How do you sit quietly in the middle of a storm?

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29:19Welcome back to the show. Back in the early 90s, when Rev first wanted to deepen her meditation practice, she started going to retreats. You might not be familiar with these. Until a few years ago, I wasn't. I've never gone, but people close to me have. What I understand is that at a retreat, people interested in meditating come together to meditate. A retreat might last five days, a week, or longer. If you go, you agree to follow a set of rules. You'll agree to wake up at the break of dawn. Often, these retreats are entirely silent, meaning for the whole time, you will not talk. At a retreat, you are meditating many times a day.

30:01Rev would say you are sitting meditation many times a day. In these sessions, you keep meditating until you hear a bell ring. There might be a walking meditation as well, or what's called a work meditation, where you're helping the center with chores. The people I know who have gone describe this experience of mostly being alone in silence in your own mind for a week as exactly as excruciating as I imagine it. But they also describe it as beautiful, and most of them go back. I don't understand any of this at all, and part of the reason why I was talking to Rev, an ordained Zen priest, was because I was hoping to understand it more.

30:41She told me what it's like to go learn to sit in retreat. It's like a pendulum swing between the most profound stillness You can enjoy the feeling of your body or the movement of a butterfly and utter excruciating, why is that person coughing? Will somebody please ring the fucking bell? It's all the things in between. And that's the best thing about it, is you realize that in this, you know, spaces that are set just so and everything is right and it's all prepared, you still manage to drive yourself nuts. And to hate people and to love people, you do the whole gamut in there in a little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny constructed container.

31:41And yet you manage to play out all of the shenanigans, do all the things. You hate people. You love them. You want to have sex with them. You want them to get as far away as possible. You know, the smallest things hurt your feelings. You get upset. You get cold and distant. You do all the things and you realize, well, wait a minute. If all of this is here, even though I'm in a different space, maybe I have something to do with creating. maybe that I have something to do with creating all of this and it's not everybody else's fault. I might have to take responsibility for my life. I see. So it's like the thing that it offers or one of the things it offers is that if it's like you find out that even if everything were taken away, like the things we think the world is doing to us, when you take away the world, you see that we do them to ourselves.

32:39And so then it gives you a place to start to find a way to not do that. Yeah, well, first it humbles you. You bring you to your knees, you know. And it's a space of reconciliation. You reconcile the distance between the truths and untruths of your life. Can you tell me a story about, for you, what it was like early on when you were sort of less skilled? Like what it was like to do a retreat like that, like what you walked in with and what it felt like to grapple with it? What it was like was, this is awesome. That's such a great question. It was this cycle of trying to find a way out. You mean like out of the physical location?

33:31Everything. Trying to find a way out. Trying to game the system. Whatever your shtick is, you're going to see it and it's going to be glaring. And so if seducing is your shtick, you're going to try to seduce everyone and everything. Me, it was gaming. I was a good talker. And so internally and externally, I was gaming the system in every way that I could possibly find. I would sneak extra bits of sleep, or I would try not to be asked to do the things that I didn't want to do. I would sort of get myself into a little corner somewhere and try to disappear so no one would notice me to ask me to do the task that I didn't want to do.

34:21You try to sit and look like you're sitting while you're really doing your taxes in your head. You sit there and it's like, yep, I look really still. Nope, they can't see that. I'm so still. Okay, if I just move this little way, then I look even more still. And I look like I'm very concentrated. I mean, I want to say that that's not the very earliest because the earliest, you're just holding on by the seat of your pants. It's like, why did I do this? Yeah. I shouldn't be here. I could just get up and walk out. Yeah, but everybody will see. But I could still just, I'm grown. I can just get up and walk out.

35:01You do that for at least four days. Well, what will happen? You play out fantasy. Well, what would happen if I just got up? And then you get to your clothes and you're like, okay, nobody's stopping you. You could pack your clothes and you have to make a decision. Yeah. And you make a decision and you make a decision. And that's all it's made up of, is making the decision to come back. And so at that point, you're walking up a mountain in a way. You're going to these retreats and you're finding that the practice is worthwhile for you. What did it mean then to decide to become a Zen priest? I don't know how that—I know nothing.

