This Is Why I Find Pema Chödrön So Essential

Introduction to University

0:00If you want to know what a university is for, look to the work. At the University of Michigan, that work looks like physicians destroying cancer with sound instead of scalpels, designers bringing braille into the digital world, and researchers detecting PFAS before they reach your tap. That's what the defining research university is for, serving the public good. For all of us, look to Michigan. See more solutions at umich.edu slash look.

Book Introduction

0:30Thank you.

Uncertainty and Fear

1:00There's this book I love, and I go back to him back to, called Comfortable with Uncertainty. It's by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron, who has also written really, really, really well-known, beloved books like When Things Fall Apart and Welcoming the Unwelcome. But this particular book resonates with me in part because of the title. It has been a real revelation of my own life, how uncomfortable I was with uncertainty, how

1:30many places I didn't go, how many things I didn't do, how many conversations I wouldn't have because I just couldn't control the way they would turn out. And just knowing that, just feeling uncertain, feeling a little afraid, was enough for me to avoid the thing altogether. But you get older, and you begin realizing how much there is that you can't avoid. You realize that discomfort is going to come for you whether you want it or not. But I think it's easy to go pretty far with the illusion that you can control what is happening around you, that there is some set of decisions you can make or choices you can

2:03make. Find the people, the partner, the job, the success, the whatever. They'll keep you safe. And then you keep getting older, and you realize it's not going to happen. That things are going to keep falling apart. And coming back together, and then coming apart again, that there's no stable ground in the end to stand on. And so you have to have some real relationship with uncertainty, with discomfort, with pain, with suffering, with loss. And I've just found children's books and work to be maybe better than anything else for

2:37trying to force at least me into some more truthful relationship with that. Which is not the illusion that I can make it not happen, or that, you know, with enough meditation or wisdom or anything else, I won't feel it. But actually the recognition that the path to growth and to wisdom is letting yourself feel it. Children is a new book out, Another Kind of Freedom, which is on these themes and many others.

3:07And it created for me this wonderful and unexpected opportunity to interview somebody from whom I've learned so much. It's a really beautiful conversation. I found it really helpful. I hope you do too. As always, my email, Ezra Klein Show at NYTimes.com.

Guest Introduction

3:32Pamit Chojun, welcome to the show. Thank you. It is such a pleasure to have you here. I want to begin with something you say in your book, Comfortable with Uncertainty, because that book is important to me. And you write there that the central question is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear, but how we relate to discomfort. Why? I think if you're going to live in this age that we live in, discomfort is an ongoing thread for everybody, through everything.

4:05And a big theme is how to get rid of it, how to not be feeling uncomfortable, not be feeling uncertain, how to not feel insecure. So the approach that Buddhism takes is that there's this expression about only way out is through. So that's really sort of the idea. And one of the things that I've started saying is get your nervous system used to certain things. If you try to just go about trying to change the outer circumstances, which of course I

4:39applaud people that try, but this is more an approach of working with what the outer circumstances trigger in you, and then the work becomes befriending or it's kind of hard to find exactly the right word, but the idea is that you're not trying to get rid of, you're trying to become intimate with. And this turns out to be completely accurate, that if you approach things and kind of become

5:11familiar with what it feels like to feel insecure, let's just start with insecure, is that okay? If you become familiar with what it feels like to be insecure, not the storylines particularly, around insecurity, but storylines are like triggers. What they trigger is something physical in your body. And so if you can contact that, and actually in working with a lot of people, it doesn't seem very hard to contact because it's kind of like, if you say like, what are you feeling

5:42in your solar plexus? People can go right there. And then what do you say? What does it feel like? And there's some version of contracted and tight, is what people usually say. So this sounds like, doesn't sound all that spiritual or anything, but actually if you can become willing to be there fully and completely with whatever it is you're feeling, with kind of a unconditional, I would say warmth is the word I would use, unconditional warmth towards whatever you're feeling, that seems to be the way, not so much that you get

6:17rid of the feeling, but that it all becomes very workable. One word you use sometimes that really helped me is abiding. Abiding. We were talking before this began about how I sometimes have trouble with the verbs here. Yeah, right. Surrendering and letting go. Right, right. But for me, discomfort, uncertainty, insecurity, they are very, it took time to see this, but they are very physical. They are a contraction in the solar plexus. Yeah, yeah. And it took a long time to see how reflexively I ran from that and tried to make the feeling

6:52go away. Absolutely, right. That is what people do. You can count on it, really.

Befriending Discomfort

6:57Tell me about the term befriending the warmth, because there's sort of two stages as I read you to what you're saying here. One is the, don't run from it. Don't run. You are going to feel uncomfortable. You are going to have discomfort. That is not an eradicable part of life. Right. But then there's this next move. You sometimes say, smile at it, befriend it. I wouldn't say I've quite figured that one out. And maybe I'll use an example. Like, imagine somebody's in a fight with their partner.

