Three Buddhist Practices For Getting Your Sh*t Together | Vinny Ferraro

28:47For me, it's like catch and release many, many times a day. And the only reason I even agreed to come on here is because I know you have a aversive mind just like I do, right? You know, it's clear. It's clear that it's really easy to believe that there's something wrong with this moment, like many, many times a day. And I can feel my resistance. I can feel it. You know, somebody doesn't use their freaking blinker or somebody cuts, you know, there's a thousand and imaginary slights, right? And there's stuff in the world as well, right? It's not like it's all just in my mind, but I can feel resistance arise in my experience many times a day.

29:35Okay. What happens when I do that? Oh, well, one thing that happens is we get a lot more sensitive to pain with practice. We don't become these bulletproof Buddhas that are just like walking around unfazed. It's like, oh no, wow, that resistance hurts. This kind of sucks. And so then you kind of turn toward it and you release it. It's like, is there anything actually wrong right now? Can I check in with a fundamental okayness? Can I feel my feet on the floor? Yeah. You okay? Actually, I am. Despite my thoughts, despite my fears and hopes and everything else that's running through, are you actually okay?

30:19And it's just like, holy shit, I am. So weird. So, you know, Ajahn Amaral, one of my first teachers, he said it so clearly. He said, I discovered a deep satisfaction in not actively seeking satisfaction. It's just like, oh, dude, it's been here the whole time. I was so busy arguing, closing arguments that I missed it. You know, the thousand masks of Mara of like, you know, what's wrong? Well, everything. Okay. But really what's wrong? You know, Joseph actually said it so clearly because every time I look for a problem, I can't find one, you know? Reminds me of something that Eckhart Tolle, who I've made fun of with gusto, but nonetheless, I think he's actually, he's on to many things.

31:11He has this little question he asks people is like, what is preventing you from being in this moment? And that just came to mind as I was listening to you talk. There is, there is a kind of satisfaction. It might not be conventional satisfaction, the way the world defines it, that's available pretty much whatever's going on. Yeah. And that's what I meant by saying that each moment is pregnant with liberation, right? That's a very poetic way to say it, right? From a thousand years ago, I think a woman may have said that. But it's like, do we trust that what's found in presence can't be found anywhere else?

31:48You know what I mean? Like, where else might satisfaction or contentment or peace arise? Does it matter if I'm peaceful or content next week? You know what I mean? This whole, the whole movement of life is leaning towards some other moment. So it's just like, of course, we're going to do that in our practice, too. It's like, oh, no, this is like a Rocky montage, and I'm getting better at this every day. You know, there's going to be more and more, and it's just going to continue. It's like, what leads you to believe that?

32:23Coming up, Vinny Ferraro talks about redirecting awareness, becoming an empathic witness for yourself, and when to opt for distraction.

32:44As I listen to you speak, it strikes me, and maybe there's some projection going on because, you know, I've sat through not a few meditation retreats myself and try to apply it on the daily. But what you're describing as your approach to life sounds deeply sane and like a lot of work. yeah yeah what else is there to do dan every time i look at my suffering most of it has my fingerprints all over it right so it's like okay dude uh we get it bro it's really really hard to have a mind and to have these nervous systems and i made my life so much harder than it needed to be, bro. You know, losing people.

33:34We're not taught how to tend to that which is difficult to bear. You just get over it, man. Keep moving. Next thing you know, you're strung out because, you know, basically all drugs are painkillers, right? We're all running from something and, you know, it can be shopping or eating or sex. You know, it has a thousand faces, right? The avoidance. And I just haven't seen it bear the fruit, right? When I see Joseph, bro, I'm like, that's a cat that's been sitting for over five decades. Is there fruit on that tree? Goddamn right. That's a pretty free character, man. That dude, you know what I mean?

34:16So when I see something like that, I'm like, that's where I want to go. That's where I believe. and how do we do that day by day and stop postponing awareness or arrival for some time where the party's going to get better? It's going to be killer. I think we might have touched on this a little bit, but I'll emphasize it here and hang a lantern on it. The second of the three techniques that you have said that you've been using for yourself in your practice to keep it together generally to do life better. The first was alignment. The second is something you call redirecting awareness. What do you mean by that?

