Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How To Find Calm in a World on Fire | Pico Iyer About this episode The antidote to a noisy, chaotic world.
Pico Iyer https://picoiyer.com/ is the acclaimed and bestselling author of more than a dozen books translated into twenty-three languages, most recently the nationally bestselling Aflame: Learning from Silence https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678663/aflame-by-pico-iyer/.
In this episode we talk about:
Why and how Pico found himself spending a lot of time at a silent monastery What he's learned about the power and potency of silence Why so many of us fear silence When silence is a tonic, and when it's a weapon or shield Why taking time out of your life is deeply beneficial — both for you and the people around you How Pico takes what he learns at the monastery into his daily life A wise approach to the news Travel as a tool for transformation Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/
Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD
Additional Resources:
Pico Iyer Journeys https://picoiyerjourneys.com/
Pico Iyer TED Talks https://www.ted.com/speakers/pico_iyer
Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here http://eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025!
Tickets are now on sale for a special live taping of the 10% Happier Podcast with guest Pete Holmes! Join us on November 18th in NYC for this benefit show, with all proceeds supporting the New York Insight Meditation Center. Grab your tickets here https://www.nyimc.org/event/great-cosmic-joke/!
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Transcript 13,908 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:34 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? It's an urgent question. In a noisy and chaotic world, how do you find some degree of calm, some stillness, some quiet? Here's another question. In a world on fire, is it possible that the greatest luxury, the greatest thrill, is to simply sit still and be quiet? Let me address any skeptics in the audience who might be thinking, "Fuck that. I want as much action and as much excitement as possible."
1:19 Dan Harris? Alternatively, you might be thinking, "In a world that has devolved in many aspects into a kind of dumpster fire, don't I need to be as noisy as possible? Don't I need to be out there making change?" So let me say, I hear both of those concerns. But truly, if you want to stoke your energy, if you want to have as much fun as possible, or alternately, if you want to be as effective as possible, and by the way, neither of those are in conflict, whatever your goal, you really do need to rest. I like the way my guest today puts it, "Only by doing nothing can you do anything at all." Said guest is Pico Iyer. You may have heard of him. He's a kind of connoisseur of quiet. He's written more than a dozen well-regarded books, but his latest...
2:03 Dan Harris? Is called "A Flame: Learning from Silence." In this conversation, we talk about why and how Pico found himself spending a lot of time at a silent monastery, what he's learned about the power and potency of silence, why so many of us fear silence, when silence is a tonic and when it can be a weapon or a shield, why taking time out of your life is deeply beneficial, both to you and to the people around you, how Pico takes what he learns at the monastery into his daily life. He's got lots of practical tips that you can use whether you plan to go to a monastery or not. We also talk about a wise approach to the news, travel as a tool for transformation, and much more. If you personally have trouble finding a measure of silence in your busy
2:48 Dan Harris? brain, today's episode comes with a custom guided meditation called Peace and Quiet, and it was created by the great meditation teacher and great friend of mine, Sebene Selassie, and it's available only to paying subscribers over at DanHarris.com. Paid subscribers also get weekly live guided meditation and Q&A sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. I love these. We meditate together and then we chop it up. The next one is coming up on October 14th. It will feature both me and Seb. That will be fun. Sign up at DanHarris.com. Join the party.
3:23 Dan Harris? Oh, and speaking of parties, if you want to meditate with me and Seb in person, we are teaching a weekend-long retreat from October 24th through the 26th at the Omega Institute, which is north of New York City. One of our subscribers over on Substack recently pointed out that I've mentioned meditation party and this retreat many times, but I have not given a lot of detail. So let me just say a little bit more. There are four chunks of teaching that we do throughout the weekend. One on Friday evening, the next on Saturday morning, then Saturday afternoon, and then finally, Sunday morning. In these sessions, we do a mixture of meditation, a conversation among the teachers, and Q&A with the audience, and then there are opportunities for you guys to interact with each other,
4:07 Dan Harris? small group discussions with your fellow attendees. And then in between the sessions, there's plenty of free time. If you sign up, you get access to hiking trails on the beautiful 240 acre campus. You can play basketball, volleyball, pickleball, tennis. There are art bags and daily optional classes, including yoga, tai chi and meditation. And then on Saturday evening, we do a dance party, which is voluntary, no forced attendance. So there's a link in the show notes. Sign up, join us, would love to see you there. Okay, we'll get started with Pico Iyer right after this. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me
4:51 Dan Harris? and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now, that really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.
5:36 Dan Harris? If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now, that really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission.
6:21 Dan Harris? And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Pico Iyer, welcome to the show.
6:35 Speaker 04 I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Dan.
6:37 Dan Harris? Happy to have you here. So as I understand it, you've spent several decades visiting this monastery in California. I would love to just get some background. Tell me what flavor monastery it is and why you've been spending so much time there.
6:51 Speaker 04 It's a Benedictine monastery that's part of the Carmeldeles congregation, which is the part of the Catholic Church that is most committed to contemplation and to interfaith dialogue. And the reason I've been going there more than 100 times for 34 years is that I'm sitting in a friend's house right now as I talk to you. And for many months, I was sleeping on the floor in this house because my house burnt down in a wildfire. And another friend came in and he saw me sleeping on the floor. And he said, come on, you can do better than this. And he told me as a school teacher that every spring he took his students up to a retreat house four hours to the north. And as he had it, even the most fidgety, phone addicted,
7:33 Speaker 04 distractible 15-year-old California kid only had to spend three days in silence and something calmed down and cooled down in him to the point where he never wanted to go home. And so I thought, well, if nothing else, if I go there, I'll have a bed to sleep in and a desk and a private walled garden over the Pacific Ocean, all the food I can eat for $30 a night in those days. So I had never thought of going to a Catholic monastery before. I'm not Christian, but I went and instantly found at some level what I was looking for.
8:03 Dan Harris? So more than three decades ago, you're sleeping on the floor of a friend's house because your house burnt down in a wildfire in California. And somebody recommended, hey, check out this monastery. It's inexpensive. And you, not guided by any spiritual impulse per se, just thought, all right, I'll check it out.
8:22 Speaker 04 I think so. I think I would have felt guilty or out of place if one year earlier, somebody had said, why don't you go to stay at a Catholic hermitage? And I would have said, well, there are lots of other quiet places in the world. I could just go to Big Sur and stay in a simple hotel there. I didn't realize the difference between a monastic silence and just a regular quiet place. To answer your question. More deeply, I've always been one of those people who has a bit of a longing to go to monasteries. The way somebody will walk past the bakery and see a strawberry cheesecake and long to try it. I've had that feeling about monasteries. And so four years before I went there, I'd left my dream job in Midtown Manhattan to go and try to live for a year in a temple in Kyoto, Japan.
9:06 Speaker 04 I only lasted a few days, but the longing was there. And of course, like in any parable, I went all the way across the world to try to find a monastery in Japan and then found the one really I'd been looking for just up the road from my family home.
9:21 Dan Harris? So what went wrong in Kyoto and what went right in California?
