Nowness and Contentment in Life

This podcast is supported by BetterHelp. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a reminder that you don't have to do this life alone. Right now, many Americans are struggling, nearly two-thirds report feeling anxious, and more than half-site financial stress. Having a licensed therapist with you by video, phone, or chat can make a difference. And BetterHelp makes it easy. Sign up now and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/slash New York Times. That's better, HGL.Pcom slash New York Times There's this book I love and I go back to and back to called Comfortable with Uncertainty. It's by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chojran, who's 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 many 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 altoget her. 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. 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 make , find the people, the partner, the job, the success of 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 have to 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 trying 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. And it created for me this wonderful and unexpected opportunity to interview somebody from whom I have learned so much. It's a really beautiful conversation. I found it really helpful. I hope you do too. As always my email, as recline show at ny times dot com Pampa Chodron, 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 un certainty, 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. And a big theme is how to get rid of it, how to get not be feeling uncomfortable, not to be feeling uncertain, how to not feel insecure. So the approach that Buddhism takes is that the inter section expression about uh only way out is through so that's really the sort of the idea you're not trying to get rid of you're trying to become intimate with. And one of the things that I 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 applaud people that that try, but this is more approach of working with what the outer circumstances trigger in you. 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 in your solar plexus people can go right there. And then what do you say? What 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 rid of the feeling, but that it all becomes very workable. Trevor Burrus 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. 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 go away. Absolutely, right. That is what people do. You can count on it, really. Tell me about the the term befriending the warmth, because there 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 from it. You are going to feel uncomfortable. You are going to have discomfort. That is not an eradicable part of life. 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 it an example. Like imagine you somebody's in a fight with their partner. Yeah. They'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. What does it mean to be friend 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, is something that I call letting the storyline go. If you meditate and you're 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, 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 h ole. So 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 ask you say, go to what are you feeling like right now? What 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? So 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 that . 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. Aaron Powell What if you don't feel unconditional love towards it? If you don't feel unconditional love towards it, not a problem. Then you send then you send the warmth towards what does it feel like to not have unconditional To not have unconditional love? Yeah. To feel like you 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 that. Yes. It's so alien that even trying to describe it i is hard because the water I swim in is wanting certain feelings to go away. Yeah, right . And 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. Mm-hmm. I think in some places you talk about sometimes noting feelings like that as a bell to pay attention. 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. Extend unconditional. What about what about just a gesture, like touching it with your hand? That does help me. I do do that. You know? In other words, get away from concept and v words altogether and just put your hand there. That can be very, very powerful to just do that. And sometimes people just express affection for themselves by, you know, maybe touching the top of their head or I don't know, 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. How do you help people learn to feel feel what they'reing 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, but she realized about me was that the way I would talk about something and the way I would feel about it were very different. Yeah. 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 I 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. Yeah. Yeah. Well I found this exactly the same thing. And 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 contra ction 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 can be on the street and then someone, for some reason they like something you just did or something they'll just ought to do this, touch their hearts. And I I find it's such a sweet thing, you know, a way to communicate to people you don't know on the street. Why do you think it's so hard to feel what we're feeling? A lot of times it's trauma related that people uh 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 uh put a little hole in it in a tiny hole so that the whole thing is a gradual opening. So let's say you're there and you are 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. Mm-hmm. You have a line that I find very uh evocative. You said I once asked the Zen master Kobun Chino Roshi. Kobunchino, yeah. How he related with fear. Oh yeah. And he said, I agree. I agree. I agree. Yeah, I it was such a beautiful answer, you know. It 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's a good word, yeah. Allowing rather than uh disapproving or criticizing. What 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 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 m another thing to beat themselves up on because I could never do that. So then if I was 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 or you feel like you're 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 rather than feel that it's because it's uncomfortable that it has to be rejected. Everybody needs a lot of time and willingness and inten tion 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. Right. I 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. Right. 