How To Use Psychology and Buddhism To Handle Your Inner Critic | Amita Schmidt

How psychology and spirituality can work together. Amita Schmidt https://amitaschmidt.com/ is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Hawaii. She has taught Vipassana meditation for over thirty years, and was the Resident Teacher at Insight Meditation Society for six years. She is the author of the book Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master. https://dipama.com/book/ Amita currently teaches and practices non-dual meditation and is a certified IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapist. In this episode we talk about: How psychology and spirituality can work together The basics of Internal Family Systems (or IFS) Amita's personal path through trauma, depression, and a pivotal insight that changed everything Why states like depression aren't as solid as they feel How to work with the inner critic Simple ways to access the sanest, wisest version of yourself The shift from psychological healing to spiritual insight The value of acceptance and surrender Simple pointers for sensing "aware presence" beneath all the mental noise Related Episodes: How (and Why) to Hug Your Inner Dragons | Richard Schwartz https://app.danharris.com/c/10-happier-podcast/how-and-why-to-hug-your-inner-dragons-richard-schwartz How To Handle Your Demons | Richard Schwartz https://app.danharris.com/c/10-happier-podcast/how-to-handle-your-demons-richard-schwartz Additional resources: Amita on InsightTimer https://insighttimer.com/amitaschmidt Amita on DharmaSeed https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/251/ 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 To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris Thanks to our sponsor: LinkedIn:  Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/happier http://linkedin.com/happier.

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 are we doing today? On this episode, we're talking about how to harness two incredibly powerful modalities to deal with your inner critic, or frankly, to deal with any difficult part of your personality. My guest has been working for years in both psychotherapy and in Buddhism, and she very skillfully blends these two disciplines. Specifically, she combines Buddhist meditation with a kind of therapy called Internal Family Systems, or IFS. It was invented by a man named Dick Schwartz, who's been a guest on the show a couple of times. The basic idea of IFS is that we all have an inner cast of characters. In IFS, they're

• 0:59Dan Harris?

  called parts, and there are ways to identify and work with these various parts, including your inner critic, so that you're not owned by your parts all of the time. My guest today is Amita Schmidt. She's been working for decades as both a Buddhist meditation teacher — in fact, she was a resident teacher at the legendary Insight Meditation Society for years — and also as a licensed psychotherapist. In this conversation, you'll hear us talk about how psychology and Buddhist meditation can work together, the basics of Internal Family System, her own personal path through trauma, depression, and then a pivotal insight that changed everything, why states like depression are not as solid as they may feel,

• 1:41Dan Harris?

  how to work with your inner critic, simple ways to access the sanest and wisest version of yourself, the shift from psychological healing to spiritual insight, the value of acceptance and surrender, simple pointers for sensing what's called a "where presence" beneath all of your mental noise, and much more. Don't forget to download my new app, 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up at danharris.com. There's a free 30-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Right now, we're running a seven-day New Year's Meditation Challenge with Joseph Goldstein. It started on January 5th, but it's not too late to join. Again, you can sign up at danharris.com. We'll get started with Amita Schmidt right after this.

• 2:26Dan Harris?

  If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission.

• 3:11Dan Harris?

  And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way

• 3:55Dan Harris?

  to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Amita Schmidt, welcome to the show.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Dan.

• 4:22Dan Harris?

  It's a pleasure. Okay, so the core idea we're going to explore today is kind of the melding of, or the integration of psychology and spirituality. Can you say a little bit about why this is so important in your work?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think during the time of when Freud came into psychology, he was really making an emphasis on having it be more scientific. And then you got pharmaceutical companies that came in later that wanted to make it scientific as well for diagnostic codes. So, psychology got a bit neutered from its spiritual basis, although of course Carl Jung still had some of that. So it's really nice that Dick Schwartz kind of brought that back in, in a stealth sort of way via the self and the concept of self, almost like having a spiritual component. So you really got, especially with Skinner and a lot of

• 5:20Speaker 01

  the psychological tools were very scientific. And I think healing is really a spectrum. It includes psychology and spirituality, although people don't really want to do that. They don't want to talk about that in psychology.

• 5:36Dan Harris?

  A bunch of questions for you. You mentioned Dick Schwartz and IFS and this notion of the self, capital S self. We have covered this on the show before, and I'll put links in the show notes to our previous episodes on this. But given that many listeners may be new or didn't hear those episodes or don't remember them, can you just describe who Dick Schwartz is, what IFS is, and what the role of the self is in that therapeutic modality?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Sure. Dick Schwartz is the founder of IFS, or Internal Family Systems Therapy, which believes that you can have like an inner family you can work with. IFS is based on what's called self-leadership, which the idea instead of just having a bunch of parts inside, like the movie Inside Out, it's to be led with something that's wiser and is different than all the parts. Kind of like, I call it Wise Self. It's the sense that there's something else that is bigger and greater, almost like awareness itself, that can lead your parts. So if you do have this inner asshole voice, you can not be blended with it,

• 6:46Speaker 01

  and your wise self can take over and drive the bus. It's really about who's driving the bus. And you know, when you're, you have a bunch of parts here, you have a bunch of, you know, we often talk about, I have a part of me that feels this way. I have a part of me that feels that way. You know, a harsh critic. We don't want those driving the bus. So the wise self in IFS or Internal Family Systems, you're having the wise self drive the bus as much as possible. The other parts can inform the wise self. You know, your little kid could say, hey, I want to stop for ice cream, or I don't like this person, or I want to do that. But the wise self is the one driving and makes the decisions.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And really, the goal of IFS is to have self-leadership, that wise self leading or driving the bus most of the time.

• 7:39Dan Harris?

