Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Your Nervous System Is Being Hijacked. Here's How To Get It Back. | Tara Brach About this episode The world is insane. You don't have to be. These Buddhist practices can help you handle it without succumbing to fear, anxiety, hatred, and apathy.
Tara Brach https://www.tarabrach.com/ is a legendary meditation teacher and psychologist. She is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and has been active in bringing meditation into schools, prisons and underserved populations. Her latest book is The Courageous Heart Workbook: Choosing to Love in Perilous Times https://www.tarabrach.com/books/the-courageous-heart-workbook/.
In this episode we talk about:
What "spiritual audacity" means — and where the term comes from Why shutting down emotionally feels like self-protection but isn't How caring is a more effective fuel than rage What lovingkindness meditation is — and how to do it The RAIN practice — and how to use it on difficult emotions Why small, local acts of service count as activism How to use your imagination to feel compassion for people you can't stand Related Episodes:
Tara Brach Has A Counterintuitive Strategy For Navigating Tumultuous Times https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/10-happier-with-dan-harris/id1087147821?i=1000669304555
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. I'm Dan Harris. Welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. One of my little taglines is, "The world is insane, but you don't have to be." I get it. It is tough out there. And given all the chaos and cruelty and uncertainty, it is natural to want to resort to despair, or hostility, or denial. But none of those things actually feel good. And more importantly, none of those things actually help the overall situation. So today, we're going to talk in great detail about how to feel better about everything that's happening in the world, and more importantly, how to engage so that you can make things better, which, by the way, will make you feel better.
0:47 Dan Harris? My guest today is the legendary meditation teacher Tara Brock. She has written such books as Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion. And she's out now with something called the Courageous Heart Workbook. We're going to talk all about it, Tara Brock, after this quick break. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. If you haven't already checked out my new-ish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris, I would love for you to do so. Many people fall prey to the myth that taking care of yourself is somehow self-indulgent. One of the big aims of this app is to disprove that, to make the argument that actually taking care of yourself is a public service.
1:30 Dan Harris? As I sometimes say, there's a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together, because it unlocks an upward spiral. The more you work with your own mind, the more you train your mind, the better you will be in your relationships with anybody who crosses your path. And that, in turn, will make you even happier. And then your relationships will improve even further, and up you go. The whole point of this app is to walk you through the unlocking of this upward spiral. If you sign up, you'll get ad-free versions of this podcast. You'll get a growing library of meditations from many of the world's greatest teachers, a growing library of courses from many of those same teachers. And we do weekly live video sessions where we meditate together.
2:14 Dan Harris? It's a chance for you to be able to ask your questions of me and many of our teachers as well. The idea there being that habit change science, the research into what it takes to form and maintain habits shows that social support, in other words, doing it in the carpool lane is a great way to boot up and maintain a habit. I know I said a lot, but I do hope you'll come check it out. You can sign up at danharris.com. Again, that's danharris.com. There's a free 14 day trial if you want to check it out before you spend any money. We'll be right back after this.
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3:50 Dan Harris? Dar Brack, welcome back to the show.
3:51 Speaker 04 It is wonderful to be with you, Dan.
3:53 Dan Harris? Let me start by being a little bit of a pain in the ass. As you know, I'm a little bit persnickety about language. I have gotten a little bit less uptight about this type of thing in recent years. And yet, I'm going to channel the old version of myself on behalf of the skeptics in the audience. When you use a term like courageous heart, what does that actually mean? Because I think the old version of me might be like, that's a little twee.
4:20 Speaker 04 Well, I welcome your skeptical self. I kind of expected, dear.
4:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, I would say the essence of a courageous heart is a heart that's willing to feel what's here. That's simple. That's, uh, there's a really beautiful inquiry, uh, that I use a lot of myself, which is, what right now am I unwilling to feel? And if I ask that, my attention goes right to whatever I was unconsciously and habitually pulling away from. So a courageous heart feels what's here to feel, because if we're willing to do that, we touch into vulnerability, we touch into tenderness, and we touch into caring and love. So I guess that would be, uh, the simplest way for me to put it.
5:08 Dan Harris? Yeah, so let me see if I can amplify it. So to me, just terms like, I think terms like heart generally are tricky, just for me, given my, you know, um, conditioning, and I will own just right from the jump that there's, um, uh, subconscious sexism that that plays into that, like, words like heart are just hard for me to swallow sometimes. But really, what you're pointing at here is a baller move, a very, very hard thing to do, which is that consciously or subconsciously, there are a lot of things going on in our mind and in our world and in our relationships that we just don't want to deal with. And a courageous heart is willing to look squarely at this stuff.
5:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's both inner, looking at what we don't want to feel inwardly, and also not turning our gaze away from the parts of the world that are struggling and that can feel amazing, deep, deep pain in paying attention, but willing to pay attention there too.
6:14 Dan Harris? Well, that leads me, because the natural next question is like, how do you do that? And that kind of leads me to a term you're using a lot these days that I find compelling, and I think, I think might get us to, you know, how we display the courage you're calling for. And that term is spiritual audacity. What does that mean?