7:30They're angry. They're hurt. They're rehearsing all the things they should have said or all the things they're going to say. Their chest is tight. They can't stop thinking about it. Right. What does it mean to befriend that feeling? Well, first of all, you have to want to. And then the question becomes just, I think it's your question, well, how do I actually do that? So the first thing would be some kind of pause. Through meditation, one of the things you learn to do, it's kind of very basic to meditation,

8:02is something that I call letting the storyline go. If you meditate and you have an object of meditation that you keep coming back to, then you begin to experience all your thoughts, storylines, as something that you can interrupt, something that you can come back from, that you don't have to keep following it and keep following it and keep following it. So it's like you see yourself going down a rabbit hole and you decide, no way am I going to go down that rabbit hole.

8:34So how do I not go down the rabbit hole? And then you go to your body and you find where in your body you're holding the grievance or the sense of revenge or the sense of regret that you didn't say the right thing. You don't really have to name it, but you say, go to, what are you feeling like right now? What are you feeling? You don't, not conceptually, don't say, you don't have to say mad or anything like that. What are you feeling? And then find that feeling in your body.

9:06So what you find is a contraction, some kind of tightness, a knot almost. And you can ask a person, well, where is it? Some people will say it's all over my body, but usually they'll say like, it's in my solar plexus, it's in my throat, my stomach, wherever, it doesn't really matter. But once you're there, the attitude towards it is not that it's something that needs to be eradicated, you know, oh, let's find it and then we'll throw it out or something like

9:38that, the attitude more is that you send, I like to use the word tenderness towards it. You send warmth towards it. People do this differently. People find their own way to do this. If you want to conceptualize it, you would say you send it unconditional love. You send it unconditional warmth, unconditional tenderness. It's like you're not going to give up on yourself. What if you don't feel unconditional love towards it? If you don't feel unconditional love towards it, not a problem.

10:10Then you send the warmth towards what does it feel like to not have unconditional love? I mean, what does that feel like? And then what would you say that would feel like? To not have unconditional love? Yeah. To feel like you don't qualify for doing this because you can't send unconditional love? Let me try to think through how it feels for me. I think the idea of how it would feel to have unconditional love is so, for a feeling like

10:40that, is so alien that even trying to describe it is hard because the water I swim in is wanting certain feelings to go away. Yeah, right.

10:52You're a typical human being. I am a typical human being. And one thing that I have gotten better at over time has been abiding in those feelings and then recognizing that they will change. Exactly. And that they will change more profoundly if I let them sit there. That's right. But I certainly have not found warmth for them. I've become maybe better at attending to them. I think in some places you talk about sometimes noting feelings like that as a bell to pay

11:26attention. And I've gotten a little bit better at that. Like I have a physical relationship to uncertainty, which when I feel it, I now feel that is something that I should look at as opposed to try to get rid of. Right. But I have a lot more trouble when people say... Extend unconditional love. Extend unconditional love to it. What about just a gesture, like touching it with your hand? That does help me. I do do that. In other words, get away from concept and words altogether and just put your hand there.

11:59That can be very, very powerful to just do that. And sometimes people just express affection for themselves by maybe touching the top of their head. I don't want to get too corny with this, but some sort of sense of being okay with yourself. How do you help people? This is such a funny question I have to ask.

Feeling Emotions

12:22How do you help people learn to feel what they're feeling in their body? It has taken me many years of therapy and meditation to even realize that I often wasn't feeling what was happening in the body that I didn't have awareness of it. I was reacting to it. It was there. Right, right. I had a therapist once who was actually one of the people who really helped me work with this. What she realized about me was that the way I would talk about something and the way I would feel about it were very different.

12:53Yeah. And she would start telling me when I was talking about something, she'd say, stop. Tell me the same thing, but have your hand on your stomach. Tell me the same thing, but have your hand on your heart. Oh, really? And it was a very powerful practice because the feeling would start to come into what I was saying. Yes. Okay. So you're saying that for you, the physical gesture is actually very, very important in terms of something. It certainly helped me, yeah. Yeah. Well, I found this exactly the same thing.

13:23And that's where I've come to find out that if people just use gestures, that it helps a lot to sort of soften up the situation, touching the heart or touching where the contraction is. Put your hand where that is. Have a sense of that hand being friendly. And the heart seems to be the one that is the, you know, really gets to people. You know, you could be on the street and then someone, for some reason, they like something you just did or something.

13:55They'll just sort of do this, touch their hearts. And I find it's such a sweet thing, you know, a way to communicate to people you don't know on the street.

Resistance to Feelings

14:03Why do you think it's so hard to feel what we're feeling? A lot of times it's trauma related. That people close down at a young age around something or other. It's like trying to open up a floodgate and maybe people are scared for one thing, you know, to open up that floodgate. And actually, it's not such a great idea to open up a floodgate. It's more a good idea to sort of like put a little hole in it, in a tiny hole, so that the whole thing is a gradual opening.

14:35So let's say you're there and you're feeling how you're feeling, you know, and maybe you don't like how you're feeling, but you're at least there with it. You have a line that I find very evocative. You said, I once asked the Zen master Kobuncino Roshi. Kobuncino, yeah. How he related with fear. Oh, yeah. And he said, I agree. I agree. I agree. Yeah. It was such a beautiful answer, you know.

