This Is Why I Find Pema Chödrön So Essential

29:42I don't want to be thinking about this. I'm not trying to do it. Worried thoughts do feed themselves, absolutely. And part of the book, Another Kind of Freedom, which is that commentary on Trungpa Rinpoche's book, there is this part which may have had a big effect on me where he talks about there's nothing wrong with, in this case it was negativity, but let's just say nothing wrong with back pain or nothing wrong with worrying about the future. Nothing wrong. but the problem is what he called negative negativity. That's on top of worrying, then there's judgment about worrying, and it goes way down the rabbit hole, right?

30:24It's almost like, I think, in your case, like on the airplane, it would be almost like meditating, getting back to meditation, where you, I don't know what you do when you meditate exactly, but do you have an object of meditation often? No, I tend to do noting. I sort of continuously speak, either aloud or mentally, what I'm aware of at that moment and from which sense. So I'm aware of looking at you. I'm aware of hearing the sound as you sort of affirm what I'm saying. I'm aware of feeling my fingers touch each other right now and just sort of letting everything come into awareness but doing nothing about it.

31:02But doing nothing about it, right. I think I could work with noting, too, in terms of this. But just in terms of more familiar ground for me, let me just propose if what you did was say, okay, I'm going to be gently note or aware of my breath going out and coming in. And my intention here is to just as much as possible stay fully present with the breath going out and the breath coming in. Nothing forced, just natural breathing. Okay, so then what happens is the worry thought is like a magnet. It's very seductive, like the sirens, you know, calling you. It keeps pulling you off. Fine, that's what happens.

31:48So then we just keep coming back to being present with the breath going in and breath going out, and then it pulls you away again. But you're training in noting that you're going off and then coming back. You're training in noting that you're going off and coming back. So you interrupt it, I guess you could say. You just get the hang of what it feels like to not continue with the storyline. And then you might find that by the time you land in San Francisco or wherever you're going, that there's been a shift in your anxiety level, a shift in your obsessive thinking part, you know, and that you're more ready to just go in without hope and fear into the situation.

32:33You're in a different place with the whole thing because you've stayed so present with what's going on. I think I'm very interested in, and this is just my own experience with myself, but the difference between energy of doing something and energy of just allowing something to be there. And to me, a lot of the exhaustion from worrying he's actually trying to think about like well what can i do about it you know do i need to be uh you know sucking on a throat lozenge and you know when i go there should i see a doctor and the the kind of trying to actually solve it and this is true in a lot of areas of my life versus just it's there like the thoughts are there i might lose my voice and i mean of course there are things in life that we want to change you do physical therapy for your back.

33:25I work in politics. I'm trying to effectuate change, not just allow things to be the way they are. And on the other hand, for me at least, how much I've trained the energy of trying to change things and solve problems and act and optimize, it's made me realize how untrained for me and unfamiliar, actually, the energy of just letting things be. I'm sure it's very unfamiliar. But are you attracted to it? Yeah. We wouldn't be having this conversation if I weren't attracted to it. And so do you find that you can do it sometimes? Just be? It's the thing I'm starting to try to learn how to do. It's been a big shift in my own meditation practice.

34:08So I do think, you know, I think probably anxiety comes up a lot. Like I was anxious about coming over here. So. What about it made you anxious? Oh, coming here? Unknown. So unknown. You weren't comfortable with the uncertainty? Actually, I didn't have a storyline, particularly. It was just butterflies in the stomach. My daughter asked me, well, what are you afraid of? And I said, I actually don't know. I'm just having butterflies. But I wasn't having a problem with having butterflies. I think that's what I'm trying to get at. It was just an automatic response. Nothing wrong with it. It wasn't escalating into a big storyline, oh, I'm going to be a big flop, or he'll ask me and I won't be able to talk.

34:55It didn't go any of those places. And so it just was, I think we have these just old habitual responses to things. Butterflies, no big deal, butterflies, is what I'm thinking in this case. So in terms of the worry, that's no big deal either. But somehow it escalates and escalates and escalates. And that's when the real unnecessary suffering gets strong, right? And affects you physically. And so you're just coming back to what it feels like in my solar plexus or whatever with a feeling of sense of humor, warmth, no big deal, something more along those lines. you're interrupting the tendency to escalate.