6:35 Speaker 04 Okay, so the origin of that term, this is Rabbi Abraham Herschel. He wrote in a, he was writing a letter to John F. Kennedy, and he said, "This historical moment calls us to respond with moral grandeur and spiritual audacity." And he was talking about the horror, the ongoing horror of generations, centuries, really, of slavery. I love this term. I'll just have to say that I really love it. It's in times of spiking fear and violence like we have now, we need a kind of daring. And spiritual audacity includes is that courage to feel what's inside and also to
7:18 Speaker 04 to sense what's really going on, the horror, the suffering outside. And it's a daring that comes from this deep caring. I mean, Rabbi Herschel really cared. He was passionate. He said, I pray with my feet. You know, I think it's great. So, so I love the term. And I know when I try it on, when I say to myself, well, what would it mean to have more spiritual audacity? In some way, it means not to hold back love. It means to be willing to forgive. It means to confront the forces that oppress our love and our
7:57 Speaker 04 spirit. So I think it's a powerful term and it's useful. What it comes from, if we really want to look deeply, is a sense of presence and a sense of imagination.
8:11 Dan Harris? It's really interesting, the idea, I pray with my feet. Right.
8:14 Speaker 04 That's his way of expressing his spirituality. Yeah. And walking out there on the streets.
8:20 Dan Harris? Just to name that, you know, I'm not somebody who explicitly prays. I don't believe in a God to whom you can petition, but I'm totally, this place is safe for people who do believe in that and also safe for people like me who don't. And I think we can all express our beliefs, whether we describe that as prayer or not, with our feet. And it's a very compelling question to ask yourself, like, what are you doing with your feet, with your body, with your time to move beyond bland exhortation into concrete action?
8:54 Speaker 04 And that is exactly the sentiment that
9:00 Speaker 04 If we care, compassion includes action. And if I look at these last few years, I was with you a couple of years ago and talking about this kind of thing, about the Bodhisattva path and about caring and about action. And if I had to say what has shifted, we have more extremes in our world than we did before. I think many, more than we imagined, the accelerated unraveling, right? The spiking fear and so on. And it can lead to aggression, anger, hatred. It can also lead to normalizing the destructiveness and numbing. I can watch both of those.
9:44 Speaker 04 And so the challenge is, how do we respond? Thich Nhat Hanh had this saying that just keeps going through my mind. He says, "This, my dear, is the greatest challenge to being alive." He says, "To witness injustice in the world, cruelty, suffering, and not allow it to consume our light, our love, our capacity to respond." So I feel like that's the danger of these times, that we get kind of paralyzed, that we can't respond. But the other side, and I'm also seeing this, Dan, in a really big way, and you can see it through history in our own lives, is that suffering, the suffering of the fear of what's
10:27 Speaker 04 happening, the violence, the division, the cruelty, it's waking people up. And it's waking people up in a way that it's stirring outrage, but under that, a kind of grief and caring and acting from that, praying with our feet, so to speak.
10:48 Dan Harris? Okay, let me ask you a question. I'll preface this question by saying, one of the great things about having retired from my long career as a news anchor is now I can actually say what I think. And I look at the world, and there are a lot of things, specifically with the Trump administration, that I'm horrified by, the just incredible corruption, the tsunami of lying, the wanton cruelty, as expressed in many forms from...
11:10 Dan Harris? Cutting foreign aid to internal immigration actions, the undermining of the rule of law, which is perhaps the thing that concerns me the most. And then just overall in the country, just the, and this is global, the extent to which our fractured media environment fueled by, I think, bad incentives from social media algorithms, drive people apart with ruthless efficiency. I could also talk about unnecessary wars and on and on. There is a lot of shit to worry about. And in the face of this laundry list of things to worry about, do you, Tara,
11:51 Dan Harris? never feel like, you know what, I'm gonna look away? Like, just in the name of self-preservation, I can't deal with this. I've got my own life to attend to. I need to look away.
12:03 Speaker 04 I don't know if I say it to myself. I think I do look away. And, and I don't think looking away is a problem unto itself. I think we all need ways of nourishing our hearts and psyches. And now I'm very self-conscious when I say the word heart, so I have.
12:24 Dan Harris? Please don't be. Please don't be.
12:28 Speaker 04 I think that, you know, for me, I go out every day walking in the woods and I'm not like thinking about ICE or thinking about the Middle East. I'm touching trees and, you know, playing with my dogs a lot. So I think we need to keep the balance. There's just all this beauty and preciousness to this world. And if we look away in a continuous way from the parts of our larger earth body and being that are in trouble, we are cutting out a part of ourselves. We are numbing or dimming a part of ourselves. It's part of our wholeness
13:14 Speaker 04 to feel our belonging to, to it all, to life and to respond. I mean, I often think of it in the very used metaphor of we're on this boat and the boat's tilting and sinking. And some people are experiencing it more intensely than others. I mean, those of us with more privilege, we're not as proximate to the violence. And the boat sinking, and everybody else on the boat is part of us. And so, the trainings I most value are the ones that wake us up to the truth of that belonging, and that everybody matters.
13:56 Speaker 04 I often think of a conversation I had with Father Gregory Boyle, who I know you know, you've had him on the show, who really embodies the spirit of spiritual audacity and sensing that we're all in it together. And for those that aren't familiar, he's the author of Tattoos on the Heart and many other things. He's known for his work with LA gangs, you know, creating Homeboy Industries. This amazing community of loving, trusting, healing beings made of these young people with history of huge violence. They were rivals, killing each other's friends and family. So, my inquiry to him, what made it possible?