34:58Yeah, well, I suffer sometimes my whole life with anxiety. It's what really brought me to the Dharma, you know, a real difficulty sometimes accommodating that energy. You know, it can come in the form of self-incrimination. It can come in many forms, but it's like, it's kind of scary to be inside here. So it's like, okay, how can I accommodate this experience? How can I meet that experience? And so through some trauma training, they really teach you that you can direct awareness to, you know, especially if the mind is not offering up anything helpful, can you redirect it to a different part of your experience.

35:44It's like, oh yeah. Okay. Like I mentioned earlier, the fundamental okayness I feel in my feet, right? Touching the ground. It's not a story. It's a direct experience. It's like, okay. All right. Most of the time when I feel anxious, I feel it in my trunk, sometimes in my throat, but it's generally a contracted feeling of my trunk, my belly. Is it in my feet? Not so much. Oh, okay. So that means that I can titrate my awareness a bit. I can locate awareness very specifically anywhere I want. And not through the mind, not through thinking about it, not imagining my feet, but actually, oh, I can direct awareness and it kind of turns on awareness in my feet where my feet are touching the rug.

36:34It's like, okay. Okay, so anxiety is not the only thing happening right now. Well, that's good news. Okay. Are you okay down here? It's like, yeah. Okay. Do you want to dip back into the anxiety to see if you can tend to it? To see if what we can discover about this thing I'm calling anxiety. Right? So is there a center? Is it throbbing? What are its characteristics? Are there edges? Right? And are there places that it's not? That way I can tend to it with care. We're not being asked to cannonball into these overwhelming experiences. We're asked to tend to them with some care. And so I can do that if I redirect my awareness where it's not overwhelmed.

37:26Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, this seems like a pretty deeply complementary practice to alignment. With alignment, you're looking at the full menu of options and then picking the healthiest option and using your commitment to it to condition future moments. With redirecting awareness, it seems like maybe a different take on the same idea, which is, okay, I have these unpleasant sensations in my trunk and my throat that I'm calling anxiety, but I'm going to pick something else to focus on right now. Maybe it's the feeling in my feet. And is that okay? Is that better? Let me go with that. Am I restating this correctly?

38:06Yeah, I think it's a good way to put it. I mean, basically, we're trying to figure out how to open the closed fist of the mind, right? When I am activated, let's say, right, with the anger or anxiety or something that's hard to bear, I've lost access to my clearest thinking. I'm gone, dude. I'm in that fight, flight, freeze, fawn. So the animal body that I'm in, I don't have access to that clear thinking because I'm afraid whatever's happening, anxious, angry. I mean, you have a kid. When my son is wilding out, reason and logic ain't going to reach him. I can't just reassure him again that there's nothing under the bed that there's, you know what I mean?

38:56Like, bro, bro, bro, you can't, nothing in this room wants to hurt you, bro. It's just going to fall on deaf ears. What does he want to know? Oh, he wants to know that he's not alone and he wants to be held. He's like, okay, I can do that. Okay. They say, the experts at trauma say that trauma happens with the absence of an empathetic witness, right? So we can be that empathetic witness, even to ourselves. So it's like, okay, I'm having anxiety. I have a place I lay down. I wrap myself up with warmth and affection, same as I would anybody I love. And I say, all right, I'm right here. Now I have my own way of dealing with that.

39:40So first it's like, I stopped taking it very personally. That's the first part of it because it manifests as something that's wrong with me, but I hear the Buddha's voice, 2 ,600 years echoing through time and space. What if it wasn't about you? Like just for a second. I know that it's hard to imagine, but what if it was just for a second, right? And so when I'm not taking it personally, when I'm not making it my fault, that eases up some of the blame and some of the loneliness that suffering often comes accompanied by, right? Now, like, okay, is this mine? Is this I, me, or mine? No, I'm not the origin story of anxiety.