15:05It was sort of shorthand for this whole thing that we're talking about. I stress the warmth and the friendliness because people seem to need that a lot. But the fundamental thing, if you're saying, what are we actually trying to do here? It's like agreeing rather than disagreeing, accepting rather than rejecting, staying with rather than running away. What are some other ways we could say? Allowing. Allowing. Allowing is a good word, yeah. Allowing rather than disapproving or criticizing.

15:38What I like about this approach and what seems to be attractive to people is it doesn't matter where you are in the process, you can make friends with that. So, like, for instance, it might be very common for people who have low self-esteem, which is many, many, many, many people, that they hear a meditation instruction, and then it's just another thing to beat themselves up on because I could never do that. So then if I had an opportunity to work closely with someone, I would just say, well, then let's just work with what happens in your body when you feel like you're a loser,

16:17or you feel like you can never get it right, or let's get at what it feels like physically to feel like I'm always messing up, or I'm inadequate, or there's something fundamentally unlovable about me, you know. So somehow getting right to the core of a lot of the dysfunction that they might be feeling. So getting back to the original thing is I think we all need a lot of help to start to agree with what's happening with us,

16:49rather than feel that it's because it's uncomfortable that it has to be rejected. Everybody needs a lot of time and willingness and intention to be able to hold more discomfort, hold more pain, really, you know. It took me, it is still taking me, a really long time to realize that what I'm trying to do when I meditate is not to change how I'm feeling.

17:19I started meditating because I had and have a fair amount of anxiety and stress, and I started really seriously when I was starting a company, and I was trying to feel differently than I felt. And for years and years and years and years, I was there in a practice of trying to feel differently than I felt. And I do think it is a very subtle and difficult shift, and one I've only begun to recognize needs to be made.

17:50Right. To this place of agreement that you're, that how you feel might change, but you're not trying to change it. Right. That you're trying to be in a space of accepting how you feel. So I believe you work with Will Kabat-Zinn. So one of the big things about why the stress reduction program that his father has, Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the premises is you, he says to people, you just have to give up the idea that this is going to help you in any way.

18:22You have to give up the idea that there's like a goal here. We're just going to be mindful of what's happening for itself, for its own self. That's such a hard idea to give up. But he must have a lot of success doing it, right? Because it's in all the hospitals and everything. But that is a very important part of it is you're not trying to improve. And these are people with severe back pains mostly that no doctors could help. So all the exercises are for themselves alone and not to try to get rid of the thing.

18:52So I'm sure it's very hard. But let's just say it helps to be introduced to the idea. And people sometimes get kind of fascinated by the idea that there's an alternative to trying to get rid of it. Why? Because they've spent how many years they're alive trying to get rid of it and it hasn't helped. So let's try something different. What attracted you to this side of it? I mean, something if you go through your book titles. Yeah. Just that, right? I know. It's like when things fall apart, comfortable with uncertainty, how we live is how we die.

19:26But, you know, a different kind of freedom that, you know, one after another. Welcoming the unwelcome. Welcoming the unwelcome. I know. There's been a real attraction for you. Yeah, that's true. In this idea that it's going to hurt sometimes. Yeah. And that let's just be okay with it hurting sometimes. Like Trungpa Rinpoche, Chogem Trungpa Rinpoche, my teacher, he always used to say, lean into the sharp points. And that's a great phrase, I think, you know.

19:58Lean into the sharp points. It expresses what we're trying to say here about leaning in rather than pulling back, you know. So sometimes it's just really physical, you sort of have the idea, okay, this is really hurting. And so some people would say, so I lean into it. Other people would say, I stop resisting. That's what, for me, that's what it is. I've learned that anything unpleasant, I can feel that I'm resisting. I don't want it to happen.

20:29And then I just go through this process, which I've done so many times now that I can actually do it. But I go through this process of relaxing with it, physically not resisting, like unknotting the stomach. Walk me through that process. I mean, I believe you have back pain. I do. We were talking about back pain a minute ago, too. When you're in pain, what do you do, right? Some part of you must not want to feel the pain. What then happens in your mind or body? All right.

20:59So I stand up, I stretch, I do physical therapy, things like that. You're not just accepting it and letting the pain be there. No. You are trying to change it, too. I'm doing the smart things, you know, or what the doctors recommend. And those things are really helpful. I'm a big PT fan around physical pain. But the attitude is the main thing. So I've given up the idea that maybe it's all going to go away. And I live more with the idea, like, this is what I'm going to be living with for the

21:30rest of my life. So that's a whole different kind of more relaxed attitude about it. You do do the physical therapy and things like this. But the attitude is, we might say agreeing. You might say making friends with. But for me, what I catch is when I resist. I don't want, I don't want. And I can feel that physically. And then I lean in. I lean in. What does lean in mean?

22:00Okay, I'll give an example. I don't know if it's going to answer your question, but Chogam Trungpa once gave a talk. And the topic of the talk was collaborating with reality. And he gave the example, though I was very familiar with living in Nova Scotia in the wintertime, of walking in the winter when the snow and sleet is coming in your face and it's extremely unpleasant and your whole body is as if you're in the dentist chair. You're just like tensing up.

22:32So leaning in means you physically stop resisting what's happening and you're more like relax with it. You sort of relax with it. The thing is that the contrast is so great between resisting and then relaxing that somehow it's not that hard to do because it's so tangible, this resisting thing, because I can feel everything in me is like pushing away and that's like fruitless.

