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10% Happier with Dan Harris
An Episode For The Over-Thinkers and The Stressed | Matthew Brensilver, Vinny Ferraro, Kaira Jewel Lingo
01:07:45
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- [00:01]
Dan Harris
Wondery subscribers can listen to 10% Happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay everybody, how we doing today? We are talking about one of the most important and most misunderstood concepts in all of Buddhism, letting go or surrender. What does this mean exactly? Is it a recipe for passivity? And how do you do it anyway? Properly understood, letting go is a recipe for reducing stress and overthinking, for not fighting with reality, for achieving equanimity in the face of whatever life throws at you. However, as always, easier said than done. This episode is the fourth in a series of special episodes we're doing where my executive producer, DJ Kashmir identifies an issue in his life, in this case surrender or letting go, and then goes out and talks to a bunch of Buddhist teachers about how to deal with it. So the structure of this episode is a little bit different from our usual fare. You'll hear me in conversation with dj, who will then play clips of his conversation with the teachers he reached out to. And those teachers are Kyra Duolingo, who's a former nun in the Plum Village tradition started by the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh Vinnie Ferraro, who teaches at the Insight Meditation Society, Spirit Rock, and also prisons and Matthew Brensilver, who teaches at many of those same retreat centers and before that spent many years working in the field of addiction pharmacotherapy. I really enjoy this format. Would be curious to hear your thoughts on whether it's working for you. Hit me up in the chat over@danharris.com DJ Kashmir and our trio of Dharma maestros right after this. Before we get started, I want to remind you of all the good stuff we're doing over@danharris.com these days. You probably heard me announce that we've started a new community through Substack, which includes all kinds of perks for subscribers, such as the ability to chat with me and sometimes our guests about each of the new podcast episodes, video Ask Me Anything Sessions, even live meditation sessions with me. Plus you'll get a cheat sheet, which includes a full transcript and key takeaways from every episode. We're having a lot of fun. We'd love you to join. Join us. It's 8 bucks a month or 80 bucks a year or free for anybody who can't afford it. No questions asked. Just head over to danharris.com we'll see you there. The Happier Meditation App Just launched a new course called Unlearn to Meditate. This course takes you deeper into the why behind mindfulness. It's a chance to start fresh and challenge what you think you know about meditation. The teachers involved are Devin Haza, Pascal Eau Claire, and Matthew Hepburn. Download the Happier Meditation app today to explore, unlearn to meditate and rediscover your practice. This podcast is brought to you by Huggy's Little Movers. Our son is nine. It's been a minute since we've been in the diapers stage of life, but I have many, many fond memories of having a little critter around the house. You know, the poop part of it I could take or leave, but that's a non negotiable fact of life. And given that it's a non negotiable fact of life, Huggies are a darn good option. Huggies know that babies come in all shapes and sizes and so do their tushies. Huggies has more curves and outstanding active fit. No matter the size of your baby. Said baby will feel comfy in Huggies. Little Movers curve to fit all of your curves. With 12 hour protection against leaks. Get your baby into the best fitting diaper. Huggies Little Movers wet fit among branded open diapers. The show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I'd like to take a quick moment to say thank you to you, the listeners of this show and would not do this work without you. I'm incredibly grateful every single day for the fact that you show up and listen to this show. So again, thank you. I say all this because November is all about gratitude and along with the listeners of this show who I just shouted out, there's another person who I think we should all be thanking ourselves. I recently saw a clip on TikTok of Snoop aka Snoop Dogg when he got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and he got up and thanked himself for working so hard and it's hilarious and also quite wise. Obviously we don't want to get into overconfidence or cockiness or self centeredness. But actually I think it's quite healthy to give yourself a pat on the back. So in this month of November, let's send some thanks to the people in your life, including maybe your therapist who are there when you need them. But also don't leave yourself out of the picture. If you're thinking about starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. I know my therapist is excellent at reminding me to be grateful for the things or for the people I may be overlooking in my life. BetterHelp is entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com happiertoday to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E L P D.J. welcome back to the show.
- [05:36]
DJ Kashmir
Thank you, Dan.
- [05:38]
Dan Harris
What's the deal?
- [05:38]
DJ Kashmir
Today we are recording the last in this little miniseries we've been running. Regular listeners know that we've been doing a series of what we've been calling reported episodes or correspondent episodes, where I basically try to answer a question that's coming up in my life and in my practice, and I go do some research and reporting, talk to some teachers, bring back what I learned. And so over the last few weeks, we've talked about what to do when we get angry, what to do when people get angry at us, why we're wrong so much more often than we realize, and what to do about that. And today the last question we're going to tackle in this little miniseries is how can we let go? How can we surrender to what's happening even when we really don't like what's happening?
