#751: Elizabeth Gilbert and Jack Kornfield

25:59That's where it's really, really hard. There's a couple layers of it. I now treat my inbox like it's my home because I think it's an extension of my home. So if somebody walks into my home uninvited and announces themselves and doesn't say how they got a key and asks for something, I delete that email. I'm just like, I didn't invite you in. There are proper channels. You know what they are. I don't know how you got my personal email. And I just delete it. And if I feel a sense in my sternum of offense, of feeling like this person has taken the liberty, I don't believe that I owe them anything.

26:33I don't believe that I owe them anything anymore than if I came down to my kitchen and saw people sitting at my table who I didn't know eating breakfast. I wouldn't believe that I owed them to make them a cup of coffee. I'd be like, get out of my house. You're not supposed to be here. I don't even think I owe them a polite response. I owe them nothing. I didn't ask you to come into my house. I don't owe you anything. So that's the easiest. Those are ones that are easy. And I now treat myself to doing that. I mean, I do that every day. I clear my inbox out very quickly now. And then I'm entertained when they come back later and they're like, just circling back.

27:06And I'm like, yeah, just deleting you again. Circle back as many times as you want. You are not coming in. So that's simple. Just bumping this up, Pixar. Yeah, I'm just bumping you back. It's like whack-a-moles. It's like, I can do this all day. Delete, delete, delete. If it's somebody who I care about, if it's something that I'm interested in, but I'm just not going to do it because I don't want to, I will write back and say, thank you so much, and I'm really honored that you invited me to this, but I'm not going to be able to do this at this time. and I don't feel I need to give a reason. I think a simple no is really, really good.

27:44And the reason, sometimes the reason it's good not to give an explanation is that if that person is an expert manipulator, as many of us are, that explanation will not suffice. So it won't matter what you give as an explanation because they can come back and be like, well, we can do it by audio. You know, we can do, oh, if you're, oh, well, we can do it a different weekend. Just no. And I learned a lot about this from my teacher, Byron Katie, who teaches an amazing thing called the School for the Work. She's a whole nother being who's not at all living by the rules. He's extraterrestrial, for sure.

28:19She is extraterrestrial. She is the only fully enlightened human being I believe I have ever met. And as such, she does not have any trouble saying an honest yes and no to people. Just to underscore that, because I did an in-person training with her. I mean, literally no hesitation, no struggle, no conflict. It's bizarre and mesmerizing to watch. And she loves you. Yeah. She loves you. There's also no hostility. No offense, no hostility. Somebody came up to her at an event, handed her a book that they'd written, which people do to me all the time, too. So I really marveled at this. They said, I wrote this and I want to share it with you.

29:03And she said, oh, sweetheart, I'm never going to read that. She said, true. It's just true. I'm never going to read that. And I'm like, oh, my God, I didn't know you could say that. So that's amazing. And she said it so lovingly, like, oh, no, I have no interest in reading that. So she teaches, I don't know if you did, when you took her training, did you do where she teaches a simple no? and she does the training on how to give a simple no. I don't think we actually spent much time on that. So I would love to hear you say more. We worked on the emotional one pages and the turnarounds. We did a lot on the turnarounds, which is probably, we could do a whole episode just on that.

29:40Everybody look up Byron Katie. She's amazing. And if you have the means and if you have the chance to ever take her nine-day school for the work, it's the most important thing I've ever done for myself. So I say that quite simply. But she has a whole day in the nine-day school for work, which is about the simple no. And the simple no is ways to say no. And it always begins with thank you. And there's never a but. Because she feels that the word but is very cruel. And it's just an and. So it's thank you and no. And that's it. That's a simple no. And then if they come back, you can say. Well, hold on.

30:14Just to pause for a second. Is that literally the phrasing? Or is it just. Yeah. Thank you and no. Yeah, that's it. That's it. And it just, it still makes my stomach ache because I'm like, oh my God, you can't just do that. You've got to give, you've got to like do the dance. And she's like, you don't have to do the dance. And she's the one who taught me if the person is a good enough manipulator, it doesn't matter what you bring. They're going to manipulate it. And the beautiful thing about a simple no is that it gives, in the jujitsu game, it gives somebody no weapon that they can take and bring back you.

30:41They can say you're being incredibly selfish. And you can say, I hear that. And you might be right about that. That's another one. She always says, you might be right about that. You might be right about that. And no. And you just keep adding and no after the statement. So then there's, but you know, I really, I need you to do this. I'm desperate. And you say, I see that. I see your desperation. And no. And one other thing she'll add is you can say, if I change my mind about this, I'll let you know. And no. And that's been a game changer for me. So I just did one last week. Somebody who I have a professional relationship said, I want you to do this one hour video interview to promote this thing that I'm doing.

31:26And old Liz would have thought I owe her that because she did this other thing for me that time. And I checked in with my inner compass and I was like, nothing in me wants to do this. And so I just wrote back to her, I said, I'm so sorry. And I'm not going to be able to do this at this time. And she wrote back and pushed in and said, oh, let me clarify. I wasn't clear about why we need it. We really need it because right now it's really hard for us to sell things because of COVID-19. And that's why we need it. And I wrote back and said, I hear you and I understand you and no. And it goes away.

32:00They don't tend to come back a third time. You know, it really does just stop and let it sit at the no. The more words you add after that, the more entangled you get. But again, I want to make clear, it's hardest closest to home and it's hardest with family. And with family, I find if I anticipate that I'm going to be asked something, I really have to practice. I really, because it's scary and I have to really practice and be like, and just practice saying, I'm not doing that right now. I'm not coming this year. And I'll say it a thousand times. I'll just go for a long walk and I'll just practice it and practice it and practice it.

32:36Because as I say, the closer the people are to you, the more difficult it is. It has a bit of personal digression here. I was working on a book, an entire book about saying no this past summer. And the great irony, of course, is that I came up with all the reasons why I shouldn't write the book in the process of putting it together. But what I noticed as I was practicing different ways of saying no is that it's an incredibly clarifying exercise because it, in a sense, it kind of brings to surface the true character of many people you know or people who are attempting to reach you. And what I found surprising, and maybe I shouldn't have found it surprising, is that many of my close friends who I anticipated might be upset would respond with, dude, good for you for respecting your boundaries.

33:29That's a great line. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? Rock on. And they got it. And they were just like, oh, I wish I could say that more myself. Like, good for you. And it was the bonfire that wasn't a bonfire in those cases. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Did you ever run into a bonfire that was one? Oh, for sure. Absolutely. And then I'm like, oh, wow. Because what I like about what you said about the jujitsu analogy is that if you provide really specific reasons for why you can't do it and you elaborate, you've just created a potential negotiation. But if you don't provide that grip, that toll hold, then one of the few responses someone can give you if they're upset and still want to push is some type of personal ad hominem attack or an accusation.

34:23And then you're like, oh, wow. Okay, now it's that kind of party. Okay, this is good to know before we're on stage having a public tiff at God knows what. I mean, this is valuable information. So there were definitely some bonfires and basically people just self-immolated because I was like, oh, wow, you've just proved my internal compass to be extremely accurate. Right. This is the reason. And here is the reason I'm not working with you. But you don't even just say that. You just know it because the body knows first. The body knows first, but only always. Only always. One of the things that Martha says that I love is she's like, because culture and civilization have overwritten the software system of the body so much and told you that you don't trust that, what you trust are the rules and the mores and the fear-based, scarcity-based grasping.

35:17This is how you have to act. This is who you have to be in order to be safe. And meanwhile, our body's like, ew, you know how it's working? No, yuck, ew, gross. Or on the opposite side, like yummy. money like that's i want to be over there i want to be with those people you know i don't want to be with these people and if you think about it the wisdom of the body is so incredible how many people do you know who said i knew the night before my wedding that this was a mistake how many people do you know said that and yet why did you do it because you were 29 and it was time to get married because you'd been raised in a culture that said this is what you do now because the invitations had been sent out because 300 people had gathered, because your family spent$30 ,000 on the wedding.

36:00Like whatever the reasons were, you knew somewhere in that sternum area, you knew and how much you had to drink that day in order to override that, whatever you had to do in order to shut down that compass that was saying, uh-uh, it's brutal. That's the work of the second half of my life. I can say that now that I'm 50, that the only thing I'm interested in anymore is that.

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37:33And now, Jack Kornfield, one of the key teachers to introduce mindfulness practice to the West, author of 16 books, including Bringing Home the Dharma, and Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, and a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. You can find Jack on Instagram at Jack underscore Cornfield. Jack, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you, Tim. Pleasure to reconnect. I have wanted to have you on the show for some time now, And you've had certainly a tremendous impact on my life, both through your writing and through firsthand in-person interaction, which I think we'll touch upon.

38:21But first, I wanted to ask you a complete non sequitur from that, which is something that our mutual friend Adam Ghazali suggested I ask you about. And Adam, for people who don't know him, is an incredible PhD, MD, neuroscientist based at UCSF. and he suggested that I ask you about hang gliding, and I have no idea why he suggested that, but I'm going to start there, and if it doesn't go anywhere, we can change direction, but I figured we would just start with that, and then we're going to rewind the clock, but why did he suggest I ask you about hang gliding? Well, it started many years ago when I crossed country with a friend who had a hang glider, and we would stop periodically and go off different hills, And it was fantastic.

39:12And then I wanted to do paragliding and started to learn it now because everything is developed. Paragliding is a lot more official. You need a license, which I don't have. But one of my favorite things is to tandem paraglide and go off the top of places like Grindelwald in Switzerland, where you can take the ski lift up to 9 ,000 feet and then jump off and float silently like you're a bird among the clouds. The birds actually do come by sometimes and like, check out, what's this big bird flying up here? You can catch thermals and go way up above the glaciers. It's one of the most thrilling and delicious experiences that I know.

39:56That's incredible. So you first experienced that at what age? probably in my late 20s and did some and then sort of put it aside. And then I was traveling and teaching in Europe and I saw a sign for paragliding and I said, oh gosh, I really want to do it. And started and now each time I go where there's high mountains and paragliding, that's one of my things that I love doing. Most people have these dreams once in a while, if you're lucky, a dream of flying. Or maybe in your meditation, you have this sense of not being limited to your body. And this is the closest thing that I know because it's absolutely silent and you're floating there.

40:36It's quite fantastic. And this is something you still do? Mm-hmm. I hope to do it next summer when I'm back in the Alps. And how old are you now? 72. 72. Good man. Well, we're going to then go back a bit in chronology and ask about childhood. I would love to hear you describe your childhood. What were you like as a child? What was your upbringing like? Well, first thing to say is I remember when I got to Dartmouth College in 1963, and I called my mom from the payphone in the dorm sometime in that fall. I didn't call very often, but you know how it is. And I said, Mom, I said, guess what? There are a lot of other really fucked up families beside ours.

41:28So that's kind of where we start. So I had three brothers, and my father was a mixture of a tyrant and a really abusive person and a brilliant guy. I was born on a Marine base toward the end of World War II, and they didn't send him overseas to do, they put him in the medical part of the Marines because he tested so high on their tests that they, you know, okay, we're going to use him for something. So he was brilliant in certain ways. He was a biophysicist who helped design some of the first artificial hearts and lungs, worked on the space program, but also did other kinds of weird stuff like work for the army biological weapons people.

42:14Not making biological weapons, but trying to design things that were kind of computer biological interfaces, all kinds of creative stuff. But he had mental problems. And so we didn't know when the car pulled in whether we were going to get Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. He would come in and, you know, either he could shout, be abusive, throw my mother down the stairs, rant, chase after us, try to hit us, whatever. Or we'd get this interesting creative person. But we hardly ever had people come over when he was around during the daytime, the way we would, because he never knew what you would get. And so our family life, and my family life in some way was also, there were great parts of it, because I had my brothers and we were like our own gang.

43:01We moved all the time, but we had each other. And because he was wacky as well as smart, my father either quit or got fired every year or two. And then we would go from one place to another. I went to, I don't know, eight schools by the time I finished high school. So my childhood, partly it was the happy things of roughhousing and being a boy with three other boys and adventures. And then in the basement, my father had all kinds of scientific equipment. He had all this stuff from World War II, this huge radio from a battleship that you could tune into, a thousand different shortwave stations around the world and projects he was trying to design stuff.

43:43And so we learned from him, you could pretty much take or design or do anything in the physical world. And at the same time, I felt like my whole childhood was also colored with the fear of his violence and his unpredictability. And I became kind of a peacemaker in the family. We all sort of had our roles, and now I do it as a profession, right? Trying to kind of make it a little smoother between my parents. so they'd kill each other. And each of my brothers had their own strategy. My twin brother, who was a lot bigger and much more outgoing, played football, which I certainly didn't. I was skinnier and, you know, I was in the orchestra and he was the football player.

44:27I remember when he first got in a fistfight with my dad because my father was abusing her mom. My twin brother had been, as young men sometimes do, He was probably 13, 14, pretty big, and he was looking in the mirror, making muscles in the mirror to see how strong he'd become. Anyway, he just got into a fistfight with my father, and I was both thrilled and terrified, but it worked in some way because the abuse settled down quite a lot after that. So that was his strategy was just to get angry and then later kind of to go his own way somewhat more, although we're all all have been very close as brothers.

45:09So there was that. At the same time, there was a lot of interest, intellectual interest. So we read and learned about all kinds of things. Both my parents were really interested in the world around us. So it was sort of this mixed thing of the gift of being together with my brothers and a mom who was basically pretty nurturing, although she kept trying to leave him and never got it together. I think it was too scary in the 50s to have four boys, you know, no job. And so we were in the middle of this. And the kind of healing that it took, it took a long time to do the inner healing work from the pain of my family.

