The Tim Ferriss Show: #684: Jack Kornfield — How to Reduce Anxiety and Polish the Lens of Consciousness

Just a quick note before we get started to experience and practice one of the most important

themes from this episode, stick around after the interview for a guided loving kindness

meditation from Jack. He is very famous for these and for a very good reason.

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of

The Tim Ferriss Show. This is a rare in-person episode. And my job always is to investigate,

interrogate people I consider to be world-class performers. I have one in front of me. He is

a friend. He is a repeat guest, a very popular guest, Jack Kornfield. You can find him on Twitter

at JackKornfield. Jack trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India,

and Burma. That's an understatement, but maybe we'll come back to that. He has taught meditation

internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to have introduced Buddhist mindfulness

practice to the West. Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts,

with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, and Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California.

Current projects include CloudSongha.co, which we will talk about, which offers practice groups

for all the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, which has trained 7,000.

7,000, that's a lot. Mindfulness teachers in 75 countries and Wisdom Ventures, a fund

investing in companies that promote compassion. His books, many books, have been translated into

22 languages and have sold roughly 2 million copies. They include The Wise Heart, a guide to

the universal teachings of Buddhist psychology, A Path with Heart, After the Ecstasy in the Laundry,

one of the best book titles of all time, Buddha's Little Instruction Book, The Art of Forgiveness,

Loving Kindness and Peace, and his most recent book, No Time Like the Present, Finding Freedom,

Love, Enjoy Right Where You Are. You can find all things Jack at jackcornfield.com. That's

k-o-r-n-f-i-e-l-d.com, and we'll link to, of course, all of his social and everything else

in the show notes, tim.blog, slash podcast. Jack, so nice to see you.

I'm very glad to see you, Tim, and I'm glad that our lives have now intertwined over a number of

years, so it's been a pleasure in all these different venues.

It has been a pleasure. You have been a safety net, a mentor, a guide, a field EMT, perhaps,

with some of my situations over the years, and I really appreciate your year.

Well, it's my pleasure, too. We do it for each other.

The triage, the wisdom, the teaching, and there are a million different directions we could go,

but before we started recording, we were chatting a bit, I was making my tea, asking about good

departure points, perhaps the initial lift off where we should go, and we landed on a name,

and that's Stan Groff. So perhaps you can take that and lead us wherever you may,

providing context on who this is, why it matters, why it relates to your life, and so on.

Yeah, thank you, Tim, and I wanted to do this in some way because Stan Groff and the scene

that I want to set for you who are listening opens the doorway to a huge number of really

interesting questions about who we are, about humanity, about healing, about interconnection,

about all kinds of things. So here's the scene. Stan Groff, or Stanislav Groff, as he is sometimes

called, is a check-born physician and psychiatrist who was the last legitimate LSD researcher

in the 1970s. He'd done LSD research in Europe, got samples from Sandoz, and took some himself,

and it completely changed his life from being a kind of academic physician to say,

whoa, there's something a lot bigger going on here. And he ended up at Johns Hopkins when he

escaped from the communist regime, running the last LSD research for people who had cancer,

and were in hospice, were dying, for vets returning, for clergy, so that they might

actually have a little experience of the divine that was off the pages of their texts and so

forth. And then he moved after that to be at Esalen for a long time. We collaborated there

together for about 20 years. Over the course of our time to get to the story, and he's a polymath,

speaks 12 or 15 languages and reads Sanskrit and is completely well versed in the European

education of the great music of the world and all kinds of things like that. So when it became

less possible to work with psychedelics except a bit underground, he developed with his wife

Christina Holotropic Breathwork, which allows people to go to some of those very profound open

states using breath. And it mirrored things that I'd learned in monastery in Burma, where we'd

done incredibly intense deep breathing for some hours, and open to all kinds of states.

We worked together and retreats all around the world, and we'd be in a room with 200 or 300

people, huge speakers, I think the Grateful Dead or something like that. Half of the people, 150

lying on their backs on a nice mat, and then a sitter next to them. And then the music would

start with the instructions, very simple instructions, breathe as deep and fast and hard as you can,

and keep it going for the next hour or two until for liftoff till you go wherever you go. So people

would be breathing away and there would be this incredible music. It might be drumming from the

African musicians in the Congo drum jungle or all kinds of world music. And as you looked out over

the room, once the breathing had kicked in after half an hour or an hour, it was like walking into

Dante's divine comedy. It has heavens and purgatory and hell and so forth. So there would be people

in bliss laughing, smiling, their arms spread like they were angels having the most ecstatic

experiences. There would be people in the middle who were working stuff out with their bodies,

things that were tight that would want to open, and every kind of possible sound would come.

There were a lot of people in a birth experience because like psychedelics of different kinds,

one of the doorways you go through is in your regression, is to relive your birth. And so there

would be people pushing and being squeezed and going through a process that was both physical,

but more than that it mirrored what their birth was like. And then there would be people reliving

incredible traumas of different kinds, birth traumas, childhood traumas and so forth. And

they were encouraged to go through it and let it all out. There would be laughter, there would be the

sounds of ecstasy and there'd be people crying and screaming and you'd all at the same time with

this pounding music. And you go like, what is this? The result of it to kind of cut to the chase

once the music quieted down and people are invited to make some art and then talk about it,

is that, and Stan's work is this, if you trust the body and psyche and heart and mind to open

and you give it the opportunity and the medicine and someone's with you so you're not alone,

it wants to open. And whatever's unfinished wants to come out or whatever needs to be expressed.

And if there isn't something that's waiting there, then it becomes the doorway to the realms of

profound both awakening, freedom, understanding, beautiful things. And one of the great

sayings that Stan offered as we all began this collective journey was from our friend Joseph

Campbell, the great mythologist, who said, if you're to do this inner work, you either need a

very big story like the vastness of the universe that has what we could see in front of us, heavens

and hells and, you know, the hungry ghosts and the jealous gods and everybody all enacting it.

Either you need a very big story or even better, no story at all. And this scene was really the

scene of the gateway to the human heart and the human psyche. This is who we are, what we carry.

And then we shrink down a bit as we need to in our roles to be a parent or an artist or a business

person and so forth. But they're really kind of a contraction of this enormous spirit that we

were born with and that we carry. So how's that for an opening scene?

The divine comedy of expansive states. I think it's a great place to start. And I'll add just a

few things to that. And then I will have numerous questions that come to mind. So the first is,

for people who may wonder about the scope of Stan's experience, he's probably in some way

directly or indirectly supervised at least 1500 sessions. I remember when I spoke with him quite

a number of years ago. LSD sessions? Yeah, thousands of thousands. So the breadth of experience that

he has in witnessing in a clinical setting, how these things affect consciousness and also outcomes

is vast. It's really vast. The second is holotropic breathwork for people who

need just a bit more in the visual in terms of conjuring an image of what you just described.

The pounding music really can be pounding music. It's really can be very, very loud.

And I've had some really bizarre experiences going through holotropic breathwork, which I don't do

that often. And I may be doing something incorrectly, but I tend to have, speaking of pounding,

a pounding headache the day after from the breathwork. However, I've had some really

unusual experiences that I didn't go in trying to confirm. So I didn't go in with the expectancy of

these experiences, but later I was told that it was sometimes referred to as a yogic sleep. Maybe

you have some thoughts related to this. But the experience of breathing as hard as I can,

I take these directions very literally. So I'm really going for the gold medal of heavy breathing,

sweating profusely and having the experience of subjectively a gap in time where I haven't fallen

asleep in the physiological sense that most people would conjure, but I've gone blank. And then I

come to and I'm still breathing as intensely as I was, but I had these gaps that would pop up

repeatedly. Do you make anything of that? There's a beautiful old yogic text that details eight

kinds of yogic swoons. Not a word we use very often, but basically it's description of what

it's like to leave our ordinary consciousness and either go to a place where it's at the void,

where there's nothing or the sense of profound emptiness, but there's still some awareness,

there's a variety of them. And some of them have a huge impact on us when we experience it. It's

as if, oh, the whole world that we've constructed is a little bit like a dream. And we step out of

that dream of our identity. And here we are coming back into this dream. And it puts in an incredible

perspective. This is a lot of questions also, whether it's my experience that I described,

certainly you can have some interesting responses with, say, tetanus and the lobster claws from

the breathing when the hands get pulled in, you start puckering at the mouth just physiologically

due to various changes in the blood. And I should note for folks, I have quite a few friends who

have trained or done weekend courses in holotropic breathwork. It is not standard that people have

headaches afterwards. I haven't experienced that for whatever reason, I just drew the Joker card

on that. But I have found it very helpful. I've also experienced with breath workers

in Baltimore, specifically, the approach of holotropic minus 40% intensity, you can still

seemingly reach some very, let's call them alternative experiences of consciousness.

But if we put that type of practice aside, even my experiences in some cases with, say, surgeries

in anesthesia, where I'm given a push of versed before I go under. And the last thing I remember

is them asking me to switch from, say, a gurney to a table. But they afterwards tell me that I was

conversing freely, following directions, cracking jokes for 20 minutes afterwards, which I have

no recollection of. Who was that? Who was that? Exactly. Who was that? If the primary observer

that I have sort of constructed as this identity of the self was not that, who was that? So if you

look back at your life, you've had some very unusual experiences from the vantage point of,

let's just say, most Westerners who are raised in the secular society without mindfulness practice.

You've spent a lot of time in silence. You've had the experience of metabolizing your anger,

wrapped in all sorts of clothing. And we've explored these in previous conversations,

we probably won't get into all the weeds. But how do you think of, this is a big question,

but consciousness as it stands right now? Or is that a bad question?

It's a central, a really important question. And kind of connecting it with starting with

that scene of seeing Dante's realms all laid out and the people in ecstasy and those in agony

and everybody in between. One more thing to say about it, because some people say, well,

that's too fast. If you've got a trauma and it's not right, of course, nothing's right for everyone.

