Is Your Ambition Rooted in Trauma? | Christiane Wolf

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

0:18Happy Sunday, everybody. Here's a provocative question for you. What drives you? This is such a crucial question. I don't think enough of us ask ourselves this question. For many of us, though, if we pay attention, we may find that our fuel is fear or self-loathing or some kind of inner coercion. However, it is possible to change that. Today, we're going to hear from a very driven person, Christiana Wolf. She's a medical doctor, a Dharma teacher, and an ultramarathoner. She's been on this show several times, so you may be familiar with her. If you are, you may be happy to hear that she is our Teacher of the Month over on danharris.com for the month of November.

0:57That means she will be crafting guided meditations to go along with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. She'll also be doing some weekly live meditation and Q &A sessions, which we do every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. This stuff is all available to paying subscribers over at danharris.com, so you should sign up and join the party. One other thing to say before we dive in with Christiana Wolf, very quickly, if you want to meditate with me in real life, I've got a live taping of this podcast coming up on November 18th in New York City. My guest will be the comedian Pete Holmes, who's a dedicated meditator.

1:32Very thoughtful dude. We will also do some meditation before we start chopping it up. This is a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. Go to the link in the show notes and sign up and join us. Okay, after the break, you're going to hear Christiana Wolfe in conversation with the executive producer of this show, DJ Kashmir. Christiana Wolfe, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me back. So happy to have you back. I would love to hear the story of how you got to where you are now. What made you into a meditation teacher? Yeah, that's a very long story. And I just want to start with that growing up, it never crossed my mind.

2:13I could be a meditation teacher. I didn't even know something like that existed. And so it's this curious thing that I turned from being so engaged in becoming a physician for so many years. So I knew I wanted to be a physician when I was 15. So it was not just like a whim of, oh, I don't know what to do with my life. And of course, spend a lot of time going to medical school, going through my residency. And so for me, it's just this, honestly, still to this day, this weirdest thing that I'm not working officially in medicine anymore, but I do this full time. And I love doing this full time. Yeah, and so my mind still tries to wrap itself around this change.

2:59And what's really interesting for me, it still has to do with healing. It still has to do with being more peaceful, being more content. Because for me, those are all qualities of what I would call healing. So even though you're not practicing medicine anymore, there's more overlap than one might imagine. There's actually a surprising amount of overlap. And for me in particular, because I work a lot with people with chronic pain and chronic illness, that just made a lot of sense for me to, because I understand that, not from a patient's side so much, but really from a practitioner's side. And then if we're thinking about really what the teachings are at the core of what the Buddha taught, like the Buddha was often called the first physician when he established what he called the Four Noble Truths, which is really getting out of our increasing our own suffering by how we relate to things.

3:59And this is where I'm really interested in is how our body really responds to how are we relating to things. Are we worried about things? Are we in resistance against how things are? And so this is right at the core of all the practices, really, that we're doing. That idea of the Buddha as the first physician, is part of that, that the Four Noble Truths are almost a sort of prescription? There's a cause of suffering, here's what it is, here's what to do, yeah? Exactly. Healing is possible. That's what the message of the Buddha was. He didn't call it healing, but he called it like peace as possible or liberation as possible.

4:42And so for me, language is really important. And to also be very aware that we're working with translation. And because English is not my first language, so I'm very aware of the meaning or associations of different words. and how much just like what has been translated to us from Pali into English, how that has been shaped by how the English language was shaped. Which then, like a lot of that was like then from English translated into German. And then now being on that end, seeing like, okay, so where did that actually come from? And what was added in the process? Maybe I'm reading into this a little bit, but in that first noble truth that there is dukkha, right?

5:27Dukkha has lots of different English translations. Suffering is one of them, but it's not the only one. Are you pointing to something there in the notion that maybe just at that most fundamental level, we're sometimes missing something with how we talk about that? Yeah. Often people are really confused about when the Buddha said there's suffering, there's Dukkha, and Dukkha is translated as either suffering or pain. They get really confused that the Buddha says, oh, there's an end to Dukkha, meaning there's an end to suffering or pain. And people go, that's impossible, right? That's impossible because we get old, we get sick, we will die.