  You mentioned awareness. We'll get to awareness later. That's a confusing term for some people. But sticking with IFS specifically, and just to state it back to you, basically, Internal Family Systems and its progenitor, Dick Schwartz, hold that much like in the movie Inside Out. I assume most people have seen that movie. It's really good. And there's also a sequel that's really good. It's about the inner life of a young girl, and she's got an angry part and a joyous part and a fearful part. And that, I think, is, you know, if we examine our own life experience, we may find that to be true for us. And Dick Schwartz goes further to say that there's this kind of capital S self, which, as you said, is the best, wisest part of ourself,

• 8:24Dan Harris?

  which hopefully through the practice of IFS and through meditation, both of which we're going to talk about today, we can learn to hand the reins, to give the steering wheel to the self. How am I doing?

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yes, great reframe.

• 8:41Dan Harris?

  So for you personally, like, how did you come to this blending of psychology and the Dharma or spirituality? Many people who have the training you do in the meditation world, in the Buddhist world, kind of just stick with the Dharma, but you are going all in on this integration. Why?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't have any choice. I had a lot of suffering. I had two mentally ill parents and one who committed suicide when I was a kid. So I was very drawn to finding the end of suffering, you know, and the Buddha talked about that. So I, when I read Siddhartha, I always thought, oh, somebody can find the end of this suffering. And then at the same time, I was very drawn to helping others. In my senior year of college, we did a mental health family therapy program in rural Iowa. So I really saw the value of social work and therapy. So for the last like 45 years, I've just combined both. It's been amazing.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  And they just both kind of walked hand in hand for me. I guess it was just because I wanted to try every tool I could to be free from suffering. I had very severe depression from age five onward. I had suicidal thoughts at age five.

• 10:00Dan Harris?

  Wow.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  And so I really wanted to heal that. And I can say that it took about 20 years, but in my 40s, the chronic depression absolutely fell away. And for 20 years, it's never returned. So it's really possible to heal. And none of the women in my, on my mother's side survived depression. They've all either died of suicide or have severe mental health issues currently. So I'm the only one that's survived and I'm the only one that's done both therapy and meditation.

• 10:37Dan Harris?

  We're really breaking the cycle. That's quite an achievement.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it was meant to be. Yeah.

• 10:46Dan Harris?

  Well, I don't know, saying it's meant to be kind of downplays the amount of grit that I imagine went into this surviving, so.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  I did at a point about 20 years in, after 20 years of therapy, I did like five three-month retreats, silent three-month retreats. And one point I was like, should I just keep going? I mean, is this even gonna work? After 20 years, you're like, you're looking at your watch going, when is the depression going to end? And because I'd been trying so hard. And you know what happened, I think, Dan, was there was a moment, I was on a retreat, actually, where I was like, when is this gonna end? And I've done everything and I worked 100%, you know, with three-month retreats and doing my own therapy twice a week for 10 years. And then I just thought, you know, if I have to live with this the rest of my life, it's okay.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  And I think there was just this moment of surrender and acceptance. And then about two months later, there was just an insight where the whole thing just unhooked. The whole depression, almost like a pattern, it just undid itself and it never came back.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And I know it's not that easy for everyone, but it was, I wouldn't have ever imagined that. Yeah.

• 12:07Dan Harris?

  When you say there was an insight where it all unhooked, do you mean some sort of a key insight moment in meditations? Or maybe even an enlightenment experience?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  It was more, I just saw clearly, I wouldn't say an enlightenment experience, but I saw clearly that the depression itself that I'd struggled and fought with for 25 years or 20 years was empty. They always say that sometimes really deep insights are slightly embarrassing. I just felt like, what? Twenty years I've been fighting and struggling with things and there's nothing there. It was like a caboose unhooked from the train and it was just a moment where I saw this unhooking. And I just saw I've been struggling and there's no, nothing there. Kind of like they talk about the five aggregates in Buddhism, like, don't ask me to tell them what they are, but you know, intention, body, mind.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Um, it was like the Big Dipper. It was like, you know how you see the Big Dipper? And you know, you look up there and you see those, what is seven stars? This time I just looked up in there and there weren't depression. There weren't the Big Dipper. There was just seven stars and I saw depression was just energy, low energy, negative thinking, couple of other things. There wasn't anything called depression and I'd been fighting. The whole thing, the coagulation of it all and the struggle with it all just fell away.

• 13:34Dan Harris?

  Just a note to the listener, Amita used the word empty, which is a Buddhist term of art, but it, she then went on to explain it, which means that it's her depression, your depression, your anxiety and everything we're experiencing, which feels so monolithic, so personally monogrammed, so like non-negotiable, actually is empty of inherent substance. There is no thing you can put your finger on and call it depression. It's just a made up of these constantly shifting constituent parts. The same as, and this is a metaphor, Joseph Goldstein, who has worked with both of us often uses, it's like you look at the Big Dipper in the sky and seems like, yeah, that's a Big Dipper, but actually it's just seven stars.

• 14:16Dan Harris?

  All of which of course are made up of their own shifting component parts, all each of those stars. So there is no solid Big Dipper and there's no solid depression and that's a massive insight that can be hard won and kind of has to be molecular in order to, for many of us, be super. Liberating or kind of unhooking the way the caboose unhooks from the rest of the train. Would that be an accurate reflection of what you just said?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's beautiful reflection. I think it's similar to the Buddha supposedly under the Bodhi tree when he woke up. He was fighting Mara and fighting his mind. And then at one point, he went, wait a minute, there's nothing here. This isn't real. And that's supposedly when mind fell away too. And I like to talk about working with these inner voices. I think that depression is a precursor for letting go of our addiction to the thought mind and to the mind perspective. And actually, when the depression fell away, this kind of quiet voice said, this is how your sense of self is going to fall away too. So I'm still waiting.