But there are two ways to go with this. One, which was Stan's way is just, as you said,

go for the goal. Just keep going. And the people he trained to sit with you, if something was opening

up and it took a long time, they would take all night and sit there with you as you breathed

or screamed or wept or just lay there quietly until you felt you had been able to experience it all

and come back to a place of presence. Now, some other people say, oh, you have to resource the

trauma away. You have to get more quiet and strengthen yourself before you even approach

your trauma and that's better for you. Neither of these are the right way. But I'm glad there is

this spectrum. For me, entering that room or doing that work throws me into the place of being the

conscious witness of it all. And my deepest experiences, whether it's through long

meditation, I spent more than a year in silence doing this little hot doing intensive meditation

18, 20 hours a day, or whether it's psychedelic experiences which were equally profound or other

things, who we are is consciousness. And there's a couple of levels, a lot of levels to it. One,

I can say, you're not your body. Clearly, your physical body changes all the time. So it's not

who you are. You rent it, you get to use it. You're not your emotions. They're always changing,

like the tide. You're definitely not your thoughts. At least I hope not. In most cases,

certainly for me and people I know, who you are, you could say, is the consciousness that was born

into your body and that will leave it. And we could talk about death and how consciousness leaves.

But there's a deeper level in that to know that not only are you that as consciousness,

but more profoundly, it's all consciousness. That at the deepest level, what I've experienced

is that there is, whether you call it primordial consciousness or a field of consciousness,

that the creative principle that creates all things. And we're a piece of that or a part of that.

And there are all kinds of beautiful myths that talk about how consciousness

wants to explore all the possibilities it can be, or it is the creative of the universe. There's

the void, and then out of the void comes creativity and all these myriad forms. When you experience

this, and it's not a philosophy, you understand that this is a play. The Hindus call it the

lila, the play of the divine or something like that. And it doesn't mean you don't have to take care

of your part. The play is in theater. The play is in theater. The play of the divine. And it

doesn't mean that you don't have to play your part. As Ram Dass would say, remember your true nature

and your social security number. You have to remember both. And that's part of the very

interesting paradox of waking up, knowing that what you are is consciousness itself. You are

awareness. You're not all those other things. You are the awareness that's experiencing these

things. When you know that, it gives you a kind of freedom, a sense of well-being and freedom,

within which you can go through all the things you do as a human being. But some part of it

behind that is smiling and going, wow, I hope I say this when I die, like, wow, what a ride,

you know, that it's been quiet. And some of it is painful and tragic, but with that perspective,

there's a place of wisdom. I'm going to read you something. It's just a not very long,

a few lines from The Doubt of Jing. All the time in the world.

If you don't realize the source, consciousness, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you

realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kindhearted as a

grandmother, dignified as a king, immersed in the wonder of the Tao. You can deal with whatever

life brings you. And even when death comes, it's okay, you are ready. And so it's a kind of 3000

year old or 2000 year old description of the consciousness where you're both disinterested

and amused, and it's the same kindhearted and attentive. And it's the wedding of that universal

dimension with this mystery of actually being a human being, which is what you've done. Then you

can enter or you go to Japan or you say, all right, let's play this game, let's do martial arts,

let's do business. But you do it with less fear and attachment and much more with the delight of

the game. Right, it makes me think that you're to come back to the play term sort of, you're aware

of the movies that you are watching or the games that you're choosing to play. But you have that

outside witness perspective so that you don't necessarily identify or grip too strongly onto

those things. Exactly. And that includes your own personality. And again, just because I'm

thinking of him in this regard referred around us, he talked about his personalities being

like his pet, you know, and he would see his neurosis. And he said, you think that getting

wiser and more enlightened, that all would go away? He said, it doesn't, he's just, I've

adopted it, it's my pet, I feed it, I say thank you, you know, but I know it's not who I am.

And from that place, even the kind of great suffering that many of us have in our lives,

the people that we love who've died and illness, we can hold it with great tenderness,

but it's not a surprise. It's like, oh, this too, this is part of what it is to be human.

And, you know, someone dies in and from that perspective, it was their time.

So quick question for you, related to the Joseph Campbell quote that you mentioned earlier.

I'd love for you just to elaborate on that a little bit, maybe what it means to you,

that you either need a really big story, right, one of maybe a cosmovision or a mythology,

or better still, no story at all. What does that mean to you?

So I have a friend, Roger Walsh, MD, PhD, who's on the faculty of Stanford Medical School,

written a lot of books as both a mystic and a psychiatrist and other things. And being somewhat

scholarly, he decided to read through the entire encyclopedia of world religions

from Ahura Mazda, although it is aoroaster and everything in between.

Oh, right. Underachiever.

Exactly. So I said to him afterwards, I said, Roger, you read the whole damn thing,

what did you get out of it? And he said, what I saw is that every religion has a story

of the origin of the world. It is a story of some kind about how to navigate

gain and loss, praise and blame, good and bad, he said, usually has a story about death and

afterlife. They're all very different stories. They're quite compelling. They're all different

stories. And when I was finished, I realized human beings need to tell a story and place it on top

of the mystery. Because without the stories, then we would be in the present with the mystery of

being alive with the universe. But for most of us, we want a story. And so these are the big

stories that humanity has written. What is the alternative of no story? Because when I think

of no story, that actually strikes terror into my heart because I imagine this free floating

nihilism or meaninglessness, and I understand experientially in some of these alternate modes

of experience through psychedelics and so on, that you can have the experience of no story,

no time, no name, no self. I understand that. Or I shouldn't say I understand that,

I've experienced it. I definitely can't claim to understand it. But what does the alternative

mean to you? This is really important because it's as if you're talking to

some Zen monk somewhere, and they talk about emptiness, and you go, oh, shit, emptiness,

like, how do I deal with that? How do I buy a new car? Or how do I take care of my family or

things like that? So it's a really important question. And there are a couple that we've

talked about a number of levels. One level is the more opinions you have about the way things are,

the more trouble you have. And one of my favorite passages is that the Buddhist texts aren't really

full of a lot of jokes and humor, but there's one place where the Buddha says, and those who cling

to their opinions go around the world annoying one another. And that's an observation that holds

truth thousands of years later. So we know that. The more we're attached to our view because

whatever you're thinking or whatever you view, there is an alternative. It's not the only view.

So on this level, what my Korean Zen master, Daesung Sun, Sun Sunim, said is to keep a don't-know-mind

or Suzuki Roshi calls it beginner's mind, where you meet somebody fresh, where you go into circumstance

risk. So that's part of not having this story, but it's a much more positive cast on it. Then the

second is that without having that story, then it's replaced in somehow by a sense of, I don't

have quite words, wonder, value, meaning, a sense both of the vastness of things and also the delight

in being incarnated as a human being. And so with that, like the Tao De Ching says, you remember

the source, which is you are consciousness. That's who you are. And you get to witness this. You are

the awareness, the loving awareness. Then your story might be, all right, I am the loving awareness

as, you know, as you are as everyone who's listening, you are loving awareness. And you get to then

embody and enact in this world. And then you get to choose how. And it turns out in

our direct experience that there are ways we can act that bring understanding, connection, joy, happiness,

well-being, and ways we can act that create suffering. In the Buddhist teachings that Buddha said,

I do not answer philosophical questions. People would have all these, what's the first beginning?

What is all the meaning of karma? How do all of this, what's the story? And you would say, I just

teach how human beings can release themselves from suffering and fear and confusion and live with

innate freedom that is their birthright. That's what I teach. That is a story. It's my favorite story,

I think, in this life, because there is suffering and difficulty and incarnation. There are causes

that human beings can understand. And there's freedom. When Nelson Mandela walked out of

Robin Island prison after 27 years, that's a long time. That's half his life in that prison,

with such magnanimity and graciousness and compassion. He not only changed to South Africa,

but he somehow changed the imagination of the world. They can put your body in prison, but no one

can imprison your spirit or your consciousness. And when you know this deeply, then there comes a

different innate kind of story, which is one more deeply of connectedness and care.

Stan Gruff, to return to our dear friend Stanislav, has written a lot of books. He mentioned

he's a polymath, he truly is, and he's prolific also in his writing. There is one book, it may be

two volumes, I can't recall offhand, called The Cosmic Game. One volume, The Cosmic Game.

One volume, all right. Why does this book of all of his books

grab your attention, or why is it meaningful?

It does, I'm glad you named it, because he explores the very questions you're asking.

Not only who are you, but he also shows, suppose we were to have a world that didn't have

loss, didn't have conflict, didn't have disease, didn't have the kind of troubles that we live.

What would that world be like? And he explores, and you kind of follow along with his exploration,

how it is that the world that we live in somehow has been manufactured in some way,

what there is to learn from it. And what's beautiful about it is that, he says, I think,

in the beginning, that he took the records from 5,000 LSD sessions, and from the deepest

understandings and the height, and a lot of the people who did those sessions were also people

who were already meditators or yogis or martial arts masters, or in some way,

and shaman people who had already a very deep spiritual perspective. And he collated them,

and he said, here's what we as human beings, when the gates between the worlds open,

this is how it looks, which is really compelling. He's so clear that he doesn't want to say,

this is how it is, or how I think it is. He said, this is what 5,000 people report

from the height or the deepest of their experiences. And you go, oh yeah, I've seen that, I know that

that's true. All right, I need to dig back in and get into the Cosmic Game. So I'll get that on

my Kindle for my upcoming travels. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right

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Let's talk about something perhaps that many people listening will identify with or at least

recognize in their daily experience. And that is anxiety. And maybe we could just define terms

and look at anxiety as fear of the future. You could also define it differently. Could be

pre-experiencing the worst case scenario. I really don't know how you would like to define it. But

if you wouldn't mind digging into that and share any approaches that you think are helpful,

practices, thought exercises for people who are suffering from anxiety, that would be very helpful.