6:01The people we love will go through that same process. How is that being possible that we're not suffering? We're not, how can we get out of this without getting callous, right? And without closing our heart. And so for me, I was very puzzled about that for a really long time to what does the Buddha actually mean by like the cessation of suffering? And then what's really interesting for me, so again, like coming back because I work so much with people with chronic pain, physical pain, but this applies really to everything, is this awesome equation that the meditation teacher Shinzen Young coined.

6:36He was very much into math and physics, but it made so much sense to me. So he coined this formula that he said suffering equals pain times resistance. And that made so much sense to me because that is so commonsensical. And so first of all, what we have to say, so like here we have pain as a constant, but pain is not the same as suffering. But often in everyday language, we use it in the same way. And so people get really confused. But we were saying like, okay, so pain is part of life. And I will often ask people like, and I can ask you here, is that your experience that when there is something painful?

7:16and you really resist it or you really worry about it, what happens to your overall suffering? Yeah, significant increase. Yeah, no kidding. And we know this in our own experience. And then there's a situation where maybe the same pain, for whatever reason, we just don't worry so much about it or we're not so much in resistance. What happens to our suffering? Yeah, decrease. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. And then even to the point where like, because it's a math formula, we could just push it a little bit further and say, so what happens in this equation when there's zero suffering or resistance? What happens to suffering?

7:56Yeah. Well, I know if you multiply something by zero. Right? Right? Right? Yeah. So suffering is zero. And then people go like, wait a second. And then I ask, so anybody can give me an example of a situation where there was pain but no suffering. And I always get answers. People will say like, oh, I did a really big workout and I'm really sore. So that's quite painful, but no suffering because I'm actually proud I did that workout. Yes, yes. Yeah. Or women will often say there were moments during childbirth where the pain was excruciating. But I was so excited because I knew I was going to have my baby soon.

8:43right and then so just so what it does it loosens up our ideas about pain and suffering and for me that is like a really beautiful way how we can work with that to come back like that first noble truth so the pain is inevitable but the suffering is optional and the key is to reduce the resistance as close to zero as we can. Exactly. And this phrase, so when I work with people with chronic pain and I say that, they're often insulted. I can imagine, yeah. Blaming the victim. Yeah. That's not how that works. So for me, that equation, which in a way says something similar, but that is just seems to lend more.

9:29So that's just something that I've learned teaching and people go like, get away with that phrase. Suffering is optional. Yeah, fair enough. You referenced childbirth. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I believe you started your career as a gynecologist in Berlin and then you took a fateful maternity leave trip to LA that kind of changed the course of your entire life. Am I on track here? You're totally on track, yes. So that was my husband's idea. that didn't want to immigrate, leave my job or anything. But I was on maternity leave. My husband always wanted to be abroad in the U.S. for a year. He got a job in L.A.

10:11I was not interested in L.A. the least. And I said, okay, I'll go for a year. I was on maternity leave with our oldest daughter. And one year became two, became three. And so this oldest daughter, she'll be 23 in January. So we've been here 22 years. Yeah. I'm sure you get this a lot, but I find myself just slightly distracted in hearing this story by the year-long maternity leave. The generosity of the German people. Yeah, I have to say, so it was not 22 years maternity leave. But I have to say, what gave me my plan B was for many years, if this doesn't work out, I go back. Because they kept my job for three years per child.

10:56and I have three children, which is like such a privilege, really. So I had, or we had the option for nine years. We could have just gone back to Berlin and I could have just plugged Ryan back into my work, but I didn't. That is just so wild. I know, as an American, I know, I know. Yeah, and just watching my wife go through having our two kids recently. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, but so you land in LA. It sounds like you're open but skeptical to being there in the first place, let alone staying. And I believe you meet Trudy Goodman, Dharma teacher who was actually on the show just a few weeks back.

