A Buddhist Compass To Direct You Toward Happiness | Beth Upton

The happiness recipe from ancient Buddhist psychology. Beth Upton https://bethupton.com/ has been teaching meditation since 2014. Before that she spent ten years as a Buddhist nun, five of them in Burma under the guidance of Pa Auk Sayadaw. She currently leads the Sanditthika Meditation Community http://www.sanditthika.org/. In this episode we talk about: The Buddhist Abhidhamma, which Beth calls "particle physics for the mind" Why she's interested in the broader teaching of Kusala (happy mind states) Practical ways to design our lives to get more Kusala The beautiful qualities of mind that all co-arise in a moment of Kusala How we get tripped up in the realm of the "unwholesome" How Beth navigates Kusala and Akusala in her day to day life Related Episodes: The Profound Upsides of Mortality | Nikki Mirghafori, PhD https://www.danharris.com/p/the-profound-upsides-of-mortality-f71?utm_source=publication-search Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? Today, we're going to do one of my favorite things. We're going to nerd out on the Dharma. But in a way, and I want to assure you of this very, very early, in a way that is relevant and practical, which Buddhism pretty much always is. My guest today is a former Buddhist nun who underwent some of the most rigorous training possible over in Burma. She hit some elevated, rarefied states of consciousness. And her job now is to teach the rest of us, unenlightened worldlings, how we can get a little taste of what she tasted in our own lives. She's going to dive into a section of the Buddhist teachings known as the Abhidharma, which she describes as particle physics for the mind.

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  Specifically, she's going to focus on a concept called kusala. Now, there are a lot of translations for that word, kusala, and my guest will get into all of the various translations. But basically, what you need to know is that kusala mind states are happy mind states. They're what we all want. And today, my guest is going to give us the recipe for achieving the aforementioned kusala mind states. My guest is Beth Upton, who's been teaching meditation since 2014. Before that, she spent 10 years as a Buddhist nun, five of them in Burma, under the guidance of Pa Auk Sayadaw, a renowned Buddhist master. Beth also spent many months doing long solo retreats in various caves and forests. I had a lot of questions about that, as you will hear.

• 1:46Dan Harris?

  And she currently leads the Sanditthika meditation community in the caves of Almeria, southern Spain. I'm probably mangling the pronunciation of both of those words, Sanditthika and Almeria. Almeria, I guess. Anyway, there is a bespoke companion meditation that comes with today's episode. It focuses on the cultivation of gratitude, which is part of the aforementioned recipe for Kusala mind states. And that meditation comes from our teacher of the month, Dan Mauricio. As a reminder, we're now doing guided meditations for every Monday, Wednesday episode in July and August. If you want them, you got to sign up over at DanHarris.com. Paid subscribers also get regular live meditation and Q and A sessions with me. They get ad-free

• 2:30Dan Harris?

  versions of this podcast, plus much more. DanHarris.com. Check it out. We'll get started with Beth Upton right after this.

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• 4:10Dan Harris?

  Beth Upton, welcome to the show.

• 4:12Speaker 05

  Thank you. Nice to meet you.

• 4:14Dan Harris?

  Likewise, I'm excited to talk to you. I don't usually do this with meditation teachers, but your story is very intriguing to me. So I would love to start by just hearing a little bit about how and why you became a Buddhist nun. And I see here that you practiced and continue to practice in caves. So yeah, I would love to hear some of your backstory before we get into the meat of the discussion. When and how and why did you ordain as a Buddhist nun?

• 4:40Speaker 05

  I was 25 when I ordained. I mean, there's always sort of loads of reasons that will lead somebody to take that decision. It's never just one thing. But in my case, I'd done a lot already by the time I was 25. I'd exhausted a lot of avenues. I'd learned a lot of things that weren't going to make me happy. And it was like the next thing that I was trying. So I'd been working in Sri Lanka, sort of post tsunami Sri Lanka, and doing some international development work and found out about meditation there. Not found out, I'd heard about meditation before, but I started meditating regularly there. And it just struck me as a different way of going about my quality of life, like

• 5:25Speaker 05

  a fundamentally different orientation, rather than seeking things outside of myself, sort of to do something on what's happening on the inside. When that chapter in Sri Lanka ended and I was thinking about what to do next, going deeper into meditation was one of the options. It ended up being the winning option. And then I wasn't particularly attached to the idea of ordaining. I just went around Southeast Asia, looking for places to meditate long term. Eventually, I found the monastery that I ended up ordaining at. And I was just impressed by the quality of practice there, the amazing things that people were doing with their minds. I couldn't believe it. It blew my mind that these things are possible. And I decided I wanted to stay there until I had learned what they are teaching.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  The majority of that community were ordained. It made sense to me to ordain in that context. And I loved ordained life. I think when I die, I will look back on it as some of the best years of my life.

• 6:23Dan Harris?

  Hmm. What blew your mind? What were people doing with their minds that blew your mind?

• 6:28Speaker 05

  Where to start? There's so much amazing stuff in the world of meditation. Enough for several lifetimes. And most people don't know. Most people think of meditation as something that you do each day, like go for a jog, basic maintenance or something. But if you go deep into meditation, there's a whole universe of incredible advanced practices there. Maybe some of the things that are easiest to talk about for people who don't have a lot of technical knowledge of advanced meditation. Things like people discern in past and future lives and causality over lifetimes. Some of the really advanced Samadhi states.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  I remember one of the first group interviews I was ever in. So in the monastery where I trained, I only ever had group interview. It means if you wanted instruction, you were in a group setting and you asked your questions and received instruction in front of a group. One of the first ever group interviews that I was in. One of the nuns was describing her experience of the seventh jhana, which is the base of nothingness. And she was like this. And the teacher said to her, was it peaceful? And she said, yes, yes, Banti was very peaceful. And he said, for how long could you maintain your seventh jhana? This is a state which is like

• 7:52Speaker 05

  exquisitely refined, free from any thought, free from any distraction, no awareness of the body, no awareness of time. And she said, for two hours, Banti. And he said, bit short.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  This was like one of my first days there, bit short. And she was like, okay, you know, to go off and do this amazing thing for even longer.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  I had had like a pretty good education in the UK. And I arrived there and was like, there's so much that nobody even ever told me was possible in this human experience. There's so much on the menu that nobody even ever mentioned to me. That will do me so much better than the things that I've already been taught. And so I committed to stay there until I had learned what they were teaching.