45:49and I remember when I became a Buddhist monk and I was sitting these first years with my teacher Ajahn Chah in the forest monasteries of Thailand on the border of Thailand and Laos and I'd be sitting quietly and then some of these memories or energy would come where I remember one monk who had a pot near mine in the forest did something that annoyed me and I just got enraged inside and I said when I went to the teacher and I said I'm really getting angry here and he smiled he said yeah where do you think that comes from or something like that and I said well I don't know I said I thought I was a peaceful guy I was never going to be like my father I won't you know I'll be peaceful but it turned out I just stuffed all that stuff and so when I told it my teacher about it he said good she'd go back in your hut it's the hot season you get a little tin roof and close the doors and windows and put all your robes on.

46:50And if you're going to be angry, do it right. Sit in the middle of that, you know, and sit in the middle of the fire and don't be so afraid of it because you're afraid of it. You're just going to keep stuffing it. And on the other hand, or if you're afraid of it, it'll just explode. There's another way to be with it. And so that was the beginning of some healing, just to realize that I could actually tolerate the suffering and the energy that was in my still carried from trauma in my body and heart so we're gonna absolutely come back to Ajahn Chavez because I have many questions on that chapter in your life but just so that I can create the proper visual in my own head so you sat there in your hut in the sweltering heat with all of your robes on were you angry in silence were you yelling well what I was I was pretty much angry in silence.

47:39And that's an interesting question. You know, in the monastery, the culture was not much that you would yell. You could go somewhere out in the forest and yell. It wasn't decorous or something. People go, what the hell's wrong with that monk? So mostly I was sitting in silence and then scenes would come and I would realize, wow, I thought I was peaceful. In every cell of my body, I also carry both the pain and anger of my childhood and my father and just the anger that comes with being a human being and human incarnation and i was never going to have that but of course there was and it lasted you know this was i had days of and and actually much longer weeks or months of waves of of this coming um and learning how to be present for it and not get overwhelmed by it so i want to backtrack and then connect those dots.

48:30So between childhood and ending up in Thailand, you mentioned Dartmouth earlier, and from what I've read at least, you were initially pre-med and then ended up Asian studies. Could you describe that experience in Dartmouth or how you went from pre-med to Asian studies? Well, you know, we all get turned in these mysterious ways in our life. We think we're going one direction, and then something happens unexpectedly, and a gateway opens. So I was coming from an organic chemistry class to the class that I'd signed up for out of interest on Asian studies or Asian philosophy or something. And it was an old professor, Dr.

49:20Wingsit Chan, who had come up from Harvard. He was kind of emeritus there. and he even sat cross-legged sometimes, you know, in the front of the room and would talk about Lao Tzu and Taoism and they'd talk about Buddhist teachings and how the Buddha taught suffering and its causes and its end. And that really, all of a sudden I sat up, there's an end to suffering. And he said, oh, there's all these teachings and practices where you can transform your heart and mind. and I became thrilled about it and realized that whatever impulse I had to go to medical school, probably part of it came from wanting to heal myself.

50:02And so I started to take more and more courses and then it was the 60s and I became a card-carrying hippie, a card-carrying LSD-taking hippie, as a matter of fact. And at the end of when I was getting ready to graduate, there was still the draft. And I thought, well, I definitely don't want to go over and kill people in a war that I've been protesting against. So I decided to go into the Peace Corps instead and ask them to send me to a Buddhist country where maybe I could find one of those old Zen masters that you read about and got assigned to Thailand. And when I got there, you could kind of request where you went.

50:42And I said, send me to the most remote place you can. I wanted adventure, but I also wanted to kind of, reading all those old Zen stories, I wanted to see if that still existed. You know, and there were little detours like being in Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love and things like that, that definitely, they changed my life also in a very deep way, because for at least for a time, there was a window when people were just giving things away. There was such a sense that the world could be transformed. Some of it, as we know, very, very naive. But on the other hand, it also felt like a greater sense of brotherhood and sisterhood than I had ever known, except with my own brothers, who I love a lot.

51:24We've done a lot of things together. And I started to feel like there are other ways for me and for the world to be and live. And that was also very wonderful. You mentioned a three-letter acronym that we're probably not going to spend too, too much time on. but you and I have had quite a number of conversations where I've wanted to ask you about some of your experiences with psychedelics, including LSD, but we've never really gotten into it, so I figure why not do it in front of a few million people. The LSD at that point, your experiences with that, did that inform your decisions at all to then go into the Peace Corps and end up in a remote area?

52:01It did, and I've written a little bit about it in a couple different of my books, chapters in books I've written. Because most Buddhist teachers and Hindu teachers of my generation also started psychedelics. You know, myself and almost all my colleagues, you know, in the spiritual industry that I'm in. And that was a beginning. And for me, it showed an incredible possibility that all is created out of consciousness. And the possibilities of inner freedom. And basically, I was able, at the best of it, to see my body and my personality and my history and realize that that's not who I am. To become much more the conscious witness of it all, to see, yes, birth and death, and to go through those kind of death-rebirth experiences that can happen at times in a deep session with LSD, or death of ego or sense of self or removing and realizing, wow, there's a freedom and a life force.

53:02It's what we're made of. And that profoundly influenced my interest in spirituality, also interest in what the world can be. Now, just a few days ago, I was on Maui with my beloved wife, Trudy, and we were visiting, spending time with Ram Dass, who, for listeners that don't know, was the author of this bestseller in the 60s called Be Here Now, and now he's in 86, hanging in a wheelchair. But Ram Dass, who had been at Harvard University and was one of the early explorers of LSD before he went to India and became a spiritual teacher, in the living room while we were there two days ago, Roland Fisher, who is one of the senior professors and psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins University Medical School.

53:51Oh, Roland Griffiths. Roland Griffiths, rather. And Roland, excuse me, Roland Griffiths. And Roland laid out all the research that's happening now on psilocybin that he's been doing. And it's success for people, terminal cancer patients, all losing a great deal of the fears that they had, working with people with severe depression. and it was a beautiful session because you could hear how these sacred substances and these mind-altering substances, when they're used in the right context, can really transform human beings. And NYU, Johns Hopkins, there's a whole series of studies that are happening now that are finally bringing it back into the mainstream.

54:39So I'd love to underscore just a few things that you mentioned. And number one, Ram Dass, for those people who want to do additional reading, formerly known as Richard Alpert, if I'm getting that right, also has a fascinating story coming full circle with psychedelic research, beginning, I guess, at Harvard in some respects. So it makes sense to me why Roland's research would be so meaningful to him. And a number of other just quick comments for people. Number one is if you're interested in looking into these psilocybin, which is considered the active, psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.

55:20I've actually been involved with crowdfunding and funding myself some of the research related to treatment-resistant depression at Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths as the senior investigator. and I'll be posting some updates to that. But fascinating work looking at everything from, and this is also, as you mentioned, NYU and at other very well-regarded universities, alcohol addiction, nicotine slash tobacco addiction, as you mentioned, end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients. The implications are really profound and the data very, very promising. And I wanted to also mention to folks who are perhaps saying to themselves, well, I'm not interested in taking psychedelics myself, that there are people I know, good friends of mine, who do not currently use psychedelics, but had the ego-dissolving experience of a non-ordinary reality through psychedelics that then led them to become, or contributed to them becoming, very, very diligent meditators.

56:22And Sam Harris, who's a PhD in neuroscience and thought of, or very well known as an atheist, or, you know, one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, along with Richard Dawkins and others, is a very close friend and extremely diligent meditator. And he's written about how his psychedelic experiences, which were in some respects very, some of them uncontrolled, and you really have a coin flip there in terms of which direction you can go, but showed him possibilities within his own mind that then led to a very, very, I'm not going to call it devout, although I should just to bother diligent practice so I don't want to take us too far off the rails but you go to Southeast Asia well I just want to say one more thing before we move on because we are talking about this it turns out for those who are listening that set and setting and intention are extremely important if one uses these psychedelics like psilocybin or something to set the intention to learn to open, to have a quiet, it's not as a party experience.

57:29Absolutely. Brings your attention inward and then all the kind of discoveries become right in front of you. But the other thing is that whether it's right for somebody to use psychedelics or to use meditation, these are all invitations to step back and see the mystery of your life. Because we tend to live in the daily minutiae and checking off our list of tasks that we have to do and completing them, our work or, you know, or eating or all the kind of things that make up a day. And we go on to automatic. And whether it's meditation and different or other spiritual disciplines, or for some people, it also can just be that they have what in Greek is called a katabasa, a blow.

58:18Oh, you know, somebody close to them gets cancer or is dying or they have some accident or something. And all of a sudden you step back and you realize, whoa, life is uncertain the way I've been taking it. It's not just checking off the list. This is a mystery, human incarnation. And what am I going to do with it? And wow, look at this. How did I get in this body? Look at plants and trees and language, the air coming out of your mouth that you shape it different ways. and it vibrates a little drum in the ear of someone else and I can say Golden Gate Bridge and they can envision it. And you start to realize that all of it is alive and made of consciousness.

58:56And then the whole sense of who you are and what matters begins to shift. And you start to realize that life is not just getting through the hoops, but it actually also can be a celebration of the heart, of something that you have to bring to the world that you come out of life. And my friend Maladoma Sommet, who's a West African shaman and medicine man, also true PhD, is a kind of remarkable guy. He says with the Dagorah people in West Africa that he's from, that they say that every child comes into the world with a certain cargo, is their metaphor, like the cargo ships that ply the rivers of West Africa.

59:41and that they're given gifts to bring into the world and that we have gifts to bring to this mystery, which include opening to it. And as we do, love grows, connection grows, and a whole different way of being in the world happens that we need so much at this time. So that's a little interlude there before we move on to your next question. I welcome as many interludes as you would like to interject, And I wanted to just ask you to say one more time that it was, I believe, Greek word for... Katambas, which means a blow. It's like something comes and it just sets your life spinning in an entirely different direction.

1:00:23Right, like a catalyzing event. Exactly. I've had a few of those recently that I'd like to selfishly ask you about later. So I can bookmark... Just so I can bookmark this name, Stanislav Gruff, if I'm saying that correctly. That's correct. When did you meet him roughly? What age or what date? Just so I can come back to it. Because this is another thing I've been meaning to ask you about for a long time and get into, but I haven't had the chance. There's two things to say. When I came back from the monastery, and now it's, you know, I guess the year that I connected with Stan was maybe 1973. I made two really important connections.

1:01:03I came back and started psychology in graduate school. I was in Boston, and first really important connection happened when I went to a meeting of the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and there was this guy who looked like he didn't look just like the straight psychologist, and it turned out he'd just come back from India not long before, named Dan Goldman, who was a graduate student at Harvard, and he'd projected on the screen this Tibetan wheel of birth and death that you see in the Tibetan tankas. that normally would be taken as some kind of primitive, iconic symbol. And he said, no, no, no, this is a psychological diagram.

1:01:43The Buddha was actually, more than anything else, he was a scientist of the mind and a profound psychologist. And here is how craving turns into contentment, and here's how aggression can be transformed into powerful energy to heal yourself and others. And he was going through this diagram, and I went and I talked to him, And he said, oh, you, you come back from monastery, you've got to come over. And so he took me to David McClellan, who had been the chairman of the social science and psychology department at Harvard at that time. The one who hired Tim Leary and Ram Dass and then later had to fire them for their LSD work.

1:02:25And his house, he and his wife Mary were Quakers. His home was a kind of soiree where Ram Dass and Tibetan lamas like Chogyam Trungpa and I think Krishnamurti and various spiritual figures would come. People were going to India and coming back. And I connected with this whole group of folks who have now been friends for 45 years. Richie Davidson was another that I met there who's now one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the world on studying contemplative neuroscience and affective emotional neuroscience. It was a whole collective of people. Dan Goldman who wrote Emotional Intelligence that sold 10 million copies and many others.

1:03:09And then I got a job working for an Esalen-like growth center in Boston at that time because I was excited at all the new Gestalt bioenergetics. What are the things that are transformative here? And they asked me to help set up programs. And I thought, well, who do I want to meet? So I set up a program with John Lilly. And I set up a program with Stan Groff, who was still at Johns Hopkins and married at that time, just married to Joan Halifax, Joan Groff. And we became friends. And so we have Stan and I have now worked together for 45 years. I went out to join him at Esalen for many, many years, spending many months together, helping during his development of the holotropic breath work that's this powerful breath transformation.

1:03:56And he has been a partner and a heart friend for exploration. And we've traveled, we've taught in Russia and in places in Europe and various places around the world. So this is definitely a path that we're going to come down and dig further into. But I'm going to steer us to Ajahn Shah, because I want to know, how do you land with the Peace Corps in remote, well, what most people would consider a remote corner of the world, and end up finding a living master? How does that actually happen? I don't know, but I assume you didn't speak Thai at the time. I did actually because the Peace Corps and then I had to learn Lao.

1:04:42I did because the Peace Corps at that time, it was very early in the Peace Corps, had really good language training. They borrowed it from the Monterey Language Institute. So, you know, initially I didn't speak that well, but because I'd also studied Chinese at Dartmouth, it came more easily. And I was there working in the rural health department on tropical medicine teams, mostly malaria, but also typhoid and teams going out to different villages and drawing blood and giving out medicine and things like that. And then somebody said, there's a Western monk in this province we heard about. Do you want to meet him?