11:38Can you say a little about that fateful meeting? Yeah, honestly, that felt a little bit fateful to me in retrospect. So one of the conditions, I told my husband, okay, I'll go to a country and a place where I don't know anybody, where I'll be just by myself with a newborn. I felt very weird about being a new mom. But I'll go if I find a meditation group. Because I knew that community, sangha, was just something that I needed to keep my practice going. Especially when things were so up in the air everywhere. I googled meditation groups in my tradition in Los Angeles. And what was very interesting, on the Spirit Rock website, that's my tradition, the Vipassana, so the inside meditation tradition.

12:25And they had just featured a teacher who was back then still in training herself. She was a Zen teacher before, but she did the teacher training with Jack Kornfield, who she later married, way later married. But they featured her on the website and said, Trudy Goodman just started a sitting group, a practice group, weekly practice group in Los Angeles. And so I knew, okay, so there's a place for me to land with my practice. And I think the second week we were in LA, I went to Trudy's sitting group. And we kind of joke and the rest is history. So Trudy just had started Inside LA, the organization that we grew into something really amazing over the years, just a few months earlier.

13:09So the sitting group was just a handful of people back then. And Inside LA was just Trudy and a handful of people. Yeah, and for me, needing like a purpose other than just taking care of my daughter, which of course was wonderful. But if you take like somebody like me, overachiever, you just pull her out of work. So there's just a lot of extra energy. And I put that into growing inside LA. So the amazing thing about Trudy, what was really important for me, which I really hadn't noticed before so much, is how much I needed a female teacher. the group I practiced with before in Berlin. So there were mainly male teachers.

13:52And the focus was very much on, so you either become a monastic, or if you're not dedicated enough to be a monastic, you should at least be single and have no children. Or if you need to have a partner, then at least don't have children. I mean, that was not so explicit, but that was very clear in how the leaders were leading, living their lives. And so for me to come to LA and then meet Trudy, who was a trained psychotherapist, who was a trained Buddhist teacher, who was a mother, a single mother for a really long time, and who was just living all of that, which where I just found myself, that was so important for me to have a living example of this is doable.

14:42And I know that for many people that work with me, I'm that example now, which is really beautiful. That resonates really strongly with me. I often hear teachers on the show talking about how this Buddhist tradition was held largely by monastics over thousands of years, and that this idea of ordained lay teachers who are householders and living lives as spouses, parents, etc., is in some ways a bit of an experiment that's still being worked out. I can remember just a few years ago being on a retreat and asking a pretty respected teacher in the same in the insight tradition that you're talking about.

15:28Basically, like, how far can I go on this path with two little kids at home? Actually, I might have had just one at the time. I have two now. But it's all a blur. But either way, he's sort of said something like, oh, you know, you can come back in 18 years. That answer didn't work for me. I'm one of those people, I think, who's looking for people like you to look to. Okay, you meet Trudy. You start building out this group. You jokingly referenced your status as an overachiever. I believe you have a PhD, an MD, and you're an ultramarathoner. Yes. On top of being a revered Dharma teacher. After all these years of practice, all these years of teaching, do you have any insight to share around those of us who also identify as overachievers like how you hold that ambition alongside the practice which is so much of you know ambition can be so much about striving and clinging and the practices at least on the surface seems like it's so much about letting go how do you live in that tension yeah I have to say it is still like really letting go and surrendering is still hard for me to this day.

16:43I think that's probably my main practice, but something that I've been realizing more and more over the years is, so of course I'm very proud of the things that I have achieved, but I'm really understanding more on a practical cellular level, how much of that in my case is actually driven by a trauma response, like a survival response of I need to prove that I'm worthy. I need to prove that I'm lovable. I need to prove that I'm worth keeping. It's just interesting to consider that. And then with all the practices that I do, and I'm not just doing meditation because that was just something, at least the way that it was taught, was not sufficient for me to get that close to how I'm structured or how I'm built.