23:04I mean, it's not going to help at all. Whereas as when I sort of just let it be what it is and stop tensing against it, then it becomes totally fine. I think about this when I walk home with my kids, you know, half the days of the week I do pick up and I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old and we live in New York and it rains.

23:29Like yesterday. And when we walk home in the rain, what happens is I'm sitting there trying to not get wet and they're like, puddles! And they're trying to jump in every puddle and if they have their rain boots on, that's great. And if they don't, I'm like, don't get your feet wet and you don't get your shoes wet. But I'm often tensed up against getting wet and I'm going to get wet one way or the other. Right, exactly. And they're playing in the rain. They're collaborating with reality.

23:59That's right. And I'm resisting reality. I don't want to get wet. And they're like, there's so much water here. That's so fun. It is a subtle shift mentally, I think. And so for the kids, it's natural. And then somehow we lose it, right? As we get older, it seems like. But then you can kind of go back. You can begin to be more joyful about what's happening. I mean, I just had this experience with the sleet and everything. And I always use this image. So it did feel like I was in a dance with the storm.

24:32There was something very joyful. About it. Funny. I think that's what it was. It became sort of funny. Like I felt like I was in a New Yorker cartoon or something. But it's more like your kids with the puddle that becomes enjoyable rather than a battle. So struggle is a helpful word, I think. You find yourself struggling and basically you pause.

24:58And you find your way to not struggle.

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27:02You've aligned that I think is interesting where you say,

Meditation and Growth

27:04when we resist change, it's called suffering. Hmm. And I often find Buddhist teachers make this distinction between suffering and pain. Right. I'd love you to talk a bit about that. Pain is you put your finger on the burner, and there's pain you pull away. And there's many, many examples, like I have back pain, you know, or whatever it is. So that's pain. That's like direct experience.

27:36Then there's suffering, which is all the storylines that we lay on top of it. And I call that unnecessary suffering, actually. In this case, you call it pain and suffering. But suffering, in this case, is optional because it's based on the storylines you're telling yourself about. Like, I talk to people about back pain, you know, spiritual discussions about back pain. But one of the things is people are curious about how to be with the experience without all the storylines,

28:13because they're saying to themselves things like, this is going to get worse and I'm going to be disabled, or I'm not going to be able to do my work because of this, or all sorts of disaster scenarios, which are causing them so much suffering. That's optional, that part. I take this as a very important part of, I mean, Buddhism generally, but your teaching in particular, working with this layer of resistance to what's happening. And I struggle with this a tremendous amount,

28:43and it's something I'm trying to work on, where I'm in a situation that exists. It's not a situation at this point I can change. I have created the schedule, I'm going to the thing, I'm, you know, I have back pain too, I'm feeling the back pain.

28:59Or there's something in the future that I'm worried about happening, but it may not happen. I was just doing a governor's forum in California, and I was worried on the flight out that I was losing my voice. I didn't end up losing my voice, but I worried about it a lot. And there's this layer of experience that for me is resisting, trying to make it different than it is when I can't. And on the one hand, I think I've become more attentive to how much suffering comes out of that.

29:29But I'm curious, again, in a very sort of physical or tactical way, how you drop that layer. Because for me, the impulse to try to solve every problem or to treat even every moment like a problem to solve or to perfect is very deep and reflexive. Now, would you say, though, is it possible to keep it going if you don't keep feeding it with storyline? Is it dependent on storyline?

30:00When you say to keep feeding it, to me, I, the I, am not feeding it. The storyline feeds itself. It takes an enormous amount of mental energy for me to not have worried thoughts feed themselves. I don't want to be thinking about this. I'm not trying to do it. Worried thoughts do feed themselves, absolutely. And part of the book, Another Kind of Freedom, which is that commentary on Trungpa Rinpoche's book,

30:30there is this part which may have had a big effect on me where he talks about there's nothing wrong with, in this case it was negativity, but let's just say nothing wrong with back pain or nothing wrong with worrying about the future. Nothing wrong. But the problem is what he called negative negativity. That's on top of worrying, then there's judgment about worrying, and it goes way down the rabbit hole, right? It's almost like, I think, in your case, like on the airplane,

31:01it would be almost like meditating, getting back to meditation, where you, I don't know what you do when you meditate exactly, but do you have an object of meditation often? No, I tend to do noting. I sort of continuously speak, either aloud or mentally, what I'm aware of at that moment, and from which sense. So I'm aware of looking at you, I'm aware of hearing the sound as you sort of affirm what I'm saying. Yes, right. I'm aware of feeling my fingers touch each other right now, and just sort of letting everything come into awareness,

31:34but doing nothing about it. But doing nothing about it, right. I think I could work with noting, too, in terms of this, but just in terms of more familiar ground for me, let me just propose, if what you did was say, okay, I'm going to be gently note or aware of my breath going out and coming in. And my intention here is to just, as much as possible, stay fully present with the breath going out and the breath coming in.

32:06Nothing forced, just natural breathing. Okay, so then what happens is the worry thought is like a magnet. It's very seductive, like the sirens, you know, calling you. It keeps pulling you off. Fine, that's what happens. So then we just keep coming back to being present with the breath going in and breath going out, and then it pulls you away again. But you're training in noting that you're going off and then coming back. You're training in noting that you're going off and coming back.

