Jack Kornfield on How to Stay Sane in Insane Times

31:58It's not who you are. I mean, you rent it. You get to use it. You are the consciousness that was born into this body that's timeless. You're the consciousness that will also leave it. And I've been privileged to sit with many people in hospice or as they die, and there's this extraordinary moment that's silent like a shooting star where spirit leaves the body. And the body is just their piece of meat, basically. It's there physically, but that person isn't there. And of course, because I've done all these weird meditation things and stuff I've had out-of-the-body experiences, people have them regularly when they're in an accident and they float out of their body and see things that they could never see.

32:51And people who are dying will float out of their body and sometimes come back and will say, how are you? They said, oh, there was so much light. Basically, I see that it's all love. I see that I had this life. They kind of look back, okay, I did what I could do, the good and the bad sort of looking. But they look with the eyes of something vast and love and say, yeah, this is really what matters because it's who you are. You are consciousness, you are awareness born into this body. And I'd like to call it loving awareness because it connects to everything. So now we've shifted from politics to, you know, vastness and they come together.

33:34Yes, because we can use the POV of vastness to leaven the daily drumbeat of horror in our news feeds. Yes, we need it. We need a bigger picture. And the news is, it's not good for us. I don't say that we shouldn't pay attention, but we shouldn't pay too much attention. By that, I mean, again, out of fear, people will scroll and read, and it's not a good diet. Do what is necessary to keep yourself informed, and then turn off the damn news and turn on Mozart or turn on whatever hip-hop, whatever lights you up, because we're so much bigger than the problems. Also, and this sort of fits with what you were saying, Dan, about opportunity and difficulty.

34:35Francis Lamb, the head of MIT Media and Futures Lab, and they were working on the futures of technology, but they're also working on the futures of agriculture, new seeds and new ways for crops and things to grow to really feed people, especially with changing climate. And one of the students came and said, can we play music for the seeds? And he said, well, sort of skeptical, he said, okay, but only if we do it through the lens of science, which is being cuckooed these days, but it's simply an honest inquiry in what happens. She said, well, what do you mean? He said, all right, you plant some seeds in that greenhouse there and just leave them be and see what happens.

35:23You plant some seeds in the second greenhouse and play Mozart, and you plant seeds in the third greenhouse and play Tupac, and then see how the seeds do. It turned out that music made a difference. But the place that made a difference where the plants grew more robust and stronger was in the Tupac greenhouse. And the reason that's so is because the beat was really intense, and it pushed on them, and it strengthened their roots as the plants listened to the music, and they grew stronger. So we're being pushed on, not by choice, but by the collective energy, and in many ways also of the collective ignorance at this time.

36:15It is what also, as you point to, allows us to find a different kind of strength. So let's talk about some of the specific practices. I have a bunch of practices that I would like to ask you about, but before I ask about my list, what's coming to mind for you as I begin to broach this subject? I got a call from a CEO in the auto industry ahead of one of the major auto companies who also meditates. He's a really great guy, Bill Ford. It was some years ago, and the U.S. was in an economic crisis, and he said, and Chrysler's gone bankrupt, GM has gone bankrupt, and Ford is, you know, we're being pressured incredibly.

37:07I'm about to lose my grandfather's company and the whole industry on my watch, and I can't sleep. I try, but what can you do? How can you help? And so I taught him several practices of grounding, a practice of equanimity in which you really surrender to say that it's not in your purview to control things, and you reflect on the changing of seasons and the rise and fall of empires and the birth and death of humans, and you, again, go to a place of kind of vast perspective. And the most important practice I taught him was that of loving compassion, loving kindness, metta, and compassion practice.

38:00And he began to do this practice of well-wishing for the people close to him who he cared most about. And their simple phrases, may you be well, may you be safe, may you be protected. and he'd do it for his children or his wife or his family members or people close to him. And that well-wishing began to soothe his heart some. And then as he continued to do it, I said, well, now expand it beyond that to the people in your company. And Bill has a great affection for the employees of Ford because he worked on the line assembling cars and things. So it's like in his DNA, he's part of the workers and so forth.

38:41And think of the different ones that you've met and do this loving kindness practice, and now bring it back to yourself. Imagine your family and the people around you looking at you and saying, we want you to be well too. May I be safe and protected and so forth, and then extend it further. And he found that that was the most helpful of these practices. There are a number that allowed him to settle because he began to rest in the goodness of love and the goodness of his heart. And yes, the economy would change, and he had to do some drastic things in those times, and also to hold the fear of everybody.