• 8:44Dan Harris?

  I have so many questions.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  I mean, you can go if you want, Dan, like, go and do it if you want. It's still there, monastery is still there.

• 8:52Dan Harris?

  Yes, I know, I know. And I have a lot of thoughts on that, but I'm going to keep myself out of it for a second. I just want to define two terms for people that you used. Samadhi, which is the poly term, poly being the now dead language that the Buddhist teachings were written down in. But samadhi is the poly term for concentration or focus, one pointedness of the mind. And jhana states, J H A N A, are these eight interconnected rooms in the mind. I can only speak of them theoretically because I've not accessed them that are apparently on offer, whereas your samadhi gets really refined.

• 9:35Dan Harris?

  You access these eight levels of, it's just amazing to me that the, you can see consistently over time that the mind, something about the human mind has this access to these states of being, states of mind that are described for millennia that we can experience if we do the right kind of practice and get our mind focused in this way. You're describing a scene where on your first day, one of the other nuns is like, yeah, I'm on level seven for two hours. And the teacher is like, yeah, well, see if you can up that to three.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  Or four.

• 10:15Dan Harris?

  Which is incredible.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:17Dan Harris?

  But the other thing you said in there is about past and future lives, which you kind of just mentioned and moved along. And I guess my question to you is, if I were showing up as a 25-year-old at this monastery, the 25-year-old version of me would never have fucking done that because he was an idiot. But if I was 25, showing up at the monastery and somebody was saying, "Yeah, you can get the mind to the point where you can discern past and future lives." I would have said, "I'm out. This is a cult. There's no way that's true." What about you allowed you to believe that was a thing that could be done?

• 10:53Speaker 05

  Well, the whole of the nature of the Dharma, when it's being well taught, is what we call "ehi pasika", which is another Pali word. And it means "come and see." So like "ehi", come, "pasika" to see, come and see. So it's inviting your investigation, it's not requiring your blind belief. And there is a systematic practice by which you can come and see, is it really possible or not? And that really appealed to my scientific side. I had like a scientific education. And so I was skeptical and open and enthusiastic. You know, I was willing to come and see.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  And I went through that method with a fine tooth comb, searching for the mistakes. But the community there is like around a thousand people. And of those a thousand people, not all of them are in those very advanced practices. A good chunk of them are breaths going in, breaths going out. But a good number of them are in those advanced practices. So just out of humility, I think it's worth not immediately discounting that as everyone's just in a cult, and embracing this attitude that is praised by the Buddha of like, "Okay, let's see. Let's see if it's possible."

• 12:18Dan Harris?

  What did you find when you went and saw?

• 12:21Speaker 05

  I saw it's possible and beneficial. There's a lot in this life which is possible, but not beneficial. And the beautiful thing about this training is, yeah, it's possible, and when you do it, you feel the benefit to your quality of life.

• 12:40Dan Harris?

  What is the benefit of having some?

• 12:45Dan Harris?

  Insight into your past lives and future lives. How does that help? Because I would just be thinking about telling past versions of myself to buy Apple stock.

• 12:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I think like any tool, you can use it for benefit or not. And the way that you just described wouldn't be beneficial. So in the Dharma, we understand that the root of everything which makes us suffer is identity. There's some me or mine and all of the suffering crystallizes around that, right? So we've already got enough me and mine in this life to be causing our suffering. The danger when we see our past lives is that we just increase that amount of me and mine. And it's not only I suffered in this life, but woe is me, I also suffered in the past life and so on. And I also didn't get this.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  And if we discern our past lives like that, leaning into the identity, then it can just increase our suffering. And there isn't really any benefit in it. It can also increase our pride. Look at me and what I can do and I was this and I was that. So that would be the wrong use of the tool. The way that we use it for benefit is the opposite and is to deepen our understanding of non-self. So in order to use this practice to deepen our understanding of non-self, what we do when we discern the past lives is essentially ignore the concept. The concept is like, oh, I was an elephant or I was a human or I was a deva in my past life or whatever it might be.

• 14:27Speaker 05

  And instead, we discern that past life as, to bring us here into the Abhidhamma, we discern that past life as momentary phenomena arising and passing away. So it's moments of consciousness arising and passing away one after the other and particles of materiality arising and passing away. And then what we discern is the causal relation between that momentary phenomena in the past life and the momentary phenomena that is happening now. And so what we can see is that every moment of experience that is happening now is conditioned by momentary phenomena in the past and momentary phenomena in the present.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  But what we have is impermanent moments conditioning other impermanent moments. And when we see that, we understand even more vividly. There's no me and there's no mine in the center of this. It's all just a momentary causal process. And that gives rise to a great unburdening, we could say, a great renunciation, a great unburdening.

• 15:38Dan Harris?

  I'm going to do my best to restate that to you. And please, at the back end of my

• 15:43Speaker 05

  I mean, it's a lot. You really like, you dived right in there.

• 15:50Dan Harris?