17:41Yeah, it's just very curious to see that loosen more. The drive is different, and obviously I still have a lot of drive, but it's not as, what's the word I'm looking for? The coercion, the inner coercion has changed. And that actually feels really good. Yeah, so I really wasn't aware for a long time how little room of flexibility I had. I know we talk a lot about we're practicing to be more flexible with these teachings. That's a lot like what the outcome is. I did not have a lot of flexibility around achieving. There was no option. Yeah, so there was never an option of, oh, maybe if I work hard enough, I'll become a physician.

18:30It was just like, oh, no, I'll become a physician. Oh, no, I'll do a PhD. Oh, no, I'll write a book. Do you know that amount of rigidity in that? Yes, great for the outcome, but also not a lot of ease, let's just put it that way. As that grip loosens, have you found a different way to, I guess when I hear you say there wasn't a lot of ease, I think what I'm hearing, correct me if I'm wrong, is that that's shifted for you over the last however many years, that more ease and less tightness. as that has happened, are you still ambitious? Does achieving things mean something different to you now? Yeah, it's interesting.

19:17And I ask myself that a lot, right? Or like I have that conversation with people, like say with ultra running, for example, you do something that's really hard. You don't have to do that. I pay for that, right? Sometimes I have that when I run and I go, you're paying for this, this is way crazy. So 60 miles in it, you go like, why am I doing that to myself? but there is something so what i found really is and again i'm in process with that but what i found is when we're doing this coming back to the term healing work over time like slow and steady that at least i'm not like a explosive like opening person most people are not some people are that way i'm not most people are just slow and steady but what i find is that i'm actually through the healing work, I'm freeing up frozen energy in my system.

20:07And that frozen energy turns into a very nice driver, very different driver, but still a driver, if that makes sense. So it's just something, it's like a level of energy. And often people actually share that, like when they do healing work or they do therapy work and something is releasing that people say, oh, I have more energy. Yeah, I'm more awake. I can do more things. And so there seems to be something for a lot of people in that process. So you get that frozen up energy that trauma has frozen up in our system. You get that back. And then together, of course, with the practices, also the inside meditation practice, it makes you so much happier and joyful.

20:48So, yeah, I still like to do a lot of things. And I get I'm very enthusiastic and passionate about things. But again, the driving force behind that is different. I feel like I'm hearing at least two really helpful things in that answer. I just want to try to reflect them back and see if this lands for you. So the first one is, when I hear you talking about this drive for achievement and how it has its roots in trauma that you might have experienced early in your life, it has its roots in a sort of survival response. It was just interesting for me to hear that in the tone that you were speaking about it in, which was very nonjudgmental, at least what I was receiving on like a vibe level.

21:36There was no sense of heaviness or blaming or shaming. It was just this observation like, oh, this is where this comes from. But there was like a neutrality there or a peace with it. And yeah, let me just pause there. Does that part of it land? Yeah, but let me tell you, that is hard earned. Yeah, yeah. Right? So I did not start out that way. I started out being very angry, upset, disappointed with some of the circumstances that I was raised, as many people are, but I didn't want to be stuck there. Yeah, that lands for sure. Yeah. so you started to unpack the roots of these behaviors looking at that was not simple was not without pain was not without suffering but you've worked through it in such a way where you're now more at peace with these sort of origins yeah yeah and it's also in something so what's really important for me or was very important for me is really so I said like it's not just been mindfulness and compassion, but mindfulness and compassion have always been there.

22:48So I started meditating as a teenager, like when I finished high school. So I've been doing this for a really long time. And I have to say, I would not have wanted to do it without those tools. Yeah, because what we're learning, so what you're noticing is what we call equanimity. Yeah, and equanimity is something, and part of this is how things are. coming to terms with things and how things were, and not taking them so personally. Because so that is also like part of that work. I see like, oh, yes, those were the conditions. Like my parents couldn't do it otherwise. You know, they did the best they could given their history, their trauma.