35:43So you're actually kind of practicing non-resistance. We've talked so much about the relationship to discomfort. What about the relationship to comfort? I love it.

35:58Well, this is a really important question. So let's talk about comfort as a comfort zone. That's the expression that people use. Are you familiar with that expression? So everybody needs some time with the comfort zone because your nervous system needs it. Swimming in the ocean, all these things that soothe you, listening to music that you love and all these things. But there's no growth in the comfort zone. Growth happens where it's more uncomfortable. And we call it challenge because we've come up against our edge a little bit there. And so you want your edge to expand. In other words, if today your edge is the sidewalk, then by this time next year you want to be able to walk five blocks or something like that.

36:48Yeah, somebody once said to me that the amount of growth you are capable of is a direct correlate of the amount of discomfort you're willing to tolerate. Oh, that's right on. That person was very wise who said that to you. That's absolutely true. So I guess what we're talking about then is to the degree that we can feel discomfort, to that degree we can grow. And grow means let the natural change in evolution happen rather than get frozen in views and opinions that keep you stuck in the same way for your whole life, really. Meditation has been coming in and out of this conversation. And what is the purpose for you of meditation?

37:33What are you trying to practice? There could be a lot of answers to that question. But I think of it as a way to get to know yourself deeply, intimately, fearlessly, with an attitude of friendliness. So a person who goes on a meditation retreat, let's say, where you do more hours, and then inevitably things start floating up. Like maybe they think this is all about getting calm and blissful, but then when they go on the meditation retreat, a lot of painful memories, regrets, flashbacks, all kinds of stuff comes up. For instance, I once raised my hand with Chogim Trimpa Rinpoche, and I said, Rinpoche, you're always talking about making friends with yourself.

38:20But I've been meditating now for a couple of years, and I think I'm getting a lot of ammunition and proof that I am a pretty messed up person. And then he said, okay, move closer to the feeling of messed up. That was his answer. One of my teachers is called Soni Rinpoche, and he has this expression, being okay with not being okay, which I think I like that a lot because it's very pithy. It's kind of a fearless thing to see your habits, to see your emotional reactivity, to see maybe selfishness, pride, rage about things that you thought you had worked through and all this kind of stuff. So to me, making friends with yourself is making friends with all of that, all of that unresolved and stuff like this.

39:12So meditation provides a forum or something like this for you to be able to see yourself very clearly. And then the instruction is to agree with what you're seeing, to not reject what you're seeing. What about for someone who's experienced meditation, which I think is very common, is not that they get these fireworks of self-insight, but they just realize they can't take 10 breaths without their mind running away from them. And they're bored. Okay. Yes, absolutely. I was kind of jumping ahead, I guess, a little bit in terms of what I was saying. One of the things Trump-Romarche says in Myth of Freedom is he has a whole chapter called Boredom.

39:55And the chapter is about what a wonderful thing boredom is. Why is it a wonderful thing? He says, because it doesn't feed the ego at all. There's nothing about it that feeds the ego. And so if you start getting bored, that is an excellent sign that your meditation is progressing and that, okay, sit through the hot boredom until it becomes cool boredom. And so hot boredom is what we're familiar with, which is like jumpiness. You want to get out of there. Boredom has this quality of just wanting to bolt, you know. And cool boredom is you just, you sit there with the feeling of boredom. I would hear these teachings on cool boredom, and honestly, I had not a clue what they were talking about.

40:42And I use this example. So I went to Mexico where my parents had retired. My father had died. My mother liked to sit inside with all the windows, shades closed in Mexico, where outside of her door and the windows was like blazing with color and action and everything's happening. And I'm young, you know. And so I go there to be with her and everything in me wants to be outside there. So for the first two days, I was so bored and restless. And then I realized I came all this way to be with my mother. At some point, I just gave up the struggle and I was just there with my mother. And then it was so remarkable because I began to feel like I was sitting on a stage, and every once in a while the door would open and a friend would come in or something, they'd have this conversation, and then the door would close, and then we were in this like nothing happening zone.