  That's, that's my job. Also, part of my job is to see if I can understand what my guest is saying as a proxy for the audience. So I'm going to see if I can restate it and please correct me on the other side. At the heart of the Dharma is letting go. And one of the hardest renunciations is this very natural identification we have with the self. I am this, I am that, I have an Instagram page, I have a resume, I have dentist appointment, et cetera. And all that is true on one level. You're Beth, I'm Dan, in consensual reality, that's all true. But on an ultimate level, it's all just impermanent

• 16:33Dan Harris?

  arisings within consciousness, which is itself also impermanent. And so what's the point of looking at your past lives? It's not to reify your identity. It's not to concretize some sense of, look how good a meditator I am, or look how I was in my past lives. It's to see that everything that was and everything that will be and everything that is now are just these blips arising in consciousness, these impersonal, impermanent objects arising in the mind. And each arising is conditioned by this vast, incomprehensible gumbo of previous causes and conditions.

• 17:18Dan Harris?

  And so, understanding who and what you were in past lives It's not to show off, it's to deepen your understanding that you are less solid than you think you are.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  Yes, that was pretty good.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  That was pretty good.

• 17:37Dan Harris?

  Thank you. I feel, you know, much more I am in this moment because you're inflating my ego.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  Because of the pride, it gets us, doesn't it?

• 17:46Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's an amazing thing to hear and I want to point out that I don't know if you know Nikki Mirghafori.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've never met her, but I know of her.

• 17:57Dan Harris?

  Yeah, so she studied at the same monastery, to my knowledge, in the same school. There's a renowned Buddhist monk in Burma, Pa Auk Sayadaw, I'm probably mangling his name. And he was her teacher and your teacher, and Nikki was on this show a couple of years ago and talked about her own work in this style of practice. So I will drop a link to that in the show notes. But I'm saying all of that to get me to this guy Pa Auk Sayadaw. Because his way of teaching is renowned to be incredibly rigorous. Where you, if memory serves, you really go through the jhanas before you even do

• 18:40Dan Harris?

  what most of us are doing on a daily basis, which is mindfulness or insight practice. So I'd be curious to hear more about like, how your mind encountered that level of rigor and, you know, whether it's for everybody.

• 18:57Speaker 05

  Well, I would describe the Pa Auk training as being systematic and detailed. I guess you could say rigorous, but when you say rigorous, it makes it sound like it's hard work. And my experience at Pa Auk wasn't so much that it was hard work, but it is detailed and it's systematic. And that's sort of reflective of the personality of Pa Auk Sayadaw, whose name you pronounced very well. He is a very detail-oriented man. And he sort of delights in the detail for its own sake. What can be known, what can be discerned, for its own sake.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  And so there's a lot of detail in the practice. As for the jhana training, we can think of the direction of progress in meditation as moving from more coarse states to more subtle states. At first, when the mind is full of coarse objects and distraction, we're not able to know very subtle things. We're only able to know relatively coarse things. Later, like you said, the direction is letting go. So when we've put down some of those more clunky, more coarse things, we're able to stay with more refined things for longer. And so we can imagine that that jhana training is essentially habituating the mind to be with very subtle things for a long time.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  And not to get distracted by more coarse things, not to pick them back up. So a lot of the really interesting practices involve being with very subtle things for a long time. Discerning your past lives and causality across individual mind moments is subtle by its very nature. And so we do that training first to incline the mind towards subtle states. But inclining the mind towards subtle states is complex in and of its own right. It's not just like, be with that subtle state, get on with it, do it till you can do it. In order to be with something subtle for a long time, we need to, along the way, be building

• 21:04Speaker 05

  awareness of all of the clunky things that we're holding on to and why, what emotions can't we put down, what objects of attention keep on drawing us in. And so it's all included, even though it might sound rigorous. It involves a lot of love and a lot of kindness and a lot of getting to know yourself and all of these things that people are doing when they are calling it, let's say, a mindfulness practice.

• 21:33Dan Harris?

  So it's even if you're on a Pa'ak retreat or you've ordained in that tradition, you're still noticing some of the same things that we notice in meditation, us civilians, like hunger, desire, anger, ancient resentments, et cetera, et cetera. You're working with a lot of the same raw materials, but over time, you're getting down to levels that are really subtle.

• 21:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can't not see those things. I think it is maybe a meditation myth that you can just bulldoze your way into a Samadhi state or into a Jhana state. You can't. You have to see all of the things which are coming into your attention. You have to see your habits of mind. I think what we noticed with the Pa'ak training is sort of different traditions have had to define their USP, if you like, sort of what they're leading with. And the Pa'ak tradition is really emphasizing those more refined ends of the practice. And so that's where all the vocabulary picks up. That's what the culture is built around. It's a magnet for people who want to practice at that level.

• 22:40Speaker 05

  But nobody gets to skip over dealing with hunger and irritation with the sound and feeling sad and nobody gets to skip over that. We all have to learn how to deal with those things.

• 22:54Dan Harris?

  What's the deal with the caves?

• 22:57Speaker 05

  What do you want to know about it?

• 22:59Dan Harris?

  Why? Why not just stay in the monastery? Why sit in a cave?

• 23:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I had been at Pa'ak at that time, like just over five years. I had practiced my way through the meditations that they were teaching. And I think what I really needed at that time was a little while to practice outside of the institution.

• 23:24Speaker 05

  Not because there's anything wrong with the institution, but as you or anyone will know, if you've spent a long time living full time within an institution, there's just like the way of doing things, there's the cultural blind spots, there's the bad habits that you pick up within that institution, there's the ways in which you're not challenged because, you know, everyone's doing the same thing. So after those years, I just wanted a place to practise that wasn't within the monastery, where I could go over everything that I've learned in my own time, in my own pace, digest it. And I found it a surprisingly difficult need to get met, to be honest.