9:26 Speaker 04 What went wrong in Kyoto was I had all kinds of romances. Sitting on 50th Street in Midtown Manhattan, I thought, oh, Zen temple in Kyoto is about sitting under the full moon, contemplating a motionless garden and writing haiku. I didn't realize it was mostly about shoveling leaves and scrubbing floors and really, really hard work. Much too similar to the boarding school I served time in for 10 years in England. So the impulse that took me to Kyoto, I think, was the right one, but I was too immature to realize it. And now I still live near Kyoto 37 years later with my wife in a fairly monastic setting. But when I was 29, I just wanted to grab the romance and the pretty image, not the hard reality.
10:10 Speaker 04 And I think maybe the benefit of the Benedictine Hermitage was I had no expectations. I was so, as you can tell, almost going to it backwards out of necessity because I was in need of a bed. And maybe that helped me because there were no illusions to cut through when I arrived there. It was just expectations to overturn. And the most beautiful of them was the monks I met couldn't have been more different from what I imagined monks to be.
10:36 Dan Harris? Say more.
10:37 Speaker 04 They're the least dogmatic souls I know, much less dogmatic than I and my friends. They're very down to earth, they're extremely gregarious. And even as devoutly Catholic monks, they're so grounded in their own tradition that they're open to learning from every tradition. They open their hearts and their homes to everyone. I think quite a large number of the people who stay there are not Christian. Many of them are women, some are Buddhist or Sufi or nothing at all. And they're wise enough to know that whoever you are, you will find what you need, however you choose to describe or define it, just by sitting in silence. And I think, again, one of the things that surprised me initially was to find that when you check into your little cell there
11:22 Speaker 04 and you open the pamphlet describing the place, on the very first page, they cite the Buddha, they talk about the Hindu Rigveda. Some of the monks are teaching at the Zen monastery across the hills now and then. And they actually maintain a Catholic Hindu ashram in southern India, where the Catholic priest wears a dotty and sleeps on the floor and eats with his hands. And wonderfully, the slogan for the ashram in southern India is, "We are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness." Which is a wonderful phrase. And if my friends ask me, "Why do you go to this place?", I'd say, "First, to wake up. And second, to cut through the illusion of separateness and feel a much richer connection with everything around me."
12:06 Speaker 04 So I already admired them for having that as their motto. And then I found out that that phrase actually comes from the contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. And I thought, "Well, these are really evolved Catholics to take as their very slogan the motto of a Vietnamese Buddhist."
12:24 Dan Harris? When you say "separateness", what do you mean by that?
12:29 Speaker 04 I mean, that as I'm sitting here in Santa Barbara, I'm thinking of you, Dan, and me, Pico. And as I'm going to be driving down the freeway later this afternoon, it's me in my little car and all the other cars are rivals or obstructions or challenges in one way or another. And I define myself in very limited ways. I am Pico, I've done this, this is my job, this is where I live. And as soon as I enter that silence, that all falls away. And I fall away. And I'm emptied of the ways I think of myself. And I'm just filled with the light on the water and the bees buzzing in the lavender and the rabbit on the fence. And filled with something much more interesting than my thoughts or feelings about the world.
13:13 Speaker 04 I'm actually filled with the real world. And so in all kinds of ways, I think one of the surprises for me of going to stay there is that by being alone in my little room, I realize I'm never alone. I feel much closer to my loved ones there sometimes than when they're in the same room. And it's not because of the loved ones. It's because of something in me. And you know, as such a seasoned meditator, all the tricks the mind can play. And if you can free yourself from that dualistic mind, suddenly you're in a much more spacious place. And I know you find it through meditation. I've somehow found maybe some small equivalent by stepping into this very particular silence that's not just an absence of noise,
13:56 Speaker 04 but it feels like a presence of things I sleepwalk past.
14:00 Dan Harris? What is it about silence that would turn the volume down on your ego that keeps you separate from the world? Because I've had, you know, a non-trivial amount of silence in my life. And especially in the first couple of days, I feel really separate. I want to get the fuck out of there. I miss the strawberry cheesecake that you don't long for, but I do long for. Like, what? Give me the mechanism.
14:29 Speaker 04 I love that question. And of course, there are no guarantees. And sometimes when I'm there, Suddenly, the rain is pattering on the roof all night long, and the aged heater is groaning in the winter cold. And the very foundations of the little hut in which I'm sitting are shaking in the wind. And so there's a lot of noise, and there's a lot of disturbance, and it's unquiet and scary, and feels like forty days and nights in the wilderness. And also, as you suggest, if I go straight after I've taken a long flight, for example, and I'm jet lagged, I may just still be possessed by my thoughts. And as you say, even though the external world is silent, the chatter in my head can be deafening.
15:08 Speaker 04 I've never exactly understood what it is about that silence that does seem like a liberation. But it is a very particular silence. I've found it in every monastery or convent I've been to in the world. And I think it's created by decades of meditation, or prayer, or worship collectively, that creates a really special atmosphere that's not just like being on a mountaintop or being in a forest. But how exactly it frees me, I really couldn't tell you. But it does most times. And you're right to point out that it doesn't for everybody. I've recommended this place to friends, and they go there, and something agitates them,
15:49 Speaker 04 or it's more austere than they want, or they can hear somebody chattering next door, one way or another, they're not always getting the silence. And although I don't always get it, I do find reliably, it feels as if I and my little thoughts and concerns and plans are left down on the highway below, and I step out of myself the way I step out of my car. How and why, I couldn't tell you. And the other thing I should say, maybe really importantly, is that I've been there so often that the monks often allow me to stay with them in their cloister, or enclosure, as they call it. And that's the opposite of silent. That's like the temple I was staying in in Kyoto, because the monks are working round the clock to look after their guests.
16:33 Speaker 04 And so they're wheeling barrows and taking laundry in and taking care of accounts and driving a golf cart hither and thither to clean the rooms. They're working very, very hard to ensure that the fifteen retreatants can live in this kind of spotless silence. So it's perhaps an unreal silence, it's one that visitors enjoy only for a few days. I'm a tourist in that radiant silence. And the men who live there in a very contemplative life, it's also a noisy life, and it's very hard work.
17:04 Dan Harris? So now I'm slightly confused because you're saying you still get this mild ego dissolution, even though when you go there now, it's not very silent because you're staying with the monks who have to be busy and working all day.
17:19 Speaker 04 I'm saying that there's a sort of driveway and it says, please don't come in. The monks are on that side, the visitors are on this side. And I'm still, most of the time, a visitor. I was there two days ago and I was a visitor and I got all the liberation and, as you said, mild ego dissolution I could want. But it's a tonic reminder that although the monks are the most contemplative within their tradition and devoted to maybe four hours every day of contemplation, and they're the rare monks who don't sleep under the same roof, each one of them has his own cell to intensify the sense of solitary reflection and contemplation. Nonetheless, they do work very hard. And of course, they're living, as all monks do, with people they might never have chosen
18:04 Speaker 04 to live with otherwise. And so when they make their vow of obedience, it's not just obedience to God or to their prior, but it's obedience to every member of their community, some of whom they might never have wanted to spend the rest of their life with. So it's a good reminder for me that I am in heaven of a kind, but thanks to the really hard work of people who are in the middle of their daily lives.