14:40 Speaker 04 You know, how did the people on the boat all get together and together hold hands and start scooping out the water and helping each other? So, he described this, he said, "There's two unwavering principles that guide our community." And he said, "One, everyone is unshakably good, no exceptions. And the other is, we belong to each other, no exceptions." And then he said, "Now, do I think all our vexing and complex social dilemmas would disappear if we embraced these two notions?" Yeah, I do, I do. And, you know, because it's true, if we really know our belonging, if we sense that
15:25 Speaker 04 there's one spirit underlying, we're naturally going to respond for the greater good. So, you ask, "What do I ever turn away?" Absolutely turn towards other parts of life, and to keep remembering that those that are more vulnerable than I am are part of me. And it makes a difference.
15:46 Dan Harris? You said a lot there, but there's one thing I'm just gonna zero in on, and I think you'll like how I say this. It's subtle, but if you're paying attention, armoring up, shutting down your heart, so to speak, doesn't feel good.
16:00 Speaker 04 It doesn't feel good. We can't truly be at home because we're living in, I call it a trance. It's a sliver of reality. We're not occupying the wholeness of who we are. And the wholeness of who we are is, means that we really get that we don't exist separately. No, it's an illusion. I mean, our well-being can't be separated from others. Like, here we are right now, Dan, you and I are talking, and our inner experience is entirely related to the energy and actions of the other. I mean, if you're anxious, or irritated, or
16:40 Speaker 04 over cynical, or whatever, or if you're warm-hearted and open, it affects me, you know? And so, we truly get 10% happier. If we do, it's because we're 10% more awake to the truth of our belonging. No exceptions. You know, we're 10% more caring because we know our belonging. By the way, I have to tell you that I planned to say that. Wanted to bring in that 10% then, you know?
17:09 Dan Harris? Well, thank you for staying on brand. I appreciate that very much.
17:13 Speaker 04 Do what I can, Dan.
17:15 Dan Harris? Let's press on that for a second, because this, this is something that I struggled with for a long time. Not, now I'm not speaking as somebody who's stubbornly skeptical. I mean, just didn't understand the concept you were just pointing to right there, interconnection. Like, the idea that other people's lives, like, I certainly was not a fan of injustice, and I spent my journalistic career trying to expose and uproot it. But I don't know that viscerally I really understood.
17:46 Dan Harris? The whole idea that no one's free until everyone's free, that kind of thing. And so maybe you can articulate it in a way that is concrete.
17:56 Speaker 04 Well, first, maybe just to say, from an evolutionary perspective, that we, our default and our huge, huge patterning is to perceive ourselves as separate. And even if we have some conceptual understanding of interdependence, I can say for myself, I've had many, many moments through meditation or through psychedelics or through nature of having the separateness fall away. And really, those deep ahas, and I know many people have had them, that we're all part of each other and love is what it is. And daily, daily, you know, there's a shrinking back into that trance of this bubble of self who's concerned with, you know,
18:41 Speaker 04 protecting and defending the self and furthering the self and succeeding and failing and so on. So it's no surprise that interdependence is just conceptual. I mean, we're in this super individualistic society and it impacts all domains of life, including spiritual life. I mean, I remember, I remember an issue of Tricycle where it had, it had a cartoon with Buddhist personals and it said, "Tall, dark, handsome Buddhist, looking for himself." And, you know, you could just see it all, that it's, Buddhism has been translated in an individualistic way
19:25 Speaker 04 and practitioners get drawn to practices or life hacks that bring our personal ease or well-being, sleep, inner freedom. And, but it reifies a self that's on a path looking for its own healing and freedom. And that is not a mistake. It's it's part of our evolutionary makeup that we have a primitive part of our nervous systems designed to perceive a separate self and do whatever we can to protect, you know, aggression towards others and to enhance when we feel deprived grasping. It's a part of us. And more recently evolved brain actually allows us to see beyond that separation.
20:08 Speaker 04 We have the kind of a whole part of the brain dedicated to perceiving connections with each other. So that as I tend to you, I can sense a bit of like how you might be feeling and sense what it's like to be you and feel compassion. And I mean, bottom line, to begin to operate more from we than from I. But the challenge, as we know, is we get easily hijacked by the more primitive level of selfing, you know, focusing on self. So what it means, and this is to what you asked, it's conceptual interdependence. We is conceptual unless we intentionally
20:53 Speaker 04 practice in a way that helps us wake it up. It's a capacity, but it needs attention because we so quickly get hijacked into fear and feeling separate. If we just practice mindfulness alone, we will get flashes of interdependence and connection, but they will get compartmentalized because of the power of an individualistic culture. So it takes intention to widen the circles to we. It takes intention, ways to pay attention. And there are Bodhisattva practices that really help us use our imagination to feel that sense of belonging with each other.
21:35 Dan Harris? What are these practices you're recommending? And how do they fit into the lives of people with one or two full time jobs and some kids and et cetera, et cetera?