35:36What was that? It's like, I feel like it's when you watch the movie, you're like, oh, I could be a wizard. I could be a mugwort or whatever they call that. I could be a wizard. That's it. That you're like, oh, it's going to be hard and there's going to be the snake people and the rough people that are doing terrible things to me and playing jokes on me and stuff like that. Or I could go back and just be a human.

36:07And you're like, I'm going to do it. And I might fall off my broom and end up being dragged. and I'd rather be a wizard. You know, I'd rather know a little bit more about what's going on in this life and not feel so confused and put upon. So Rev chose the more interesting path. She studied the precepts, she trained. Eventually she was ordained as a Zen priest. She was the second Black woman recognized as a teacher in her lineage. That was three sentences, but they describe many years. So I did all of that and I went through the ranks, so to speak. I hold the most senior title in the Zen tradition.

36:49It was a very small handful of Black women that actually hold that role as sanctioned Zen teachers, and I'm one of them. And then I got a cool honorific, it's called Roshi, means old teacher. Not that old for those of you that can't see me. So I hold that, and right around the time that I was heading towards that and they were, you know, I was getting the titles and all the ranks and I was like, I don't know about this, y 'all. And in fact, I wrote an essay called, I May Not Get There With You. And it was saying that, yep, I did this thing where it was like climbing the mountain, you know, doing all the ranks and all the things.

37:32And I was like, I don't know if this is really what most people are going to be. I know most people are not going to be able to do this, what I just did. They're not going to commit the time, the energy, the, you know, whatever. And it's not because they're bad or because they're less or they're less deserving of liberation and freedom in their life. It's not because of that. It's because we haven't structured it in a way. And we are, I'm an activist, social justice-y, all of that. And I was like, we're jacking the planet up and creating destruction at a rate at which this will never solve. And so this journey, this 20-year thing that I've done, now 30 plus years, we are not going to be able to deal with the crises of the world and the planet if we don't have more people mature, right?

38:25Become more mature human beings, more kind human beings at a more accelerated rate. And we need something that will operate, forgive me for saying this, at scale. Enlightenment at scale.

38:45We need to be able to, I don't know if that we, I don't think we need a thousand more Buddhas. I think we need millions more people that are, I like to say, aware, more aligned, and more alive. And when we do that, it is not that all of our problems will disappear. We will learn to conflict well with each other. We will learn to conflict honestly and with integrity and with a willingness to meet life as it is and not to abdicate to fantasies and the fictions that we're creating and getting ourselves looped into.

39:33To be clear, Rev still holds the title of Zen Priest. It's just that she's decided, in her words, to leave the track, to help people find liberation where they are. Presumably this mission includes the slightly unusual choice to talk to doofy podcasters such as myself.

39:53After a short break, where does someone go to sit quietly?

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42:54Welcome back. So my life has begun to fill up with meditators. I mean, not fill up, but they've been sneaking in. And, you know, they still seem to experience the world roughly the way I do. They don't seem like different, you know, in like a, they're not so different. But it does feel like they have access to a practice that, I don't know, it's like if you never jogged and everyone's jogging. And they seem a little bit happier and they seem a little bit fitter and they're breathing a little bit easier. And I honestly don't understand the relationship between, I understand that the very few times I've tried to sit down in a room quietly, it has been surprisingly excruciating.

43:34but I don't understand the relationship between closing your eyes for 15 minutes or 20 minutes and contending with that feeling of wrongness or recentering yourself. It's not that I'm skeptical of it. I'm really curious about it and I'm slightly in awe of it, but I don't understand it. And maybe it's something that you have to experience to understand, but I'm just curious about it. I know that's more of like a question mark than a question. Yeah. I do think there's something of, experiencing it. So there's a state and there's trait. So there's the state of meditation, there's people that practice meditation, they have a kind of meditation practice and letting that system, that operating system go offline for a while and not just keep churning and churning and churning and churning and churning.