40:26I didn't give birth to it on this planet. It's like, okay, do other beings know this? How many other beings know this feeling? Countless. Oh, okay. So now I'm in the presence of Sangha, right? Now I'm in the presence of community. How many of my ancestors may have struggled with these energies? you know stress anxiety self-forgiveness so just buckling under the pressure of trying to meet their family's needs i mean both of my grandfathers were dead before 45 of heart disease they didn't have access to these healing modalities that we do i mean sometimes i'm just trying to just trying to touch into the compassion to the one who's being judged so harshly, but there's a compassionate response.

41:15And this can be a way that we can break the cycle. Things tend to get bigger the more I run from them. So when we turn and say, okay, anxiety is here, difficulty's here, grief is here, it's like, okay, what is this thing? And so by directing our awareness toward it, and if we feel too overwhelmed away from it, we can even look at the validity of a path, we can say by, well, what delivers me to a moment? What delivers me from it? Sometimes I need to be delivered from it. Sometimes redirecting awareness is like, you know what? I'm going to take a walk. I'm going to distract myself. I'm going to just let this pass, man.

41:57I don't actually have the inner resources right now to meet it. You know what I mean? We have to be honest about ourselves because there has to be that willingness. If there's not willingness, we're just, it's like a get out of jail free card. we're looking for. We're going to outmaneuver it. You know what I mean? Through meditation, we're going to somehow outsmart suffering. So silly. I mean, even in the Buddha, right? So we don't need these energies, whatever it is, to just somehow disappear. That's not what happened to the Buddha. When the Buddha became enlightened, Mara continued to arise, but he just, he wasn't perceived as a problem, right?

42:40Because it's not the thought. It's not the afflictive states that are the problem. It's our relationship to them. It's taking them for who we think we really are. I am this problem. I am this anxiety. I've always been like this. I'm always going to be like this. So in some way, redirecting awareness for me has become a superpower of being able to tend to this and not even be afraid. And then 10, 15 minutes, I can usually feel that kind of golden honey sunset light, because we can imbue awareness with qualities, just like we imbue it with fear or anger or frustration. We can imbue it with this wish for all beings to be free.

43:25And I get to be included in that. Every time we sit, it's not just for Vinny. That would be like some Sisyphus over and over and over. But when we're able to hold it, that these energies are not me, not I, not mine. Even the precepts, right? You familiar with the precepts, Dan? Yeah, just for folks who may not be, it's basically these promises that we make to ourselves and others in a Buddhist context to behave in a certain way. way. What I like about Buddhist ethics, the precepts may be like not taking other people's stuff, not killing or not harming, those kinds of things. What I like about the Buddhist version of the commandments is there's more elasticity and no promises of eternal damnation.

44:17That's right. Yeah. I mean, the second one is the one that really moves me. You know, the second precept is not taking what's not ours. Well, we can think about that quite literally, right, in terms of property, right, not stealing. Okay? But we can also expand that to include how do we not take things personally? How do we not take the suffering of our families on that are not ours? When I see the cycles of intergenerational trauma, right, in my family of addiction, incarceration and violence. I've been conditioned to take that on. How do I keep this precept in mind? You know, is it okay to be free when somebody is suffering in my family?

45:03It's like, I don't know. Am I taking what's not mine? Am I taking, you know, like I said, taking things personally? There's a lot of ways that that particular precept delivers freedom. Just to say that's the third of the techniques that we were going to talk about today. The first being alignment, the second being redirecting awareness, and the third, not taking what's not mine. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit, especially as it pertains to, and I know you've gotten more interested in ancestor practices, ancestor worship even. So how does that connect to not taking what's not yours and not taking things personally?

45:41Yeah. You can see how they roll into each other. Yeah. These topics, they arise pretty seamlessly with even a little bit of practice. But the ancestor practice for me, it's like I really felt alone in the world. I was a homeless teen, strung out, locked up, all that stuff. I didn't feel like there was anybody pulling for me at a certain point in my life. I turned my back to the world and kind of lost my sense of belonging. I felt very exiled. That led me to some very scary places, that sense. Because the thing is, Dan, belonging is not enough. You have to know it. The knowing of it is as important as the bond.