32:39So you interrupt it, I guess you could say. You just get the hang of what it feels like to not continue with the storyline. And then you might find, but by the time you land in San Francisco or wherever you're going, that there's been a shift in your anxiety level, a shift in your obsessive thinking part, you know, and that you're more ready to just go in without hope and fear into the situation. You're in a different place with the whole thing because you've stayed so present with what's going on.

33:12I think I'm very interested in, and this is just my own experience with myself, but the difference between energy of doing something and energy of just allowing something to be there. And to me, a lot of the exhaustion from worrying is actually trying to think about, like, well, what can I do about it? You know, do I need to be, you know, sucking on a throat lozenge? And, you know, when I go there, should I see a doctor? And the kind of trying to actually solve it, and this is true in a lot of areas of my life,

33:46versus just, it's there. Like, the thoughts are there, I might lose my voice.

33:54And, I mean, of course there are things in life that we want to change. You do physical therapy for your back. I work in politics. I'm trying to effectuate change, not just allow things to be the way they are. And on the other hand, for me at least, how much I've trained the energy of trying to change things and solve problems and act and optimize, it's made me realize, like, how untrained for me, and unfamiliar, actually, the energy of just letting things be. I'm sure. I'm sure it's very unfamiliar.

34:25But are you attracted to it? Yeah. We wouldn't be having this conversation if I weren't attracted to it. And so, do you find that you can do it sometimes? Sometimes. It's the thing I'm starting to try to learn how to do. It's been a big shift in my own meditation practice. So, I do think, you know, I think probably anxiety comes up a lot. Like, I was anxious about coming over here. What about it made you anxious? Oh, coming here? Unknown. So unknown.

34:55You weren't comfortable with the uncertainty? Actually, I didn't have a storyline, particularly. It was just butterflies in the stomach. My daughter asked me, well, what are you afraid of? And I said, I actually don't know. I'm just having butterflies. But I wasn't having a problem with having butterflies. I think that's what I'm trying to get at. It was just an automatic response. Nothing wrong with it. I wasn't escalating into a big storyline. Oh, I'm going to be a big flop.

35:26Or he'll ask me and I won't be able to talk. Or, you know, it didn't go any of those places. And so it just was, I think, you know, we have these just old habitual responses to things. Butterflies. No big deal, butterflies, is what I'm thinking in this case. So in terms of the worry, that's no big deal either. But somehow it escalates and escalates and escalates. And that's when the real unnecessary suffering gets strong, right?

35:57And affects you physically. And so you're just coming back to what it feels like in my solar plexus or whatever. With a feeling of sense of humor, warmth, no big deal. Something more along those lines. You're interrupting the tendency to escalate. So you're actually kind of practicing non-resistance. We've talked so much about the relationship to discomfort. What about the relationship to comfort?

36:27I love it.

36:32Well, this is a really important question. So let's talk about comfort as a comfort zone. That's the expression that people use. Are you familiar with that expression? So everybody needs some time with the comfort zone because your nervous system needs it. Swimming in the ocean, all these things that soothe you. Listening to music that you love and all these things. But there's no growth in the comfort zone. Growth happens where it's more uncomfortable.

37:03And we call it challenge because we've come up against our edge a little bit there. And so you want your edge to expand. In other words, if today your edge is the sidewalk, then by this time next year, you want to be able to walk five blocks or something like that. Yeah, somebody once said to me that the amount of growth you're capable of is a direct correlate of the amount of discomfort you're willing to tolerate.

37:33Oh, that's right on. That person was very wise who said that to you. That's absolutely true. So I guess what we're talking about then is to the degree that we can feel discomfort, to that degree we can grow. And grow means let the natural change in evolution happen rather than get frozen in views and opinions that keep you stuck in the same way for your whole life, really. Meditation has been coming in and out of this conversation.

Purpose of Meditation

38:03And what is the purpose for you of meditation? What are you trying to practice? There could be a lot of answers to that question. But I think of it as a way to get to know yourself deeply, intimately, fearlessly, with an attitude of friendliness. So a person who goes on a meditation retreat, let's say, where you do more hours, and then inevitably things start floating up.

38:34Like maybe they think this is all about getting calm and blissful. But then when they go on the meditation retreat, a lot of painful memories, regrets, flashbacks, all kinds of stuff comes up. For instance, I once raised my hand with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and I said, Rinpoche, you're always talking about making friends with yourself. But I've been meditating now for a couple of years, and I think I'm getting a lot of ammunition and proof that I am a pretty messed up person. And then he said, okay, move closer to the feeling of messed up.

39:08That was his answer. One of my teachers is called Soni Rinpoche, and he has this expression, being okay with not being okay, which I think I like that a lot because it's very pithy. It's kind of a fearless thing to see your habits, to see your emotional reactivity, to see maybe selfishness, pride, rage about things that you thought you had worked through, and all this kind of stuff. So, to me, making friends with yourself is making friends with all of that, all of that unresolved and stuff like this.