44:27And giving it a break and letting it reset so that you become a little bit more aligned and in tune with your own pace, rhythm, speed, and the frenetic pace, rhythm, speed, or sometimes the too slow pace, rhythm, and speed of life, you recognize them as not being yours, and so you can stick closer to your own pace, rhythm, and speed. And when we are more attuned to our own pace, rhythm, and speed, then we feel happier. When we are more aligned within ourselves, within whatever confluences of this thing that we call, this fellow once said, the thing I shamelessly refer to as me. when we're more in tune with it, we feel more aligned with it.

45:26Even with how weird we are and odd we are and out of sync we seem with everything else, we feel more happy. That's our navigating system. Our navigating system says that you are here to be you. You're not here to be anybody else. You're not here to be me. You're not here to match up and sync with my rhythm in the way that I am, you're here to be you. And that's telling that even when we don't seem to fit in whatever else is happening, that we are more, and this word is a funny little word for me, but I'll just use it, happy, right? We're more content when we are more true to ourselves. That is just real.

46:10And the other thing is we are more content when we're just doing what we're doing. What do you mean? When we're not running other programs while we're doing what we're actually doing. So in other words, if we're not talking about what we're doing, questioning what we're doing, wondering about what we're doing as we're doing it, when we're just doing what we're doing, We experience ourselves as more content. So it's like what you're saying is one of the things that people might develop from a practice like this is like the voice gets quieter or goes away sometimes? Yeah, for sure. I would say that what the voice does is the voice syncs up and it's got something to do, which is the thing it's doing instead of watching the thing that it's doing.

47:02It's like we're separated from ourselves, literally, right? because there's us doing what we're doing and there's us watching us and having commentary and having judgment about what we're doing and anxiety about what we're doing. And then we're like, wait a minute, I don't think you should be doing that. It's like when you're watching a movie, you're like, wait a minute, don't go over there. I know what's over there. I'm not sure what's over there, but I have a sense because I've watched this movie before. I've watched movies just that are like this and so then I'm anticipating what might happen if that person, and you're getting all of the, you know, anxious feelings and the heart racing and the blood rushing of what happens.

47:39And when you're watching someone else and you're closely connected with the watching, but that's your life that you're doing. You can turn it off if it's Netflix or a movie or something else. But when it's your life, you live with that and you're just running on that fight or flight. You're running in the sympathetic nervous system all the time because you don't get to turn the movie off. And it's sometimes time to just join in and just be the character. And for you, for most of the time, you don't have, like the voice in your head is in sync in that way. It is very much in sync. In fact, the voice in my head just now was your voice.

48:15What do you mean? So as you were speaking, the only voice that's in my head is your voice. I'm with your voice because that's what's happening. so I'm in the habit and the practice of being with what is and not running commentary alongside which for some people maddens them because it means I respond to things slower as a result because I didn't process I'm with life I'm with what is happening not watching life and being a spectator. I am in my life. I feel being alive rather than being a spectator of my life that's sitting there on the sideline, you know, annoyingly having all kinds of judgments and interventions and, you know, postulating about and perseverating about what's going on or what could happen and what might happen and what happened, why didn't I do this or that, you know, it's like you can feel the energy of it.

49:15It's just, it's maddening. And when you throw that offline, you just get this. So when you sit, what do you hear when you sit quietly? So when I said earlier that the instructions that I think most of us get is, you know, we think and even sit quietly, right? So that conjures up all sorts of weird stuff for us, And so then we sit there and we're actively trying to be quiet. And so then we're in a little bit of a battle. So here's the way that I come to it. We're super stealthy, right? Like the ego structure or that extra voice, the sideshow is super stealthy. It's faster and smarter than us. And so my approach is you have to kind of get out of the way of even getting out of the way.