I was going to say that word before you said it. So we're somehow riding some current. We'll

see where it takes us. And if we're still in the same boat as we go through the raft.

Learning how to paddle, we'll see. And anxiety is a big but also a really

important question. And the first thing to notice is that we're living in a time of

tremendous cultural anxiety. Even in places where there was warfare or starvation or things when

there were very small groups of people, there was still a kind of basic, I know who my family is.

I know where the land is. We'll have the food or we won't. But everything is up for us in certain

ways. There's a kind of upheaval now of identity, where we live, who we are, and so forth. That's

accelerating. And it's been accelerated, of course, for all kinds of things. And now we'll get to it.

It's certainly been accelerated by technology. And we're on the cusp on the roller coaster ride.

You know, as you're going up to the top to start it up. Right. And the little sign that you get,

your ticket for said AI, go on this ride. So we'll get to that. But anyway, so there's the

anxiety. There's the economy anxiety. There's the collective anxiety about climate. There's racial

and economic injustice that's really in our forefront. And then there's the human anxiety of

our own family and people going through things of loneliness and economic insecurity.

So first thing to say, there's a whole bunch of things that might be helpful.

The image that I'd like to start with is an archetypal one of the Buddha seated under the

tree of enlightenment. The night of his enlightenment before he was enlightened,

the Indian god named Mara, who is the god of greed, fear, hatred, aggression, all of the forces of

suffering appeared and said, what are you trying to do to the Buddha? And this is the way it appeared.

He said, you have no idea what you're dealing with. And he said, let me show you this enlightenment

stuff. And so he paraded before him all the most beautiful dancing dakinis and gilded chariots,

the Lamborghinis of the time. And the Buddha said, you know, been there, done that. Thank you.

Okay. And then he said, well, you know, you have no right to be there. And he started throwing

flaming arrows and swords and the Buddha lifted his hand and touched them all with compassion.

And they turned to flower petals. Cool. Then Mara said, you don't even know who you are. You

don't know what you're doing. And there's no reason for you to be sitting here. Then Mara came

basically in the form of doubt. And at that point, the Buddha put his hand down and touched the earth

and said, will you bear witness to my right as a human being here halfway between heaven and earth

to awaken to the way things are? He said that one more time, heaven and earth or heaven and hell?

Between heaven and earth. Okay. We didn't get to hell yet. If you want to go there,

we can go there later. And halfway between heaven and earth in this human form, be my witness

that we human beings have the right to see clearly, not with delusion, not with doubt.

And then Mara appeared again. And the Buddha just looked at Mara and said,

I see you, Mara. I see who you are. And the minute he said that clearly, Mara dissolved.

Now what people don't know in the Buddhist texts is that after his enlightenment,

Mara came back to visit the Buddha quite a few times. You think there's enlightened retirement,

but Mara is part of the game. And Tick Naut Hanh has a really beautiful image about this,

where he sets the scene of the Buddha sitting in a cave. And again, the Buddha really is a

stand-in for your awakened self. Sitting in a cave, mouth of a cave meditating, and his attendant is

there and Mara appears. And his attendant tries to chase Mara away. And the Buddha says, Ananda,

is that my old friend Mara? Set out some tea. Let us sit down. And he says, is that you, Mara? And

usually all that it takes is for the Buddhists to say, is that you, Mara? Or I see you, Mara.

And Mara looks and kind of sadly slinks away, if you will. So the first thing about anxiety

is to acknowledge that it's entirely human, that there are cultural reasons for it, and that

they're physiological reasons, that we have fear and we have fear of loss and all of those things.

And to be able to name it and say, oh, this is anxiety, it feels this way in my body,

your hands sweat, your breath stops, your heart. And it's hard to feel, it's unpleasant in the body.

And then it has its thoughts. We'll get to those in a minute. And what you can do in naming Mara,

you can say, oh, anxiety, I see you, I feel you. So that's the first thing. And already,

you start to step halfway back from it as the witness. So that already begins to liberate you

a little bit. And then the next thing is you can also say, thank you for trying to protect me.

Because if you fight against the anxiety, what that is is more anxiety. Oh my God,

I got to get rid of it. I hate of it. But instead, it's almost like you take a little bow. Okay,

Mara, I see you. Thank you for trying to protect me, because that's what it's trying to do. And

you remember that statement from Mark Twain, where he said, my life has been filled with terrible

misfortunes, most of which never happened, right? So these are the stories, you meant sort of the

advanced stories, say, thank you, Mara, I see you. Thanks for trying to protect me. Then the next thing

is to know that there's something called the wisdom of insecurity, that it's actually okay to be

insecure. My monastic teachers would say it's uncertain, isn't it? We could ask them all kinds

of things, tell me about enlightenment, my teacher would laugh, he said, it's uncertain, isn't it?

He wanted us just to get comfortable with uncertainty. And then what happens is when you

realize that you can't know, that you come back into the present moment. And then the next thing

to do with anxiety is ground your senses, feel your feet on the floor, or maybe go out in nature,

stand there with a tree, feel the roots of the tree and imagine your own feet as roots into the

earth. And notice the wind comes and the storms and all those things happen, but the tree is rooted,

and it can stay there and you can be the same, you can let the storms of thoughts and fears and so

forth arise. So that's another practice you can do. Then you can question your thoughts. And this is

more the beautifully spelled out by Byron Katie, for example, who has these practices of questioning

your thought, says, what if that thought isn't true? How can you know that thought is true?

And if you look deeply, you can't know it. And you get to a place of realizing that your thoughts

are tentative, they're a creation. And you say, thank you, thank you for trying to protect me.

And again, you become the witness of those thoughts. Then a few more very simple things that you can do.

You can find where you feel the anxiety most strongly in your body. And once you feel it,

you can feel into its elements. Is it hot or cold? Is it hard or soft? Is it vibrating the

earth, the air fire? So you really get close into it. You can ask it what stories it tells,

because it'll have a story. And then you say, again, not only thank you, thank you for trying to

protect me, but you wrap it with kindness, with loving awareness and say, thank you. I know you're

worried. I can respect you and hold you with kindness and compassion. And you know that that's

not who you are. This is a part, it's something, it's common for human beings. You say, I respect

this and who I am is honoring you and so much bigger than who you are. And you feel yourself

literally being both the witness, the grounded one, the I know you, I see you, Mara. And you become

more the Buddha rather than the one who's caught by all these things. Could you say a bit more about

asking, for instance, in this case, the anxiety, what stories it tells, maybe give an example,

whether from your personal experience, someone else's or just a hypothetical, what that might

look like. Because it's the first time I've heard that and that piques my curiosity.

So it's a beautiful question, because one of the things that I've learned all over these years

is that you can have, the Sufis call it a so-bet, a conversation with the heart.

And if you let yourself get quiet, it might be after a little walk in the woods or just

sitting quietly, taking a cup of tea or something that you like to drink and letting yourself quiet

down or meditating if you want to. And when you get quiet, you can have an inner conversation

and there's information that's waiting there for you to ask. So for example,

since we're talking about anxiety, and you want to have a conversation with it,

you can say to the anxiety, where do I feel you most strongly in my body? Okay, that's a pretty

simple one. Then you can say, ask the anxiety, what is the thing you're most afraid of?

And usually it will be something like loss of death, something huge. Okay, you say, okay, thank you.

Get quiet and say, tell me the story you have about it. And then your anxiety will answer and it

will say, well, if you lose your job, which we're afraid you will, you'll be out on the street,

you'll be homeless, people will beat up on you, then you'll be in the hospital or you'll become

whatever. And there's a whole disastrous scenario. And you can say, yes, thank you. I hear your story.

Then there's another interesting question. So all these are things you can ask. And if you're

willing to ask and get quiet and listen, usually your body and your heart will answer. Then there's

another really important question or two that you can ask, what is the most important thing

I need to learn from you? And it will give you an answer. I want you to pay attention or I want

you to take care of your financial affairs so I don't have to worry so much, you know, or I want

you to make sure you have friends who know where you are or whatever it happens to be

or some bigger story. And then you can step out of the anxiety. And this is a really beautiful one

and get quiet and ask, what is my best intention of how I want to live this next month or this next

year? If I only had a year to live, what style? How do I want to live this? Because anxiety also

has time in it. And so you're sort of stepping out of time and say, all right, so my time's limited.

How do I want to live? What is my deepest intention? And if you pause and ask, your heart will answer.

So this may tie into my next question, it might not. But you mentioned this MD-PhD earlier and you

said, as you told the story of his digesting this gigantic encyclopedia, you said, end a mystic,

and then you moved on to say what you said. And since you mentioned Sufism, that also brought the

word mystic or mysticism to mind for me, what does that mean to you, someone being a mystic?

I'm afraid that it's sort of gotten relegated to the realm of religion. Okay, the Sufis have

their mystics and they were the Christian desert, Father mystics or the Zen mystics or something.

And that's true. These are people who are really interested in some way, in vast spiritual

experiences and understanding. But it puts it outside of ourself. We all, in that sense,

are open to mystery when we quiet. How the hell did you get into this body? You take a look,

look in the damn mirror, there are these weird round things that we call eyes and

protuberances from your head that stick out, mine stick out pretty far in my ears.

Got made fun of as a kid. You know, you open your mouth and the tongue comes out and

there's this hole in your body into which you keep stuffing dead plants and animals and

grinding them up with these bones that hang down, right? And glugging them down through the tube.

And you move it. It's weird watching how people, you fall one direction by peeds and then you catch

yourself and you fall the next year. How did you get in there? And if you don't think that's weird,

pay attention when you're making love. It's a fabulous thing to do. I'm completely, you know,

love it. It's bizarre. It is, okay, you know, whatever way you do it, licking, putting this in

that part of that body or that and so forth or that a little whatever. I mean, it's weird.