• 15:27Dan Harris?

  You mentioned that this took 20 years. That might scan as a little discouraging to people listening, like, oh, my God, I don't have 20 years or I don't have time to do five three-month retreats. So this is just out of reach for me.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's what it was for me. Remember, this is a journey of love and awakening and higher versions of truth and love and being who you are. So it's not like time lost. It's not like, that was my journey and it was my path, my spiritual path, and it was my psychological path. And it was fine. It wasn't like I thought I should have been doing something else. It's a divine path. So yeah, the key is to not think that there's something else. I remember early on, when I was at the retreat center, I kept thinking, well, if only I didn't have trauma, I could progress further in insight. And then I realized,

• 16:22Speaker 01

  no, the trauma is part of my journey on the spiritual path. So it's important, I think, with anybody that's working with difficult emotions or trauma, you don't think that's a separate path from your spiritual journey. They're the same thing.

• 16:39Dan Harris?

  Yeah. It's a great point you're making about, it kind of takes what it takes. And it's, well, what's the expression about the Dharma or the path of meditation practice? It's good in the beginning, it's good in the middle, it's good in the end. So like, what's the alternative is the way I think about it.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  It's all Dharma now. I say it's all Dharma now, Dan. Everything is Dharma now, like whether you're working with depression, or you're, we're talking in an interview right now, or I'm sipping a cup of tea, it's all Dharma now. There's nothing outside of the Dharma. So it fits with what you said. Beautiful in the beginning, middle, and the end. But it's all Dharma now. What would be outside of the Dharma?

• 17:24Dan Harris?

  Especially if you think of Dharma as just a synonym for nature.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I feel like we're always doing the highest form of love we know, and hopefully we can upgrade. So some of us might have had addictions that were the highest form of love we knew, or that mean inner voice was the highest form of love we knew at that time. But, you know, hopefully we upgrade to better and better versions of love. And you said in an interview, love is omnipotent and multidirectional. And it's inwardly no end to how much we can develop love and wisdom inside.

• 18:03Dan Harris?

  So let's talk about your framework for combining psychology and Dharma. The overarching framework, as I understand it, is tend, befriend, transcend, which has a ring to it. So let's start with tend and befriend, which is all about like working with our inner critic, working with our difficult parts, specifically the part that, you know, is in the habit of berating ourselves. So just a signal to the listener, there are several sections here that we're going to work through. I'm looking at a really helpful set of notes that Amita put together along with our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman, and we're going to work through these. But it starts with this idea of tend and befriend. We'll move into transcend later. And under tend and befriend,

• 18:48Dan Harris?

  there are a couple of steps, five to be complete. The first one is just understanding the voice in the head. What does that mean and how do we do it?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the inner critic really gets demonized, but it's a protector part per the IFS terms, and it's here to help. All parts are here to help in some way. And generally, people with inner critics kind of learned it somewhere. And so it was here to keep us safe, except sometimes what helped keep us safe doesn't work so well for growth now.

• 19:22Dan Harris?

  One of the points you make as I'm reading your notes here is that I guess there are some people who don't have an inner critic. I suspect they're not drawn to the show. But for those of us who do have an inner critic, there's something about today's internet culture that can intensify it.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I've been doing therapy, acting as a therapist for about 35 years. And so I'm pre-internet culture. And man, the minute Facebook and social media, people started coming into the therapy room and they were just more depressed and more self-hatred because the comparing mind just gets so amplified by the internet culture and social media. That was like a whole new wave I saw in therapy of dealing with kind of the fake news of people's social feeds. And then people were comparing themselves to that.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  And it just created a whole disparaging voice inside for people that I hadn't seen before.

• 20:26Dan Harris?

  So how do we befriend this voice, which is so obnoxious?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  You don't want to meet it with another part. Often, when we have an inner critic, there's several parts going on. We often have another part saying, that voice needs to shut up now. And then you have a third part almost running between the two. Like, this is often a civil war inside. Inner critic, it just doesn't, is not a standalone. So you really have to bring this wise self to this inner critic and kind of find out, first of all, what it's trying to do, why it came online, what its job is. You remember, parts are not what their job is. Just because it's criticizing you doesn't mean that this is a mean part. It has a job to criticize you.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  And actually, it's kind of fascinating you discover as an IBS therapist that actually, a lot of parts are the opposite of the job they do. Sometimes when you can really talk to the inner critic, you find actually that it's being mean, but it's actually kind of a kind and caring part underneath it all. And that takes a lot of work to get to that. But it's fascinating to me that parts are the opposite of the job they do. So like I said a minute ago, you have a polarization. When you have the critic, you have another part saying, I don't like the critic. It needs to stop now. And then you have a third part that's not actually Wise Self that's trying to navigate

• 22:00Speaker 01

  between these two kids. They're like kids fighting each other, you know? Dan, you have kids and you can't let them fight it out. So Wise Self is like this third thing that comes in. It kind of says, okay, you both have a piece of the truth and I'm going to decide what happens next for Dan or Amita. And it makes the decision like a wise CEO or wise parent when kids are fighting.

• 22:28Dan Harris?