41:43And I just sat there with her, and then she'd start talking, and then that's what was happening. The whole thing became kind of fascinating. It feels very similar to what you were saying earlier about the suffering was coming from resistance. That's right. The suffering was coming from the resistance. And so I learned, I said, oh, this is cool boredom. I'm just here with it and there's no resistance. I actually think time is a very interesting dimension of all of this. I mean, everybody feels uncomfortable sometimes, but really, in a way, what we're talking about here, what you're talking about, is being willing to feel like that for longer without acting.

42:23You have a line where you say, the opposite of patience is aggression, the desire to jump and move, to push against our lives, to try to fill up space. You talk about refraining as the method of becoming a Dharmic person. And in some ways, I don't understand any of this as never acting, but as taking a longer space. Before acting. Before acting. Yeah, absolutely. And that's been a very important and transformative. Distinction. Insight for me. And I'd be curious to just hear more from you on this dimension of time and action. Along the lines of what I was just saying, it would mean that you're very patient.

43:04Just tell me about how you understand patience. First, let's start with impatience, because might as well start where we are, right? I experience as restless and, like I was saying about boredom, wanting to get out of there, wanting to move, to just get off the hot seat, sort of. And then patience would be sitting still with that restless energy, just sitting there with it, you know, like in my mother's living room. That's how I experienced patience. So again, it's growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Patience is part of, it would be a necessary tool, I guess you could call it. Do you think that that as a general capacity, as weekend, and I'm thinking of something you wrote that I think about a lot.

43:56You wrote, refraining is very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. It's a quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It's a practice of not immediately filling up space just because there's a gap. And we didn't used to have the ability to fill the space of every gap. You know, you were sitting in traffic and there wasn't a lot to do. You were in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at. And now we have the world of distraction at our fingertips. We have AirPods in our ears. And so just the daily necessity of sitting with boredom even has dissolved.

44:39That's so true. And I think it changes us. It's so true, and not for the better, I would say. Less in touch with the richness of the world. You were discussing with me earlier about going on the subway without your earpods, you know, and just sitting there and how rich an experience it was of just being there, the sights and sounds and what was happening, the drama and just the whole experience as being very rich. and sometimes with students, very often these days, I really encourage them to one day a week or one morning a week or take an opportunity time when they just go offline and go to the grocery store offline, ride on the subway offline, be there fully for what's happening because you're not engrossed in a movie or a podcast or anything.

45:41Let's not get crazy here. I put you out of business, Ezra. But you know how it is. You go on the subway or anywhere and everybody is somewhere else. So I encourage them to be present without their device. But, you know, I'm trying to be realistic and just say, do it this short period of time every Wednesday or every Wednesday morning or something like that. And it's like my granddaughter, when she was still in college, and her teacher said, no devices in the room. And I said, couldn't you just turn the sound off? She said, no, because it vibrates. So then, you know, so they had to leave them outside.

46:22My attention is different if I can feel my phone in my pocket. Yep. So when we do, when I do conversations, my phone is here. It's not in my pocket right now. It's on the floor near me. Right. Because my attention to you would be different if it were in my pocket. Of course. Even knowing that the sound is off, even though I'm not going to check in. Right, exactly. That's what she said. And then she said, I never realized how I was training myself to be distracted. That was her vocabulary. And because it was so different being in class without it, even just in her pocket, as you say. So, yeah, I think everybody can do themselves a big favor by spending some time offline and seeing what that's like for them.

47:08And, you know, you could say, well, that's when you get into being bored. But you could also say, well, maybe that's when you get into being alive, more alive. I mean, the subway is such a great example of fascinating, really totally fascinating to just be there because of the people, if nothing else, just what's, there's so much happening from when you get on to when you get off. There is so much. I'm sometimes thinking, wish weren't happening, but nevertheless. To just expand that, we were talking earlier off the microphone about one thing I've been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on the subway and just be aware of what's happening around me.