39:46So meditation provides a forum or something like this for you to be able to see yourself very clearly, and then the instruction is to agree with what you're seeing, to not reject what you're seeing. What about for someone whose experience with meditation, which I think is very common, is not that they get these fireworks of self-insight, but they just realize they can't take 10 breaths without their mind running away from them, and they're bored. Yeah, that's so true.

40:16Okay, yes, absolutely. I was kind of jumping ahead, I guess, a little bit in terms of what I was saying. One of the things Trump-Ramache says in Myth of Freedom is he has a whole chapter called Boredom. And the chapter is about what a wonderful thing boredom is.

40:34Why is it a wonderful thing? He says because it doesn't feed the ego at all. There's nothing about it that feeds the ego. And so if you start getting bored, that is an excellent sign that your meditation is progressing. And that, okay, sit through the hot boredom until it becomes cool boredom. And so hot boredom is what we're familiar with, which is like jumpiness. You want to get out of there. Boredom has this quality of just wanting to bolt, you know.

41:05And cool boredom is you just, you sit there with the feeling of boredom. I would hear these teachings on cool boredom, and honestly, I had not a clue what they were talking about. And I use this example. So I went to Mexico where my parents had retired. My father had died. My mother liked to sit inside with all the windows, shades closed in Mexico. We're outside of her door, and the windows was like blazing with color and action, and everything's happening.

41:38And I'm young, you know. And so I go there to be with her, and everything in me wants to be outside there. So for the first two days, I was so bored and restless. And then I realized I came all this way to be with my mother. At some point, I just gave up the struggle, and I was just there with my mother. And then it was so remarkable because I began to feel like I was sitting on a stage, and every once in a while, the door would open, and someone would, a friend would come in or something.

42:11They'd have this conversation, and then the door would close, and then we were in this like nothing happening zone. And I just sat there with her, and then she'd start talking, and then that's what was happening. The whole thing became kind of fascinating. It feels very similar to what you were saying earlier about the suffering was coming from resistance. That's right. The suffering was coming from the resistance. And so I learned, I said, oh, this is cool boredom. I'm just here with it, and there's no resistance. I actually think time is a very interesting dimension of all of this.

Time and Action

42:44I mean, everybody feels uncomfortable sometimes, but really, in a way, what we're talking about here, what you're talking about, is being willing to feel like that for longer without acting. You have a line where you say, the opposite of patience is aggression, the desire to jump and move, to push against our lives, to try to fill up space. You talk about refraining as the method of becoming a Dharmic person. And in some ways, I don't understand any of this as never acting, but as taking a longer space.

43:19Before acting. Before acting. Yeah, absolutely. And that's been a very important and transformative. Distinction. Insight for me. And I'd be curious to just hear more from you on this dimension of time and action. Along the lines of what I was just saying, it would mean that you're very patient. Just tell me about how you understand patience. First, let's start with impatience, because might as well start where we are, right? I experience as restless and, like I was saying about boredom, wanting to get out of there, wanting to move, to just get off the hot seat, sort of.

43:57And then patience would be sitting still with that restless energy. Just sitting there with it, you know, like in my mother's living room. But that's how I experience patience. So again, it's growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Patience is part of, it would be a necessary tool, I guess you could call it that. Do you think that that, as a general capacity, as weekend, and I'm thinking of something you wrote that I think about a lot.

44:30You wrote, refraining is very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. It's a quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It's a practice of not immediately filling up space just because there's a gap. And we didn't used to have the ability to fill the space of every gap. You know, you were sitting in traffic and there wasn't a lot to do. You were in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at. And now we have the world of distraction at our fingertips.

45:01We have AirPods in our ears. And so just the daily necessity of sitting with boredom, even, has dissolved. That's so true. And I think it changes us. It's so true. And not for the better, I would say. You know, less in touch with the richness of the world. You were discussing with me earlier about going on the subway without your earpods, you know.

45:31And just sitting there and how rich an experience it was of just being there, the sights and sounds and what was happening, the drama and just the whole experience as being very rich. And sometimes with students, very often these days, I really encourage them to one day a week or one morning a week or take an upper time when they just go offline and go to the grocery store offline, ride on the subway offline.

46:05Be there fully for what's happening because you're not engrossed in a movie or a podcast or anything. Let's not get crazy here.

46:17I put you out of business, Ezra. But you know how it is. You go on the subway or anywhere and everybody is somewhere else. So I encourage them to be present without their device. But, you know, I'm trying to be realistic and just say, do it this short period of time every Wednesday or every Wednesday morning or something like that. And it's like my granddaughter when she was still in college and her teacher said, no, no devices in the room.

46:49And I said, couldn't you just turn the sound off? She said, no, because it vibrates. So then, you know, so they had to leave them outside. My attention is different if I can feel my phone in my pocket. Yep. So when we do, when I do conversations, my phone is here. It's not in my pocket right now. It's on the floor near me. Right. Because my attention to you would be different if it were in my pocket. Of course. Even knowing that the sound is off, even though I'm not going to check in. Right, exactly. That's what she said. And then she said, I never realized how I was training myself to be distracted.