• 24:08Speaker 05

  As a monastic, I wasn't using money and I didn't have money, so paying to go and be in a retreat centre wasn't an option for me. A lot of other monasteries were happy to have you if you practised in the way that they wanted, so sort of re-institutionalised yourself into their institution. Some monasteries wanted you to disrobe and re-ordain in their tradition, which I didn't want to do. And so after a bit of a search, I just said to my mum, like, can you put me on a bus to southern Spain? And my idea was it'll be warm enough to sleep outside in southern Spain. And it's Europe, like, I'm not going to get skinnier and skinnier and starve to death on the side

• 24:53Speaker 05

  of the road, someone's going to feed me, you know? And so that's what I did. I didn't know that the caves were there when I left and the first little while, few nights, I was just sleeping on a park bench and begging my food in the local market. And then little by little, finding slightly more comfortable places to stay until I ended up in the caves. And then I was there for about fifteen months, the first time I was there. And then later I went back and we turned it into a meditation community. It was a great time, really, really great time.

• 25:27Dan Harris?

  You're a badass. I love this. This is awesome. So I promise I'll move off the biographical questions in a second, but you said earlier that you loved being a monastic.

• 25:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:38Dan Harris?

  But then you did decide to disrobe in 2018. So what was that about?

• 25:43Speaker 05

  I think it's more of what I was just saying. So I moved out of the institution. I was still ordained when I was in the caves. And I was doing my own practice, just as an ordained person living in those caves. And then, as I felt more into my practice, I realized that the things which still destabilized me, let's say, were all things that I was avoiding by being in the robes. So when you're an ordained person, for example, the way that people tend to interact with you, even strangers, there's a certain quality to it, which is very samey. And so my relational life was lacking diversity and challenge.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  Because everybody was relating to me first and foremost as a monastic. There were also sort of parts of myself that never came out to play. Because I was a monastic. And so I couldn't really apply wisdom to those parts of myself. Because I never saw the light of day, because I was always being a nun. Another big one was money. So I had this rule not to use money. My university degree had been in economics. And it was very convenient for me to be not using money, because I had taken a huge dislike to money and the financial system. And then I just could keep my hands clean. And I was at a stage where I was realizing I was going to start picking up more responsibility in the Dharma, maybe doing some teaching.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  And very much needing other people to deal with money.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  And yet secretly, I was holding some avoidance, judgment aversion towards the whole of the world of finance. That and a few other things, basically, I realized I need to get my hands a bit dirty, go and do a bit more living, go and let some of these other parts of myself out to play so that I could apply my wisdom to those things and integrate it into my practice. The other thing also is, it was around the time that I was starting to teach others in a very gentle way. And I was very aware that being ordained at Par Akh, I'm also representing them in the way that I teach others.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  And I think as a layperson, the way that I teach is very loyal to the tradition in which I trained. And if I had forced myself to conduct myself at all times to that standard, it would have been so stifling for me. Because everything, the way that you sit, the way that you talk, the way that you eat, the way that you... So I think I just wanted to not misrepresent them in my humanness and also cut myself a bit of slack by not having this pressure, this institutional pressure to teach in a way that is exactly by the book.

• 28:39Dan Harris?

  That makes complete sense. Back to what you were saying about wanting to engage with parts of yourself that were quite naturally suppressed by the monastic lifestyle. As I was listening to you speak, I was remembering those Zen ox herding pictures. I'm sure you're familiar with them. There are these series of Zen images comparing enlightenment to ox herding and...

• 29:06Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 29:07Dan Harris?

  Okay, well, I don't remember all the different, I'm probably mangling this in a thousand different ways, but the punchline is the final image is going to the market.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 29:18Dan Harris?

  So you can get enlightened, but the point is to then reengage with the world.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  To integrate, yeah. So another sort of like hackneyed simile is the child learning to walk. You know, when you're teaching a child to walk, you do want to make it easy. You don't want to put them in the middle of the street, but we don't always in our practice want to be making it as safe and sterile as possible. There's the right time for challenge and integration. That's really at the heart of why I disrobed. But I still, I've got such a soft spot for monastic life. In my heart, I love it, but in this chapter, it's not, it's not the right context for me to grow.

• 30:00Dan Harris?

  Thank you for your patience with my personal questions.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  My pleasure.

• 30:08Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Beth Upton talks about the Buddhist Abhidhamma, which she calls particle physics for the mind. She talks about why she's interested in the broader teaching of Kusala and practical ways to design your life to get more Kusala.

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• 31:27Dan Harris?

  Let's talk about the thing you wanted to teach today. In your conversations with Marissa, our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman, who is quite a serious Dharma student herself, in those conversations that you had with Marissa, you said that you wanted to talk about the Abhidhamma. Many people might not know what that is. Can you just describe and define, if you would?

• 31:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, so just to clarify a little bit. Because of the way I trained, I spend a lot of my teaching life in these very sort of technical conversations with people. My teaching life inclines to people who are very dedicated to the practice, would probably say it's the most or one of the most important things in their life. They're doing long silent retreats with me every year. And it doesn't come naturally to me to think about aspects of what I have learned that I can give to a broad audience. My natural strength is sort of attending to the person in front of me, if you like. And so when I was thinking about,

• 32:35Speaker 05

  or I am thinking in general at the moment more about of this knowledge base, what things can I take that would be beneficial for anyone? Not just the dedicated meditator in front of me, but anyone. One of the answers that I landed on is this topic of, again, another Pali word, kusala. Kusala is like a quality of mind which has a group of mental qualities that always coexist. It's like the beautiful thing that the mind can do, and it's essentially just one thing. But in order to understand it well...

• 33:17Speaker 05

  We need to lean into the Abhidhamma. And the Abhidhamma, to answer your question, is the side of the Buddha's teachings, which breaks everything down into its building blocks, into its smallest possible building blocks. So it's like the essence of what's really happening when you break it down as much as you can. And when we break things down into their building blocks, we find that it's all momentary. So this is what we were speaking about before with the past life practice, for example. When we go as subtle as we can go, we see that things are momentarily coming into and out of existence. And what the Abhidhamma deals with is what are these momentary building blocks of reality?