1:05:20I said, of course I do. So I went to this little mountain and walked up 2 ,000 steps to the old Cambodian temple ruin at the top. And there was this very interesting guy who had just finished a couple years before the first Peace Corps, I think, in Borneo, and then got interested in Buddhism and come and ordained as a monk. And I talk with him. He's now, he's named Ajahn Sumedho is his monk's name because he's still a monk. And he became quite famous in Thailand and then became the abbot of a temple in England. And I became friends with him. And he said, oh, I found a really fine teacher. He said, you know, a lot of them, they kind of take you, you're a Westerner, and they treat you special.

1:06:02He said, this guy doesn't treat you any differently than anyone else. He just wants you to do the work, you know, and learn the deepest way you can. And he's in this forest, jungle, and I said, I'm going there. So having heard that, I went and I visited Ajahn Chah, and he was a little bit like the Dalai Lama. He was funny and wise and very warm-hearted, but also very strict and very demanding, but he did it in this loving way. And I thought, okay, this is the real deal. This guy looks like what I was reading about in all those Zen stories. I read that he said to you, and I'd love for you to tell us when he said this to you, I hope you're not afraid to suffer.

1:06:46If that's true, when did he say that and why did he say that? So I visited him a number of times and told him I was going to become a monk. And then I ordained in the village where I was living in the Peace Corps. People wanted me to do that. It was a beautiful ritual. And then after some days made my way down to his temple, that was his opening gambit. I'm walking into the gates and I see him, I bow, I say, I'm here. And he looks at me, you know, kind of leans back a little, a little skeptically. He said, all right, I hope you're not afraid to suffer. Welcome. It was like, you know, you didn't come here just to kind of do some interesting, cool anthropological experiment or something like that.

1:07:32If you're going to do it, we're going to put you through the training. And he did. But, you know, there was like this little smile as he said it like okay are you up for it all right dude come on in and what did the training consist of what were some of the first things that you had to do and then what was this suffering that he alluded to what were some examples well there'll be some examples okay so of course the first training was just how to walk around and not have my robe you know fall on the ground and embarrass me and everyone oh they'd come so they all loved it oh yeah right I look at the Westerner.

1:08:06He can't even chew gum and wear his robes right or whatever. So part of it was just the unfamiliarity of it culturally and otherwise. There were the two kinds of suffering. The big suffering, of course, was being alone with my own mind. I mean, there you go, you know, having to do hours of meditation when I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And then as I talked about with anger or fear or confusion or, you know, all those kind of states, learning to deal in a very conscious and mindful way, and then more importantly, in a compassionate way, in a kind and loving way with all the energies that make up my humanity and our humanity.

1:08:49And that means when you sit and you get quiet, anything unfinished in your heart will also come up, all the unfinished business. So, you know, relationships that I'd had that ended badly in college or certainly stuff from my childhood and family, dreams that I carried, things fulfilled and not, all that comes up. It's, yeah, my friend Annie Lamott, humorist and writer, says my mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone. And there's some way in which in community, sitting together with others in meditation and then sitting in my hut, It was really facing myself and my full humanity.

1:09:28That was probably the most difficult thing. Because then you get insanely bored or insanely restless. And then how do you deal with all those energies? Normally when we're restless or bored, what do we do? We open the refrigerator or go online or something. Because we can't be with our own loneliness or our own fear. So that was the inner. And then there's the outer ones. And the outer ones were things like getting up. The bell would ring at 3.30 in the morning. And I'm not an early riser by nature. I go, oh, God, here we go. And we walked through. It was actually very beautiful. Then we'd walk through the forest at night, either by moonlight or sometimes you'd have a tiny little flashlight.

1:10:12And in one of the forest monasteries where there were a lot of cobras, we'd have a little stick and you'd tap the path. so that the snakes would know you or feel you coming and move out of the way, wouldn't step on them. And then we would sit silently for a couple of hours and then do an hour of chanting on a hard stone floor, mind you, where everybody else seemed comfortable and my body was killing me. And then at least once a week we would sit up all night with the teacher and he would sit there comfortably meditating, maybe talking with another colleague that would come and we'd just be sitting and meditating And he would kind of peek over at us like, how are you doing?

1:10:50And I'd go, God, it's been four hours. When is he going to let us go back to sleep? And he didn't. So sitting up all night, it got very cold in the cold season. And it got insanely hot in the hot season. And somehow learning to live extremely simply with a set of sandals and a set of robes and an alms bowl. And then you would eat what you got offered in the village, and we would share it in that monastery with others around us. And sometimes you'd get nice food, and a lot of times in the dry season, you'd get really, really skimpy food, and there wasn't that much to eat. And so picture a day where you get up at 3.30 in the morning, you sit for a couple of hours in meditation and do long, then an hour-long chanting on a stone floor.

1:11:41Then it's getting dawn and you walk barefoot, three miles, five miles, ten miles with an alms bowl and a handful of other monks and get your food and come back, whatever you've been offered, and that's the food for the day. And then you go back to your meditation or to the work of the monastery of sewing robes or drawing water from the well, and it's muggy and 105 degrees hot season. Then you go back and you join in the community for more meditation. And then the teacher smiles and say, how are you doing? You know, and then other kinds of practices, for example, we had a charnel ground there. And so I'm sorry, a what ground?

1:12:20A charnel ground, which is where a cremation ground where people, bodies would be burned. And so on occasion would go to a cremation and then sit up all night and contemplate death, look at the body and then watch as it burned. and then do these meditations where you would reflect on, well, this is going to happen to the body that you're inhabiting as well. Who do you think you are? Do you think you're this physical body made of hamburgers or lettuce or whatever you happen to eat? Are you hamburgers and lettuce? Or are you your feelings? Are you your thoughts? Who are you really born into this body?

1:13:00Like koans. so anyway and the alms bowl so you would be did you eat whatever you gathered in one meal was it spread throughout the one meal one meal you eat one meal a day which makes you very easy to makes your life easy and at the same that monastery things were shared there was other monasteries i stayed in where you would just eat what was put in your own bowl and you didn't have to eat everything that was given to you. There were some things that were, you know, in the dry, poor season, there would be curries that were too hot for me to eat because they used the chilies to kind of preserve the food.

1:13:42But, you know, when it was a really poor village or something, you know, they would have to make curries out of field lice or field rats or bats or, you know, I remember eating there was a curry that was made out of basically grasshoppers that had come sweat through and there was this whole big insect wave of insects that were eating the crops and they collected them all made a curry out of them so you know okay this is this is what you get for your food today dude i think i might take the grasshoppers over the over the bats but yeah well yeah when it's really highly spiced you can't tell what it's mystery that's true we all had mystery meat in middle school anyway this was like mystery meat on steroids exotic mystery meat what was the longest period of time that you spent in silence during that time in thailand well then i went to a burmese monastery because i wanted to do this very intense meditative training and i spent about 500 days so less than a year and a half in silence with the exception that i would talk to the teacher.

1:14:47Every couple of days, I'd have a little 10 minute conversation about what was happening in my meditation. And the rest, I was just sitting and walking 18 hours a day when I could or so sleeping a little bit. And I remember at one point, it was relatively early on, I'd been sitting and walking and pushing it as young men do, you know, I'm going to get enlightened and all of that and not moving, sitting with a lot of pain, which is also part of what happened at the forest monastery, sitting on a stone floor for hours without moving, really had to learn how to deal with your own physical pain. And I was exhausted from sitting and walking in my little hut that I had for that long retreat.

1:15:33And after a couple months, I thought, I'm really tired. I got to lie down. But then I thought, well, but I'm not going to nap for very long because I'm on my way to enlightenment. Whenever I'm going to do this right. So I said, all right, I'll lie down on the wooden floor rather than on the little mat that I had. And that way I won't sleep so long. And I'm lying there. And then I wake up and I get up and I walk very slowly doing this mindful slow walking to the end of the hut and look out the window toward where some of the other monks and the teachers live some way down through the trees. And then I turn around and I start walking the other direction in this meditation hut that I had.

1:16:15And he could walk probably, it was maybe 15, 18 feet long. It was long and narrow. And I see this body lying on the floor. And all of a sudden I go, oh, that's me. And then I realized that I'm having an out-of-the-body body experience. And what had happened is that I was so intent. I'm not going to sleep long. I'll get up very soon. That intention was really strong, but my body didn't want to get up. So I got up, but it wasn't, it wasn't in my body. And I walk very slowly and I peered down on my body and I turned around and walked the other way, walked back. And then the second time I walked back, I got closer and then I fell into my body and I woke up.

1:16:55I said, oh, wow, that's interesting. But what I saw out the window wasn't just like a dream because I was watching my teacher and talking to these other monks. And then I got up again and that's exactly what was happening. And that was the first of a series of all kinds of very interesting experiences that happened. What would other examples of those types of unusual experiences be? And was it your time in Burma that found you experiencing these for the first time? First of all, the first experiences, even though I had experiment with meditation back in college and so forth, were experiences, again, that came through psychedelics.

1:17:35And so I was familiar with all kinds of weird and powerful and mysterious or mystical kind of experiences. But there's something about learning how to navigate it without taking a substance and learning that your own consciousness is the field that you can learn to navigate. First, all the personality and emotions and history and so forth. But then you start to realize that you're bigger than that, that who you are is not just your thoughts and feelings in your mind. And so whether it's out of body experience or the experience of vastness of becoming the sky within which everything arises and passes, or the experience of profound silence or of the void where you enter a stillness before experience even arises, or the experience of luminosity where my body would dissolve into light.

1:18:30There are times sitting as you get concentrated in samadhi or concentration builds that your whole body and mind open up and, you know, first you get the elements. Your body can feel heavy like a stone, the earth element, or it can feel so light that you have to open your eyes and make sure you're not floating because it feels like you're floating in the air. Or it can be filled with fire and you feel like you're in the middle of a raging fire. Or it can get icy cold, you know, or all kinds of vibrations and kundalini energies and chakras start to open. And sometimes it's pleasant and sometimes it's not.

1:19:04You know, as deep energies start to move through your body, they also kind of push open the places that are held closed. so that when your heart starts to open in deep meditation, sometimes it feels like you're having a heart attack, it's physically painful, because all the things that you've held around your heart to protect yourself start to loosen. Or when the energy hits your throat and it starts to open, weird sounds come out, you know, and then you get to visions that come in the brow chakra, and you start to see all kinds of colors and visions and hear things that all possibilities of the play of consciousness can start to open after both period of silence, but also really deeply training attention and concentration.

1:19:52These experiences, just to put them in, or at least part of what you said in context for people listening, there are a number of things you mentioned, but one in particular, that opening in the chest that I experienced in the 10-day retreat done at Spirit Rock, for which you were one of the instructors or the lead instructor. And it was an incredibly powerful experience. And listening to your description of some of the feelings, it makes me want to go to the jungle and spend time doing this type of training. However, the 10-day retreat, as you know from firsthand observation and interacting with me was incredibly difficult for me and terrifying at a number of points where I felt like I had crossed a boundary into maybe even madness where I was fearful I wouldn't be able to return from.

1:20:47So I'm curious to know, during that period of time in Thailand and Burma, could be afterwards as well, but when you were in the jungle and doing this very intense work, were there any particular points when you wanted to quit to go home? Oh, absolutely. I mean, and I remember I got what I think was malaria, a really high fever, and I was sick as a dog, and I'm lying in the bottom of my little hut there, high fever and shivering, and Ajahn Chah came to visit me. And in the Lao language, and he was also funny and quite blunt, and the Lao language is a very straightforward kind of, the sentence structures are fairly simple.

1:21:28So he looked at me and he said, sick huh and I said yeah and he said hurts all over huh I said it's your test he said hot and cold yeah he said makes you afraid I nod he said makes you want to go home and see your mother doesn't it and I'm nodding there and then he looked at me and he said you know this is the jungle fever this is malaria we've all had it but now there's some good medicine I'll send the medicine monk over and in a couple days you'll be fine and then he looked at me and he said you can do this, you know, you can do this. So, I mean, that was an example of wanting to show my mother.

1:22:03What am I doing here? What kept you going? I mean, I don't want to interrupt, but it's like, what kept you going? I'm imagining 500 days of silence. I could barely handle 10 days. You know, Tim, I mean, what's kept you going? What keeps any of us going about things that we care about? I had somehow, I don't know, kind of a wacky, but I think also important kind of passion to say, I want to understand, or I've started down this road and I want to see where it goes. And I think all of us find at a certain point in our life that they're, or if we're lucky, that something really matters and you've done it in your work and your travel, you want to explore what your human capacity is.

1:22:46And I'd read these old Zen stories and I want to see if this is true. I want to find out. And then as I started, things started to happen like that out of the body experience and rapture and changes and openings. And I realized there's really something to learn here. But there are a couple other things that I want to add to this. One of them that's the most important is that it turns out that it wasn't and it isn't so much about the actual experiences. So Ajahn Chah, my teacher, talked about how in his own training for the first eight years in the jungle. He had been a very ardent meditator and had all kinds of insights and dissolving in samadhi and jhana experiences, all kinds of special...

1:23:32Samadhi is awakening. Samadhi is... Yeah, or... Nirvana. How would you translate that? Profound. Samadhi has a lot of meanings, is the word, but it can mean profound states of concentration in which the mind dissolves into light or into joy or bliss or becomes absorbed with any one of all kinds of states. So he went to the most famous teacher of that time, another Ajahn, Ajahn Man, and told him about all these experiences. And the master looked back at him and said, Cha, you missed the point. These are just experiences. You know, it's like going to the movies and you have a romantic comedy and you have a war movie and you have a documentary and you have, you know, a Disney movie.