46:37because, you know, when did I really not belong? It's so strange. I found myself in 95. You know, I'd made some really big commitments to go to India, to meet the Dalai Lama, to see if this was real or if this was just another hustle. You know, my whole life was a hustle, bro. The family, the neighborhood, the drugs, it was just like, oh, another thing. and so I made a commitment and I was like okay I'm gonna go look in this guy's eyes and if I see some side eye you know what I mean if I see some slickness I'm gonna snap this dude's elbow I can get close enough to him I'm nice with my hands I could do this and this is how afraid I was bro this is how afraid I was that there wasn't anything in this world worth living for right This is what was at stake.

47:33And so I got a chance to meet him, and I just wailed. Oh, my God, an ocean of tears because of the love he looked at me with, right? A week later, I'm sitting in a cave in Nepal. This hermit monk been there, and he's doing his puja. And I'm staying there for two, three days, just sleeping on the floor. He's giving me a little bit of food. I don't understand any Tibetan. He spoke even less English. so it wasn't in his words but there was something about it bro he's up there praying for all beings and there was some admittance back into the garden for me there was just tears flowing down my face and i realized i've never been alone this guy been up here for 2600 years you know what i mean that lineage.

48:20So when I talk about ancestry, I look back on this idea that all my ancestors are behind me. I'm at the tip of the spear shooting through time and space because I'm alive right now. They're all pulling for me, but it's my time to see if I can break some of these cycles that my family and the world has been lost in. And so there's something about that that gives me strength. That's like, I'm not just doing this for me. I'm doing this for all my ancestors that couldn't do it. And I'm doing it for my kid. So I don't pass on anything that's not helpful. Right? Yeah. So that's how the ancestor kind of worship or actually you just, you know, I burn stuff every day and I just try to keep it in mind that like, okay, I'm at the tip of the spear.

49:19They're pulling for me and that can be kind of like a resource. A reflection and a question. The thought that I had in listening to you is that, you know, I kind of glibly said at the beginning, we're going to talk about these three practices you use to keep your shit together. but really it's three practices i mean it's that and then on a on a bigger note it's these three practices you use to break cultural evolutionary familial patterns that have not worked well for your forebears and might not work well for your kid if you weren't in the middle there trying to show a different way of being yeah i mean i didn't want to have a kid bro you know i wasn't raised in a conventional sense.

50:08So I didn't want to pass on things that were not helpful. And I didn't feel like I had anything to offer. I was just going to do my best to be a good godfather, good uncle. And then I met a woman that I knew I needed to be with. And she was just like, this is what I'm doing. So I better get on board or bounce, you know? And I, you know, there was a lot of grief there, you know, a lifetime of never allowing myself to feel that feeling, you know, that excitement of like, well, maybe it's something I could allow myself to, to just consider. I had never let that happen. And then once you do it, you realize, oh my God, this was such an act of generosity.

50:55Oh my God, like thankless, you know what I mean? In some ways, you know what I mean? Like it has its own gifts, obviously, but it would call on me. And I thought I was much further along on the path, to be quite honest.

51:10Real talk, man. I mean, talk about, you know, I'm back in therapy. That cat got me on the cushion every day. You know, talk of the cruel tutelage of Valentino. You know what I mean?

51:24You know, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, you know? and uh you know he he really calls forth in me the most generous part of me you know and you realize that the barrel that you're surrounded around you and your wife or you and your partner that barrel is not you this life is not your own anymore so i had to sell my chopper i had to you know if you sell the lowriders had to do the things that i could do to to make that decision that commitment to something bigger than me, something more important than me. Because you know what it's like. You have a child, that moment, that there burst into this world.

52:10I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would die for him. Wasn't that he was funny. He didn't have some Gucci diaper. You're just like, oh shit. Wow. And that's where we can get in touch with at least what comes to mind for me. Everybody talks about the beauty of kids. It's like, I don't think babies are beautiful. I just think that the eyes that we look at are so blameless. It makes them beautiful. You know what I mean? If we bookend this thing and say, all right, one of the first things we talked about is like, is there any part of us that's beyond redemption. We know that we can see through those eyes.