50:11And the way to do that is to have one single instruction. And the one single instruction is that you just return. You just come back to yourself. Just come back. Everything else is a sideshow. Everything else that you're doing is a sideshow or a rationale for the sideshow, or it's a judgment of the sideshow, or if it's a judgment of why you should have the sideshow, or maybe the sideshow is worthy this particular time, and it's all a sideshow. All of it is a sideshow. There's just your life. Can we just pause and say, you've just got a life, and that's it. That's it. And when I'm fully in my life, that's kind of enough for me.

51:00It's just my life. It takes up all my time, takes up all my energy, takes up all my attention. If I'm fully online with my life, that's all I need is my life. I don't need the sideshow. I don't need the conversations. I don't need the judgment. I don't need the perseverating. I don't need the postulating. I don't need going into the past, projecting myself into the future, wondering about that. I can just take up the full-ass space of my existence with facing my life and meeting my life just what's right here. So rather than sit quietly, I just invite people to come back to themselves because that's what we're trying to do.

51:44It's kind of a shortcut. Instead of doing all these other things that are about coming back to your life, how about just come back to your life? Just come back. Right. You don't have to sit quietly. The way that I say it is you're getting quiet enough to hear yourself. Whatever is happening, you can hear it, and you're getting still enough to be able to feel yourself. because if you've got a lot of things happening and moving around so that you can't even feel the condition of yourself, then you're not even in the game at all, right? So enough means just enough for you. And if you can feel yourself and hear yourself when you're running, that's awesome.

52:26That's good enough. You don't have to sit in a room. If you're on a bike and you just go and it's just like, wow, I can feel my senses. I feel my heart. I feel the quality of my skin. I feel the temperature. I feel the air moving through my hair. And I'm in this body. That's still enough. That's quiet enough. And that's the point. When Rev uses that word point, she's referring to something specific. I might use the wrong words here, so you'll have to forgive me. but my understanding is that she means a particular place where you learn to rest your attention and awareness. A place you will drift away from but which you'll learn to return to.

53:12I'm describing a place I'm trying to learn to get to but the instructions for getting there as I've heard them go like this. Find a place that's quiet enough. Get your body into a position that's comfortable enough. Find the specific place. REV specifies your lower belly. That's the place where your attention is supposed to rest as you breathe naturally. And as you find your attention awareness moving away, and it will, to a to-do list, to questions about what's going to happen next week, or what happened in the past, you'll just gently return to point. That's the whole thing. But I'm at the very beginning of trying to understand it, so it feels very strange to try to explain it.

53:56But the most basic instruction is just return. Meditation is not, for me, about sitting quietly or becoming quiet. It's about the choice. That when you find yourself anywhere other than where you intend to be, you come back. That's what I did when I was a kid. I was like, I don't want to be there. I want to come back. I am out here someplace else tripping on some other possibility that hasn't happened. I don't know if it's going to happen. I'm just going to come back right here. I'm curious how many people come to you like me, like whether election week for people who have a meditation practice is sort of like January at the gym, like just like a lot of nervous people being like help.

54:47Yes. Yes? Yes, absolutely. I don't personally entertain it anymore. Like, it's not how I face the world. But I always get my most podcasts and everything right around the election and right around in January, right, when everything jumps off. It's like prayer, you know. It's like, you know, you lose your keys and suddenly you get religious. Yeah. Like, I need to pray. I need to do something. But that makes sense. You know, it's when the bottom falls out. We feel the bottom is falling out or we fear the bottom is going to fall out beneath us that we want to find some ground. So, it's right. It's the right thing to do.

55:23Whatever brings you there, whatever throws you over the edge, that's the thing that should get you there. The thing I've been most astounded by in the people in my life who have been drawn to this hasn't, it's funny, I feel like this, not the sales pitch, but the sales pitch a little bit feels like maybe it would be easier to live in your own mind, which for me is very attractive. But then what I've seen some people growing into has been instead meditation that's about compassion, that's about not just being in your own mind as easily, but extending compassion to people who might be difficult or just far away from you.