1:24:13He said, they're just movies on the screen, some pleasant, some unpleasant. The only question is, to whom do they happen? Turn your attention back and ask, look to see who is the witness of these? What is the consciousness that is knowing these ever-changing experiences? This is where your liberation will come. He said, become, his language, if I translate it, is the one who knows. Become the knowing rather than the experiences. And then you can tolerate anything and you can respond with love and understanding because you rest in the timeless consciousness, which is your true nature. So part of what I also learned in meditation and teach is that it's not so much about the experiences.

1:25:03Oh, I want to have this or that experience. But it's this profound turning back to ask, who am I? What is this consciousness itself that was born into this body? that we'll leave it. We can talk about death at some point if you want. What is this mysterious consciousness itself? So there was that. And then I also had the opportunity of being with a few other teachers. And one of the people that I was very close to and inspired me profoundly was a Cambodian monk named Maha Gosananda, who was the Gandhi of Cambodia. And when I met him, we were living and training together in a forest monastery in Thailand.

1:25:46And it was during the time that Khmer Rouge came to power and eventually killed two million Cambodians in a kind of genocide. He survived because he wasn't in country, but all 19 of his family members were killed. His temple burned, all the Buddhist texts and so forth were destroyed. And when he was able to, he went to the refugee camps. Refugees were pouring out of Cambodia by the hundreds of thousands. And he went to the refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Cambodia. And I was able to go with him at a certain point. And he decided to open a temple in the middle of one of the biggest refugee camps.

1:26:28Here's 50 or 100 ,000 people, these tiny little bamboo huts, and got permission from the UNHCR, our high commissioner of refugees, and built a platform with a little roof over it and put an altar with the traditional Cambodian Buddha on it and so forth. But it was a camp with the Khmer Rouge underground, lots of them. And so they put the word out that if anyone went to be with this monk, when they got out of the camp back to Cambodia, they would all be shot. So we wondered who would, if anyone, would come. And went through the camp the day, the opening day, with a big kind of temple gong ringing it.

1:27:10And 25 ,000 people poured into the central square around this little temple. Oh, my God. And he, Mahagosananda sat there, and he was a scholar. He spoke 15 languages. And he was a, you know, extremely kind-hearted human being who had suffered enormously. and had transformed it into the kind of compassion that we think of with the Dalai Lama or something like that. In fact, they became friends and Ghoshananda became the head of all of Cambodian Bhushan. But there he was at this point, sitting, looking out at 25 ,000 people who had suffered immense traumas. And you could see there was a grandmother and the only two surviving grandchildren that she had or an uncle and one niece and their faces were the faces of trauma and of survivors and i thought all right what is he going to say to them and he sat very quietly for a long time just in their presence and then he put his hands together in this kind of modest way and began to chant in the microphone he had a sound system in cambodian and in sanskrit or pali the buddhist language, one of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes, hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed.

1:28:35This is the ancient and eternal law. And he chanted it over and over in Cambodian and in Sanskrit Pali. And pretty soon the chant was picked up and in a little while, 25 ,000 people were chanting this verse with him. And I looked out and they were weeping, many of them because they hadn't heard their sacred chants for years, but also because he was offering them a truth that was even bigger than their sorrows, that hatred never ends by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And they were sitting in the middle of the healing energy of the Dharma, of the teachings of the heart that can liberate us.

1:29:26Later on, Gosananda, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times, spent 15 years walking through the killing fields and the mined areas and so forth, leading people on foot back to their village. And he said to the refugees, you can't go back in a bus or the back of a truck or something like that. You have to reclaim your land with love. And so he would lead a thousand people and he'd be in the front with a bell and a gong and a few other monks. And the whole way back they would be chanting the chants of loving kindness so that by the time they got to their village, whatever had been destroyed, there was the sense that they were reclaiming not just the land, but they were reclaiming their own hearts.

1:30:16That's a beautiful, really beautiful story. And it prompts me to ask a question that I struggle with answering myself. And it's also a question many of my friends have asked themselves and I'll take a stab at it. How do you decide when to do deep inner work and take an extended period to do that versus being in the world and trying to impact others in the world. And to just provide a little bit of background on that, I have friends who are building businesses or building careers of some type or families. And I, at this point, do not have wife, kids, or company to build, at least with a large organization.

1:31:03And I've come back from various experiments, sojourns, experiences over weeks or months and shared these with them. and they've expressed this longing, this deep yearning to do something similar. And then they ask this question, like, how do I best decide if and when to do the deep extended work versus being in the world? And I know it might be a false dichotomy. You might not have to choose, but I'll talk a little bit more just to fill the space. But I had this experience personally, not long ago when I was in South America and had someone telling me in Spanish, which was not their native language this is an indigenous tribe but this apple this mayor effectively who worked a lot with different plant medicines and he said that he recommended one 15 month diet very very strict 15 month period with many different restrictions no sex no alcohol no pork etc to develop certain capacities and to practice in effect i mean at certain types of meditative practices.

1:32:06So I struggle with this myself as well. How do you suggest someone think through? So did you give up sex and pork? I've done it for short periods of time. I've done it for weeks at a time, but not for 15 months. But what appealed to me about that, definitely not the lack of sex and pork. I like both of those things. It was, he said, that's something you only have to do once in your life and it opens doors and creates opportunities that are difficult, if not impossible to achieve otherwise. So of course, that's very tantalizing. But 15 months is a really, really long time to opt out of everything else.

1:32:42And I'm not saying it has to be 15 months. For some people, as you know, setting aside even 10 days to do a silent retreat is hard. And I know there are things that they can do on an ongoing basis, like morning meditation and so on. But for those who are really drawn to this extended, deeper work, how do you think about, and that's why Gosananda brought it up for me, because he'd spent so much time outside of his country and then went back and was really on the ground doing work with locals. How do you think about that or suggest someone think about it? First, my answer is yes. Because all of the things that you say are true that, yes, most cultures encourage at some point human beings, most wise cultures, human beings, to step out of their ordinary roles and their ordinary routine, whether you go to the mountains or the ocean, you know, or a temple or change how you're living so that you can open up to the mystery.

1:33:33And so that you also can open up to love because what I saw with my teachers and Gosananda was one, Ajahn Chah, another, is that they were able to love no matter what. It was really because they inhabited consciousness in a very different way than just the small sense of self. There was something, a possibility that we could live with forgiveness and love and be really effective in the world at the same time. So they're not separate. And that's sort of what your question is. How do we live in the world? And at the same time, you know, what trainings and how do we connect with something deeper?

1:34:08And part of it is just intuitive. You know, Tim, if you have newborn, you know, or young children and so forth, it's not the time to go on a long retreat. Your kids are your practice. And in fact, you can't get a Zen master who's going to be more demanding than, you know, an infant with colic, right? Or, you know, or a teenage, you know, certain teenage kid. But with the young ones, you know, your Zen master might say, you've got to get up early in the morning. And, you know, once in a while you might roll over. The kid is crying and sick. You have to get up. Your family needs tending. And, you know, if you're even vaguely a responsible and caring parent, that becomes your practice.

1:34:55And if you think, well, if only I could be in the Great Zen Temple of Kyoto or an ashram in India or down in the Amazon with Tim taking ayahuasca or whatever the plant medicine they give, you know, your kid can be like ayahuasca on steroids. Okay, you want to face yourself and your own limitations and your own, you know, you want to look at the small sense of self and find out how to live with a freer and bigger spirit here. We just hired someone to live with you and train you full time. So it's really, and that's an important thing, but what makes it work is that you have that intention, not just to soldier through it, but to say, let this be a place where I awaken graciousness and inner sense of freedom and peace as things come and go, where I awaken the possibility of presence in pleasure and pain and joy and sorrow and gain and loss and all the changes that I find an inviolable.

1:35:57a timeless place of becoming the loving witness of it all, becoming the loving awareness that says, yeah, now I'm having a family experience, and this is the place to find freedom. Because freedom is not in the Himalayas or in the Amazon. The only place it's found is in your own heart exactly where you are. And that's what Gosananda taught and what Ajahn Chah, that's really what they wanted to communicate. Now, that being said, if you have an opportunity and you're drawn to it, like somebody you might, do you know Jack Dorsey? I do. I do know Jack, yeah. So Jack just did his first 10-day meditation retreat.

1:36:38Oh, good for him. And he tweeted about, I wouldn't say it otherwise, but he tweeted about it, and it was, you know, one of the top transformative experiences of his life. And it's not to say 10-day retreats are the be-all and end-all. They are very powerful and compelling. Even if you have a company or even if you have a family, there might be a period of a week or some days where you can, in fact, get away and step out of those roles and turn inward. And that can be tremendously valuable. So I think both are important. You just have to listen when the time is right. There are so many things that this brings up.

1:37:15The first, though, is just housekeeping for people who may not recognize the name Jack Dorsey. That's Jack, at Jack, I believe it is. on Twitter of, you might then wonder, how did he get that user handle? Well, he is one of the people behind Twitter. So he is of Twitter and Square fame among many others. Fascinating, fascinating guy. So people can check him out. The comment on the infant being the full-time trainer working with you 24-7 reminded me also, since you mentioned Ram Dass earlier, of a quote of his that I like, and I'm going to paraphrase, I'm sure. But if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family, which I think is a fantastic one.

1:37:58And that's part of the reason, and you know some of the backstory, but we all have, I would imagine, we all have tough things that happen to us, experience traumatic experiences as children, have a lot of triggers related to family members typically. And for me, the forced break takes a number of different forms, but that includes a trip every six months, an extended trip of two to four weeks with my parents and my brother when he can make it. So that's only after being introduced to meditation, something that I would even consider as a practice. And the last point I'll mention just out of my personal experience is there's a piece of paper I have in my wallet and I've had in my wallet for a few years now.

1:38:39It's getting a bit worn down. It's a piece of construction paper. An ex-girlfriend gave it to me who knew me very well. And it says, the task that hinders your task is your task. Beautiful. Beautiful. And that's a good reminder for me. I wanted to ask you two questions that are personally important but also may apply to other people. The first is the question that I believe you mentioned, Ajahn Chah, perhaps others have indicated is the question versus the experiences or movies of these, say, out-of-body experiences and so on. to whom do they happen, right? To whom do they happen? Is this a koan, like what is the sound of one hand clapping, where there isn't really an answer you're expected to arrive at?

1:39:25Is the value in contemplating the question more than any answer? Yes, both. No. Yes, both and no. Yeah, because it's a profound contemplation for us. One of the great questions of human incarnation, Who are we? How do we get into this body with the wiggly things on the end of your limbs, you know, and the little bits of claws that you have left, you know, as nails and a vestigial tail and a hole at one end into which you stuff dead plants and animals and glug them down through the tube? I mean, the whole incarnation thing is really pretty wild. So who are we? And then how do we make meaning of it?

1:40:08This is a lifetime question. And that way, it's a koan. But in another way, it also actually does have an answer. And the answer, of course, has to be found by each person. The answer to point toward it, it's very clear that you're not just your salad and vegetables and hamburger body. And you're not just your emotions, I hope, because they're always changing and your thoughts. Good God, I hope you're not your thoughts. So you start to realize, all right, what is there? Then what is this self? Who am I? And neuroscience, you know, there was a Time magazine issue on modern neuroscience where it said neuroscience has searched throughout the brain over many decades now and come to the conclusion that they cannot find the self located anywhere in the neural mechanisms of the brain and that it simply does not exist.

1:41:01But what does exist is a sense of self that's built out of a sense of identification with our thoughts and body and so forth. It's all wise and appropriate. We should be. But we also know that it's not the end of the story. And you know it from walking in the high mountains or listening to an extraordinary piece of music or making love or taking some sacred medicine. or sitting at the bedside of someone when they die, that mysterious moment when spirit leaves the body, or when a child is born, we have these moments where we open to mystery and realize that who we are is not just our personal history or our body and emotions, that we become the consciousness itself, the witnessing awareness, that we are the loving awareness that was born into this body.

1:41:54And that becomes actually a direct knowing, a direct experience. So there is a way in which we also can come home to ourselves. And it brings a tremendous sense of freedom and well-being as all the movies of ever-changing life happen to us. So that's why I said yes and no and both. And as a little aside, thinking about going back to your family as a practice, and twice a year as you're doing, I just want to remind you and the listeners that Buddha and Jesus both had a hard time when they went back to their family. So don't think that there's something wrong with you. That's why they call it nuclear family, I think.

1:42:40Anyway. There's another, I guess it's a word more than a question that I'd love to ask you to define, and that is compassion or compassionate. When you use that word or those words, what do you mean exactly? Or what would you like it to mean for people? I would like to distinguish compassion from empathy. And I'll use a simple illustration. if you're on the playground and you see a kid being bullied and you feel oh that must feel terrible that hurts right that's an empathy and empathy can be useful it also can be you can get overwhelmed by empathy if you don't know what to do with it but there's some way in which you start to feel resonating you because we are not limited to these bodies we are actually a an interconnected connected system of consciousness and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute but we all know whether it's mirror neurons from neuroscience or the field of presence as you know scientists like Dan Siegel talk about extended presence that we can feel empathy with one another when someone's sad someone's angry someone's hurting compassion is the next step you see or recognize you feel and then you care you care about it and you want to if you can do something that helps so that you see the kid being bullied and you realize i want to tell the teacher or the principal or i want to just walk over there and say something or intervene to help stop it and so compassion it's called the quivering of the heart when it wants to move to alleviate the suffering of yourself because you can have self-compassion that's very important or of those around you and it's born into the earliest studies of infants you know at yale and various places like that show that and even very very very small children have this resonance and this kind of care and so it's not shut down in us we're a species that's interconnected and we care for one another And this is your birthright, this natural compassion.