39:22and part of what good leadership is, is to say, don't be afraid. We know how to do this. We've done this for generations and for thousands of years. We human beings, we've got through really tough things. And if you think about it, and I think about our ancestors, they've lived through incredibly difficult things. And somehow it's like they're on your shoulders saying, yeah, we can do this. And his understanding of trusting that loving heart of loving kindness and supporting allowed him to sleep in a very different way of work in a different way. I have found loving kindness practice to be incredibly helpful for me personally.

40:10I do encounter a pushback that I'm sure you've heard a million times, which is, well, this is going to make me soft and weak, a palooka, a pushover, a doormat, in a time when actually what's needed is, to use the term of the day, resistance. Yes. Well, there are different kinds of resistance because I've certainly heard this. I think a different word that I would bring up is the word courage because that's partly what's needed. And the force behind courage that really makes a difference is love. You talk to soldiers who come back from the battlefield, and they're not fighting so much for an ideal, for the constitution of their country.

40:55They're fighting for their buddies. They're fighting to take care of the people that they care about and love the most. That's the story that you hear. that's the power. And we think that greed and fear and hatred is the most powerful thing, but then you watch mothers lift cars off their children, and you realize that turns out love is the big power. And it doesn't mean you back off, and it doesn't mean you ignore or turn away, you become rooted in your love of the earth and one another, and that gives you the courage to care and gives you the strength. So in fact, it's a power. Not for nothing, you know this, I'm not telling you anything new for you, but the listeners, it might be new that the Buddha is said to have designed this practice as an antidote to fear and anxiety.

41:58Yes, exactly. Another piece that's important is that of joy. And this is really something powerful to say because we can turn our meditation or whatever we do, our fears, into kind of some grim duty. Okay, I'm supposed to do this, it will help me. I go to the gym, I go to therapy, and now I meditate and I'll be a better person and stronger to stand up. There's a book that was published called The Book of Joy, I believe, a dialogue between Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama. They both laugh a lot. Their spirit is joyful. And the question that's asked to them is how can you, in South Africa, all the suffering you saw under apartheid and people being killed and imprisoned for years and all of the things, how can you be joyful?

42:57For the Dalai Lama, the Chinese military have taken over your country and burned the monasteries and destroyed the sacred texts and you can't go back. And the Dalai Lama looked back and he said, they've taken so much from me, Why should I let them destroy my happiness? And so there's a kind of instruction about joy in the Buddhist tradition that commends it. Here's the passage that Buddha says, live in joy and love even among those who hate. Live in joy and health even among the afflicted. Live in joy and peace even among the troubled. Look within, be still, free from fears and attachments. Know the sweet joy of living in the way of wisdom.

43:57It's not a turning away from the world. But it's actually renewing yourself with every flower that comes in the spring. The poet Pablo Neruda said, you can pick all the flowers, but you can't stop the spring. All those babies coming in, all the things renewing, you align yourself with that. As the French philosopher Guillaume Apollinaire said, now and then it's good to pause in your pursuit of happiness and simply be happy. And there's something about this. When you go to a refugee camp, as I've done in the past, they don't want you to come in depressed. They're depressed enough. They actually want you to come in with that spirit that says, in the middle of all of this, there's a possibility that we can do something, plant seeds, turn it towards something better.

44:53And that way, the French philosopher André Gide said, joy is a moral obligation, which is to say, aligning yourself with the possibility of changing in this world. So that's another dimension of inner practice. What do you do personally for consistent hits of joy? I'm a runner. A number of days a week I go out and I have a house that's right on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. And there's this three-mile path along the edge of the water. And I love the running, but also I love to see which birds have come and the changes of the clouds and what ships are going by. It's just stepping out and connecting to nature is an incredibly good thing.

45:43doing my metta and loving kindness practice. I read things that are uplifting, and I'm basically, by temperament, optimistic, even in the very most difficult times. And again, Joanna Macy's work, she calls despair and empowerment, that you actually have to face the fears that you've said and that we carry and feel the despair, and then let it motivate you, let it empower you to sense that that's not the end of the story, because it's not. Howard Zinn says, to be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It's based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

46:42What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to respond. But if we imagine and remember those times and places, and there have been so many, where people have behaved magnificently. This gives us the energy as well to act and to contribute our part. I'm just going to add one little sentence that my teacher Ajahn Chah had, and it helps because we can get flooded by the difficulties of life. So here's the scene. He's walking with a number of monks like we would in the mornings on the little dikes between the rice paddies carrying our alms bowls to receive food from villages nearby.