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 to this place of agreement that you're that how you feel might change, but you're not trying to change it. That you're trying to So I believe you work with Will Cabinson. So one of the big things about why the stress reduction program that his father has, John Cabots in, one of the premises is you the he says to people, you just have to give up the idea that this is going to help you in any way. You have to give up the idea that there's like a a goal here. We're just gonna be mindful of what's happening for itself, for its own people. 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 things. I'm sure it's very hard. But uh 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 the side of it? I mean something is if you go through your book titles, just that, right? I know. It's like when things fall apart, comfortable with uncertainty, how we live is how we die. Um, you know, a different kind of freedom that, you know, one after another. Welcoming the unwelc.ome Welcoming the unwelcome. The the I know. There's been a real attraction for you. Yeah, that's true. In this idea that it's gonna hurt sometimes. Yeah. And and that let's just be okay with it hurting sometimes. Like Trumparam She, Chogam Trumpa Ramsey, my teacher, he always used to say lean into the sharp points. And that's a great phrase, I think, you know, lean 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, I 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. And 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 unnotting the stomach. I do. When you're in pain, what do you do? What then happens in your mind or body? Uh all right. So I stand up, I stretch, I do physical therapy, things like that. It's just accepting it and letting the pain be there. You are trying to change it too. I'm doing those smart things, you know, or what the doctors recommend. And 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'm live more with the idea like this is what I'm gonna be living with for the rest 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, the 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. So What does lean in mean? Um okay, I'll I'll give an example. I don't know if it's gonna answer your question , but Shogam Trumper once gave a talk, and the topic of the talk was collaborating with reality . And he gave the example that I was very familiar with in living in Nova Scotia in the winter time , of walking in the winter when the snow and sleet is coming in your face and it's extremely unpleasant and and your whole body is as if you're in the dentist chair. You're just like tensing up so leaning in means you you physically stop resisting what's happening and you you 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 so tangible , this resisting thing, because I can feel everything in me is like pushing away, and that's like fruitless. I mean, it's not gonna 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 pickup.. Yeah And I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old. Yeah. And we live in New York and it rains. Like yesterday. 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 the 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 w et. 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. That'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 and mentally, I think. And so for the kids it's natural. And then somehow we lose it, right? As we get old, it seems like. But then you can kinda 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 I was it did feel like I was in a dance with the storm, you know? There 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 but it's more like your kids with the the puddle that becomes enjoyable rather than a a battle. So struggle is is a helpful word, I think. You find yourself struggling and and and basically you pause and uh you find your way to not struggle . This podcast is supported by BetterHelp. May is mental health awareness month, a reminder that you don't have to do this life alone. Right now, many Americans are struggling. Nearly two-thirds report feeling anxious, and more than half cite financial stress. Having a licensed therapist with you by video, phone, or chat, can make a difference, and better help makes it easy. Sign up now and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash New York Times. That's betterh .com slash New York Times. Trade traffic for a tropical getaway by earning free nights with the Marriott Bonboy Boundless card. Learn more at MarriottBonboy.com forward slash boundless. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offer subject to change. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member of FDIC . It's Pod'ss biggest sale of the year. Save up to 30% on moving and storage until May 18th and see why Pods was named America's number one container moving company by Move.org. Whether you're relocating to a new home or renovating your current one, save up to 30% . Pods brings the container to you and you can pack at your own pace. Then we'll take it to your new home or to a secure Pods storage center until you need it. So you don't have to do the driving. Book now and save at Pods com . You have a line that I think is interesting where you say when we resist change, it's called suffering. 