1:44:53And through practice and meditation, you can reawaken it, you can extend it, and it can become your way of living and moving in the world. As a little aside, and I'll just bookmark this one, just got back from a conference with our dear friend Adam Ghazali, our mutual friend, Richie Davidson, who's another of the most famous neuroscientists, especially in this area, and a number of other, some contemplatives and neuroscientists and some technologists from the Valley in BC, talking about how to build compassion into our interface with the technological world, compassion tech. Starting from the very simplest things of projects like, can you build a Fitbit for compassion?

1:45:39Where instead of your body, where you can either note moments of care around you or in yourself, or be prompted to care for yourself. Or when you say to Siri or Alexa, I'm feeling lonely and so forth, what kind of response do you get from the algorithms and all of that? because the UK, England, just appointed their first minister of loneliness for the country. You'd think it was a joke, but it's not. It's like an old Beatles song, All the Lonely People. There are 10 million lonely people in England, they've estimated. And it's for isolation and loss of capacity and health and all kinds of reasons that loneliness makes things way worse.

1:46:23But there's some way in which compassion is that which connects us. And it's a beautiful thing. Even if you walked on the street and you see someone, you know, who's struggling and so forth, doesn't mean you have to fix the whole world. That's not your job. That would be egotistical. But you can reach your hand out and mend the things that you can. You can tend the things that you can. And you can do it not because, oh, you pity them, those poor people, but because they're your family. You recognize that we are common humanity. We're in this together. I'd like to build on that and preface it with a comment on the text.

1:47:02You mentioned collaborating with Adam and at least discussing the potential of combining or utilizing technology to help people to develop and harness compassion. And some folks listening might be like, oh, come on, that's so pie in the sky. but I'd like to point out that you've already collaborated successfully with Adam on software like Metatrain, M-E-D-I-T-R-A-I-N, which was one of the tools Adam has used in his N-of-1 or N-of-2 experiments in rejuvenating his mental capacity to, I want to say, in his 20s. And Adam's one of those guys, you can't tell if he's 28 or 45. He's just a silver fox who always looks young, so I don't know how old he is, but he's not 22.

1:47:46but the meditrain was one of the tools that he utilized i don't remember the the name that he used for this run of experiments you might know the training that he did neuroman or something like that was very very successful so you already have a track record of collaborating successfully with neuroscientists and technologists on the compassion front i'd love to use that as a segue to loving kindness. And by way of personal example, I failed. Well, failed is a strong word. I quit. I stopped meditating after many, many attempts. Had a very absurdly high number of false starts over many years. And it really stuck after a number of experiments and experiences I had doing three or four day trainings with, say, Transcendental Meditation and having the social accountability.

1:48:38Being accountable to someone else is very helpful. But another turning point was experimenting with loving kindness meditation. And I think in part it succeeded because it took the focus off of me, me, me, I, I, I, and allowed me to focus on others. But I'd like to read a brief paragraph from a profile of you in the New York Times. This is from 2014. and feel free to correct anything that is incorrect, but I'll give it a read first. And I quote, in the West, Kornfield says, quote, we encounter a lot of intense striving ambition and a lot of self-criticism, self-judgment and self-hatred. End quote.

1:49:18Concerned, he initially turned to the Dalai Lama for advice, but self-hatred was such a foreign concept to the Tibetan Buddhists that he wasn't able to offer any real insight. Over time, Kornfield and his colleagues began to believe that Americans needed particular meditation practice closely linked to the concepts of self-forgiveness and loving kindness, a training in the unconditional acceptance of imperfection. Without such a foundation, says Kornfield, meditation can easily become, and this is the part that I underlined and starred, without this foundation, says Kornfield, meditation can easily become yet another form of striving, quote, another thing you do to make yourself better, end quote, instead of a path to true contentment.

1:49:52Could you please describe for folks what loving kindness meditation practice looks like and elaborate in any way that you feel might be useful or helpful for folks. Yeah, that meeting, which was some decades ago with the Dalai Lama, yeah, he didn't understand when we talked about self-hatred. He couldn't even, there's no word for it. Back and forth with his translator, what does this mean? Finally, he looked up and he said, but this is a mistake. Why would anyone do this? But then he asked how many of you, there was a group of us who were teachers that experienced this and almost everyone raised their hand.

1:50:26So we see that when people begin in our culture, in the West, to meditate or to turn inward, really, that it's very common to encounter a lot of self-criticism, self-judgment, or even self-hatred. And, you know, there are all the causes from our, these are all kind of conditioning that we got from our childhood, our education, and so forth. but what it means is that you're sitting there saying, I'm not doing it right, I'm no good. You turn meditation into one other thing that you don't do right because you can't control your mind. The truth is that you can't control your mind easily. That's not the point.

1:51:08There's a different way of approaching your mind which gives you tremendous capacities, but it's not, oh, I have to stop my thinking or I don't want to have these feelings and I hate having all these judgments. I don't want to be so judgmental. I hate this judging mind. What is it? It's just more judgment. So instead, as you become first able to become the loving witness, the mindful, loving awareness that says, oh, this is the judging mind, and it's been trying to protect me. Thank you for trying to protect me. I don't need you now. Thank you. All of a sudden, there's a distance from the painful or destructive or self-critical thoughts simply by witnessing them with loving awareness and acknowledging them this becomes a gateway to the practice of loving kindness and self-compassion and very often people can't do it for themselves they feel that's too much of a stretch like why would i wish myself well it feels egotistical and so the way that this practice begins in skillfully for such folks is instead to think of someone that you really care about a lot.

1:52:21And to picture them, remember them, put them in your mind's eye, and feel the kind of well-wishing you would want for them. You know, may they be protected and safe from difficulty. May they be held in loving kindness. May they be well, healthy, strong. And you wish them that, may they be happy. And you do this for a time, a kind of inner well-wishing. And also maybe you feel as you think of this person that you care about if you let yourself also tune into the measure of sorrows they have the struggles that every human being has you know and it tenderizes your heart as you think of them because you don't want them to suffer you feel the kind of rising of compassion and care so may they hold themselves in compassion may they be safe and protected and well.

1:53:13And you do that with one or two people that you care about for a time. And then you can imagine, even as I'm describing this and you following your own heart, you can imagine these two loved ones looking back at you with the same kindness and saying, just as you wish us protection and safety and happiness and well-being and compassion, they gaze at you and they say, you too, you may you be safe and protected and may you be filled with tender compassion for yourself and kindness may you too be healthy and well and may you be happy they want you to be happy I think about when I'm doing this I'm visualizing some loved ones and I know that as I do it I can feel they want that for me.

1:54:06And then finally, as you feel that from these loved ones, you can put your hand on your body or your heart, even if you like, and take it in and then begin to realize that you can wish this for yourself. May I hold all of the joys and sorrows of my life with tenderness and kindness. May I hold my struggles with compassion. May I be filled with loving kindness and loving awareness. May I be safe and protected. May I be well, strong or healed. And as you repeat these simple intentions that have been done for thousands of years, it's as if your cells are listening. And this is the research of people like Liz Blackburn and Alyssa Eppel, who Liz Blackburn got the Nobel Prize for discovering the telomerase and the telomeres at the end of the caps and the DNA, it turns out that your cells listen to your heart and to your intention, that consciousness affects your body.

1:55:10And little by little, even though it can bring up its opposite, I hate myself, I'm never good enough. And you see all those and you say, thank you for trying to protect me. I appreciate that. May I be well, may I be safe, may I be held in love. And little by little, like water on a stone, It starts to soften the places that are holding your lack of self-forgiveness, your lack of care. And loving kindness starts to grow in you. And it's a very beautiful practice. There's lots of places you can find it in my work and teachers like Sharon Salzberg and Emma Chodron and Tara Brock and so forth. Do you have any guided loving kindness meditations or audio that you can recommend people listen to?

1:55:55I do. They can go on my website, jackcornfield.com. I think they will be on there. I do know for sure, I have a whole series of great programs with Sounds True, soundstrue.com, that include meditations on the mind vast as the sky, meditations on compassion and loving kindness. And I did a book, one of the books I've done is called A Lamp in the Darkness. And it contains, I think, eight or nine different guided practices that you can get either with it on a CD, but you can get it as a download, basically. And Sounds True also has that and has a compassion practice and a grounding practice and a vast sky-like mind practice and so forth.

1:56:37So you can look for all of those. The beautiful thing is that you can learn this. And I was a couple of years ago invited to be part of the first White House Buddhist leadership gathering. There were 120 Buddhist leaders from around the country from different communities. I don't think that's going to happen again very soon, but there it was. One could hope. And most of the communities did beautiful things that were involved in soup kitchens and tending the homeless and projects to support healing for whether it was malaria, other diseases in different other parts of the world and so forth, all kinds of great stuff, and certainly meditation.

1:57:18And when I got to talk, which was kind of a summary talk toward the end of it, I mentioned that in this historical record, whether it's true or not, the texts and so forth describe the Buddha meeting with kings and princes and ministers and so forth. And probably if the Buddha were around now, he would go to the White House if he were invited. He certainly would have met with Obama and who knows now. And he had advice about wise society, which he would give to leaders. And he'd say, if you can train your people to meet one another with respect, to listen with respect to differences and to come together peacefully listening to one another, then your society will prosper and not decline.

1:58:01And if your society tends the vulnerable among them, the young people, the old people, those who are sick, it will prosper and not decline. And if your society tends the environment around it in a healthy way, it will prosper and not decline. these are principles of compassion and wise society that you could read perhaps in a number of great traditions from the Iroquois nation or from the Taoist sages but here's the beautiful piece yes these are good things meeting in harmony and discussing in harmony and being respectful for one another and so forth there are practices that you can teach and learn that develop this capacity so that in our elementary schools now, you know, through organizations like CASEL, which is a consortium for social and emotional learning that's worked in, you know, 10 ,000 schools, kids learn social and emotional learning.

1:58:59They learn compassion, and it changes their lives. They're better academically. And all these kids carry the troubles of our times. They hear the news. They see the trouble even in their own family. to teach you how to steward your own heart from when you're young. And then these capacities are now being incorporated, as we know, mindfulness-based stress reduction in clinics and hospitals and businesses. There's the mindfulness teachers when the Seahawks won the championship or the Chicago Bulls and the L.A. Lakers when they were championship teams. They had a meditation coach, a mindfulness coach, George Mumford, a good friend.

1:59:37and that these capacities can be learned wherever we are and they transform our life. It's not just by accident or that you have this beautiful experience on the mountains or making love, but you can make that alive for you through these trainings every day, every part of your life. Jack, there was a question I was planning on asking at some point anyway, and I think this is a good segue, which is how can you get a busy person hooked on mindfulness practice? What would be a first step or how to start? And since we're talking about loving kindness, I would like to give a bit of a hard sell for loving kindness meditation as one option because I recall, perhaps it was two years ago, I was really beating myself up.

2:00:21And for people who don't know this about me, I've spent the majority of my life being my own worst enemy in terms of inner dialogue. I mean, extremely brutal and hypercritical and loathsome of myself in so many different respects. And I was going through a particularly intense and difficult time with that inner critic, just ruthlessly beating myself up. And at that point, another friend of mine, Chade Meng Tan, who created the Search Inside Yourself class at Google, he was a very early engineer, which became the most oversubscribed class for employees at Google, recommended that I take a look at loving kindness meditation.

2:01:01And I didn't have any particularly sophisticated approach to it, but I decided with nothing to lose and that I was having so much trouble during that period sitting still and trying to focus on, say, the breath or anything like that, that at night, this happened to coincide with book deadline. Probably not pure coincidence that my beating myself up was exacerbated during that time. That was a few years ago. and I began at night in my case when I would take a shower at night or sit in a sauna I very often go to hotels to write which is something Maya Angelou and a few others that convinced me might be a good idea that I would consider two people just like you had mentioned two people I really cared for and wish them well that's all I did and Che had said to me Meng is usually what I would call him, that at one point a woman in one of his classes had done this for one day at work.

2:01:55Every hour on the hour, she would just look out of her office and wish someone well that she could see in her mind's eye for 60 seconds or so. And she said it was her best day of work in seven years. And I found that unbelievable. So I decided to try it myself. And that week of just spending maybe two to four minutes at night before going to bed ended up being one of the most blissful weeks in memory, certainly at that point in several years, it was really profound. And I couldn't pick out any other variable that had changed. So for me, I just want to, for people who are listening and saying, ah, you know what, I'm type A driven, super hyper competitor.

2:02:32This doesn't apply to me that it very well could apply to you. And that by taking a little bit of the harmful edge off, you don't automatically remove your competitive edge. And in fact, I would argue just as you mentioned that the Bulls and so on used to have or still do it used to have a mindfulness coach For competitive advantage that it can be another tool in your toolkit and doesn't take you out of the game So to speak it just makes you more aware of the games that you're playing so And that's a long sort of infomercial sales pitch that I wanted to just make sure I got in because I discounted a lot of these practices for a very long time because I thought it would be a waste of a waste of life.

2:03:34If you wanted to get a busy, maybe even impatient person hooked on mindfulness practice, what first steps or approaches you might suggest? So a lot of different questions sort of woven into what you said. And the first is that there's a kind of misunderstanding in our culture that love is a weakness. And it's not. There is a way in which it's the force that can, probably the only force that can meet the level of aggression or violence and other such things that are happening in the world. It's the power that lets mothers lift cars off their children or lets somebody like Dr. Martin Luther King stand after his church was bombed and children were killed and say, we will meet your physical violence with soul force.