So how did you get in here? So we don't have to go to the Sufi mystics or the whatever.

It's really more mystery. Is the mystical in this sense, and this is my placeholder way of

thinking about it, the direct experience of the mystery or seeking the direct unmediated

experience of that mystery? Is that one way to think about it?

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a nice way to say it. I might want to change the word seeking to

opening to it. And just to be really direct with you who are listening,

you know what I'm talking about. You have had experiences, whether it's walking in the high

mountains or taking psychedelics and meditating, if that's your wand or your avenue, you've had it

listening to an amazing piece of music or going into an incredible cathedral or a forest of the

sequoias in redwoods of wonder, or you know it from making love, you know it even more from

being there at the birth of a child. You go, whoa, here's a whole new human being and my beloved

wife Trudy Goodman, who's also a meditation teacher in LA, inside LA, is her center. She was 21

years old. She was giving birth to her daughter. And by circumstance, she was in a hospital room

alone. It was like in the 60s. And it was the old style birth basically. And they left her alone.

And she had no idea her body just started contracting and going through these things incredibly

painful. And she didn't understand it in a deep way at all. No one had sort of explained how it

happened. She said, and then all of a sudden, it was late afternoon, it was in what the French

color blue, the blue hour of kind of transition between day and night. She said, and all of a

sudden, it wasn't my body. My body was doing its thing delivering this child. But I became

all mothers. I could feel that I was in a chain of being that went back to a million lives before

one mother after another birthing people out of their body and would continue. And there was this

incredible sense of being part of this huge mystery of life recreating itself. She said,

afterward, I was walking down the street. And I look at all these people, I say,

they all came out of a woman's vagina. You know, how could that be? I mean, so you want to look

at mystery. It's it's staring us in the face. Got it. We are that don't have to be a whirling

dervish. You don't have to be whirling dervishes. They're all kinds of ways. So we all know this

from somewhere. And even more so sitting with someone when they die. Because there you are,

especially if it's a reasonably conscious or peaceful death, that person is there. And you

might be able to talk to them or there's some sense of them being conscious. And then as quietly as

a falling star, consciousness leaves the body. And it's meat. It's just dead. You know, it's like

at the butcher. I mean, I'm being really graphic. But that's all that is. It's this cold, you know,

flesh. It's so clear that it's not that person. And you go, whoa, the gates between the worlds

have opened like, who are we? So you want that, baby? It's around you. It's here.

Okay, I think we're at an intersection where I'm going to bring up something just opportunistically

because it's on my mind. And this has somehow popped up on my radar. I want to say at least twice.

I don't know what it is. I literally have a Wikipedia page open. But why go on Wikipedia when

I have you right here? And you could use chatbot, that would answer. Well, I could use a chatbot.

I could use a chatbot. The human chatbot will speak. Go ahead. Yeah, that's right. So, you know,

why use AI when you can use organic intelligence, right? We got it.

Janna practice? Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yes. What is Janna practice?

Okay, so Janna practice. Now you're getting down into the technical weeds of certain kinds of

Buddhist practice. This got sent to me out of left field. I know. Okay. So one of the things that's

true about the dimensions of deep meditation practice is that we human beings have a capacity

to concentrate our attention. In meditation practices, there are two major dimensions.

One is the dimension of awareness. It can be mindfulness or devotion or something.

Where you open to the mystery of things, unfolding thoughts, appearing emotions,

or you create certain emotions of love, compassion, joy, all of those things.

The other is the dimension of concentration, where you focus deeply on one thing, generally.

It can be a candle flame or a mantra or a particular emotion like love or your breath.

And there's a beautiful biblical phrase where it says, if thine eye be single,

then the gates of heaven's open or something like that. When you start to get very concentrated,

several things happen. Your thoughts start to disappear. To be concentrated means you're focused

on an experience like the breath or a light and the thoughts quiet down and gradually they go away.

It's not easy to do for most people, but it's possible. And then as you get more concentrated

on the breath or a mantra or whatever you've chosen and you do it over and over again,

it becomes a doorway. The next thing that happens is that inner forms of light will appear.

So there you're sensing your breath. We use that as an example, but it could be other things.

And as you do, the thoughts start to get quiet. And then the sense as you feel your breath is not

only is there a breath, but around your nostrils or your throat or wherever you're paying attention,

your body and the field starts to fill with light because consciousness is made of light.

So light will appear. And then with it comes quite spontaneously qualities of deep joy and

happiness and incredible steadiness and inner peacefulness. And when these qualities start to

arise, they are the gateway to a whole series of what are called jhanas or samadhi states.

The deepest ones you no longer see or hear what's happening around you. You're so absorbed in the

light or the bliss or the sense of peacefulness and well-being that everything else disappears

and you're in a realm that's just filled with light and stillness and peace. And you can move

around from one realm to another several different flavors of them. The closest thing I can describe

to it is if you're a diver and you're out on the water and there's waves and the sun shining and

things, and then you go under the surface of the water and everything becomes silent. There's

waves on the surface. They have nothing to do with you. And instead you're in this vast, timeless,

silent realm. The purpose of training to go into these kind of states is two-fold. One is

it gives you some skill in navigating in your consciousness and mind. So you don't have to

live if there's a lot of whatever it is, anxiety or conflict or things around you. You can actually

stabilize yourself, become quite stable. It gives a kind of faith. Oh, the mind actually can be

trained. But the other is that from that stillness, then you can see or listen more deeply. To concentrate

is a little bit like polishing the lens of consciousness so that whether it's a microscope

or a telescope, when you're very concentrated, at the beginning you notice their thoughts,

then you notice the thoughts at the end, then you're more concentrated, you notice at the beginning

of the thought, oh, it's about to arise. Then you notice the impulse for thoughts to come. It's like

a little burp that's coming out of the brain. And then you see the space around thoughts,

where they're born before they're even there. And then you look into the body and at first you see

hot or cold. And then it pixelates with deeper concentration. And you see all the elements

that make it up. So this is like the microscope. Or you point it outward and consciousness becomes

a vast like the sky. And there's no bounds to it. It's timeless. So these kind of states of

consciousness give you access to the telescope and the microscope and the information that comes

through that doorway. How's that? That was great. You had me at pixelate. So another question about

this, and I suspect we've talked about this. Nobody ever asked me this on the air before,

so this is fun. Okay, keep going. Yeah, so let's go. So I hear your description,

and it grabs my attention and interest. And I would love to experience these states. I consider

myself good at being a diligent practicer. So I've trained in sports, I've done many things

consistently over extended periods of time. My felt experience of meditation is that it's

done regularly on a daily basis in small doses. I experience an improved quality of life, decreased

reactivity. But I doubt my own ability to reliably achieve the type of states that you're

describing, which is part of the reason. And now I'm not married to that belief. But I think part

of the appeal for a lot of people with say psychedelics is in most cases with sufficient

dosing, you're probably going to feel something. Yes. And that is not to say that should be

the sole tool or that people should be a hammer looking for nails with psychedelics because

there are risks and trade offs and so on. That is just a very long winded way of asking

to get to a point where you would feel reasonably confident that someone could achieve these types

of states. Are we talking about five years, 10 years, 15 years in some instances is like

10 people pursue this, they do it for 10 years, and then only three of them experience these

states. I fear the possibility that I would dedicate to a long-term practice and then

for whatever reason, just not have the capability. So now this is a really important question. It's

more than about John. Sure. Even though I'm happy to talk about it because it's fun to talk about.

I'm also a little bit reluctant because it can mislead people or feed into a kind of spiritual,

not spiritual materialism, but idealism of some kind. Okay, I've heard about these states and then

you go and you read these end stories and okay, then they worked on their co-on and finally whacked

the master, hits them, and then they have this great revelation or other things like that.

John is completely unnecessary for wisdom. It's the kind of thing that yogis and people who devote

themselves to meditation, some of them can do, some can't. It depends. There's sort of light

levels and then very deep levels of this. If you want to do a light level, John, there are several

ingredients. One is you probably have to have a certain temperament or inclination to be able to

do it, and that's probably a third of people. Not everyone can do it. And then you need to go on

retreat. If you want deep, John, you need to go on long retreats. What is long? Just because I know

your reference point may be different than most. A month or two months or three months,

long practice. If you want to have some kind of initial experience, a good friend of mine,

a colleague named Lee Brazington leads 10-day retreats and you can have an experience.

And it's fun to play with. It's completely unnecessary. Now I want to talk about enlightenment,

because the point of all this is if you divide it, there are experiences and then there's

understanding or being. And the experiences that we have, you mentioned psychedelic experience,

which I deeply respect. Whether it's John experience or deep insight and meditations

of different kinds that we do, or other spiritual experiences, you can be the

dervish, as you mentioned, whirling. And it's such a beautiful thing to see and to do.

And the world starts to dissolve. Most of these practices dissolve the separate sense of self.

And you're there as Alice Walker wrote of one character. One day I was sitting there like

a motherless child, which I was. And it come to me that feeling of being a part of everything.

And I knew if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laugh and I cry. I run all around the house.

In fact, when it happens, you can't miss it. So there are all these doorways that open us beyond

the separate sense of self, which that sense of small self, it's sometimes called the body of

fear that limits and self dissolves. Hallelujah. They're great. I played with John, I've taken

psychedelics, I've done shamanic things, all these, I've had a bunch of experiences. And part of it

gives me a kind of confidence, okay, I know this territory. Part of it is deeper than that

in the most profound places as we talked about. I know that who I am is not this body. I know

that who I am is consciousness. Then the game is not about the experiences. It's about who you are,

who I am as we manifest in the world. And the way that I most express enlightenment at this point

is not somebody who's had a lot of these experiences in all these years. My understanding

really is that it comes down to love. I've met swamis and llamas and gurus and mamas and everybody

else in between in my industry. And some of them are fabulous. But there's a really interesting

thing that you can have these powerful experiences and still be a little bit of a jerk. Just getting

real about it, you know. Because we are, our consciousness is like a mandala. And we can

awaken some dimensions of it. So you have an Olympic level athlete who's an emotional idiot.