  You said a couple of things in there that I'm curious to get to the how of. You said one thing about, you know, when you talk to your inner critic, it may reveal itself, he or she may reveal him or herself eventually to be a protector. And then the other thing you said is, you know, bringing the wise self to bear is, you know, to break up the fight among the parts is really, really the move. So I'm curious, like, how do we do each of these? Again, just to restate them, one, how do we learn how to talk to our inner critic? And how do we access the wise self and bring it to bear?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, one key is to realize that Wise Self doesn't have an agenda. You know, if you have an agenda to make that part stop, then you're in that other part, the virtuous one. So you have to really, you know, we talked about the eight Cs of Wise Self. I think you've probably talked about that on the show. That's one way to bring that online and to make sure you're talking from that versus another part. But you really want to bring compassion to this part and curiosity. These are two of the eight Cs. I use those the most, compassion and curiosity. And calmness, you really want to listen. Hey, why are you doing that? Why are you criticizing me? What's that about? Could you tell me more about that?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  What are you afraid of? This is a key question, Dan, to ask apart is, what are you afraid would happen if you didn't criticize me? Well, if I didn't criticize Dan, then he might mess up or he'll be caught unaware.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  So often, then, when you find out what that part's afraid of, then you address that fear, which is usually another part, you know, I don't want him to look dumb, or I don't want him to make a mistake. Then you can talk with that part that's afraid of making mistakes and help that one calm down. So in a way that you always want to be doing this, though, with this wise self and it's curious, calm, creative, connected, it listens. It's kind of like a good listener, like you. It reflects back. It's not trying to like shake this part to get it to change. And most people are subtly blended with a part that's trying to get the critic to go away.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  I think I was doing that with the depression my whole life. You gotta go away. Come on, why aren't you going away? Right? And of course, then that part just digs in deeper when you do that.

• 24:56Dan Harris?

  So you know you're in the wise self when you're kind of inhabiting some of the, what you call the eight Cs. I'll list them. Curiosity, compassion, calm, connectedness, courage, creativity, confidence, clarity. But I do want to push you a little bit. I love, by the way, you know, asking the question, you know, what are you afraid of? That's, that seems really fruitful. And just to say, in IFS therapy, when you're working with a therapist, like, the therapist will actually have you do this dialogue out loud between the wise self and the part. I've done this with Dick Schwartz, you know, live here on the show. So, like I said, we'll drop links in the show notes. If you want to hear me kind of awkwardly go through this, you can.

• 25:39Dan Harris?

  But this is also something you can do on your own. But I do want to go back to the question, like, how, if somebody's new to all of this, how can you be somewhat confident you have some access to this elevated part of yourself that's characterized by the aforementioned eight Cs? How can you get there?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of people, unfortunately, I notice, have very little access to self, wise self.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  And that's part of the problem. Sometimes I'll come in therapy, I talked to some really high up guy and all these corporate things. And I said, how much self do you think you have? He goes, 20%. I go, dude, that's not enough. Like, at least he was honest and he could see. He only had like access to 20%. And all these parts running around, no wonder it was hard for him. And most people, Dan, I would say it's like 20, 30%. So I do a lot with trying to just build self-energy before we even do much with parts, because people just don't have access to it. Fortunately, meditation, I think, can build a lot of self-energy

• 26:52Speaker 01

  too. But one of the ways I help people do is like, like the big sky mind that Jack Kornfield does, or Joseph talks about, Joseph Goldstein talks about it, to make your mind and heart as wide as the sky. You know, just opening up, because when we're trying to problem solve a part, often we get really collapsed. And so you want to open up. And in the Hawaiian tradition, they have something called kahi, which means make your mind and heart like the night sky full of stars. So it's trying to approach that part with that. But yeah, it's tricky how to teach people to have that wise self when they don't have

• 27:34Speaker 01

  access to it. They're just blended from one part to another to another, right?

• 27:40Dan Harris?

  Yes. And by blended, you mean like completely identified with, owned by, inhabiting? So you mentioned big sky mind, or the Hawaiian practice of, you know, making your mind as broad as a night full of stars. Can you just say a little bit more about how, you know, what are the moves that would help somebody to come at least close to that?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, some other tools are just ask, you know, is my wise self here now? I'll have people even envision like their self like 20 years from now. So if you were to think about like, maybe a 70 or 80 year old you, how would he be with this? Sometimes I'll say, what would the Buddha do? You know, just trying to get some wise elder online, you know? We're not taught this in our culture. We're not taught how to access a wise elder. We don't even have a lot of wise elders in our family often. So it's how to get a wise presence online.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  So, you know, I bring up the Buddha as an idea. I bring up my wise older self. I don't really think parts are linear in time. So I think I do this a lot. I go to an older version of you and people are almost always surprised. I'll say, well, what would your 80 year old? How does he look? How does he feel? Like, and if you checked in, Dan, you have an 80 year old that's like really mean and critical to you? Probably not. He's probably like been through that. He's just chill. And you can bring like him online too, to help like kind of strengthen that sense of wise self. That's your, your wise elder to come.

• 29:26Dan Harris?

  One other technique I would just add that has been useful for me is, you know, in self compassion, as it's taught by Kristin Neff, she'll often have you talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend or a mentee or a kid. And like, we all have this capacity to be good advice givers. We very rarely channel it and direct it inwardly. And I don't know if you agree with this, but for me, I do find that that is a pretty...

• 29:56Dan Harris?

  Easy and doable way to access this wise self that we're talking about here.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's perfect. Whatever tool allows you to find that kind of more expansive, not agenda, compassionate, caring, you just would have to be careful because self isn't necessarily advice giving. That would be a part. You can have what's called self-like parts, and that's like for another dialogue, but remember self doesn't have any agenda. It's just here and it just is loving, present, kind of like a, you know, when you're in your best self as a parent, you're probably not giving advice. You're just present with what your kids are going through and with love. And advice might come out of that,

• 30:44Speaker 01

  but it's not the primary focus. Does that make sense?

• 30:49Dan Harris?

  It does. It's a really good bit of feedback.

• 30:55Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Amita Schmidt talks about the shift from psychological healing to spiritual insight and some strategies for making space in your mind so that you're not so owned by your inner critic.

• 31:14Speaker 02

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• 31:41Speaker 03

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• 32:14Dan Harris?

  Okay, so I'm working through these really helpful notes that you and Marissa put together, and so we've just kind of gone through the first section, kind of talking about the IFS perspective, and then you have a sort of transitional section here where you're talking about moving from psychology, IFS being an example of psychology, to the more spiritual. Can you just say a little bit more about this piece?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that it's super important that, you know, we're all carrying some kind of pain or tension, that before you look at transcendence, you have to relax your parts and your pain and tension. You have to look at where does it hurt? You know, you have to bring compassion and inner generosity and kindness to the places we might have some pain, not just like, hey, let's go to emptiness, or let's go to awakening. It's so important that we look at the areas where we're carrying pain, because we're all carrying some kind of pain often. So you're using this tend and befriend and working with parts, or just bringing inner love to your system through psychology to help calm the system

• 33:23Speaker 01

  down and create safety for your body and mind. And then you can start looking at where the transcendent principles. If you didn't really do that first, it would be a bit of a spiritual bypass. It's important that you kind of do both.

• 33:40Dan Harris?

  This is where the word self gets a little tricky, because we're using it, or at least the way I'm thinking about this discussion is, in my mind, I'm using the word self in a bunch of different ways. So there's the self as it's used in IFS, where they, you're calling it the wise self, or Richard has, you know, capitalizes the self. There's the ways we talk about the self in normal conversation, where it's just like we're referring to ourselves, self compassion, self love, self loathing, whatever. It's all referring back to this individual. And then there's self transcendence. This is where we move from the psychological

• 34:20Dan Harris?

  to the spiritual, where you actually start to see that this reference point of a fixed and separate I.

• 34:29Dan Harris?

  Is, when you pay attention in the right way, revealed to be an illusion. And this can be very healing. It can make all of your stuff less personal, less monolithic, more tractable, more workable. And I think what you were just saying right there is, we need to start on the level of reality that is easily comprehensible to most of us, you know, the sort of psychological level that most of us sort of innately understand. We need to start by calming the system, by bringing love to the obnoxious parts of our inner repertoire. And once we've done that, we can move into the sort of advanced level where we're looking at it through a spiritual transcendent lens, where we're starting to tap into this

• 35:13Dan Harris?

  somewhat esoteric truth that the self is an illusion, after all.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yes, well put.

• 35:21Dan Harris?

  Thank you. I always like the gold star.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  You do so well at reframing.

• 35:29Dan Harris?

  This is my whole life. This is all I do is I talk to people like you and make sure that the people listening truly get it. It's like some sort of intermediary. So is there more to say about this movement from psychology to spirituality before we move into like transcending and how it's done?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Well, I would say the overarching piece is really just knowing who you are. So often, you know, there's these blocks or pain points in our psychology. So we're kind of undoing those. And then spirituality is more going even deeper. Well, maybe we're not even this identity of self. It's this developing more flow and connection with the truth of who you are. You know, you're not the pain body. You're not your trauma pain body. But then you might be willing to, not everybody wants to do this, but you might be willing to go further and say, well, gosh, am I even the ego self? What am I?

• 36:34Speaker 01

  It's not a question many people ask, but we probably should be asking it because the body and mind's going to go. And what's still going to be here? I work with a lot of people that are nearing death in their 70s and 80s. And they really want to know this question when my body, mind goes, what's still gonna be here? And of course, whatever that is, is here now, so.

• 37:00Dan Harris?

  How do you answer that question?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Well, I kind of have them look in the here and now. So, you know, think of those air puppets in front of used car dealers.

• 37:12Dan Harris?

  Oh, yeah, I love those.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  If all of a sudden, we're like these air puppets, right, Dan? If the air gets gone from those air puppets, this is our body and mind gone, right? Well, something's still here, right? I have people look because it's not my answer, it's what you see. I mean, what would still be here? Is it like awareness, a sense of presence? Just to feel what might still be here when the body and mind's gone. Something will still be here. Maybe it's a more universal presence or awareness.

• 37:54Dan Harris?

  I mentioned this earlier, but the word awareness can be, I think, for some people, a bit of a stopper. Like, what does that mean? We culturally, we use it as like drug awareness or, you know, workplace safety awareness month, mental health awareness month. But in this context, awareness refers to the knowing faculty of the mind. The fact the lights are on at all, that we are... There's something that's hearing the sound of my voice right now. There's something that's, if you have working eyeballs, seeing whatever you're seeing right now. Some mysterious something or not a thing at all is taking delivery of these sensory packages. And that's what you mean, I think, when you're pointing to awareness.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you could call that maybe pure awareness. Like, what animates our bodies? What's breathing your lungs right now? What's beating your heart? What's growing your hair? Those could be pure, technical things, you know, write cells. But what is animating the trees and you and me? What's making all this happen? The whole thing is like a giant air puppet. What's doing all that? You know, maybe that takes you to a more numinous presence. But I call it pure awareness because often, Dan, what we do is we identify my awareness, Dan's awareness, or Amita's awareness. And then we personalize it in an egoistic way.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  But I think there's something called the awareness that kind of is animating all things, all at once. You know, whatever's breathing you and me right now is breathing everybody across the globe and breathing animals and the whales in the ocean. It's breathing everything at the same time. Like, what is that?

• 39:44Dan Harris?