56:07And I was wondering if you could talk about compassion practices. Yeah. I would love to say that compassion naturally arises out of every type of meditation. I don't think that's actually true. I think there's ways that people can meditate and use very focused meditation, right? Where it's about focus and concentrating attention that if there's no moral container, there's no moral container and it doesn't necessarily cause compassion to arise. so yay for your friends and the people that are like this comes along with it as well because they clearly have enough of a moral container either that they brought to it themselves or that's coming along with it as they teach.

57:00That is the ideal if we want to be useful for humanity. Meditation that doesn't cause and incite compassion to arise is not going to be of much use to us on the planet, frankly. Meditation is not in and of itself, like, it's just going to be good. It makes us better at something, but not necessarily things that are pro-social all the time. We pitch it as pro-social, but we should be clear about that. You could be like an executioner who was living in the moment, and you would still be an executioner. Totally. But what about, I mean, like, I guess one of the things that I was at, I won't say drag to, But I attended, as I was going with my editor, Shruti, to this event that was a bunch of meditation people and they were speaking.

57:45And I found it interesting and it was nice to be among people who were not my people, who were trying to ask and answer some of the questions I care about. And the moment that stopped me short was somebody, I think it was an audience member, asked one of the people on stage. they said well you know i'm somebody who's trying to practice compassion meditation and how do you when you sit and you try to extend compassion to to you know difficult people what do you do about donald trump and i had a moment it was funny sitting in the audience the first feeling i had was like a groan which was interesting where i was just like how can we have to talk about this right now?

58:26Or maybe it felt very like we're in Manhattan where everybody's of the same tribe and everybody agrees that the same person is bad. And there's something, but then really sitting with the question for a moment, I thought like, it's a great question. It's a really hard question. Like, how do you feel compassion towards people who have become an avatar of people who just like inflict suffering on a really wide scale. And I think, like, I live where I live and I'm in the tribe where I am. And so I like, it's like not hard for a person to predict, like, most of the people in my life, what they want to happen in a week.

59:04But everybody in the country right now has kind of been, everybody feels like the world's about to end. Maybe you feel like the world's about to end because Donald Trump's about to be elected, or maybe you feel like the world's about to end because Kamala Harris has been elected. And it feels like a moment of, I think most people feel alienated and most people feel like, who are these people? Even if they don't agree, which the people are. And I'm curious whether your meditation practices, when you think about having compassion for people, where you really disagree with them, or you really feel like they are moving through the world without compassion and just kind of like human bulldozers, but those feel like the people that you're supposed to aim it at.

59:48And again, this is more of like a series of statements that are shaped like a question mark than a question. But let me put it as a question. Okay. You, I assume, have a smartphone. I do. And you open your smartphone and one of the apps pushes you a notification that's just like, here's the last thing Donald Trump said and it's horrible. And a part of your brain comes online. What do you do with that part of your brain? What is the way you talk to yourself or what is the way you think about that? I'm from New York, so I say, oi

1:00:24I'm like oi and then I put it down it's like return yeah I'm just like I put it down I actually I feel a lot of compassion toward him or for him I don't mean I have to keep him close or you know make him my bedfellow or want him to win the presidency but I feel a great amount of suffering from that human being And mostly because I believe, I don't believe much, but I do believe that human beings are designed to be human. And so when they're acting outside of humanity in ways that are in conflict with humanity, then there's something wrong. And I feel badly for that. I feel badly for anyone that's been fashioned or shaped in such a way that the demands of their nervous system express themselves as operating against humanity.

1:01:17I feel for that. And if I didn't feel for that, I kind of should just jump off of this whole ship and get out of here. Because then it means that I've lost a hope and aspiration for us to do better. when I take it as, you know, somehow it's okay that that person is like that and they're just a shit because they're like that and I can write them off, then I've lost aspiration for all of us, honestly. Or I've decided that I'm going to partition and cut everybody up into the ones that deserve to be here and the ones that don't because they align with my values, beliefs, life's orientations, wishes once, and I'm queer and I'm Black and I'm like, I have like so many like points on the little like marginal spectrum.