• 34:01Speaker 05

  And then it classifies them and defines them in lots of different ways.

• 34:05Dan Harris?

  I'm going to do my re-stating.

• 34:07Speaker 05

  Go on, you go.

• 34:12Dan Harris?

  I'm going to reverse the order of what you said. So the Abhidhamma is, my friend Dr. Mark Epstein, who's a Buddhist psychiatrist, I believe he wrote his master's thesis or his senior thesis on the Abhidhamma, and he has described it as the table of elements for the mind.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. Like particle physics for the mind.

• 34:34Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes, yes. It's the aspect of the Buddhist teachings that really breaks down this whole system of mind, body, heart, whatever you want to call it, to its most fundamental and subtle elements.

• 34:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, the bit which is better than it being an elementary table is that it's not only for the physical world. It's that also for the mind, which is completely non-physical.

• 35:01Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 35:01Speaker 05

  So that's where we trump science.

• 35:06Dan Harris?

  Or you're ahead of science and science may catch up.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  Let's hope so. I really want that to happen, Dan. Make that happen.

• 35:13Dan Harris?

  I'm doing my best. I mean, you can think of it as its own science.

• 35:16Speaker 05

  More scientific than science, yeah. I would love, love for science to.

• 35:24Speaker 05

  Integrate more of the Abhidhamma understanding. I'd love it. I'd love it. Yeah.

• 35:31Dan Harris?

  My suspicion is that it will happen, not having anything to do with me. It's just that I see so many neuroscientists and just plain old scientists who are operating in the world today, who are really interested in the Dharma. I have a sense that that momentum exists. Within Buddhism and within the Abhidhamma, one of the really important concepts, as you said earlier, and now I'm continuing with my restating thing here, is kusala, K U S A L A, which, according to my notes here, can be translated as skillful, intelligent, expert, good, right, virtuous, meritorious, beneficial, lucky, happy, healthy, prosperous, depending on the contexts.

• 36:15Dan Harris?

  The opposite of kusala is akusala, A K U S A L A. That is, in Pali, often you have a concept and then the opposite of the concept, you just put an A in front of it, kind of like atheist or theist, probably where we get it from. And so that's my full reflection. Yes, we have the Abhidhamma, which is a detailed deconstruction of the mind, and kusala is a concept that comes up within the Dharma and within specifically the the Abhidhamma. And so why, if I'm correct about all of that, what about kusala is attractive to you as a broad teaching?

• 36:55Speaker 05

  I spend a lot of my time teaching the technical things, and when I am in that work of taking somebody up the meditation mountain, for example, I'm very much thinking about what is beneficial to them for their next step in terms of like the technique and the balance of their mind and everything. If I step back and I'm like, what is beneficial to everybody, wherever they are on the mountain, to take one step up the mountain, the answer is kusala. The name of your podcast is 10% happier. What do you do if you want to be 10% happier? Do more kusala. What do you do if you wanna like, take one step out of your depression?

• 37:36Speaker 05

  Do more kusala. What do you do if you're suffering from anxiety and you want to ease it? One step, do more kusala. What do you do if you want to improve your parenting? Do more kusala. What do you do if you wanna get on better with your boss? Do more kusala. What do you do if you're in chronic pain? Do more kusala. It's the medicine that everyone can take and get benefit.

• 38:00Dan Harris?

  So how do you do more kusala?

• 38:02Speaker 05

  Well, I think this is where the Abhidhamma really helps. Because as you just said, like in your definition of that word, it doesn't translate easily into English. And we have words like skillful, beneficial, wholesome, good, and they are vague. And so we think about, okay, how do I be more skillful? Well, if I knew, you know. So it's difficult to put into practice. When we understand what's happening on that Abhidhamma level, so on this atomic building blocks level, I think it becomes much more actionable and very unifying as well.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  So what we need to know about kusala is that it is a collection of qualities of mind that always arise. It's a law of the mind that these things come together. You can think of them like best friends that are handcuffed together. And so if you invite one of them to the party, they all come along. These qualities of mind are faith, which is not the same thing as blind belief. It is our confidence that what we're doing is good. Right? So our faith, mindfulness, which I'm sure you will have spoken about a lot.

• 39:23Speaker 05

  Our non-greed, which is our renunciation, letting go, generosity, contentment. Our non-hatred, which is our acceptance, loving kindness, welcoming, embracing. Our morality, which is like our conscience doesn't wanna harm ourselves or others, wants to do the right thing. Basic mental balance, like nothing and too much excess. Um. On a course level, we could think of this like no drama, nice and balanced, nice and even keel. Tranquility, a softness, lightness, flexibility.

• 40:03Speaker 05

  And then we have a proficiency, which basically means this Kusala mind is good at its task, so a type of proficiency. And then the last one is an uprightness, which we could think of as authenticity, integrity, a truthfulness, but not just in speech, in the way that we conduct ourselves, straight and true, uprightness. When we know that we're dealing with this collection of mental qualities, then to do more Kusala, we can pick any one of them and we'll be doing all of them.

• 40:38Dan Harris?

  Hmm.

• 40:40Speaker 05

  Let me be more generous today. Who could I give a gift to today? And without trying, you're already more tranquil, you're already more loving. You've already got more faith in the goodness of humanity, you're already more mindful, you're already more in line with your conscience. Alternatively, you could sit and think, hmm, what's weighing on my conscience? Where have I transgressed my own ethics? Let me make amends for that today. And you're already more loving, more generous of spirit, more faithful, more tranquil, all of the good things coming along together with it. And again, whatever is your context, whatever is your life situation, you can pick any of these, you can do any of them,

• 41:24Speaker 05

  lean into any of them, you get all of them together as a like added bonus and you will feel better.

• 41:33Dan Harris?

  I'm picturing like an abacus.

• 41:37Dan Harris?

  With rows, horizontal rows and some sort of bead on each row. If each of those beads is one of the component parts of Kusala, all you have to do is move any bead, so it could be the mindfulness bead, all the way to the right and automatically click all the other beads are in place. As soon as you're paying attention in a nonjudgmental way, i.e. mindfulness, uprightness, faith, all those other beads click into place alongside it. In a true moment of mindfulness, all those things are there and it's Kusala.

• 42:14Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right. Even in that, that you just said mindfulness, i.e. paying attention in a nonjudgmental way. So even in that, you're conflating two of those different mental factors, mindfulness and nonjudgment. You notice they come along together, but they're actually two different things. They're two best friends handcuffed together. The part which is mindfulness is not forgetting what you're doing, not forgetting to stay with your object of attention. And the nonjudgment is the non-hatred mental factor that comes right along with it, handcuffed to it. The part where your simile breaks down just a little is that although all of these mental factors come along together,

• 42:58Speaker 05

  they can vary slightly in their predominance. So, for example, if you're practicing loving kindness meditation, you'll be leading with non-hatred and it will be the predominant one in the group. They'll all be there, but one of them is making the most noise. If you do prostrations to the Buddha, you're leading with faith. It will be the loudest one. All of them will be there, but that one will be the strongest.

• 43:23Dan Harris?

  So it's as if when the beads click onto the right side. They each inflate or deflate based on which one is in the lead?

• 43:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, or like maybe instead of they're connected by a rod, they're connected by an elastic or something. We could work the simile. But yeah, you're basically, you're right. You're right.

• 43:44Dan Harris?

  I do appreciate when you correct me and I would encourage you to keep doing that.

• 43:48Speaker 05

  Pleasure.

• 43:49Dan Harris?

  The point here is not for me to be right. The point is for the people listening to this to understand. Okay, so you're saying if the goal is Kusala, to have a healthy wholesome state of mind, which will help us be 10% happier, 10% less depressed, 10% less addicted, whatever it is. So we all want this. We all want Kusala. So there are, I can't remember how many factors, maybe it sounded like about 10, that are non-negotiable component parts handcuffed together that arise, co-arise in any Kusala moment of mine. We can pick anything off that

• 44:27Dan Harris?

  menu. Uprightness, non-hatred, generosity, mindfulness, and just focus on that and we will get happier.

• 44:37Speaker 05

  Yes. Don't you think more people should know? It's like a basic law of how everybody's mind works. It's happening in everybody. It's like a law of the mind and we don't know. To me, that's a tragedy. That's a tragedy.

• 44:54Dan Harris?

  Well, you are remedying that.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  With your help. With your help. Yeah.

• 45:00Dan Harris?

  We're both in a Kusala mind state right now.

• 45:03Speaker 05

  We are. Yeah.

• 45:05Dan Harris?

  Let's go a click more practical. If I'm listening to you, Beth, speak about this, tell me more about how I can design my busy life, because a lot of people are listening to this while driving or washing the dishes and they don't have a ton of extra time. How can I design my busy life to get more of this Kusala thing to which you keep referring?

• 45:26Speaker 05

  Well, when I'm speaking to meditators, I often suggest that we sort of break our day down into different sections. So one section might be time where you're really just not doing anything. And we tend to fill that with scrolling our phone or distracting ourselves or whatever we do, but really. You're not doing anything and there's nothing particularly useful for you to be doing. So my advice to meditators at that time is. Meditate.

• 45:57Dan Harris?

  Um.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  But if you're not a meditator and you're not inclined to meditate, it's worth making an inventory of those times. And committing rather than filling them with distraction and junk. What kind of Kusala piques your interest? Would you like to do a gratitude practice? Would you like to do a generosity practice? In the last relationship that I was in, we had a Kusala hat where we put people's names in the hat. And if we had some downtime, we'd pick someone's name out and we'd plan a little Kusala that we could do. For them, like something nice that we could do for them. So. That's the time of the day when you've got nothing useful to be doing, basically like meditate.

• 46:39Speaker 05

  Or make a list of different types of Kusala things that you would like to do and do them at that time. Another chunk of the day, like the second chunk to work with, is all of the things that we do in a day sort of on autopilot. So it's not requiring much active attention from us. But you've got to be doing those things, you know, you've got to be doing laundry, you've got to do your commute, you've got to. Chop the vegetables, you know, whatever it is that you've got to do, you've got to answer the emails. And so for those activities, usually what I suggest to meditators. Is that you train yourself to do those things with your attention on whatever is your meditation object.

• 47:23Speaker 05

  Because realistically, there's enough space in the mind to.

• 47:28Speaker 05

  Be with your breath or be practising loving kindness or whatever meditation you're doing, mindfulness of the body alongside doing these kind of autopilot activities. For people who aren't meditators, again, you could just think, what kusala can I bring to this activity? Can I chop the vegetables as a service to the people who will eat them or with gratitude for the people that planted the vegetables? Or, you know, whatever it might be, when I'm on my commute, can I do well wishes to the other people on the train? You know, whatever it might be, because you know that you're going to have to do those things every day. So if you start to build into your habit to do it in a kusala frame of mind, then it's going to

• 48:08Speaker 05

  compound over time because the habits will become sort of like snowballing, reinforcing themselves. And then we've got the things that we have to do each day, which do require active engagement. For example, now I'm doing this podcast with you and it's requiring my full attention. Or, you know, whatever we have to attend to in our work life or our parenting or whatever it might be, where we do need to be fully engaged with the activity. In those cases, first of all, I would suggest people to have a look at, are there any of these things that you are having to give your full attention to?