47:22That was her vocabulary. And because it was so different being in class without it, even just in her pocket, as you say. So, yeah, I think everybody can do themselves a big favor by spending some time offline and seeing what that's like for them. And, you know, you could say, well, that's when you get into being bored. But you could also say, oh, maybe that's when you get into being alive, more alive.

47:52I mean, the subway is such a great example of fascinating, really totally fascinating to just be there. Because of the people, if nothing else, just what's there's so much happening from when you get on to when you get off. There is so much. I'm sometimes thinking you wish weren't happening, but nevertheless. To just expand that, we were talking earlier off the microphone about one thing I've been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on the subway and just be aware of what's happening around me.

48:25And it's interesting because a lot of the times I don't really love what's happening around me. It's a rich experience, but it's a boombox. It's, you know, somebody like trying to grab my attention with music I don't really want to be listening to. It's the screeching of the brakes. But there's just a lot going on. And dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the right music or podcast or thing on my Kindle to distract myself in the right way and try to maintain a kind of like a hermetic comfort, it's easier to stop.

48:57That's been my big lesson from it. It's not so much that I love every moment on the subway, but I didn't quite notice how much energy I was expending trying to block it all out. Do you feel more relaxed? I do. Yeah. I do. And then I pick up my kids and I'm more present with them. Yeah, yeah. Because I've just spent the last 35 minutes practicing being present. Right, right, right. As opposed to practicing finding somewhere my mind would rather be. So it's interesting because I would call that a form of meditation. You're just present. It's interesting because we didn't used to have all these devices.

49:31You know, I grew up before television even. But now that we have the devices, it's very helpful actually to feel the contrast. It's, you know, somehow it's richer. You have a lovely line. I think it's a line somebody told you that meditation is not a vacation from irritation. That's right. That's right. It's the first time I ever went for meditation instruction. That's what the woman said to me. And then later I saw that it was from Myth of Freedom that Cho Kim Trimbran said that.

50:02She plagiarized. But anyway, it made a big impression on me. Because that's right. Meditation is not a vacation from irritation. It's just another way of saying the same kind of thing, you know. But I have to say, even though I was introduced to this view or this attitude from day one, took me a lot of years to somehow have it penetrate and get to me that the path of non-resistance. It was in there. The seed was in there. But it wasn't that I immediately was open to everything that was happening.

50:36Narrate that progress for a minute.

Meditation Progress

50:39Because, I mean, somebody listening to this, here you are, you're a famed nun. And the idea of moving from I've never meditated to whatever you must be experiencing seems very intimidating. How would you describe the stages your experience of meditation or your relationship to it have gone through?

51:05That's a difficult question to answer because I've never actually given it a lot of thought. But let me just go back to remembering the first time I was taught to meditate.

51:18I could hardly stay with the breath for two seconds, you know. But then that was like what I was saying earlier. It was just a revelation to see how I had no idea that my mind was like that. And instead of being discouraged by that, because of what my teacher at the time was telling me and so forth, I was told, just expect that, that actually meditation is not about getting rid of thoughts. There's always going to be thoughts, but you don't have to follow them for an hour and a half, you know.

51:49So I would say in the beginning, my very wild mind. And when I say beginning, I don't just mean, you know, what, first month or something. I guess for a couple of years, maybe, maybe five years. I don't know how long, but of course I kept at it and I did some long meditation practices. We had these month-long meditation practices and I did that kind of thing. And then what started to happen more was, okay, a very important thing was I,

52:24Trumper Rinpoche used to talk about something he called the gap. And again, I didn't really know what in the world he was talking about. But he said, you know, it could be possible that at the end of every breath, there's a gap before you breathe back in again. And he sometimes gave a meditation, like just natural breathing out and then pause, like create a gap and then come back in. So he called that the gap and it had supposedly very profound, but I didn't have a clue really what he was talking about.

52:58And then I was in a meditation retreat and we had a big fan that was going all the time. And so the hum of the fan became just background noise that was always there. So I was sitting there meditating, doing my practice, and the fan is going, and all of a sudden, it went off for just a second. I said, that's the gap. That's what he's talking about.

53:31So then I understood what he meant by gap. He meant there's all this noise and then suddenly there's silence. It's sort of like being in a, use the image of being in a sack or something like that, and it's dark and then there's this little slit and you suddenly realize, oh, there's a whole big space out there. It's sort of like that. Someone used this example that they were in a room with this teacher in Nepal and his window was covered with black plastic.

54:03And he said, think of that as just all the discursive thoughts, this black plastic, it's just covering over. And then you just make a pinprick in it and then the light comes through. And that's like, oh, there's a background here to this whole thing. In a breath. So he said that you could, at the end of every breath, you could pause and you could experience that gap. In the tense of the fan, it was just the sound was going and then it stopped. So you could say in terms of chatter, it would be chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter.

54:38Chatter, chatter.

54:41Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter.