47:51And it's interesting because a lot of the times I don't really love what's happening around me. It's a rich experience, but it's a boombox. It's

48:00somebody trying to grab my attention with music I don't really want to be listening to. It's the screeching of the brakes, but there's just a lot going on. And dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the right music or podcast or thing on my Kindle to distract myself in the right way and try to maintain a kind of like a hermetic comfort, it's easier to stop. That's been my big lesson from it. It's not so much that I love every moment on the subway, but I didn't quite notice how much energy I was expending trying to block it all out. Do you feel more relaxed? I do. I do. And then I pick up my kids and I'm more present with them.

48:38Because I've just spent the last 35 minutes practicing being present as opposed to practicing finding somewhere my mind would rather be. So it's interesting because I would call that a form of meditation. You're just present. It's interesting because we didn't used to have all these devices. I grew up before television even. But now that we have the devices, it's very helpful actually to feel the contrast. Somehow it's richer. You have a lovely line. I think it's a line somebody told you, that meditation is not a vacation from irritation. That's right. That's right. The first time I ever went for meditation instruction, that's what the woman said to me.

49:23And then later I saw that it was from Myth of Freedom that Chokyam Trubrat said that, and she plagiarized. But anyway, it made a big impression on me, because that's right, meditation is not a vacation from irritation. It's just another way of saying the same kind of thing, you know. But I have to say, even though I was introduced to this view or this attitude from day one, it took me a lot of years to somehow have it penetrate and get to me, the path of non-resistance. It was in there. The seed was in there. But it wasn't that I immediately was open to everything that was happening. Can I narrate that progress for a minute?

50:05Because I mean, somebody listening to this, here you are, you're a famed nun. And the idea of moving from I've never meditated to whatever you must be experiencing seems very intimidating. How would you describe the stages your experience of meditation or your relationship to it have gone through? Hmm. That's a difficult question to answer because I've never actually given it a lot of thought. But let me just go back to remembering the first time I was taught to meditate. I could hardly stay with the breath for two seconds, you know. But then that was like what I was saying earlier. It was just a revelation to see how I had no idea that my mind was like that.

50:57And instead of being discouraged by that, because of what my teacher at the time was telling me and so forth, I was told, just expect that. That actually meditation is not about getting rid of thoughts. There's always going to be thoughts, but you don't have to follow them for an hour and a half. So I would say in the beginning, very wild mind. And when I say beginning, I don't just mean first month or something. I guess for a couple of years, maybe, maybe five years. I don't know how long, but of course I kept at it and I did some long meditation practices. We had these month-long meditation practices and I did that kind of thing.

51:41And then what started to happen more was, okay, a very important thing was I, um, Trumper Rinpoche used to talk about something he called the gap. And again, I, I didn't really know what in the world he was talking about, but he said, you know, it could be possible that at the end of every breath, there's a gap before you breathe back in again. And he, he haven't sometimes gave a meditation, like just natural breathing out and then pause, like create a gap and then come back in. So he called that the gap and it had supposedly very profound, but I didn't have a clue really what he was talking about.

52:24And then I was in a meditation retreat, and we had a big fan that was going all the time. And so the hum of the fan became just background noise that was always there. So I was sitting there meditating, doing my practice, and the fan is going, and all of a sudden, it went off for just a second. I said, that's the gap. That's what he's talking about.

52:57So then I understood what he meant by gap. He meant there's all this noise, and then suddenly there's silence. It's sort of like being in a, use the image of being in a sack or something like that, and it's dark, and then there's this little slit, and you suddenly realize, oh, there's a whole big space out there. It's sort of like that. Someone used this example that they were in a room with this teacher in Nepal, and his window was covered with black plastic. And he said, think of that as just all the discursive thoughts, this black plastic, It's just covering over. And then you just make a pinprick in it, and then the light comes through.

53:41And that's like, oh, there's a background here to this whole thing. In a breath. So he said that you could, at the end of every breath, you could pause, and you could experience that gap. In the tense of the fan, it was just the sound was going, and then it stopped. So you could say, in terms of chatter, it would be, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. Chatter, chatter. chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. But you're not trying to prefer the gap. You're just trying to discover that, say, if the discursive thoughts and emotions and everything are foreground, there's also a background to the whole thing that you could connect with at any moment.