2:04:24We will not harm you, but we will love you so deeply that we will not only transform ourselves, but we will transform you in the process. And so the notion that love is somehow a weakness, I think we do everything out of love. We want to be loved, even in our, you know, ambition and our desire for success. Underneath it is, you know, we want to be well. We want to find our happiness. And that's part of love. So it's actually a power. And my colleague and friend Wes Nisker went to interview Gary Snyder a couple of years ago. Gary is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and environmentalist for 50 years when writing about bioregionalism and one of our great kind of elders in this environmental movement.

2:05:11And he said, Gary, what do you have to say to us now? The oceans are rising. The world climate is changing hotter and hotter. The species extinction. And Gary looked back and he said, don't feel guilty. If you're going to save it, don't save it out of guilt or anger or fear. Those are the very things that are actually making the world worse. Save it because you love it. Because it's part of you. And that is the power. whether you're starting a company, but also it's not just that you, you know, some vision, okay, now I'm going to become this wealthy playboy or whatever, you know, zillionaire, that what does your life mean for you and what do you really want?

2:05:54And when you listen, there is something in you and it's part of your birthright to both be able to give your gifts, but also to love and be loved in return. And it turns out that it's a power. So then what you talk about is that it doesn't take much to begin the training. And you're, you know, two minutes or four minutes in the evening or this woman at her work taking once an hour, 30 seconds or a minute to look at somebody there and offer a well-wishing can transform everything. For people who want the practical support, because it is hard to do on your own, if you go to soundstrue.com and look up the programs that I have.

2:06:37First, there's a 40-day program called Mindfulness Daily, which is 15 minutes a day or 12 minutes a day, depending on the segment, that both gives instructions in mindfulness, loving awareness, and loving kindness practice. And it's 12 or 15 minutes a day. And by the end of those 40 days, you really have learned the inner skills. And then it builds up. There's then a deeper training called Power of Awareness. And for those who are interested, We're about to open an online teacher training for people interested in mindful, passing along mindfulness and loving kindness to others. Jack, just to interject for one second, for people listening, I will also link to all of these resources in the show notes, which you can find at tim.blog forward slash podcast.

2:07:20So you don't necessarily have to remember all these things. You can go to the URL and we will have direct links to these resources. Sorry to interrupt, Jack. Just wanted to mention it for people listening. And with it, then, there is also, of the programs there, there's one called Guided Meditations that's, you know, a download. It's like$10 or something. And it has a loving-kindness practice, a compassion practice, a forgiveness practice. I think it may even have a joy practice. And it's really helpful to have guided meditations at first, because otherwise your attention, we have a very short attention span in modern society.

2:07:54Albert Einstein, at least according to Scientific American, American said, if you can drive safely while kissing a girl, you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. And we are in this kind of multitasking world with our devices, and we've forgotten how to tend our own hearts. We've forgotten how, in some ways, to really be present for one another, and more importantly, for our own life. And so getting guided meditations is tremendously helpful. And doing these little mini practices that you talk about one minute, two minutes, several times a day can transform you. I was just going to mention to people also, if you look at behavioral change, if you look at BJ Fogg, formerly of the Persuasion Laboratory at Stanford, you look at dietary change, any of these things, doing less than you think you're capable of doing is a really good long-term strategy in terms of starting off rigging the game so that you can win in the beginning, so that your pass-fail mark in your mind is a really, really low hurdle.

2:08:58So I just wanted to reiterate, guided meditation, don't white-knuckle in the beginning. Make it as easy as possible. The same principle from ancient texts say that you start in the easiest way. For some people, kindness for themselves seems impossible, but then you pick a child you care about or someone else. Or even when you do go to yourself, you think of yourself when you were an innocent child and wish yourself well. The game is to do whatever naturally opens the gateway, whatever is the easiest. For some people, it's their dog. You come home and the most nonjudgmental being in their life wags its tail and loves you, and it doesn't care, you know, what's going on in your head.

2:09:38So you take the avenue that most naturally opens your heart, and then you do this just a little at a time, as you said, and it doesn't take long. But the other thing that's important is that sometimes as you do it, it can actually display or show you the hypercritical nature of your mind, the shame that you carry, the self-judgment or self-loathing. And so then you say, well, what do you do then? Or it brings up its opposite. Is that's the place that you just breathe and hold all that stuff with kindness, because this is our humanity. And we all have some of that. And the point isn't to get rid of it or judge yourself for having it or try to fix it.

2:10:18it's almost as if you put your hand on your heart and you say, you know, this is like mindful self-compassion or deep training. This is part of the measure of struggles that I've been given like every human being. These things have tried to protect me and now I can hold them with tenderness and say, all right, you know, thank you, but I don't need your help anymore. I can be kind to myself. And in that way, you're not trying to fix yourself or perfect yourself. If anything, you're trying to perfect your love. So Jack, I wanted to give you a credit for help that you gave me and also tactical advice that you gave me during the 10 day silent retreat.

2:10:58You gave me a lot, but I want to highlight one that's related to what you just said. I was going through a very, very difficult time, particularly days seven, eight, nine. And you gave me the advice that you just mentioned. And there's one component I want to really underscore for people, and that is when you're, for instance, trying to do loving kindness meditation and instead you get the opposite or you get this self ridicule. Who are you to try to meditate in this self indulgent way? This is ridiculous. Or this voice starts to pop up that is angry or hateful, whatever it might be. the process of not simply dismissing it or fighting against it, but recognizing it as a coping strategy that helped you in the past in some way that you developed because in my case, you know, the rage was a fuel that without which I probably would never have left Long Island, where I had friends who later overdosed on opiates and so on.

2:12:00So it was a gift in a way and a tool and as you said you can thank that response or that part of yourself and then put it and i remember you recommended even visualizing and please correct me if i'm wrong or elaborate but visualize taking that part of you that is a coping strategy thanking it and then putting it say on a shelf where you can use it later if need be along with say other icons or figures who whether it's Buddha or other that you recognize as wise and then continuing with the meditation. So that thanking that part of yourself for the function that it once served, even if it is not serving you now, was such a key insight for me that then helped me to manage my internal states or observe and appreciate my internal states for the next several days where I really felt like I was lost at that point.

2:12:57So that was a really direct tool that helped me tremendously. Yeah, thank you. for bringing it up because it's so important for people when we come to that hypercritical shame place we feel very vulnerable and we've been identified with it and because you needed it i needed these things for survival and if you try to get rid of this stuff you just end up in a fruitless battle against yourself and it's just more judgment so what you described as saying thank you for helping me survive i appreciate it let me put it on the shelf or the altar i'll put it in the lap of the Buddha or whoever, you know, the goddess of infinite compassion.

2:13:34You hold it for me. If I need it, I'll pull it back. And that sense that this isn't who you are. It doesn't describe who you are. It isn't who you are. It was a strategy because we're vulnerable beings and you were tender as a child and you had to make sure you could survive. Thank you for that. And now I have a different capacity. And let me just talk about that capacity a little bit because the capacity for presence and the great heart of compassion that's said to be your birthright is a really mysterious thing. Talk about identity. And when my youngest brother's wife, Esther, was dying of cancer, and she's just a beautiful being, and I spent quite a bit of time with her and with my brother.

2:14:19She was close to dying. I'd gone home to sleep, and I wanted to get up early and hurry back because it was very close. And I got in my car. I had to stop at the drugstore to pick up a prescription, hurriedly running, dashing through the aisles and so forth. And I'm at the checkout counter. And all of a sudden, my whole body relaxed. And I thought, oh, Esther died. And I got out to the car. And I called my brother. I said, how's it going? He He said, oh, Esther died a few minutes ago. And I said, I know. You know, I'll be there shortly. We've all had these experiences. If I ask in a room how many have had this particular kind where you knew someone died when they died, you know, a quarter of the hands will go up.

2:15:04Why is this? It's because who we are is not this body. We are the consciousness itself. And so with all these practices, what they allow us to do is to step out of what's called the small sense of self or the body of fear and reconnect with a field of connection, of interdependence, of compassion, and to take our history and to honor it, but not be bound by it. One of my favorite stories is of Ram Dass, again, this wonderful spiritual teacher. in the early years when he came back from being with his guru in India. He was sitting up there and teaching devotional practices and meditation practices, and he had a beard and white robes and beads, and he was sort of in the guru outfit.

2:15:57And a woman in the front row raised her hand and said, Ram Dass, Ram Dass, aren't you Jewish? What's with this Hindu stuff? And Ram Dass said, well, yes, I am, actually. I was bar mitzvahed as I was, too. And there are many things I love about the Jewish spiritual tradition, the generosity of it, the Kabbalah, all the great teachings on the many stages and states of consciousness, the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters. And then he paused and looked at it and he said, but remember, I'm only Jewish on my parents' side. And there is something both withy, which he was, but also profound about it, because we are not just our parental history or the historical circumstances of this place and body that we were born into.

2:16:43and something in us knows this. So that when you look at the, there's a wonderful book that came out last year or the year before called The Book of Joy, which was a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu. And both of them have marvelous laughs. I think people go to hear the Dalai Lama by the tens of thousands, not just for the Tibetan teachings, some of which are actually hard to understand, or even the fact that he's this Nobel Prize winning world figure. I think people go to hear him laugh, that somebody who's carried so much suffering from the loss of his country where he can't return and the burning of temples and texts and all of those things.

2:17:26And he and Tutu had a week together when they were asked, and this created this book, how can you be joyful, how can you laugh like this when you've lived through apartheid and the death of so many people around you? And Dalai Lama, they banter back and forth like brothers, And Dalai Lama says, so much has been taken from me. You know, they've taken our sacred texts. They've taken our ability to make prayers in public. They've taken so much of our culture. Why should I let them take my happiness? And then Tutu starts to laugh and giggle and say, you know, I've been through so much, but I am not going to let myself live in that place.

2:18:05I'm going to let myself live in that which affirms life. And in a kind of profound joy that we made it. that we're still alive, that we can contribute, that we can be here in this beautiful Earth. And this shift of consciousness is what's needed for the world. Because if we look, honestly, no amount of technology alone is going to save us. Nanotechnology and space technology and biotechnology and worldwide web, internet, computer or supercomputer technology is going to stop continuing warfare and racism and tribalism and environmental destruction. Those are happening based on consciousness of the human heart.

2:18:49And so we are now, you know, we've made these enormous developments outwardly where you have the great library of Alexandria and your smartphone in your pocket, along with a million, you know, cat YouTubes or whatever. But there it is. It's all in there. And then what we need is collectively to develop a transformation inwardly of our inner life that is parallel to this enormous outer transformation. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff some years ago said, we are a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants. I don't know how old humanity is, but it's time to grow up. So that this work that we're talking about is both individual, but as you learn to meet your own life with greater understanding and compassion, it empowers you to move through the world in a different way and to help others do the same.

2:19:46And then you get that kind of joy of Tutu and the Dalai Lama that you're somehow part of an awakening that humanity now needs more than ever. Jack I'd love to ask you these interviews are always driven by some self-interest I always have some issue or challenge or problem that I'm trying to figure out so I reach out to someone like you to help me do it but I record the conversation as we chatted about before we hit record and you know this already but the last several years have been very very important for me in terms of addressing certain traumas in the last eight weeks in particular have been transformative in a lot of beautiful ways.

2:20:24And the duration of periods within which I don't berate or attack myself have become longer. But there are still times when the wheels fly off the car. And this last week has been one such example. And I tend to, when I make a mistake or feel like I'm backsliding or relapsing to compound the problem by beating myself up, then I beat myself up about beating myself up and you know where that goes. So let me paint a picture. So I found out recently that my Japanese host father, and I've been in touch with this family since I was 15. I'm very, very close to them. I'm 40 now. And I found out that he just was admitted because the host mother sent me an email to the hospital with liver cancer.

2:21:10They don't have the details yet. I just sent a follow-up email. They don't know what the prognosis is exactly, but needless to say, the worst case scenarios are certainly being conjured in my mind or the potential of those. And then simultaneously have been contending with, and I believe you have some experience with this, contending with a, what should be a very simple construction project of a cabin up in the mountains. And it has been delayed and delayed and delayed. And there have been cost overruns and cost overruns and cost of runs and promises made promises broken expectations set expectations missed and a friend of mine called with a whole new slew of problems yesterday related to this place and i lost my shit for lack of a better term i mean there are many other things going on simultaneously but i got really pissed and i was like you know what this extending the olive branch being understanding can't gambit is not working with these people like i need to i need to take out the baseball bat and like pull old tim off the shelf who was just this like juggernaut head through brick walls and be like, listen, fuck face, like if you don't do ABCD and E here, these are going to be the consequences.

2:22:19And then I'm like, well, wait, I'm supposed to be compassionate, but how do I not be a pushover? And it turns into this big dramatic play inside my head. And then I wait, this is going to end soon. I'm not going to keep going. But what I then often do is self-medicate with caffeine. And I think it's a way of feeling productive without actually being productive. And it also creates so much volume on the noise. I think I use it to tune out a lot of feelings. So when someone relapses or has this kind of experience, what do you suggest to them? I mean, is there a particular pattern interrupt or approach that you've found helpful for regaining footing?