  So, and I say this in a good way. This conversation is now veered into the weird. And I love it. I'm here for it. But let me ask a sort of a grounding question, which is this notion of awareness, how is any of this relevant to the stuff we started talking about, which was the easily comprehensible, although painful, reality of the fact that most of us have an inner hectoring voice who's kind of a dick. And we want to, you know, not be so owned by that voice anymore. So this awareness piece that we're talking about now, how is that relevant to where we began?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, because ultimately, the inner voice you're working with, like what's on the canvas? And ah, the inner voice is mean, a heckler. But where now we're looking at the canvas itself, the blank canvas. You know, your awareness itself is never an asshole. Pure awareness, it doesn't even have any thoughts. It might seem like it does, but if you look more carefully. Awareness is almost like just the pure canvas it all happens on. The movie of you or the blank screen, you know, Rattman or Maharshi used to talk about you're this empty movie screen that then the movie gets played on. So we can change the movie and get better characters in your movie, you know, the inner

• 41:07Speaker 01

  heckler. But we can also look at, well, what's here that is the screen of it all? And that just takes you deeper because then none of these things apply. When you're just that pure awareness, Dan, where's the heckler? No place. But what is still there? Maybe it's just presence. You know, some people might call this soul, which probably is a terrible word for your podcast, but it's kind of where you're free of all these components. So think of it like layers, you know, you're, you're solving the places where your psychology's kind of mucked up because you've got some mean parts in there. And then you go down deeper and you're just maybe kind of this loving kindness.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  But then you go down deeper and maybe it's just, I don't want to say emptiness, but it's just something more universal there, right? That's not about our movie. Maybe it's a universal movie we're looking at. I don't know if that answers your question, but we're moving away from fixing our movie to more like, well, what is happening here? Yeah.

• 42:19Dan Harris?

  Moving away from content and toward process. This movie analogy, you know, I've heard, I just spent some time with the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein, and he uses it a lot, too. It's like you look at a movie and it seems like, oh, this is happening. This is a real story. But actually, if you look at it critically, it's, there's nothing happening. It's a lunch of light and shadow on a screen, 24 frame. You could easily break it down to 24 frames per second.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:48Dan Harris?

  And then we move away from like, so it's important to start with offering love to your parts, but what you can do on an even deeper level is put the whole movie through a cheese grater where it's like, yeah, none of this, I don't need to take this as seriously as I've been taking it. It's kind of like what you said at the very beginning of this conversation. My depression is empty as soon as I see that it, my depression is as solid as a movie that's playing on a screen, then the caboose unhooks from the train.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Right. So think of it this way, you know, it's almost like that voice talking, whether it's saying good things or bad things to you or about you. But then you're here, you're just here, right? And we often think, you know, we get involved with two voices talking, but there aren't two minds. There's the voice, the mind that da, da, da, da, da, you should do this, you shouldn't do that. But what is just here, no matter what? Voices here talking to you, talking trash to you or not, right? But you're just here. The voice might come, it might go, might come, it might go. What is always a constant that's just here?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Irregardless of the voice, irregardless of your psychology, irregardless of happy, sad. What about you is unchanging is always here? And then in a way, that can tell you more maybe about the secrets of the universe. Let's always just here with everybody.

• 44:21Dan Harris?

  This is also fascinating. Let's talk about some initial practical tools. And you list some in this document that I'm reading off of, that was given to me to prepare for this interview. One of them is labeling. What is labeling and how does it help with what we're talking about here?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, labeling is just simple mindfulness naming. So like you already did it, that, oh, there's an inner critic, there's an inner heckler, you know, whatever you want to call it, you're making a mental label of it. What that does is the minute you label it, A, you're not caught in it. You're in awareness itself. So it's kind of a cheat code to just go to pure awareness. Because the label itself has you go to the awareness. You're not lost in that emotion. Think of it like the turbulent emotion is like a turbulent river. And the minute you label, you're like up on the bridge, looking down at it going, oh, there's the inner critic. And they've actually shown that labeling in a study with Lieberman and UCLA in 2007,

• 45:24Speaker 01

  that labeling moved it to a different part of the brain, where it was easier to process it. They had MRI imaging. And when you didn't label it, you were stuck. The inner heckler, you were stuck in the amygdala, which is kind of your fight or flight brain. But when you labeled it, it immediately moved whatever emotion you were dealing with to the prefrontal cortex, which is the reasoning area of the brain. So the labeling really works to help you process it with a different part of your brain.

• 45:55Dan Harris?

  And so the labeling that you're talking about, I just want to be clear, is this something that many of us who've meditated know about mental noting, where you might use these little whispers in the mind to note, oh, this is hearing, that's seeing, that's desire, and then you go back to your breath or whatever. So when you're talking about labeling, are you talking about it in a meditation context? Or I'm just walking down the street, I pass a reflective surface and my inner critic says, you look frumpy today, and then I just quickly note, oh, that's the inner critic? Or are you talking about both?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  No, I would say this is more daily life, so perfect analogy, yeah. Oh, inner critic. You know, I had a very mean and cruel father, so I used to joke and I'd just say my dad's name, because then I'd just go, oh, that's his voice, not me, because it wasn't me. Your inner critic isn't you, and that labeling helps you see, oh, it's not me. And it's not to blame anyone from our past, but for me, it just helped me go, this is not even my voice. It just comes online. And maybe you had a really mean coach and you might joke, it's his voice, you know, right? But again, it helps you move away from it and get some breathing room and some space.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  And then you can have a choice how you want to respond to that voice. Do you want to believe what it says, or do you want to say thank you and no?

• 47:27Dan Harris?

  Several years ago, I interviewed a very interesting woman named Sonya Renee Taylor, and she said...

• 47:33Dan Harris?