54:44But you're not trying to prefer the gap. You're just trying to discover that, say, if the discursive thoughts and emotions and everything are foreground, there's also a background to the whole thing that you could connect with at any moment. A kind of, you could call it a stillness. You could call it an openness, freshness. I have a question about this. Like a pretty, I think a question I really struggle with. When I read his books, when I read your books,

55:16I feel like there's like a shifting back and forth a little bit between this instruction of there is no good, there is no bad. It is not better to have mental chatter. It is not better to have spacious mental quiet. It is not better to see the light coming through the pinhole in the black plastic over the chatter of the mind. It is not better to be looking at the black plastic. There's this non-dualism, everything is totally fine and in some ways the same

55:48because it's all the ground of experience. And maybe it is better. So why don't we even talk about gap then? Because it's there, I guess. I guess because it's there. But I think I'm asking at the underlying thing, that is there, I feel like sometimes there is a conversation about better and worse or that nothing is better and nothing is worse. And then sometimes something seems to be being described that is better. Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. And well, that's where sense of humor comes in

56:21and ability to like be okay with paradox and ambiguity and things not always being so neat and tidy like that. Because if you know the basic thing, that struggle, polarization, pitting one thing against another, trying to get better, which comes from the place of feeling that you're not good enough to begin with, you know, that as long as you have the idea that we're moving in the direction of you're okay just the way you are.

56:54That's a Suzuki Roshi choke. Suzuki Roshi was a Zen master in San Francisco, started the San Francisco Zen Center. And he had this expression. He looked out at the audience of his students and he said, you are all perfect just as you are. And you can use a little work. And it is sort of like that, you know? And how do you understand what he meant? I understand that fundamentally we have Buddha nature. That would be the traditional way to say it. But you could say fundamentally everybody has this potential

57:27for awakening from the sleep of confusion. Let's call it that, you know, kind of glamorous language. But everybody has that potential. And you look out and you see a room full of Buddhas. You know, you see a room full of people that are awake but just don't realize it. Something like that. And so you begin to say, okay, I'm one of them, you know? And I want to recognize more my true nature, I guess you could say. But the thing is, if you want to recognize the true nature

57:59by getting rid of the ego, let's say, it doesn't work. The only way to actually have the confusion lesson is to become familiar, intimate with yourself just as you are, which is a lot of confusion and wild-mindedness and boredom and all those things, you know? And so if you have a view that there's nothing problematic with any of that, then you can also understand that my fundamental nature is basic goodness,

58:34but I'm not recognizing that. And so the work is kind of uncovering what's already here. So it is a paradox. Earlier in the conversation, you were talking about unconditional love. Yeah. And what you're saying there, as I was trying to absorb it, made me think of it, that the thing that came to mind is how I feel as a parent. Yeah, that's a good example. I don't want my children to be any different than they are. I want them to be, I in some ways, absolutely don't want them to be any different than they are.

59:04I love them just the way they are. And also I want them to grow. And there are ways that they can grow, but it doesn't come from a desire to change them. Like I really do. Like I really love them as they are. And I want them to grow and learn how to do more math and all the things that you do as a person and put on their own pants. Tie their own shoes. But so they're both there. It was funny. It was the only experience I could come to

59:35that had both of those in my head. Yeah, yeah. So it's a good one. You could think of yourself that way. You know, just think of yourself that way. Does that make sense? Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah. You could. You used to be that little, you know. But you don't have to think of yourself necessarily as a little kid, but you could think of yourself as fine just as you are. And yet at the same time, let's just say not wanting to harm people with my speech, not wanting to harm people with my actions,

1:00:06not wanting to be so critical minded about everything. So it is paradoxical, but the basic view is that there's nothing wrong here.

Abiding and Acting

1:00:17How do you think about the relationship between that kind of, here we're talking about is loving and changing, but the way I want to ask the question is more about the relation between abiding and acting. We've talked about abiding in difficult emotions, and I think that a question that comes up for people, and that's come up for me, is, you know, if your partner treats you badly and you think, okay, you know, I'm having these difficult emotions, I'm going to sit here, and I'm not going to be reactive,

1:00:48and I'm going to work with the texture of them and drop the storyline and touch the energy of the emotion. Yeah. And yet your therapist would say, well, maybe the story here is important. Maybe, you know, this person is not treating you well. Maybe you are allowing it because you don't love yourself enough. Maybe you, this is not, I'm not giving an example of my own life here. I'm just using it as an example.

1:01:14But there is something about the dropping of storylines that can become, or at least I fear it can become, also a way to accept situations that shouldn't be accepted. Yeah, yeah. To deny the responsibility for change. Yeah, I hear you. How do you think about that? Yeah. Well, one, I frequently get women in abusive relationships. And I always say, get out of there as fast as you can, you know. Like one woman stood up, and she was saying,

1:01:46she described it as an abusive relationship with her husband for many years. And she said, so I try to work with it by just, you know, going to the feelings and all of this. I said, forget about all of that. Just get out of the relationship. You need to get out of the relationship and get some distance from it. That is the most compassionate thing you can do for your husband and also for yourself. So I said, you know, this is not the time to sit there

1:02:16and contact what it feels like in the body. This is time to just get out. Take the kids and go and just start exploring how you could do that, how you practically could do that. You know, go to your mother's or whatever. She actually wrote to me later, that woman, and said that she had followed that advice and thanked me, you know, thanked me. For some reason, she was willing to just take my word for it. I guess she was probably ready. But she would have been an example of what you're talking about, where she was just using my instructions

1:02:47but staying there, being beaten, you know. It was crazy, crazy situation. So that's an extreme situation, of course.