52:56Now, whether we think we got that coming, that's another story. But we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that baby's got it coming. So that's something they give us. They offer us that, that blameless, unconditional love that's just like, I didn't know it was possible. There was always a reason. I loved my friends because he was funny. I loved her because she was beautiful. She was smart. There was always reasons to love and then then there was the unconditioned that they bring into our lives into our then knowing in our hearts you know i remember uh right after our son was born i was i ran into john cabot zinn the great buddhist teacher sure the great meditation teacher i don't know how buddhist he considers himself these days but i told him i had a kid and he said oh yeah the Dalai Lama just moved into your house.

53:51That's right. That's right. Coming up, Vinny asks a very provocative question. How loyal are you to your suffering?

54:10So what is the connection between seeing our family patterns and not taking what is not ours? You know, so much of my life has been very intense, Dan. You know, dramatic, very dramatic. Came home and found my mom passed away when I was a teenager. That was very dramatic. One of my family members had to take her life. Very dramatic. So I got to be there. You had to take her life? No. Well, we had to pull the plug on my mom, but one of my family members, she tried to take her own life. Oh, okay. So I was in the emergency room again and standing over her and realizing like, oh, wow. Okay. And I talked her into letting them take her in, like for real, right?

55:07Not just saying what you need to be said to get out. And she was like, okay. And they started wheeling her away. And I was like, oh, wow, I remember this moment from my teenage years. And I was part of the problem. But now I'm like the helpful uncle. Okay, how real do you take these roles that you're being cast into? Like just, okay, I was the pain in the ass teenager. Now I'm the helpful other. It's just like, wow. You start seeing the intergenerational trauma. And then you're able to start questioning how loyal I've been to my suffering. What am I pledging allegiance to here? Is this I, me, or mine?

55:51You know, and it's not just some spiritual bypass. It's a real question. I'm like, okay, what do I take myself to be? Obviously, I care about this person deeply. There's compassion there. But how do I not take on more than is helpful? What's helpful? And what's personal? What's the added layer? Sometimes we call the second arrow. It's just like, oh my God, when is this person ever going to figure it out? Now I got to figure out how to remind them of who they are. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. So in a way, I guess it's like not making things harder than they need to be. There's already enough real suffering going on.

56:31We don't need the additional that comes with taking things very personally. let me test my own comprehension there and say it back to you so as a teenager you had this horrible thing happen to you where you found your mother deceased or near deceased and and then had to bring her to the hospital and make a painful decision fast forward several decades another really a hard situation where a member of your family has tried to take her own life and you're trying to play as positive a role as possible. So there's already a lot of sort of non-negotiable suffering that's happening in both of these situations, specifically in the latter situation where you've at this point been practicing meditation for a while, but you decline to add on the level of, oh, I'm part of this messed up family and these people can't get their stuff together and I'm never going to get out of these patterns.

57:33And, you know, I, me, mine, all of this. So you're not taking all of that as yours anymore. That's right. As one great monk said, you're not misappropriating public property. That's right. You're just focusing on what is actually here now, instead of adding on a bunch of voluntary pain. Yeah. And what was there was incredible heart, a lot of compassion, just not that added layers. And that's like, okay, is this how we break the cycle? By seeing through that I wasn't the pain in the ass teenager and I'm not the helpful brother. It's like, you know what I mean? Like that was never me. That's just like the role.

58:15Okay, now I'll be this. It's like, how wholeheartedly can you hold these roles when you see that you weren't the first one, you're not the second one, you're not going to be the third one. You're just a being here that cares deeply about this person. I don't know what it's like to be you, but I was really bred to take on that suffering, to make it my fault, to make it my problem, to figure out if you can't figure it out, then you failed, right? And maybe it's different in all kinds of different families. But that's what I kind of grew up with. And so the deep failure of losing my mom, it was just like, hold on, it's already hard to lose your mom.

59:00She was like my best friend. But then there's like, it was your fault. You should have been there. She died alone. It was just like, whoa. Decades of, you know, trying to run from that, you know, a path, a life of destructive relationships based on those beliefs. You know, kids make everything their fault, right? So, you know, I kind of saw through that in this instance, you know, that the details were dramatic enough to wake me up out of that and see like, oh my God, it's just happening again. Wow. wow, okay, what am I in choice about here? How can this be in the service of awakening, this very confusing moment?