21:45 Speaker 04 First off, just to say, to be compassionate and engaged doesn't mean we travel across the world or we do any grand gesture.
21:57 Speaker 04 You know, I'm thinking, there's a woman that I was talking to in a webinar just a couple of days ago, who's very close into a lot of the suffering in Ukraine, and very overwhelmed. And her way of being a bodhisattva, she says, "I am just doing tiny little things regularly, reaching out, and it can be as small as texting somebody and saying an encouraging thing, or smiling at someone, or hugging them, or an errand for a neighbor."
22:38 Speaker 04 So I'm saying that because I think it just absolutely will stall us out and paralyze us if we have some grand idea of what love-based activism means. For me, there's kind of the inner practices and the outer ways of expressing, and we need both. And imagination is central to it all. We need to have a capacity for imagination to be able to really feel our sense of belonging. I often think of John Paul Letterak. One of his messages is that if we're going to bring any healing to the world,
23:20 Speaker 04 we have to be in relationship with those of difference, or a relationship with someone you bad other, or a relationship with the enemy. And what that means is that we extend where we can in life, in vivo, to find out who we really are together beyond the differences. And we can also use our imagination. So I'll bring to mind someone, one of those stronger, manlier types that it's easiest for me to feel aversion towards. And what I'll do is I'll imagine their pain, imagine their insecurity, imagine how, you know, if I was living with that face
24:04 Speaker 04 and sense the expression on the face, what would I be feeling? And it's not a happy feeling, you know? There is suffering, even if they don't know they're suffering.
24:15 Speaker 04 You know, I often give that, that little metaphor of, you know, seeing the dog and going to pet it and then it lurches at you and you get angry at the dog, but then you see that the dog has its leg in a trap. It's like, can we see how others have a leg in the trap? Can we be in relationship with them in a way that we start seeing that? And sometimes through our imagination. And he also talks about, imagine, you know, doing things with them. Imagine what they long for. Imagine them with their children. Imagine what matters to them. Imagine trying to help, you teaming up to try to help in some way. Seeing something beautiful. So that's one piece, just to name.
24:59 Speaker 04 And the other way of using imagination is to really look to see people's goodness. No exception, you know, that, that we, if we, if right now their coverings and their anger and their destructiveness is overwhelming, then to imagine them as a young child or imagine them on their deathbed or when they're very happy or peaceful. One student told me how his way of training himself to see goodness in New York City on the subway was he'd bring, he'd focus on somebody who was on the subway who looked very different and who didn't feel like an easy person to feel belonging with.
25:42 Speaker 04 And he'd reflect on the word thou, you know, which is Martin Buber, you know, seeing, kind of seeing that sacred space that we share. And he'd just say thou over and over until something in him would, would just get tender. I'll give another example for myself, which is using, and how we can use our imagination to feel that connection. And this is something I haven't shared very much, which is every day now, after I do my regular meditation, which is much more of a kind of open awareness, open presence, allowing what is to be here. I'll start bringing people to mind.
26:26 Speaker 04 I'll start with the close in, easy people. But first I imagine, you know, kind of the field of loving presence. And I imagine that I'm being blessed with a kiss on the brow.
26:39 Speaker 04 And then I'll take one person at a time and I'll imagine looking them in the eye and kissing them on the brow and imagine them kissing me on the brow and just feeling the collapse of separate selfness and just the tender field. So I'll do, I'll work it with people that are easy and then I widen it until it start, it's now become really easy for me to bring people to mind where I might have judgment or feeling of defensiveness or whatever and kind of break through that with my imagination.
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28:20 Dan Harris? Okay, I have a bunch of things to say. Do you mind if I get on the soapbox for a second?
28:27 Speaker 04 That's why I paused. I was waiting. I was welcoming it. Please come forward.
28:32 Dan Harris? This is not going to be a skeptical line of angry. This is going to be me just, just full throated, giving full throated support to everything you just said. First, you know, on this, on the imagination tip, I am a big believer and practitioner of loving kindness meditation for people who have never heard of it. It really is just, and you know this obviously Tara, but you, you start by envisioning, um, one way to do it is to start by envisioning an easy person could be a pet or a kid. Uh, and you send phrases like, may be happy, healthy, safe, live with ease. And then, then you move to yourself, to a mentor, to a neutral person, somebody you see frequently but tend to overlook. And then you get to a difficult person.
29:16 Dan Harris? And I'll put Trump in that category. And, and when I do it, I, you know, I have very specific language. I don't say, may you be happy, meaning, uh, may you, um, uh, enrich yourself infinitely at the cost of the taxpayers and national security. May you succeed in all of your plans with which I disagree. I mean, uh, may you be happy because happy people tend not to be assholes. And same with people who feel safe and same with healthy people and same with people who live with ease. They tend not to be aggressive and obnoxious and destructive. So that's just one thing to say.
29:59 Dan Harris? The second thing I wanted to say to, to have your back on all of this is that this is not weakness. That, um, because there is, there is, and I, I get it. This, this desire to push back on what you're calling love-based activism as weak. Well, that, that's not what's needed right now. This is what's gotten us in trouble in the first place is all too much namby-pamby love stuff. But being motivated by hatred and aggression on the level of the brain makes you less effective. Love does not mean you're inviting your enemies over for dinner or giving them a free pass or you're being a doormat. It just means you are not miserable, which isn't helping anybody anyway. Okay.
30:44 Dan Harris? So now I'm going to shut up and see if you agree with everything I just said there.
30:48 Speaker 04 I totally do. I mean, the, the whole idea of choosing love is not just that it sounds nice.
30:57 Speaker 04 It's really our opening to a more evolved potential. And for me, one of the key pieces of that is, again, Gregory Boyle, is to be able to use our imagination to sense what's possible in others. I mean, I think as long as we can sense the possibility in others for goodness and the possibilities in our world, it doesn't mean that it's going to happen, but it means that we're part of whatever healing is possible. And one of my heroes, John Lewis, most of you know of,
31:38 Speaker 04 you know, a long, long-lived civil rights leader, congressman, African American. He lived through decades of racial violence. So he told a story. And this was, it was about over 65 years ago. He was talking about how he and a colleague were beaten with baseball bats by a group of white men, and they didn't fight back. They didn't press charges. They treated their wounds and continued their work, which is nonviolent resistance. Okay, so about 15 years ago, one of those attackers, his name was Elvin Wilson. He walked into Lewis's Capitol Hill office with his son. And he said, you know, "I'm the man who beat you, and I want to atone. Will you forgive me?"
32:23 Speaker 04 And so Lewis said, you know, "I forgave him. We embraced, you know, he and his son and I, and we all wept. And then we talked." Then, as he's finishing telling the story, he says this quietly, almost to himself. He says, "People can change." So I'm sharing this because here he was, he had the resilience and the courage through these decades. And this is despite the brutality, the cruelty, the hatred and racism. He maintained his imagination to see potential in humans.
32:57 Speaker 04 And I feel like that's our work is, you know, I quoted Thich Nhat Hanh at the beginning, to not let this consume our light. It's to keep having the spiritual audacity to choose love. And the place it's hardest, I think, speaking personally, is for me, is when I'm caught in the bad othering. You described one way is to bring people to mind and have a wish that actually makes a whole lot of sense for them. For me, there's there's an initial step before I can even do that often when I'm bad othering is to
33:36 Speaker 04 first go inward and sense in myself where it's coming from, like do that U-turn, because usually it's coming, even though it's taking shape as anger, under anger, there's something we care about. I mean, there's something that matters to us. And it feels really crucial right now that we keep getting down to what we care about. Because that's what that's what'll give us hope, you know, that we can sense we care about people and other people do, other people are caring and that we're holding hands.
34:11 Dan Harris? That caring is a cleaner burning fuel than hatred and aggression. And that doesn't mean you can't take really firm action, but let it be motivated by caring about the people you you claim to protect and caring about yourself, caring about the world. Let that be what drives you rather than wanting to see, you know, death and destruction rain down upon your enemies.
34:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, there's that that line from a movie, vengeance is a lazy form of grief. And so, you know, vengeance is, it doesn't really help the world. If we get down to our grief, and I'm a believer in grieving, I often will ask that question to people, like, what's breaking your heart? Because even the question when I ask myself, I realize there is a place in me where my heart's breaking and I am so glad. That that's there and that I can feel it because embedded in grief is caring. And when you say it's a cleaner burning fuel, oh, my gosh. I mean, there's no transformation that's happened through history.
35:16 Speaker 04 That was something we would applaud that came from vengeance, anger, hatred. You know, it comes from care and the leaders that we most honor. You can feel that caring coming through.
35:30 Dan Harris? Tara, let's go back to something you were talking about earlier. I think you were talking about somebody who's very active on the Ukraine issue. And she's doing it in ways that are like small, like small daily actions. The last time you were on the show, and I'll drop a link in the show notes because it was a great conversation. And in many ways, this conversation is building on it. You used a phrase that I had never heard before, and then I started saying it a lot. And it kind of got picked up in the in the culture, not just because of me, but also because of you and others. It got picked up in the culture and the sort of depressing post-Trump reelection days. And that that phrase is action absorbs anxiety. I had literally never heard it before I heard you say it.
36:14 Dan Harris? And then I started saying it a bunch, giving you credit. And now other people say it sometimes give me credit, which I don't deserve because I did not coin it. And so I just love you to say a little bit about how action is available to those of us who are perhaps overly overemployed and have a lot of childcare responsibilities or whatever, and don't have time to like make signs and go marching. What what was available to us?
36:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, first of all, I didn't coin it, and I can't remember who did. But it's a great phrase. And I would, but what I add to it now, action absorbs anxiety. And action with others deepens belonging and serves the world. That it really makes a difference to hold hands and act together. And so, but I think your question, which is really good, is what do you say to the person who is overwhelmed and busy or who feels just isolated or stressed or has no idea where to start?
37:21 Speaker 04 And, you know, I often will talk about just the small things of, I mean, I was so touched by this woman who, that I mentioned, who said that reaching out in those small ways, she said, it saved my life. And that was very big, you know, it was just that I started trusting that even these small things make a difference. So I think that's part of the interdependence web that we're part of, that if we care and just reach out in some small way. There's also a quote that I'll share that has stuck with me a lot. This is John Rodel, who says, "Whenever I feel helpless
38:03 Speaker 04 in this overwhelming world, I become a helper. Oh, oh, my love, on the days when it feels like I have no power, I serve others. You see, whenever I wash the world's feet, my hands immediately stop shaking." Well, you can feel the truth of it, that we lose our selfness, our separateness in the moment that we're washing the world's feet in any way, in any way.
38:32 Dan Harris? Here I come with another of my glib, profane little statements, but the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. And that's what happens when you're helping other people. You're just less stuck in your stuff. And the helping doesn't even have to be related to the thing you're worried about. If you're worried about Ukraine, texting a friend who's having a bad day will suffice, in my view. And I'd be curious to see if you agree, but that, to me, qualifies as action that absorbs anxiety.
39:09 Speaker 04 Absolutely. I mean, I feel like anything we do out of caring is part of love-based activism. And I think that it feels really important that we stretch some to widen the circles. And by that, I mean, let ourselves pay. We don't have to, like, take on every cause in the world. But there, often, we can live in this cocoon where we really, those over on that continent, having that happen, feel very unreal. So it's valuable to see what we can do to have others become more real to us. And that means...
39:49 Speaker 04 Stretching a little to live into the felt experience of what would that be like? You know, what would it be like if, you know, because of this climate emergency, I had to leave my home and I didn't have the money for other homes? And I wasn't able to get across a border to somewhere safer? And, you know, what would that really be like? So I think it's important that we stretch in that way. And I say that and also want to say that it's easier to stretch. It's easier to widen circles. It's easier to talk about forgiveness when we have the privilege of not being that proximate ourselves.
40:34 Speaker 04 And there are many people that are living much closer into violence and are much more overwhelmed. And the first step on a, on a path of healing and freedom for the world is to, if we're choosing to love, we have to choose to love what's going on inside us. And so I feel like the grounds of this path we're talking about, Dan, is really, we're talking about having the spiritual audacity to choose to love because it's always dangerous. Because it takes us beyond ourself and that always feels dangerous on some level. And the first starting place is to love our fear, to love our hurt, to love the parts of our own being that we have in some way pushed away.
41:17 Speaker 04 Because if we're traumatized, we have to do that so that we're feeling more safe, more at home, so we can then even have the capacity to widen circles. So, so I have, I feel like in my own teaching, I have to be very careful not to talk too much about how we all need to forgive everybody, you know, because we can't. If, if we've been traumatized, there's a natural development in that process. And it starts with bringing a lot of love inward and having others help us have that feeling of more safety.
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43:01 Dan Harris? Can you say a little bit about how practically we can learn to love our own fear, our own hatred, our own whatever is dogging us?
43:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, maybe to just go back to that I said earlier, to have, first of all, the understanding that if there's a part of ourselves that we're not opening to, it's there, and the feeling of not opening to it, there's some... What it does is it locks us in some undercurrent of anxiety and tension and not being at home. So Carl Jung always talked about that our suffering comes from the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche, and it just feels true. So that's the first. It's just some intuitive understanding that if I don't open to what's here, I'm going to be imprisoned in a certain way,
43:54 Speaker 04 and I won't have full access to the joy and the love. So, once we're motivated, once we're motivated to have that, and again, it's spiritual audacity, that courage to choose to love, then the practicality is, and I often use rain for this because it's so useful, is to recognize the way those parts are expressing themselves in the moment. It might be that we're constantly judging other people, or blaming other people, or we're constantly judging ourself, or we're always postponing things, or whatever shape it takes, just to start where we are. That's the entry point. Wherever we are, that there's some hint of suffering, we start there.
44:39 Speaker 04 And name it in some way, and let it be there. I always encourage people to use the message, "This belongs." Because, just like a wave in the ocean, it is here. It's reality, so reality belongs. And any effort to push away, or judge, or not pay attention denies reality, or is at war with reality. So, the first two steps are to name the suffering as it arises. And I use blame a lot as an example because so many of us are caught in anger and blame. And then to say, "Okay, this belongs." And then to begin to really investigate, and it's very somatic.
45:23 Speaker 04 I mean, the mistake most people get into is to do a kind of mental investigation of, "He said, she said, I shouldn't, I didn't." Feel it in our bodies. It helps to say, "Well, what am I believing when this is going on?" Just to get a little more sense of the limiting thought that's containing us. But go into our body and feel it. And here's a trick I use a lot.
45:50 Speaker 04 Because most of us are pretty dissociative from our bodies, and you know, there's that saying, "Our issues are in our tissues." And we have to, we have to feel what's here to be able to, to really open. The big question is, well, how do I get into my body? And what I found helps is, let's say, under blame is a feeling of personal failure, inadequacy, or shame, or not okayness, to make the facial expression that you think approximates that, and to take the posture and play with this. This is psychodrama, it's expressive therapies, but it works. It works. It's an outside in thing that works. Actually make the face and feel the feeling behind the face.
46:35 Speaker 04 Because the vagal nerve runs through the face, it gives a lot of information. And then just have the intention to feel in the body what you're feeling, to say yes to the most vulnerable place inside the body. So that's the, the way of, of getting in and feeling feelings. And the healing comes when we sense what that place needs. It's often a place that has felt, feels unloved or unworthy. And what it needs is some flavor of care. And we can kind of be in dialogue with the parts of ourselves and find out what's the flavor. And then, my hand on my heart, try to offer it.
47:20 Speaker 04 And if we can't offer it ourselves, don't be shy about invoking or imagining, because this imagination, again, that works, any source that you wish you could get that affirmation from, any source. Imagine it. Like, if it's the mother you didn't have, imagine that mother, you know? If it's formless light and love, imagine that. If it's your dog, or if it's a tree, just bring it up and then sense what you needed coming through. Because what I have found is when we can really say yes to the feelings and offer some care,
47:58 Speaker 04 There's a enlarging of being. We're occupying a larger sense of who we are. And we're living from a larger truth. It's like more true. The space of compassion and presence than any story that we were caught in. So I hope that's helpful. I know it's a little abstract when I give it, when I give the directions in that way, but I hope that gives a feeling for it.
48:27 Dan Harris? No, it's great. I'm going to say it back to you to make sure I've got it. And of course, by extension, to make sure that the viewers and listeners have it. Is that, is that cool with you?
48:37 Speaker 04 Please.
48:38 Dan Harris? You mentioned RAIN. That's an acronym, R A I N, that was first articulated by a Dharma teacher named Michelle McDonald, but, but popularized by youth over many, many years and to great and very helpful effect. And so what you were saying, if we're proceeding from the question of like, how do we love the difficult or ugly parts of ourselves, our hatred, our shame? RAIN is a great and very practical method that you can use in formal meditation or just as you're moving through the world. So R is to recognize, oh, this is what's happening right now.
49:18 Dan Harris? I'm, yeah, I'm just in a spiral of self-loathing. I'm looking in the mirror and I don't like that guy. So just to recognize it is R. A is to allow it. We don't want to be at war with reality. This is what's happening right now. As you said, this belongs. I is to investigate it. And that doesn't, as you say, mean a cognitive, intellectual investigation. What are the roots of this? Is this because of my, you know, my, how my dad talked to me when I was a kid? No, this is about investigating somatically, how is this self-hatred or whatever we're dealing with showing up in the body? And if you have no toehold in your bodily sensations because the world teaches us to dissociate,
50:03 Dan Harris? you can actually do a little bit of play acting of like making the facial expression that. Roughly approximates the thing you're trying to investigate and adopting the posture that that might essentially doing an interpretive dance of the emotion and then allowing your mind and your mindfulness to see like, how does this feel? Is there a buzzing in my chest? Is there a heaviness in my head? Is this, is there a feeling of an an anvil in my stomach? So you're just checking it out. And by checking it out, it loses some of its solidity. You start to see that it's made up of a flexing gumbo of sensations. And then N is nurture. There are
50:48 Dan Harris? lots of ways to talk about N, but nurture is one of the most common ones. And what you were recommending is like to talk to that part of ourselves that is the difficult part that we're trying to work with. And if we can't summon something useful and constructive to say to that part, well, we can enlist help from somebody in our world. So maybe it's me imagining my cat, Ozzy, who loves me and jumps up on the bed and licks my face in the morning is saying, bro, that hateful part of you is actually just the organism trying to protect itself. Like, it's not awesome. And we're not trying to give permission to it, but we are trying
51:30 Dan Harris? to peacefully disarm it through seeing that it is trying to help you. How did I do as a rough summation there?
51:39 Speaker 04 You did great. It really was great. And what I, there's some things I particularly liked, which is that the more you pay attention in this way, the less you're identified. And that's just what happens. And the N of nurture, it's not so much of a cognitive message as an energetic warmth that we intend to let in.
52:03 Speaker 04 And I always talk about after the rain, just like after a real rain is when you see the flowering. After the rain, we can start to sense that larger, not so identified presence that's more who we are. And the beauty of it, you know, learning to, this is a way we're loving, love is a form of attention. We're loving our fear, we're loving what's here, is that once we've done that, and once we're resting in a larger space, it's much more natural for us to perceive ourselves as part of a larger world and to very caringly and creatively want to serve into that world. So it does work to first
52:46 Speaker 04 start inwardly to love what's here and then find that we are in love with our world.
52:52 Dan Harris? Yes, and then when you engage effectively and lovingly with the world, your inner weather gets even better and then your relationships get even better and then you get, this is, this is the upward spiral that is available to all of us if we want to go there.
53:10 Speaker 04 It is a virtuous, a virtuous spiral. One of the illusions I do want to name, because we're talking a lot about feeling a larger belonging and serving into our world, is that it's an illusion that we're a separate self trying to help. And that's one that most of us are in. And it's very, the reason I so like teaming up with others is because it makes it so clear that I'm part of the stream of caring that, and the stream of awakening. And one of the most, one of my most ongoing reflections, I invite anybody
53:53 Speaker 04 to do this because I feel like it really helps, especially when we're feeling like the world is really in trouble and feeling isolated, is I will bring to mind all of those beings that I know that really care. And there's, you know, tons and tons, all of you listening, people I know who are helping or trying to do what they can. I was with a group recently and so many people were talking about how they wanted a more loving world and they Wanted to help. They weren't sure what to do. So just to bring everyone to mind those around the globe that are caring about the most vulnerable and about our living earth. And then I'll bring to mind beings from the past, just to sense, and this isn't necessarily
54:37 Speaker 04 famous people, but just all those who care deeply and in small ways, our large ways tried to help. And then I'll do those in the future, our descendants, you know, our great grandchildren, those who will be trying to serve the world. And then I kind of pull it all together as this big field of caring. Bodhicitta is the word, you know, that aspiration to help and sense that we're all a part of this. And that gives a lot more resilience and freedom and courage and happiness than it's kind of like the exhaustion of thinking
55:19 Speaker 04 that I'm separate and trying to make a difference. So I invite people to reflect on all those who are caring. It really does help.
