Buddhist Monks On: Letting Go of Shame, The Opposite of Depression, and Dealing With Criticism | Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho

Plus, staying sane in a crazy world, giving tough feedback, and how to orient to the dumpster fire of the news. Ajahn Kovilo Bhikkhu and Ajahn Nisabho are North American-born, Theravada monks who founded Clear Mountain Monastery https://www.clearmountainmonastery.org/ in Seattle, Washington. In this episode we talk about: How to get stuff off your chest How to live with less shame and regret How to give feedback without pissing people off too much How to accept feedback without getting pissed off or getting defensive How to stay sane in a crazy news cycle Why being miserable about the state of the world doesn't actually help anything How to cultivate the opposite of depression Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter 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 This episode is sponsored by: LinkedIn Ads — Reach the right professionals with precision targeting. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit at http://www.linkedin.com/happier Fast Growing Trees — America's largest online nursery, with plants guaranteed to arrive healthy. Get 20% off your first purchase with code HAPPIER at https://www.fastgrowingtrees.com https://www.fastgrowingtrees.com/ Tonal — Smart home strength training with real-time coaching. Get $200 off with promo code HAPPIER at https://www.tonal.com https://www.tonal.com/ Northwest Registered Agent — LLC formation, registered agent service, and free business resources at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/Happier-free 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, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing? Today, we're going to talk to a fascinating pair of American Buddhist monks about how to get stuff off your chest when you need to vent your spleen, how to live with less shame and regret, how to give feedback without pissing people off too much, how to accept feedback without getting pissed off yourself or getting defensive, how to stay sane in a crazy, never-ending news cycle, why being miserable about the state of the world doesn't actually help anything, and how to cultivate the opposite of depression. Let me just say, before we get too far into this, that I think there might be a reflex among some of you to think, "Well, what do celibate monks know about navigating the

• 1:00Dan Harris?

  complexities of human relationships, or about navigating life in the real world?" And the answer, as it turns out, is a lot, especially these monks, who are quite young and yet incredibly smart and experienced. Said monks both go by their formal Buddhist names, which start with the word ajahn. Ajahn is the Thai word for teacher or master. So my guests' names are respectively Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho. Together, they have founded the Clear Mountain Monastery, which is based in Seattle. They also host a podcast of their own, which is called The Clear Mountain Monastery Project. Before we dive in, though, I do want to quickly tell you about a meditation challenge,

• 1:42Dan Harris?

  a free one that we're running over on my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. This is a five-day challenge, inspired by a new Audible book, or an Audible original. It's an audiobook. It's called Even You Can Meditate, which I co-wrote and co-recorded with the great Sebene Selassie. The challenge starts on March 23, and alongside the daily meditations that you'll get from Sebene, Sebene will also do two live meditation and Q&A sessions. So there's a lot going on here. There's the release of the Audible book, Even You Can Meditate, and then there's the challenge that runs alongside, or is in celebration of, the release of this Audible original. You can get all the details if you go to danharris.com, or you can just download the app wherever you get your apps.

• 2:26Dan Harris?

  All right, we'll get started with Ajahn Kovilow and Ajahn Nisabho right after this.

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• 3:30Dan Harris?

  Ajahn Kovilow and Ajahn Nisabho, welcome to the show.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Thanks, Dan. It's good to meet you. Good to be here.

• 3:37Dan Harris?

  How did I do with my pronunciations there?

• 3:39Speaker 03

  I thought it was great. Yeah, better than some of my family members.

• 3:46Dan Harris?

  I'm not sure how low or high a bar that is, but fine. I have a million questions to ask you. We've been behind the scenes calling this episode "Monk Hacks", and I want to jump into those hacks. But first, I would love to briefly hear how you got into being monks. So Ajahn Kovilo, let me start with you. What's your background here?

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so was in university, studying world religions and studying to be an elementary school teacher. And- Had a great teacher named Alan Hoddard at Hampshire University, who taught comparative religion and transcendentalists. So, reading a lot of Emerson and Thoreau. And of course, the Walden Pond Experiment was just very inspiring. And then had a friend who recommended that I go to a Gawenka retreat, one of these 10-day vipassana retreats. I went because it was free. And that was really my first big dive into meditation. I tried a little bit before, but as you probably know, these Gawenka retreats are 10 hours a day for 10 days straight.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  That was a lot, but it was also very much a life-changing, life-reorienting experience. The first two or three days, basically hell. You know, it seems like such an easy task, just watch the breath at the tip of your nose. But when I would sit down to do that, the mind would just be anywhere but at the tip of the nose. And so totally frustrating for those first several days. And then the third day, mind kind of just settled into that space of peace and had some levels of happiness and contentment that I'd never experienced before. You know, and I'd given up my phone, given up my entertainment, my relationships, being quiet. And to have this totally other type of happiness,

• 5:34Speaker 03

  well-being, peace, to be able to experience that based on nothing, and almost totally independent, it seemed, a type of happiness that I could create. Seeing that that was possible and that I put in the causes to bring that about, very much shifted the course of my life. And after that 10 days, sat religiously, an hour in the morning, hour in the evening. But still, it took me about two years to realize that those teachings were from a Therabata Buddhist context. And yeah, after three years from that first retreat, I was basically ready to move into the monastery and pretty much have been there ever since.

• 6:11Dan Harris?

  It's amazing. From my view, we need people making this level of commitment to the practice because it benefits everybody else. Because you can teach us. So Ajahn Nisabha, what's your deal, dude?

• 6:27Speaker 04

  I suppose Ajahn Kobo is speaking in the language of happiness. Maybe I'll shift to the language of purpose. I grew up with somewhat Buddhist parents. They listened to Jack Kornfield and really gave me a good grounding. But I always just felt I could never get myself to the different hobbies and activities that my peers did. So when I was 15, I read Siddhartha, like many a burgeoning hippie, and was just very moved by the image of the Buddha and the idea of a monk, like that you could dedicate your life in that way. And started meditating every day. It just became a bigger and bigger part of my life until by the end of college, I went to college in Portland.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  I'd seen that it was kind of the core of what I found most meaningful was that center of getting to sit and find stillness. I went to India and saw a doctor working in kind of the slums there, and that was my goal, actually, was to work as a doctor. But she was emotionally really a bit of a wreck, very ragged. And it was this very clear indication to me that there needs to be a spiritual kind of grounding aligned with that external work. And that was what I felt most drawn to. So I went to Thailand and there's a very pristine tradition there that goes back to the time of the Buddha. Monastics in our tradition, we don't touch money, we don't use money. We live, you know, really beautifully simple lives. And it was, we met people there who were, you know, enlightened.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  And that is something you don't get to see every day in the West, I feel. So that was very special. And since then, it's been time at monasteries. And then with Ajahn Kobo in our little monastery here in Seattle.

• 8:08Dan Harris?

  All right, I appreciate the background. I believe this is true for both of you. It's just incredible what you're doing. So let's get to the monk hacks and sorry for the flippant tone here. So I have an outline in front of me that the two of you, in collaboration with our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman, put together, really talking about what the rest of us can learn from those who are living a monastic lifestyle. And there are really three areas that we want to talk about. And the first is How to be in a healthy relationship with other human beings, which is not easy. As I often say in my perhaps overly glib style, we need other humans to flourish, an often overlooked fact.

• 8:51Dan Harris?

  We need other humans, and yet other humans are a Titanic pain in the ass. So

• 8:57Dan Harris?

  how do we navigate this? And you have this practice that you recommend, and it's essentially a practice of confession, which is a term that carries a lot of cultural baggage. So Kovil, I'll start with you again. What do you mean by confession in this context?

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's an integral part of a monastic life, whether one's a monk or a nun. The Buddha stipulated that we have to, it's useful to know the Pali word, the word that the Buddha was using is avikaroti, which literally means making open. So it's an opening oneself up. And the Buddha framed this practice as being one of growth in the Dhamma. When you see a mistake and aspire or dedicate in front of someone else who's keeping the same rules, keeping the same principles, the same integrity, then that's growth in his teaching and in his discipline. So what the Buddha stipulated for monastics is that every two weeks we come together and do this avikaroti,

• 9:56Speaker 03

  opening ourselves up. We've got lots of rules, we've got lots of sub-rules, we've just got rules on top of rules. And I think the principle of discipline equals freedom is one which is paradoxical, but one which I think most monastics who kind of stick it out really are able to see. And so every two weeks we come together and we open our hearts to our trusted brothers or sisters in robes. It's a humbling practice and it makes us just have a level of metacognition about what we're doing and

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of us, especially Western monks, were making a very clear choice to become Buddhist. Most of us weren't born into Buddhist families. Oftentimes, the mono of monasticism does mean singular, one. So a lot of us go into monastic life thinking that we're just going to be by ourselves all the time. Whereas Sangha is this group of people. We're the bunch of adult, human dudes, men, living in sometimes very close quarters. And we didn't choose the individuals who we'll be living with. So we've got the whole range. We've got extrovert monks, introvert monks, monks who really bare their hearts in a very open way in this confession practice,

• 11:10Speaker 03

  and others who are, yeah, just do more of a formulaic version of it. But I've personally just found it a great practice of keeping track and an eye, one level removed, of watching my actions of speech and actions of body and amari, transgressing my doing things that a better part of myself wouldn't want to be doing. And I can lay myself out there for the friends who I trust.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  That's a beautiful kind of description of much of it. And it kind of echoes this opening term. So much of the language we have to speak about these practices are loaded with enormous cultural baggage for people, which is problematic, but it's the language we have. So confession might be a bit heavy, but opening is a really good one. And it speaks to the power of living in community. People have this idea of monastics as kind of living off in these little huts. And honestly, I've rarely seen that work for most monastics, at least for the first five, six, or seven years. Like, living in community, we live, you know, our great malady in modern life right now, I think, is this siloed, alienated existence from that sanctity of communion and relationship,

• 12:17Speaker 04

  either with some higher ideal or with each other. And so a really key quality of the lineage we're part of, the Ajahn Chah lineage, is living in community with a bunch of adult people. And, you know, I've heard one teacher say, "Look, you can either have the suffering of living alone or the suffering of living in community, but it's much better that suffering of living in community, because it's the mirror, like it's you opening yourself day after day."

• 12:42Speaker 03

  And if you don't have that, I've really seen people get really strange. And I think a really good metric for modern practitioners is flourishing normalcy and warmth. And if you're cold, weird, and not flourishing, like, people around you will point it out. So it's a really good metric. And the confession is just a way of, you know, ritual has a lot of baggage in our society. But it's a way of framing up these moments in a meaningful way. So every two weeks, we get together with a companion. And this is how you do it with someone in your life. A spiritual friend is every week or two weeks, someone you trust. Or if it's too much, even just a Buddha image or some image you respect. And kind of lay open the things that you wish you could have done a bit better, those things you appreciated.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  And it's not like some kind of commandment from on high, you're trying to purify yourself against. It's just you're opening the dark corners to the light of day and letting kind of the eye of awareness clean it. So that's what the practice is essentially.

• 13:41Dan Harris?

  I like the way you said that the eye of awareness cleaning it. Or as my favorite indie rock band of the 90s, Pavement, put it, brightening the corners. So I'd be curious to hear a little bit more, though, about, for those of us who are not monks and are new to this, what are the practical steps?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  What we do is every two weeks, as mentioned, we get together to recite all of our rules. And before we do that is when we pair off monk with monk or nun with nun to open ourselves and show those corners to one another. I think this is something people can do. One of our teachers, Ajahn Jayasaro, in Thailand, will suggest that families actually have a very clear contract that they write up. You know, actually talking with your family members about what the expectations and the rules and certain things are within the family. I haven't known too many people who've tried to do a confession. I haven't known anybody who's tried to do it with a child, but certainly with a spouse. I mean, Ajahn Nissibo and I, right now in Seattle, it's just he and I.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  So we're usually confessing to each other. One principle is that if we have the same offense, you can't confess that rule to someone else. So we'll oftentimes contact one of our monk brothers at a different monastery, say, if we've... Broken some minor rule, we'll contact them to open ourselves up to them. So we come together and we, as Dr. Nisabho said, bow to a Buddha statue as our highest kind of goal, as our role model in life. And then we open ourselves up with a polyformula where you say, first, we praise the Buddha, homage to the Blessed One, the Noble One, the Perfectly Enlightened One. And then we will say, okay, in the last two weeks, I had to run a little bit to catch the bus. And monks are supposed to run in public.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Unless we're being chased. We're allowed to unless we're being, if we're being chased.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  We can climb trees even if we're being chased. But whatever rule we break, we confess that last two weeks I did this and would like to show restraint in the future. And our monk brother will say, do you see? And we'll say, it is a bit formulaic, but we also do try to live this. Yeah, I do see actually that it is a little bit unbecoming to do this, or it is inappropriate to transgress that rule that we had agreed upon. And then the other monk says, will you show restraint in the future? And we say, yes, we will try. And we both say, sadhu, sadhu, sadhu. It's great. It's wonderful that you're trying to practice this. So that's a little bit of the formula.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  It's a useful formula because often when you're confessing, the other person wants to respond somehow. And either that can take the form of putting a little too much weight on what you're saying or trying to say, oh, it's no big thing. And often they're just supposed to be there as a bit of a mirror and a caring mirror. So that's why the formula can be useful. Like you say something that came up in your heart. Do you see? I see. Will you be restrained in the future? I will. Sadhu. It's simple. And then you can go a little deeper if you want. But that basic formula allows a back and forth and it's supposed to be held confidentially. You should do it with someone you trust. And then we usually follow it with gratitudes, things we think we did well. And often it's just aligning with our higher ideals.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  Like it's not explicitly against our monastic rules for us to speak a bit too hurriedly sometimes. Well, way too fast, maybe. It's those little things where you're like, I wish I'd been a little more beautiful there. And that's that polishing. Like after a time, the language of right and wrong stops holding as much power in our practices, the language of beautiful and unbeautiful or trivial and non-trivial. Like there comes a point where practice is operating at that different strata of language. And that's what you're really looking at. Like what could I have done a little more beautifully?

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not supposed to be held too heavily, not with any self recrimination. It's just a chance to open.

• 17:31Dan Harris?

  Your sila, which is the poly or the ancient word for ethical conduct, is, I would imagine, quite refined, more refined than, for example, mine. So I've got stuff that I could confess that might qualify as straight up wrong, not just not beautiful. I think it gets probably, this practice might get a little bit more complex for quote unquote, regular people.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it can, but it really is just a matter of having an accountability buddy. You know, someone who, especially someone you admire. Like at the monastery, we have, as I mentioned, a whole cast of characters. But I've got certain monk brothers who I really look up to the way that they speak. Like someone who's always honest or is always very careful with his speech. And if I've been a little bit loose with my speech, I might go up to him. He's someone who I admire. And then there might be someone else who's just very refined in their, the way they move through the world, like physically. So I might confess other things with them. And here in Seattle, this has been a practice that a lot of lay members or non-monastic

• 18:39Speaker 03

  community members of the Clear Mountain Broader Sangha have taken on. And they do, they'll have peers, not necessarily espoused, but somebody who they look up to and who they trust. And it's like, get together and maybe have, go out for a tea, go out for a meal and then do this. And it doesn't have to be heavy, it can be as light as you want. And you really want it to be something which does feel sustainable, which doesn't feel like a crunch. It's not something that you're dreading every two weeks, but even something that you're looking forward to. I, I want to improve in this realm of my life and this is a buddy, this is a friend who I can kind of make that more explicit with and iterate with.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  And reaffirming our values regularly is really important. They did a study where they had people report for their car insurance claim, the amount of miles they'd driven in the past year. And they had half of the people sign their name saying, I will report honestly at the top of the document and half at the bottom, after they'd written the number in. And those who wrote their name as kind of a signature of truth at the top, they reported a much higher amount of miles, like they'd reported more honestly because they'd affirmed their identity as someone who told truth at the very beginning of that moment. So. It might seem like we don't really need to reaffirm our values and kind of goals and the way we want to live, but there's real power psychologically.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Every one or two weeks, kind of saying, this is how I want to live. This is how I want to steer my life. So that's much of what this is about is saying what we're aiming at.

• 20:08Dan Harris?

  I want to say something and see if you, how it lands for you. Feel free to disagree or correct me, but my understanding, this word sila, which is in the ancient language of Pali, the language in which the Buddha's teaching was written down, it translates as ethical conduct, one translation. It's such a freighted term in the West because we have lived through enormous amounts of hypocrisy from the paragons of, and the public faces of organized religion, thundering from the pulpit about this or that, and then doing the opposite in their private lives. And also, these often male-dominated structures have set out ethical guidelines

• 20:49Dan Harris?

  that were designed to repress people, or often specific groups of people. So it's, I think we're conditioned not to love this whole idea of ethics and ethical conduct, but in a Buddhist context, to the extent that I understand it, it's not really about, especially for non-monks, non-nuns, it's not really about policing every aspect of your behavior because we want to control you. It's about helping you to be happier. There's this term, the bliss of blamelessness. The idea that if you're living according to your values, you're living, the corners of your psyche aren't dark. They're brightened through regular unburdening

• 21:30Dan Harris?

  and a real focus on keeping your ethics game as tight as possible. You're just going to be happier if you're not spending so much time keeping your lies straight, or feeling guilty, et cetera, et cetera. Your meditation practice will be more focused. There are just many benefits that you could characterize, and I use this term not in the pejorative, as selfish, self-gratifying. So I said a lot there, but how does all of that sound to the two of you?

• 21:56Speaker 04

  I think it's right on the mark. That bliss of being blameless is in Pali, anavajasuka, the bliss of blamelessness, and

• 22:04Speaker 04

  It gets to the core of, well, first, there's a teacher who said the sign of virtue is peace of mind or concentration. The nemita of silla is samadhi. And why that seems relevant is when our virtues really feels clean, when we're living in line with our values at different strata of patterning of our being to action, to deepest values, there is a sense of the mind is able to calm down. And it relates to the concept of sada or faith in Buddhism. Faith is a term that's not totally appropriate to the Buddhist concept because there's an epistemological humility in Buddhism where the Buddha's not saying

• 22:47Speaker 04

  you have to take this binary of faith and jump into this wholeheartedly and take on these commandments. The starting point of a Buddhist sada, confidence or faith, is taking on enough of these teachings with enough confidence to take them on as working hypotheses. And because the practice can reveal the truth or not of them, you can really test them out at every level of your path. And the same goes for virtue. The Buddha didn't give commandments. He gave things to be trained in and if then statements. If you want to get a calm mind, you're probably going to have to stop lying. And you don't have to just believe that. Like, that's one of the beautiful aspects of meditation practice is

• 23:31Speaker 04

  if you start sitting half an hour a day, you'll notice if you expressed anger, if you lied, if you kind of transgressed the deeper values of your own, how you want to live your life, you'll notice the mind does not settle. And it just becomes a very clear vision of why virtue is key to unity of mind and happiness. But it's not something that you have to take on faith. You can test it out day to day. So I think that is a good rundown. Ajahn, do you have anything to add?

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, just you were pointing to it a bit is that oftentimes Buddhism gets a bad rap in that we're only talking about suffering. Or maybe if you've ever met a monk and they're repressed internally and you think that a whole monastic life is one of total suffering all the time. And the Buddha did talk about suffering, it's the Four Noble Truths, but he also talked about the conditionality of happiness. There's a framework which he uses again and again and again that we call the well-being cascade. And he gives this image of just as there's a cloud, a rain cloud, that's filled with rain, and then it rains down on the top of a mountain, and then the pools at the top of the mountain collect and fill, and then they overflow into the pools below them.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Those overflow and fill in the rivulets, which then overflow into the the streams, which go to the rivers, which go out to the great ocean eventually. By practicing, this is just one instance of it, by keeping precepts, this sense of integrity, of morality, of inner virtue, it fills up. The first pool is called Pamoja, or well-being. And that fills up, and it fills up the pool of peaty, or rapture, or joy, which fills up to bodily tranquility, which leads to suka, or happiness, which then fills up and leads to samadhi. So a lot of people think, once I get my samadhi together, once I can meditate, then I'll be happy. Whereas in this framework of the well-being cascade, the Buddha is saying

• 25:27Speaker 03

  it's actually the other way around. Once I'm happy, then my concentration, my meditation can come together, and sila can be that rain cloud.

• 25:35Dan Harris?

  That's really cool. So just a few practical questions here about this confessional practice. Would you recommend we do this with a friend rather than our spouse?

• 25:51Dan Harris?

  I guess you're the wrong guys to ask this, given that you don't have spouses.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  I don't know on that one, actually. Yeah, it depends on your spouse, it depends on your friend. You really want to have someone who you can speak very openly to about this kind of thing. Like, it's possible that we married our spouse for all sorts of other things, whereas this aspect of our lives of revealing our things that we don't feel good about, for whatever reason, they're not into that. Whereas maybe a friend is, or maybe vice versa. So I think it really depends, do you have any thoughts?

• 26:21Speaker 04

  No, just even if we have the main practice with a kalyanamita, what we call a beautiful spiritual friend, and that's a different sort of relationship than worldly friendships that are predicated on how much pleasure you get from each other's company. Like, a spiritual friend, the foundation of that relationship is supporting each other's values and deeper aspirations. And it's meaningful to have it, instead of like entwined strings, it's like sympathetic resonance, where you pluck a string and the others that are tuned the same all resonate at the same time. It's gentler, but quite profound. I think you definitely want a friend like that, and as many as you can. But even if your spouse isn't quite as interested in these spiritual practices as you are,

• 27:04Speaker 04

  there's something very powerful about at least asking forgiveness from them for what you have done in the relationship at a regular basis, which wasn't perfect. And that is its own sort of confession or opening. But like, that's another thing monastics do, is whenever we leave a monastery, we'll always ask forgiveness, because there's always something we've done that could have been a little more beautiful. So I'd say, even if your spouse isn't your prime spiritual companion in this sense, there's still something about opening yourself on a regular basis because of the beauty of that act and the relationship.

• 27:41Dan Harris?

  And so again, I just want to make sure that I understand, and by extension, that the listener understands, that the way this goes is you say to your conversation partner, confession partner, what you did, and then the other person says, do you see? I guess you could language it how you want, but something to the effect of, do you see? The person who's confessing says, yeah, I do, I see. And then the other person says, so will you be restrained in the future? And the other person says, I'll try. And then at the end, it's like, high five, good job, homie.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Totally fist bump, if you want.

• 28:17Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  You can use the same formula for gratitude afterwards, or things you've done correctly. I found I was able to navigate this I gave at a time when I think two years ago, I wouldn't have even thought to give. Do you see? I see. You know, will you encourage that sort of behavior in the future? Will you rejoice in that? I will. And high five after, if you want.

• 28:41Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho talk about the Buddha's guidelines for giving feedback and other ways of building skillful relationships.

• 28:53Speaker 05

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• 29:25Dan Harris?

  Okay, so the next practice that you're recommending, I don't think this one requires the other person to be fully bought in. I believe what we're about to talk about, which is how to give feedback, only one person could be following your advice here. The other person doesn't have to be, you know, participating in the exercise so robustly. Am I right about that before we dive in?

• 29:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely.

• 29:50Dan Harris?

  So the Buddha himself actually gave instructions on how to give feedback?

• 29:56Speaker 03

  He did, yeah, and he pointed out the drawbacks of not giving feedback very well. Like if you are someone who just jumps in at the wrong time and you are angry yourself and you're actually, you do the same thing that you're trying to call somebody else out on. If you do any of these, then the other person just isn't going to listen to you. So it's not for any kind of mystical reason that the Buddha gave these principles to consider when given feedback. It's just very practical. It's people won't listen to you. Or even if they do listen to you because you've got some kind of power or authority over them, they're going to resent you for it. So these principles are really helpful for allaying that. And some of them are to just examine oneself before giving feedback.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Okay, what is my mind state? And then to try to, so first to look, okay, what is my mind state? Why am I wanting to give this feedback? Is it out of hatred? Is it out of envy? Or is it because I want them to improve? Is it because I care about them? And then if it's for any of those less than beautiful reasons, like I'm just angry at them, or I'm in a bad mood, or I'm angry, or whatever it is, just trying to establish the heart and, you know, kind of even prompting oneself. If I am going to mention this to the person, then I want to establish a heart of love and kindness, of friendliness. I want the best for this person. And then looking for the right time. So time and place is important. If you get that wrong, they're not going to be able to hear you and it can go wrong in all sorts of ways.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  So those are a few principles, looking at your own conduct. Am I actually doing or refraining from doing the thing that I want the other person to not do? So am I pure in this action, body, or speech? Because if you're not, then they'll see the hypocrisy in that and only follow with resentment. Quite a few lists, actually, that the Buddha loves lists.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  A lot of lists, Dan. And one of them, no hangry feedback. That's good. I mean, the ones Ajahn Kohli pointed to, especially noticing what your intention is, I think are just so key. And usually we single out three or four or five of these to really check. And I honestly, so much of our karma, of the damage and the good we do in the modern era is all through speech. And I really feel like if people took on this principle of giving admonishment or feedback, it would be a pretty holistic spiritual path in and of itself. So some of the key points are, like Ajahn Kohli said, only speaking from a mind of loving kindness.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  So if there's any other intention, even kind of a splinter of annoyance, you don't give feedback from that spot. You can just say, oh, it's just a little bit of annoyance, but people can sense that sliver of contempt or exasperation. It changes everything. And often all you have to do is wait 15 minutes or an hour, although I do know one monk who had to wait a whole year before he could fulfill that one.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Speaking from a mind of loving kindness, right time, like Ajahn said, speaking truthfully, speaking to the matter at hand. And this is a big one, is asking and receiving permission. So I really like to single those two out, the speaking from a mind of loving kindness and asking and receiving permission. And I feel like honestly, if people took on this principle around giving feedback in their relationships, that firewall, it just gives you so much to work with because often 15 minutes later, 20 minutes later, things are so different. I think they did studies on married couples in the midst of arguments and they'd be filming it. And then sometimes they'd tell the married couple that the cameras had broken and they had to take a 15 minute break.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  And then after they reconvened 15 minutes later, like the argument was easily resolved because the adrenaline had dropped, all the activation had gone away. And so I think these principles are actually really quite important for people's relationships.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  One good way to remember some of those, it's a slightly different list, but the acronym or memory aid is, the Buddha didn't give this, but it's a modern memory aid, is bagel. So before you open your mouth, you think bagel. And so B, is this going to be beneficial for the other person? A, is this accurate? G, am I speaking gently? E, as in expedient? And by that, I mean timely, is this the right time? And am I saying it in a timely way? And then L is with a mind of loving kindness. So you wanna, before you open your mouth, just check the bagel. And if it's all bagel, then it's all good.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  And what is the other option, Ajahn? If it's not a bagel?

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, this one isn't as good, but the other option is a donut, which is basically all the opposites of those. Yeah, it's not beneficial, but for a deleterious reason. If it's obviously untrue, you're speaking from a noxious mind versus a loving mind. If it's untimely and from a cheaterous space. So donut acronym, not so good. Sorry. Bagel.

• 34:54Dan Harris?

  I love everything you're saying. I would just add one other thing that I learned from the communication coaches. Joseph Goldstein, who I'm sure you've heard of, I think he's been on your show, has these friends he introduced me to many years ago, Dan Klarman and Moody Tad Nisker. They're Buddhist practitioners and they teach communication skills. And one of the things that they've taught me to do that I found very helpful is once I've established my wholesome intentions for giving somebody feedback, I also repeat those intentions to the recipient of the feedback. Hey, I'm telling you this because this relationship matters to me, or you're a star and I think you can flourish even more. This is why I'm telling you. And then you say it.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  That's beautiful. And what Ajahn Kogel is pointing to about the preciousness of feedback, what the Buddha called the brahmada, the sort of ultimate punishment, was telling the community to not speak to another monk because they'd just gone off the rails and hadn't been open to feedback. And he spoke a lot about how, you know, if someone points out your flaws, it's a treasure. It's like they're pointing out treasure to you. And I think we've all seen like that humility of someone who can receive feedback well. And people often ask like, how do we model spiritual practice to our children? How do you kind of teach them to be whatever?

• 36:13Speaker 03

  I think one of the most powerful things a parent can do is have the humility to apologize to their child when they do something wrong. It's such a powerful act of receiving feedback for what you're accountable for, kind of, you know, acknowledging that. Yeah, so I really appreciate this practice a lot.

• 36:31Dan Harris?

  You've brought me exactly where I wanted to go, which is the next item in this outline that I'm looking at that you and Marissa put together, which is how to receive feedback, which I think is even harder than giving feedback. How do you deal with criticism? Because often it's not delivered skillfully. The Buddha apparently had a lot to say about how to be open to feedback. What was it? What did he say?

• 36:52Speaker 03

  He's got a lot to say. The whole thing centers around one particular virtue, which is highlighted by the Buddha in Pali. It's called suvacha, which literally means being easy to speak to. Sometimes it's translated as being easy to admonish or easy to give feedback to. And it's kind of a shame there isn't a better English word for that because it's so important. As Ajahn Nispo said, if you're really taking to heart that feedback from another person can be like someone pointing out hidden treasure, then you want to be able to receive that well. There's a discourse of the Buddha called On Inference in the Middle Link Discourses, number 15, which has got this whole long list of ways to make oneself easy to speak to.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  And the Buddha says, someone might think, oh, I want to be easy to speak to and to make myself easy to speak to, but they might do the things which make themselves hard to speak to, like you're getting feedback and you counter-prove the reprover, or you respond with stubbornness, or you respond with entrenchedness, or you totally change the topic, or you get angry, or you speak words bordering on anger, which is fascinating, that even if you were to write out the things that I'm saying, it would seem totally innocuous, but I'm speaking with such venom that they're words bordering on anger. So the Buddha gives an amazing list of about 16 or 20 of these ways to poorly receive

• 38:20Speaker 03

  feedback, and that one does the opposite actually, rather than responding with obstinacy or to change the subject, or responding with anger, or to speak words bordering on anger, or to counter-prove the reprover. I'm actually going to value this quality of being subicha, easy to speak to. And he gives a beautiful simile, which is actually practical. You know, oftentimes the Buddha would give similes not just because they're interesting, but because when you bring them to mind, it can change the heart. So he gives, just as a young man, a young woman, a young person fond of adornment, might look in a mirror, and if there was a smudge on their face or some dirt, they would wipe it off, you know, being conscious of their own beauty.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  So too, someone who cares about their character development, cares about being a good person, cares about being a minch. They'll see these smudges, these things of responding to feedback with obstinacy or aversion, that's a taint, that's a non-beauty. It's a smudge on the face of someone who's really wanting to receive feedback well. So it's really fantastic, beautiful list that I really appreciate. And that virtue in general is one which, it's hard, as you know, Dan. It's hard, and why the list is fascinating is because although the Buddha was, gave it 2,600 years ago, I see myself almost check, check, okay, I'm being bad to give feedback to in this way, this way, this way. But leaning in a different direction because I want to be easy to speak to.

• 39:52Dan Harris?

  Okay, so let's get super practical. I mean, you've given some overarching themes from the Buddha. What can we actually do in our minds, in our mouths, in our bodies in order to be easy to speak to in this regard?

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I appreciate how you continually kind of bring things down to what we can actually act out, you know, after speaking to this or listening. So in our bodies, the motion of anjali, it might seem foreign, but it is really hard to be stubborn and recalcitrant when you're holding your hands like this, and if it's-

• 40:27Dan Harris?

  Prayer hands.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, prayer hands, exactly, the emoji prayer hand. It's a very powerful symbol, and it might be strange in some contexts, but it's also a very powerful one, and it opens up the heart in a way, and it kind of makes you for a time take a certain receptive stance internally as well as externally.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  In terms of mouth, I would say not, you know, really taking seriously those principles of admonishment in terms of counter admonishment. So if you're not able to speak from a place of non-ill will, if you're speaking from reactivity, just not speaking from that. And you can kind of respond to the feedback after that initial impulse towards defensiveness has faded away and you've really gotten a chance to sit with it. And so I think there's something very powerful about that, about just saying to someone who's giving you feedback, "Thank you for what you said. I don't know if I can agree with all of it, but I'm going to take this and think about it for about 15 minutes and I'll get right back to you."

• 41:28Speaker 04

  That motion is very meaningful and you won't lose anything through 15 minutes, probably. The other thing you can do with the mouth is use Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication framework. We use this a ton. This might be harder to remember another. It's not really an acronym. Well, it is, but it's not a fun one like donut. But stating your observation. "I noticed, you know, you seemed angry in this way." Feeling. "It's made me feel worried, afraid." Need. "When I'm with you, I need to feel like I can speak to these things." Request. Tell me how that lands, what's coming up for you. We use this framework consistently. Observation, feeling, need, request. And it's just an extremely powerful way to receive and give

• 42:13Speaker 04

  communication, even on very difficult subjects. Because often one person will be operating on the level of observation and another person's completely in the level of feeling. And if those two are misaligned, you're having two very different conversations that are orthogonal and do not intersect. So that's very useful. And then in terms of mind, I would just say noticing your breathing. This is where meditation and a meditative practice is meaningful. Notice your breathing, slow it down. Come into your feet if you feel that kind of tensing up of anger. And then just spread loving kindness. And true metta practice, loving kindness, requires a certain agility because the temptation is to spread it towards the person you're angry at.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  Ways often it's a much more humble and human motion of spreading it to yourself and just feeling how much it hurts to be angry. Like it really hurts. Often a hand over the heart can help that. So if you're receiving feedback and just feeling a lot of pain, vibration, you want to lash out, whatever it is, just bringing a gentle glow of loving kindness directed at oneself and letting that kind of hold you through the period where you're just vibrating like a wound. And then, once the vibration has died down, then you can actually, you know, decide what to do from there, whether it be to respond, or accept, or apologize, whatever it is.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  One tiny list the Buddha gave when you're on the receiving end of feedback is just two things. Keep two things in mind. One of them is truth. Is this true? Is this really true? That's the first one. And then, the second one is not being provoked. So, okay, I'm on the receiving end. I didn't ask for this. Maybe they didn't get the right time. And regardless of all of that, maybe they spoke with the mind of inner hate, and it was the wrong time, and it's unbeneficial, and it's even untrue, but still, I'm not going to be provoked. So those two things, is this true? And I'm not going to be provoked.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  He also said if you're being sawed limb by limb by a band of bandits, you should not give rise to even one thought of ill will. So, speaking of not being provoked.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. If one does, then they're not practicing the Buddhist teachings, so high bar.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  If your spasm is not on your limb by limb, limb from limb, you're doing all right.

• 44:27Dan Harris?

  But you say high bar, and your voice is light, you know, you're laughing about it, but like, that's a ridiculously high bar. Like, yeah, how do we think about that?

• 44:35Speaker 04

  A huge part of the path is noticing how to put forth right effort. And if you notice that you aren't able to achieve that absurd, amazingly high bar, obviously, the right motion of the heart is not self-recrimination. Oh, like, look, I'm supposed to be a practitioner and hear this anger's coming up. That's more aversion. And just acknowledging, we have our conditioning, our patterns, and we're working with them as best we can. But I think the Buddha sometimes gave those similes just for a clarity of, you know, there's so many ways we justify our anger. Well, I deserve to be a little angry. I mean, how could that person do that? I think this is the Buddha's way of just cutting all that off. And there's a real compassion to that action of just being like,

• 45:18Speaker 04

  there's so many times where I feel like my anger or annoyance was at least slightly justified. And I'll just be proliferating around it. And I realize it's because I'm trying to justify intellectually something that my heart knows was actually not beautiful in the way I want to be. And there's such a humility to just being like, you know, I wasn't actually perfect there. And I can acknowledge that. For me, the Buddha's simile is just a way of kind of cutting off that unwholesome negotiating. Anger is never useful and it's never part of this path in terms of expressing it. It can be a messenger, but it's not something you want to lay on another person, basically.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  In that same discourse where the Buddha is talking about this simile of the saw, and the name of the discourse is the simile of the saw. He actually gives three or four other really striking similes which might be more approachable. He says, if someone is coming at you with feedback, again, whether it's good or bad, or true or false, or they're angry, or whatever it is, still you can prepare the heart to be like the great earth, just as if someone would come along with a shovel and start thinking, okay, I'm gonna totally dig up the whole earth. There's no way they could do that because the earth is huge. So too, you should make your mind abundant like the great earth. Just as someone might come with a torch and think, I'm gonna burn down the Ganges River.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  So too, you can make your heart as cool and broad and vast and flowing as the Ganges River. Or someone might come up with a paintbrush and think, I'm gonna paint in the sky. And so too, you can make your heart as open and spacious as the sky. Because the sky just doesn't receive paint. It doesn't receive all these marks. It's signless. So some other beautiful similes of that kind of extreme one, that's the one the Buddha ends with, the simile of being sawed limb from limb. But these other ones are also, and you can feel that, you can kind of ground into yourself when you're on the receiving end of things like the earth, or like water, like space. That's very helpful. I feel a little better.

• 47:21Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Ajahn Khye Lo and Ajahn Nisabho talk about some practical ways to handle the dumpster fire of modern life.

• 48:03Dan Harris?

  Okay, just to reset, we've been talking about, there were kind of three areas of, again, I'm using this term respectfully, I hope you receive it as such, of monk hacks that we're going to cover in this episode. I don't know if we'll get to the all three areas that you and Marissa talked about, but the first big area, we've just spent a huge chunk of time talking about skillful relationship, we've talked about confession, we talked about how to give feedback and how to receive feedback. The second area that you two wanted to talk about is how to handle the dumpster fire of modern life, how to navigate skillfully

• 48:41Dan Harris?

  in troubled times. And once again, you have a bunch of really practical thoughts based in the Buddha's teaching. So I'll shut up and let you hold forth.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  Well, do feel free to chime in as well, Dan. You have navigated the fire, whether it be a dumpster fire or a beautiful fire around wood, whatever it is, for many years. So I'm sure you have wisdom to contribute as well. This just seems like a very, it's on people's hearts right now, whether it be the difficulties in navigating the current cultural landscape, or political landscape, or news landscape, or just the intimacy of relationship that's difficult. But to speak to that wider context of that landscape...

• 49:26Speaker 04

  One useful thing to know is the Buddha would sometimes divide the Noble Eightfold Path into three aspects or ways of approaching it. One is sila, so I like to think of this as things we can do by body, what we can change in our life externally. The next is samadhi, so concentration, how we can cultivate wholesome emotional states to counteract the negative. And the third is panya, or wisdom, and that's how we can, with clear seeing, step into a place of greater equipoise and love. So, just to lay that threefold approach on the current landscape. For example, with news, Hegel said that evil lies in the gaze that sees evil all around it.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  There's a great deal wrong with the world, and there's a great deal right with the world. With the sila aspect, what we can change externally, I think there's very practical steps people can take about, really checking, how often do they need to check the news? Can you wait to check the news until after your morning practice session of meditation? And can you put down the phone after 6:00 PM at night? Can you take just one day a week to not look at news? These are very small steps, but important resets, and it's astonishing how easily people forget the bright garden their hands work in for the faint whisper of a serpent. And that serpent is real, people need to take action, but how many times they need to step to look at their iPhone every day, to know things they can do, is something that they

• 50:52Speaker 04

  really, I think, we need to take a careful look at. Because as practitioners, we really have a duty to keep our minds bright and loving. We do no one any favors by being miserable and depressed about the state of the world. With samadhi, cultivating wholesome emotional states, I just say really emphasizing loving kindness, and if someone only has a chance for 10 minutes of practice or meditation every day, I think spending them on loving kindness would be a good start. So at the very beginning of the day, right when you wake up, you'll notice the mind trying to crystallize around something. It'll usually crystallize around an argument, or an obsession, or a plan, or desire.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  And so at the very beginning of the day, really being very guarded and making sure to crystallize the mind around loving kindness. So just right when you wake up, bring the attention to the heart, get a glow of loving kindness going. And for the first 15 minutes of the day, instead of like arguing with this imaginary person in the shower, you know, keep in mind a loving kindness mantra, may they be well, may they be happy, may they be filled with loving kindness, whatever it is. And that will pay dividends to the rest of the day because you're orienting your trajectory along metta. And the third is with wisdom, panya. We call Upeka, equipoise, a bird's eye view. Joseph Goldstein says it's looking at the wild affairs of earth through the lens of Venus. And Venus is the

• 52:16Speaker 04

  goddess of love. I think, actually, I heard that on your podcast, Dan. But I think there's something about just noticing a wider view of like, things are difficult right now. And they were difficult in the Buddhist time. There was child mortality of 50%. There was famine and war. The world is difficult and it has been before. And still, the saints and beautiful beings of the past navigated with equanimity and care. And that's what we can bring to this moment as well. And I think that wider context is significant in letting the mind constrict less around the moment. Ajahn, what would you bring up to this?

• 52:52Speaker 03

  That's a beautiful way to break things down. But just on a level of things we can do with the body, this level of virtue or integrity, something else to be paying attention to is generosity, yeah, in response to all the poverty and all of the trouble that you see around us, especially with input from all over the world. We're seeing images of the carnage and the poverty from everywhere in the world. And part of why it feels so overwhelming is because it is overwhelming and there's nothing that we can seemingly do about it, about so much of these things. But one really useful practice is what we

• 53:32Speaker 03

  call sorinaya practice. Sorinaya is a Pali word that means either to be remembered or that which is endearing. It's a practice specifically of giving before consuming. So first encountered this in a monastery in Sri Lanka where, as happens, monks, we go down, there's a food line, often pretty much every day after we go for alms, we give up all of our food to the communal table, and then we go through and then take food from the different dishes. And then at this particular monastery, after one has gotten the food, all of our food in one bowl, we eat our one meal a day in one bowl. Still, these monks there would take food before they ate out of their bowl

• 54:15Speaker 03

  and then put it into at least one other monk friend's bowl before they ate. This is based on a saying by the Buddha where he said, "If beings knew, as I know, the power of giving and sharing, they wouldn't eat without first having given." And so Ajahn Nispo's birthday was last Wednesday, and his parents, who, as you noted, were Buddhists, they asked, "What can we get you?" And he said, "That's a very nice offer to make, but something I would like more than anything material, because honestly, it is hard to get a gift for a monk." But he said, "What can we get you?" And Ajahn Nispo said, "Rather than anything material, actually, if you could take on this sarnia practice for any period of time,

• 54:56Speaker 03

  is figure out some way to instantiate your desire to give every day, whether that's composting a bit of food before you eat, or feeding the dog before you eat, or taking, say, like, power bars or protein bars, carry around like 10 of them every day, and aspire to give one away before you eat, or something like that. Just some way to instantiate your generosity and to make it real and to aspire to do that every day, or once a week, I'm gonna go to a soup kitchen every week." And so his parents took that on, and we actually introduced it to our whole community. So now people are making these sarnia aspirations to, "Okay, from now until New Year's,

• 55:37Speaker 03

  every week I will go to the women's shelter and make a meal, or every day I will serve my child before I eat," or something like that. And it's a really creative and beautiful and real hands-on way to practice generosity, beautification of body, bodily acts.

• 55:55Speaker 04

  Ajahn Kovilo often will drop like little nuts into my bowl right before he eats. He does this all the time.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  It's because I'm stingy. Ajahn Kovilo is kindly pointing out this moment around the birthday, but it's an astounding practice. What happens to the heart when you start to give like that? I've seen teachers who, I'd find them after the meal, like really possibly enlightened monastics, who after the meal, I'd find them out back of the meditation hall feeding little bits of bread from their bowl to the line of ants, like...

• 56:26Speaker 04

  This aspect of giving is just so deeply instantiated. We have one community member who, whenever he would see someone on the street and give them food, and you know, we have people who, you can buy McDonald's gift certificates and other things to give away, if you want, or protein bars, whatever it is to carry around with you. But he'd have three things he did when he gave something is he'd lower himself to their physical level on the street, so crouch down or whatever it is. He'd learn their name and he touched their hand. And like, that aspect of making sure there's connection along with a gift, like, what would it really mean in a life? It would be transformative to really take that on day after day.

• 57:07Speaker 04

  And in the West, we conceive of this practice as just meditating and kind of achieving these deep states of wisdom. But just the act of giving and relinquishing self in that way is the most, maybe one of those powerful acts I've ever seen in people. So I hope people can take that.

• 57:24Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it's beautiful and it cuts right against the misery and overwhelm that many of us feel about the state of the world. Because the expression that gets used a lot, which I like, is that action absorbs anxiety. It feels like you're doing your little piece to heal the world, even if you know it's not going to solve climate change or polarization or whatever. It's meaningful nonetheless. And so just to put the list together again, just to recapitulate it for people who heard all of that and want a just a brief summary. Again, what the Ajahn are recommending here is a combination of sila or virtue, samadhi or concentration or meditation, and panya slash wisdom.

• 58:05Dan Harris?

  So under virtue, it's like, can you renounce your, your phone a little bit? Like, as my friend Sabine Selassie says, no news before noon. And also under virtue, you know, maybe having some sort of generosity practice that makes you feel a little bit better about the state of the world. Under concentration or meditation, can you start the day with meditation? Or right when you wake up, generating a sense of warmth, loving kindness? For someone or for everyone. And then finally, under wisdom, you know, can you develop some equanimity? Can you develop a bird's eye view on the noise and machinations and frequent developments

• 58:47Dan Harris?

  and cruelty of the world by maybe, as Joseph recommends, viewing it through the lens of Venus? Just you see in a different light. So how's that for a summary?

• 58:56Speaker 04

  It's good, and I think it circles around this one misconception in the West I think we often have, that to honor the suffering we see around the world, we need to be suffering ourselves. And that's a useless narrative in some extent, but at least it's not a helpful one all the time. Karuna, compassion in a Buddhist sense, that one of the brahmaviharas, these boundless states of art, is a bright luminous state. And dolmanasa is the Pali word for depressed mind, and that's never wholesome. And, you know, if you go to the doctor or the nurse or whatever you want, your doctor or nurse to be happy, you don't want them to be like, oh, man, this looks really bad.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  I'm just gonna, you know, give me five minutes to sort of collect myself before I even talk to you. If we're intent on helping the world and bringing brightness to it, we can keep our minds in a bright space even as we interact with the world, and that's one of the best gifts we can give it. So, yeah, all these practices, they are about keeping the mind in a bright spot while doing something good in the world. But we have to dispel that insidious narrative that lies beneath the surface often of people's interaction with these situations, that they need to be depressed and suffering to honor the depression and suffering they see. The way you honor those things is by bringing brightness and healing to them, and you can have a bright heart to do that. You need to have a bright heart to do that.

• 1:00:23Dan Harris?

  The quote that comes up not infrequently on the show, I think it's Joseph Campbell, talked about engaging joyfully in the sorrows of the world. And I just think about that a lot, and I love what you just said. Okay, so we've got a limited amount of time left. Let's see if we can hit the third area that you and Marissa were hoping we would get to, which is this concept that came up earlier of faith, which is another loaded term in the West, but in the Dharma has a different connotation. What is faith? Why should we develop it? And how should we develop it?

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. We were in our own minds conceiving of this conversation, something like faith for fidgety skeptics.

• 1:01:07Dan Harris?

  And I appreciate the shout out.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Great book title. And I have, I think I've tried to arrange to get that book for several family members. And I don't know how successful they've been at implementing the practices. But yeah, in terms of faith, I mean, it's good to know that the Pali word, again, going back to the Pali, literally means sadh, means heart, and da means to place or to hold. So it's really a holding or placing of the heart. And we just all have to acknowledge, you know, as Bob Dylan's famous song says, you've got to serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you've got to serve somebody. And whether we recognize it or not, or are conscious of it or not, we are operating from different presuppositions. And we can't know.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  So different possibilities are that the universe is just totally by chance, or the universe is totally determined, or the universe is totally taken by fate, or by some kind of divine being's will. Those are all possible, but the state of the world that the Buddha said, and this is really the foundation of Buddhist sadha or Buddhist faith, very, very simple, is that it is possible to abandon unwholesome mind states. That's a direct quote. And that it is possible to cultivate wholesome mind states. That's itself, its own discourse in the Buddha's teaching. And that's the foundation. And you can believe that or not. And we are operating from that perception.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  Like if you're actively cultivating any positive habits or giving up any negative habit, you're operating from that underlying presupposition that it is possible to give up smoking or drinking or to take on that exercise habit. Whatever it is, that's a Buddhist right view. That is faith. And why it's important to actually make that conscious. And we do, we do a lot of bowing. So this is a way that we instantiate that faith. Every morning, first thing we do as soon as we wake up, we bow three times to the Buddha, to the Dhamma, to the Sangha. And before we go to bed, we bow three more times. And before we eat, we bow three more times. And after we eat, we bow three more times. So much bowing. We bow a lot. We bow a lot, yeah.

• 1:03:19Dan Harris?

  It's a good hamstring stretch.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  This is true, yeah. Buddhist burpees, good exercise. And it's meaningful. As Western convert Buddhists, we're not bowing to some deity because someone else is making us do it. It's because we've examined this, this principle of the Buddha as awakening, this principle as Dhamma, as the truth, the way things are, the Sangha as the principle of love. And these all have other meanings to them, which we might go into. But those are things which I want to bow to every morning. And I don't want to operate from some other underlying thought mechanism, pre-thought mechanism, that it's not possible. This is actually the mechanics behind a depressive mind state, is that it's not possible to abandon unwholesome mind states.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  It's not possible to cultivate mind states. So why even try? It seems like I'm just trapped in that. And it's very easy to fall in that. If the brain's chemistry tweaks in that direction, you can really fall into a really dark place very quickly. But if you've been actively nurturing this, placing the heart in this principle, it is possible. Even though my heart feels very dark, it is possible to abandon this darkness, for me to go out and speak with a friend or to exercise a little bit or to meditate for a little bit. So that, yeah, it's nothing super. It's not at all mystical thing. It's just recognizing that we're all placing the heart on something and just being more conscious of how we do that and what we're placing it upon.

• 1:04:48Dan Harris?

  I've done many, many long, or long for me, 10-day silent meditation retreats. And I do bow to the Buddha. At first, I was really skeptical about this, but you know, 15, 16 years ago. But now I see it the way you're describing it, which is just a physical...

• 1:05:06Dan Harris?

  Tribute to what I believe in and find uncontroversial, which is that through, you said it before, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The Buddha is just an avatar of the potential for training the mind. The Dharma is his vast body of teachings for doing that, for training the mind. And the Sangha is other people who are interested in doing the same thing. So bowing to the Buddha in that way, it feels good. It's just kind of a, it's a great embodied reminder of the North Star for my life.

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  It's a fascinating subject here and it's beautiful to know that you appreciate that practice, Dan. We don't support blind faith and there's a sutta called the Chan Ki Sutta, Majjhumi Nikai 95, where a Brahman asks the Buddha, "How do you protect truth?" And the Buddha says, "If you have faith in something, you say, 'I have faith in this,' but you don't come to the conclusion, 'Only this is true, everything else is false.'" If you believe in something because of logical reasoning, you say, "I believe in this because of logical reasoning," but you don't come to the conclusion, "Only this is true, everything else is false," etc. And just this humility. But then he says, you know, eventually you do realize a final arrival of truth is just awakening

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  because that cessation of greed, hatred and delusion is something we can know for ourselves. And until then, it's a much gentler faith. It's not this intense binary at the heart or the foundation of the whole thing. It's a working hypothesis. Can we step into this practice and see if it works? It's nice to present it to people because it's a very easy on-ramp. But as you've noticed, like something does happen over time where you keep practicing. And you know, the Buddha gave us a map. You read, "There's trees there," and you look and there's trees there. And there's a river there, and you look and there's a river there. And after 10 or 15 years, you just begin to get the sense, "This is a really good map." And maybe you see some things on the map that you can't yet believe. Like there's these mountains and you've never seen mountains.

• 1:07:11Speaker 04

  This is Ajahn Jayasara's simile. But you know, do you immediately dismiss the fact that there's no mountains? Or is there some kind of humility there of like, this map has been right about so many things, maybe that is also true. Maybe I don't have to dismiss this out of hand. And then the final thing I'd say is like, we like to translate Sadaya's confidence, because it's an easy kind of on-ramp. It's a very secular word. But there is a union substrate to the human psyche, which speaks in the language of embodiment, of its story, of ritual. And that's where like, you see some practitioners only enter on the level of the logical side of Dharma and never get to the point where they can bow. And it's like thin ice over roiling waters,

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  because that deeper strata of the psyche has not been settled and crystallized and consolidated. And these are technologies, like it's just a statue. But when you speak to it embodiment, if you speak to it in ritual and mythology and archetype, something profound shifts at a subverbal level. And that is very distinct. And I think that is what is lacking in a lot of secular Dharma circles in the US right now is like, we need some way of remembering that deeper strata of being that is touched by beauty. And that's a growth point. How do we touch beauty and this deeper strata without asking of people more than they are interested in giving in terms of faith or a leap?

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  It's an interesting moment we're at.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  And I think this is really important. You know, a bowing practice can be hugely transformational for someone. And you definitely don't have to be Buddhist. You know, it makes sense that Christian, certainly in the Catholic faith, there is the genuflection. In Islamic faith, there's the call to prayer and the bowing, you know, five times a day. And certainly in every Buddhist country. But it's kind of sad, you know, I come from a secular family, humanist family, Unitarian family. And sometimes it can be confusing if you don't have, as you said, this embodied reminder of your North Star, or you're afraid that you're being manipulated by some kind of monastic

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  body, or you're being influenced by some, it could be a cult-like thing, but just having that daily reminder. We had a good conversation with Sam Harris recently, and we titled it, "The End of Faith: Buddhism Realized." And this is kind of a reminder of this sutta where the Buddha asked his foremost disciple in wisdom, named Sariputta. He says, "Oh, do you believe this particular teaching? And do you have faith in this particular teaching?" And Sariputta, foremost in wisdom, says, "No, I don't have faith. I've seen it for myself." He's realized it for oneself. And so, yeah, that's what we're inclining

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  towards, is an end of faith, a realization of faith, in other words. Like, the Buddha does want us to see these things clearly, but this act, and again, bowing to your North Star, and really being clear about that, starting your day off with it, first thing you wake up. You know, we sleep, all the huts we live in, we have a Buddha shrine or something, which is a symbol for what we care about most. First thing we wake up, bow, bow, bow. It's a great way to start the day, just a good reminder, and would love it if people could just spend two minutes, three minutes, thinking about what's most important, and is it worth bowing to. We're not asking you to, you know, if you don't like Buddhism, or it seems too religious to you, bow to something. Bow to something

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  that's more than just your ego, your baser things, that can take over if we're not more conscious about something higher.

• 1:10:54Dan Harris?

  Yeah. I think you make a really strong case. Ajahn Kovilo, Ajahn Nisabha, this has been a fantastic conversation. Before I let you go, can you just... It's a funny thing to ask paramonks to do, but can you please plug your podcast and also your monastic community so that if people want to spend more time with you, virtually or otherwise, they can do so?

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, our monastery project, aspiration is called Clear Mountain Monastery Project, or Clear Mountain Monastery, clearmountainmonastery.org, and we're on YouTube, Clear Mountain Monastery Project as well. We have a lot of lovely teachings and teachers on. We did just interview Joseph Goldstein as well. And yeah, we're in Seattle. If people are nearby, we hope you stop in. Otherwise, we just have a lot of online chances to tap in and practice together. So, yeah, thank you, Dan.

• 1:11:44Dan Harris?

  Yeah, this has been fantastic. Thank you both. Really appreciate it.

• 1:11:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you, Dan. Dan, we also asked, we asked Sam Harris if we got another person to convert to Buddhism and ordain, if he would ordain with us temporarily. If we got Sam Harris to ordain with us temporarily, would you ordain with us temporarily, Dan?

• 1:12:03Dan Harris?

  Oh, a million percent. Shave my head, wear robes with my homie Sam Harris? Yes.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  All right. We're winding him up. All right. Dan, it's been, it's been great to, thank you so much for what you do, making these teachings accessible to so many who need them right now. Appreciate it a lot.

• 1:12:21Dan Harris?

  Right back at you. Thank you for your work. Your level of commitment surpasses mine, clearly. So I'm impressed and grateful. Thanks again to Ajahn Kovilo and Ajahn Nisabho. Awesome to talk to them. They're really incredible, as you've just heard. By the way, if hearing from them inspired you to meditate, let me just remind you that I've got a new app called 10% with Dan Harris, and we've got a free meditation challenge we're running, starting on March 23rd and running through the 27th. It's called Even You Can Meditate. That's the name of the challenge. And we're doing it in celebration of a new Audible book, an Audible original that I co-wrote and co-recorded with my great friend, Seven A. Selassie. That book is also

• 1:13:05Dan Harris?

  called Even You Can Meditate. Join the party. Head on over to danharris.com to download the app, or you can just get it wherever you get your apps. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show, and they really do work hard. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:13:40Speaker 05

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