18:25 Dan Harris? Tell me if this extrapolation or interpretation is correct. It's not just silence generically that is so liberating for you. There's something about the silence of a monastery where there are perhaps generations of contemplatives who have practiced there, this cumulative mystical silence that is the unlock for you.
18:52 Speaker 04 A hundred percent. And everybody listening to this conversation has been on the receiving end of the silent treatment or has spent long hours in silence with a partner, which couldn't be more aggressive and unpleasant. So exactly as you say, silence can be used as a weapon or a shield as much as a tonic, but it is precisely decades and generations. And that Really, although you have the sounds of nature all around you there, the principal sounds you hear as a visitor are tolling bells and if you are so inclined, the liturgy. But this age-old, millennia-old discipline, this particular group, the Kamalatulis congregation, was founded more than a thousand years ago and probably not much has changed in those thousand years. So it's a very ancient
19:37 Speaker 04 sound that you're entering, or an ancient silence you're entering. I should say, they have a bookstore there and there are not many books there currently, but they have Ekathala and the Dalai Lama and a few others. And there is a book called Meditation for Fijiti Skeptics. So it's one of the few books that they're offering to visitors as a doorway to their life.
19:59 Dan Harris? That's really cool. Just for the listener who's not getting the joke, I co-wrote that book. Tell me a little bit about how you spend your day, because I think listeners to this show will at least have a passing familiarity with meditation retreats or the concept of a meditation retreat. But this is not that. How do you spend your time when you're in the monastery?
20:20 Speaker 04 This is not that, indeed. And I think two of the differences between this and a typical Vipassana or Buddhist retreat are it's not guided, there isn't any kind of format, there are no rules really, and there's no teacher guiding you through it. So essentially, everybody is left to her own devices. And I say her because probably the majority of visitors are women. This is the only place in my life where I can follow intuition, where I wake up and I don't have a plan for the day. And so sometimes I'll wake up and I'll just take a walk and see the sun rising over the hills. Sometimes I'll pick a book at random out of my suitcase and read it. Sometimes I'll sit in the garden and just watch the light on the water.
21:05 Speaker 04 It's a rare place where you can do nothing and see that it's only by doing nothing you can sort of do anything at all. There are five services a day, which you're welcome to join if you so wish. There is spiritual council if you want to talk to a monk. They're glad to take a long walk with you and talk through some problem or issue. But I think they're very keen not to try to put any limitations because each person probably finds her own way to what she needs. So everyone is probably doing very different things. And nowadays, they actually even admit couples. So I go with my wife sometimes now, though we stay in separate rooms, but we still share lunch and take walks together. Again, the silence is encouraged, and I think most people who go there are in search of quiet.
21:51 Speaker 04 And so they recommend that, of course, there's no internet, no cellphone reception, no television, and they recommend being quiet around the rooms where people are staying. But there is a two-mile-long monastery road and trails to hike in, and you're more than welcome to talk to anyone as you take a walk or to take a walk with the monks.
22:10 Dan Harris? You said something that I want to follow up on. Only by doing nothing can you do anything at all.
22:17 Speaker 04 Yes.
22:17 Dan Harris? Can you elaborate on that?
22:20 Speaker 04 Yes, I think I think of it as an inner savings account. And unless you gather your inner resources, you have nothing to give to the world. So, you know, my friends might say, isn't it selfish or indulgent to go on retreat for three days every season? And I would say, first, it's only by going on retreat I can learn to be a little less selfish. And second, it's only by doing that that I can gather the things that I have to share with other people. So to this day, every time I make that long drive, I feel really guilty to be leaving my wife or my aged mother behind. I feel really worried my colleagues aren't going to get hold of me for seventy-two hours. I feel upset I'm missing a friend's birthday party.
23:03 Speaker 04 And as soon as I step into that place, I realize it's only by going there that I'll actually have anything fresh and creative and joyful to share with my mother and friends and colleagues. Because otherwise, all they're getting is my exhaustion or my distractedness or my mumbled, you know, catch you later. And when I come back from retreat after seventy-two hours, My mother, of course, is delighted suddenly to see her son looking full of joy and light and excitement and not the person he left. And she's been able to get on more than happily for seventy two hours in my absence, probably hasn't even noticed that I'm gone. But, you know, I feel that all of us have a social self, which we need to go to the bank and
23:46 Speaker 04 pay our taxes and be with our friends. But underneath that, we have a silent self. And one reason I wrote this book after thirty four years of going there is, as you know, the world has never been in such a state of distraction as right now. And I think many of us, as we're driving from the bank to the supermarket to the pharmacy, we feel this can't be the whole story. This can't be everything that I am. This can't be all of reality. But we don't know how to reclaim that deeper self that we've lost. Seventy years ago, when the world was much more quiet, T. S. Eliot said, where is the life we have lost in living? And unless we find that life, that deeper part of ourselves or that wider reality, I don't think we have so much to give to the world. We're sort of like a
24:31 Speaker 04 car without an engine, I think, unless we fill ourselves up with gas and take care of that engine. The most beautiful Maserati in the world is not going to take you anywhere unless you can make sure that it's got enough gas in it, that the engine is working. Does that make any sense? That all we have to give to the world is what we've gathered? And if we're frazzled or distracted or scattered, a friend comes to us in need. And I feel I don't have so much to give because I'm all over the place and I can't access whatever is wiser than I am.
25:04 Dan Harris? It makes complete sense to me. And actually, I'm gonna use it next time somebody maybe by the name of Dr. Bianca Harris asks why I'm going on retreat again. Because I think it's a really good answer, to be fair to my wife. She actually is totally fine with me going on retreats, especially now. But I think early on, it was, I think justifiably viewed by her as self indulgent. And it may have actually been self indulgent. And I think what you said just there is a terrific answer. And not just a rebuttal, a real answer that by doing this, by
25:41 Dan Harris? Stripping life down to the struts and developing some distance from the chattering mind and putting some gas in the tank. Then I can come home and be a better husband, colleague, father, et cetera.
25:55 Speaker 04 Exactly. I mean, 600 years ago, the German mystic Meister Eckhart said, as long as your inner work is strong, the outer will never be puny. In other words, take care of the inner landscape. Then your relationships, your career, your understanding of yourself takes care of itself. But if you neglect that, I think you are in some ways bankrupt. And I guess my question for myself is, what do I have to bring to the ICU? Because the hard truth is, all of us, at some point, are going to face many challenges. And I remember a few years ago, I was sitting at home and suddenly I got a phone call. My mother had had a stroke and I was her only living relative.
26:36 Speaker 04 So I had to fly over and I was next to her in the ICU for 35 days. And she was teetering between life and death. And like anybody in that situation, I was thinking, what can I bring to my mother? And what can I bring to myself in this really hard moment? And I realized that my bank account was of very limited use. And my resume was useless. And all the books I'd written were kind of beside the point. And I felt the only thing I can bring to this moment is probably whatever I've gathered quietly, sitting in silence. I'm sure you feel that when life or reality suddenly makes a house call, the one thing that you can bring to that is maybe whatever you've gathered through years of meditation.