23:34So I moved away from just the blaming or being the victim or you did that to me. Yeah. Yeah. Or I would have needed something else. And I know this is so true for so many people, but it's a process. We cannot start out by saying, oh, I want to be just so equanimous about this. And then, yeah, good luck with that. Sure. No, absolutely. So it sounds like, yeah, the mindfulness meditation, cultivating compassion, these were crucial building blocks in this work. They certainly weren't the only thing. There are other kind of therapeutic modalities. Yeah, it's just like when I talk about some of those things, and you notice that in how I was speaking about that, it's really more like, no, that's what happened.

24:18And I wish it didn't. And at this point now, it's okay. I couldn't really see for a long time. I just had this feeling of like, oh, if that didn't happen, I would be happier. I would be not so driven, not so neurotic, not so, I mean, fill in the blanks, right? But now I really realize, and this is something, that's a long process. I mean, I would never say that to a person that is starting out, or I would never say that to a person, period. It's just, it also made me into who I am. I wouldn't be here if that hadn't happened. Yeah, and if you would have told me that 30 years ago, I would have slapped you.

25:03You know? Right, right, right. Time and a place. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I want to go back. There's one other thing that you said earlier that I just wanted to go back to before we wrap up here, which was you talked about how letting go of some of this clinging and tightness around achievement and sort of unwinding some of that, maybe putting down some of these notions that you only matter or you're only worthy if you've accomplished XYZ thing. You talked about how that actually hasn't made you less ambitious. Instead, it's freed up new kinds of energy and they feel like healthier kinds of energy. Dan on the show often talks about a cleaner burning fuel.

25:48And I just, yeah, I just wanted to highlight that one particular piece because it really resonated with me. And it feels really good to know that if we work through some of those things that, you know, that it doesn't just mean that we stop caring about the world or stop being who we but instead it's a healthier version is maybe on offer. A healthier version is on offer for sure. And I also have to say, I'm looking at some of the things that I used to do, the amount of daily work that I put in of just, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm done with that. Because that was guided a lot by this inner driver of this feeling, whatever I do, it's not good enough.

26:28I can never work enough. and that actually feels really healthy. So I really, I work less and I have immediately a part that comes up saying, don't say that out loud. She's still here. She's still here. She's still listening. But there's just something, there is really like when I said, there's more ease in my system. So it feels like, so what I'm learning is I'm learning to rest and to take breaks and to just be offline and off in nature and I don't really care about my social media feed during that time. I can say that. And it's so deeply nourishing. And then I come back and then I'm really ready to fully engage again.

27:13But that feels healthier than like before. It was just like I had to be on all the time. And then, of course, raising three children on top of that. It was exhausting. It was really exhausting. Before I let you go, we have a lot of exhausted folks in our sort of virtual worldwide sangha, myself included, who are going to have you in their ears with them on the cushion or as they do walking meditation or what have you starting tomorrow. So I just wanted to give you an opportunity real quick, if there's anything you wanted to say or share about these meditations that you're offering, what people can look forward to over the next four weeks as you guide their practice in two ways, right?

27:58So you'll be dropping guided meditations every Monday and Wednesday, and then we'll also be doing live sits on Tuesday. So yeah, anything you want to share about that? Yes, the one thing I would feel is really important is, so I really wish for everybody that the driver for meditation really becomes something that feels nourishing and supportive. I wish for everybody at some point becomes a non-negotiable. Like it is a non-negotiable for me in the morning to meditate. And I also have to say, I personally don't listen to guided meditations. But what I do is I love instructions for how to work with my mind.

28:38So the guided meditations that we have recorded and that will drop for a lot of them, they have a concept in them that is really helpful to practice in a meditation setting. We actually call that more reflection than a meditation. So where we get into like a contemplative, open, calm space. and then we work with something. We look at thinking or we look at the amount of effort that we use or something like that. And we can do that in a meditation and we can listen to that over and over just as a way so we practice. We do almost a dry practice with it. But what's really important for me is to remind people that it's about your life.

29:26These things are not just showing up in meditation, But we're training something so that when it then shows up during your day, you go like, oh, here we go. And I know what to do. So that's really my intention. Love it. Thank you so much for doing it and look forward to practicing with you this month. Thank you. Thank you for your awesome questions. Love that. Thanks. Thank you.