- [06:27]
Dan Harris
Right. I think that's a pretty universal issue. Why did it come up for you? How did this issue make the list as being described as emergencies that you wanted to put it on the list of things you wanted to tackle for this series?
- [06:39]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah, this one felt super urgent to me. I think it started being something I was wrestling with actively at the very beginning of the pandemic. I was living in Manhattan in March of 2020, and we were right at the center of one of the first big global epicenters. And we were in that phase where we're wiping down groceries and trying to figure out if it was okay to go to the store. And I was seeing a therapist remotely at the time, and at one point she suggested that I try practicing a little bit of surrender. Not in the sense of not taking precautions or not taking it seriously, but just easing into the reality of what was out of my control. And that felt deeply counterintuitive, but also obviously felt familiar. It's a really central plank of the Buddhist teachings. And so I've been sort of mulling on this word surrender on and off over the last four years and looking at just how deep my resistance to the present moment runs. And, you know, the most obvious place this comes up for me right now in My day to day life is with my kids. Someone doesn't want to wash their hands, someone doesn't want to share a toy, someone's having a meltdown or just last night I was woken up on two different occasions, one by each kid in the middle of the night. And so there's just a thousand things in my day where my very first knee jerk reaction is to want it to be other than it is. Of course this isn't exclusive to kids. You know, sometimes it's just a mosquito bite or I like knock over a glass of water and I'm irrationally frustrated with myself or whatever and.
- [08:15]
Dan Harris
Or your boss is being an asshole.
- [08:21]
DJ Kashmir
I'm just going to let that one sit there.
- [08:23]
Dan Harris
That was a no win situation for you right there.
- [08:26]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah, I know because I've been practicing for a while. I know intellectually and I even know, honestly, I know in my body, I know that softening to what's happening and finding some fundamental okayness is a much more healthy first step than digging my heels in. And when I am able to do that, to soften to the moment, the discomfort of the moment passes much more quickly. But it just feels like all of my conditioning, at least up until the moment where I started meditating, just militates so strongly against that. I have so many decades of practice being deeply aversive to anything that doesn't please me and there's, there's a lot that doesn't please me. So it's actually feeling increasingly urgent for me to really dig in here on, you know, what's stopping me from experiencing a little more surrender, a little more ease and what can I try? What can I do about it that I haven't already? So yeah, that's sort of where I'm coming from today.
- [09:24]
Dan Harris
Yeah. And to state the obvious, it's not personal to you. I think of our mutual friend and frequent flyer on this show, meditation teacher and rabbi and activist and journalist Jay Michaelson, who I've heard say, you know, even single celled organisms, I don't know if that's technically true, but even the simplest of living organisms will go toward the stuff it wants, like food, and try to avert the things that doesn't want, like danger or pain. And so that is just the way we're wired. And for me, you know, the softened to what's in, what's here in the moment. That language doesn't really work for me personally, but it's like, can you, can I be cool with it? Can I be okay with what's happening right now. The Buddhist term of art would be equanimous with it. And, yeah, I mean, that. That just seems like it's at the heart of meditation, or at least Buddhist meditation. So I know we've got a bunch of ringers recruited for Buddhist meditation teachers who are going to help talk us through this concept today. So where are we starting?
- [10:25]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah. So we're going to do this in three acts today. We'll start with Matthew Brensilver and sort of explore this phrase, let go, which we all hear so often in meditation instructions and out in the wider world. And then when we come back from the first break, we'll go to Vinny Ferraro and get some more advice. And then we'll end our interview with some practices and a story from Kyra Duolingo. And so this clip from Matthew that I'm about to play is specifically about letting go. And what you're about to hear is first me asking him a question. The question is about some advice I heard him give recently. He gave this story, an online meditation and dharma talk that he was doing not too long ago. So I'm asking him about this advice I heard him give, and then he'll respond to my question. So here's the first clip I've heard you say. All phenomena mean the same thing. Let go. What?
- [11:28]
Matthew Brensilver
Well, just a kind of acknowledgement that dharma teachers, we're desperate. We'll say anything. We'll just say anything that we think is going to help. And the context really does matter. So I hope I said that to you not while you were at a busy intersection, but while you were sitting in retreat. Right?
- [11:54]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah. I was in one of your Dharmets recently.