47:38And across the field is this giant boulder. And he turns to the monks and he says to monks, he says, is that bold or heavy? And the monks say, of course it is. And he smiles and he says, not if you don't pick it up. And it was really his meditation instruction that we have the choice of where we direct our attention. Yes, we need to honor the despair or the suffering and become empowered by it to be a force of love, but not to keep picking up the things that sink our spirits, that take us over. And this is a meditative skill. You watch your mind spin out, and then you can say like a bow, thank you for trying to protect me.

48:34I'm okay now. I'm going to do something positive. So it's not like you're fighting against it. You say, Okay, all those thoughts, all that anxiety, it comes because you care, and it's trying to keep you safe. Thank you for trying to protect me. Thank you. I'm okay. And you let it go, and you say, now what can I do that sustains well-being? What can I do that's where I can reach out my hand and mend the fabric of this society where it's being torn? You can't do the whole thing, but you can touch places and help weave it back together. I love that about thanking your anxiety. That is very cool and radical.

49:16Coming up, Jack talks about why intention is important and how to cultivate wholesome intentions. And we talk about some more survival strategies for these intense times.

49:30I do want to pick up on a few things you said earlier, one of which was something about motivation slash intention and the importance of that. And my question, I guess, is two parts of why is that so important? And second, how do we cultivate a wholesome intentions? Intention is really, really important because out of it comes our actions and the life that we live. Here's an example. Suppose you're in conflict with someone close to you. It could be Jack and Trudy, even though we're Buddhist teachers, so we never have conflict. But just in case such a little thing could happen, in that conflict, if I take a breath or to a mindful pause, which you learn in meditation to take a mindful, loving pause.

50:31And then I ask, what is my highest intention? What's my best intention? And then on the screen goes, well, I'm trying to be right. I'm trying to prove my point. I'm trying to talk about how painful or how hurt I am, all this stuff. What's my highest intention? my best intention. It really is an intention of love. That's where I want it to go. And the minute that that intention surfaces, when I ask that, my tone of voice changes. My eyes soften. I say, well, we're in it. Can we hold this with compassion? We'll sort this out. Instead of being right, I'd rather be loving. That is a kind of a seed example, but it can be in the work that you do, in the political activism that you do.

51:27It can be in the art that you make, tuning into what is your deepest and what is your best intention? What's your highest intention? And that sets the compass of your heart, which way you will go. I completely agree with that. I've seen that play out in my own life. And I have gotten caught up or stuck for me in reading a little bit about Buddhism over the years, you see this kind of grandiose veneration of pure motivation. I think the Buddha talked about it with an analogy of increasingly refined dairy products. So like the ultimate cream of ghee would be, you know, a pure loving motivation. And, you know, the Tibetans have this whole thing about the the Avelokya Teshvara, this thousand armed deity, you know, and all the arms have eyeballs in the palms of the hand and they're all looking for suffering all the time to see if they can help.

52:28And like my thousand arms get bursitis a lot. My motivation is not always pure. And when I look at how the Buddhists talk about this, I feel like I fall short a million times a day. You do, Dan. I feel sorry for you. Yeah. No, here's the deal. And it's true. I mean, I say at the beginning of people coming for their first meditation retreat a day or a week or something, we are first very quick to judge ourselves. And in fact, that pattern of self-judging, there's a whole beautiful practice called mindful self-compassion, because we haven't learned that in our lives. And it leaves us without a kind of fundamental well-being.

53:16The thing that I say at the beginning of retreats is don't be idealistic. There ain't no ideal human being. Every human being I've ever met, even the most saintly and so forth, they've all effed up at some time. You know they have, right? And then to measure yourself, So having an ideal is a lovely thing. It sort of sets a direction. Can I tune in and find better intention? And then I tune in and I realize, well, my intentions are actually kind of sucky right now. Maybe I can improve them. But to measure yourself by an ideal and really think that it fits a human being, it doesn't. It's in a different realm.

53:55It's in the realm of thinking. The realm of the heart is different than that. And of course, you, like everybody, will have moments of magnanimity and graciousness and wisdom. And then you'll have moments mostly fueled by fear, actually, that are not, how do we say, the most charitable, you know, or admirable. And the actual response is to hold that with compassion and say, ah, only human, only human. And then you realize you're part of humanity, this is it, and it's workable. When you say only human, it's like saying to your anxiety, thank you for trying to protect me. Okay, here's an ideal that you're not living up to, only human, now what?