27:19 Speaker 04 But I feel those are the resources that we can't afford to do without. And I know you've used this metaphor. And I've also independently often thought it's kind of like going to the health club. And I remember years ago, my doctor was looking at my blood test results, my annual physical. And he said, you seem fine, but, but, always the big but, you're not getting any younger. So he said, you need to do 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise every day. So as soon as he said that, of course, I signed up at the local health club. And I religiously, so to speak, do my 30 minutes on the treadmill every day. And then later, a friend said to me, well, look, you spend all your time flying around and taking care of emails and the like.
28:01 Speaker 04 Have you never thought of just spending 20 minutes quietly without your devices every day? I said, no way, I don't have time. And then later, I thought, that's so silly. It's as if I'm saying I don't have time to take my medicine. I don't have time to see the doctor. I don't have time to be healthy. Or really, I don't have time to be happy. And if I can devote an hour every day to making sure my body and muscles are in working order, surely I could spend at least an hour a day making sure my mind and my heart and my spirit are where they have to be. I mean, the emotional or mental health club is probably much more important ultimately than the physical health club.
28:41 Dan Harris? So now, when you're not at the monastery and you're taking your silence on a daily basis, what are you doing in that time if you're not meditating or not praying?
28:51 Speaker 04 Trying to make a clearing in my mind, trying to ensure I'm not doing anything. So for example, like all of us, I'm always tempted to kill time. And then one day, I thought, maybe I could try to restore time in those moments instead. So every day in our little apartment in Japan, I used to be waiting for my wife to come back from work, and I never knew if it'd be 20 minutes or 70 minutes. So I'd kill time. I'd go online, even though there was nothing I was looking for. I'd turn on the TV. There's never anything to watch on Japanese TV. And then I thought, no, wait a minute. Why don't I just turn off all the lights and listen to some music? Very quiet music at first, could be Bach or Handel or Leonard Cohen, but not so quiet music sometimes.
29:35 Speaker 04 And I was amazed, just by disabling my senses and just listening to music while I was waiting for my wife to come home. I was so much fresher when I heard her key in the door. I slept so much better that day. I was so much less jangled when I woke up the next night. I tried to take walks. As a writer, I found the most important part of my writing discipline is to take two walks a day. And that's when, instead of being filled with my agenda and my notes and my outline, by kind of emptying my mind, things can come to me that are much more interesting than I would be. And that's when I can really reconceive a whole project. So I tried to go three days on retreat every season because I worked out that's only 3%
30:20 Speaker 04 Of the days of my life, but it completely transforms the other ninety seven percent. And then picking up my friend's suggestion, I thought if I just sit quietly in my room for twenty minutes every morning without my devices. That sets a good tone for the day and twenty minutes is again only three percent of my waking time, but it could revolutionize the other ninety seven percent. I don't do it as often as I would like, but it seems to me a good practice. And then maybe the last one I'll share because I know we have sort of parallel lives coming from media and, you know, I've been making my life through writing for Time Magazine and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, everyone else for forty three years.
31:01 Speaker 04 And as a result of that, I make sure never to take in more than five minutes of the news every day because I know as a working journalist, there's usually five minutes of news and then maybe twenty three hours of opinion, response, prediction, speculation. And I remember during the pandemic, every day when I woke up, if I turned on the news, I would hear that maybe a thousand people had just died of the virus in Iran or that the morgues in Bolivia were overflowing. It was really tragic material, but I honestly felt there was nothing I could do to help those people and it left me feeling hopeless and powerless. And then I would look out the window on a radiant spring afternoon and be flooded with a sense of hope and possibility.
31:45 Speaker 04 And just as you said a minute ago, reminded of how I could be a better neighbor and son and husband and friend to the people around me, there was something I could affect. And so I thought every day I have a choice whether I will attend to what cuts me up or what opens me up. Probably if I attend to what opens me up, my day will go better, but certainly the days of everybody around me will go much better. You know, a hundred years ago, William James said, our lives are defined by what we choose to attend to. And I think that choice is important because these days there are more and more forms of media and they're more and more deafening. We have the choice which are going to lead us towards richer, better, happier lives
32:27 Speaker 04 and which are going to leave us depleted the way junk food sometimes does.
32:32 Dan Harris? I like that five minutes of news a day. My old job, I couldn't have plus one on that, but now that I'm retired from the news business, I can feel free to agree with that advice. Coming up, Pico Iyer talks about why so many of us fear silence, the importance of caring for your mind, and then we get pretty explicit and practical about how we can use Pico's experience at the monastery to our benefit in our daily lives, even if we don't plan to go to a monastery ourselves.
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34:03 Dan Harris? Let me ask you a question about silence. Why do you think so many of us fear it? You know, when I go on retreat, so many people say, "You're not going to talk for 10 days?" Like, how do you do that? And of course, that's not the hardest part of retreat. The not talking is really not the hard part. But nonetheless, at least in a vacuum, many people fear silence. Why do you think that is?
34:28 Speaker 04 Because we're at the mercy of our own thoughts, of our own fears, of our anxieties. Whenever a great religious teacher goes out into the desert, demons jump out at him as much as angels do. And when we're at the mercy of our mind, that's when the dark things and the shadows come as much as the epiphanies. And you know, as a meditator, that meditation is about sitting there when storm clouds pass through the mind as well as... When the sun comes slanting through. Yeah. So it is scary. And one reason I really admire my monk friends is that I go there and spend three days there and then return to my busy life. They have committed to spending every day of their lives alone in their cells much of
35:11 Speaker 04 the time, probably with their fears and their doubts and their frustrations. And there's nowhere for them to run and nowhere for them to hide. And as you say, silence isn't always a friend. It can be the worst of enemies. I will say again, as we were talking about before, that the silence I find in a monastic setting is much safer, more comforting, and I think more benign than the silence I would find if I just sat in this room right now with the traffic going past and in the middle of a town. It is a particular kind of silence, but nonetheless, it too can be a minefield. So I completely understand why people are scared of being silent, why they're scared of being with themselves and why they're scared of meditation.
35:53 Speaker 04 I remember, actually, I mention in my book how I once met a very sweet but troubled friend and I said to her, maybe you'd like to come and try and stay in the place where I go up north. So she came up and we walked around the little chapel together and she was very moved, almost to the point of tears. And then we came and started walking down the road and we sat on a bench. And she looked at me and her eyes were flooding. And she said, this really moves me more than I can say. But I'm envious because you, Pico, seem to really enjoy being alone and being quiet. I am terrified and I feel as if everything I'm scared of comes out in the silence. And so she never returned there.
36:37 Speaker 04 And I can understand why that silence brought up to the surface everything that she probably would much rather keep down. And I too, my dark places, my shadows, my fears do sometimes arise, but I always feel I would rather meet them in that benign, quiet place than when I'm driving down the freeway or waiting in a long line in the bank or whatever. If nothing else, I can come to peace with them more easily in that kind of setting than in the Russian distraction of my regular days.