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. Then 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, difference be 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 talked to people about back pain in a spiritual spiritual discuss ions about back pain but one of the things is um people are curious about how to be with the experience without without all the storylines because 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. Aaron Powell I take this as a very important part of I mean Buddhism generally, but your your teaching in particular , working with this layer of resistance to what's happening. And I struggle with this a tremendous amount. And 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 . Or 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. Right, right. And there's this like layer of experience that for me is resisting.. Yeah Trying to make it different than it is. Right. When I can't. And on the one hand, I think I've become more attentive to how much suffering comes out of that. But I'm curious i 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? 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. And um part of the the book, the uh another kind of freedom, which is that commentary on Tom Purbuche's book, there is this part which may have had a big effect on me where he talks about there's nothing wrong with in this case it was negativity, but let's just say nothing wrong with back pain or nothing wrong with worrying about the future. Nothing wrong. But the problem is what he called negative negative And it goes way down the rabbit hole, right? It's almost like I think i in your case like on the airplane, it would be almost like Uh no, I tend to do noting. I sort of continuously speak either aloud or 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, but doing nothing about it. But doing nothing about it, right. I think I could work with noting too in in terms of this , but just in terms of more familiar ground for me. Let me just propose if you what you did was say, okay, I'm going to be gently uh note or aware of my breath going out and coming in. And uh my intention here is to just as much as possible stay fully present with the breath going out and the breath coming in. Nothing forced, just natural breathing. Okay, so then what happens is you the worry thought is like a magnet, 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 uh being present with the breath going in and breath going out and then it pulls you away again. But you're training in noting that you're going off and then coming back. You're training in noting that you're going off and coming back. So you interrupt it, I guess you could say, you just get the hang of what it feels like to not continue with the storyline. And then you might find but by the time you land in San Francisco or wherever you're going, that uh there's been a shift in your anxiety level, a shift in your uh 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. I I've become very interested in and this is just my own experience of 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. Right. It's actually trying to think about like, well, what can I do about it? You know, do I need to be uh you know sucking on a throat lozenge? And you know, when I go there should I see a doctor and the the kind of trying to actually solve it, and this is true in a lot of areas of my life, versus just it's there. Like the thoughts are there. I might lose my voice . And I mean, of course, there are things in life that we want to change. You do physical therapy for your back. I work in politics. I'm trying to effectuate change, not just allow things to be the way they are. Right, right. And on the other hand, the 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. But uh are you attracted to it? Yeah. And so do you find that you can do it sometimes? Just be. It is 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, you I think probably anxiety comes up a lot. Like I was anxious about coming over here. So uh What about it made you anxious? Well coming here? Unknown. So unkno wn. You were with the uncertainty? Actually, I didn't have a storyline particularly. Uh huh. It was just butterflies in the stomach. My daughter asked me, Well, what are you for afraid of? And I said, I I actually don't know. I'm just just I 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 a automatic response, nothing wrong with it. I wasn't escalating into a big storyline, or I'm gonna be a big flop, or 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 habit habitual responses to things. Butterflies. No big deal, butterflies, is what I'm thinking in this case. So in terms of the worry , that's no big deal either. But somehow it escalates and escalates and escalates, and that's when the real unnecessary suffering gets strong, right? And affects you physically. And uh so 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 uh tendency to escalate. So you're actually kind of practicing nonresistance. We've talked so much about the relationship to discomfort. Mm-hmm. What about the relationship to comfort? I love it. Well here here is the this is a really uh important question. So let's talk about comfort as a comfort zone. That's the expression that people use. 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 it there's no growth in the comfort zone. Growth happens where it's more uncomfortable . And we call it challenge because it's uh we've come up against our edge a little bit there. And so you 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 are capable of is a direct correlate of the amount of discomfort you're willing to tolerate. Oh, that's right on. That person was very wise who said that to you. That's absolutely true. So I guess what we're talking about then is to the degree that we can feel discomfort, to that degree we can grow. And grow means uh let the natural change and evolution happen rather than get frozen in views and opinions that keep you stuck in the same way for your whole life, really. Meditation has been coming in and out of this conversation. And what is the purpose for you of meditation? What are you trying to practice? There's could be a lot of answers to that question. But um 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 