55:26 Dan Harris? I buy it completely. And, you know, one of the big themes of this conversation is the, the meeting of inner and outer, and in fact, the illusion that there's a separation between inner and outer. But, but if we think of roughly what you just described as an inner exercise of using imagination and contemplative practice to, to break down this barrier, this illusion of separation, that's, that's a, we can think of that as an inner move, but there's also, there are also outer moves, to hearken back to the question that the, the people in the group you were speaking to asked, like, how do
56:05 Dan Harris? we get involved? And, you know, I, I don't think it's that complicated. Like volunteering is, there are plenty of organizations that would love to have your labor. And, and volunteering is a great way to put yourself in contact with people who share your values. And it doesn't have to be huge and all consuming. My cousin Deb, for example, does this thing where On a Wednesday evening, once a month or once every other month, like people drop off the makings of sandwiches, and then we all make the sandwiches together and we drop it off at a shelter for the unhoused. And it's fun and the kids are involved and it doesn't cost a lot of money and it, you know, it's not changing the whole world,
56:50 Dan Harris? but it is making our little corner of the world better. And I think these two, you can call them like inner contemplative exercises and then outer concrete moves work beautifully together. And in the end, they serve to shave down this illusion of separation.
57:09 Speaker 04 That's beautifully said. And I don't think they can be separated because the more we wake up our heart, the more we naturally want to help and the more we help, the more we get tender and open. I also like what you're saying about local. There's something about local and with others that comes really naturally, doesn't have to be some grand, like one of my friends here speaks Spanish. So, once a week for three hours, she volunteers to help immigrants make sure they understand the documents that they're having to deal with. And another one of my friends is in a rural county and she serves on the election board. And, you know, has ended up having to, you know, really create relationships
57:54 Speaker 04 with people from the party that she's not part of. And then all sorts of, I mean, the question I ask Dan often, which I've mentioned is, we can sense what really stirs you, what breaks your heart? And also, what is love asking? I mean, I just feel like if we say, what is love asking? In some way, it moves us to, we can donate, we can volunteer time, we can in some way reach out. And whichever we do, if we do it with real care, it does make a difference.
58:27 Dan Harris? Another way to phrase that question, I mean, I'm totally fine with what is love asking, but another phrase that our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein uses a lot, and he got this phrase from Ram Dass, the legendary and no longer with us sadly, meditation and spiritual teacher and author, he wrote a book or he co-authored a book called How Can I Help? And that's just not a bad. Phrase to keep in your mind as you move through the world.
58:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, beautiful.
58:58 Dan Harris? Before I let you go, Tara, can you say a little bit about your new workbook? Again, the Courageous Heart Workbook?
59:06 Speaker 04 I mentioned earlier that we can care a lot and yet it's very easy to get caught in that trance of busyness, overwhelm, we can get numb, we can get indifferent, we can get angry. The workbook is a set of trainings for bodhisattvas, meaning all of us who care, to help us wake up and and serve from our most caring, awake heart. It starts with very simple practices and how to arrive fully and get more embodied within ourselves. And then it includes a lot of the using our imagination kind of practices that I've mentioned.
59:49 Speaker 04 And ultimately, it's something we can, it's a workbook that you can practice with others because there's relational exercises, how to work and how to deal with a relationship where there's distance, where you've kind of closed your heart to somebody. It's very practical and it's also has the vision of that we don't know what's going to happen in this world and we don't need to know. We don't need to be hopeful in the sense of having certain expectations. But if we keep open to what's possible, to humans realizing and living more from their goodness, we can serve into that. And that's all that matters is that today, tomorrow, we take those steps that can be helpful and see what happens.
1:00:34 Dan Harris? Well said. Is there anything you were hoping that we would get to that we have failed to get to?
1:00:39 Speaker 04 No, this has felt actually really complete and I've loved the way you've grounded things and what you've added in. I actually took some notes.
1:00:51 Dan Harris? Well, thank you for saying that. I appreciate it. And thank you for making the time to do this. It's always such a pleasure to talk to you.
1:00:58 Speaker 04 I feel the same, Dan. Thank you.
1:01:01 Dan Harris? I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by 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. Also, one quick ask before I let you go. Head on over, please, to danharris.com to sign up for my weekly newsletter. Every Monday, I drop a little bit of goodness into your inbox. Mondays, especially Monday mornings, can be super stressful. So that is when I drop in one useful nugget that you can operationalize
1:01:42 Dan Harris? in your life immediately, either from ancient wisdom like Buddhism or from modern science. It's short, it's easy to read, it's worth it, it's free. Sign up at danharris.com.
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