54:27A kind of, you could call it a stillness. You could call it an openness, freshness. I have a question about this. I think a question I really struggle with. When I read his books, when I read your books, I feel like there's a shifting back and forth a little bit between this instruction of there is no good, there is no bad. It is not better to have mental chatter. It is not better to have spacious mental quiet. It is not better to see the light coming through the pinhole in the black plastic over the chatter of the mind. It is not better to be looking at the black plastic. There's this non-dualism, everything is totally fine and in some ways the same because it's all the ground of experience.

55:17And? And maybe it is better. So why don't we even talk about gap then? Because it's there, I guess. I guess because it's there. But I think I'm asking at the underlying thing that is there. I feel like sometimes there is a conversation about better and worse or that nothing is better and nothing is worse. And then sometimes something seems to be being described that is better. Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. And well, that's where sense of humor comes in and ability to be okay with paradox and ambiguity and things not always being so neat and tidy like that. Because if you know the basic thing, that struggle, polarization, pitting one thing against another, trying to get better, which comes from the place of feeling that you're not good enough to begin with, you know, as long as you have the idea that we're moving in the direction of you're okay just the way you are.

56:20that's a Suzuki Roshi joke Suzuki Roshi was a Zen master in San Francisco started the San Francisco Zen Center and he had this expression he looked out at the audience at his students and he said you are all perfect just as you are and you can use a little work and it is sort of like that you know and how do you understand what he meant I understand that fundamentally we have Buddha nature that would be the traditional way to say it, but you could say fundamentally everybody has this potential for awakening from the sleep of confusion. Let's call it that in a kind of glamorous language. But everybody has that potential and you look out and you see a room full of Buddhas.

57:08You see a room full of people that are awake but just don't realize it, something like that. And so you begin to say, okay, I'm one of them, you know, and I want to recognize more my true nature, I guess you could say. But the thing is, if you want to recognize the true nature by getting rid of the ego, let's say, it doesn't work. The only way to actually have the confusion lesson is to become familiar, intimate with yourself just as you are, which is a lot of confusion and wild-mindedness and boredom and all those things, you know. And so if you have a view that there's nothing problematic with any of that, then you can also understand that my fundamental nature is basic goodness, but I'm not recognizing that.

58:04And so the work is kind of uncovering what's already here. So it is a paradox. Earlier in the conversation, you were talking about unconditional love. Yeah. And what you're saying there, as I was trying to absorb it, made me think of it, that the thing that came to mind is how I feel as a parent. Yeah, that's a good example. I don't want my children to be any different than they are. I, in some ways, absolutely don't want them to be any different than they are. I love them just the way they are. And also, I want them to grow. And there are ways that they can grow, but it doesn't come from a desire to change them.

58:41like I really do like I really love them as they are and I want them to grow and you know learn how to do more math and you know all the things you do as a person and put on their own pants tie their own shoes but so they're both there it was funny it was the only experience I could come to that had both of those in my head so it's a good one you could think of yourself that way you know just think of yourself that way Does that make sense? Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah. You could. You used to be that little, you know. But you don't have to think of yourself necessarily as a little kid, but you could think of yourself as fine just as you are, and yet at the same time, let's just say, not wanting to harm people with my speech, not wanting to harm people with my actions, not wanting to be so critical-minded about everything.

59:36So it is paradoxical. But the basic view is that there's nothing wrong here. How do you think about the relationship between that kind of... Here we're talking about is loving and changing. But the way I want to ask the question is more about the relation between abiding and acting. We've talked about abiding in difficult emotions. And I think that a question that comes up for people, and that's come up for me, is if your partner treats you badly and you think, okay, I'm having these difficult emotions, I'm gonna sit here and I'm not going to be reactive and I'm going to work with the texture of them and drop the storyline and touch the energy of the emotion.

1:00:22And yet your therapist would say, well, maybe the story here is important. Maybe this person is not treating you well. Maybe you are allowing it because you don't love yourself enough. Maybe you, this is not, I'm not giving an example of my own life here. I'm just using it as an example. But there is something about the dropping of storylines that can become, or at least I fear it can become, also a way to accept situations that shouldn't be accepted. Yeah, yeah. To deny the responsibility for change. Yeah, I hear you. How do you think about that? Yeah. Well, one, I frequently get women in abusive relationships.