You have a professor of nuclear physics, most brilliant, and she can't find her shoes or her

body. We can develop ourselves in some areas, but it turns out, unfortunately, that doesn't always

go over to another area. And so there's a kind of halo effect where people think, oh, this person

is a spiritual teacher and they've had these spiritual experiences. I'll go ask them for

marriage advice or advice for sexuality. They don't know shit about that. So this is our human

nature. If we're actually to become wise, we need to direct our attention to body, to emotions,

to relationships, to thought. We actually need to become wise in those major dimensions of our life.

And we can't expect that of people just because they have a certain title or robe or anything else.

But having said that, my measure now for myself, are you loving? Am I loving? Are they?

And that love isn't just like, oh, sweet Valentine love, but it's can you be in this world

and can you love it with all its imperfections? And can you bring that spirit of care and love

in the middle of what's tragic and what's beautiful? That's a liberated heart.

So love, let's underscore this. For people who are listening, this might sound like a really

strange question, who are thinking to themselves, well, I love my dog. I love cheesecake.

Love my kids. If they have kids, let's say, but maybe they're like, I'm not sure if I would

recognize or even know the feeling of what it is to love the world.

Maybe they feel like they might be colorblind to the first person experience of feeling that.

Is it just something they can intuit or could you expand on that?

You remember Einstein said that the task for humanity is to widen our circle of compassion,

or you could call it love, to include all of humanity and all of nature in its beauty.

And so we start by loving that, which is right around us. It's natural, your dog,

your children, the partner, the people you care about, and maybe your neighbors.

And now we're talking about, well, what is wisdom and what is liberation? And it's that

widening of the circle so that when you're moving through the world, it's not just that

person over there as an object, but they become more and more a part of your family.

There's a beautiful monument to a mystical experience, going back to your asking about that.

In Louisville, Kentucky, I think it's on 4th Street, 4th and Walnut, and the great Christian

mystic Thomas Merton left his monastery and was walking down the street in the middle of Louisville.

And he said, I come from the monastery, we were all trying to be holy and close to God and have

all these spiritual experiences the way one does and pray and so forth. And I was walking down

the street and all of a sudden it came to me. I looked in the eyes of everyone going by and I saw

their secret beauty that was born in them, that no one can take from them, that magnificence of

spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it. He said, the only problem would be I wanted to fall

down at their feet and worship each one that went by. He said, if we could see each other,

that way there'd be no more need for war and cruelty, the world would be a different place.

So this monument, a public monument to a mystical experience, what it does is it says that this is

possible, but more than that, there are beautiful trainings to do it. One of my favorite trainings

is trainings in loving kindness meditation. There's bunches of it on my website in Sharon

Salzburg and Tard Brock and lots of other colleagues and teachers. And it turns out,

if you practice it like anything, it grows. You start with the people close to you and then those

in a little wider circle and gradually extend it. And for me, for example, I'm out on the street or

I'm driving or something, and I'm a bit of a speed freak. I can sit quiet in meditation,

but my general MO is to get stuff done and move through the road. And so if somebody's

driving slowly and meandering and not being a good driver in front of me and I get annoyed or

even on the sidewalk, people are blocking it and not aware that I have something important to get

done. And I feel a little moment of irritation arise, which it will. I look and I see them,

not as they are now, but as they were at three, as I imagine them at three or four years old,

completely innocent child, you know, they all were that, no matter what things happen to them.

And I go, oh yeah, I see who's in there. That's like, I see that there's that person doing the

best they can. And there's that child that's in there. And instantly my heart changes. And I go,

oh yeah, I wish them well. May they be safe and whatever dance they're in, may they be protected.

And this quality of loving kindness and compassion, it's grown because I practice it some. It's where

I want to live. But it's more than that. I see it or sense it as the best expression of enlightenment.

All those other things or experiences, they lead us back to love. And if they don't,

I'm not sure that they matter that much. And we can learn it and become it.

So would you suggest maybe people use this objective or beacon of love versus enlightenment

as a term? Because the word enlightenment has always bothered me because I've never had someone

define it clearly for me in any way. Let's call it enlovenment. I just made it up.

But perfect. Okay, great. Problem solved. Problem solved. We're into enlovenment.

Pre-op problem solved. I also wanted to take a side note because Joseph Campbell came up earlier

and he has so many tremendous books. And one of them is called, I believe it's the power of the

animal spirits, which is this anthropological and historic overview of animal mythology

cross cultures. It's a beautiful hardcover book. It's gigantic. It's absolutely

spectacularly illustrated with drawings and photographs and so on. Just to come back to the

why you wouldn't ask your fill in the blank, right? Your psychedelic practitioner automatically

for marriage advice, for instance. Across the board, shamans in almost every culture pretty

much consider pains in the ass in like trickster troublemakers. And here you are aspiring to be

a shaman, Tim. You're in trouble. Oh, no. I'm not in the shaman MBA program at present.

Rule number one of tracking down shamans. If they call themselves a shaman, be very, very,

very cautious. Might want to run the other way. It's kind of like if you meet the Buddha on the

road, kill him to kind of situation. But let's shift to a moment to wisdom. And I would love to

ask you, and this is a question that you can feel free to dissect in any way that you like, but

who would you consider some of the wisest people you have met and why and or what have you learned

from them? I could certainly go down the list and I'll answer you explicitly. And then there's

some place I want to go from here. But I studied with a guru in Bombay named Nisargadat Maharaj.

And there's a wonderful book of his or dialogues with him called I Am That, N-I-S-A-R-G-A-D-A-T-T-A.

He had a little like beady cigarette stand. He was a kind of modest business person, but he had a

wonderful guru that he met and he had some profound realization happen to him. And so groups of us

would gather around. And one day, when I was with him over a course of a few years, I would go and

visit him. Somebody says, you're 80 years old. He was sort of getting toward the end of his life.

What do you think about your approaching death? The kind of thing you want to ask a guru. And he

looked back, completely affronted. And he says, you are telling me I will die? And the person said,

well, aren't you? He said, that's just this body. It's made of, you know, drapates and wheat flour

and vegetables and subji. You think I am, it's like saying I'm made of McDonald's. Is that who you

think I am? You think I'm these feelings? You think I am, you know, these thoughts? You have no idea

that this has nothing to do with me. I was never born. And I will never die. Who I am is beyond

birth and death. I am the consciousness from which everything is born. And then later he said, wisdom

says I am nothing. Love says I am everything between these two, my life flows. So he was a pretty

wise cat. Yeah, solid response. And Tick-Nut Han said sort of the same thing as he was dying. People,

oh God, Ty, as they call him, you're gonna die. And he said, I was never born. Look at a rain cloud

and it comes down as raindrops or snowflakes and goes into the rivers and flows into the ocean and

then gets evaporated and it becomes a cloud again. You think I can disappear? I am you and you are me.

We are a life itself unfolding. And it's one thing to have him say it, but it was another to be with

him and have him look you in the eye and say, this is who we are. So there, of course, there's all

these beautiful examples. What are the most reliable approaches for eliciting the experience,

the direct experience of non-self? And I say that because I don't recommend everyone use psychedelics.

There are a lot of footnotes to any conversation on these compounds, which are so powerful.

But that is how I've had my most direct experience of what you're describing,

which has removed much of my fear of physical death. I fear the descent to death. That's still

there. But in terms of the light switch being flipped and being turned off, I don't have that

much anxiety at least at present related to that. And I haven't for quite a while.

A whole trip of breath work might be another tool. Are there other modalities that you think

apply or could be applied to more people than powerful psychedelics? Of course. I mean psychedelics,

they open a lot of doorways and they also need to be used with some discretion and some caution or

discernment, as you say. It's definitely not just like, okay, let me take a high dose of

psychedelics and see what happens. You want set and setting and it has to be appropriate for you,

all of those sort of things. It's really what we've been talking about, that there's a worldwide

treasury now. We live in the treasury of the great spiritual teachings and practices. And you can go

online and find masters and sages and llamas and mamas and so forth, many of whom are really,

really good. How do you separate the charlatans from the real McCoy though?

It's just like, I don't know, I'm sort of like chopping for a car. You know, the minute you

walk in, if it's a sleazy salesperson, showroom and it feels like this doesn't feel like it's

you can go somewhere else. There are so many jokers with large followings out there.

Oh, yes, well, really. Any suggestions for the intrepid used car purchaser who's looking for a

llama? I'd say probably start with the name brands, although there's plenty of very widely known

llamas and swamis and mamas who's also misused their position. What a good teacher wants is your

dedication and your common sense. And if the common sense is thrown out, it's the wrong place for

you. You really have to trust yourself as well. Now you were asking about wisdom. I want to read

you a few lines from a great Indian master named Ateesha. And they're really instructions because

you say, okay, how do we do this? Yes, you can find practices, meditations, think reflections, walking

in the wilderness, things that will open your mind and your heart. Here's Ateesha's instruction

in something like eight lines. And they really each has a kind of practice. The first one,

consider all experiences to be dreams, that there's a dream-like nature, and it is true.

I mean, here we are, you and I are talking in April 2023. What happened to March? What happened to

January? What happened to your childhood? Where did it go? What happened to, do you remember Y2K?