• 48:50Speaker 05

  That you know it's almost impossible to do it with a kusala mind. You hate it. And if that's the case, then gradually, obviously, we can't just immediately change our lives. But we are responsible for our lives. We are the captain of the ship. And if there are things we're consenting to every day that just completely drain our kusala, we want to gradually start to steer our lives away from having to engage in those kinds of things.

• 49:22Speaker 05

  The things that we really can't get out of, again, we want to ask ourselves, what beautiful quality of attention can I bring to this activity? If I need to do emails for two hours a day, can I make each email an act of service? For example, or an act of patience, or humility, or renunciation? Or if I need to do a lot of parenting, can I make this my act of loving kindness? Or again, patience, can I bring in more tranquility, whatever it might be? So what one or more than one of these beautiful qualities of mind can I bring to this activity that I must do?

• 50:02Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Beth talks about the beautiful qualities of mind that all co-arise in a moment of kusala. They are co-activating these states of mind. She talks about how we get tripped up in the realm of the unwholesome and how she, Beth, navigates kusala and akusala in her own daily life.

• 50:29Dan Harris?

  Can you go over the menu again? What are the beautiful qualities of mind that all co-arise in a moment of akusala moment?

• 50:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll go over them just quickly. So we've got faith, mindfulness, non-greed, non-hatred. I think non-greed and non-hatred are very boring translations for these two very powerful mental factors. But anyway, non-greed, non-hatred, our morality, like our conscience, mental balance, tranquility, lightness, softness, flexibility, proficiency and uprightness.

• 51:05Dan Harris?

  What's proficiency again?

• 51:07Speaker 05

  Proficiency is a type of good at what it does. So if you imagine a mind that is angry, for example, it will be rigid. And if you try to turn it to a task to get a job done, it's not going to do it very well because it's an agitated, unstable mind. So if you are angry and you were trying to chop the vegetables, for example, you're more likely to cut your finger or make a mistake. It's not established in proficiency. But when the mind is well established in kusala, you can direct your attention, do this now, do this now, and it will do it well because it's established in kusala.

• 51:48Dan Harris?

  So when I hear proficiency, as you described, and I'm thinking a little bit about flow states.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:54Dan Harris?

  I don't get into flow that often, or at least I don't know enough about flow to know whether I'm in it often. But there are things that I do in my daily life where I'm pretty proficient. I can play the drums. I can write an introduction to this podcast. And when I'm in those states where I'm fully absorbed and I know what I'm doing and it feels good to do it. That is kusala.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  You notice that other kusala comes along with it. So when you lean into proficiency and you're not thinking about it, you're not controlling anymore. Then you notice you become tranquil, you become naturally mindful, you become surrendered. The hate goes away, right? They all come along together. So you're right there. And in that flow state, we have proficiency predominant, but we also have that flexibility and softness predominant. That there's no rigidity, there's no control in that flow state, right?

• 52:52Dan Harris?

  I'm trying to think of the right similar metaphor for what it is you're laying out here for us. Because you can think of it as a recipe. Where if you get one ingredient, you get all of them. So it's bargain shopping in that way.

• 53:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like a happiness cake.

• 53:10Dan Harris?

  Yeah. But it's also kind of like a compass, I think.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 53:14Dan Harris?

  I'm making this up, but it's like, if you have this lens on life. Let's boost our kusala quotient for as many waking moments. Or even if you're sleeping and you're a master meditator and you can meditate in your sleep. For as many mind moments as are available to you. If that's your north star, if that's the direction. Well, then you're practicing all the time.

• 53:42Speaker 05

  Yes. And the truth is, sort of aside from the force of habit, which is a very strong force. There is no reason why you can't be practicing kusala at any time. There is no circumstance where this isn't the right time for kusala now. It's always the better option.

• 54:01Dan Harris?

  Let's talk a little bit about akusala, the opposite. What qualifies? Like, if I like to mindlessly eat some pretzels and watch sports with my son. So is that akusala?

• 54:14Speaker 05

  That is akusala, yeah. So whereas kusala has just got that one flavor that now we've spoken about a lot, all of these factors that are chained together. Akusala isn't like that. There's many, many different kinds of unwholesome things that the mind can do. We can be angry or prideful or greedy or lustful or many things, fearful, sad, loads and loads of different ways that the mind can be unwholesome. And at the core of the reason why we fall into akusala is because we're addicted to that me and mine. So the aversive kinds of akusala, to oversimplify, are sort of doing a protecting function for that imagined me and mine.

• 54:53Speaker 05

  And then the greedy kinds of akusala are doing a nourishing function for that imagined me or mine. So you're like, my body and my pleasure. Where are those pretzels? But there is no your body and there is no your pleasure, right? So there's that wrongly imagined me and mine that we're serving through all of that akusala, which is what makes it akusala. Probably one of the main reasons that we get caught up, well, at the center is that me and mine. But on the level of habit is because both kusala and akusa can feel good, right? It feels good when you're eating your favorite kind of ice cream. It feels good when you're having those pretzels.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  It feels good when you're gossiping with your friend. There's lots of things in the realm of unwholesome that feel good for a little while. It's not as refined of a pleasure as you get through the kusala, but it is our habit. And it's sort of a more coarse form of pleasure that is somewhat addicting. So the Buddha famously said, if you want big happiness, give up the small happiness. Give it up. We're addicted to this small happiness of the akusala, which is like gratification to our ego, gratification to our senses. And so we keep on missing the opportunity to do the kusala. And when we do that, it's essentially a habit shift.

• 56:20Speaker 05

  And the habit is away from something slightly more coarse and again towards something slightly more subtle, but actually far more gratifying.

• 56:30Dan Harris?