what it inevitably things start floating up. Like maybe they think this is all about getting calm and blissful, but then when they go on the meditation retreat, a lot of painful memories, uh regrets, uh flashbacks, all all kinds of stuff comes up. For instance, I once raised my hand with Chogim Trimper and I said, Rimboche, you're always talking about making friends with yourself, but n I've been meditating now for a couple of years and I think I'm getting a lot of ammunition and proof that I ha I am pretty messed up person. And then he said, Okay, so move closer to the feeling of messed up that is his answer. One of my teachers is called Sony Rampochet , 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. So 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 thinking. What about for someone whose experience of meditation, which I think is very common, is not that they get these fireworks of self insight. Right . But they just realize they can't take ten breaths without their mind running away from them. Yeah, that's when they're bored. Called boredom . And the chapter is about what a wonderful thing boredom is . Why is it a wonderful thing? He says, because it doesn't feed the ego at all. There's nothing about it that feeds the ego. And so if you start getting bored, that is an excellent sign that your meditation is progressing. And that , okay, sit through the hot boredom until it becomes cool boredom. And so hot boredom is what we're familiar with, which is like uh jumpiness. You you want to get out of there. You wanna boredom has this quality of just wanting to bolt, you know. And cool boredom is you just you sit there with a feeling of boredom. I would hear these teachings on cool boredom, and honestly, I had not a clue what they were talking about. And uh 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. And I'm young, you know. And so I go there to be with her and everything in me wants to be outside there. So for the first two days, I was so bored and restless. And then I realized I came all this way to be with my mother. At some point I just gave up the struggle and I was just there with my mother. And then it was so remarkable because I began to feel like I was sitting in a on a stage and every once in a while the door would open and someone would a friend would come in or something, they'd have this conversation and then the door would close, and then we were in this like nothing happening zone. 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. 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 it's and there's no I actually think time is a very interesting dimension of all of this. Yes. That I mean everybody feels uncomfortable sometimes, but really in a way, what we're talking about here, what you're talking about is being willing to feel like that for longer without acting. 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. Um, you talk about refraining as a method of becoming a a dharmic person. And and in some ways I don't understand any of this as never acting, but as taking a longer space before acting. Yeah, absolutely. And that's been a very important and transformative distinction. And I'm I'd be curious to just hear more from you. Aaron Powell Along the lines of what I was just saying, it would mean that you you're very patient. First let's start with impatience, because like might as well start where we are, right? Uh I experience as restless and uh uh like I was saying about boredom, wanting to get out of there, wanting to move to just get off the hot seat sort of. And then patience would be sitting still with that restless energy. Just sitting there with it, you know, like in my mother's living room. That uh that's how I experience patience. So the again it's uh growing your capac ity to hold discomfort. Patience is part of uh it would be a necessary uh tool, I guess you could cause Do you think that that as a general capacity has has weakened? And I'm thinking of something you wrote that I think about a lot. You 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. Yeah. You know, you were sitting in traffic and there wasn't a lot to do. You were in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at. And now we have the world of distraction at our fingertips, we have airpods in our ears. And so the just the daily necess ity of sitting with boredom even has dissolved. That's so true. And I think it changes us. It's so true. And 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 without your earpods, you know, and just sitting there and how rich an experience it was of just being there, the sights and sounds and what what was happening, the drama and the it just the whole experience as being very rich. And uh sometimes w with students, very often these days, I'll really encourage them to one day a week or one morning a week or take an opp time when they just go offline and go to the grocery store offline. Ride on the subway offline. Be there fully for what's happening because you're not uh engrossed in a movie or or a podcast or anything. Let's not let's not get crazy here. And put you out of business, Ezra. Uh so uh but you know how it is. You 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 uh it's like my grand daughter when she was still in college and her teacher said, no no devices in the room. And I said, Well 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 you to would be different if it were in my pocket. Of course. Even knowing that the sound is off. Even know I'm not going to check. Right, exactly. That's what she said. And then she said I'd never realiz ed how I was training myself to be distracted. That was her vocabulary. Even just in her pocket as you say. So yeah, I 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 but maybe that's when you get into being alive more alive. I mean the subway is such a great example of fascinating, really totally fascinating to just be there because of the people, if nothing else. Just what's there's so much happening from when you get on to when you get off, there is so much time. Sometimes things weren't happening, but nevertheless, but to just expand that we were talking earlier off the microphone about uh one thing I've been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on the subway and just yeah be aware of what's happening around me. And 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 uh like trying to grab my attention with music I don't really want to be listening to. It's the the screeching of brakes, but there's just a lot going on and dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the right music or podcast or thing on my Kindle to distract myself in the right way and try to maintain a kind of like a hermetic comfort, it's easier to stop. That that's been my big lesson from it. It's not so much that I love every moment on the subway, but I didn't quite notice how much energy I was expending trying to block it all out. Do you feel more relaxed? I do. Yeah. I do it and pretty then I pick up my kids and I'm more present with them. Yeah, yeah. Because I've just spent the last thirty five minutes practic ing being present. 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 just it's interesting because we didn't used to have all these devices . You know, I grew up before television even, so but now that we have the devices, it's very helpful actually to feel the contrast. You know, it's it's somehow it's richer. You have a lovely line. I think it's the a line somebody told you that meditation is not a vocation 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 I later I saw that it was from Myth of Freedom that Chogyam Tribrat said that she was she plagiarized. But anyway, it made a big impression on me because that's right, meditation not a vac 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 the f day one, took me a lot of years to somehow have it penetrate and get to me that the path of nonresistance. It was in there, the seed was in there, but it wasn't that I immediately Narrate that progress for a minute. Because I mean somebody listening to this, here here you are, you're uh you know a a famed nun. Um And the idea of moving from I've never meditated to whatever you must be experiencing seems very intimidating. Like what what how would you describe the stages your experience of meditation or your relationship to it have gone through? Mm-hmm That's a difficult question to answer because I've never actually given it a lot of thought. But let me just go back to r remembering the first time I was taught to meditate . Uh I could hardly stay with the breath for two seconds, you know. But then that was like what I was saying earlier. It was just a revelation to see how I had no idea that my mind was like that. 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. So I would say in the beginning, uh my very wild mind. And um 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 I don't know how long, but but of course I kept at it and I did some long meditation practices. We had these month long meditation practices and I d did that kind of thing. And um then what started to happen more was uh okay, a very important thing was I um Trumper remembers used to talk about something he called the gap. And again, I I didn't really know what in the world he was talking about. But he said, you know, it could be possible that at the end of every breath there's a gap before you breathe back in again. And the he Evans 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 and but I didn't didn't have a clue really what he was talking about. And then I was in a meditation retreat uh um and uh 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 m mm and all of a sudden mmm it went off for just a second. I said, that's the gap. That's what he's talking about. Mmm . Mmm . So 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 there's a whole big space out there. It's s it's sort of like that. Someone used this example that they were in a room with this teacher in Nepal and had his window was covered with uh black plastic. And he said, think of that as just all the discursive thoughts, this black plastic, it's just covering over. And then you just make a pinprick in it and then the light comes through. 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 there would you could experience that gap. In the tense of the fan it was just the sound was going and then it stopped. So you could say in terms of chatter it would be chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter Chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter But you're not trying to prefer the gap You're just trying to discover that say if the discursive thoughts and emotions and everything are foreground, there's also a background to the whole thing that you could connect with at any moment. A kind of uh you could call it a stillness. I have a question about this. Like a pretty I th I think uh a a question I really struggle with. When I read his books, when I read your books, I 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 because it's all the ground of experience. And also, and maybe it is better. So why don't we even talk about gap then? Um because it's there, I guess. I guess because it's there. But I think I'm asking at the underlying thing. That that is there they 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 uh uh well that's where sense of humor comes in and an ability to like uh be okay with paradox and ambiguity and things not always being so neat and tidy uh 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. idea that we're moving in the direction of you're okay just the way you are . That that'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 at his students, and he said, You are all perfect just as you are. And you can use a little work . And it is sort of like that, you know. And how do you understand what he meant? I understand that fundamentally we have Buddha nature. That would be the traditional way to say it. But you could say fundamentally everybody has this potential for awakening from the sleep of confusion. Let's call it that, you know, kind of glamorous language. But um everybody has that potential. And uh 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 by getting rid of the ego, let's say, it doesn't work. The only way to actually have the confusion lessen is to become familiar, intimate with yourself just as you are, which is a lot of confusion and and wild-mindedness and boredom and the 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 uh basic goodness, but uh I'm not recognizing that. And so the work is kind of uncovering what's already here. So it it is ambiguo uh a a paradox. Earlier in the conversation you were talking about unconditional love. Yeah. And what you were 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 love them just the way they are. And also I want them to grow and their 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 you know learn how to do more math and you know all the things that you do as a person and put on their own pants. Um tie their own shoes. But so they're both there. It was funny. It was the only it was the only experience I could come to that that had both of them 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. Yeah. But you don't have to think of yourself necessarily as a little kid, but you could think of yourself as fine just as you are, and yet at the same time, let's just say not wanting to harm people with my speech, not wanting to harm people with my actions, not wanting to be s h so critical minded about everything. So it is paradoxical, but the the basic view is that there's nothing wrong here. Aaron Ross Powell How do you think about the relationship between that kind of Here we're talking about as loving and changing, but the way I want to ask the question is more about the relationship between abiding and acting. We've talked about abiding and difficult emotions and 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, I, you know, I'm having these difficult emotions, I'm going to sit here and I'm not going to be reactive and I'm going to work with the texture of them and drop the storyline and touch the energy of the emotion. 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're allowing it because you don't love yourself enough. Maybe you this is not I'm I'm not giving an example of my own life here. I'm I'm just using it as an example. Um but there is something about the dropping of storylines that can be come 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. I hear you. How do you think about that? Yeah. Well, one I I I frequently get uh women in abusive relationships. And I always say, get out of there as fast as you can, you know. Like one woman tell stood up and she was saying she has she described it as an abusive relationship with her husband for many years. And she said, so I try to work with it by just, you know, going to the feelings and all of this . I said, uh forget about all of that. Just get out of the relationship. You need to get out of the relationship and get some distance from it. That is the most compassionate thing you can do for your husband and also for yourself. So I said, you know, this is not the time to sit there and contact what it feels like in the body. This is time to get 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 but staying there when you should be taking the storyline seriously versus when you should be abiding, feeling, touching the energy without the storyline? That's a really good question. And uh this comes up a lot with um protesting injustice in various forms. And uh that conversation I've had with a lot of people, and I always say, you know, I say what they already know, but then we have a discussion about it. And that is that you're not effective if you're caught in uh strong emotions and you're being carried away by the energy of anger or something like this. That you just can't be effective. First of all, you're not able to communicate. Someone's only going to hear your anger. They're not going to hear your words. And there's no possibility of change. So I I expect I first of all I say, try to experiment with That actually start to communicate to the heart of the people that you're trying to influence for change. Try it when you're angry, try it when you're not angry, like find out for yourself, you know. That's the only way it really lands in the body. So I'm encouraging the people to continue with what they're doing, but not when they're caught up in in their clacias, that's a Tibetan word, for strong destructive emotions. And then in that process, they might go to the body, feel what they're feeling, gut in touch as a way of uh being able to then walk through the door and have the conversation that doesn't come from that place. And is actually curious to hear what they have to say and is actually open to hearing what they have to say and isn't uh controlled by fear. It's a more like a willingness to kind of take a leap, I guess you could say . This is the Chase Sapphire Lounge of Boston Logan. You got Clamp Chowder. In New York, Dirty Martini. Over 13,00 airport lounges and one card that gets you in. Chase Sapphire Reserve. Now even more rewarding. Learn more at Chase.com slash Sapphire Reserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member of FDIC, subject to credit approval. Safety doesn't happen by chance. It happens because safety standards developed by independent nonprofit organizations are working behind the scenes. The National Fire Protection Association is on a mission to keep you and your family safer. For 130 years, NFPA has helped create codes and standards that protect our homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, and communities. Visit Don't Chance Safety.org to learn more some songs that I've written I started on the piano that happened with all I went for Christmas is you. If you couldn't tell, that is Mariah Carey. I'm John Caramonica, one of the critics behind the New York Times' 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters Project. We interviewed some of the songwriters on our list, including Taylor Swift, who hasn't sat for a video like this in a long time. These are not ordinary conversations. You're gonna watch these videos and learn about intimate approaches to craft in ways that you rarely have access to. And I was just writing it really small because I didn't want anybody to read what I was writing. Okay, Jay-Z teenage notebooks. I need to see those. Watch all the video interviews for free and check out the entire 30 greatest Lingiv American songwriters Project at nytimes.com slash 30greatest or in the app. And let us know if you agree with our picks. I bet you won't. One of the things I've experienced with some of your work and some of this is that there were a lot of actions I was not willing to take because I was afraid of feeling the discomfort , the uncertainty associated with them. Right. And it was only when I became less afraid of feeling that I could take those actions. Right. There are many actions I could take to try to avoid those feelings, and I did take them. It didn't work, right? You know, it did it worked in its own way, but but yes, it there were there were forms of change. And also, I mean, even in this work, like forms of conversation that were not on the table. What does it mean not on the table? That I I just wasn't willing to sit in the discomfort of you know, uh confronting a certain personal situation. Yeah, right. Or risking a certain outcome. Right. Or having a certain kind of political conversation across difference. Right. Because I didn't trust my own ability to hold the discomfort of it. Right. And it was, you know, and it's an ongoing process for me certainly, but getting more comfortable being uncomfortable has opened up a wider range of space in which I can act. That now you can. But that now I can't because I'm not as afraid of them. You know, I think a really good way to go about this is uh think like, okay, where do I want to be in one year time? How about five years, you know? Like, do I want to be stuck in exactly the same way, you know, on this day 2027 ? Or on this day in twenty twenty seven, well I feel that like okay, I'm I'm able to sit with sus with discomfort a little bit more than before. In other words, it's a growth process and and I think you're actually changing the DNA in some kind of way. Like it's really fundamental what's being changed. All these studies now about the brain and how meditation affects it and stuff, they have some interesting uh observations from that. And one of them is that there's grooves in the brain that we experience as habitual patterns and that um every time you follow the habitual pattern in the old way, the deep grooves are getting dee per. And every time you even pause and consider an alternative, it opens up a new neurological pathway. And there's an opportunity for change in that way, at really at the level of your brain. So I found that pretty exciting to hear about that, because uh it's so optimistic in a way. So you were saying what of what about meditation and what it is, and I was emphasizing in this case it would be seeing what the habits are that you're stuck in that you keep making that grows deeper and deeper and experimenting with how to open up new ones. And it says that all you have to do is even just don't go down the the rabbit hole and don't do anything else. That opens up new. Or just sit there with the feeling that is coming up in meditation for it. Or just for me some of what's so Yeah, exactly. Both like intense and interesting about meditation is just sitting there and not doing anything with what's going on in my head. Right. Which I find difficult. Yeah, right. But I I want to pick up on something you said about it possible, right? Very possible. And the more I do it, the better I get at it. Exactly. In one of your teacher's books. He writes, one's whole practice should be based on the relationship between you and nowness . Oh, I love that. Yeah. And just as Nowness is a word I really love. I I struggle a bit with nouness a lot. I struggle a lot with nouness. It feels like one of those sentences it like has a universe in it. Yeah. Read it to me again. One's whole practice whole practice should be based on the relationship between you and nouness. Uh yeah, and another place he says like the let the thread of n nouness run through your whole life. But you don't like the word nouness, so it doesn't communicate with the sam.e No, I do. I I just just struggle with achieving it. Oh I see. It's a wonderful work. Well, you are achieving it on the subway without your devices. But but I would just be curious on hearing your reflection because this can all feel so abstract, but just Okay, basically that you're present instead of drawn off and that being pres ent I was talking about foreground and background. An example might be the difference between being all caught up in your thoughts and going to the window and looking at the sky. And uh, you know, it's like the astronauts' experiences. They're all out there and they're having these amazing spiritual experiences just because they're seeing the earth from the perspective of vast space. And earlier astronauts had the same experience. They say, it's just this one earth. Why can't we just l all live on it together? It seems so easy from the perspective of infinity or like that. And then you get back down on earth and right away all that your habitual patterns and things click in. You're already stuck in struggle and so forth. So in a way, I guess what it means with nouness is that you begin to have more that big perspective that puts everything in in perspective and then you just go about your life but all the time you know at the same time that earth is a little dot and you are nothing in the you know, really tiny, tiny in the face of this vast universe that just expands forever and does not have an end. If you do this practice in a committed way, I mean you've done it for many decades , if what it's promising is not an end to pain, if what it's promising is not that you'll always feel radiant joy or equanimity. Yeah w what is it promising? What what are you trying to achieve or or or or what is achieved amidst it. Contentment Um Being Okay with how things unfold, even if it's disturbing. In other words, okay with how things unfold doesn't mean that you wouldn't act, but it does mean that you aren't struggling against what's happening? Contentment