Dharma Seed is. If you go, and I'll put a link in the show notes, if you go to dharmased.org and search for Amita Schmidt, you'll see all the talks she's given on meditation retreats over the years, and you'll be able to listen to those. And then also there's an app called Insight Timer where you have more material. I think you also said that. Yeah. I also wrote a book about a woman named Deepma, who was Joseph Goldstein's teacher.

59:35And there's a lot of wonderful things in there about loving kindness and wisdom. She's a whole separate subject, but she was kind of a female embodiment that was way ahead of her time. I do want to recommend that book to people. I have not yet read it, but everybody I know who has read it has really gotten a lot out of it. And we will put a link to that if you want to check out that book. Yeah, it's called Deep Among the Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master. It's on Amazon. It's sort of a biography about this woman teacher who is a Buddhist master. And I guess she was the teacher to Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg.

1:00:22and I wrote about her because she just has some really inspiring stories for all of us. She was a householder she never ordained and she raised her daughter and achieved very high states of awareness while raising a child so she was quite a wonderful example of what's possible. Amita Schmidt, thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure to talk to you. You're welcome, Dan. It was really nice to meet you.

1:01:17What Joseph has created in this series of guided meditations is really cool. You should come check it out. Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on 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.

1:01:47Thank you.