37:09 Dan Harris? Yeah, I completely agree with that. This is a kind of an easy thing for me to say, given that I don't have a lot of capital T trauma in my life, especially not, you know, a lot of adverse childhood events, et cetera, et cetera. So with that caveat issue, my sense is that your demons are there no matter what. So would you rather reckon with them in a supportive container at a retreat or in your daily meditation practice, or do you want to just be owned by them all the time? I know what the answer is for me.
37:42 Speaker 04 And I think, I mean, I haven't engaged in meditation, least of all the way you have, but I'm guessing in meditation, one thing that's happening is it's like watching the sky. In other words, you see the storm clouds and the storm clouds pass and the sunshine passes and everything is just constantly coming and going, that nothing is lasting for long. And that's very different from being in the regular world where you're looking up at the storm clouds and they seem to occupy everything. In other words, my sense is that meditation is partly a practice about seeing that everything is impermanent and interdependent and also not therefore taking anything too seriously. This too shall pass, which we see if ever we really
38:22 Speaker 04 look closely at the sky, we see it's in constant movement and nothing is fixed, was going to plague us till eternity.
38:30 Dan Harris? Yes, I think that is largely correct. And one benefit that can occur, especially on a longer retreat, but I think you can have this insight in your daily practice too, is viscerally understanding this too shall pass. It's one thing to have it said to you or to read it somewhere, but to actually sit, watch your mind, notice, you can go from homicidal rage to equanimity within a couple of minutes. That's incredibly empowering because then off the cushion in the rest of your life, you're not as owned or controlled by the passing squalls.
39:10 Speaker 04 Exactly, you're not attached to it. And yeah, you don't take it more seriously than you ought to. You know, in my book, I write quite a lot about Leonard Cohen, whom I got to know when he was a monk. And he used to say wonderfully, oh, well, enlightenment is just about lightening up. In other words, about not attaching yourself so furiously to every moment. And you know, what you were saying is so important because I think we all know that our lives are not defined by what happens to us, but what we make of what happens to us. I mean, for example, when our house burnt down, four hundred and fifty other structures burned to the ground. And I think many people understandably were traumatized for life.
39:52 Speaker 04 But others, after a few months of adjustment, actually saw that this dramatic change could open doors as well as close them and make things possible that might not be otherwise. Just as during the pandemic, almost everyone was going through much the same kind of situation and unsettledness. But some people saw it as an opportunity and some people saw it only as a catastrophe. And so, again, to some degree, not entirely, but maybe more than we suppose, we have the chance to think about how we respond to everything that happens to us, including the many distractions you were talking about. In Japan, where I live, they say, take care of the mind and you take care of the world. Goes back to what we were saying before with Meister Eckhart, that the world is never our problem.
40:38 Speaker 04 It's our thoughts about the world that tend to get us in a turn wheel.
40:42 Dan Harris? Well, but that also, that expression, that Jebedee's expression, take care of the mind, you take care of the world, also goes right at the self-indulgence argument, that it's selfish to take care of your mind or to go on retreat. But actually, by taking care of your mind, you are better able to be a participant in the events of the world.
41:01 Speaker 04 Precisely. I travel regularly with the Dalai Lama. And every time he comes to Japan for ten straight Novembers, I would be by his side for every minute of his eight-hour working day. And at the end of that day, I'd be exhausted, just watching him go through his job, even though he is twenty-two years older than I am. And finally, I realized at one point, well, wait a minute. As you know, because I know you've spent time with him, he never takes a break in his working day. And his host would sometimes very kindly say, "Your Holiness, do you just want to be quiet for a while? Or would you like to take lunch alone?" "No, no, we must be together." And I would marvel at how he could be so present and so generous
41:42 Speaker 04 and so absolutely attentive to everyone, eight hours a day, in his eighties, day after day. And then I recalled, every morning, while I was enjoying my beauty sleep and then helping myself to a second portion at the buffet breakfast, he was waking up at three thirty and spending his first four hours every day meditating. And he has to spend those hours there because that's his job and his responsibility as a Dalai Lama. But nonetheless, it's by gathering his resources in those first four hours that he can be so absolutely there and give so much of his heart and attention to every last person he meets. And it's a perfect example of what you were saying. If he didn't make that investment in his meditation,
42:26 Speaker 04 I don't think he would be the radiant, compassionate, and wise person we see. And when I watched that, I sometimes would think, "Well, goodness, if the most busy person I know can spend four hours a day doing this, surely I can afford twenty minutes." And although I've been daunted by formal meditation, at least twenty minutes just sitting quietly trying to empty my mind is my equivalent. And it's something I would never regret.
42:51 Dan Harris? Yeah. Just to pick up on any sheepishness you may or may not be expressing about your... Being daunted in the face of meditation. I am deeply influenced by a meditation teacher named Joseph Goldstein, who often says, whatever works. And so I've picked up on that spirit of dogmatic, non-dogmatism. Like if what you're doing works for you, great.
43:14 Speaker 04 Joseph Goldstein is the most inspiring teacher. I was lucky enough to watch one of the events you did with him. And just listening to him makes me feel calmer and clearer.
43:23 Dan Harris? Yes, contact high.
43:26 Speaker 04 I mean, the proof is in the pudding. In other words, when you see some of the people who've given themselves to 40 years of meditation, it's hard to argue with it because they're radiating something that most of us want, which is calm in the middle of uncertainty and hope in the middle of impermanence. He's an example, the Dalai Lama's example, and many others. And I think many of us who wonder what's wrong with us when we see that, oh, that's probably a good example to follow.
43:50 Dan Harris? Indeed. I know you've given some thought to how to take some of the lessons from your more than three decades of visiting this monastery and, you know, operationalize them in our lives, given that most of us are not going to make the investment that you've made. I would love to just kind of get pretty explicit and practical about how we can use your experience to our own benefit. You've talked about some of these, like five minutes of news a day, which I love. And you've talked about this 3% rule of, you know, like 3% of your life is going to be on retreat and 3% of your waking hours will be spent in a silence on a day to day basis. But you've also got something called
44:32 Dan Harris? the two hour rule and the 20 foot rule. Can you say a little bit about those?
44:39 Speaker 04 Yes. And before I say that, I mean, I love this question because as you say, most people don't have the time or don't have the resources to go on retreat, let alone to a beautiful place like Big Sur. And so I always recommend, you know, take a long hike on a Sunday, go and see a friend without your cell phone, do what so many people in Silicon Valley do, which is put a mail away message on your email every Saturday or every Sunday or both of those. The two hour rule is my bungled version of what scientists could tell you better, which is just I make sure not to go online for two hours before I go to sleep. And I think that has a very positive effect on my sleep and how I sleep pretty much determines everything the next day.
45:24 Speaker 04 So if I can take care of my sleep, I'm really taking care of everybody around me. I also have a practice that many people couldn't implement, but some could. And that is I try to go as long as possible when I wake up every day without going online. Because as soon as I go online, I feel I'm in Times Square on New Year's Eve. And the whole world is shouting at me in a thousand directions. Until that, I'm sort of walking along an empty beach. I'm much quieter and calmer and much more receptive to interesting things that come to me. I know people with little kids or certain kind of job like the job you used to have, or so many jobs, you have to check in very quickly.
46:05 Speaker 04 But if it's at all possible, I think none of us loses by extending the amount of time before we enter the maelstrom, because none of us is at our best in a crowded subway station. And that's pretty much where we are, I think, when we're online and everybody roaring at us with top volume and it doesn't usually invigorate us. I was actually doing an event a few years ago with somebody, and this is just another example, who is an editor. And he said every day he woke up and he checked the news and within about 20 minutes he was raging and he was furious. And so when anyone came into the room, they quickly left. They didn't want to spend time with him. And then he thought, well, this is really not getting me anywhere.
46:46 Speaker 04 So he decided every day when he woke up, he would read a poem or read poetry for maybe 30 minutes. And he found suddenly his wife and his kids and his colleagues were much keener to spend time with him. And there's actually an article this week in The New Yorker, which I read this morning by a professor at Harvard, who said, instead of checking the news every morning, she started reading classics of literature. And they gave her much more wisdom and much more fuel for the day than if she learnt about the latest things that might just make her agitated. I love that. So those are a few things, but I think each person can formulate her own. And my sense is that we're in such a hurry, we often can't tell what a hurry we're in.
47:30 Speaker 04 And that most of us are longing just to implement certain practices, which we could easily come up with ourselves, but we don't know where to start, or we feel that we don't have time to do so. Years ago, Simone Weil, the great French wise person, said, "The problem is not that there isn't bread. The problem is we don't realize we're starving." And I think most of us are starving. And once we realize that, then we can take the appropriate methods. And each person will have different methods than I suggest. But I think we need to do something quite radical to break through this vicious cycle whereby we're running and running and running, and we're so out of breath, we can't realize that we need to be quiet.
48:09 Dan Harris? Yes, I take that comment well, that you're throwing out some ideas. It's a menu of options. We can try them, and we may start to develop our own inner compass about what strategies really work best for us in order to not be so perpetually caught up in the maelstrom, as you said earlier. Coming up, Pico talks about how to operationalize his learnings from the monastery into your life and travel as a tool for transformation.
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50:17 Dan Harris? I did want to make sure we didn't overlook the 20-foot rule. What is the 20-foot rule?
50:22 Speaker 04 That's a rather arbitrary one, but I'm sure everybody has had the experience stepping into a museum and you find yourself in front of a very complicated, large canvas and you just can't make out what it's saying. And you realize you have to step back, further back, and further back. And finally, maybe when you're 20 feet back, suddenly it clicks into focus and you can catch the larger picture as it were. You can see what it's communicating. If you're too close to it, you can't make out a thing. And I feel with myself and maybe with others too, I'm so close to the world and I'm so close to my life. I can't make out its proportions and I can't, you know, I can't see what's important and what's not.
51:04 Speaker 04 And every minute, there are a thousand things coming in on us and in on me and I can't sift what is trifling from what is essential. And that's why I have to step back. And when I go on retreat, what's essentially is happening is I'm remembering what I love. I remember what matters and what is essential rises to the top. Just because I'm stepping away from the rush and allowing myself to take a deep breath and suddenly I think, well, that's my wife. That's my real obligation. And this is the important thing, not what just came over the wire six seconds ago. Traveling with the Dalai Lama, over and over, I see people come to him with their really heartfelt requests, with serious problems in their lives. And as you know, he always commiserates with them with great warmth and kindness.
51:49 Speaker 04 But he always, his answer is, take a wider perspective. See the larger picture, wider perspective. In terms of time and in terms of space. And I think maybe that's what I'm trying to get at at the twenty foot rule. If we're right up against this, we just can't see, we can't put proportions on our life. We don't have perspective. So it's as we were saying a few minutes ago, you have to step back from your life and from the world in order to see either of them. And if you don't, I'm finding with myself, I'm just sort of blindly racing around. And I realize, you know, as we're saying all this, I'm guessing almost everybody who listens to your podcast already does something, maybe meditates or has a yoga practice or plays a piano or plays tennis or sails or cooks.
52:35 Speaker 04 But whatever it is we're doing, I think the world is accelerating at such a pace that we need to do more of it. I mean, a hundred years ago, J P Morgan was wonderfully saying, J P Morgan, of all people, that he could never achieve in twelve months what he achieves in ten months. And he would give himself two months off every year. And, you know, this is why Bill Gates takes think weeks and why Steve Jobs took long walks and why Warren Buffett clears out his calendar. Because you can't think and you can't make clear decisions and you can't hear intuition unless you free yourself a little bit from clutter. I just read a statistic that in response to a Department of Labor,
53:18 Speaker 04 therefore governmental study two years ago, twenty twenty three, seventy nine percent of people said they never had a moment either to rest or to think. And if you can't rest and if you can't think, I'm not sure how much you can really give to the people around you or to your job or to the world. Even, I mean, before the pandemic, the W H O said the great predicament of the twenty first century was stress. And I would say another version of that is speed and acceleration. And we're trying to keep up with machines. And I don't think humans were ever designed to live at a pace determined by machines. The only way we could do that is by becoming machines ourselves, which I don't think any of us much wants.
53:58 Dan Harris? One thing Joseph talks about a lot, this is perhaps more applicable or useful or operationalizable for meditators, but to use the feeling of rushing in your body, because if you can tune into that swarm of bees in the chest or whatever it is, to use that as a mindfulness bell to wake up and slow down. I really like that and I try to do it. I have a lot of. Habit energy around rushing and have been trying in fits and starts and slowly to unwind it. Let me just keep going with your list of really, I think, very helpful practical suggestions. Another is to declutter your space as a way to declutter your mind.
54:43 Dan Harris? Can you say a little bit more about that?
54:45 Speaker 04 I'll just say, and again, I think you've made a similar trajectory. When I was 29, I was leading the life I probably would have dreamed of as a boy. 25th floor office, Midtown Manhattan, apartment on Park Avenue, very exciting job, writing on world affairs for Time Magazine, traveling the world, scintillating colleagues. And I decided to throw over my dream life and go and live in a temple in Japan. And as I said, my stay in the temple didn't last long. I felt that living in a temple in Japan would be a perfect complement to my very overstimulated, high-speed life in New York City. And I also knew, you know, it's easy to give up your job in your twenties. I had no dependents.
55:29 Speaker 04 And if everything had gone wrong, I could probably have returned to New York and got another job. But I felt as soon as I got to Kyoto, every day would last 1,000 hours. Every trip to the supermarket would be an adventure. And one way or another, it would expand what limited things I had learned in New York City. And although I didn't last long in the temple, I soon moved to a single room on the eastern hills of Kyoto. Didn't have my own phone, didn't have my own toilet, barely had my own bed. But it felt as if I had all the freedom and all the time in the world. And so now, again, this is not something I recommend to anyone, but it's my way that I've found suits me. My wife
56:14 Speaker 04 and I, for 32 years, have lived in a two-room apartment in the middle of a very boring suburb near Kyoto. I've never used a cellphone, even though I still travel all the time, and I'm still a practicing journalist. I don't have a car, so it's 100 things not to think about or worry about. We don't really have much media, so that's a release in itself. And so I found in certain ways that this relatively stripped-down life opens space for so many more interesting things, when, just as you were saying, I was racing, racing, racing, and putting in 18-hour days in the office on 50th and 6th Avenue.
56:52 Speaker 04 And again, each person, you know, for example, most people couldn't survive without the cellphone because they have children or aging parents or a job that required it. So again, it's not something that I would recommend to anybody else, but in my case, I find I have enough data and distraction in my life already. What I don't have is the time and space to make sense of it. And I also feel already my attention is being cut up quite a bit and I'm scattered. And when I talk to you, I want to be fully present. I don't want to be in a thousand places. And so anything that can make me less scattered and bring me to a point is very welcome. I'm always touched when I go on retreat.
57:33 Speaker 04 As you know, I think the monks talk about the experience of being on retreat as recollection. And I think that means two things. One, it's not some revelation. You're just remembering something that all of us knew but forgot or misplaced along the way, some wider truth that we can't see because we're running around. But also recollection suggests to me collecting all the scattered parts of yourself and bringing them together into a whole. Because, you know, when I'm multitasking and I've got many things to do this very day, I'm moving in sixteen different directions. When I'm in the silence without distraction, I really feel I'm entirely present. And suddenly the world seems beautiful and it's exactly the same world it's always been. The world is always present.
58:18 Speaker 04 It's just me who's not present most of the time. And so any correction in my life has to take place within me, not within. The world's doing fine. I just need to be awake to it, I guess.
58:30 Dan Harris? Another lesson from the monastery that I think would be readily applicable for most, if not all of us, is the restorative benefits of nature, of being outside, even if you can't live your whole life there, you can get doses.
58:47 Speaker 04 Yes, and nature's rhythms tend to be much happier than technology's rhythms, and much closer to the human pace of life. When I wrote this book, I was trying to replicate what I feel when I'm up there, which is the day lasts a very long time, partly because I have no plans, I'm not cutting it up, and I'm moving very much at a human pace. I take off my watch as soon as I'm there, and it doesn't really matter what time of day it is, because I'm free of my plans, and the day is measured by the hours. And it's very interesting, as you know, in every order monks and nuns maintain a very rigorous discipline, five to seven times a day, often starting before dawn, and then their last prayer is late at night.
59:29 Speaker 04 And through that discipline, they find an incredible freedom, because they know exactly where they're going to be at 3:00 PM tomorrow afternoon. And by knowing it, they actually have more freedom than those of us who are trying to cram six things into every hour. So just being awake to nature, as I say, nature is everywhere around us. And when I was living in New York City, I remember when I went for a job interview in New York City, it was very short time, I was 25 years old, I really wanted to get a good job, and I was going from office to office. And thank heavens, at one point, I had the sense just to step into St. Patrick's Cathedral for five minutes, even though I'm not a Christian. I knew, as we've been saying, that would calm me down, it would free me from myself,
1:00:13 Speaker 04 there'd be nothing but the dark hush, the prayerful silence, the light coming through the windows, the flicker of the candles, that was the medicine I needed before I went back and raced to the next office. And later, when I was living in New York City, if I could sit in a park, and there were abundant parks, even the middle of that busy city, everything fell into place and calmed down a little. And there were always, you know, wherever you happen to be, as you say, nature is always present, it's just we who are not. During the pandemic, for example, I found that I couldn't go to my health club because it was closed, I wasn't traveling the way I usually would have to, and I needed exercise. So every morning, my wife and I would take a walk behind my mother's house up in the hills of California.
1:00:56 Speaker 04 And the sun would be rising behind the hills, flooding the slopes with golden light, and other parts of the landscape would be buried in thick fog. And I'd turn around and I'd see the Pacific Ocean in the distance, shining in the spring sunshine with the islands so clear that you could almost count the ridges in the hills. And I would suddenly think, wait a minute, this is as beautiful as Rio de Janeiro or Cape Town or Capri or any of the places I would fly across the world to see. It was right in my backyard. My parents had lived in that property for 50 years. I'd never walked to the end of the street 20 minutes away until the pandemic sort of necessitated it. And I think many of us during the pandemic
1:01:39 Speaker 04 had the experience of suddenly waking up and seeing, gosh, there's beauty all around us, wherever we happen to be. But we're always looking, you know, to the monastery in Japan, as it were, instead of seeing down the street is a place of quiet, is a is beautiful nature. And if I can just say one more thing, I was thinking about your previous question. Sorry for the long answers, but I think it took me a while to see that luxury is defined not by how much you have, but by how much you don't need. If you're satisfied your needs, you're content, and that's the greatest form of luxury. Where I live in Japan, you may have been there, there's a famous rock garden in Kyoto, where there are 15 rocks, and you can't see all 15 of them from any given place.
1:02:22 Speaker 04 And so it's been a tempting, fascinating enigma for every visitor for 300 years. But just around the corner from where the rock garden is, there's a little water basin, and there's one Japanese character on all four sides, and there's a hole in the middle. And if you put those four characters on the hole together, it says, what I have is all I need. And I think that's kind of what all of us are aspiring to. What I have is all I need. If we're free from the desire, the wish to have more, that takes care of many of our problems. We'll still get sick, we'll still get old, we'll still die. But on a day to day level, we might be much better off. And of course, that's a classic Buddhist precept.
1:03:05 Speaker 04 But I think it's probably something you find in meditation, too, that what you have is is all you need.
1:03:11 Dan Harris? Yes. The word travel has come up a lot in this conversation. You're, of course, a well-known travel writer. We've been focusing for the last chunk of this conversation on lessons we can learn from the monastery. But I'm wondering, does travel play a role potentially and done well in creating calm and space in a noisy world? Or is travel, as you kind of indicated in one of the paragraphs you uttered a few moments ago, or is travel definitionally the kind of clutter that in this conversation, at least, we're trying to avoid?
1:03:52 Speaker 04 No, I love the beginning of your question, that travel, like anything, can be a tool for transformation. I mean, I often think that when I'm traveling, I'm living much more simply. I've just got what I can carry in my suitcase. I'm freed from my usual definitions of myself. When I'm walking down the street in Port-au-Prince or Plomben and somebody comes up to me, they don't care where I went to college or what job I have or which part of New York City I was once living in. They're just thinking to themselves, is this person kind? Is he honest? Can I trust him? So I think you're taken back to something much more essential, you're stripped of all the external fluff, which often distracts us or by which we define ourselves. I find I'm much more open to people when I travel because I don't have plans.
1:04:38 Speaker 04 If I'm walking down the street in Santa Barbara this afternoon and a homeless person comes up to me with a request, sadly, I'll probably hurry past because I have to be somewhere at 3:10. If the same thing happens on the streets of Calcutta when I'm traveling, I might well stay with that person and talk to them because I don't have to be anywhere. And I'm there in order to meet this culture. So I think travel in all kinds of ways can be used to slow one down. Of course, if you're riding the buses of India, you're automatically slowed down because they're nine hours late and then they stop every three minutes. But in a deeper way, travel does a great thing because it humbles you and it leaves you at the mercy of the world. I think when I was a kid, I sort of thought, I'm the master of my destiny. I can plan everything and I can craft my life.
1:05:23 Speaker 04 And the older I've got, the more I find I'm sort of the servant of destiny and life has much more interesting plans for me than I ever could. And you really feel that when you travel because you're released from the illusion of control and you realize when you wake up, you can't always plan your day very well. And even if you do, you're likely to get lost and the plan is likely to get upended. So it does great things for the ego and it does good things for the heart because I think many of us can be more open hearted when we're traveling than when we're kind of imprisoned within our daily habits at home.
1:05:58 Dan Harris? You make a good case. I like it. In our remaining moments, let me just go back to the aspects of life in the monastery that I really do think can be applicable to our lives in the world. And one of them is community. Even though you're not speaking, you are living in a community and certainly the monks are really living in a community and are doing a little bit of speaking. And we live in a lonely era where social connection, the social fabric, it's all in tatters sadly. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing epic rises in anxiety, depression and suicide and addiction in that context. And so I'd be curious to hear if you have any thoughts on all of this.
1:06:41 Speaker 04 Too many. But I think traditionally, whenever people have been confronted with the difficulties that life throws up, they've turned to three things, family, community, and faith. And in a place like California where I'm sitting, sadly, families were often quite fractured, community is very scattered, and faith has sometimes been lost along the way. Or traditional faith is not as common as it used to be. And so, as you say, it's very easy to be lost. And I think for me, one of the really beautiful surprises of going on retreat was to see how much that solitude was indeed a gateway to a much richer
1:07:22 Speaker 04 sense of community and of compassion. You know, I'm a writer, so I usually spend eight hours a day by myself at my desk. I'm an only child. I love being by myself. And so when I first arrived in my little room in beautiful Big Sur with not a care in the world, of course, I thought, this is heaven. But as the years went on, I saw first, as I was saying before, that I was thinking much more about the people I love in that environment than when I'm driving down the freeway. And secondly, that I was learning from the monks that solitude is a means to gathering more to share with other people. When Henry David Thoreau lived in a Walden Pond for two years, it was not because he
1:08:05 Speaker 04 was a recluse or a hermit, as he says, it was because he wanted to have more to give to the community. And he would look after Emerson's family. And for 10 months while Emerson was traveling, he would hold melon parties, he would fix people's plumbing. The stepping away from the world was a means to being a better part of the world. And I sometimes think I might never have gotten married if I hadn't spent that time sitting silently in a cell. And it was sitting there that made me wake up to commitments and probably to what is the richest part of life and to think that the richest part of life does come in community. And that being alone is only a way to be able to do richer justice to community.
1:08:46 Speaker 04 And also just understanding a little more about selflessness and service by watching the monks, seeing these people who've consecrated their lives pretty much entirely to looking after other people. They've died to themselves and they're living for everybody else. And when you see that, you can't fail but think, well, this is a better way of living than many others I've witnessed, just as with the Dalai Lama, whose instant thought always is for the other person and how he can offer medicine to that person.
1:09:17 Dan Harris? Pico, in closing, I like to ask two questions. Sometimes these questions provoke long answers, sometimes they're very short. The first is, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we haven't yet gotten to?
1:09:29 Speaker 04 No, I mean, there's so much we could talk about because I think we've had a lot of common experiences as well as common friends, but no, thank you.
1:09:36 Dan Harris? And then the final question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book we've been discussing today and also your previous works and anything else you've put out into the world that we should know about?
1:09:46 Speaker 04 Thank you. So my recent book is called A Flame: Learning from Silence, and it's about my first 100 retreats over 34 years with the Benedictines. But it's also about how to live calmly with fire, because we all know the world is on fire, literally, but also metaphorically. And we're all addressing how to remain calm in this time of unsettledness. And by chance, I flew back into California to talk about a flame the very night that flames were upending so many lives in Los Angeles down the road. Carl Gustav Jung said, "The difference between a good life and a bad life is how you walk through the fire." And in all kinds of ways, I think we're more aware of that than ever. And the previous book
1:10:28 Speaker 04 I'd written, which is a bit of a brother book to this one, was called The Half-Known Life. And A Flame is entirely about my time with the monks. And The Half-Known Life is about searching for paradise in war zones and places of conflict, many of which you, Dan, will know. So I go to Iran and North Korea and Yemen and Jerusalem and war-torn Sri Lanka and many other places, because I figure any glimpse of hope you can find in the middle of that harsh reality is one you could trust. I don't trust a paradise that's a golden beach in the middle of nowhere, because night's going to fall and it's not going to be golden forever. But if you can find something right in the heart of Jerusalem or a war zone that offers you hope,
1:11:12 Speaker 04 that's something substantial. So both those books are, I suppose, about how to find hope in the very real world and looking at the world really closely, but never giving up faith in it.
1:11:25 Dan Harris? Well, just to say, you've also done four TED Talks. We'll put some links to those TED Talks in the show notes for people who want to check those out. Do you have a website that we should also let people know about?
1:11:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, I have two websites, picoia journeys.com and picoia.com. And I actually, I gave the concluding talk at TED last month, so I don't know when that will be posted. But there is a fifth talk specifically on silence on the way.
1:11:56 Dan Harris? Okay, all right. Well, you've given us lots to chew on here. It's a pleasure to finally meet you, albeit remotely, but truly a pleasure, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
1:12:05 Speaker 04 Well, thank you. I really hope there's a time when I can ask you a million questions because I would love to hear your answers to all of these. You've been more deeply in this world and certainly in meditation than I. Thank you for all you do. I mean, I think for somebody in the heart of the mainstream media to be reminding people of this incredible resource that they have within them, I can't think of a better thing to be doing. So I'm so glad you've been doing it on many fronts for a long time.
1:12:29 Dan Harris? Thank you. I appreciate that.
1:12:35 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Pico Ira. Awesome to talk to him. I've followed him for years. Great to finally meet him. Don't forget, if you're interested in learning how to achieve some degree of quiet in your own busy brain, we've got a guided meditation that comes with this podcast episode from the great meditation teacher, Seven A. Selassie. If you sign up at danharris.com, you can get access to that meditation and all the bespoke guided meditations that we're dropping with our Monday and Wednesday episodes. Also, if you sign up, you get weekly live guided meditation and Q and A sessions. The next one is coming up on Tuesday, October 14th at 4:00 PM. We do them every Tuesday at 4:00, 4:00 Eastern, that is. This one on the 14th will feature both me and Seb together, which will be fun. And if you want
1:13:20 Dan Harris? more of me and Seb, we're doing that meditation party retreat at the Omega Institute on the weekend of October 24th. There's a link in the show notes. Seb and I will be joined by Jeff Warren and a host of Jones Cortez. It's going to be awesome. Sign up. Finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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