1:01:03And I always say, get out of there as fast as you can. Like one woman stood up and she was saying, she described it as an abusive relationship with her husband for many years. And she said, so I try to work with it by just going to the feelings and all of this. I said, forget about all of that. Just get out of the relationship. You need to get out of the relationship and get some distance from it. That is the most compassionate thing you can do for your husband and also for yourself. So I said, you know, this is not the time to sit there and contact what it feels like in the body. This is time to just get out.

1:01:47Take the kids and go and just start exploring how you could do that, how you practically could do that. You know, go to your mother's or whatever. She actually wrote to me later, that woman, and said that she had followed that advice and thanked me. For some reason, she was willing to just take my word for it. I guess she was probably ready. But she would have been an example of what you're talking about, where she was just using my instructions but staying there, being beaten. It was crazy, crazy situation. So that's an extreme situation, of course. So how then do you discern when you should be acting, when you should be taking the storyline seriously versus when you should be abiding, feeling, touching the energy without the storyline?

1:02:33That's a really good question. And this comes up a lot with protesting injustice in various forms. and that conversation I've had with a lot of people and I always say you know I say what they already know but then we have a discussion about it and that is that you're not effective if you're caught in strong emotions and you're being carried away by the energy of anger or something like this that you just can't be effective first of all you're not able to communicate someone's only going to hear your anger. They're not going to hear your words. And there's no possibility of change. So first of all, I say, try to experiment with ways that actually start to communicate to the heart of the people that you're trying to influence for change.

1:03:29Try it when you're angry. Try it when you're not angry. Find out for yourself. That's the only way it really lands in the body. So I'm encouraging the people to continue with what they're doing, but not when they're caught up in their kleshas. That's a Tibetan word for strong, destructive emotions. And then in that process, they might go to the body, feel what they're feeling, gut and touch, as a way of being able to then walk through the door and have the conversation that doesn't come from that place and is actually curious to hear what they have to say and is actually open to hearing what they have to say and isn't controlled by fear.

1:04:18It's more like a willingness to kind of take a leap, I guess you could say.

1:04:48One of the things I've experienced with some of your work and some of this is that there were a lot of actions I was not willing to take because I was afraid of feeling the discomfort, the uncertainty associated with them. Right. And it was only when I became less afraid of feeling that that I could take those actions. There are many actions I could take to try to avoid those feelings, and I did take them. It didn't work, right? It worked in its own way, but yes, there were forms of change. And also, I mean, even in this work, forms of conversation that were not on the table. What does it mean, not on the table?

1:05:28That I just wasn't willing to sit in the discomfort of confronting a certain personal situation or risking a certain outcome or having a certain kind of political conversation across difference. Because I didn't trust my own ability to hold the discomfort of it. Right. And it was, you know, and it's an ongoing process for me, certainly. But getting more comfortable being uncomfortable has opened up a wider range of space in which I can act. There are actions I wouldn't even really let myself think about. That now you can? That now I can because I'm not as afraid of them. You know, I think a really good way to go about this is think like, okay, where do I want to be in one year time?

1:06:18How about five years? Do I want to be stuck in exactly the same way on this day, 2027? Or on this day in 2027, will I feel that, okay, I'm able to sit with discomfort a little bit more than before? In other words, it's a growth process, and I think you're actually changing the DNA in some kind of way. Like, it's really fundamental what's being changed. All these studies now about the brain and how meditation affects it and stuff, they have some interesting observations from that. And one of them is that there's grooves in the brain that we experience as habitual patterns, and that every time you follow the habitual pattern in the old way, the grooves are getting deeper.

1:07:09And every time you even pause and consider an alternative, it opens up a new neurological pathway. And there's an opportunity for change in that way, really at the level of your brain. So I found that pretty exciting to hear about that because it's so optimistic in a way. So you were saying, what about meditation and what it is? And I was emphasizing, in this case, it would be seeing what the habits are that you're stuck in, that you keep making that grows deeper and deeper, and experimenting with how to open up new ones. And it says that all you have to do is even just don't go down the rabbit hole and don't do anything else.