54:43And now what is to say that you have a beginner's mind? It's never too late to start again. In this moment, it's never too late to build something beautiful or to plant a good seed. So all them ideals, forget about it, honestly. Well, they're a compass. They point you some way. But if you use them to judge yourself, give up. Do you recommend the regular recitation throughout the day internally or externally of your intention? I don't. Somebody might find that, well, you know, the thing of recommendations is it's also inner practice of the heart is very much an art of listening to yourself. Someone can say it's really great to do mindfulness of breathing, and for other people, that doesn't help them at all.

55:41Some people say, do loving kindness practice, shine love every direction. But in fact, when they look around, it's not love that's needed, but compassion. You can't say, may you be happy and well. When these people that you're thinking of or looking at are suffering, then you might shift and do a practice, may you be held in compassion. And you have to kind of listen to what serves you. There's a tradition in the Buddhist world of the bodhisattva vows. And bodhisattva is a Sanskrit word. Bodhi means awakened or free, and sattva is a being who promotes well-being and freedom for all. And so one aspires to be bodhisattva.

56:31And if you go into, for example, into a Zen center, there are these bodhisattva vows as people sit down to meditate, and they recite their vows, sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all, desires are inexhaustible, I vow to master them, whatever it is. There's a problem with these vows. They're beautiful vows. But that is that sentient beings don't want to be saved by you. Go home and try it in your family. So if you take it literally, it's not going to help you much. But if you see it instead as a setting of the compass, and a better translation is, beings are numberless. I vow to free us all.

57:20And free us from what? Free us from fear and confusion and delusion. So that sets your direction. How I live will be to help beings be free. free from fear and confusion and free to love. Then, for me, having taken those bodhisattva vows, I don't recite them several times a day, as you ask, but I remember them. And in particular, if I have decisions to make, or I get in trouble, or I'm in conflict, or assessing should I do a new thing or whatever it happens to be, I can take a mindful pause and then bring up that vow of vowing to be a force for freedom and well-being, love in the world. And I'll say, does it measure?

58:12Is this right? And so having it to turn back to. And I do this practice with people. When I teach, after they meditate and get quiet, I'll recite some of these kind of traditional vows and say, if you had to make your own vow, what would it be? And people, I said, sometimes it's very poetic, sometimes it's simple. I vow to be kind. And then you go through your life. Dalai Lama said, my religion is kindness. I vow to be kind. And then that becomes a mirror. is there a time when not being kind is the right thing? I don't think so. And kind doesn't mean you can't stand up with courage and be incredibly strong and stop the suffering, do what you can.

58:59But even then, you don't have to do it with hatred. So you kind of reflect on your own vows, if you will. Another thing you mentioned earlier, and this comes up in both your new book and your course that you're offering, is this concept of imagination. Some of the phrases you use are creating a wise society based on mutual care, transforming anxiety and fear into imagination and hope. You talk about exhorting us to be the imaginal cells of the butterfly or a make weight of hope. Can you sort of unpack some of these phrases and talk about this kind of envisioning of a better future and how empowering that can be?

59:46Yes. When you read, who knows what actually happened, but when you read the 2 ,000-year-old text of the last month of the Buddha's life, last days, in that text in the last year, he says that if a society treats each other with respect, it will prosper and not decline. If a society treats the vulnerable, the children, the women, those who are struggling with care, it will prosper and not decline. If the society comes together and meets with mutual care to consider how to live and go forward, they will prosper and not decline. If a society cares for the environment around, they will prosper and not decline.

1:00:45So these are some of the very last teachings of the Buddha for Wise Society. And the beautiful thing is that there are practices. if you do a loving kindness practice, if you do a practice of mindfulness, of mindful loving awareness, you actually expand the window of tolerance in your life to where you can bear witness to fear and anxiety and longing and self-judgment and so forth, and hold them all in a much bigger space of loving awareness, because that's what you are, your love and your awareness. So then, that image of when a butterfly is in its life cycle, a caterpillar spins a cocoon to go in and transform itself into a butterfly.

1:01:38The kind of naive idea is there's a caterpillar and it grows wings, already completely mysterious, like, how does this happen? How do we grow a body out of these little cells? We can describe it, but it's amazing that anything exists and that it keeps making new things. So here's the caterpillar, but it doesn't do it that way. In fact, it dissolves itself into a kind of gooey mass of cells, so it deconstructs itself. Maybe it's partly what's happening in our society at this time. And then there's a series of cells in there that the scientists, the biologists have named imaginal cells that have a sense that they could come together and do something beyond being a caterpillar, and they start to assemble themselves as a butterfly.

1:02:31Those are the cells, and sometimes they're in conflict with the other cells as they watch, the ones that want to go back the old way, but they build and construct a butterfly with its wings until the chrysalis opens. We have the opportunity to be the imaginal cells at this difficult time, to vision that there is a society that humans can have, and we've seen it in places which is characterized by mutual respect, by care for the vulnerable, by care for the environment by coming together and listening to each other. The other thing of those images, if you go in the marketplace for a very long time, maybe until just recent electronics, and you buy fruit, the vendor will have a balance scale.

1:03:24And on one side, you put the mangoes or the bananas or apples or whatever it is. On the other side, they put weights until it balances. is, okay, this is, you know, two pounds or whatever it is, and gives you the price. But it turns out in the balance scales that they're the big weights that sort of approximate, but in the end, to get it to balance right, there's this little line of tiny weights that are called make weights. And sometimes they're like little animals, little dragons or dogs or whatever. They make them in nice forms. And so it almost balances, but not quite. And then you take a couple of these little weights and you put it on that side and then things balance out.

1:04:09And those make weights are the ones that bring things back into balance in spite of how huge the other weights are or how big the pile of apples is. Those things tip the scale and bring it into balance. And it's really important for us to understand, because we are living in mystery, that we don't know, but maybe you are the make-weight. Maybe your podcast, Dan, maybe the way that you live, maybe the people that you influence, tips the scale in some important way. And so there's something tremendously empowering about this, like the imaginal cells, that we think we don't make a difference because the problems are so vast.

1:05:00Bigger than the problems is imagination. It's way bigger. In your last answer, you used a word that might be a good and meaty, weighty subject on which we could close. You use the word mystery. In your new book, you talk about a survival, a sanity strategy in these dark times, being connecting with mystery, with death, with consciousness, these big, just brain-breaking concepts. And there's a specific practice you recommend called the you are consciousness practice. Would you mind describing how we could do that? Sure. Well, first of all, it is mysterious. I'm sorry, but how does a planet create all this stuff?

1:05:55And it continues to create new species. It's extraordinary, and we have no idea. We really don't. There's a creative force, whatever name you want to use, that cosmic creativity that makes not just the planet, but the sun and the turning of the galaxies and everything. It's incredible. And we forget it because we have our shopping list and our projects and things that we have to tend, and we do. We have to tend our garden. But the fact that things grow out of the earth and assemble themselves in the way they do, how did that happen? It is incredibly mysterious. And then trees. One of the great, wonderful things about trees, and there's so many wonderful things about them.

1:06:49Now we know they communicate with other trees in the mycelium underneath and send sugar to their children and help sick trees. And trees are a lot more connected than we know. But the thing that I love particularly is that this is how you live, Dan and I, I live also, is that trees turn sunlight into sugar. Go through chlorophyll, all those little lessons you learned in high school or whatever about the cycle of the plants, that what it means is that when sunlight hits the trees, that the light activates a chemical reaction that turns that light into sugar. And then the trees become the food for all the animals and various things like that.

1:07:39Who designed this? You know, you could put whatever name you want on it, but it is wild. And we think we're in charge. Now, the next thing to say is that there are 10 ,000 joys and 10 ,000 sorrows. And if we look in human history, we've had very bleak times collectively. And we've also done magnificent things. As I read in that passage, human history is filled with magnificent courage as well as difficulties. So you asked about a practice. There's two. Here's a really simple one. You can stand in front of a mirror in your bathroom and look at yourself. and if you look, you'll notice you've aged, right?

1:08:30For me, it's losing fur. For others, it's like little bits of drooping, a little paunch, a little your skin, you know, but you'll notice you've aged, right? No matter what. But the weird thing is, you don't necessarily feel older. That's such a common experience. And that's because it's only the body that's aged. But that's not who you are. When you have that feeling, you know, it's weird because I don't feel older. The truth is that you are the awareness itself. And I like to call it loving awareness, borrowing that phrase also from Ram Dass and working with him, because this awareness is outside of time, and it's who you are.

1:09:25You're the consciousness that goes through all these different adventures, and there are different ways to practice doing it. Sometimes you can sit quietly and close your eyes, and as you get quiet, imagine that your mind is not limited to the size of your head, but that it's vast, like the sky, and all the sounds you hear the airplane in the distance and the clanking of the radiator or the wind in the trees outside, they're all happening in the vast space of your own mind, which is the space of awareness. That's a beautiful practice, and it's one you can use sitting in a cafe in the street in New York, and the traffic's going by and people are talking, and instead of fighting it, you open and you hear it all as music, and you are the space of awareness.

1:10:19Or, like looking in the mirror, you can also turn your attention back. And my teacher, Ajahn Chah, went to see the greatest master of his day, and asked, he said, I've been living in these forest monasteries and jungles, and practicing, and I've had all these experiences, my body would turn into light when I got really present, the sense of boundaries would open and dissolve, and I would have these images and insights and all the kind of meditative experiences. Can I get your help? And the master looked at him and said, Cha, you're looking in the wrong direction. Those experiences you have, they're like going to the movies.

1:11:06There's a romantic comedy, and there's a documentary, and there's a war movie, and there's a social whatever movie, and so forth. He said, those are just the movies that come and go. Turn around and see that they're created by the light that shines. They're not fundamentally real because they arise and pass. And turn your attention back and become the one who knows, the loving witness of it all. And you can do that even as we talk now, even if you're driving, I don't know that you want and close your eyes, but you can sense that who you are is not the body. It's not your emotions. They come and go like waves.

1:11:58Who you are is not your thoughts, I hope, because they're like fireflies. They appear pictures and words and disappear. Who you are is the loving witness of all of this. This is the timeless dimension of consciousness itself. And practicing this way and knowing this gives you a kind of freedom that is true for you, that is your birthright. Again, they can put your body in prison, but no one can imprison your spirit. You can go through beautiful things, and you go, wow, that was fantastic, and horrible things. oh my God, that's terrible and breaks your heart and you feel so much compassion. And then at some point you step back and say, wow, that was an amazing year we got through, wasn't it?

1:12:47Because the one who knows is the consciousness itself that sees all of this arising and passing and is the space of peacefulness, graciousness, love. I like to call it mindful loving awareness because you're present, and you're present with love, you're alive to it. There was a sign in the casino in Las Vegas that I saw that said, you must be present to win. And it's true in Las Vegas. us. But it's really the invitation of meditation. Instead of getting lost in our fears and our thoughts, and you walk down the street and you don't see anything because you're reliving something and planning something, you're not so alive.

1:13:41But instead, you can notice that, or you can plan a bit, you can remember things. But how about being here and seeing both what's mysterious and responding from a place of really deep presence. And whatever you bring yourself to with that kind of mindful, loving presence and attention, you do it more beautifully. You come from a place of freedom. Whatever is going on with you, you are free. Your spirit is free. That's the truth. I want to say to our listeners, Jack, we have barely scratched the surface of the treasury of practical stuff available in Jack's new course, which is called Stand Up for Compassion.

1:14:30There will be a link in the show notes. It's free. And in Jack's new book, All in This Together, there will also be a link if you want to buy that. We have, as I just said, scratch the surface, you should go listen and or read to both the course and the book. Before I let you go, Jack, anything else that you want people to know about that you've made and put out there? Just go on jackcornfield.com, and there are lots of free meditations. And for many, many people, having an audio or video guided meditation is a really great way to start. so that. Thank you for mentioning the merch.

1:15:15You know, here we are. This is our wild society. I'm just grateful for the work you do, Dan. Thanks. You know, I know when you started 10%, it came from your own inner transformation, and it seems like your own understanding of meditation and mindfulness and loving-kindness practice has made you a happy camper or happier camper. And that's what we want for everybody, that they find a well-being. And so your work has really been important for a lot of people in finding that. And I thank you for it. Yeah. Well, I thank you. If listeners go back and check out your previous appearances on the show, they will hear me say what I'm about to say, which is that everything I do is because of all the stuff you did.

1:16:07So thank you right back at you. I guess we are in it together. Another crass advertisement for my book.

1:16:22Thanks again to Jack Kornfield. Love that guy. Don't forget, there's a guided meditation that comes with today's episode. It's all about how to meet the insanity of these times with more steadiness. It comes from Jeff Warren, our teacher of the month over on danharris.com. Our next live meditation and Q &A session coming up on December 9th. And don't forget the whole pods fight poverty thing we're doing. Go to give directly dot org slash Dan if you want to get involved in lifting 700 families in Rwanda out of poverty. It's awesome. You should join us. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show.

1:16:56Our 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.