2:23:03Oh, so there's a number of things to say. First of all, you could call it relapsing or you could just call it, yeah, being human. The most beloved poet in Japan was a Zen master named Ryokan. And there's a two-line verse of his that I particularly find fitting for this, where he wrote, last year a foolish monk, this year no change. And you can sort of feel the humor and the tenderness in it. And there's a way in which you see your personality, the point, you know, you have a body, you have this particular body you're born with, and you can transform it in certain ways within the limits of the body that you were given.

2:23:45And similarly, you have a personality. And anybody who has a number of kids realizes that you don't come in tabla rasa, that you actually, this kid is born and has this kind of temperament. So you have a personality. And just like you don't want to look too closely to the body sometimes, you don't want to look back closely to the personality either. You know, it has its foibles and its fears and all of that. And so you start to kind of look at it and say, oh, now there's a really good example of how neurotic I can get. Thank you. Thank you for reminding me. You know, and then you get a little sort of like the keeper of the zoo, a little more tender with those kind of creatures.

2:24:20It's bringing in the non-judgment or the loving kindness for the way that you actually are and not your ideal or bringing compassion. You could say, yeah, this is a tough one and this triggered. I got triggered. So what? Now, the other thing is that I had the same experience where we had a big remodel of our house when I was some years ago raising my daughter and in my first marriage. And we were supposed to go and teach and travel in Europe. And this guy who was a good contractor, but, you know, everything, of course, gets more expensive when you have to do this. And it kept getting slowed down.

2:24:55And I said, you are going to get this done so we could make these decisions forward to Europe. And it's not happening. You've got to hurry up. I do that like three or four different times and it doesn't happen. Finally, I go in. I get pissed. And I say, listen, you said this in our contract was going to be done. And if you don't fucking get this done by the time of that, I'm going to haul your ass in court and sue you. Because I need this done. And I'm not going to pay you the goddamn money. He looked at me and he said, oh, you really want this done, don't you? I said, yes. Next day, there's a huge crew.

2:25:26It starts to get done. And I realized, okay, I've been sort of talking meditation speak. Yeah, nice, get it done. He was a fucking contractor. And I just had to speak contractorese. Get the goddamn job done or I'll haul your ass in. Okay, I get it. Yeah, I'll send a team over. And that's all it took. So there's something playful about that as well. It's not that you can't. I've seen the Dalai Lama get angry at people. It's not that you can't use that power and that understanding when it's necessary to get very strong or forceful. And you don't have to judge yourself unless you hurt people. And then, of course, that's the misuse of it.

2:26:07But it's just, it's part of being human. Is there something you say to yourself? I don't know, you are certainly in person and with any contact I've had with you, one of the most compassionate people I've ever met. And I don't use that word very much, but your presence of listening and being with someone is really incredible. I don't know how much of that is intrinsic versus trained, but for better or for worse, coming out of the womb, I've been very impatient since day one. So I worry about I can get, it seems like my default is speaking contractor ease to more than just the wayward contractor who's putting off work.

2:26:55is there some when I feel that the sensations of anger beginning to bubble up is there something that you would suggest as self-talk or just a temporary pumping of the brakes to make it an informed decision versus just a lashing out well I could give you an answer but in a minute I'm going to guide you in a little practice perfect so that you can find the better answer first I I just want to say that that anger, you know, yes, it's your habit or maybe your temperament. That's energy. And there's nothing wrong with energy. You know, it's the power to let you do all the kind of things you've done in your life that are tremendously creative or resourceful or daring or whatever kinds of things.

2:27:39So you want to respect, okay, I'm getting filled with energy. And, you know, it might be then you want to lash out. But first you want to respect that energy. Wow, let me feel this in my body. Woo, anger. How big is it? Okay, then your question is, what can I do to modulate it? I could give you, okay, take some breaths, ground yourself, look at that other person, blah, blah, blah. But instead, as we're talking, let yourself picture a circumstance recently. It might have been with the contractors doing your cabin or something else. you know that uprising of the injustice of it and how right you are and how you're going to get this goddamn thing done and how you have to be hard and strong you feel all that and feel that energy in your body first thing is just remember what it felt like and now you're becoming the kind of mindful loving witness of it and saying wow this is a lot of energy so can you feel that and remember that Oh, yeah.

2:28:38Oh, yeah. Okay. Now, next step is that the wisest figure you can imagine, maybe it's the Buddha or doesn't matter, some great master or martial arts master, you know, who's mastered themselves as well as their art comes to you and let yourself imagine somebody is going to teach you how to manage this powerful energy and see who appears. somebody appears to you and first they look at you and they smile and they say yeah this is the big energy and they appreciate you so instead of saying oh you're a doofus you know they say oh yeah you actually carry some powerful energy and they acknowledge that they bow to you yeah and you got it all right and then you say yeah but how do i manage this when it takes me over and so this send master, whoever comes, reaches under their robe and pulls out a gift for you, which is a clear symbol of exactly what you need in that moment to help you regulate it so that you can keep the energy, but do it in a way that doesn't cause harm to you or another.

2:29:47And this clear symbol, you'll be able to see it's just what you need. So let yourself picture the gifts that they put in your hand and let yourself imagine see envision picture what it is and if you can't see it clearly hold it up to the sunlight you'll be able to and then let me know what you get you want me to tell you what it is yeah yeah all right so the person who came to mind for me i went through a few was the creator of judo fascinating guy named jigo rocano really small small guy yes who could who could throw all the big guys and smile at the same time right exactly changed a lot also in japanese government fascinating guy the symbol i don't know why this is to be honest but it's a pyramid the size with with with straight edges about a little too big to hold in your palm that is blue it's like almost a mixture of pure sky blue like a bluebird blue with a bit of electric blue mixed in.

2:30:52And it's sort of a smoky vapor that's floating around inside this glass pyramid. I have no idea why that's the case, but that's what came up. All right, so we'll stay with it, and then there's one more little piece. So he gives you this pyramid. Reassociate a little bit on what it might possibly mean, because these symbols are like dream images, and they come from a deep place in your psyche. and this pyramid has a message for you, this blue pyramid, just guess what it might be. I think it's very, very stable. It's an extremely stable structure. And for me, it also, I could imagine it representing power also.

2:31:32It seems like a very powerful symbol in many different cultures, certainly. Yep. The blue is a little easier for me. it's a very cooling, soothing color, where certainly red is the color I would associate with a fire, with the high resonance, anger, energy, would be more of a red fire element. So the blue would be a cooling or countering balancing force for that. All right, so now what I want you to do is imagine taking this blue pyramid gift, which represents a kind of extreme stability and also a kind of power and cooling that's given to you by Jigarokano and taking this into your body so that there you are filled with this energy and anger, you know, this huge wave.

2:32:22You let that be there and you take this pyramid in and you let that energy be inside this stable, grounded place of power and feel what it's like to be inside this blue pyramid with this energy and feel how it affects it. Just notice. As if there you're in that circumstance, and now I'm remembering I am the blue pyramid. And what does it feel like? The most noticeable thing, I wonder, of course, how much of this is the actual visualization versus the timeout that I permit myself to have, but there's very often a tightness on the left side of my chest, right by the sternum, that I feel when I start getting wound up.

2:33:08And that is absent after taking this gift and then visualizing it being incorporated. That dissipates. While you're practicing, and you know this very well in athletics, that yes, you practice things, but other times you also practice envisioning, whether it's playing piano or whether it's some Olympic training, that some of the times you just do it through visualization and it activates a lot of the same neural circuitry. So here you're starting to get the feeling of what it's like to be in the middle of this upwelling of anger and so forth, and then taking a couple of breaths and feeling the blue pyramid and the connection with the earth and the stability of it And the power then of that presence that cools you and allows the anger to be there, but not in the same uncontrolled way.

2:34:00Now, there's one more thing, and that is if you imagine again, Jigoro Kano, I believe you said his name is. You got it. He comes up to you after giving you this gift, and he touches you kindly on the shoulder. and he has a few words of advice of how to handle this powerful energy that comes up in you because he knows all about it and what does he whisper into your ear kindly well he whispers this came to mind immediately he says zenyo ko zenyo which is you know i still have this actually there are two he has many famous quotes but he has what you might consider proverbs short aphorisms that I've actually carried with me since I was 15, but they're packed away somewhere.

2:34:47I have two of them. They're on cloth. And the first is, It means basically if you work hard, you will achieve. You will reach your target. It's not the best translation, but that's the idea. The other one is, which is effectively the most efficient use of energy, but it could also be the best slash most benevolent use of energy. It's a principle of Judo, but it's something that he applied to everything, including education. So it would be that very short bite-sized aphorism, which is, and I'm sure some scholars probably disagree with me, but roughly translated here, at least as I take it, is the maximum or most efficient use of energy.

2:35:34So take that in, take his intention, Zenyoko Zenyo. the benevolent and efficient use of it. Feel the pyramid. And now your assignment is that the next five times that this comes, which it will, maybe tomorrow or next week or so forth, bring in the blue pyramids, stable, powerful, cooling. So the energy is still there. And then you hear his voice say, and you go, oh yeah, I can use this, but I can use it in a benevolent way. And try it five times. Then text me. let me know what happened because now we're closing the loop if you do it and see now you now you're responsible if you agree that you're going to do it it sort of gooses the game a little bit you go okay now i better do it because i have to let jack know where you know what happened let me know what happens well i'll be able to use it this week because i'm flying out to the site of this cabin to meet with everybody and see what the hell's going on so i'll have at least five opportunities to do that you have you have your zen training ahead i mean the other thing that's great and then that you can hear in this, rather than my giving you a cookie-cutter answer, is that we actually have the wisdom that we're seeking or that's available, we have it in ourselves.

2:36:52I mean, you didn't have to fly to Kyoto and get in your time machine to go back and see Jigarokano, you know, or whoever it happens to be, the Dalai Lama or whoever happens to come to you, the Buddha or some other great figure, that actually, the goddess of compassion, that we carry that wisdom in our own heart. And part of what these contemplative trainings do is they give us access just by taking a little pause. It didn't take you either. 30 seconds. Okay, he appears. What do I do? Ah, here's how my body would feel. What perspective should I bring? Ah, here's efficient and benevolent use of energy.

2:37:30Okay, now I remember. So these answers for the questions of the psyche and the heart don't require going somewhere. They ask us to quiet and begin to listen. And as you do, you discover your own inherent wisdom and your own compassion as well, because the benevolent use that he offers to you, where does that live? It lives In Tim, it lives in you. One of the reasons I've wanted to have you on the podcast for so long is that for me, you represent a very wide spectrum of tools. You have developed a toolkit that has enabled you to work with everyone from the seekers of, say, the Buddhist, along the lines of the Buddhist traditions, to, say, adolescents who are cutters, to war vets with PTSD, missing limbs, and so on.

2:38:23you've worked with a very diverse set of students and patients maybe even. And that leads me to my next question, which is after these experiences abroad, why did you decide to come back to the U.S. period? And then why did you decide to go back to school and study clinical psychology? So after the first five years in Asia, there were two other Westerners who had become monks. It was a handful. And some were going to stay for the rest of their lives. I'd learned a lot. And so that was kind of a choice. Am I just going to stay? And I realized, no, I want a family. I want a lover. I was a young man after all.

2:39:05And just the celibacy for those years was actually pretty hard. I want to see if what I have learned really translates into the life back home. I don't want to just leave it. And so it was some wrestling, but it became very clear to me that I wasn't fit for the monastery for the rest of my life. I had other, not only other desires, but also, and longings, but also a real interest to say, does this work elsewhere? So I came back and thought, well, what can I do? I got a couple of jobs and right away. And of course, what I knew how to do was be a student, but I was now a student of the mind and the heart.

2:39:41And I thought, well, how do I learn more about what happened to me in the monastery? Oh, I'll study Western psychology. And so that started me on that particular path. And I learned a lot of complementary things. There's some very good trauma work in the West that I've learned about that really enhances the compassion and loving kindness and mindfulness things that I learned in the temple. And now I've done a lot of years of teaching Eastern and Western psychology together. These principles that I've learned are spreading so widely in Western psychology. I went to the largest therapy conference in the country in December and down in Anaheim and gave a talk.

2:40:23Here's a room full of 3 ,000 or 5 ,000 people. And I asked, how many of you have some experience of meditation or mindfulness practice? And the majority of the hands went up. And that would not have happened 20 or 30 years ago. So Eastern psychology is now becoming more invisibly woven into the understandings of clinical psychology in the West. And it's beautiful. Now, I want to say something else. You know, when you talk about working with a variety of population, yes, people in prisons. Yes, dads or kids coming out of gangs, but also CEOs. And there's a dialogue that Bill Ford and I did. He was at that time the chairman of Ford Motors.

2:41:08He was actually the CEO, perhaps, before that. But then he's the chairman of Ford Motors. And he talks about it, too. It was in 2008, I guess, when the auto industry was just about to melt down. He called. We'd had some contact. He's a meditator. And he said, you know, I'm going to lose my grandfather's company and maybe the whole industry on my watch. And it's hard to sleep. what can I do? And we did loving kindness practices and mindfulness practices together and so forth. And I gave him some practices that he could use. And it turns out that at whatever level you're on, whether you're incarcerated or whether you're a CEO or whether you're a returning vet, that these inner capacities that we have to be present without getting loss, to bring an understanding attention to these energies, just as you were doing with anger in ourselves, are really, really liberating.

2:42:07And sometimes what's needed, like for the vets or the people coming back from the war, is also a kind of forgiveness practice in trauma work. And we'll come together and, you know, they'll say things like, I can't tell you what I saw. Because in fact, people don't want to hear the horrors of war. They can't tell the story. And And if they do, often they re-traumatize themselves. And the people around them couldn't bear it. But there's something worse because they'll say, I can't tell you what I had to do. And so it's locked up in their hearts, you know. And then what do they have? They can drink or they can distract themselves or get in blind rages periodically.