- [11:56]
Matthew Brensilver
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all phenomena mean the same thing. Let go. So in a sense, the task of living, of survival, of safety, means discerning true alarms from false alarms, of discern. And we kind of err on the side of treating them all as true alarms, as something that urgently needs my attention, action, even if it's a subtle something, but it becomes urgent. And so that's fair enough. It's adaptive, at least in some ways, to be vigilant, to be awake in every moment, to threat an opportunity, and to be, in a sense, over reading that data. You know, that often comes from our body. It does. Something doesn't feel good. What is this? What's the problem? How do I get it right? And yet in Dharma practice, the development that we're cultivating is essentially treating all phenomena as false alarms, to be awake to phenomena as phenomena is not to read into them. The Buddha says, just let the sound be sound. Let the sight be sight. Right? That classic instruction. And when you're restless, just no restlessness. When you're angry, no anger. There's something in us that really deeply rebels against the simplicity of that instruction. Wait, when I'm angry, just feel, know you're angry? No, the knowing is not nearly enough. The knowing does not respond to the urgency of the demand placed on me by the anger. It is my job. And then it kind of puts us back into the corner of the sense of self as the kind of project manager for my life. And so, okay, this means that. That means this. Da, da, da, da, da, on and on and on. And we just keep interpreting every bit of affect, every phenomena as a kind of commandment to do something, modulate something. Just some knob somewhere in Samsara in this realm. And Dharma, practice is not about neglecting our basic kind of safety, but it's about relinquishing the tendency to overread phenomena when we actually don't need to. We are investing some measure of equanimity in order to develop it further. We're treating pleasant and unpleasant in the same way as phenomena with a valence, basically. And that is very counterintuitive to our biology, which wants to leverage all of that as information about what is next, what to do. And so to treat all phenomena, this ache in my heart, this knee pain, this excited thought, this hopeful vision, to treat all of that as if the Buddha were whispering in our ear, let go. That is not an instruction that scales to the complexity of our life. Sometimes meditation instructions scale very naturally to the rest of our life. Some of them really don't, but they are cultivating something that will serve us in the rest of our life. And so that kind of surrender, relinquishment, the freedom to no longer need to put phenomena into the category of welcome and unwelcome, to treat them all as exactly the same way, Even though the valence may be polar opposites, we just treat it all as a kind of reminder. Let go, let go. And that leads us into certain kinds of development that are said to be useful.
- [16:23]
Dan Harris
Yeah, I just want to make sure I note for people listening. I suspect some people might be hearing this and thinking, well, is this going to lead to a kind of passivity, a quietude, a resignation? And the answer is no, and we'll touch on that later. And also, just to explain this term that Matthew used of phenomena with a valence in that Buddhist worldview, your experience, if you get right down to it, is just a river of objects. You know, us again, objects, that's another Buddhist term of art. Like things to notice things that are passing through your mind, sensation in your knee, sound in the environment, a thought passing through. It's just rushing river of these phenomena with a valence, meaning that they all come with the topspin of their pleasant, they're unpleasant or they're neutral. So that's, that's just a little color on, on how the Buddhists think about the. That comes up in our mind. Anyway, D.J. back to you. This meditation instruction that he recommended of, you know, the Buddha whispering in your ear, let go. That's apparently something you've been taste testing.
- [17:34]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah, this is something I try from time to time. And it's an interesting instruction. It's not all that different from the very traditional sort of 101 mindfulness meditation where you're just, you're sitting down, bringing your attention to some object. Maybe it's the breath, following the sensation of the breath going in and out. And then when you get distracted, noticing it, letting go of that distraction and bringing your attention back to the breath and beginning again. But it's just, it slightly reframes the focus on that moment of letting go. And so, yeah, just the other day I was sitting and letting this be the only thing I was doing during this sit. It was just any time I noticed anything, just hearing that phrase, let go, seeing what it felt like to try to let the thing go. Yeah. As he says in this clip, it's not necessarily the most scalable piece of advice to your everyday life, but it really is a fascinating process practice to play with on the cushion. And I've been playing this clip back over and over as I've been preparing for this episode. And it struck me that I had heard something a lot like this before. And Matthew actually helped me track this down. It's a passage from Ajahn Sumedo, who is himself an esteemed Buddhist teacher. And so I just wanted to offer this short passage as just another way to think about what it might mean to practice with letting go. So Ajahn Sumedo writes, you simplify your meditation practice down to just two words, let go. Rather than try to develop this practice and then develop that and achieve this and go into that and understand this and read the suttas and study the Abhidhamma and then learn Pali and Sanskrit, then the Madhyamika and the Prajna Paramita, get ordinations in the Hinayana Mahayana Vajrayana, write books and become a world renowned authority on Buddhism. Instead of becoming the world's expert on Buddhism and being invited to great international Buddhist conferences, just let go, let go, let go. He writes, I did nothing but this for about two years. Every time I tried to understand or figure things out, I'd say, let go, let go, until the desire would fade out. So I'm making it very simple for you to save you from getting caught in incredible amounts of suffering. There's nothing more sorrowful than having to attend international Buddhist conferences. Some of you might have the desire to become the Buddha of the age, Maitreya, radiating love throughout the world. But instead, I suggest just being an earthworm, letting go of the desire to radiate love throughout the world. Just be an earthworm who knows only two words. Let go, let go, let go.
- [20:24]
Dan Harris
All right, I want to jump in here because again, I'm channeling this mystical and miraculous ability I have to read the minds of the audience. And I have this suspicion that some people are bumping on the phrase let go. What does that actually mean? And I know that's something you've been thinking about. Can you take the mic back and talk about that?
- [20:46]
DJ Kashmir
Yes, yes. So it's such a tricky phrase, and I wanted to spend extra time with it here at the top because there's a lot of things it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean be apathetic. It doesn't mean surrender to injustice without putting up a fight. It doesn't mean don't stand up for yourself. It doesn't mean crawl in a hole and give up on the world. We're going to keep exploring what it means over the course of this whole episode and get multiple more perspectives. You know, something we've been talking about a lot in these last few episodes we've done together, Dan, is that different language lands with people differently. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. We all come to this with our own idiosyncrasies. So if you don't, like, let go, or if you're practicing with letting go and it's just causing you more suffering because you're like, well, I'm trying to let go and I can't, and I'm bad at letting go. And now that's a whole new story, and you can't let go of that story. Like, there are variations here. So just to give two other perspectives, one is from Lamorad Owens, who was on the show not too long ago, and he shared this acronym that he has for meditation Snowl which is see it, name it, own it, experience it, let it go, let it float. And I was really struck by those last two that he pairs let it go with let it float. And he said the reason he does that is because sometimes when he tries to let something go, he finds himself right back on top of it. And so his next step is to just say let it float. Which he said is a really important step for him as a follow up to let it go. If he let something go and it comes back, then he just practices with letting it float. And to him that means listen, it's here but it's it's lighter. I don't have to grab it again, it doesn't have to bug me again. It can just kind of be here floating. I think he actually may have referenced like an image of a cloud. It can just kind of be here floating. And that's okay this last one is from Sabine Selassie, who is a massive fan favorite and I know a close friend of yours, Dan, and she recently posted about this idea of letting go on her newsletter Ancestors to Elements, which is on Substack, and she has talked on the show before about what she sees as the limits of the phrase let go or the phrase let it go. So here's a clip of Sabine reading this short excerpt.
- [23:02]
Vinnie Ferraro
My suffering is directly linked to my contention with reality. The tightness I create by constantly needing things to be different than they are. A tightness in my mind that I also find in my body. Whether I'm anxious or avoidant, disgruntled or dejected, I can usually locate physical contraction within me. It's often in my heart area or in my lower back and hips. But I can feel tension in my face or jaw and my shoulders or belly too. Embodied practices, including meditation, have helped loosen that contraction. But I've also found subtler ways to inflict my obsession with control onto life. Even the simple phrase let go can become an attempt to manipulate reality, to turn this moment into something I deem better or necessary. Go implies somewhere else to be. If I just let go of this pain, grief, anger, person, place, thing, then I won't suffer. My spiritual practice becomes a bargaining space. I will be with this back pain, heartache, anxiety around political uncertainty, so that it will go away. Sometimes you may have heard a slightly different instruction, let it be. This distinction is subtle but crucial. Let it be invites me into a more nuanced understanding that ultimately, practice and everything is paradoxical. The transformation I seek comes not from control and manipulation, but from the subtle play of aspiration and allowing transformation always involves understanding how things are in this moment. I aspire for love, joy, beauty, freedom, and I allow things to be right here, right now, in the midst of back pain, heartache, injustice, suffering. I am not the boss of reality, and I must be careful not to make practice simply another way to attempt control. If I make space simply to be with my experience, I can meet moments of liberation.