  I wrote it down and I have not forgotten it, that when she notices self criticism in her own mind, she reframes it as the voice, in her words, the voice of the system. Meaning, the culture wants us to be self critical because it gets us buying the next thing or swiping to the next video. That's the engine for the worst parts of capitalism. So if you can just reframe, oh yeah, that voice that just said, you look frumpy is my internalized Madison Avenue trying to get me to go buy some new clothes.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you could even use, because we're so into AI now. What if it was Siri saying that to you, hey, Dan, you look like crap. You know, you'd be like, hey, stop. Your inner voice is the first AI. The mind is the first AI. So take it with a grain of salt, just like you would AI. I mean, now people are really giving a lot of credit to AI, that it might even be sentient or something, but just do it like an AI voice. If it was a Siri chatbot, you'd be like, eh, get alive.

• 48:39Dan Harris?

  Literally, because they're not alive.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Right, but our mind is like AI. Your original nature, that's just here, and then it comes in, da, da, da, da, da. If we start treating the mind like AI, I think we might be able to get some space from it. Before we start projecting our own stuff onto AI, it's good to see that our mind is the original AI.

• 49:07Dan Harris?

  You just talked about getting some space from it, which is really important. It's at the heart of all of this. Another technique that you recommend for getting some space from your inner critic is to think about, well, I'll let you describe it. It's you're using. The analogy of an airplane hangar. Can you talk about that?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's moving back from it, labeling it, seeing that, you know, the voice is no different than any sounds. It could be the same as a bird sound. It's just blah, blah, blah, right? And the more you can back off and give some space with these voices, then you might still have the same inner critic. Let's say it's like a couch. But if you're in a really small room of Dan and you've got this tiny studio apartment, you have this big couch of the inner critic and you have a big easy chair of your anxiety part, Dan, you're going to be bumping into those chairs all the time. Your psyche is going to be running into them. But we put them in a big airplane hangar.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  The same couch of inner critic, the same chair of anxiety. How often are you going to run into them?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  You haven't gotten rid of anything.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  But there's so much more spaciousness in who you are.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  That mind that's, you know, the big sky. It's fine that the anxiety or inner critic's here because you, there's more of you here. A spacious awareness. There's just more presence. There's more love. So then the couch of inner critic and the chair of anxiety can be no big deal. It's just no big deal.

• 50:59Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Amita talks about how acceptance and surrender can soften your resistance and help your difficult patterns fall away. And she goes over some simple pointers for sensing what she calls aware presence beneath all of your mental noise.

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• 52:21Dan Harris?

  How important is, here's another A-word, acceptance in all of this?

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like I said with my depression, when it fell away, I think the final step was just surrender acceptance. Because we're fighting, you know, they have that old saying, "What we resist persists." Because we're fighting it, then we're creating another part that's wanting it to go away. You see this a lot in addicts. "I want to stop doing this, eating this compulsive eating," right? And yet, the compulsive eater part, and it becomes this paradoxical struggle. And when you can just let go and ease up on the whole thing, and that wise presence can be here with it all, okay, however long it takes, whatever it takes, this is my path.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  And you're not fighting that path, then it can really fall away. Acceptance is kind of like a softening of all our parts.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  So that we can just relax into what is the truth versus thinking we know this part shouldn't be here, or we shouldn't be doing this, or if you're just relaxing in that whole process via acceptance. It's a willingness. I'm just willing to be here with whatever is, however long it takes. And there's something about that, when you make that vow and that frame of mind, that really can transform things. I don't completely understand it, Dan, but it's, acceptance is very transformative.

• 53:59Dan Harris?

  Let's get back into the weird stuff for a second. The, you know, the fundamental move, as I understand it, that you're calling for us to make is to kind of pull the rug out from the whole system, to call bullshit on the whole movie, and really inhabit this awareness to go back to that word. And so I'm curious, any further thoughts on how we can do what you're describing?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's important to probably try it right now. I call it an aware presence or awake presence. It's not a belief. It's not a thought. That's your mind co-opting it. It's just here. Like, notice it doesn't take a lot of effort for you and I just to be here right now. Just feel that. We're just here. And your awareness or your attention awareness, attention's a little different than awareness, but it's just here.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  So notice, this is not a belief. This is not a thought. Your aware presence is just here now without any effort. So right here, visible in the here and now, you can see it. Now, your inner critic might come in on top of that.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  But before any voices come in, just notice you're just here. Again, like that movie screen before the movie starts playing. And it doesn't take any belief. It's not heard to find it. We make it complicated and the mind tries, the AI mind tries to come and go, well, let me tell you about, you know, when you're doing an AI search now, it's like, well, do you want more about this? So here we are, we're just here. And then the mind comes in and tries to go, well, let me tell you more about this aware presence. And that's fine, but come back to the simplicity of it all. It doesn't take any effort just to be.

• 55:59Dan Harris?

  I agree. It doesn't take any effort just to be. That seems readily comprehensible. Help me connect that insight to working with the inner critic.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  So your presence is just here, then a voice arises. And whether you want to call it that wise self we talked about, or just your Buddha nature, just that like seeing, aware, then you're meeting that critic. I mean, there's two levels to this. You can meet it with that IFS type wise self. Or you could just meet it like the Buddha did with, oh, this is just empty. There's nothing here. And then the voice will just fall away. So when the inner critic comes up, it's like a thought form, right? And then you meet that with awareness.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  And either the thought forms, you can just meet it with pure awareness, or you can meet it with compassion, connection, like we talked about earlier. What's it trying to do? How's it trying to help? Or you can just meet it with kind of a pure, empty awareness that just is like, doesn't even have to do anything with the inner critic. It just, the inner critic will arise and pass away on its own in the spaciousness of you.

• 57:29Dan Harris?