  My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who I've worked with for 15 years or whatever, he makes this attempt that I find, it doesn't always work for me. I can't always operationalize it in my life, but I do find it work for me intellectually. I think to me, it's a winning reframe. I think it's possible to hear what you're saying about giving up these small forms of happiness, which is referred to within the Dharma as renunciation, which is not always the most winning term for Westerners. We don't love it. But Joseph tries to reframe it as non-addiction, which I actually do think works for the Western mind, because we know that it sucks to be addicted. So I'd be curious to hear if you have any thoughts on that.

• 57:09Speaker 05

  I think it's a beautiful reframe. Yeah. The problem is that addiction to akusala, if you want to put it in that way, addiction to this small happiness of ego gratification, seeking praise, accomplishment, achievement, seeking gratification to the senses in the ice cream and the pretzels. It's such a culturally normalized addiction, culturally praised in a lot of cases.

• 57:34Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 05

  It's the way that people connect and feel included with each other, that I think it's probably quite a difficult reframe for people to maintain, right? Because we're not walking around pointing out to each other that we're addicted. We're really encouraging each other. We're pulling people into this world of the small happiness again and again and again. And I think Joseph is right. At its core, it's an addiction. Yeah.

• 58:03Dan Harris?

  So how do we make this practical? I'm curious. Maybe the way to do this is talk about how you live as no longer a nun and what you recommend to your students. Like, do you enjoy ice cream once in a while? Do you ever allow yourself to scroll on your phone? Do you anti Instagram? Like, how do you navigate all of this?

• 58:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, as I don't have social media really, and I don't really use that as habit, but I do have ice cream and I do like those things. We exist in a world where sense pleasure and sense pain is definitely going to happen because we have this sensitive body. So those two things are definitely going to happen. The solution isn't just avoid anything that might feel good with the body and only do things which feel painful with the body. The Buddha made that mistake. It's not the right way. The idea is that we can allow this body to experience both pleasure and pain. Where we are getting our gratification from is not that momentary pleasure.

• 59:07Speaker 05

  It's the kusala that we bring in our quality of attention. Right? So, oh, this pleasure and pain is happening. It's all the time changing. For example, is a type of mindfulness, which is a type of kusala. Or, oh, this ice cream is here. Let me be grateful for it. Or let me be in loving connection with the friends I'm sharing this ice cream with. Would be like a different type of kusala that we could be doing. So the idea isn't like cut off the body from pleasure. The idea is that our well being is not rooted in that fleeting pleasure of the body. Right?

• 59:42Dan Harris?

  So I had a cinnamon roll last night.

• 59:45Speaker 05

  We're getting confessional.

• 59:46Dan Harris?

  No, no, I, I, I don't feel any guilt about it. Maybe I feel a little guilt about it. But anyway, I had a cinnamon roll last night and it was awesome. And I don't know if my eating of it was, if my mind was in a kusala or a kusala state. But one way I could imagine making it truly kusala while eating the cinnamon bun is to notice how the pleasure comes and goes.

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's one way. Exactly.

• 1:00:17Dan Harris?

  Another Buddhist term that we use in the West is a pejorative, but it's actually, there's a lot to it, I think, in a positive way is disenchantment.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Dan Harris?

  Like waking up from the spell. If you're really paying attention while you were eating cinnamon bun, which I frankly wasn't, that's the confessional part. You can see, okay, I get this big hit of dopamine. It's chewy and the frosting is really sweet. And there is suffering embedded in the happiness there, in the pleasure, rather. And if you're paying attention, you really see that. Then it becomes this tasteless mush in your mouth that you then use this weird thing called a tongue to shove back down your gullet. And if you're really paying attention, you can turn anything into kusala.

• 1:00:59Speaker 05

  That's right. And can you see in that example that you just gave? Had you done that, you've gifted yourself in that moment a better happiness. You've not denied yourself anything. You've increased your quality of life by moving your framing to something kusala in that time. You've elevated your quality of life, right? You haven't denied yourself anything. You've gifted yourself a bigger happiness.

• 1:01:24Dan Harris?

  So if we use this compass, this kusala compass, or if you want to use a different simile, the recipe for the happiness cake, the happiness cinnamon bun, it's not living in a hair shirt. It's not shaving our heads and becoming a nun necessarily.

• 1:01:42Speaker 05

  Do that if you want.

• 1:01:43Dan Harris?

  Yes. But we're not living in a harshly abstemious life necessarily. We're walking the middle path between total self-denial and self-mortification as the Buddha did before he got enlightened and total sense of pleasure, which will never actually get you anywhere.

• 1:02:02Speaker 05

  Right. It's like I said, wherever you are on the mountain, if you're just starting out, taking your first step on the mountain, or you're caught up in thorny bushes, or you're sinking in a sinkhole, or you're like right near the top, do more kusala. You'll feel better. You'll be on your way up.

• 1:02:19Dan Harris?

  Beth, this has been a huge pleasure. Thank you very much for doing this. It's so great to meet you. I really appreciate your time.

• 1:02:25Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me, Dan.

• 1:02:29Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Beth Upton. Awesome to talk to her. I believe I mentioned another student of the Burmese Master Pa Auk Sayadaw. That student is named Nikki Mirghafori. She was on this show several years ago. I'm going to drop a link to that episode in the show notes. She is astonishingly impressive, Nikki is. As a reminder, there's a guided meditation designed to go with this episode. It is all about cultivating gratitude, which is a kusala mind state. So it's part of the recipe for the Buddhist happiness cake that Beth was talking about. The meditation comes from Dan Mauricio, who's our teacher of the month. You can get it if you go over to danharris.com and become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers

• 1:03:13Dan Harris?

  also get ad-free versions of this podcast, plus transcripts of every podcast and a summary, and several times a month, live guided meditation and Q and A sessions with yours truly. So head on over to danharris.com. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the awesome people over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.