What happened to 2000? It's back with the pyramids and the dinosaurs. Everything disappears back

into the void from which it came. And then something new is born. It's the reason why people keep

writing love songs. It's not like there haven't been a lot of good love poems, but the universe

wants to keep recreating itself all the time. That's why your body creates 100 billion red cells

every day, red blood cells. The universe is a process of creation, but it also is like a dream

because it appears today is here and it will be gone like your life of this kind will be gone at

some point. So consider all experience to be dream-like. Next one, be grateful to everyone.

So that's an instruction and it sort of fits with this other instruction. Let suffering teach you

compassion because in Tibet, in some of the Tibetan teachings, they actually pray for suffering. They

say, may I be granted enough suffering so that the great heart of compassion will open in me.

So consider all experience to be dreams. Be grateful to everyone because they all

have a lesson to offer you, might be an unpleasant or painful lesson. Let suffering teach you

compassion. Next line, don't be swayed by outer circumstances. This is a tough one. They want

you to be this and that and all that conditioning and you can see it and you can use it, but don't

let it guide your life. Let your life be guided when you get a little quiet by your own values in

your own heart. A few more lines. I love this one. Don't brood over the faults of others.

I could use some work on that one. Yeah, this one can save a lot of agony because people don't act

the way we want them to and they all have their faults and not us, of course, but

don't brood over the faults of others. You can feel how there's liberation in every one of these

lines and you can practice it. Explore the timeless nature of consciousness, which is what

we've been talking about. Two more things. At all times, simply rely on a joyful mind

and we'll talk about joy in a minute. Joy and community too, they're things I want to talk

about. And then the last line I really love, he says, don't expect a standing ovation.

How do you spell Atisha? A-T-I-S-H-A. Oh man, that's great.

And you know, don't expect, and it's like we're looking for the universe to affirm us.

The universe has affirmed you, baby. You wouldn't be here otherwise.

Don't expect a standing ovation. So those are all, you're asking how we do it. Those are all

actually practices. They're instructions in some way and you can take one or another. This year,

I'm going to practice being grateful for everyone. The ones that are difficult. I remember when my

daughter first got her, one of her first jobs, you know, and she was complaining about, she liked

the work and she liked, but the manager, sort of the middle level boss was not good. He was a

tyrant. He didn't organize things. She said, God, it's so bad we need to get rid of him.

I said, Caroline, welcome to the world of work. You think there's a bad boss there?

Try another job. There will be someone, he's a stand-in for the archetype of, you know,

the bad boys. You will find them. So you got to figure out how to live in a place

and not brood over it where people are just that way.

Yeah. Joyful mind. I could always use more joyful mind. So joy or joyful mind.

How should we find our way into this vast subject, which I think all listeners could

certainly use a bit more of? Yeah. I want to repeat something that I believe I might have said

in a previous podcast with you, but it is one of the great poems of the last decades in my mind

by Jack Gilbert. And it's particularly so because we, at this time, those of you and I and those

who are listening, not only is there the mystery and incredible beauty of life, with all its sorrow,

it still has this unbearable beauty in so many directions, but we also carry in our heart

the suffering of the world, and we can talk about that and how one holds it.

But this is a poem called A Brief for the Defense. The Defense of What? You might ask,

by Jack Gilbert. Sorrow everywhere, slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace,

they're starving somewhere else with flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives

because that's also what the gods want. Otherwise, the mornings before lavender,

summer dawn would not be made so fine, and the Bengal tiger, orange and black, would not be

fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the

suffering they've known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the

village is very sick. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance

of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure seeking, but not delight,

not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace

of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit that there will be music despite everything. And so that's a line. To make injustice

the only measure of our attention is to praise the devil. We must have the stubbornness to accept

our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. What is the name of that poem one more time?

It's called A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert, and it really speaks to the tearing

open of the heart in our time that we have the suffering of the world and it's presented to us.

If we don't have it in our family or in our neighborhood, it's there on our screens and

it's there given to us. How do we hold it? And is it okay? Is it okay to be happy? And the Buddha

put it the same way. He said, live in joy and love even among those who hate. There's an instruction.

Yes, that's there. Live in love even among those who hate. Live in joy and health even among the

afflicted. Live in joy and peace even among the troubled. And that was like my teacher's monastery

during the wartime in Cambodia and Laos in Vietnam. It was a place of peace in the middle of all of

that. Live in peace even among the troubled. Look within. Be still. Free from fears and attachments.

Know the sweet joy of living in the way. So these are really instructions. Permission. People think

spiritual life is a grim duty. I'm going to meditate. I go to the gym. I work out. I have a diet.

I've got my trainer. Now I got to go and meditate. And it's not meant to be a grim duty. If you don't

have some joy and pleasure in it, that's the wrong direction, baby. It's really an invitation

to quiet and calm, to bring in care and compassion. If you go into a refugee camp,

they don't want your depression and sadness. They have enough of that. They actually want

somebody to come in and say, Hey, you know, let's see what we can do with this, even though it's

incredibly difficult. So building on that, and also off of the previous mention of holding,

suffering, I'd like to shift to community. And the timing is perfect for that.

Looking at my personal experience, because I've been in Los Angeles for a few weeks.

And I made a commitment to myself, which is very atypical for me, because I have this

productivity fetish, and I should put productivity and quotation marks, whatever that means.

But I decided that my mantra for this time here was going to be social, not solo.

And that meant rather than doing what I normally do, which is default no to any type of social

invitation, I made it to fall. Yes. And my well being, my

sense of inner peace is so much improved. Since I started doing that, and I granted my output is

less than substantially, but at this point, who cares, I think on some level. And it's highlighted

for me how even in a city, for instance, could be anywhere, any city, it's possible to be surrounded

by people, but feel entirely alone. And it takes some intentionality, perhaps,

to build and be supported by community. So maybe this is a place to talk about CloudSangha.co,

CloudSangha, but we could lead into it in any way that makes sense to you.

Yeah, I welcome this as part of our conversation. First of all, there is an epidemic of loneliness.

As you point to it, the Brits have their minister of loneliness now. And I think it's even gotten

more extreme since Brexit in some way. They actually got lonely from the continent, sadly.

But anyway, from the very earliest understandings, there is a teaching or a pointing to the fact

that we need each other in community, whether it's the Jewish Minion or whenever two or more

gathered in his name, whether it's the Satsang in Hindu or the Sangha in Buddhism, or within a

community in a village around a teacher or a shaman or and so forth. We're communal beings.

We're raised by one another, we're connected. And so we languish when we don't have connection.

One of the great problems in the current time is that there had been a way that many, many people

had a sense of community through religious affiliation for generations before their church,

their mosque, their temple, whatever it happened to be. That's dropped away a lot for all kinds of

reasons. And it's left people more isolated. And so together with Tarabrak and a couple of friends,

we founded a company called Cloud Sangha, S-A-N-G-H-A, Sangha, which means community,

cloudcommunity.co. And you can join for a month or several months to start with and become part

of a group of people who meet together every week around themes that you're working with. We have

groups for anxiety and how people are managing and learning about it and transforming it. We have

groups for people who are parents. And in those groups, you can talk about whether it's your

toddler's tantrum or your teenager's acting out or whatever it happens to be. We have groups for

people who are interested in promoting joy in their lives and groups for those who are dealing

with grief or loss and those kind of things. And people who join them love them because you can

be living in Boise, Idaho or Belfast, Ireland or whatever. And it can be hard to practice on your

own. It's hard to meditate. It's hard to feel a sense that you have a kind of community who are

supporting you. And what happens is as people come together and share, they learn as much or more

from themselves together as from any teacher. You know, I've done the sage on the stage thing a lot

in my life. And yeah, I can put on a good act or show or something. And sometimes it helps people.

I love telling stories and I remind them and so forth. But when we're in groups, one of my favorite

things to do is to say, what have you all learned about this? Somebody will raise their hand and say,

what about grief or what about climate or what about how do I, and if I respond, what have you all

learned? There is a collective wisdom when invited that comes out where people learn so much from

each other. And this is really what CloudSonga offers. It also has, if you go on to CloudSonga.co,

for the fun of it, there's a test you can take, a mindful awareness test to see just for your own

fun, which areas are you really attentive in your life and which ones you really, you wish you had

support for. And it would make such a difference when we've got great people running them. And

people who are in them love them. So it's one of the offerings in my life now that I'm very

really happy to be a part of and want to invite people to try.

Are there practices, tools, and so on that help people to share in communal experience?

What are people finding most gratifying? So there are a couple of things. There are some

practices and there's teachings and you can go on that and there will be guided meditations.

And there's weekly teachings by several variety of good teachers. But it turns out people will

come together and, for example, it will be a group on parenting. Some are doing a mindfulness

practice. Maybe some are doing some other form of meditation. They learn TM or maybe they've been

doing a Jewish or Christian practice or shamanic practice or something. But there they are and

their toddler is having fits and screaming as toddlers sometimes do as they're supposed to.

And the common element is much less the focus on what you're practicing as how do you engage in

the world from that place of practice? And people will say, well, I meditate and it helps me be

calmer with my kids. And surprisingly, when I'm calmer, my children get calmer. Or they say,

when my teen is pushing back, if I get into the conflict mode with them, it just builds.