1:07:55That opens up new. Or just sit there with the feeling that is coming up in meditation. For me, some of what's so both intense and interesting about meditation is just sitting there and not doing anything with what's going on in my head, which I find difficult. Yeah, right. I want to pick up on something you said a minute. But possible, right? Very possible. And the more I do it, the better I get at it. Exactly. Let me, as we come to a close here, ask you about a very lovely line in one of your teacher's books. He writes, one's whole practice should be based on the relationship between you and nowness.

1:08:32Oh, I love that. Yeah. Nowness is a word I really love. I struggle a bit with nowness. I struggle a lot with nowness. It feels like one of those sentences that has a universe in it. Yeah. Read it to me again. One's whole practice should be based on the relationship between you and nowness. Yes. Yeah, in another place he says, like, let the thread of nowness run through your whole life. But you don't like the word nowness, so it doesn't communicate to you. No, I do. I just struggle with achieving it. Oh, I see. It's a wonderful word. Well, you are achieving it on the subway without your devices.

1:09:13But I would just be curious on hearing your reflection, because this can all feel so abstract, but just what does it mean to have a relationship with nowness? Okay, basically that you're present instead of drawn off, and that being present itself can tune you into a bigger perspective on your life. I was talking about foreground and background. An example might be the difference between being all caught up in your thoughts and going to the window and looking at the sky. And, you know, it's like the astronauts' experiences. They're all out there, and they're having these amazing spiritual experiences just because they're seeing the Earth from the perspective of vast space.

1:10:07And earlier astronauts had the same experience. They said, it's just this one Earth. Why can't we just all live on it together? It seems so easy from the perspective of infinity or like that. And then you get back down on Earth and right away all your habitual patterns and things click in. You're already stuck in struggle and so forth. So in a way, I guess what it means with nowness is that you begin to have more of that big perspective that puts everything in perspective. and then you just go about your life, but all the time you know at the same time that Earth is a little dot and you are nothing, and really tiny, tiny in the face of this vast universe that just expands forever and does not have an end.

1:11:01If you do this practice in a committed way, I mean, you've done it for many decades, if what is promising is not an end to pain, if what it's promising is not that you'll always feel radiant joy or equanimity, what is it promising? What are you trying to achieve, or what is achieved amidst it?

1:11:32Contentment. being okay with how things unfold, even if it's disturbing. In other words, okay with how things unfold doesn't mean that you wouldn't act, but it does mean that you aren't struggling against what's happening. Contentment is so deep because you're not struggling against the unfolding of your life. You're more like letting it unfold and then doing things to fine-tune it or uncover the openness and vastness of your mind and not be all caught up in the smallness of petty grievances and criticisms and likes and dislikes. So somehow then all of that likes and dislikes and everything just have a lot of room to exist.

1:12:29And so there is a sense of less and less separation between you and your experience. And that has a lot of contentment in it. I would say definitely that I am deeply contented with my life. And I have a very good life, and there's not a lot of horror in it or anything like that. But I do feel it comes from not from the outer circumstances, but from the meditation practice and working with my mind. And knowing that mind has so much power to make you suffer or to help you stay awake and alive to your life. I think that's a lovely place to end. Then always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

1:13:16Yes, right. So I recommend Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trimhor Roshi, which is an excellent book to be reading right now in terms of what's happening in the world. and I recommend Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Suzuki Roshi, which is one of the very first books I ever read in Buddhism. Have you read it? And I recommend this book called Enlightened Vagabond by Matthew Ricard. He collected stories about this 19th century eccentric Buddhist master, but very eccentric and the stories are totally delightful and it's like every story has a moral, so to speak. But funny, very, very funny and the man was fabulous character.

1:14:15So I love those stories and Matthew Ricard collected them over many, many, many years hearing them from his teachers and things. So those are the three books that I recommend. Bama Chodron, thank you very much. Ezra Klein, thank you very much.

1:15:12The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser.