#751: Elizabeth Gilbert and Jack Kornfield

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #430 "Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creative Path: Saying No, Trusting Your Intuition, Index Cards, Integrity Checks, Grief, Awe, and Much More https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/" and episode #300 "Jack Kornfield — Finding Freedom, Love, and Joy in the Present https://tim.blog/2018/03/05/jack-kornfield/." Please enjoy! Sponsors: AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.) Helix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses: https://helixsleep.com/tim (25–30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows) LMNT https://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any drink mix purchase) Timestamps: [00:00] Start [05:36] Notes about this supercombo format. [06:38] Enter Elizabeth Gilbert. [07:04] Liz shares who Rayya Elias was and how she's remembered her in story at The Moth. [14:53] What kind of stories and storytellers make Liz break out in applause? [21:05] What has Liz learned from Martha Beck? [23:49] Staying true to one's inner compass and saying "No" without remorse. [27:03] The simple "No" via Byron Katie. [33:07] The wisdom of the body. [36:56] Enter Jack Kornfield. [37:24] Jack's connection with hang gliding and paragliding. [40:06] Jack's childhood, abusive father, and role as family peacemaker. [45:12] "If you're going to be angry, do it right." [47:48] Jack's transition from pre-med to Asian studies at Dartmouth. [49:28] From hippie to Buddhist monk. [50:57] Psychedelics' influence on Jack's spiritual path and current stance. [59:53] Meeting Stanislav Grof. [1:03:32] Finding and studying under Ajahn Chah. [1:05:59] Rookie monk training in Thailand and enduring suffering. [1:13:49] Long silence periods and out-of-body experiences. [1:16:37] Mystical experiences aren't always pleasant. [1:19:15] Tim's experience at Spirit Rock. [1:20:10] Challenges during training in Thailand and Burma. [1:24:47] "Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed..." [1:29:55] Advice for deep inner work with real-life responsibilities. [1:42:04] Compassion vs. empathy. [1:46:19] Technology's role in developing compassion. [1:47:26] Lovingkindness meditation for Westerners. [1:56:04] Attending the first White House Buddhist Leadership Conference. [1:57:59] The mission of CASEL. [1:59:18] Introducing mindfulness practice and love as a superpower. [2:10:11] Returning to self-discovery after derailment. [2:15:57] Apparent derailment as necessary communication. [2:19:17] Self-talk for managing inappropriate anger. [2:37:21] Returning to the US to study clinical psychology. [2:42:50] Using forgiveness to help veterans and at-risk youth. [2:45:30] Why community support beats community apathy. [2:49:23] Lack of significant initiation rituals in modern society. [2:53:10] Recommended book for newcomers to Jack's work. [2:57:48] Jack's billboard. [2:59:02] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes,

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  you're just not getting enough. And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita, but for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer.

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  Things clicked and bam, company was born. So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends, three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their Master Chief, marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting and On and On. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Get your free Element sample pack with any drink mix per

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  Purchase at drinklmnt.com/tim. That's drinklmnt.com/tim. And if you're an Element Insider, one of their most loyal customers, you have first access to Element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out. Drinklmnt.com/tim. Drinklmnt.com/tim.

• 2:39Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions, and on and on, they have you covered. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at helixsleep.com/tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Personally, for the last few years,

• 3:22Tim Ferriss?

  I have been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one of those in the guest bedroom, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. Helix mattresses are American-made and come with a 10- or 15-year warranty, depending on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door, free of charge. And there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home. That's why they offer a 100-night risk-free trial. If you decide it's not the best fit, you're welcome to return it for a full refund. Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and Wired magazines. And now Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise

• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  to bring you a truly elevated sleep experience. Their newest collection of mattresses, called Helix Elite, includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences. So you can get exactly what you Your body needs. Each Helix Sleep mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and thousands of extra micro coils for best-in-class support and durability. Every Helix Sleep mattress also comes with a 15-year manufacturer's warranty and the same 100-night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. And you, my dear listeners, can get between 25% and 30% off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders. So, go to helixsleep.com/tim to check it out.

• 4:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's helixsleep.com/tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

• 4:57Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  No, we're just sitting in a broken time.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is

• 6:02Tim Ferriss?

  to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser-known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy, and thank you for listening.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  First up, Elizabeth Gilbert, the number one New York Times bestselling author of 10 books, including Eat, Pray, Love, and Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, which together have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, and her latest book, City of Girls. You can find Elizabeth on Twitter @GilbertLiz.

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  I thought I would begin with The Alpha Wolf, if you don't mind. For those who don't know, this is a moth-talk slash presentation story slash tear-jerker slash laugh-out-loud-at-moments tale. And I saw that Rea's birthday, her 60th birthday, was just a few days ago. Could you speak to who Rea was, a little bit of context, and then how, to how you prepared for that?

• 7:38Elizabeth Gilbert?

  There's quite literally nothing I would rather talk about than Rea's. So you started in a good place for me. So Rea Elias was, quite simply, the love of my life. She and I were friends for 17 years. I was married for most of that, and just very slowly and very quietly, over the years, fell in love with her. She was a lesbian, Syrian, Detroit-raised, rock and roll, hairdresser, filmmaker, author, musician, who had always wanted to live just right on the edge of life. She had been

• 8:21Elizabeth Gilbert?

  a speedball heroin junkie on the Lower East Side, New York City in the 1980s, was in Rikers Island, was in Bellevue, was in various rehabs and rehabilitations, was homeless, was... Oh God, she'd had such a storied life and then she finally put it all down and she spent 19 years clean and sober. And when I met her, she was on the other side of that recovery and she was the strongest, most extraordinary person I ever met. And as I said in that speech that I gave in that talk that I gave at the Moth about her, which I shared a year after she died, she was the most powerful person in every room that she ever walked into. And I adored her. She was my guide. She was my teacher. She was

• 9:01Elizabeth Gilbert?

  the rock, the ground underneath my feet. She was the one person in the world who always made me feel safe. And she didn't just make me feel safe. The feeling that everyone had when Rea walked into the room was, oh, thank God, Rea's here. Everybody is safe. You know, that's what the alpha is, right? The alpha is the person who keeps the entire pack safe. And because she was the most powerful person in the room, what I always knew when she walked in was not only would she make sure I was okay, if anybody was preying on me in any way, she would make sure the predator was okay, too. Like, she had everybody under her wing to make sure that people were all right, you know? She just had this way of

• 9:43Elizabeth Gilbert?

  handling humans like nothing I've ever seen in my entire life. And I absolutely adored her. And I was a loyal wife and I loved my husband and the three of us were really good friends. And there was no way in the world that I was ever going to cross that line. I just kept that love very quietly in my heart. And we all just had a beautiful life together until the day that she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer. And I got a phone call from her saying that she'd gotten this diagnosis and that they said she had six months to live. And from that point forward, it was no longer possible for me to keep that love hidden. And very swiftly after that, I had a conversation with my husband and said, I need to go and be with Rea. And no one was surprised by

• 10:27Elizabeth Gilbert?

  this. He wasn't surprised by it. He'd seen it for years. And he very, in one of the greatest acts of courage and dignity I've ever seen anybody do, he very graciously stepped out of the way. And we separated and I went to be with her and I was with her until the end of her life. So that's who Rea was and that's who she was to me. As for that speech that I gave at the Moth, that talk. What I was challenged to do in 12 minutes was to try to get over the net who that person was, the most epic human being I'd ever met. And I decided the way to do that was to tell a few stories about the experience of her death and dying, which were mostly based on ideas that I had about how she was going

• 11:11Elizabeth Gilbert?

  to become very helpless and I was going to have to be her hero and protect her versus the reality of the situation, which is that she never became helpless. She remained the alpha in the entire situation. She was a really hard patient to take care of. For that reason. She absolutely refused to cooperate with my version of some airy-fairy, soft hippie dab that I wanted to give to her. And instead, she died the way she lived, like the badass, fierce, unrelenting warrior that she was. And it was brutal and it was beautiful. And she never stopped taking us by surprise, right? Even up till the last second. And the point is going to come where that truth is going to become bigger than your plans.

• 11:53Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And that extended into the way that I tried to manage, I'm using air quotes now, manage Rea's death. I also went into her death with a plan. We're going to have an enlightened death. We're going to have a real hospice death. We're going to bring grief bereavement experts in here to talk. I mean, I laugh now because it's like, you know, just Rea, like who is such a biker chick. It's like, you're going to bring a fucking grief bereavement expert in here like to talk to me? You know, like, give me a break. I'm going to go down watching football, eating chicken wings and smoking, you know? Like, this is like, I have no interest in that. So she just waylaid that plan completely and died on her own terms. I'm just thinking of something that a hospice nurse said to me because we were cracking up one day.

• 12:36Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And I can't remember what it was about, but there's a lot of, anybody who's ever been by it, you know, there's a lot of humor. That shows up and it is literally gallows humor. You know, it really is like, I've got a picture of me and Rea's ex-wife and Rea's ex-girlfriend, who were the two women who showed up like champions at the end of her life to help to take care of me and help to take care of her because they, they loved her so much. It was also just such a factor of what a boss Mac Daddy Rea was that she had like, every woman who'd ever loved her came back to take care of her when she was dying, you know, and to take care of each other. And there was a lot of laughter between the three of us about just like handling this force of nature as she was dying, like, can we survive it, right? She's the opposite of a good patient, you know? And so there was a lot of humor in there. And the hospice nurse was laughing with this one day.

• 13:21Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And I said to her, it's amazing that you can laugh, given the line of work that you're in. She spends her life working with people at the worst, most painful parts of their lives, at the end of their lives. And she said, we have a little motto. We say, if you can't laugh at death, get out of show business. You shouldn't be a hospice nurse if you can't laugh. You won't survive. And I'm sure that's what you and I are talking right now in the midst of the COVID crisis. And I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about the nurses that I know. And I'm imagining that you know, there's some dark ass humor happening in those hospitals right now. There has to be, in the same way that soldiers would tell you about the, the humor that happens when you're under fire, like, there absolutely has to be, or you, you simply won't be able to survive it. So I will say that the humor is there in those moments.

• 14:06Elizabeth Gilbert?

  I mean, right after Rea died, I mean, we had been through such hell with her. And her death was not, as I say, it was, it was brutal. You know, one minute after she took her last breath, her last horrible breath, Gigi, her ex-wife, stood up, brushed off her hands and goes, okay, so that's done. I'm going to be on the next flight out of here, like at two o'clock. You know, we just, it was hilarious, but it was also just like what Rea would have done, you know? Okay, you guys good? We good? We done here? You know, we just all like rolled over laughing in the middle of our tears. You know, and I feel like that humor has to be shot through the entirety of your life or else you really are not going to make it through earth school because earth school's a hard, hard school and it's a hard assignment.

• 14:50Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And, and I, I think the humor is quite literally grace.

• 14:53Tim Ferriss?

  Let's pair stillness with awe for a moment.

• 14:59Tim Ferriss?

  I've also read that there are times when you'll love a sentence so much that you read that you'll start clapping by yourself where you happen to be reading. And I would love to know what type of writing, what writers have done that for you? If you could name even a few of them and what it is? What are the ingredients that lead to that one woman's standing ovation?

• 15:27Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Often in the back tubs. Well, they say that great art has to contain two features. It has to be both surprising and inevitable. So that's the great.

• 15:37Tim Ferriss?

  That's good. That's good.

• 15:39Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Right?

• 15:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Elizabeth Gilbert?

  That's paradox is that you have to go, oh, my God, I didn't see that coming. And that is the only way that could go. I'm thinking of the ending of Breaking Bad, that whole show, but like the last moments of.

• 15:52Tim Ferriss?

  Spoiler alert.

• 15:53Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Yeah. You've had many years to watch it now, people. I won't tell you the ending. I will just tell you that I also stood up and applauded at that because it felt both surprising and inevitable. So that's the feeling. You want your whole nervous system to kind of be like, oh, oh, my God, I didn't know that could be. And yes, of course, you know, it had to be. And now it's rearranged my DNA in a certain way where I can't be the same now. Poetry tends to do it. The poets have this amazing ability to, to put that into such a tiny space where it's like the encapsulization of inevitability and surprise. So I'll give you an example of, of one piece that I love, which is a poem by T S Eliot

• 16:36Elizabeth Gilbert?

  called East Coker that has gotten me through some of the darkest times in my life, some of those moments in your life where you don't know what to do, right? Where a human being, and this is where I think human life gets really interesting. What happens to people when they reach the end of their power? Because especially in this culture where we live in, in a culture that says you should be able to power through anything, life is, it will very generously remind you that you cannot, and it will very generously break you at times and very generously show you, as we're seeing right now in the COVID virus. We're like, oh, actually there's a limit to our powers here and it's very humbling. And what do you do when you're at the end of your power? So the poem East Coker is one, and it gets me every single time.

• 17:16Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell Coker?

• 17:17Elizabeth Gilbert?

  C O K E R. C K E R. Yeah. East Coker. And there's a part of the poem where T S Eliot writes. Wait without hope, for hope would be hope of the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. And so the darkness shall be light and the stillness, the dancing. That's a stand up and applause moment.

• 17:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that is a stand up and applause moment.

• 17:49Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And sometimes when people I know are grieving, or they're stuck, or they're broken, or everything has been taken away, I will give them that poem because that says what I don't know how to say better than that, which is, right now, you're being asked to wait without hope, for anything that you hope for would be the wrong thing. And wait without love, anybody who's been going through a horrible break, I'll give them that poem, like, you're being asked to wait without love right now because love would be love of the wrong thing. And anybody who's a beginning meditator, I give them that poem because of the line, wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. You don't have the wisdom right now to have the correct thoughts. So you need to wait without thought.

• 18:35Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And then you will see, if you do that, and there's still faith, but the faith is in the waiting. The faith is in waiting without hope, waiting without love, waiting without thought. That's the definition of faith, sitting in the darkness in that waiting. And then you will see how the darkness becomes light and the stillness becomes dancing. But only every time, in order to have it, you've got to give up hope, and you've got to give up love, and you've got to have faith only in the waiting. So that's a line that makes me applaud. Another author who gets me is, another poet who gets me is Walt Whitman. And Walt Whitman sang, describing himself in a song of myself, describing himself as standing both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it, and also being involved in it.

• 19:19Elizabeth Gilbert?

  That description of he watching himself walk through life, both in and out of the game, is again, something that I think of as the highest point of enlightenment. Can you engage with your life? Can you be involved with your life? Can you feel all of the feelings? Can you fall in love? Can you lose? Can you fail? Can you grow? Can you succeed? Can you fuck up? And also watch it from a little bit of a detached distance and marvel at the game itself. So that line gets me. And then as far as fiction writers go, I'm so in love with Hilary Mantel, who wrote the Wolf Hall trilogy about Henry VIII and won the Booker Prize for the first two installments of it. And then the third one just came out.

• 20:02Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And the way that I've been describing it to people is imagine if all three Godfather movies were as good as the first two. Imagine if Godfather Part Three was just as good as one and two. That's how good Hilary Mantel is, that the third installment. And I'm reading that right now and I'm just, it's just a bow down moment. You know, as an artist, there are a lot of writers who I look at their work and I admire them, but I see how they did it because it's almost like a carpenter looking at another carpenter's work and being like, oh, I can see how you did the joints there and you hid that hinge there. And that's cool. I see, well done, you know? And then there are people, I look at their work and I'm like, I literally don't believe that you're human.

• 20:43Elizabeth Gilbert?

  I don't understand how you can even do this. And that's how I feel about Hilary Mantel writing about 16th century England in a way that is so intimate and so, you cannot read that book without thinking, this is exactly how it happened. And I don't know how she does it. I'm happy to never be able to do that. I'm just lucky to live on earth at the same time as somebody who can.

• 21:05Tim Ferriss?

  I would push back a little bit and I would say that you have a rare ability to blend readability with wordsmithing sentences that are very memorable and really strike a chord. I don't think that is easy to do. And I would say Kurt Vonnegut is one who comes to mind, but it's not easy to combine those two things. And it made me crack a smile when I was reading about you appreciating sentences. The quote from you at the end of this portion of the interview was, "It's part of the reason that the arts are around, to remind us that we're not just here to pay bills and die, that we're also here to get excited and feel wonder and to feel awe."

• 21:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's easy to read, but it is something that makes me go, fuck, goddamn, you're totally right. Like, I need more wonder and awe. I'm paying too many bills, spending too much on paperwork. So I do want to applaud that ability. And I'd love for you to speak to what else you've learned from Martha Beck. What are some of the other things that have really stuck for you?

• 22:15Elizabeth Gilbert?

  I'll give you one more Martha Beck line that I love. She says, there are certain moments of your life where you're standing in front of a bonfire and you have to jump. You just have to jump into it and you have to be willing to burn away everything that you've been taught and everything that you're afraid of and just do it. And she said, and I remember her telling me this with such glee. She goes, it's such a cool moment that you're in. And she said this to me as I was leaving my marriage and going to be with Ray. She said that these bonfire moments are so fantastic because there's only two things that can happen when you jump into a bonfire. One of them is that you find out that it wasn't actually a bonfire, that you were afraid that it was going to burn you to pieces and it actually didn't. It wasn't as scary as you thought. You did it, you took the leap.

• 23:00Elizabeth Gilbert?

  It turned out to be kind of like warm and soft and easy. So it was no big deal. The other thing that can happen is that it is a bonfire and you are incinerated and your entire life is incinerated by it. And that's even better because then you get to be reborn as a phoenix on the other side, completely new. So either way, you win. So there's no reason not to. You'll either jump in and find out it was nothing or you'll jump in and you'll be destroyed. And that's awesome, too. When I say Martha doesn't play by the game, that's what I mean. Like, that's what I mean about she's not even in the arena that we would call any sort of normal way of living. And for that reason, she's been one of the top three most influential people in my entire life.

• 23:41Tim Ferriss?

  You're like, Martha, do we go left, left, right or straight? And she's like, we go up. You're like, what? How do we do that? Uh, that's incredible. Let's talk about the integrity check that sternum to navel area will have to come up with some sort of perineum like label that makes it a little easier.

• 24:01Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Intercom, I think, is it?

• 24:03Tim Ferriss?

  Intercom, there we go.

• 24:05Elizabeth Gilbert?

  That's where it's located, yeah.

• 24:06Tim Ferriss?

  When you do say an integrity check, and I had read that. When Ray was sick, for instance, you began deleting or archiving emails without responding as a bit of a treat to yourself.

• 24:18Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Delete.

• 24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Not archiving, delete. Okay, deleting, goodbye. And when you say now, check in with yourself and decide to say no to something, let's just to make it easy or make it concrete via email. You get an invitation from a friend you do actually really like with something that could plausibly advance your career or be fun, but you check in with yourself and it's like, no, this isn't a yes. How do you phrase your no's or declines? Do you have any particular go-to language that you like to use?

• 24:54Elizabeth Gilbert?

  I just want to make sure everybody knows that this is not easy. I don't want to have any illusions for anybody that this is simple. And the closer the relationship, the harder it is. The closer and more intimately I'm involved with somebody, the more stakes there are for me and the harder it is for me to tell the truth. And that feels like it should be, you know, there's a paradox. The people you love the most should be the people that you are able to be the most honest with. Well, no, because they're the people who you want to hurt the least. That's where it's really, really hard. There's a couple of layers of it. I now treat my inbox like it's my home because I think it's an extension of my home. So if somebody walks into my home uninvited and announces themselves and doesn't say

• 25:35Elizabeth Gilbert?

  how they got a key and asks for something, I delete that email. I'm just like, I didn't invite you. There are proper channels, you know what they are. I don't know how you got my personal email and I just delete it. And if I feel a sense in my sternum of offense, of feeling like this person has taken a liberty, I don't believe that I owe them anything. I don't believe that I owe them anything anymore than if I came down to my kitchen and saw people sitting at my table who I didn't know eating breakfast. I wouldn't believe that I owed them to make them a cup of coffee. I'd be like, get out of my house. You're not supposed to be here. I don't even think I owe them a polite response. I owe them nothing. I didn't ask you to come into my house. I don't owe you anything. So that's the easiest. Those are ones are easy.

• 26:19Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And I now treat myself to doing that. I mean, I do that every day. I clear my inbox out very quickly though. And then it's very, I'm entertained when they come back later and they're like, just circling back. And I'm like, yeah, just deleting you again. Circle back as many times as you want. You are not coming in. So that's simple. If it's a-

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  Just bumping this up, Pixie, how are you?

• 26:38Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Yeah, I'm just bumping you back. And I'm just, it's like whack a mole. It's like, I can do this all day. Delete, delete, delete. If it's somebody who I care about, if it's something that I'm interested in, but I'm just not going to do it because I don't want to, I will write back and say, thank you so much. I'm really honored that you invited me to this, but I'm not going to be able to do this at this time. And I don't feel a need to give a reason. I think a simple no is really, really good. And the reason, sometimes the reason it's good not to give an explanation is that if that person is an expert manipulator, as many of us are, that explanation will not suffice. So it won't matter what you give as an explanation because they can come back and be like, well,

• 27:23Elizabeth Gilbert?

  we can do it by audio, you know?

• 27:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 27:25Elizabeth Gilbert?

  We can do, oh, if you're, oh, well, we can do it a different weekend. Just no. And I learned a lot about this from my teacher, Byron Katie, who, who teaches an amazing thing called the School for the Work. She's a whole nother, another being who's not, not at all living by the rules.

• 27:40Tim Ferriss?

  Extraterrestrial, for sure.

• 27:42Elizabeth Gilbert?

  She is extraterrestrial. She is not, she is the only fully enlightened human being I can, I believe I have ever met. And as such, she does not have any trouble saying an honest yes and a no to people.

• 27:53Tim Ferriss?

  Just to underscore that, because I did a, an in-person training with her. I mean, literally, no.

• 28:01Tim Ferriss?

  Hesitation, no struggle, no conflict. It's bizarre and mesmerizing to watch.

• 28:11Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And she loves you.

• 28:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Elizabeth Gilbert?

  She loves you. There's also no hostility.

• 28:14Tim Ferriss?

  And no offense, no hostility.

• 28:17Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Somebody came up to her, somebody came up to her at an event, handed her a book that they'd written, which people do to me all the time, too. So I really marveled at this. They said, I wrote this and I want to share it with you. And she said, oh, sweetheart, I'm never going to read that. She said, true, it's just true. I'm never going to read that. And I'm like, oh, my God, I didn't know you could say that. So that's amazing. And she said it so lovingly, like, oh, no, I have no interest in reading that. So she teaches, I don't know if you did, when you took her training, did you do where she teaches a simple no? And she does the training on how to give a simple no?

• 28:49Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think we actually spent much time on that. So I would love to hear you say more. We worked on the emotional one pages and the turnarounds. We did a lot on the turnarounds, which is probably, we could do a whole episode just on that.

• 29:03Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Everybody look up Byron Katie, she's amazing. But, and if you have the means and if you have the chance to ever take her nine day school for the work, it's the most important thing I've ever done for myself. So.

• 29:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 29:13Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Say that quite simply. But she has a whole day in the nine day school for work, which is about the simple no. And the simple no is ways to say no. And it always begins with thank you. And there's never a but, because she feels that the word but is very cruel. And it's just an and. So it's thank you and no. And that's it. That's a simple no. And then if they come back, you can say.

• 29:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hold on, just to pause for a second. Is that literally the phrasing? Or is it just?

• 29:41Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 29:42Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Thank you and no. Yeah, that's it. That's it. And it just, it still makes my stomach ache because I'm like, oh, my God, you can't just do that. You've got to give, you've got to like, do the dance. And she's like, you don't have to do the dance. And she's the one who taught me, if the person is a good enough manipulator, it doesn't matter what you bring, they're going to manipulate it. And the beautiful thing about a simple no is that it gives, in the jujitsu game, it gives somebody no weapon that they can take and bring back at you. They can say, you're being incredibly selfish. And you can say, I hear that and you might be right about that. That's another one she always says, you might be right about that. You might be right about that. And no.

• 30:18Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And you just keep adding and no after the statement. So then there's, but you know, I really, I need you to do this. I'm desperate. And you say, I see that. I see your desperation and no. And one other thing she'll add is you can say, if I change my mind about this, I'll let you know. And no. And that's been a game changer for me. So I just did one last week. Somebody who I have a professional relationship said, I want you to do this one hour video interview to promote this thing that I'm doing. And old Liz would have thought, I owe her that because she did this other thing for me that time. And I checked in with my inner compass and I was like, nothing in me wants to do this.

• 31:01Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And so I just wrote back to her, I said, I'm so sorry, and I'm not going to be able to do this at this time. And she wrote back and pushed in and said, oh, let me clarify. I wasn't clear about why we need it. We really need it because right now it's really hard for us to sell things because of COVID-19. And that's why we need it. And I wrote back and said, I hear you and I understand you and no. And it goes away. They don't tend to come back a third time. You know, it really does just stop and let it sit at the no. The more words you add after that, the more entangled you get. But again, I want to make clear it's hardest closest to home and it's hardest with family. And with family, I find if I anticipate that I'm going to be asked something, I really have to practice.

• 31:45Elizabeth Gilbert?

  I really, because it's scary and I have to really practice and be like, and just practice saying, I'm not doing that right now. I'm not coming this year. And I'll say it a thousand times. I'll just go for a long walk and I'll just practice it and practice it and practice it. Because as I say, the closer the people are to you, the more difficult it is.

• 32:02Tim Ferriss?

  It has a bit of personal digression here. I was working on a book, an entire book about saying no this past summer. And the great irony, of course, is that I came up with all the reasons why I shouldn't write the book in the process of putting it together. But what I noticed as I was practicing different ways of saying no is that it's an incredibly clarifying.

• 32:27Tim Ferriss?

  Exercise because it, in a sense, it kind of brings to surface the true character of many people you know, or people who are attempting to reach you. And what I found surprising, and maybe I shouldn't have found it surprising, is that many of my close friends, who I anticipated might be upset, would respond with, dude, good for you for respecting your boundaries. That's a great line.

• 32:53Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Yeah, right.

• 32:54Tim Ferriss?

  Rock on. And they got it. And they were just like, oh, I wish I could say that more myself. Like, good for you. And it was the bonfire that wasn't a bonfire in those cases.

• 33:05Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Uh huh. Uh huh. Did you ever run into a bonfire that was one?

• 33:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure. Absolutely. And then I'm like, oh, wow. Because if you, what I like about what you said about the, or the sort of jujitsu analogy, is that if you provide really specific reasons for why you can't do it, and you elaborate, you've just created a potential negotiation.

• 33:30Elizabeth Gilbert?

  Right.

• 33:30Tim Ferriss?

  But if you don't provide that grip, that toehold, then one of the few responses someone can give you if they're upset and still want to push is some type of personal ad hominem attack or an accusation. And then you're like, oh, wow. Okay, now it's that kind of party. Okay. This is good to know before we're on stage having a public tiff at god knows what. I mean, this is valuable information. So there were definitely some bonfires. And basically, people just self-immolated because I was like, oh, wow. You've just proved my internal compass to be extremely accurate.

• 34:08Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And right. This is the reason. And here is the reason I'm not working with you.

• 34:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:14Elizabeth Gilbert?

  But you don't even just say that. You just know it because the body knows first. The body knows first, but only always. Only always. One of the things that Martha says that I love is she's like, because culture and civilization have overwritten the software system of the body so much and told you that you don't trust that, what you trust are the rules and the mores and the fear-based, scarcity-based grasping, this is how you have to act, this is who you have to be in order to be safe. And meanwhile, our body's like, ew, you know, it's working. No, ew, gross. Or on the opposite side, like yummy, like, mm, that's, I want to be over there. I want to be with those people, you know, I don't want to be with these people.

• 34:57Elizabeth Gilbert?

  And if you think about it, the wisdom of the body is so incredible. How many people do you know who said, I knew the night before my wedding that this was a mistake? How many people do you know say that? And yet, why did you do it? Because you were 29 and it was time to get married? Because you'd been raised in a culture that said, this is what you do now? Because the invitations had been sent out? Because 300 people had gathered? Because your family spent $30,000 on the wedding? Like, whatever the reasons were, you knew, somewhere in that sternum area, you knew. And how much you had to drink that day in order to override that? Whatever you had to do in order to shut down that compass that was saying, uh-uh, it's brutal. That's the work of the second half of my life. I

• 35:41Elizabeth Gilbert?

  can say that now that I'm 50, that the only thing I'm interested in anymore is that.

• 35:51Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply.

• 36:32Tim Ferriss?

  Vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  And now, Jack Kornfield, one of the key teachers to introduce mindfulness practice to the West, author of 16 books, including Bringing Home the Dharma and Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, and a founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. You can find Jack on Instagram @Jack underscore Kornfield.

• 37:24Tim Ferriss?

  Jack, welcome to the show.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you, Tim. Pleasure to reconnect.

• 37:29Tim Ferriss?

  I have wanted to have you on the show for some time now, and you've had certainly a tremendous impact on my life, both through your writing and through firsthand, in-person interaction, which I think we'll touch upon. But first, I wanted to ask you a complete non sequitur from that, which is something that our mutual friend Adam Gazali suggested I ask you about. And Adam, for people who don't know him, is an incredible PhD, MD neuroscientist based at UCSF. And he suggested that I ask you about hang gliding. And I have no idea why he suggested that, but I'm going to start there, and if it doesn't

• 38:13Tim Ferriss?

  go anywhere, we can change direction. But I figured we would just start with that, and then we're going to rewind the clock. But why did he suggest I ask you about hang gliding?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Well, it started many years ago when I crossed country with a friend who had a hang glider, and we would stop periodically and go off different hills. And it was fantastic. And then I wanted to do paragliding and started to learn it now because everything is developed. Paragliding is a lot more official. You need a license, which I don't have. But one of my favorite things is to tandem paraglide and go off the top of places like Grindelwald in Switzerland, where you can take the ski lift up to 9,000 feet and then jump off and float. Silently, like you're a bird among the clouds.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  The birds actually do come by sometimes and like check out, what's this big bird flying up here? You can catch thermals and go way up above the glaciers. It's one of the most thrilling and delicious experiences that I know.

• 39:20Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible. So you first experienced that at what age?

• 39:23Speaker 02

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

• 40:00Tim Ferriss?

  And this is something you still do?

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. I hope to do it next summer when I'm back in the Alps.

• 40:06Tim Ferriss?

  And how, how old are you now?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Seventy-two.

• 40:09Tim Ferriss?

  Seventy-two. Good man. Well, we're gonna then go back a bit in chronology and ask about childhood. I would love to hear you describe your childhood. What were you like as a child? What was your upbringing like?

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Well, first thing to say is I remember when I got to Dartmouth College in 1963. And I called my mom from the payphone in the dorm sometime in that fall. I didn't call very often, but you know how it is. And I said, Mom, I said, guess what? There are a lot of other really fucked up families beside ours.

• 40:51Speaker 02

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

• 41:33Speaker 02

  the Army Biological Weapons people, not making biological weapons, but trying to design things that were kind of computer biological interfaces, all kinds of creative stuff. But he was, he had mental problems and so we didn't know when the car pulled in whether we were going to get Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. He would come in and, you know, either he could shout, be abusive, throw my mother down the stairs, rant, chase after us, try to hit us, whatever, or we'd get this interesting creative person, but we hardly ever had people come over when he was around during the daytime, is the way we would, because he never knew what you would get.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  And so our family life, in my family life, in some way was also, there were great parts of it because I had my brothers and we were like our own gang. We moved all the time, but we had each other. And because he was wacky as well as smart, my father either quit or got fired every year or two and then we would go from one place to another. I went to, I don't know, eight schools by the time I finished high school. So my childhood partly was the happy things of roughhousing and being a boy with three other boys and adventures. And then in the basement, my father had all kinds of scientific equipment. He had all this stuff from World War II, this huge radio from a battleship that you

• 42:58Speaker 02

  could tune into, a thousand different shortwave stations around the world and projects he was trying to design stuff. And so we learned from him, you could pretty much. Pick or design or do anything in the physical world. And at the same time, I felt like my whole childhood was also colored with the fear of his violence and his unpredictability. And I became kind of a peacemaker in the family. We all sort of had our roles and now I do it as a profession, right? Trying to kind of make it a little smoother between my parents so that they'd kill each other. And each of my brothers had their own strategy.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  My twin brother, who was a lot bigger and much more outgoing, played football, which I certainly didn't. I was skinnier and, you know, I was in the orchestra and he was the football player. I remember when he first got in a fistfight with my dad, because my father was abusing her mom. My twin brother had been, as young men sometimes do, was probably thirteen, fourteen, pretty big, and he was looking in the mirror, making muscles in the mirror to see how strong he'd become. Anyway, he just got into a fistfight with my father. And I was both thrilled and terrified, but it worked in some way because of the abuse. Settled down quite a lot after that.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  So that was his, his strategy was just to get angry and then later kind of to go his own way somewhat more, although we're all, all have been very close as brothers. So there was that. At the same time, there was a lot of interest, intellectual interest. So we read and learned about all kinds of things. Both my parents were really interested in the world around us. So it was sort of this mixed thing of the gift of being together with my brothers and a mom who was basically pretty nurturing, although she kept trying to leave him and never got it together. I think it was too scary in the fifties to have four boys, you know, no job. And so we were in the middle of this.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  And the kind of healing that it took, it took a long time to do the inner healing work from the pain of my family. And I remember when I became a Buddhist monk and I was sitting. These first years with my teacher Ajahn Chah in the forest monasteries of Thailand, on the border of Thailand and Laos. And I'm sitting quietly, and then some of these memories or energy would come. Where I remember one monk who had a hut near mine in the forest did something that annoyed me, and I just got enraged inside. And I sat, and I went to the teacher and I said, "I'm really getting angry here."

• 45:47Speaker 02

  And he smiled, he said, "Yeah, where do you think that comes from?" Or something like that. And I said, "Well, I don't know." I said, "I thought I was a peaceful guy. I was never gonna be like my father. I won't, you know, I'll be peaceful." But it turned out I just stuffed all that stuff. And so when I told my teacher about it, he said, "Good." He said, "Go back in your hut. It's the hot season. You got a little tin roof and close the doors and windows and put all your robes on. And if you're gonna be angry, do it right. Sit in the middle of that, you know, and sit in the middle of the fire and don't be so afraid of it. Because if you're afraid of it, you're just gonna keep stuffing it. And on the other hand, or if you're afraid of it, it'll just explode. There's another way to be with it." And so that was the beginning of some healing,

• 46:30Speaker 02

  just to realize that I could actually tolerate the suffering and the energy that was in my, still carried from trauma in my body and heart.

• 46:40Tim Ferriss?

  So we're gonna absolutely come back to Ajahn Chah because I have many questions on that chapter in your life. But just so that I can create the proper visual in my own head. So you sat there in your hut, in the sweltering heat with all of your robes on. Were you angry in silence? Were you yelling?

• 46:59Speaker 02

  I was, I was pretty much angry in silence. And that's an interesting question. You know, in the monastery, the culture was not much that you would yell. You could go somewhere out in the forest and yell. It wasn't decorous or something. People were, "What the hell's wrong with that monk?" So mostly, I was sitting in silence. And then scenes would come, and I would realize, "Wow." I thought I was peaceful in every cell of my body. I also carry both the pain and anger of my childhood and my father, and just the anger that comes with being a human being, a human incarnation. And I was never going to have that, but of course, there it was. And it lasted, you know, this was, I had days of, and actually, much longer, weeks or months of waves of this coming,

• 47:44Speaker 02

  and learning how to be present for it and not get overwhelmed by it.

• 47:49Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to backtrack and then connect those dots. So between childhood and ending up in Thailand, you mentioned Dartmouth earlier, and from what I've read at least, you were initially pre-med and then ended up Asian Studies. Could you describe that experience in Dartmouth, or how you went from pre-med to Asian Studies?

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we all get turned in these mysterious ways in our life. We think we're going one direction, and then something happens unexpectedly and a gateway opens. So I was coming from an organic chemistry class to the class that I'd signed up for out of interest on Asian Studies, or Asian philosophy or something. And it was an old professor, Dr. Wing Sit Chan, who'd come up from Harvard. He was kind of emeritus there. And he even sat cross-legged sometimes, you know, in the front of the room, and would talk about Lao Tzu and Taoism.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  And they'd talk about Buddhist teachings and how the Buddha taught suffering and its causes and its end. And that really, all of a sudden, I sat up, there's an end to suffering. And he said, oh, there's all these teachings and practices where you can transform your heart and mind. And I became... Thrilled about it and realized that whatever impulse I had to go to medical school, probably part of it came from wanting to heal myself. And so I started to take more and more courses and then it was the sixties and I became a card carrying hippie, a card carrying LSD taking hippie, as a matter of fact. And at the end of when I was getting ready to graduate, there was still the draft.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  And I thought, well, I definitely don't want to go over and kill people in a war that I've been protesting against. So I decided to go into the Peace Corps instead and ask them to send me to a Buddhist country where maybe I could find a, one of those old Zen masters that you read about and got assigned to Thailand. And when I got there, you could kind of request where you went. And I said, send me the most remote place you can. I wanted adventure, but I also wanted to kind of, reading all those old Zen stories, I wanted to see if that still existed. You know, and there were little detours, like being in Haydas Brey in the Summer of Love and things like that, that definitely, they, it changed my life also in a very deep way.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Because for, at least for a time, there was a window when people were just giving things away. There was such a sense that the world could be transformed. Some of it, as we know, very, very naive. But on the other hand, it also felt like a greater sense of brotherhood and sisterhood than I had ever known, except with my own brothers, who I love a lot. We've done a lot of things together. And I started to feel like there are other ways for me and for the world to be and live. And that was also very wonderful.

• 50:57Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned a three letter acronym that we're probably not going to spend too too much time on, but you and I have had quite a number of conversations where I've wanted to ask you about some of your experiences with psychedelics, including LSD, but we've never really gotten into it. So I figure, why not do it in front of a few million people? The LSD, at that point, your experiences with that, did that inform your decisions at all to then go into the Peace Corps and?

• 51:22Speaker 02

  End up in a remote area? It did, and I've written a little bit about it in a couple of different of my books, chapters in books I've written, because most Buddhist teachers and Hindu teachers of my generation also started with psychedelics, you know, myself and almost all my colleagues, you know, in the spiritual industry that I'm in. That was a beginning, and for me, it showed an incredible possibility that all is created out of consciousness and the possibilities of inner freedom. And basically, I was able, at the best of it, to see my body and my personality and my history and realize that that's not who I am.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  To become much more the conscious witness of it all, to see, yes, birth and death, and to go through those kind of death rebirth experiences that can happen at times in a deep session with LSD, or death of ego or sense of self, or removing, and realizing, wow, there's a freedom and a life force, it's what we're made of. And that profoundly influenced my interest in spirituality, also interest in what the world can be. Now, just a few days ago, I was on Maui with my beloved wife Trudy, and we were visiting, spending time with Ram Dass, who, for listeners that don't know, was the author of this bestseller

• 52:47Speaker 02

  in the sixties called Be Here Now, and now he's in eighty-six, in a wheelchair. But Ram Dass, who had been at Harvard University and was one of the early explorers of LSD before he went to India and became a spiritual teacher, in the living room while we were there two days ago, Roland Fisher, who is one of the senior professors and psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Oh, Roland Griffiths. Roland Griffiths, rather. And Roland, excuse me, Roland Griffiths, and Roland laid out all the research that's happening now on psilocybin that he's been doing, and its success for people, terminal

• 53:30Speaker 02

  cancer patients, all losing a great deal of their, the fears that they had, working with people with severe depression. And it was a beautiful session, because you could hear how these sacred substances and these mind-altering substances, when they're used in the right context.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Can really transform human beings. And NYU, Johns Hopkins, there's a whole series of studies that are happening now that are finally bringing it back into the mainstream.

• 54:02Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love to underscore just a few things that you mentioned. Number one, Ram Dass, for those people who want to do additional reading, formerly known as Richard Alpert, if I'm getting that right.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:14Tim Ferriss?

  Also has a fascinating story coming full circle with psychedelic research, beginning, I guess, at Harvard in some respects. So it makes sense to me why Roland's research would be so meaningful to him. And a number of other just quick comments for people. Number one is if you're interested in looking into these psilocybin, which is considered the active, psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. I've actually been involved with crowdfunding and funding myself some of the research related to treatment-resistant depression at Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths as the senior investigator. And I'll be posting some updates to that.

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  But fascinating work, looking at everything from, and this is also, as you mentioned, NYU and at other very well-regarded universities, alcohol addiction, nicotine slash tobacco addiction, as you mentioned, end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients. The implications are really profound and the data very, very promising. And I wanted to also mention to folks who are perhaps saying to themselves, well, I'm not interested in taking psychedelics myself, that there are people I know, good friends of mine, who do not currently use psychedelics, but had the ego-dissolving experience of a non-ordinary reality through psychedelics that then led them to become,

• 55:41Tim Ferriss?

  or contributed to them becoming, very, very diligent meditators. And Sam Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience and thought of or very well-known as An atheist, or you know, one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse, along with Richard Dawkins and others, is a very close friend and extremely diligent meditator. And he's, he's written about how his psychedelic experiences, which were in some respects very, some of them uncontrolled, and you really have a coin flip there in terms of which direction you can go, but showed him possibilities within his own mind that then led to a very, very, I'm not gonna call it devout, although I should just to bother maybe diligent

• 56:24Tim Ferriss?

  practice. So I don't want to take us too far off the rails, but you go to Southeast Asia.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Well, I just want to say one more thing before we move on, because we are talking about this. It turns out, for those who are listening, that set and setting and intention are extremely important. If one uses these psychedelics like psilocybin or something, to set the intention to learn, to open, to have a quiet, it's not as a party experience.

• 56:52Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely.

• 56:53Speaker 02

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

• 57:37Speaker 02

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

• 58:19Speaker 02

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

• 59:04Speaker 02

  And that they're given gifts to bring into the world. And that we have gifts to bring to this mystery, which include opening to it. And as we do, love grows, connection grows, and a whole different way of being in the world happens that we need so much at this time. So that's a little interlude there before we move on to your next question.

• 59:29Tim Ferriss?

  I welcome as many interludes as you would like to interject. And I wanted to just ask you to say one more time that it was, I believe, Greek word for...

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Khatemba, which means a blow. It's like something comes and it just sets your life spinning in an entirely different direction.

• 59:46Tim Ferriss?

  Right, like a catalyzing event.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 59:49Tim Ferriss?

  I've had a few of those recently that I'd like to selfishly ask you about later. But so I can bookmark, just so I can bookmark this name, Stanislav Grav, if I'm saying that correctly?

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  Yes, that's correct.

• 1:00:01Tim Ferriss?

  When, just when did you meet him roughly? What age or what date, just so I can come back to it? Because this is another thing I've been meaning to ask you about for a long time and get into, but I haven't had the chance.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  There's two things to say. When I came back from the monastery... And now, you know, I guess the year that I connected with Stan was maybe 1973. I made two really important connections. I came back and started a psychology in graduate school. I was in Boston. And first really important connection happened when I went to a meeting of the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and there was this guy who looked like he didn't look just like the straight psychologist, and it turned out he'd just come back from India not long before, named Dan Goldman, who was a graduate student at Harvard. And he'd projected on the screen this Tibetan wheel of birth and death that

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  you see in the Tibetan tankas that normally would be taken as some kind of primitive iconic symbol. And he said, no, no, no, this is a psychological diagram. The Buddha was actually, more than anything else, he was a scientist of the mind and a profound psychologist. And here is how craving turns into contentment, and here's how aggression can be transformed into powerful energy to heal yourself and others. And he was going through this diagram. And I went and I talked to him, and he said, oh, you, you come back from monastery, you've got to come over. And so he took me to David McClellan, who had been the chairman of the Social Science and Psychology Department at Harvard at that

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  time, the one who hired Tim Leary and Ram Dass, and then later had to fire them for their LSD work. And his house, he and his wife Mary were Quakers, his home was a kind of soiree where Ram Dass and Tibetan lamas like Chogyam Trungpa, and I think Krishnamurti, and various spiritual figures would come. People were going to India and coming back. And I connected with this whole group of folks who've now been friends for 45 years. Richie Davidson was another that I met there, who's now one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the world on studying contemplative neuroscience and affective emotional neuroscience. It

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  was a whole collective of people. Dan Goldman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence that sold 10 million copies and many others. And then I got a job working for an Esalen-like growth center in Boston at that time because I was excited at all the new Gestalt, Bioenergetics, what are the things that are transformative here? And they asked me to help set up programs and I thought, well, who do I want to meet? So I set up a program with John Lilly and I set up a program with Stan Grof, who was still at Johns Hopkins and married at that time, just married to Joan, Halifax Joan Grof. And we became friends. And so we, Stan and I have now worked together for 45 years.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  I went out to join him at Esalen for many, many years, spending many months together, helping during his development of the Holotropic Breath work that's this powerful breath transformation. And he has been a partner and a heart friend for exploration and we've traveled, we've taught in Russia and in places in Europe and various places around the world.

• 1:03:32Tim Ferriss?

  So this is definitely a path that we're going to come down and dig further into. But I'm going to steer us to Ajahn Shah because I want to know, how do you land with the Peace Corps in remote, well, what most people would consider a remote corner of the world and end up finding a living master? How does that actually happen? I don't know, but I assume you didn't speak Thai at the time?

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  I did, actually.

• 1:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  You did?

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Because the Peace Corps.

• 1:04:03Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

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

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  So I, I went to this little mountain and walked up 2,000 steps to the old Cambodian temple ruin at the top. And there was this very interesting guy who had just finished a couple of years before the first Peace Corps, I think, in Borneo, and then got interested in Buddhism and come and ordained as a monk. And I talked with him. He's now, he's named Ajahn Sumedha is his monk's name, because he's still a monk. And he became quite famous in Thailand and then became the abbot of a temple in, in England. And I, I became friends with him. And he said, "Oh, I found a really fine teacher." He said, "You know, a lot of them, they kind of take you, you're a Westerner and they treat you special." He said, "This guy doesn't treat you any differently than anyone else.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  He just wants you to do the work, you know, and learn the deepest way you can." And he's in this forest jungle. And I said, "I'm going there." So having heard that, I went and I visited Ajahn Chah. And he was a little bit like the Dalai Lama. He was funny and wise and very warm-hearted, but also very strict and very demanding, but he did it in this loving way. And I thought, "Okay, this is the real deal. This guy looks like what I was reading about in all those Zen stories."

• 1:05:59Tim Ferriss?

  I read that he said to you, and I'd love for you to tell us when he said this to you, "I hope you're not afraid to suffer." If that's true, when did he say that and why did he say that?

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  So I'd visited him a number of times and told him I was going to become a monk. And then I ordained in a village where I was living in the Peace Corps. People wanted me to do that. It was a beautiful ritual. And then after some days, made my way down to his temple. That was his opening gambit. I'm walking in, into the gates and I see him right now and I say, "I'm here." And he looks at me, you know, kind of... Leans back a little, a little skeptical. He said, "All right, I hope you're not afraid to suffer. Welcome." It was like, you know, "You didn't come here just to kind of do some interesting, cool anthropological experiment or something like that. If you're gonna do it, we're gonna put you through the training."

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  And he did, but you know, there was like this little smile as he said it, like, "Okay, are you up for it? All right, dude, come on in."

• 1:07:07Tim Ferriss?

  And what did the training consist of? What were some of the first things that you had to do? And then what was this suffering that he alluded to? What were some examples?

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Well, there'll be some examples. Okay. So, of course, the first training was just how to walk around and not have my robe, you know, fall on the ground and embarrass me and everyone else. "Oh, they come..." So, they all loved it. "Oh, yeah, all right, look at the Westerner. He's... He can't even chew gum and wear his robes right," or whatever. So, part of it was just the unfamiliarity of it culturally and otherwise. There were the two kinds of suffering. The big suffering, of course, was being alone with my own mind. I mean, there you go, you know, having to do hours of meditation when I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And then, as I talked about, with anger, or fear, or confusion, or, you know, all

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  those kind of states, learning to deal in a very conscious and mindful way, and then, more importantly, in a compassionate way, in a kind and loving way, with all the energies that make up my humanity and our humanity. And that means that when you sit and you get quiet, anything unfinished in your heart will also come up, all the unfinished business. So, you know, relationships that I'd had that ended badly in college, or certainly stuff from my childhood and family, dreams that I carried, things fulfilled and not... All that comes up. It's... Yeah, my friend, Annie Lamott, humorist and writer, says, "My mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone."

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  And there's some way in which, in community, sitting together with others in meditation, and then sitting in my hut, it was really facing myself and my full humanity. That was probably the most difficult thing, because then you get insanely bored, or insanely restless, or... And then, how do you deal with all those energies? Normally, when we're restless or bored, what do we do? We open the refrigerator, or, you know, go online or something, because we can't be with our own loneliness. Or our own fear. So that was the inner, and then there's the outer ones. What are the? And the outer ones. Yeah, the outer ones. Outer ones were things like, hmm, getting up, the bell would ring at three thirty in the morning. And I'm not an early riser by nature. I go, oh God, here we go.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Then we walked through, it was actually very beautiful. Then we'd walk through the forest at night, either by moonlight, or sometimes you'd have a tiny little flashlight. And in one of the forest monasteries where there were a lot of cobras, we'd have a little stick and you'd tap the path. So that the snakes would know you were, feel you coming and move out of the way, wouldn't step on them. And then we would sit silently for a couple of hours and then do an hour of chanting on a hard stone floor, mind you. Where everybody else seemed comfortable and my body was killing me. And then at least once a week, we would sit up all night with the teacher. And he would sit there comfortably, meditating, maybe talking with another colleague that would come.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  And we'd just be sitting and meditating and he would kind of peek over at us like, how are you doing? And I'd go, God, it's been four hours. When is he gonna let us go back to sleep? And he didn't, you know, so sitting up all night, it got very cold in the cold season. And it got insanely hot in the hot season. And somehow learning to live extremely simply with a set of sandals and a set of robes. And an almspole, and then you would eat what you got offered in the village. And we would share it in that monastery with others around us. And sometimes you'd get nice food and a lot of times in the dry season.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  You'd get really, really skimpy food and there wasn't that much to eat. And so picture a day where you get up at three thirty in the morning. You sit for a couple of hours in meditation and do a long, then an hour long chanting on a stone floor. Then it's getting dawn and you walk barefoot, three miles, five miles, ten miles with an almspole and a handful of other monks. And get your food and come back, whatever you've been offered, and that's the food for the day. And then you go back to your meditation or to the work of the monastery of sewing robes or drawing water from the well. And it's muggy and a hundred and five degrees hot season. Then you go back and you join in the community for more meditation.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  And then the teacher smiles and say, how are you doing, you know? And then other kinds of practices, for example, we had a charnel ground there. And so

• 1:11:41Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry, a what ground?

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  A charnel ground, which is where a cremation ground, where people bodies would be burned. And so on occasion would go to a cremation and then sit up all night and contemplate death. Look at the body and then watches it burned. And then do these meditations where you would reflect on, well, this is going to happen to the body that you're inhabiting as well. Who do you think you are? Do you think you're this physical body made of hamburgers or lettuce or whatever you happen to eat? Is that you are you hamburgers and lettuce? You know, or or are you your feelings or are you your thoughts? Who are you really born into this body? Like koans. So anyways.

• 1:12:26Tim Ferriss?

  And the alms bowl, so you'd be. Did you eat whatever you gathered in one meal? Was it spread throughout?

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  One meal, one meal, you eat one meal a day, which makes you very easy to makes your life easy. And at the same at that monastery, things were shared. There was other monasteries I stayed in where you would just eat what was put in your own bowl. And you didn't have to eat everything that was given to you. There were some things that were, you know, in the dry, poor season, there would be curries that were too hot for me to eat because they use the chilies to kind of

• 1:13:02Tim Ferriss?

  Preserve the food.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Preserve, preserve the food. But you know, when it was a really poor village or something, you know, they would have to make curries out of field mice or field rats or bat or bats or, you know, I remember eating, there was a curry that was made out of basically grasshoppers that had come sweat through. And there was this whole big insect wave of insects that were eating the crops and they they collected them all and made a curry out of it. So, you know, okay, this is this is what you get for your food today, dude.

• 1:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  I think I might take the grasshoppers over the over the bats, but

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah. When it's really highly spicy, you can't tell what is mystery.

• 1:13:41Tim Ferriss?

  That's true.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  We all had mystery meat in middle school anyway. This was like mystery meat on steroids.

• 1:13:47Tim Ferriss?

  Exotic mystery meat. What was the longest period of time that you spent in silence during that time in Thailand?

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Well, then I went to a Burmese monastery because I wanted to do this very intense meditative. Training and I spent about 500 days, so less than a year and a half in silence, with the exception that I would talk to the teacher. Every couple of days, I'd have a little 10-minute conversation about what was happening in my meditation. And the rest, I was just sitting and walking 18 hours a day when I could, or so, sleeping a little bit. And I remember, at one point, it was relatively early on, I'd been sitting and walking and appreciating it as young men do, you know, I'm gonna get enlightened and all of that, and not moving, sitting with a lot of pain,

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  which is also part of what happened at the forest monastery, sitting on a stone floor for hours without moving. Really had to learn how to deal with your own physical pain. And I was exhausted from sitting and walking in my little hut that I had for that long retreat, and after a couple of months, I thought, I'm really tired, I gotta lie down. But then I thought, well, but I'm not gonna nap for very long, cuz I'm I'm on my way to enlightenment, whatever, I'm gonna do this right. So I said, alright, I'll lie down on the wooden floor, rather than on the little mat that I had. And that way, I won't sleep so long. And I'm lying there, and then I wake up,

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  and I get up, and I walk very slowly, doing this mindful slow walking to the end of the hut, and look out the window toward where some of the other monks and the teachers live, some way down through the trees. And then I turn around and I start walking the other direction in this meditation hut that I had, that you could walk, probably it was maybe 15, 18 feet long, it was long and narrow. And I see this body lying on the floor. And all of a sudden, I go, oh, that's me! And then I realized that I'm having an out-of-the-body experience, and what had happened is that I was so intent, I'm not gonna sleep long, I'll get up very soon, that intention was really strong,

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  but my body didn't wanna get up, so I got up. But it wasn't, it wasn't in my body. And I walk very slowly and I peered down at my body and I turned around, walked the other way, walked back. And then the second time I walked back, I got closer and then I fell into my body. And I woke up, I thought, oh, wow, that's interesting. But what I saw out the window wasn't just like a dream, because I was watching, you know, my teacher and talking to these other monks. And then I got up again and that's exactly what was happening. And that was the first of a, a series of all kinds of very interesting experiences that happened.

• 1:16:37Tim Ferriss?

  What would other examples of those types of unusual experiences be? And was it your time in Burma that found you experiencing these for the first time?

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  First of all, the first experiences, even though I had experimented with meditation back in college and so forth, were experiences, again, that came through psychedelics. And so I was familiar with all kinds of weird and powerful and mysterious or mystical kind of experiences. But there's something about learning how to navigate it without taking a substance and learning that your own consciousness is the field that you can learn to navigate. First, all the personality and emotions and history and so forth. But then you start to realize that you're bigger than that, that who you are is not just your thoughts and feelings in your mind.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  And so whether it's out of body experience or the experience of vastness and becoming the sky within which everything arises and passes, or the experience of profound silence or of the void where you enter a stillness before experience even arises, or the experience of luminosity where my body would dissolve into light. There are times sitting as you get concentrated and some body or concentration builds that your whole body and mind open up and, you know, first you get the elements, your body can feel. Heavy like a stone, the earth element, or it can feel so light that you have to open your eyes and make sure you're not floating because it feels like you're floating in the air.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  Or it can be filled with fire and you feel like you're in the middle of a raging fire, or it can get icy cold, you know, or all kinds of vibrations and Kundalini energies and chakras start to open. And sometimes it's pleasant, sometimes it's not, you know. As deep energies start to move through your body, they also kind of push open the places that are held closed so that when your heart starts to open in deep meditation, sometimes it feels like you're having a heart attack, physically painful, because all the things that you've held around your heart to protect yourself start to loosen. Or when the energy hits your throat and it starts to open, weird sounds come out, you

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  know, and then you get to visions that come in the bra chakra, you start to see all kinds of colors and visions and hear things. All possibilities of the play of consciousness can start to open after both period of silence, but also of really deeply training attention and concentration.

• 1:19:15Tim Ferriss?

  These experiences, just to put them in, or at least part of what you said in context for people listening, there are a number of things you mentioned, but one in particular, that opening in the chest that I experienced in the 10-day retreat done at Spirit Rock, for which you were one of the instructors, the lead instructor. And it was an incredibly powerful experience. And listening to your description of some of the feelings, it makes me want to go to the jungle and spend time doing this type of training. However, the 10-day retreat, as you know from firsthand observation and interacting with

• 1:19:56Tim Ferriss?

  me, was incredibly difficult for me and terrifying at a number of points, where I felt like I had crossed a boundary into maybe even madness, where I was fearful I wouldn't be able to return from. So I'm curious to know, during that period of time in Thailand... And Burma could be afterwards as well, but when you were in the jungle and doing this very intense work, were there any particular points when you wanted to quit to go home?

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, and I remember I got what I think was malaria. I had a really high fever and I was sick as a dog and I'm lying in the bottom of my little hut there, high fever and shivering and Ajahn Chah came to visit me and in the Lao language and he was also funny and quite blunt. And the Lao language is a very straightforward kind of, the sentence structures are really simple. So he looked at me and he said, "Sick, huh?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Hurts all over, huh?" I said, "It's your tuss." He said, "Hot and cold, yeah." He said, "Makes you afraid." I nodded. He said, "Makes you want to go home and see your mother, doesn't it?" And I'm nodding there. And then he looked

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  at me and he said, "You know, this is the jungle fever. This is malaria. We've all had it. But now there's some good medicine. I'll send the medicine monk over and in a couple of days you'll be fine." And then he looked at me and he said, "You can do this, you know, you can do this." So, I mean, that was an example of wanting to go home to my mother. What am I doing?

• 1:21:29Tim Ferriss?

  What kept you going? I mean, I don't want to interrupt, but it's like, what kept you going? I'm imagining 500 days of silence. I could barely handle 10 days.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  You know, Tim, I mean, what's kept you going? What keeps any of us going about things that we care about? I had somehow, I don't know, kind of a wacky, but I think also important kind of passion to say, "I want to understand." Or, "I've started down this road and I want to see where it goes." And I think all of us find at a certain point in our lives that there, or if we're lucky, that something really matters. And you've done it in your work and your travel. You want to explore what your human capacity is. And I've read these old Zen stories and I want to see if this is true. I want to find out. And then as I started, things started to happen like that, out of the body experience

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  and rapture and changes and openings. And I realized there's really something to learn here. But there are a couple of other things that I want to add to this. One of them that's the most important is that it turns out that it wasn't, and it isn't so much about the actual experiences. So Ajahn Chah, my teacher, talked about how in his own training for

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  The first eight years in the jungle, he had been a very ardent meditator and had all kinds of insights in dissolving and samadhi and jhana experiences, all kinds of... Samadhi is awakening? Samadhi is... yeah, or certainly... Nirvana, how would you translate? Profound... samadhi has a lot of meanings as a word, but it can mean profound states of concentration in which the mind dissolves into light or into joy or bliss or becomes absorbed with any one of all kinds of states. So he went to the most famous teacher of that time, another Ajahn Ajahn Man, and told him about all these experiences. And the master looked back and said, "Cha, you missed the point. These are just experiences."

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  You know, it's like going to the movies and you have a romantic comedy and you have a war movie and you have a documentary and you have, you know, a Disney movie. He said, "They're just movies on the screen, some pleasant, some unpleasant. The only question is, to whom do they happen? Turn your attention back and ask, look to see, who is the witness of these? What is the consciousness that is knowing these ever-changing experiences? This is where your liberation will come." He said, "Become..." His language, if I translate it, is "the one who knows." Become the knowing rather than the experiences.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  And then you can tolerate anything and you can respond with love and understanding because you rest in the timeless consciousness which is your true nature. So part of what I also learned in meditation and teach is that it's not so much about the experiences, "Oh, I want to have this or that experience," but it's this profound turning back to ask, "Who am I? What is this consciousness itself?" And that was born into this body, that will leave it, and we can talk about death at some point if you want. What is this mysterious consciousness itself? So there was that. And then, then I also had the opportunity of being with a few other teachers.

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  And one of the people that I was very close to and inspired me profoundly was a Cambodian monk named Mahagosinanda, who was the Gandhi of Cambodia. And when I met him, we were living and training together in a forest monastery in Thailand. And it was during the time that Khmer Rouge came to power and eventually killed 2 million Cambodians in a kind of genocide. He survived because he wasn't in country, but all 19 of his family members were killed. His temple burned, all the Buddhist texts and so forth were destroyed. And when he was able to, he went to the refugee camps. Refugees were pouring out of Cambodia by the hundreds of thousands.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  And he went to the refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Cambodia. And I was able to go with him at a certain point. And he decided to open a temple in the middle of one of the biggest refugee camps. Here's 50 or 100,000 people, these tiny little bamboo huts. And got permission from the UN HCR, High Commissioner of Refugees, and built a platform with a little roof over it and put an altar with the traditional Cambodian Buddha on it and so forth. But it was a camp with the Khmer Rouge underground, lots of them. And so they put the word out that if anyone went to be with this monk, when they got out of the camp back to Cambodia, they would all be shot.

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  So we wondered who would, if anyone would come. And went through the camp, the day, the opening day, with a big kind of temple gong ringing it. And 25,000 people poured into the central square around this little temple. My God. And he, Mah Gosananda sat there, and he was a scholar. He spoke 15 languages. And he was a, you know, extremely kind-hearted human being who had suffered enormously and had transformed it into the kind of compassion that we think of with the Dalai Lama or something like that. In fact, they became friends. And Gosananda became the head of all Cambodian Buddhism. But there he was at this point.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Seeing, looking out at 25,000 people who had suffered immense traumas and you could see there was a grandmother and the only two surviving grandchildren that she had, or an uncle and one niece, and their faces were the faces of trauma and of survivors. And I thought, alright, what is he gonna say to them? And he sat very quietly for a long time, just in their presence. And then he put his hands together in this kind of modest way and began to chant in the microphone, he had a sound system, in Cambodian and in Sanskrit or Pali, the Buddhist language.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  One of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes, "Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law." And he chanted it over and over in Cambodian and in Sanskrit, Pali. And pretty soon, the chant was picked up and in a little while, 25,000 people were chanting this verse with him. And I looked out and they were weeping, many of them because they hadn't heard their sacred chants for years, but also

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  because he was offering them a truth that was even bigger than their sorrows. That hatred never ends by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. And they were sitting in the middle of the the healing energy of the Dharma, of the teachings of the heart that can liberate us. Later on, Gosananda, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times, spent 15 years walking through the killing fields and the mine areas and so forth, leading people on foot back to their village. And he said to the refugees, "You can't go back in a bus or the back of a truck

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  or something like that. You have to reclaim your land with love." And so he would lead a thousand people and he'd be in the front with a bell and a gong and a few other monks. And the whole way back, they would be chanting the chants of loving kindness so that by the time they got to their village, whatever had been destroyed, there was a sense that they were reclaiming not just the land, but they were reclaiming their own hearts.

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  That's a beautiful, really beautiful story. And it prompts me to ask a question that I struggle with answering myself. And it's also a question many of my friends have asked themselves. And I'll take a stab at it. How do you decide when to do deep inner work and take an extended period to do that versus being in the world and trying to impact others in the world? And to just provide a little bit of background on that, I have friends who are building businesses or building careers of some type or families.

• 1:30:19Tim Ferriss?

  And I, at this point, do not have wife, kids, or company to build, at least with a large organization. And I've come back from various experiments, sojourns, experiences over weeks or months and shared these with them. And they've expressed this longing, this deep yearning to do something similar. And then they asked this question, like, "How do I, how do I best decide if and when to do the deep extended work versus being in the world?" And I know it might be a false dichotomy, you might not have to choose, but I'll talk a little bit more just to fill the space. But I had this experience personally not long ago when I was in South America and had someone telling me in Spanish, which was not their native language, this indigenous

• 1:31:03Tim Ferriss?

  tribe, but this apel, this mayor effectively, who worked a lot with different plant medicines. And he said that he recommended one 15-month diet, very, very strict, 15-month period with many different restrictions, no sex, no alcohol, no pork, et cetera, to develop certain capacities and to practice, in effect, I mean, at certain types of meditative...

• 1:31:29Tim Ferriss?

  Practices. So I struggle with this myself as well. How do you suggest someone think through?

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  So did you give up sex and pork?

• 1:31:35Tim Ferriss?

  I've done it for short periods of time.

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  Not a year and a half.

• 1:31:39Tim Ferriss?

  I've done it for weeks at a time, but not for 15 months. But what appealed to me about that, definitely not the lack of sex and pork. I like both of those things. It was, he said, "That's something you only have to do once in your life and it opens doors and creates opportunities that are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve otherwise." So of course, that's very tantalizing. But 15 months is a really, really long time to opt out of everything else. And I'm not saying it has to be 15 months. For some people, as you know, setting aside even 10 days to do a silent retreat is hard. And I know there are things that they can do on an ongoing basis, like morning meditation and so on. But for those who are really drawn to this extended, deeper work, how do you think about, and that's why Gosananda brought it up for me,

• 1:32:24Tim Ferriss?

  because he'd spent so much time outside of his country and then went back and was really on the ground doing work with locals. How do you think about that or suggest someone think about it?

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  First, my answer is yes. Because all of the things that you say are true, that yes, most cultures encourage at some point human beings, most wise cultures, human beings, to step out of their ordinary roles and their ordinary routine, whether you go to the mountains or the ocean, you know, or a temple, or a change how you're living, so that you can open up to the mystery. And so that you also can open up to love, because what I saw with my teachers, and Gosananda was one, Ajahn Chah another, is that they were able to love no matter what. It was really because they inhabited consciousness in a very different way than just a small sense of self. There was something, a possibility,

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  that we could live with forgiveness and love and be really effective in the world at the same time. So they're not separate. And that's sort of what your question is, how do we live in the world? And at the same time, you know, what trainings and how do we connect with something deeper? And part of it is just intuitive, you know, Tim. If you have newborn, you know, or young children and so forth, it's not the time to go on a long retreat. Your kids are your practice. And in fact, you can't get a Zen master who's going to be more demanding than, you know, an infant with colic. Right, or, you know, or a teenage, you know, certain teenage kid.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  But with the young ones, you know, your Zen mastermind said, "You've got to get up early in the morning." And, you know, once in a while, you might roll over. "The kid is crying and sick. You have to get up. Your family needs tending." And, you know, if you're even vaguely a responsible and caring parent, that becomes your practice. And if you think, "Well, if only I could be in the great Zen temple of Kyoto or in ashram in India or down in the Amazon with Tim, taking ayahuasca or whatever that's plant medicine they give." You know, your kid can be like ayahuasca on steroids. "Okay, you want to face yourself and your own limitations and your own, you know, you want to look at the small sense of self

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  and find out how to live with a freer and bigger spirit. Here, we just hired someone to live with you and train you full-time." So, it's really, and that's an important thing. But what makes it work is that you have that intention, not just to soldier through it, but to say, "Let this be a place where I awaken graciousness and inner sense of freedom and peace as things come and go, where I awaken the possibility of presence in pleasure and pain and joy and sorrow and gain and loss and all that changes, that I find an inviolable or a timeless place of becoming the loving witness of it all, becoming the loving awareness that says,

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  "Yeah, now I'm having a family experience, and this is the place to find freedom." Because freedom is not in the Himalayas or in the Amazon. The only place it's found is in your own heart, exactly where you are. And that's what Gosananda taught and what Bodhacharya, that's really what they wanted to communicate. Now, that being said, if you have an opportunity and you're drawn to it, like somebody you might, do you know Jack Dorsey?

• 1:35:55Tim Ferriss?

  I do, I do know Jack, yeah.

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  So, Jack just did his first 10-day meditation retreat.

• 1:36:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, good for him.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:36:35Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:37:18Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:38:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's a piece of construction paper. An ex-girlfriend gave it to me, who knew me very well. And it says, "The task that hinders your task is your task."

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  Beautiful. Beautiful.

• 1:38:15Tim Ferriss?

  And that's a good reminder for me. I wanted to ask you two questions that are personally important, but also may apply to other people. The first is, the question that I believe you mentioned, Ajahn Chah, perhaps others have indicated, is the question versus the experiences or movies of these, say, out-of-body experiences and so on. To whom do they happen? Right? To whom do they happen? Is this a koan, like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Where there isn't really an answer you're expected to arrive at? Is the value in contemplating the question more than any answer?

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  Yes, both. No. Because...

• 1:38:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, both and no.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because it is, it's a profound contemplation for us. One of the great questions of human incarnation. Who are we? How do we get into, how do you get into this body with the wiggly things on the end of your limbs, you know, and the little bits of claws that you have left, you know, as nails and a vestigial tail and a hole at one end into which you've stuffed dead plants and animals and glug them down through the tube? I mean, the whole incarnation thing is really pretty wild. So who are we? And then what are, how do we make meaning of it? This is a lifetime question. And that way, it's a koan. But in another way, it also actually does have an answer. And the answer, of course, has to be found by each person.

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  The answer, to point toward it, it's very clear that you're not just your salad and vegetables and hamburger body, and you're not just your emotions, I hope, because they're always changing, and your thoughts. Good God, I hope you're not your thoughts. So you start to realize, all right... What is there, then? What is this self? Who am I? In neuroscience, you know, there was a Time Magazine issue on modern neuroscience, where it said, "Neuroscientists have searched throughout the brain over many decades now, and come to the conclusion that they cannot find the self located anywhere in the neural mechanisms of the brain, and that it simply does not exist." But what does exist is a sense of self

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

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

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  there's something wrong with you. It's just part of it. So that's why they call it nuclear family, I think. Anyway.

• 1:42:04Tim Ferriss?

  There's another, I guess it's a word more than a question, that I'd love to ask you to define, and that is compassion or compassionate? When you use that word... Or those words, what do you mean exactly? Or what would you like it to mean for people?

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  I would like to distinguish compassion from empathy. And I'll use a simple illustration. If you're on the playground and you see a kid being bullied, and you feel, oh, that must feel terrible, that hurts. That's an empathy. And empathy can be useful. It also can be, you can get overwhelmed by empathy if you don't know what to do with it. But there's some way in which you start to feel resonating you, because we are not limited to these bodies. We are actually an interconnected system of consciousness. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.

• 1:43:00Speaker 02

  But we all know, whether it's mirror neurons from neuroscience, or the field of presence, as you know, scientists like Dan Siegel talk about, extended presence. That we can feel empathy with one another. When someone's sad, someone's angry, someone's hurting. Compassion is the next step. You see or recognize, you feel, and then you care. You care about it and you want to, if you can, do something that helps. So that you see the kid being bullied and you realize, I want to tell the teacher or the principal, or I want to just walk over there and say something or intervene to help stop it. And so compassion, it's called the quivering of the heart

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  when it wants to move to alleviate the suffering of yourself, because you can have self-compassion, which is very important, or of those around you. And it's born into, in the earliest studies of infants, you know, at Yale and various places like that, show that even very, very, very small children have this resonance and this kind of care. And so it's not shut down in us. We're a species that's interconnected and we care for one another. And this is your birthright, this natural, natural compassion. And through practice and meditation, you can reawaken it, you can extend it. And it can become your way of living and moving in the world.

• 1:44:26Speaker 02

  As a little aside, and I'll just bookmark this one. Just got back from a conference with our dear friend Adam Gazali, our mutual friend, Richie Davidson, who's another of the most famous neuroscientists, especially in this area, and a number of other, some contemplatives and neuroscientists and some technologists from the valley in VC, talking about how to build compassion into our interface with the technological world, compassion tech. Starting from the very simplest things of projects, like can you build a Fitbit for compassion? Where instead of your body, where you can either note moments of care around you or in yourself, or be prompted to care for yourself.

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  You know, or when you say to Siri or Alexa, you know, I'm feeling lonely or, and so forth. What kind of response do you get from the algorithms and all of that? Because the UK, England, just appointed their first Minister of Loneliness for the country. And you'd think it was a joke, but it's not. It's like an old Beatles song, All the Lonely People. There are 10 million lonely people in England, they've estimated. And it's, you know, it's for isolation and loss of capacity and health and all kinds of reasons that loneliness makes things way worse. But there's some way in which compassion is that which connects us. And it's a beautiful thing, even if you walk down the street and you see someone, you

• 1:45:56Speaker 02

  know, who's struggling and so forth. Doesn't mean you have to fix the whole world. That's not your job, that would be egotistical. But you can reach your hand out and mend the things that you can, you can tend the things that you can. And you can do it not because, oh, you pity them, those poor people, but because they're your family. You recognize that we are common humanity, we're in this together.

• 1:46:20Tim Ferriss?

  I'd like to build on that and preface it with a comment on the tech. So you mentioned collaborating with Adam and really discussing the potential of combining or utilizing technology to help people to...

• 1:46:34Tim Ferriss?

  Develop and harness compassion and some folks listening might be like, oh, come on, that's so pie in the sky. But I'd like to point out that you've already collaborated successfully with Adam on software like Metatrain. Yeah. M E D I T R A I N, which was one of the tools Adam has used in his N of one or N of two experiments in rejuvenating his mental capacity to, I want to say, in his twenties. And Adam's, Adam's one of those guys, you can't tell if he's 28 or 45. He's just a silver fox who always looks young. So I don't know how old he is, but he's not 22. But the Metatrain was one of the tools that he utilized. I don't remember the, the name that he used for this run of experiments. You might know the training

• 1:47:17Tim Ferriss?

  that he did, Neuroman or something like that was very, very successful. So you already have a track record of collaborating successfully with neuroscientists and technologists. On the compassion front, I'd love to use that as a segue to loving kindness. And by way of personal example, I failed, well, failed is a strong word. I quit. I stopped meditating after many, many attempts. Had a very absurdly high number of false starts over many years. And it really stuck after a number of experiments and experiences I had doing three or four day trainings with, say, transcendental meditation and having the social accountability,

• 1:48:00Tim Ferriss?

  being accountable to someone else is very helpful. But another turning point was experimenting with loving kindness meditation. And I think in part, it succeeded because it took the focus off of me, me, me, I, I, I, and allowed me to focus on others. But I'd like to read a brief paragraph from a profile of you in the New York Times. This is from 2014.

• 1:48:27Tim Ferriss?

  And feel free to correct anything that is incorrect, but I'll give it a read first. And I quote, "In the West," Kornfield says, "we encounter a lot of intense striving ambition and a lot of self-criticism, self-judgment, and self-hatred." Concerned, he initially turned to the Dalai Lama for advice, but self-hatred was such a foreign concept to the Tibetan Buddhists that he wasn't able to offer any real insight. Over time, Kornfield and his colleagues began to believe that Americans needed particular meditation practice closely linked to the concepts of self-forgiveness and loving kindness, a training in the unconditional acceptance of imperfection. "Without such a foundation," says Kornfield, "meditation can easily become," and this is the part that I underlined and starred, "without this foundation," says Kornfield, "meditation can easily become yet another form of striving, another thing you do to

• 1:49:12Tim Ferriss?

  make yourself better," instead of a path to true contentment. Could you please describe for folks what loving kindness meditation practice looks like and elaborate in any way that you feel might be useful or helpful for folks?

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that meeting, which was some decades ago with the Dalai Lama, yeah, he didn't understand when we talked about self-hatred, he couldn't even, there's no word for it in Tibetan, back and forth with his translator, what does this mean? Finally, he looked up, he said, "But this is a mistake. Why would anyone do this?" But then he asked, "How many of you," there was a group of us who were teachers, "had experienced this?" And almost everyone raised their hand. So we see that when people begin, in our culture, in the West, to meditate, or to turn inward, really, that it's very common to encounter a lot of self-criticism, self-judgment, or even self-hatred.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  And, you know, they're all the causes from our, these are all kind of conditioning that we got from our childhood, our education and so forth. But what it means is that you're sitting there saying, "I'm not doing it right, I'm no good." You turn the meditation into one other, one other thing that you don't do right because you can't control your mind. The truth is that you can't control your mind easily. That's not the point. There's a different way of approaching your mind, which gives you tremendous capacities, but it's not, "Oh, I have to stop my thinking," or "I don't want to have these feelings, and I hate having all these judgments, I don't want to be so judgmental, I hate this judging mind." What is it? It's just more judgment. So instead, as you become first able to become the loving witness,

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  the mindful loving awareness that says, "Oh, this is the judging mind, and it's been trying to protect me. Thank you for trying to protect me. I don't need you now. Thank you." All of a sudden, there's a distance from the painful, or destructive, or self-critical thoughts, simply by witnessing them with loving awareness and acknowledging them. This becomes the gateway to the practice of loving-kindness and self-compassion. And very often, people can't do it for themselves. They feel that's too much of a stretch. Like, "Why would I wish myself well?" It feels egotistical. And so, the way that this practice begins, skillfully for such folks,

• 1:51:38Speaker 02

  is instead to think of someone that you really care about a lot, and to picture them, remember them, put them in your mind's eye, and feel the kind of well-wishing you would want for them. You know, may they be protected and safe from difficulty, may they be held in loving-kindness, may they be well, healthy, strong. And you wish them that may they be happy. And you do this for a time, a kind of inner well-wishing. And also, maybe you feel, as you think of this person that you care about, you let yourself also turn into the measure of sorrows they have, the struggles that every human being has.

• 1:52:22Speaker 02

  You know, and it tenderizes your heart as you think of them, because you don't want them to suffer. You feel a kind of rising of compassion and care. So may they hold themselves in compassion, may they be safe and protected and well. And you do that with one or two people that you care about for a time. And then, you can imagine, even as I'm describing this, and you follow in your own heart, you can imagine these two loved ones looking back at you with the same kindness, and saying, just as you wish us protection and safety and happiness and well-being, you know, and compassion, they gaze at you and they say, "You too."

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  May you be safe and protected. May you be filled with tender compassion for yourself and kindness. May you too be healthy and well. And may you be happy, they want you to be happy. I think about, when I'm doing this, I'm visualizing some loved ones. I know that, as I do it, I can feel they want that for me. And then finally, as you feel that from these loved ones, you can put your hand on your body, or your heart even if you like, and take it in and then begin to realize that you can wish this for yourself. May I hold all of the joys and sorrows of my life with tenderness and kindness.

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  May I hold my struggles with compassion. May I be filled with loving kindness and loving awareness. May I be safe and protected. May I be well, strong or healed. And as you repeat these simple intentions that have been done for thousands of years, it's as if your cells are listening. And this is the research of people like Liz Blackburn and Alyssa Epple, who Liz Blackburn got the Nobel Prize for discovering the telomerase and the telomeres at the end of the caps in the DNA. It turns out that your cells listen to your heart and to your intention, that consciousness affects your body.

• 1:54:33Speaker 02

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

• 1:55:11Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any guided loving-kindness meditations or audio that you can recommend people listen to?

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:56:02Speaker 02

  The beautiful thing is that you can learn this, and I was, a couple of years ago, invited to be part of the first White House Buddhist leadership gathering. There were 120 Buddhist leaders from around the country, from different communities. I don't think that's gonna happen again very soon, but there it was, one could hope. And most of the communities did beautiful things that were involved in soup kitchens, and tending the homeless, and projects to support healing for, whether it was malaria, or other diseases in different other parts of the world, and so forth, all kinds of great stuff. And certainly meditation. And when I got to talk, which was kind of a summary talk toward the end of it, I mentioned

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  that in this historical record, whether it's true or not, the texts and so forth describe the Buddha meeting with kings and princes and ministers and so forth, and probably if the Buddha were around now, he would go to the White House if he were invited, he certainly would have met with Obama, and who knows now. And he had advice about wise society, which he would give to leaders, and he'd say, if you can train your... People to meet one another with respect, to listen with respect to differences, and to come together peacefully, listening to one another, then your society will prosper and not decline. And if your society tends the vulnerable among them, the young people, the old people, those who are sick, it will prosper and not decline.

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  And if your society tends the environment around it in a healthy way, it will prosper and not decline. These are principles of compassion and wise society that you could read perhaps in a number of great traditions, from the Iroquois Nation or from the Taoist sages. But here's the beautiful piece. Yes, these are good things, meeting in harmony and discussing in harmony and being respectful for one another and so forth. There are practices that you can teach and learn that develop this capacity. So that in our elementary schools now, you know, through organizations like Castle, which is a consortium for social and emotional learning

• 1:58:15Speaker 02

  that's worked in, you know, 10,000 schools, kids learn social and emotional learning, they learn compassion, and it changes their lives. They're better academically. And all these kids carry the troubles of our times. They hear the news, they see the trouble even in their own family. To teach you how to steward your own heart from when you're young, and then these capacities are now being incorporated, as we know, mindfulness, space, stress reduction, in clinics, in hospitals, in businesses. There's the mindfulness teachers when the Seattle Seahawks won the championship or the Chicago Bulls and the L.A. Lakers when they were championship teams. They had a meditation coach, a mindfulness coach, George Mumford, a good friend.

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  And that these capacities can be learned wherever we are, and they transform our life. It's not just by accident or that you have this beautiful experience on the mountains or making love, but you can make that alive for you through these trainings every day, every part of your life.

• 1:59:18Tim Ferriss?

  Jack, there was a question I was planning on asking at some point anyway, and I think this is a good segue, which is, how can you get a busy person hooked on mindfulness practice? You know, what would be a first step or how to start? And since we're talking about loving-kindness, I would like to give a bit of a hard sell for loving-kindness meditation is one option because... I recall, perhaps it was two years ago, I was really beating myself up. And for people who don't know this about me, I've spent the majority of my life being my own worst enemy in terms of inner dialogue. Extremely brutal and hypercritical and loathsome of myself in so many different respects.

• 1:59:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I was going through a particularly intense and difficult time with that inner critic, just ruthlessly beating myself up. And at that point, another friend of mine, Ched Meng Tan, who created the Search Inside Yourself class at Google, he was a very early engineer, which became the most oversubscribed class for employees at Google, recommended that I take a look at loving kindness meditation. And I didn't have any particularly sophisticated approach to it, but I decided with nothing to lose, and that I was having so much trouble during that period, sitting still and trying to focus on, say, the breath or anything like that, that at night, this was, happened to coincide with book deadline, probably not pure coincidence that my beating myself

• 2:00:44Tim Ferriss?

  up was exacerbated during that time, that was a few years ago. And I began at night, in my case, when I would take a shower at night or sit in a sauna, I very often go to hotels to write, which is something Maya Angelou and a few others convinced me might be a good idea, that I would consider two people, just like you had mentioned, two people I really cared for and wished them well. That's all I did. And Ched had said to me, Meng is usually what I would call him, that at one point, a woman in one of his classes had done this for one day at work. Every hour on the hour, she would just look out of her office and wish someone well that she could see in her mind's eye for 60 seconds or so. And she said it was her best day of work in seven years.

• 2:01:28Tim Ferriss?

  And I found that unbelievable, so I decided to try it myself. And that week of just spending maybe two to four minutes at night before going to bed, ended up being one of the most blissful weeks in memory, certainly at that point, in several years. It was really profound, and I couldn't pick out any other variable that had changed. So for me, I just want to, for people who are listening and saying, ah, you know what? I'm type A driven, super hyper competitor. This doesn't apply to me. That it very well could apply to you and that by taking a little bit of the harmful edge off, you don't automatically remove your competitive edge. And in fact, I would argue, just as you mentioned, that the bowls and so on, used to have, or

• 2:02:13Tim Ferriss?

  still do, it used to have a mindfulness coach for competitive advantage, that it can be another tool in your toolkit and doesn't take you out of the game, so to speak. It just makes you more aware of the games that you're playing. So that's a long sort of infomercial sales pitch that I wanted to just make sure I got in because I discounted a lot of these practices for a very long time because I thought it would at best be a waste of time and at worst, take away some of my skills or tendencies that allowed me to get to where I am. So that is more of a confessional than a question, but I would love to hear your thoughts, any additional thoughts on loving kindness meditation, but also any additional thoughts

• 2:02:56Tim Ferriss?

  on how, if you wanted to get a busy, maybe even impatient person hooked on mindfulness practice, what first steps or approaches you might suggest?

• 2:03:06Speaker 02

  So a lot of different questions sort of woven into what you said. And the first is that there's a kind of misunderstanding in our culture that love is a weakness and it's not. There is a way in which it's the force that can, probably the only force that can meet the level of aggression or violence and other such things that are happening in, you know, in the world. It's the power that lets mothers lift cars off their children or lets somebody like Dr. Martin Luther King stand after his church was bombed and children were killed and say, we will meet your physical violence with soul force.

• 2:03:47Speaker 02

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

• 2:04:28Speaker 02

  about bioregionalism, and one of our great kind of elders in this environmental movement. He said, Gary, what do you have to say to us now that oceans are rising, the world climate is changing hotter and hotter, the species extinction? And Gary looked back and he said, "Don't feel guilty. If you're gonna save it, don't save it out of guilt, or anger, or fear. Those are the very things that are actually making the world worse. Save it because you love it, because it's part of you, because it, and that is the power." Whether you're starting a company, but also it's not just that you, you know, some vision,

• 2:05:07Speaker 02

  okay, now I'm gonna become this wealthy playboy, or whatever, you know, zillionaire, then what does your life mean for you, and what do you really want? And when you listen, there is something in you, and it's part of your birthright, to both be able to give your gifts, but also to love and be loved in return. And it turns out that it's a power. So then what you talk about is that it doesn't take much to begin the training, and you're, you know, two minutes or four minutes in the evening, or this woman at her work, taking once an hour, 30 seconds or a minute, to look at somebody there and offer a well wishing,

• 2:05:47Speaker 02

  can transform everything. For people who want the practical support, because it is hard to do on your own, if you go to soundstrue.com and look up the programs that I have, First, there's a 40-day program called Mindfulness Daily, which is 15 minutes a day, or 12 minutes a day, depending on the segment, that both gives instructions in mindfulness, loving awareness, and loving-kindness practice. And it's 12 or 15 minutes a day. And by the end of those 40 days, you really have learned the inner skills. And then it builds up. There's then a deeper training called Power of Awareness. And for those who are interested, we're about to open an online teacher training for people interested in mindful,

• 2:06:30Speaker 02

  passing along mindfulness and loving-kindness to others.

• 2:06:33Tim Ferriss?

  Jack, just to interject for one second. For people listening, I will also link to all of these resources in the show notes, which you can find at tim.blog/podcast. So you don't necessarily have to remember all these things. You can go to the URL, and we will have direct links to these resources. Sorry to interrupt, Jack. Just wanted to mention that for people listening.

• 2:06:52Speaker 02

  And with it, then, there is also of the programs there, there's one called Guided Meditations. That's, you know, a download. It's like 10 bucks or something. And it has a loving-kindness practice, compassion practice, a forgiveness practice. I think it may even have a joy practice. And it's really helpful to have guided meditations at first, because otherwise, your attention... We have a very short attention span in modern society. Albert Einstein, at least according to Scientific American, said, "If you can drive safely while kissing a girl, you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves." And we are in this kind of multitasking world with our devices. And we've forgotten how to tend our own hearts.

• 2:07:37Speaker 02

  We've forgotten how, in some ways, to really be present for one another, and more importantly, for our own life. And so getting guided meditations is tremendously helpful. And doing these little mini-practices that you talk about, one minute, two minutes, several times a day, can transform you.

• 2:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  I was just going to mention to people also, if you look at behavioral change, if you look at BJ Fogg, formerly of the Persuasion Laboratory at Stanford, you look at dietary change, any of these things, doing less than you think you're capable of doing is a really good long-term strategy, in terms of starting off...

• 2:08:15Tim Ferriss?

  Rigging the game so that you can win in the beginning, so that your pass fail mark in your mind is a really, really low hurdle. So I just wanted to reiterate guided meditation. Don't white knuckle in the beginning. Like make it as easy as possible.

• 2:08:28Speaker 02

  The same principle from ancient texts say that you start in the easiest way. For some people kindness for themselves seems impossible, but then you pick a child you care about or someone else. Or even when you do go to yourself, you think of yourself when you were an innocent child and wish yourself well. The game is to do whatever naturally opens the gateway. Whatever is the easiest for some people is their dog. You come home and the most non judgmental being in their life wags its tail and loves you and it doesn't care, you know, what's going on in your head. So you take the avenue that most naturally opens your heart and then you do this just a little at a time, as you said, and it doesn't take long.

• 2:09:10Speaker 02

  But the other thing that's important is that sometimes as you do it, it can actually display or show you the hypercritical nature of your mind, the shame that you carry, the self judgment or self loathing. And so then you say, well, what do you do then? Or it brings up its opposite. Is that's the place that you just breathe and hold all that stuff with kindness? Because this is our humanity and we all have some of that. And the point isn't to get rid of it or judge yourself for having it or try to fix it. It's almost as if you put your hand on your heart and you say, you know, this is like mindful self compassion or deep training. This is part of the measure of struggles that I've been given like every human being.

• 2:09:55Speaker 02

  These things have tried to protect me and now I can hold them with tenderness and say, all right, you know, thank you, but I don't need your help anymore. I can be kind to myself. And in that way, you're not trying to fix yourself or perfect yourself. If anything, you're trying to perfect your love.

• 2:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  So Jack, I wanted to give you a credit for help that you gave me and also tactical advice that you gave me during the 10 day silent retreat. You gave me a lot, but I wanted to, I want to highlight one that's related to what you just said. I was going through a very, very difficult time, particularly days seven, eight, nine. And you gave me the advice that you just mentioned. And there's one component I want to really underscore for people and that is

• 2:10:41Tim Ferriss?

  When you're, for instance, trying to do loving kindness meditation and instead you get the opposite, or you get this self ridicule, who are you to try to meditate in this self indulgent way, this is ridiculous, or this voice starts to pop up that is angry or hateful, whatever it might be, the process of not simply dismissing it or fighting against it, but recognizing it as a coping strategy that helped you in the past in some way, that you developed because, in my case, you know, the rage was a fuel that, without which I probably would never have left Long Island, where I had friends who later overdosed on

• 2:11:22Tim Ferriss?

  opiates and so on. So it was a gift in a way, and a tool, and as you said, you can thank that response, or that part of yourself, and then put it, and I remember you recommended even visualizing, and please correct me if I'm wrong or elaborate, but visualize taking that part of you that is a coping strategy, thanking it, and then putting it, say, on a shelf where you can use it later if need be, along with, say, other icons or figures who, whether it's Buddha or other, that you recognize as wise, and then continuing with the meditation. So that thanking that part of yourself for the function that it once

• 2:12:02Tim Ferriss?

  served, even if it is not serving you now, was such a key insight for me, that then helped me to manage my internal states, or observe and appreciate my internal states for the next several days, where I really felt like I was lost at that point. So that was a really direct tool that helped me tremendously.

• 2:12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you for bringing it up, because it's so important for people. When we come to that hypercritical shame place, we feel very vulnerable, and we've been identified with it. And because you needed it, I needed these things for survival. And if you try to get rid of this stuff, you just end up in a fruitless battle against yourself, and it's just more judgment. So what you described as saying, "Thank you for helping me survive, I appreciate it, let me put it on the shelf or the altar, I'll put it in the lap of the Buddha, or whoever, you know, the goddess of infinite compassion, you hold it for me, if I need it, I'll pull it back." And that sense that this isn't who you are, it doesn't describe who you are, it isn't who you are, it was a strategy.

• 2:13:07Speaker 02

  Because we're vulnerable beings and you were a tender as a child and you had to make sure you could survive. Thank you for that. And now I have a different capacity. And let me just talk about that capacity a little bit because the capacity for presence and the great heart of compassion that's said to be your birthright is a really mysterious thing. Talk about identity. And when my youngest brother's wife, Estha, was dying of cancer and she is just a beautiful being and I spent quite a bit of time with her and with my brother. She was close to dying. I'd gone home to sleep and I wanted to get up early and hurry back because it was very close. And I got in my car.

• 2:13:52Speaker 02

  I had to stop at the drugstore to pick up a prescription, hurriedly running, dashing through the aisles and so forth. And I'm at the checkout counter and all of a sudden, my whole body relaxed. And I thought, oh, Estha died. And I got out to the car and I called my brother. I said, how's it going? He said, oh, Estha died a few minutes ago. And I said, I know. You know, I'll be there shortly. We've all had these experiences. If I ask in a room, how many have had this particular kind where you knew someone died when they died? You know, a quarter of the hands will go up. Why is this? It's because who we are is not this body. We are the consciousness itself. And so with all these practices,

• 2:14:37Speaker 02

  what they allow us to do is to step out of what's called the small sense of self or the body of fear and reconnect with the field of connection and interdependence of compassion and to take our history and to honor it, but not be bound by it. One of my favorite stories is of Ram Dass, again, this wonderful spiritual teacher. In the early years, when he came back from being with his guru in India, he was sitting up there and teaching.

• 2:15:10Speaker 02

  You know, devotional practices and meditation practices. And he had a beard and white robes and beads. And he was sort of in the guru outfit. And a woman in the front row raised their hand and said, "Ram Dass, Ram Dass, aren't you Jewish? What's with this Hindu stuff?" And Ram Dass said, "Well, yes, I am actually. I was bar mitzvahed as I was too. And there are many things I love about the Jewish spiritual tradition. The generosity of it, the Kabbalah, all the great teachings on the many stages and states of consciousness, the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters." And then he paused and looked at and he said, "But remember, I'm only Jewish on my parents' side."

• 2:15:51Speaker 02

  And there was something both witty, which he was, but also profound about it. Because we are not just our parental history or the historical circumstances of this place and body that we were born into. And something in us knows this. So that when you look at the... There's a wonderful book that came out last year or the year before called "The Book of Joy," which was a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu. And both of them have marvelous laughs. I think people go to hear the Dalai Lama by the tens of thousands, not just for the Tibetan teachings, some of which are actually hard to understand, or even the fact that he's this Nobel Prize-winning world figure.

• 2:16:36Speaker 02

  I think people go to hear him laugh, that somebody who's carried so much suffering from the loss of his country where he can't return and the burning of temples and texts and all of those things. And he and Tutu had a week together when they were asked, and this created this book, "How can you be joyful? How can you laugh like this when you've lived through apartheid and the death of so many people around you?" And Dalai Lama, they banter back and forth like brothers. And Dalai Lama says, "So much has been taken from me." You know, they've taken our sacred texts, they've taken our ability to make prayers in public, they've taken so much of our culture. Why should I let them take my happiness?

• 2:17:20Speaker 02

  And then Tutu starts to laugh and giggle and say, you know, "I've been through so much, but I am not going to let myself live in that place. I'm gonna let myself live in that which affirms life and in a kind of profound joy that we made it, that we're still alive, that we can contribute, that we can be here on this beautiful earth." And this shift of consciousness is what's needed for the world. Because if we look honestly, no amount of technology alone is gonna save us. Nanotechnology and space technology and biotechnology and worldwide web internet computer or supercomputer technology is gonna stop continuing warfare and racism

• 2:18:02Speaker 02

  and tribalism and environmental destruction. Those are happening based on consciousness of the human heart. And so we are now, you know, we've made these enormous developments outwardly where you have the great Library of Alexandria and your smartphone in your pocket, along with a million, you know, cat YouTube's or whatever. But there it is, it's all in there. And then what we need is collectively to develop a transformation inwardly of our inner life that is parallel to this enormous outer transformation. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff some years ago said, "We are a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants."

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  You know? Or, you know, "I don't know how old humanity is, but it's time to grow up." So that this work that we're talking about is both individual, but as you learn to meet your own life with greater understanding and compassion, it empowers you to move through the world in a different way and to help others do the same. And then you get that kind of joy of Tutu and the Dalai Lama, that you're somehow part of an awakening that humanity now needs more than ever.

• 2:19:18Tim Ferriss?

  Jack, I'd love to ask you, these interviews are always driven by some self-interest. I always have some issue or challenger problem that I'm trying to figure out, so I reach out to someone like you to help me do it, but I record the conversation. As we chatted about before we hit record, and you know this already, but the last several years have been very, very important for me in terms of addressing certain traumas. And the last eight weeks in particular have been transformative in a lot of beautiful ways. And the duration of periods within which I don't berate or attack myself have become longer. But there are still times when the wheels fly off the car, and this last week has been one such example.

• 2:20:02Tim Ferriss?

  And I tend to, when I make a mistake, or feel like I'm backsliding or relapsing, to compound the problem by beating myself up. Then I beat myself up about beating myself up, and you know where that goes. So let me paint a picture. So I found out recently that my Japanese host father, and I've been in touch with this family since I was 15, I'm very, very close to them, 40 now. And I found out that he just was admitted, because the host mother sent me an email, to the hospital with liver cancer. They don't have the details yet, I just sent a follow-up email. They don't know what the prognosis is exactly, but needless to say, the worst-case scenarios are certainly being conjured in my mind, or the potential of those.

• 2:20:45Tim Ferriss?

  And then simultaneously, I've been contending with, and I believe you have some experience with this, contending with a, what should be a very simple construction project of a cabin up in the mountains. And it has been delayed and delayed and delayed, and there have been cost overruns and cost overruns and cost overruns, and promises made, promises broken, expectations set, expectations missed. And a friend of mine called with a whole new slew of problems yesterday related to this place. And I lost my shit, for lack of a better term. I mean, there are many other things going on simultaneously, but I got really pissed. And I was like, you know what? This extending the olive branch, being understanding, gambit is not...

• 2:21:27Tim Ferriss?

  Not working with these people like I need to I need to take out the baseball bat and like pull old Tim off the shelf who was just this like juggernaut head through brick walls and be like listen fuckface like if you don't do A B C D and E here well these are going to be the consequences and then I'm like well wait I'm supposed to be compassionate but how do I not be a pushover and it turns into this big dramatic play inside my head and then I wait this is gonna end soon I'm not gonna keep going but what I then often do is self-medicate with caffeine and I think it's a way of feeling productive without actually being productive and it also creates so much volume on the noise I think I use it to tune out a lot of feelings

• 2:22:12Tim Ferriss?

  so when someone relapses or has this kind of experience what do you suggest to them I mean is there a particular pattern interrupt or approach that you found helpful for regaining footing?

• 2:22:26Speaker 02

  Oh, so there's a number of things to say first of all you could call it relapsing or you could just call it yeah being human

• 2:22:36Speaker 02

  the most beloved poet in Japan was a Zen master named Ryokan and there's a two line verse of his that I particularly find fitting for this where he wrote last year a foolish monk this year no change you know and you can sort of feel the humor and the tenderness in it and there's a way in which you see your personality the point you know you have a body you have this particular body you're born in and you can transform it in certain ways within the limits of the body that you were given and similarly you have a personality and anybody who has a number of kids realizes that you don't come in tabula rasa that you actually

• 2:23:15Speaker 02

  this kid is born and has this kind of temperament so you have a personality and just like you don't want to look too closely to the body sometimes you don't want to look back closely to the personality either you know it has its foibles and its fears and all of that and so you start to kind of look at and say oh now there's a really good example of how neurotic I can get thank you thank you for reminding me you know and then you get a little sort of like the keeper of the zoo a little more tender with those kind of creatures It's bringing in the non-judgment or the loving kindness for the way that you actually are and not your ideal, or bringing compassion. You could say, yeah, this is a tough one and this triggered.

• 2:23:55Speaker 02

  I got triggered. So what? Now, the other thing is that I had the same experience when we had a big remodel of our house when I was some years ago, raising my daughter and in my first marriage. And we were supposed to go and teach and travel in Europe and this guy who was a good contractor, but you know, everything of course gets more expensive and you have to do this. And it kept getting slowed down. I said, you are going to get this done so we could make these decisions. We're going to Europe and it's not happening. You've got to hurry up. I do that like three or four different times and it doesn't happen. Finally, I go in, I get pissed and I say, listen, you said this in our contract it was going to be done by the and if you don't fucking get this done by the time, I'm going to haul your ass in court and sue you

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  because I need this done and I'm not going to pay you the goddamn money. No, no, no, no. He looked at me and he said, oh, you really want this done, don't you? I said, yes. Next day, there's a huge crew. It starts to get done and I realized, okay. Well, I've been sort of talking meditation speak, yeah, nice, get it done. He was a fucking contractor and I just had to, I had to speak contractor ease. Get the goddamn job done or I'll haul your ass in court. Okay, I get it. Yeah, I'll send a team over. And that's all it took. So there's something playful about that as well. It's not that you can't, I've seen the Dalai Lama get angry at people. It's not that you can't use that power and that understanding when it's necessary

• 2:25:22Speaker 02

  to get to be very strong or forceful. And you don't have to judge yourself unless you hurt people. And then, of course, that's the misuse of it. But it's just, it's part of being human.

• 2:25:32Tim Ferriss?

  Is there something you say to yourself, I don't know, you are certainly in person and any, with any contact I've had with you, one of the most compassionate people I've ever met. And I don't use that word very much, but you're Presence of listening and being with someone is really incredible. I don't know how much of that is intrinsic versus trained, but for better or for worse, coming out of the womb, I've been very impatient since day one. So I worry about, I can get, it seems like my default is speaking contractor-y's to more than just the

• 2:26:14Speaker 02

  The contractor.

• 2:26:14Tim Ferriss?

  The wayward contractor who's putting off work. Is there some, when I feel that the sensations of anger beginning to bubble up, is there something that you would suggest as self-talk or just a temporary pumping of the brakes to make it an informed decision versus just a lashing out?

• 2:26:37Speaker 02

  Well, I could give you an answer, but in a minute, I'm going to guide you in a little practice.

• 2:26:41Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  So that you can find the better answer. First, I just want to say that that anger, you know, yes, it's your habit or maybe your temperament, that's energy. And there's nothing wrong with energy, you know, it's the power to let you do all the kinds of things that you've done in your life that are tremendously creative or resourceful or daring or whatever kinds of things. So you want to respect, okay, I'm getting filled with energy and you, you know, it might be then you want to lash out, but first you want to respect that energy. Wow, let me feel this in my body. Woo, anger, how big is it? Woo, okay. Then your question is, then your question is, what can I do to modulate it? I could give you, you know, okay, take some breaths, ground yourself, look at that other person, blah, blah, blah.

• 2:27:25Speaker 02

  But instead, as we're talking, let yourself picture a circumstance recently, it might have been with your, you know, the contractor is doing your cabin or something else, you know, that uprising of the injustice of it and how right you are and how you're going to get this goddamn thing done and how you have to be hard and strong. You feel all that and feel that energy in your body. First thing is just remember what it felt like. And now you're becoming the kind of mindful, loving witness of it and saying, wow, this is a lot of energy. So can you feel that and remember that?

• 2:28:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:01Speaker 02

  Now, next, okay. Now, next step is that the wisest

• 2:28:08Speaker 02

  Figure you can imagine, maybe it's the Buddha, or doesn't matter, some great master, martial arts master, you know, who's mastered themselves as well as their art comes to you. And let yourself imagine, somebody is gonna teach you how to manage this powerful energy. And see who appears, somebody appears to you. And first, they look at you and they smile and they say, "Yeah, this is the big energy." And they appreciate you, so instead of saying, "Oh, you're a doofus." You know, they say, "Oh yeah, you actually carry some powerful energy." And they acknowledge that, they bow to you, "Yeah, and you got it." All right? And then you say, "Yeah, but how do I manage this when it takes me over?"

• 2:28:50Speaker 02

  And so this Zen master, whoever comes, reaches under their robe and pulls out a gift for you, which is a clear symbol of exactly what you need in that moment, to help you regulate it so that you can keep the energy, but do it in a way that doesn't cause harm to you or another. And this clear symbol, you'll be able to see, it's just what you need. So let yourself picture the gift that they put in your hand. And let yourself imagine, see, envision, picture what it is. And if you can't see it clearly, hold it up to the sunlight, you'll be able to. And then let me know what you get.

• 2:29:28Tim Ferriss?

  You want me to tell you what it is?

• 2:29:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:31Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So the person who came to mind for me, I went through a few, was the creator of judo, fascinating guy named Jiguro Kanō. Really small, small guy.

• 2:29:42Speaker 02

  Who, who, yes, who could throw all the big guys and smile at the same time.

• 2:29:47Tim Ferriss?

  Right, exactly. Changed a lot also in Japanese government, fascinating guy. The symbol, I don't know why this is, to be honest, but it's a pyramid, the size with straight edges, about, little too big to hold in your palm, that is...

• 2:30:05Tim Ferriss?

  Blue, it's like almost a mixture of pure sky blue, like a bluebird blue, with a bit of electric blue mixed in. And it's sort of a smoky vapor that's floating around inside this glass pyramid. I have no idea why that's the case, but that's what came up.

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  All right, so we'll stay with it, and then there's one more little piece. So he gives you this pyramid. Free associate a little bit on what it might possibly mean, because these symbols are like dream images, and they come from a deep place in your psyche. And this pyramid has a message for you, this blue pyramid. Just guess what it might be.

• 2:30:44Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's very, very stable. It's an extremely stable structure. And for me, it also, I could imagine it representing power also. It seems like a very powerful symbol in many different cultures, certainly.

• 2:30:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:30:59Tim Ferriss?

  The blue is a little easier for me. It's a very cooling, soothing color, where certainly red is the color I would associate with a fire, with the

• 2:31:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:31:11Tim Ferriss?

  High resonance anger energy would be more of a red fire element. So the blue would be a cooling or countering balancing force for that.

• 2:31:23Speaker 02

  All right, so now what I want you to do is imagine taking this blue pyramid gift, which represents a kind of extreme stability, and also a kind of power and cooling that's given to you by Jigar Okano, and taking this into your body so that there you are, filled with this energy and anger, you know, this huge wave of, you let that be there, and you take this pyramid in, and you let that energy be inside this stable, grounded place of power. And feel what it's like to be inside this blue pyramid with this energy, and feel how it affects it. Just notice, as if there you're in that circumstance,

• 2:32:06Speaker 02

  and now I'm remembering I am the blue pyramid. And what does it feel like?

• 2:32:11Tim Ferriss?

  The most noticeable thing

• 2:32:14Tim Ferriss?

  I wonder, of course, how much of this is the actual visualization versus the timeout

• 2:32:20Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 2:32:20Tim Ferriss?

  that I permit myself to have, but there's very often a tightness on the left side of my chest, right by the sternum, that I feel when I start getting wound up. And that is absent after taking this gift and then visualizing it being incorporated. That dissipates.

• 2:32:40Speaker 02

  What you're practicing, and you know, and you know this very well in athletics, that yes, you practice things, but other times you also practice envisioning, whether it's playing piano, or whether it's, you know, some Olympic training, that some of the times you just do it through visualization and it activates a lot of the same neural circuitry.

• 2:32:58Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 2:32:58Speaker 02

  So here you're starting to get the feeling of what it's like to be in the middle of this upwelling of anger and so forth, and then taking a couple of breaths and feeling the blue pyramid and the connection with the earth and the stability of it. And the power then of that presence that cools you and allows the anger to be there, but not in the same uncontrolled way. Now, there's one more thing, and that is if you imagine again, Jigoro Kano, I believe you said his name is.

• 2:33:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, you got it.

• 2:33:31Speaker 02

  He comes up to you after giving you this gift, and he touches you kindly on the shoulder, and he has a few words of advice of how to handle this powerful energy that comes up in you, because he knows all about it. And what does he whisper into your ear kindly?

• 2:33:49Tim Ferriss?

  Well, he whispers, this came to mind immediately, he says, "Zen yo ko zen yo", which is, you know, I still have this, actually. There are two, he has many famous quotes, but he has what you might consider proverbs, short aphorisms that I've actually carried with me since I was 15, but they're packed away somewhere. I have two of them, they're on cloth. And the first is "Stome reba kanara de tatsu", which means basically, if you, if you work hard, you will achieve, you will reach your target. It's not the best translation, but that's the idea. The other one is "Zen yo ko zen yo", which is effectively the most efficient use of energy, but it could also be the best

• 2:34:33Tim Ferriss?

  slash most benevolent use of energy. It's a principle of Judo, but it's something that he applied to everything, including education. So it would be... That very short, bite-sized aphorism, which is, and I'm sure some scholars probably disagree with me, but roughly translated here, at least as I take it, is the maximum or most efficient use of energy.

• 2:34:57Speaker 02

  So, take that in, take his intentions, Zen Yoko Zenio, the benevolent and efficient use of it, feel the pyramid, and now, your assignment is that the next five times that this comes, which it will, maybe tomorrow or next week or so forth, bring in the blue pyramid, stable, powerful, cooling, so the energy's still there, and then you hear his voice say, Zen Yoko Zenio, and you go, "Oh yeah, I can use this, but I can use it in a benevolent way." And try it five times, then text me, let me know what happened. Because now we're closing the loop. If you do it, and see, now you're responsible if you agree that you're gonna do it, it sort of gooses the game a little bit, and you go, "Okay, now I'd better do it

• 2:35:42Speaker 02

  because I have to let Jack know where you know what happened." And let me know what happens.

• 2:35:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'll be able to use it this week because I'm flying out to the site of this cabin to meet with everybody and see what the hell's going on. So, I'll have at least five opportunities to do that.

• 2:35:56Speaker 02

  You have your Zen training ahead. I mean, the other thing that's great, and then that you can hear in this, rather than by giving you a cookie cutter answer, is that we actually have the wisdom that we're seeking, or that's available, we have it in ourselves. I mean, you didn't have to fly to Kyoto and get in your time machine to go back and see Jigarhokaro, you know, or whoever it happens to be, the Dalai Lama, or whoever happens to come to you, the Buddha, or some other great figure, that actually, the goddess of compassion, that we carry that wisdom in our own heart. And part of what these contemplative trainings do is they give us access,

• 2:36:40Speaker 02

  just by taking a little pause, it didn't take you either, 30 seconds, okay, he appears. What do I do? Ah, here's how my body would feel. Perspective should I bring? Ah, here's efficient and benevolent use of energy. Okay, now I remember. So, these answers for the questions of the psyche and the heart don't require going somewhere. They ask us to quiet and begin to listen. And as you do, you discover your own inherent wisdom and your own compassion as well, because the benevolent use that he offers to you, where does that live? It lives in him. It lives in you.

• 2:37:21Tim Ferriss?

  One of the reasons I've wanted to have you on the podcast for so long is that, for me, you represent a very wide spectrum of tools. You have developed a toolkit that has enabled you to work with everyone, from the seekers of, say, the Buddhist, along the lines of the Buddhist traditions, to, say, adolescents who are cutters, to war vets with PTSD, missing limbs, and so on. You've worked with a very diverse set of students and patients, maybe even. And that leads me to my next question, which is, after these experiences abroad, why did you decide to come back to the US, period? And then, why did you decide to go back to school and study clinical psychology?

• 2:38:06Speaker 02

  So, after the first five years in Asia, there were a few other Westerners who had become monks, it was a handful. And some were going to stay for the rest of their lives. I'd learned a lot, and so that was kind of a choice. Am I just going to stay? And I realized, no, I want a family. I want a lover. I was a young man, after all, and just the celibacy for those years was actually pretty hard. I want to see if what I have learned really translates into the life back home. I don't want to just leave it. And so, it was some wrestling, but it became very clear to me that I wasn't fit for the monastery for the rest of my life.

• 2:38:47Speaker 02

  I had other, not only other desires, but also, and longings, but also were real interests to say, does this work elsewhere? So, I came back and thought, well, what can I do? I got a couple of jobs and right away. And of course, what I knew how to do was be a student, but I was now a student of the mind and the heart. And I thought, well, how do I learn more about what happened to me in the monastery? Oh, I'll study Western psychology. And so, that started me on that. Particular path and I learned a lot of complementary things. There's some very good trauma work in the West that I've learned about that really enhances the compassion and loving kindness and mindfulness, things that I learned in the temple.

• 2:39:29Speaker 02

  And now I've done a lot of years of teaching Eastern and Western psychology together. These principles that I've learned are spreading so widely in Western psychology. I went to the largest therapy conference in the country in December down in Anaheim and gave a talk, you know, here's a room full of 3,000 or 5,000 people. And I asked, "How many of you have some experience of meditation or mindfulness practice?" And the majority of the hands went up. And that would not have happened, you know, 20 or 30 years ago. So Eastern psychology is now becoming more invisibly woven into the understandings of clinical psychology in the West, and it's beautiful.

• 2:40:10Speaker 02

  Now, I want to say something else, you know, when you talk about working with a variety of population, yes, people in prisons, yes, that's, or kids coming out of gangs, but also CEOs. And there's a dialogue that Bill Ford and I did. He was at that time the chairman of Ford Motors. He was actually the CEO perhaps before that, but then he was, he's the chairman of Ford Motors. And he talks about it too. It was in 2008, I guess, when the auto industry was just about to melt down. He called, we'd had some contact, he's a meditator. And he said, "You know, I'm going to lose my grandfather's company and maybe the whole

• 2:40:54Speaker 02

  industry on my watch, and it's hard to sleep. What can I do?" And we did loving kindness practices and mindfulness practices together and so forth. And I gave him some practices that he could use. And it turns out that at whatever level you're on, whether you're incarcerated, or whether you're a CEO, or whether you're a returning vet, that these inner capacities that we have to be present without getting lost, to bring an understanding, attention to these energies, just as we were doing with anger in ourselves, are really, really liberating. And sometimes what's needed, like for the vets or the... People coming back from the war is also a kind of forgiveness practice in trauma work.

• 2:41:39Speaker 02

  And we'll come together and, you know, they'll say things like, "I can't tell you what I saw." Because in fact, people don't want to hear the horrors of war. They can't tell the story, and if they do, often they re-traumatize themselves. And the people around them couldn't bear it. But there's something worse, because they'll say, "I can't tell you what I had to do." And so it's locked up in their hearts, you know? And then what do they have? They can drink, or they can distract themselves, or get in blind rages periodically. But if you get a room of returning combat vets, and hold it with a proper space of understanding and compassion,

• 2:42:20Speaker 02

  not only can they tell their stories, which they've never told, but they can listen to one another and say, "Oh yeah, I've been there." And all of a sudden, they're not so alone anymore. And that release of the weight on their heart. So there's a social dimension to trauma, where we need to tell the story, helps them release also what's carried in their nervous system and in their body. And there's some correlation between those two together that becomes very powerful. And we need that. We need... I do a lot of teaching of forgiveness practice and self-forgiveness. Those are also on those guided meditations that I teach. And for a lot of us, self-forgiveness, like self-compassion, becomes a very, very important way to liberate ourselves

• 2:43:05Speaker 02

  from what we had to do to survive in the past, so that we're actually free in our life.

• 2:43:12Tim Ferriss?

  How do you set the stage, for instance, with those vets? What do you say to them, or what exercise might you do that opens the door for them to share these stories?

• 2:43:22Speaker 02

  So a couple of images, one with gang kids, and then one with vets. For gang kids who come in, or these kids who are trying to get out of gangs and might come with a mentor or something like that to some events we've had. And you get these guys and they're, you know, their hoods are up and their hats are on backward and they're leaning back and saying like, "Come on, man, you're gonna teach us meditation. You're gonna teach us, give us some poem stories." Listen, man, we're out on the street. People got 9mm, you know, you gotta give us something better than that. So, we try to make a setting that honors who they are from the very beginning. Or say, "Well, we can't talk yet about the real things that we came here to do 'cause there are too many people in this room

• 2:44:06Speaker 02

  who have not been acknowledged and not been respected." So, would you go out in the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person you know who's been killed? And we light one candle and put it in the center of a table. Say, "Bring it back in and say their name and put their stone by this candle." The simplest possible ritual. And these guys, and sometimes gals will come in, and their hands are full of stones. No young people should know that many dead people. And they'll say, "This is for Tito, and this is for RJ, and this is for homegirl." And pretty soon, there's a mound of stones and the names of people they've lost

• 2:44:48Speaker 02

  were put into the fabric of the air of that room. And their hoods are no longer over their heads. So, they're sitting up like, "Okay, this is the place where we can talk about what's really going on." So, there's something about making, whether it's through the simplest ritual or making a container in which people realize that this is a safe place to talk about what we've never done before. With the vets, one of the things that Michael Mead, Luis Rodriguez, these guys from Mosaic Multicultural Foundation that I've worked with for years and are really wonderful. Michael, who's, you know, a great drummer and a storyteller and mythologist who's also been working in prisons and with vets and gang kids for years.

• 2:45:29Speaker 02

  They'll say, "Let me tell you an ancient story of returning warriors." And he has a handful of stories from Africa, or Tibet, or the Mayan tradition, about warriors coming back, you know, with their hands covered with blood. And, you know, their eyes filled with the martial energy that they would, that they can't stop the violence because it's taken them over. And here's a myth or a story that tells about how ancient warriors were brought back into their community. I'll tell you the myth if you want to hear one of them. Oh, yes, please. So here we are, you know, and there's these vets. And already stories have started to pour out about, "I can't tell you what I saw, I can't tell you what I had to do." And Michael stood up and he said,

• 2:46:14Speaker 02

  "Let me tell you an old Irish story of a, an Irish warrior named Cuculain, or I'm not sure how his name is pronounced, something like that." Then he was the most fierce and famous of all Irish warriors. And the Irish warriors were mad men because they would go out, they'd paint their bodies and they'd go out naked. And sometimes you'd just see them coming and you'd run the other way. But anyway, there was some marauding king and army that had come to threaten their area. And so Cuculain went out and almost single-handedly chased them and defeated them. But then he was coming back to his own town in a chariot covered with blood and his eyes blazing,

• 2:46:56Speaker 02

  bearing down on his own town, still possessed with the violence of war, with the god Mars. And they were all terrified he would come and do violence there too. And so they ran, "What can we do? What can we do?" And they went to ask the old wise woman in the village. And she said three things. And so the first thing, they lined up all the women in the village who bared their breasts. And this slowed him down as if it reminded him of his mother's milk or something. And because he was slowed down, then the second thing they did was take a rope and tie it around him and put him in a huge cauldron of cold water, which hissed off his body.

• 2:47:38Speaker 02

  And then they filled it three times with cold water and finally his body cooled down. And then the third thing they did is they took him at still bound and they lay him on a carpet in the court of the local king. And they sang to him the stories and myths and songs of warriors who had protected the kingdom and then come back and released the violence and the fears that they carried and planted their crops again and loved their families and resumed living in harmony with the community from which they came. And they told the ancient stories and sang the songs for three days and nights.

• 2:48:21Speaker 02

  And when it was over, coca-cola, eyes opened, they let his, they untied him and he was back as a normal human being again. And after Michael told this story to vets who'd been telling terrible accounts of things that happened. In this room, a hundred men stood up and we'd been working with a simple African chant, a song that was really an African chant of a prayer, you know, "Earth, hold me for this, living is hard." We all sang to the vets together for a long time as if we could sing them back into their bodies from this, as if they were lying there in the court of the king. So this is, and you asked the question, how do you make a setting

• 2:49:06Speaker 02

  that allows people to truly feel that they can tell their stories and be held in compassion? Whether it's the grief of these gang kids that no one's really given a little place to give voice to, you know, or the vet who says, "I can't tell you what I had to do."

• 2:49:23Tim Ferriss?

  That's very powerful. And it makes me also think back to conversations I've had with Sebastian Junger, who was...

• 2:49:35Tim Ferriss?

  A wartime journalist has co-produced and shot a number of really harrowing documentary films, including Restrepo, and most recently wrote a book called Tribe that touches on some similar topic area and leads me to ask you, are there any rites of passages or rituals that you feel would be useful for every man or woman to experience? And this is something that I've felt a longing for and a lack of since my teenage years. I'm not Jewish, did not have a bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah. I don't know if that serves that purpose in the Jewish tradition necessarily, but are

• 2:50:17Tim Ferriss?

  there any rituals or rites of passage that you think we could use in, let's just say, the United States that would be helpful to, whether it's a specific population, specific group, or anyone?

• 2:50:31Speaker 02

  So what you're talking about is a really big subject. It's a subject of initiation. Unfortunately, bar mitzvahs, at least when I was, was a relatively lightweight and meaningless thing. You get up there and you recite your Hebrew portion of the Bible and now you're a man and they give you a bunch of presents and there wasn't a lot of meaning in it. The problem that you raise is that of the lack of initiation. And what's true is that it's been forgotten in our culture. One of the few places you get initiation is going into the military. That's an initiation. But a lot of these gang kids, for example, they're trying to initiate themselves, which can't really happen. You need elders and you need it in a ritualized way.

• 2:51:14Speaker 02

  But they'll go on, you know, if you're in the Maasai tradition in East Africa, the Maasai people, as everybody's heard, you know, a young man at a certain age of 14 or something will go out and kill a lion to prove that they're now an adult member of the society and that they're brave and that's part of their initiation. There were initiations for young women as well. It's not just in Africa. The Mayans had initiations. And in Thailand, when I lived there back, starting in the 1960s, at that point, almost every young man and many young women, when they reached

• 2:51:52Speaker 02

  The age of nineteen twenty, they became a monk for three months or for a year, and lived in an austere way, and it was part of their initiation to learn both the inner life of themselves and also a kind of discipline. We don't have it, and because of it, you know, kids are trying to initiate themselves on the streets by shooting somebody or doing something, you know, that shows that they're brave, but it's not a lion, it's another person, or it's trying to get the attention of the others and say, prove how powerful or strong they are. So we desperately need these, and we need them built into our education and to our psychology. And I can't give you a simple answer, but one of the people who has the most intelligence

• 2:52:33Speaker 02

  about this is a man, a colleague of mine named Michael Mead. And if you look at Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, his writings on initiation and what's possible here and the things he's led are very, very inspiring. So that's a place that I would look.

• 2:52:51Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good starting point. Wonderful. I will definitely find that. Well, Jack, I think we could go for hours and hours and hours, and I always love chatting with you, and I'd love to perhaps even consider doing a part two sometime, but given that we've already gone for two plus hours, I want to ask just a few more questions. And I'll actually start with just reading something very short, which is from your 2017 year-end message. I think this is just to inject some more optimism into our conversation, which we've already had plenty of, but this is just a small portion of your year-end message. Martin Luther King Jr. describes our collective journey with hope.

• 2:53:32Tim Ferriss?

  Quote, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," end quote. And Pablo Neruda explains further, "You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming. Renewal is happening." This is back to your voice. "Take quiet time to listen to your heart, to meditate and to rest amidst the great turnings. Feel the renewal of spring that can be born in you. Align yourself with goodness. Let yourself blossom like a lotus or whatever unique flower you are, shining in the world, offering tiny seeds of love amidst it all. Blessings to you in 2018." Jack, and I want this note to then lead into, and certainly you're welcome to comment on that, but- Which book you would recommend of yours people start with?

• 2:54:14Tim Ferriss?

  Or where they start with all of the many materials, recordings, readings that you've produced? Because you're a fantastic writer and a prolific writer. You have some of my favorite book titles I've ever heard, by the way, including "After the Ecstasy, The Laundry," which maybe we could touch on. But where would you suggest people start of the many things that you've written and shared with the world? And if you have any comments on that year-end message, you're welcome to share that as well.

• 2:54:41Speaker 02

  So for books, if you want something simple, I have books like, you know, "An Introduction to Meditation" that Sounds True publishes. Or I have a little book called "The Art of Forgiveness, Loving-Kindness, and Peace," which is very simple stories and practices. If you want something that's richer and fuller, then you could look at one of my bigger books like "A Path with Heart" or "The Wise Heart: The Guide to the Principles of Buddhist Psychology." And again, I think lots of stuff online and Sounds True is particularly a good place to go, along with my website. Then, and that 40-day mindfulness, mindfulness daily, which is like 30 bucks or something, is a really wonderful way to start.

• 2:55:23Speaker 02

  In terms of what I had written about the trusting heart, one of the greatest Zen texts from a thousand years ago says to be awakened or enlightened is one with trusting heart and mind. And that doesn't mean that we won't go through hard times. We always have, and we will again, and we are now in many ways. But that we also have, born within us, the capacity to meet these difficulties with understanding, with courage, with compassion, and to transform them. And in that way, one of my favorite recent books is called "The Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker. And he's a remarkable professor at Harvard, anthropologist, historian, talking about

• 2:56:08Speaker 02

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

• 2:56:51Speaker 02

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

• 2:57:36Speaker 02

  We have these amazing possibilities as human beings, and we're just growing into them now culturally, and it's about time. They are possible, and we each have a contribution to make in it.

• 2:57:48Tim Ferriss?

  Jack, I'm gonna ask you one more question before we wrap up with just letting people know where they can find you on social media and elsewhere, the website and so on. But last question is one I like to ask. This is a metaphor, but if you could have a short message on a billboard, in other words, get a message out to millions or billions of people, could be a few words, one word, a phrase, a quote of yours, a quote of someone else's, what might you put on that billboard?

• 2:58:16Speaker 02

  Well, two things come to mind. One is a question that when I've sat with people many times at the end of their life, that they then ask of themselves silently or out loud is, "Did I love well?" Because in the end, what matters, really? The billboard would have a question rather than a statement, and it would have a question something like, "How could I love myself better?" So that it actually, it's not that I'm gonna tell them something, they already know this, but I'm gonna remind those who read that there is something that's asking to be awakened in them. How could I love myself and this world better? Then you go, well, it gets in the way of that. And how could I love that too?

• 2:59:00Speaker 02

  How could I love myself in this world better?

• 2:59:02Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Jack, I want to, of course, thank you for your time today, but beyond that, I want to thank you. And this is very, very much from deep in my heart. Thank you for helping me to learn to love myself better. And quite frankly, to see something in the first place that is worth loving. That's not where I've spent most of my life. So it's turned into, if not my, I hesitate to say my top priority because I'm, I worry about sounding self indulgent. But it's become one of the most important and fruitful tasks in my life is asking that question. How could I love myself better? Or how could I learn to love myself better?

• 2:59:45Tim Ferriss?

  So thank you very, very sincerely for that. And the words don't do it justice, but that's the best I can do right now remotely is to put it into words. So thank you for that.

• 2:59:54Speaker 02

  Thank you, Tim. This was a pleasure to do. And what I feel and I know is that as you tend your own heart in a wise way, then it makes you available to bring the gifts, the many gifts you have to the world, you personally and others. But to do it in a way that's on the carrier wave of connection and love, and it transforms everything. So thank you too.

• 3:00:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Jack, I, you know, I'm looking at a text thread of ours and I'm feeling the necklace around my neck, which is really a thread, a red thread that was used to close the, one of the elements of the closing of the 10 day silent retreat. And I shot you a text not too long ago, asking what the three knots meant, because I'd forgotten. And this is what you wrote back. First knot equals refuge in whatever you hold is most inspiring and sacred. Second, commitment to compassion for self and others. Third, following your highest intention.

• 3:00:50Tim Ferriss?

  And the intention that I've set at the end of that 10-day retreat was to learn to love myself so I could love others more fully. But I've realized that maybe what it is, is learning to love myself so I can help others learn to do the same. And you've been an integral piece of that. And I just love that I have the opportunity to introduce you and your work and these traditions to more people. And I will certainly be linking to where everyone can find you online. But are there any particular best places, just to reiterate, where people can find you? And I'll link to these in the show notes.

• 3:01:28Speaker 02

  JackHornfield.com. And also look up JackHornfield on SoundsTrue.com for those programs that I talked about. And then SpiritRock.org, which is our great meditation center in the Bay, San Francisco Bay area.

• 3:01:42Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely stunning, stunning, beautiful location. Worth visiting just to bathe in the scenery, but many more reasons to visit as well. Well, Jack, thank you again.

• 3:01:53Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure.

• 3:01:56Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, you can find show notes, links to all the resources, books, and everything that we discussed at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, thank you so much for listening. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. You enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between 1 and 1/2 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm

• 3:02:41Tim Ferriss?

  reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences.

• 3:03:25Tim Ferriss?

  Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers - that's not me - and even a mattress made specifically for kids. They have models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, as I often do and did last night on one of their beds. Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions, and on and on. They have you covered. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at helixsleep.com/tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Personally, for the last few years, I have been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one of those in the guest bedroom, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic.

• 3:04:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:04:52Tim Ferriss?

  models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences, so you can get exactly what your body needs. Each Helix Elite mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and thousands of extra micro coils for best-in-class support and durability. Every Helix Elite mattress also comes with a 15-year manufacturer's warranty and the same 100-night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. And you, my dear listeners, can get between 25% and 30% off, plus two free pillows, on all mattress orders. So, go to helixsleep.com/tim to check it out. That's helixsleep.com/tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

• 3:05:34Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it. Or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 3:06:18Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita. But for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked and bam, company was born.

• 3:07:02Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting, and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Get your free Element sample pack with any drink.

• 3:07:44Tim Ferriss?

  Drink mix purchase at drinklmnt.com/tim. That's drinklmnt.com/tim. And if you're an Element Insider, one of their most loyal customers, you have first access to Element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out. Drinklmnt.com/tim. Drinklmnt.com/tim.