2:42:47But if you get a room of returning combat vets and hold it with a proper space of understanding and compassion, not only can they tell their stories, which they've never told, but they can listen to one another and say, oh, yeah, I've been there. And all of a sudden, they're not so alone anymore. and that release of the weight on their heart. So there's a social dimension to trauma where we need to tell the story, helps them release also what's carried in their nervous system and in their body. And there's some correlation between those two together that becomes very powerful. And we need that.

2:43:27I do a lot of teaching of forgiveness practice and self-forgiveness. Those are also on those guided meditations that I teach. And for a lot of us, self-forgiveness, like self-compassion, becomes a very, very important way to liberate ourselves from what we had to do to survive in the past so that we're actually free in our life. How do you set the stage, for instance, with those vets? What do you say to them or what exercise might you do that opens the door for them to share these stories? So a couple of images, one with gang kids and then one with vets. for gang kids who come in or these kids who are trying to get out of gangs and might come with a mentor or something like that to some events we've had and you get these guys and they're you know their hoods are up and their hats are on backward and they're leaning back and saying like come on man you're going to teach us meditation you're going to teach us give us some poem stories or bit listen we're out on the street people got nine millimeters you know you got to give us something better than that.

2:44:29So we try to make a setting that honors who they are from the very beginning. We say, well, we can't talk yet about the real things that we came here to do because there are too many people in this room who have not been acknowledged and not been respected. So would you go out in the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person you know who's been killed, and we light one candle and put it in the center of a table, say, bring it back in and say their name and put their stone by this candle. The simplest possible ritual. And these guys, and sometimes gals will come in, and their hands are full of stones.

2:45:09No young people should know that many dead people. And they'll say, this is for Tito, and this is for RJ, and this is for homegirl. And pretty soon, there's a mound of stones and the names of people they've lost were put into the fabric of the air of that room and their hoods are no longer over their heads. They're sitting up like, okay, this is the place where we can talk about what's really going on. So there's something about making, whether it's through the simplest ritual or making a container in which people realize that this is a safe place to talk about what we've never done before. With the vets, one of the things that Michael Mead, Luis Rodriguez, these guys from Mosaic Multicultural Foundation that I've worked with for years and are really wonderful.

2:45:58Michael, who's a great drummer and a storyteller and mythologist who's also been working in prisons and with vets and gang kids for years, he'll say, let me tell you an ancient story of returning warriors. And he has a handful of stories from Africa or Tibet or the Mayan tradition about warriors coming back, you know, with their hands covered with blood and, you know, their eyes are filled with the martial energy that they would, that they can't stop the violence because it's taken them over. And here's a myth or a story that tells about how ancient warriors were brought back into their community.

2:46:37I'll tell you the myth if you want to hear one of them. Oh, yes, please. So here we are, you know, and there's these vets. And already stories have started to pour out about, I can't tell you what I saw. I can't tell you what I had to do. And Michael stood up and he said, let me tell you an old Irish story of an Irish warrior named Coquilaine. Or I'm not sure how his name is pronounced, something like that. And he was the most fierce and famous of all Irish warriors. And the Irish warriors were madmen because they would go out, they'd paint their bodies and they'd go out naked. And sometimes you just see them coming and you'd run the other way.

2:47:13But anyway, there was some rotting king and army that had come to threaten their area. And so Kukulain went out and almost single-handedly chased them and defeated them. But then he was coming back to his own town in a chariot covered with blood and his eyes blazing, bearing down on his own town, still possessed with the violence of war, with the god Mars. And they were all terrified he would come and do violence there too. And so they went, what can we do? What can we do? And they went to ask the old wise woman in the village, and she said three things. And so the first thing, they lined up all the women in the village who bared their breasts.

2:47:57And this slowed him down as if it reminded him of his mother's milk or something. And because he was slowed down, then the second thing they did was take a rope and tie it around him and put him in a huge cauldron of cold water, which hissed off his body. And then they filled it three times with cold water and finally his body cooled down. And then the third thing they did is they took him, still bound, and they lay him on a carpet in the court of the local king. And they sang to him the stories and myths and songs of warriors who had protected the kingdom and then come back and released the violence and the fears that they carried and planted their crops again and loved their families and resumed living in harmony with the community from which they came.

2:48:54And they told the ancient stories and sang the songs for three days and nights. And when it was over, Kukulain's eyes opened, they untied him, and he was back as a normal human being again. And after Michael told this story to vets who'd been telling terrible accounts of things that happened, in this room, a hundred men stood up and we'd been working with a simple African chant, a song that was really an African chant of a prayer, you know, earth, hold me for this living is hard. We all sang to the vets together for a long time as if we could sing them back into their bodies from this, as if they were lying there in the court of the king.

2:49:39So this is, and you asked the question, how do you make a setting that allows people to truly feel that they can tell their stories and be held in compassion, whether it's the grief of these gang kids that no one's really given the place to give voice to you know or the that who says i can't tell you what i had to do that's very powerful and it makes me also think back to conversations i've had with sebastian junger who is a wartime journalist has co-produced and shot a number of really harrowing documentary films, including Restrepo, and most recently wrote a book called Tribe that touches on some similar topic area and leads me to ask you, are there any rites of passages or rituals that you feel would be useful for every man or woman to experience?

2:50:39And this is something that I've felt a longing for and a lack of since my teenage years. I'm not Jewish, did not have a bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah. I don't know if that serves that purpose in the Jewish tradition necessarily, but are there any rituals or rites of passage that you think we could use in, let's just say, the United States that would be helpful to whether it's a specific population, specific group, or anyone? So what you're talking about is a really big subject. It's a subject of initiation. And unfortunately, bar mitzvahs, at least when I was, was a relatively lightweight and meaningless thing.

2:51:20You get up there and you recite your Hebrew portion of the Bible, and now you're a man and they give you a bunch of presents, and there wasn't a lot of meaning in it. The problem that you raise is that of the lack of initiation. And what's true is that it's been forgotten in our culture. One of the few places you get initiation is going into the military. That's an initiation. But a lot of these gang kids, for example, they're trying to initiate themselves, which can't really happen. You need elders and you need it in a ritualized way. But they'll go on. that if you're in the Maasai tradition in East Africa, the Maasai people, as everybody's heard, a young man at a certain age of 14 or something will go out and kill a lion to prove that they're now an adult member of the society and that they're brave, and that's part of their initiation.

2:52:12There were initiations for young women as well, and it's not just in Africa. The Mayans had initiations. And in Thailand, when I lived there back starting in the 1960s. At that point, almost every young man and many young women, when they reached the age of 1920, they became a monk for three months or for a year and lived in an austere way. And it was part of their initiation to learn both the inner life of themselves and also a kind of discipline. We don't have it. And because of it, you know, kids are trying to initiate themselves on the streets by shooting somebody or doing something that shows that they're brave, but it's not a lion, it's another person.

2:52:54Or it's trying to get the attention of the others and prove how powerful or strong they are. So we desperately need these and we need them built into our education and to our psychology. And I can't give you a simple answer, but one of the people who has the most intelligence about this is a man, a colleague of mine named Michael Mead. And if you look at Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, his writings on initiation and what's possible here and the things he's led are very, very inspiring. So that's a place that I would look. That's a good starting point. Wonderful. I will definitely find that. Well, Jack, I think we could go for hours and hours and hours, and I always love chatting with you, and I'd love to perhaps even consider doing a part two sometime.

2:53:40But given that we've already gone for two-plus hours, I want to ask just a few more questions. And I'll actually start with just reading something very short, which is from your 2017 year-end message. I think this is just to inject some more optimism into our conversation, which we've already had plenty of, but this is just a small portion of your year-end message. Martin Luther King Jr. describes our collective journey with hope. Quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. end quote. And Pablo Neruda explains further, you can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming.

2:54:19Renewal is happening. This is back to your voice. Take quiet time to listen to your heart, to meditate and to rest amidst the great turnings. Feel the renewal of spring that can be born in you. Align yourself with goodness. Let yourself blossom like a lotus or whatever unique flower you are, shining in the world, offering tiny seeds of love amidst it all. blessings to you in 2018 jack and i want this note to then lead into and certainly you're welcome to comment on that but which book you would recommend of yours people start with or where they start with all of the many materials recordings readings that you produce because you're a fantastic writer and a prolific writer if some of my favorite book titles i've ever heard by the way including after the ecstasy, the laundry, which maybe we could touch on, but where would you suggest people start of the many things that you've written and shared with the world?

2:55:13And if you have any comments on that year-end message, you're welcome to share that as well. So for books, if you want something simple, I have books like, you know, an introduction to meditation that Sounds True publishes, or I have a little book called The Art of Forgiveness, loving kindness and peace, which is very simple stories and practices. If you want something that's richer and fuller, then you could look at one of my bigger books like A Path with Heart or The Wise Heart, The Guide to the Principles of Buddhist Psychology. And again, I think lots of stuff online and Soundstrue is particularly a good place to go along with my website.

2:55:52Then, and that 40-day mindfulness, Mindfulness Daily, which is like 30 bucks or something, is a really wonderful way to start. In terms of what I had written about the trusting heart, one of the greatest Zen texts from a thousand years ago says to be awakened or enlightened is one with the trusting heart and mind. And that doesn't mean that we won't go through hard times. We always have, and we will again, and we are now in many ways. But that we also have borne within us the capacity to meet these difficulties with understanding, with courage, with compassion, and to transform them. And in that way, one of my favorite recent books is called The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker.

2:56:39And he's a remarkable professor at Harvard, anthropologist, historian, talking about the growing consciousness of humanity in spite of the kind of wars and conflict and environmental things. There are so many good things that have happened that he charts over the last few centuries of the development of certain abilities for peacemaking. There's actually less war than there'd been. Respect for women, the reduction in child labor, all kinds of things. And in that same regard, there's a wonderful book called Bury the Chains, which is about the ending of slavery in the British Empire, starting with this handful of men who met in a British tea shop or printing shop and spent 30 years riding around the country bringing ex-slaves who were well-spoken to talk about the Middle Passage and the horrors of slavery and so forth.

2:57:32And even though the British Empire's economic engine was built around slavery and sugar, by the end of their work, 30 years, the British Parliament outlawed slavery in the British Empire, You know, decades before it happened in the U.S., and the Quakers were a big part of this, and the Quakers famously wouldn't take their hats off for the king. But when, what is his name, Thomas Clarkson, who was the center of this group trying to end slavery and going everywhere to do it, when Thomas Clarkson died, all the Quakers of the England took their hats off because he had freed so many spirits and so many lives.

2:58:12We have these amazing possibilities as human beings, and we're just growing into them now culturally, and it's about time. They are possible, and we each have a contribution to make in it. Jack, I'm going to ask you one more question before we wrap up with just letting people know where they can find you on social media and elsewhere, the website and so on. But last question is one I like to ask. This is a metaphor, but if you could have a short message on a billboard, in other words, get a message out to millions or billions of people, could be a few words, one word, a phrase, a quote of yours, a quote of someone else's.

2:58:51What might you put on that billboard? Well, two things come to mind. One is a question that when I've sat with people many times at the end of their life, that they then ask of themselves silently or out loud is, did I love well? Because in the end, what matters really? The billboard would have a question rather than a statement. And it would have a question something like, how could I love myself better? So that it actually, it's not that I'm going to tell them something. They already know this, but I'm going to remind those who read that there is something that's asking to be awakened in them.

2:59:30How could I love myself and this world better? Then you go, well, it gets in the way of that. And how could I love that too? How could I love myself in this world better? Well, Jack, I want to, of course, thank you for your time today. But beyond that, I want to thank you. And this is very, very much from deep in my heart. Thank you for helping me to learn to love myself better and quite frankly, to see something

3:00:26in the first place that is worth loving. do right now remotely is to put it into words. So thank you for that. Thank you, Tim. This was a pleasure to do. And what I feel and I know is that as you tend your own heart in a wise way, then it makes you available to bring the gifts, the many gifts you have to the world, you personally and others, but to do it in a way that's on the carrier wave of connection and love and it transforms everything. So thank you too. Well, Jack, I, you know, I'm looking at a text thread of ours and I'm feeling the necklace around my neck, which is really a thread, a red thread that was used to close the one of the elements of the closing of the 10 day silent retreat.

3:01:07And I shot you a text not too long ago asking what the three knots meant because I'd forgotten. And this is what you wrote back. First knot equals refuge in whatever you hold is most inspiring and sacred. Second, commitment to compassion for self and others. Third, following your highest intention. And the intention that I've said at the end of that 10-day retreat was to learn to love myself so I could love others more fully. But I've realized that maybe what it is is learning to love myself so I can help others learn to do the same. And you've been an integral piece of that. and I just love that I have the opportunity to introduce you and your work and these traditions to more people and I will certainly be linking to where everyone can find you online but are there any particular best places just to reiterate where people can find you and I'll link to these in the show notes jackornfield.com and also look up jackornfieldonsoundstrue.com for those programs that I talked about.

3:02:12And then spiritrock.org, which is our great meditation center in the San Francisco Bay Area. Absolutely stunning, stunning, beautiful location. Worth visiting just to bathe in the scenery, but many more reasons to visit as well. Well, Jack, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure. And to everybody listening, you can find show notes, links to all the resources, books, and everything that we discussed at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you so much for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday.

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