1:02:07I would just suffer immensely if I spent all my, spent my time, not even all, some of my time suffering because of what other people are doing in ways that are contrary to the way that I want to live my life. I take it that just they're doing, their thing. And I put my time in, my effort in, my energy in to try to slow down the wheels that are grinding some of my freedoms to a halt the best that I can, and then try to advance and accelerate the ones that open up portals to evolutionary leaps to something else like marriage equality that just leaps us forward despite our best intention, many people's best intention to keep it from going that way.

1:02:51Then I just play that. But you know what? None of that is my life. That's not my life. That's the structures and the contours that we're living within and operating within. But I think the trait of, I don't want to say meditation, I would say liberation. The trait of liberation is to not mistake the mechanics and operation stuff for who I am. I don't mistake all of the things that are happening. I have to contend with them. But they're not who I am. I get to keep being me. I get to keep choosing who I am and how I show up. And when I find myself veering off the track of how I'd like to show up in relationship to life, then I return.

1:03:37Get back on track. Return. What do you think people come into meditation typically wanting? And do you think that they get the thing that they come in wanting? Yeah, I think they come in wanting escape.

1:03:55Escape. Quiet, right? Which is escape. And if they mature, they don't get it. And if they don't mature, they do. So if you don't mature, you do get the escape. and when you mature, you don't get to escape and when you mature more, you don't want to. Is what you're describing that you're able, it's like you're able to sit more fully and completely. I guess people talk about wanting to be in the present more. Everybody says it. It's like this, I always joke with my partner, I'm always like, you need to be in the MoMA. But like what it really means to be in the present is to not turn away from what hurts as well as what is beautiful about it.

1:04:47Yeah, and not just not turning away, it's like welcome it. Welcome it as an understanding of it's the flip side. It's just another facet of the joy and everything that we want to welcome. That's like, oh yeah, that comes to, that too. That's my favorite thing to say. I'm like, oh, that too. Like, that too. Yeah, and then you take a breath and you make more space in your body, your heart and your physicality and welcome it. We don't get a single direction door where we can let all the good stuff in and keep out and ward off the bad stuff that all comes in. How should I start? Well, you started already.

1:05:31You just returned. That curiosity that you have, that yearning to find yourself. It's all you need. Respond to it. It's like, oh, where am I? What am I? Okay, right here. That's the whole thing? That's it. There are courses. If you want 14-week courses, there's there. But, you know, I don't know, Call me lazy. Call me expedient, interested in scale. That really is it. What we're building on is the motivation to heed it. You have it. It's there. We all come with it. That you ask the question, it means you're already there. What we build is the motivation and the practice to heed it. And to heed it so much that it becomes second nature.

1:06:37And then to heed that so much that becomes backward belongs, which is first nature. It's so intimidating, but I really, I'll try it. I hope so. I hope it's a little less intimidating. You know, it's intimidating because we are intimidating. Meeting ourselves is intimidating. That's the thing that we find out. It's like turns out none of that other stuff, and we spend a lot of time fabricating things to be intimidated by. But it turns out that the most challenging thing is to turn around and just meet ourselves where we are. Yeah. Yeah.

1:07:20Rev Angel Kyoto Williams. You can find her online at revangel.com. If you visit, you'll find audio recordings of instructions for point meditation. Also, on November 16th, she's holding a half-day sitting meditation. it's over Zoom. You can join from home. If you want more information, you can also find it on her website. Rev, thank you. Thank you.

1:08:10That's our show this week. If you are getting any value out of this show and you would like to help us make it, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You get ad-free episodes of the show as well as the occasional bonus episode. Mainly, you vote for our existence. If you want to sign up for Incognito Mode, go to searchengine.show. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinnemanani, and was produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis.

1:08:46Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Miranda, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Matt Casey-Moore, Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. follow and listen to search engine with PJ vote now for free on the odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts thank you for listening we'll see you next week