But if I do my practice of loving kindness or I do my practice of whatever it happens to be,

and I look at them and I see their secret beauty, especially it's a beautiful thing to do when your

kid is sleeping. There you've had a little conflict, you know, at that age. And then you go in there,

they fell asleep and you go look in them. And you see who they are, who they were as a child,

you know, there's there's something that original beauty is there when their personality drops away

a little bit. But they share that. And it's less critical what the practice is. And much more,

how are you applying it? And what are we all learning in doing this? And this is where the

rubber meets the road in some way. And again, it goes back to that definition of in love and

meant or in heart and meant or something that's not enlightenment. But how do we learn to love

in the midst of all of this? I've come to feel I'm excited about this, because I have realized

for myself if I have, and I realize it's not the same thing, but group dinners with,

let's just say three friends to three nights a week, that does just as much for me, maybe more

in some cases than short meditations on a daily basis, just having that support. And I'm not saying

they're usually exclusive, I do both as of right now. But that social cohesion for us monkeys on

the spinning rock in the middle of the cosmos is easy to perhaps forget in the frenzied,

individualistic prism within which we live in, say, the United States, it's easy to forget

the value of something that is so obviously in front of us, but so often lost in the wake of,

in my case, this quest for productivity and so many other things. So I'm excited to take

a look at this myself cloud sangha.co and the spelling again for folks cloud s a n g h a dot

co. I have some notes in front of me. And this has been something on my list to ask about. And

maybe you've already brought it up. It certainly includes a name that has already come up. So

Ramdas, formerly known as Richard Albert, flunking the course, Ramdas and flunking the

courses is a cue that I have in front of me. What does flunking the course refer to?

So Ramdas was a very close friend for a lot of years. And I've known him in his different

incarnations when he was Baba Ramdas just back from India, having written that bestseller be

here now that opened a lot of people's eyes about how he'd been the Harvard professor. And then he

took LSD and said, Oh, whoa, things are that's a bigger game than this. And then he met his guru

in India and all of that. And he came back in his robes and his beard and beads as sort of the guru

Baba Ramdas. And one of my favorite early Ramdas stories is there he was teaching a whole crowd

and he was articulate and funny and very self deprecating, you know, which is part of why we

loved him because he would confess his neurosis publicly and everyone go, Oh, me too, right?

Because we need there's a common humanity. And one woman was sitting in the front row,

an older woman and waved her hand and said, Hey, Ramdas, he said, Oh, he called her and she said,

Hey, there you are in the white robes and doing this whole Hindu guru thing. Aren't you Jewish?

And Ramdas said, Well, well, yes, I was born Jewish. I was bar mitzvah. She said,

So what about it? And he said, Well, there's beautiful things in it. There's the Kabbalah

and all the mystical teachings. And there's the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters. It's

there's a lot that's great in it. And then he looked at her and he said, But remember,

I'm only Jewish on my parent's side. And he was very witty, but it was also profound,

because who we are is not limited by our parents or our history, who we are as much bigger than

that. So then Ramdas evolved over his life, starting save a foundation and, you know, working to

combat blindness in Nepal and India for now, 6 million people who'd been blind can see and

all kinds of other stuff. And then he had that major stroke and ended up living 20 years in

a wheelchair with tremendous pain and, you know, different kinds of infections. But he came more

and more and more loving. So when you'd sit with him toward the end of his life, he'd look around,

he said, I love it all. I love the windows and I love the floor and I love the people who come in

and I love, you know, the dirt. He said, I just love it all, whatever it is. And people would

come to see him and he would love them. And there's a phrase in India called the glance of mercy,

when you go to see your guru, if you go to see the right kind of guru, but it doesn't have to be

in India, it can be here. They look at you and they, it's somehow they see through you, they see

all your life, your, you, Tim, you know, your strengths and your neurosis and your productivity,

you know, the rat and the wheel going around making it spin faster and all that, all that stuff.

And they look at you with so much love and they say, wow, you're just an amazing being.

And you get this glance that sees everything and says, yes, I love you. And it changes you

somehow. And that's what Ram Das became. In the end, Krishna Das, the great chanter and, you know,

also a fellow student of their guru, Neem Karoli Baba, said Ram Das became in the end the person

we thought he was when he first returned from India. He really became that place of love.

Now I've gone on and on and I haven't answered your question because I've forgotten it as I've

been waxing about the pleasure of being flunking the course. Oh, yes. So I went to see Ram Das

after I'd had a couple of events where I fell over on stage and was unconscious for a while and

opened my eyes eventually and, you know, I was surrounded by all the doctors who were part of

the audience. And so then I got all these workups and I had a lot of tremors and I got misdiagnosed

as having something like ALS. I was going to die relatively quickly and I would have dementia with

it. I thought I'd made my peace with dying, okay, I'm going to die. But then when they said, oh,

yeah, dementia too, that flipped me over the edge. That's not how I pictured it. And I got frightened

really. And I remember sitting with my daughter after I got that and crying a little bit and

thinking, okay, you know, here we go into dementia land along with tremors and my body going out of

control. And then, you know, a couple of weeks later, I got more tests and turned out that was

the wrong diagnosis and I'm okay. I'm fine. You know, I'm just aging like everybody. But I went

to see Ram Dass and I told him that story and I said, I thought I was cool with death. I'd done

all these meditations in the monastery, sitting with dead bodies and my own practice. And then

when the dementia came in, I got frightened. And he looked at me, he laughed and he said, oh, yeah,

I've flunked the course a number of times. And the minute he said it, it was like this huge relief

because it was just being human. And our body doesn't want to die, even if you know, like you

said it. And I think it's true that we've prepared ourselves in some ways. But the body doesn't want

to die. It has its own story. So Ram Dass represents for me and I think for us, that loving witness

that can wink and say, wow, we really got into a predicament this time, didn't we? And it's okay.

It's just the dance that we're in. And it's fine. He did have a real facility for combining

humor with the profound and really pithy short statements. It's remarkable.

Yes, he did. I've been listening to some of his audio recordings. There's a podcast,

I can't recall the name, which which is effectively sharing archival audio.

Yeah, I think it's probably the Be Here Now Network.

That's it. That's exactly it. And what an incredible communicator. I mean,

incredible human. I never met him. But incredible, incredible humor and twinkle and sparkle and

yeah, all those good things. And yeah, he was human too. So he had his own foibles.

And the thing that was so beautiful about it is that he would make them all public.

He would say, all right, here's where I messed up this week. And everybody would smile and say,

oh, you know, like just like me. I remember at some point, and I'm not going to be getting this

totally right. So you can correct me. I don't speak Sanskrit or can't read poly or whatever it

might be. But my understanding is that Ram Das, Das is the equivalent of servant of Ram.

And then you have Krishna Das. So it's Krishna. Right. So is Das simply,

is it just a common suffix? And therefore that's it? Or is there deeper meaning behind the choice?

I don't know if they made it or their guru or someone else made it of Krishna and Ram, respectively.

Their guru gave them their names, looked at you and say, you serve Ram, you serve Krishna. You

know, there's this whole, the cool thing about the Hindus that they have so many gods, you can sort

of pick your favorite. And the way it works, I mean, the problem is that we have God as a noun

that's a singular God. Okay. And then we fight over it. My God is realer than your God or better

than your God or bigger than your whatever, you know, my God can beat up your God, whatever it

is in all these different traditions, all that you need to do is add an S. There is Yawa or

Jehovah or whatever. And there's Jesus and Jesus. And there's, you know, there's also other versions

of God. There's Krishna and Brahman. And if you allow as the Hindus do that, the divine has many names.

And many forms instead of fighting over and say, let's celebrate. Okay. So Das means the servant of

the, I don't know who you served him, but you could be sure. Yeah. I need a guru to tell me what my

name is. Anyway, no, one of my teachers was named Buddha Das. He was the servant of the Buddha or

the Buddha's teachings or things like that. So it's very, very common. And for those who end up

digging into Stan Grof and some of his writing, he has some really fun stories around the

servants or worshipers of Shiva and his interactions with them, which is a whole separate can of worms.

Okay. And Stan also has a book when the, I think it's something like when the miraculous happens,

it's his stories of all the wild things that happened his life that were completely unexpected

and that you can't put into ordinary consciousness, just like we've talked about it before. I've had

the experience a number of times of knowing that someone died at a distance and not necessarily

that they were ready to die or, you know, they didn't have cancer. But I knew it. They had an

accident. Who would know that? And then I reach out and I found out, yeah, they had an accident.

And then I'll ask in a room of, you know, 100 or 500 people, how many people have had the experience

of knowing when someone's died, you know, unexpectedly, and a third of the hands go up.

And it's because we're connected. It's just the reality of it. So I want to talk about

climate and justice. And one of the teachers that I most admire who's in her 90s now and

still alive is Joanna Macy. She wrote a wonderful book called World as Lover, World as Self.

And she's been doing what she calls despair and empowerment work for decades now. And she did,

I remember her going and meeting in the survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

And at first they didn't want to talk to her. They said, why are you rubbing our noses in it?

You want to calm you American? And, you know, we've already had such a hard time. Why should

we talk about it all again with you? And she sat in the list and she repeated back what she'd

heard. And she said, the only reason I really want to talk to you beside my sympathy because

I too am a mother and grandmother, she said, is because I don't want this to happen to other

people's children. And you have a story that the world needs to hear. And then they wept.

And they said, all right, we'll tell you the whole story. So she's collaborated for years with others

in doing this work that she calls despair and empowerment work. And she describes it this

way. She said, we're at a time of what she calls the great turning where humanity has the capacity

and tools to make the world and how we live a beautiful place or not. Things have gotten bad.

And it's not just a disaster. It's also an opportunity. And we can all feel that in some

fashion or other. So her game is first to get people to feel the grief and the anger and the

guilt and the despair and to share it with one another so you don't feel alone. And that you

can sense that you're part of the web of life that's responding just as if you've cut your hand or

your finger. You wouldn't say, oh, that poor hand is if it's separate from you. It's part of this

your body that people could start to feel that they were together in the body of the earth,

holding this and responding. And she said, all right, now let's listen more deeply. And one of

the things that she did with an environmental activist named John Seed, they created something

called the Council of All Beings. And on those retreats, after expressing grief and despair and

holding it with compassion and feeling the interconnection of the earth alive saying,

we need to do something, people would be sent out into the woods for half a day

to wander the woods in the streams with the instruction

to sense whose voice you want to carry, who you wish to be a representative of. And it might

be someone you meet out there or it might be that it inspires you. People came together and sometimes

they even in a shamanic way would make a drawing or put something on their body that represented

what they wanted to do and come back in circle. And then they would speak but not as themselves.