59:52What am I awakening to? I don't know if this is a fair or useful question. I'll throw it out there and maybe we'll answer a different question. But how much confidence do you have after all these years of practice that you're making progress on breaking the cycle? It is a hard question to answer. I feel a lot less suffering. That's some kind of measurement. I tend to not stay in story as long. So that's another measurement because these stories can often be not generous, right? Internally or externally. So it's like, okay, you know, that catch and release that I talked about, right? It's like, oh, I can feel the resistance.

1:00:36We become a lot more sensitive. So when I wake up to that, that resistance that hurts every time, I'm usually able to release it fairly quickly. so there are some measurements that uh lead me to believe that there's uh progress being made certainly not perfection but i can wholeheartedly say that there's just so much less suffering that i'm creating for myself i believe it i do yeah yeah i feel very lucky to have found the i feel like the luckiest person i know because i'm not even supposed to be alive like there's nothing in my history that would lead you to believe that I would be alive at this age.

1:01:24And so the fact that I get to go into prisons, work with death and dying, do all this beautiful work in the world, I just never thought I had anything to offer. I didn't know I could be a part of something good because of the world I was born into. So it's that hustle, that street, survival mentality. And then, you know, growing up and coming into these more wholesome qualities, it was like, oh my God, I'm so glad that I survived the first part so that I have something to offer in the second part and really find out more who I was and not just, you know, be lost, you know, to the world. I sincerely believe we are all lucky that you are alive.

1:02:11that's sweet man thank you bro yeah you feel pretty lucky about my life my life has been charmed yeah from the jump so i had every event and so yeah i feel very lucky at baseline and then extremely lucky that even though i have attempted to sabotage all of my unearned advantages um i found the dharma you know 14 years ago and and have been awkwardly and unevenly applying it into my life to my life uh ever since so i feel lucky in several ways that brings up something so tender for me because what is the dharma you know what's the main premise here dan is that conditions don't lead to suffering?

1:02:59Because that's a really big question for me. Because you talk about the difficulties in your life, right, as I just have. What sent me running into the arms of the Dharma but my difficulties? You know, I think it was Frankl that said conditions don't lead to suffering or bondage, that it's only the attitude of the being that determine which way these things flow. What a radical proposition, you know? Radical invitation that conditions don't lead to suffering. My conditions were so intense at the beginning of my life, I couldn't imagine a happiness. I couldn't imagine a freedom. Now I can see like, oh, you're standing in an emergency room.

1:03:49Okay, which direction do these conditions lead? Throw it on your back, throw it in the backpack, sisyphus back up the hill? Or is this how we break a cycle here? It's an interesting conversation to have with people that are incarcerated. You know, there's a lot of kinds of incarceration. Right. Damn straight. Vinny, before I let you go, do you have a website? If people want to learn more about you, how can they do that? Yeah, I do. A friend of mine built me a website. It's viniferaard.org. It's sparsely populated. I'm not so good at marketing and all these other aspects of teaching. But I do feel lucky to have a sangha in San Francisco that I've been the guiding teacher of for about 20 years now.

1:04:39And so just to be witnessed, right? They've seen me through so many of the chapters, yeah? Yeah, and that's something that community really provides us. It's not just a place to compare hallucinations, but it's also this other part that's like, oh, wow, I'll remind you, you remind me when I lose my way. So I've been really, really lucky to have a community that does that for me and with me. Thank you for doing this. This was an absolute pleasure. I think it's going to help everybody who hears it. So thank you again. thanks for having me Dan I hope to see you again bro I you may regret saying that because I'm going to ensure that you see me again maybe so bro

1:05:29thanks again to Vinnie Ferraro love that guy he's amazing we referenced a few past podcast episodes during the course of this episode Kamala Masters on equanimity Roshi Joan Halifax on equanimity and Jozen Tamori Gibson on the precepts. I have put links to each of those episodes in the show notes if you want to go check them out. Speaking of checking things out, if you haven't already, you should check out my new meditation app. It's called 10 % with Dan Harris, and you can learn all about it by going to danharris.com. There's a free 14-day trial. So come check it out. Join the party. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show.

1:06:09Our 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

1:06:39Thank you.