  And so if I understand you correctly, you're saying, look, in these moments where you notice the inner critic, I think this is true for any difficult part of your personality, but we're really focusing here on the inner critic. There are two really healthy options. One is to greet it with love and compassion and warmth. To ask, what are you afraid of? That's such a great question. To be in dialogue in a warm way. And then the other move would be what I think in Buddhist circles is often referred to as wisdom, which is another funny word because I think people hear that word and just immediately imagine like Dumbledore or something like that.

• 58:12Dan Harris?

  But wisdom in this sense is really seeing it from a perspective of depth, where it may seem solid. The voice that tells you, hey, you look like shit today, may seem solid. But actually, if you pull back to the airplane hangar perspective, it's just this little quantum burst of energy in the mind. It is, as Joseph says, of thoughts little more than nothing. And when you view it in that light, it just kind of self-liberates. It just fizzles on its own. How did I do there? Is that my close?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  You did perfect. That was perfect. I would add an analogy to that. That's kind of a common analogy. So whether it's the noise in your head or you and I were like making a lot of noise, screaming, yelling, right? It's all going to default to silence. You and I could scream and yell, so kingdom come. We all could. And guess what the default is? Silence. So that voice could yell at you as much as it wants, but eventually it's going to come back to this pure awareness, like you just said in that second part. It's going to default to silence. I mean, you could see a great example of that.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Everything defaults to stillness, even though it might not sound like it. You could be at a loud party. It doesn't seem like it. Your mind can be like a loud party sometimes. But this is kind of like what Joseph's saying. It's all going to rise and pass away. And you can just wait in that space where it all passes away into, right?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  I heard once a nice analogy too, that inner critic, it's like one person in an empty stadium with a microphone. And I really like that because the stadium is just this huge, empty space of you, Dan, right? But this one dude, he's got a microphone and kind of like the Wizard of Oz. It sounds like he's taken up the whole stadium. So I like to think of both of these practices as like taking away the microphone.

• 1:00:28Dan Harris?

  I love it. Okay, so just to reset, we've worked through your sequence of tend and befriend, and then transcend. It's very compelling. What would you describe as the end game here? Is it, these are just good tools to work with our stuff as it arises in the moment? Or we can just make it all go away? We can get the caboose to unhook from the train and the way you described after 20 years of intense effort?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Great question. What is the end game? It really is what you want it to be. It's like an awareness video game. You can go to amazing levels here. You can just decide to transcend your depression and your anxiety. Or you could go to complete freedom, you know? Full arhat, full awakening. It's up to you how far you want to go in the game. The very end of the game is truth, love, peace, joy. 100%. It's tricky because I think the end game, you see people that have really walked it all the way through to the end, like Ramana Maharshi, or

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  maybe even the Dalai Lama, they just exhibit truth, love, peace, joy. Truth, love, peace, joy. That's all there is. And people that are really walking the talk, who have really done the psychological to the spiritual 100%. I mean, they're just free, free. And then that manifest, Dan, is truth, love, peace, joy, just over and over and over again.

• 1:02:09Dan Harris?

  Toward the end of every interview, I ask two questions. One of them is, is there anything you were hoping we would get to that we didn't?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Nope. I had no ideas of what would happen.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  I just wanted to connect with you. I just wanted to connect with who you were.

• 1:02:26Dan Harris?

  Yeah, well, thank you. And the second question is, you know, people want to learn more from you. How can they do so? What have you, you know, do you have a website or do you have Dharma Talks? People can go listen to any other materials that you've created that we should know about?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so probably about 20 years of Dharma Talks on Dharma Seed, you know, and they're all free there. I've got some on Insight Timer as well.

• 1:02:51Dan Harris?

  Let me just jump in on that to explain what Dharma Seed is. If you go, and I'll put a link in the show notes. If you go to dharmaseed.org and search for Amita Schmidt, you'll see all the talks she's given on meditation retreats over the years, and you'll be able to listen to those. And then also, there's an app called Insight Timer, where you have more material. I think you also said that.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also wrote a book about a woman named Deepma, who was when Joseph Goldstein's teacher. And there's a lot of wonderful things in there about loving kindness and wisdom. You know, she's a whole separate subject, but she was kind of a female embodiment that was way ahead of her time.

• 1:03:39Dan Harris?

  I do want to recommend that book to people. I have not yet read it, but everybody I know who has read it has really gotten a lot out of it. And we will put a link to that if you want to check out that book.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called Deepma, The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master. It's on Amazon. It's sort of a biography about this woman teacher who is a Buddhist master. And like I said, she was the teacher to Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and Sharn Salzberg. And I wrote about her because she just has some really inspiring stories for all of us. She was a householder. She never ordained, and she raised her daughter and achieved very high states of awareness while raising a child. So she was quite a wonderful example of what's possible.

• 1:04:32Dan Harris?

  Amita Schmidt, thank you very much for your time. It's a pleasure to talk to you.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  You're welcome, Dan. It was really nice to meet you.

• 1:04:43Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Amita Schmidt. Awesome to talk to her. Don't forget to check out my new app, 10% with Dan Harris, which you can score over at danharris.com. There's a free 30-day trial. And if you sign up right now, you'll be able to access our seven-day meditation challenge with Joseph Goldstein. It started a day or two ago, but it's not too late to join. What Joseph has created in this series of guided meditations is really cool. You should come check it out. Finally, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer.

• 1:05:28Dan Harris?

  And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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  We work with veterans every day. Caring about people isn't the same as knowing how to help. Safeguard Veterans gave our team free online on-demand training to better understand military culture, recognize when someone may be struggling, and connect veterans to support and resources. It's practical, flexible, and our staff actually use what they learned.

• 1:06:30Speaker 06

  Get started at safeguardveterans.net. Click on "Community Organizations." Safeguard Veterans is a 2026 pilot research program funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.