They would say, I speak for the redwoods or I speak for the salmon. And I want you to know

that most of my people have died off because of this and that happening. And this is what I want

you to hear. I speak for the, you know, and you can name the species or the part of the earth.

And what would come out of people was tender, grievous at times, but also tremendously inspired

because those voices said, here's what we need to do. This is what we salmon ask of you

and you can do this. You know, this is what we the sequoias and redwoods want of the world now.

And so she shifts the despair to a sense of interconnectedness and that we become the voices

of the earth in its most benevolent and best form. And it seems important to say this because,

you know, we started talking about anxiety long ago in this conversation as we wended our way

through all kinds of strange places. And this takes us back to touch on that. And the important

thing is to know that suffering is not the end of the story. It's the first Buddhist first truth

that there is suffering and there are causes. We can see it greed, hatred, fear and so forth.

And there's an end to it. There's another possibility, which is the empowerment of love,

of action. And part of what makes things liberating, and this has to do with compassion and empathy,

is not only what you feel, but then what you're empowered to do when you speak for the salmon

or whoever it is. So here's the difference between compassion and empathy. If you're walking by a

schoolyard and you see a child being bullied, the first experience inside might be, oh, I feel for

that child. That's wrong. I feel their suffering. So you have a kind of connection, an empathetic

connection with that child. Oh, I'd hate to feel that. I don't want children to feel it. You feel

with them. Come means with, with passion. That's not enough compassion. It turns out as a verb.

You have the first step is empathy. The second step in compassion is you walk over and you talk

to them or you go to the teacher or you go into the office and you say, you know, the kids on the

playground are bullying people. You not only feel it and you let yourself enter in a communion,

if you will, with what you see, but then something in you feels empowered to say,

let me reach out my hand. You don't have to fix the whole world, but you can reach and mend the

places that you can touch. And it doesn't have to be a lot. And just like you've come to LA

and decided to be social rather than solo. And it makes a difference. Reaching your hand out and

touching or doing something empowers you and it changes the world. I think that's a tremendous

place to leave people with that as a closing comment for food for thought. Is there anything

else though that you would like to add, Jack? Oh, maybe 108 other things. But this feels like

a wonderful conversation and also a kind of expression of our friendship for a long time.

I'm glad to see you and see you seeming so well. I certainly know when you describe that you're in

new phases in your life in different ways and I can very much appreciate that. And I've had fun.

Me too. And, you know, as I said, it's not a grim duty. It's actually a celebration.

It is a celebration. And I think I'm going to also set the brief for the defense,

the poem by Jack Gilbert as a reminder so that I reread and reread and reread that.

It's a really potent reminder. And I think it's catching me at a good point in my life. So hopefully

that's true for other people as well. Jack, people can find you online, Jack Cornfield.

That's the K-K-O-R-N-F-I-E-L-D.com Twitter at Jack Cornfield, Instagram Jack underscore

Cornfield. They can find CloudSangha at CloudSangha.co. And we will link to

everything that we've talked about in this conversation in the show notes for people at

TimDopLog slash podcast. And they just can search your name in the most recent episode,

probably unless we do more of these. Someone's listening to this a few years later.

They'll be able to find with ease. Thank you, Jack.

Thank you, Tim. What a pleasure.

So nice to see you. What a pleasure.

And to those listening, until next time, be just a little kinder than is necessary

to others and to yourself. And remember that compassion can begin with feeling,

but can also incorporate and often should incorporate some form of reaching out,

some form of connection, some form of action. And thanks for tuning in.

I'd like to do a guided loving kindness meditation practice.

There are many, many versions of it.

You can find them online from Sharon Salzberg and Tara Brock and Joseph Goldstein and many,

many other teachers. And this will be one version. And you can see what works for you.

There isn't a right way to do meta. Sometimes the practice of cultivating loving kindness

is just to radiate love without words. Sometimes it's to begin by holding yourself with kindness

again and again. And tonight we'll use one of the classic practices, which also involves the

inner recitation of phrases of well-wishing toward others and toward yourself.

And it invites in whatever way you can, the quality of kindness, the images and the words

are an avenue to opening the heart. But the most important thing is not to use it to judge yourself.

Sometimes it feels beautiful. Sometimes it's so-so. You know how meditation goes.

Sometimes it's frustrating. You know where it brings up its opposite. How can I feel love?

I'm so angry at that person. And then what do you do when you feel that?

You hold that too with compassion and kindness. If it feels mechanical, you hold that with kindness.

You just receive what arises and trust that the field of kindness itself

is what matters. So say it comfortably. It's hard to do meta loving kindness practice if your

body's, your knees are killing and your back's aching. So you want to be a little bit at ease

and let your eyes close gently for the next 25 minutes or so.

And first, as you settle yourself, let the body relax,

at ease. Let the eyes and face be soft.

Loosen the jaw. Maybe roll your head in a circle a little to release your neck.

Let it find a simple upright.

Let the shoulders relax and the arms and hands rest easily.

Feel yourself seated on the earth halfway between heaven and earth in this human form.

And let go. Rest where you are. Let the earth completely hold you and support you.

Let the belly be soft and the breath, breath natural.

And let the heart be soft as well

so that you invite a quieting of the mind and a tenderizing of the heart.

And the blessings of loving kindness often recited before one begins the meditation

are that it is an antidote to fear and anxiety when we enter into the loving and trusting heart.

That when we cultivate loving kindness, others will love us more commonly and

animals will notice and care and elephants will bow as we go by. It says,

children will be happier around us and we'll be happier. Our dreams get sweet, our thoughts get

easier. We become more gracious with the difficulties of life as we open the heart.

And now I'll take two long breaths,

breathing in and out deliberately and quite slowly, letting go of whatever wants to release

to be open present.

And now in this present moment, letting yourself settle

and setting the intention to awaken the field of loving kindness.

Let yourself think of or picture, remember

someone that you care about where it's easy, not a conflicted relationship, but someone where it's

easy to feel a natural care and love. It doesn't have to be some super thing. It's just whoever

evokes a sense of kindness in you and caring. It can even be your dog.

When you remember or think of this being likely a person

that you care about,

feel the natural care.

You picture them, remember them,

then begin very simply whispering

phrases of well-wishing inwardly.

May you be filled with loving kindness.

May you be safe and protected.

Feel your care as you say these things.

May you be well and strong or healed.

Be aware of the struggles in their life, the measure of struggles like all human beings

and feel the tender compassion that comes with what they struggle.

May you hold your struggles in compassion.

And underneath it all, may you be happy.

May you be filled with loving kindness.

May you be safe and protected.

May you be well and healed and strong.

May you hold your struggles with compassion and tenderness.

May you be happy.

Peaceful and happy.

Feel the natural well-wishing as you see them.

Now pick a second person or second being where there's a natural caring and love,

again uncomplicated and easy.

And as you remember and picture and sense them, think of them.

Offering the same well-wishes.

May you be filled with loving kindness.

May you be safe and protected.

May you be well and healed.

May you be well and strong.

May you hold your struggles with tenderness and compassion.

May you be happy and truly happy.

May you be happy and truly happy.

Now let yourself imagine picture that these two beings that you care about

are there in front of you gazing back at you with eyes of kindness.

For they want to wish for you the same loving kindness you extended to them.

And together they gaze at you and they whisper,

may you too be filled with loving kindness.

Receive and imagine their blessing, their kindness toward you.

They want you to have this.

May you two be safe and protected.

Feel their care.

They say, may you too be well, healed and strong.

May you too hold your struggles with compassion and kindness.

And they gaze at you, may you be happy.

May you be happy amidst it all.

And you take in these phrases and words of loving kindness

and recite them for yourself if you like.

You can even put your hand on your heart.

And just as they wish for you, these people who you care about,

they care about you as well.

May I be filled with loving kindness as they wish.

May I be safe and protected.

May I be well, healed and strong.

May I hold my struggles with compassion and courage.

May I be happy, free and happy, heart and spirit.

Filled with loving kindness.

Safe, protected.

May I be happy.

Now without any more words from me, let yourself go through

two or three or four more people that you care about or people that you know or people who are

struggling or beyond them, you can spread your loving kindness out to groups of people,

places in the world where they're having difficulty to refugees, to children, women,

beings. But start a little closer to home. Do a couple or a few more people you care about

and then become a beacon or a lighthouse and spread it more broadly using your own phrases

and well-wishing. Spread the meta, the loving kindness, like a light.

Far and near, near and far.

As you extend the loving kindness, you become the beacon of kindness,

the beacon of loving kindness, yourself and all that it touches.

you

you

you

you

you

you

you

you

you

you

you

you

Take one more minute. Whatever invites the spirit of loving kindness

for yourself and other beings. Invite it now.

You

You

You

You

Now keeping the spirit of loving kindness, allow your eyes to open gently

and sense that you can inhabit the consciousness of loving kindness. Eyes open wherever you go.

One of my ways of practicing this is to see the child in each person around me,

especially if I'm going about on errands and I see somebody who's

having a hard time or making a hard time getting pushy or aggressive or whatever

and I look and I see them and I try to picture them as a child, as a young child,

with a certain innocence and their struggles as children have

and know that that child of the spirit is still in there somewhere

and brings the loving kindness alive for me.

Whatever the principle of Mehta is to do it in whatever way most feels natural to you.

In whatever way allows you to see with the eyes of tenderness and compassion and kindness.

Find your own beautiful way.

Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday.

Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun

before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter,

my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is

basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found

or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool

things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos,

all sorts of tech tricks and so on. They get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast

guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I

share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness

before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out,

just go to tim.vlog.friday. Type that into your browser, tim.vlog.friday. Drop in your email

and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.