- [25:05]
Dan Harris
Seb's a baller. It's amazing. Yeah, Let It Be works for me personally. Everybody should check out Sebenet's newsletter on Substack. And obviously, you know, I have my own website, danharris.com, which is powered by Substack as well. And Seb and I are trading content back and forth all the time. And so she actually has a guided meditation available on Dan Harris.com on letting it be. All right, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk to another of my favorite Dharma teachers and yours as well. DJ you introduced me to this cat, Vinnie Ferraro. That's coming up after this quick break. Coming up, we talk about how to connect with the wisdom of letting go when we're deep in our own drama. And we talk about a very simple practice that you can do anytime. One of the cool things about fall is we get to do a little shopping, a little retail therapy. I recently went to quint.com got myself a Mongolian cashmere sweater and a new set of socks. Quint is great. One of the amazing things about having them as a sponsor is that I get lots of great clothes. You've heard me rhapsodize about my Quint sweatpants. I also have T shirts and now this new sweater. I love it. Quince offers affordable, high quality essentials for any wardrobe. That includes seasonal must haves like the aforementioned Mongolian cashmere sweaters from 60 bucks and comfortable pants for any occasion. Quintz only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices along with premium fabrics and finishes, and they partner with them directly, cutting out the cost of the middleman and passing the savings on to you. That means Quint's Items are priced 5050 to 80% less than similar brands. So you can update your look without breaking the bank. Upgrade your wardrobe with pieces made to last with quince. Go to quince.com happier for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E dot com happier to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com happier My son, who's 9, loves Pokemon. Loves it. If you want to win that dude over, get him some Pokemon cards. In fact, some friends of mine have done that in the past and he still remembers it. My son does. He still remembers when people give him that gift. So imagine my surprise and delight when I received in the mail a huge box filled with Pokemon trading cards, which I then of course gave to my son. It was one of those rare moments where he thought I was cool. Why did I receive said box? Because they're sponsoring the show. Specifically, the Pokemon trading card game is what I want to tell you about. It's a gift sure to delight gamers, collectors and Pokemon fans. Each Pokemon set has dozens of new cards in different styles by different artists, ranging from cute to stunning. You can learn to play in minutes. Enjoy the TCG and new cards for years to come. Find gift ideas for all ages and at every price point@tcg.pokemon.com holiday before we get started, as everybody knows, we're in the midst of an anxiety provoking election week here in the US One of my favorite slogans is Never worry Alone. So we're going to put that into action this week with live guided meditations every day. I will be going live each day at 11 Eastern. That's 11am Eastern and 8am Pacific. I'll do a 10 minute guided meditation and then I'll take questions. This is open to all subscribers, free or paid, but you do need to download the Substack app. So head over to danharris.com to find out how to do that. And if you can't make it live, you can watch the replay@danharris.com the Happier Meditation app just launched a new course called Unlearn to Meditate. This course takes you deeper into the why behind mindfulness. It's a chance to start fresh and challenge what you think you know about meditation. The teachers involved are Devin Haza, Pascal Eau Claire and Matthew Hepburn. Download the Happier Meditation app today to explore, unlearn to meditate, and rediscover your practice. All right, we're back with DJ Kashmir. We're talking about how to let go, how to surrender, how to be equanimous in the face of whatever comes up in your life. Particularly relevant topic in the middle of contentious, to say the least, presidential election in the United States. So DJ we're talking to a series of Dharma teachers about this subject. And next up is one of the funniest Dharma teachers I know of Vinny Ferraro. What did he have to say on this score?
- [29:52]
DJ Kashmir
Vinny has some really practical things that we can try, and I'm excited to play those clips for you. I'm just going to go straight to this first clip, but give a little context so we know where it's coming from. So my first real interaction with Vinny was when I took a year long class of his online via Spirit Rock, which is a meditation center on the west coast. But this was an online class on Zoom, and it was called A Year to Live. And the point of the course is essentially to spend a year living as if it is your last year on Earth. And there's a series of readings and practices and homework and class meetings. And it's a great course. I got a lot out of it. It really increased my happiness. It's also a pretty intense course. You're making peace with difficult things in your past. You're making peace with your own mortality. And so what would happen when the class would meet? There are hundreds of people in the class. And what would happen is every class meeting, Vinny would set aside some time and people would just raise their hands on Zoom, and one on one, they would have a live consultation with him, sort of in front of all of the rest of us. And people were bringing in all kinds of things to that space. There were people who had jokes or were sharing gratitude or had kind of heady intellectual reflections on what we were doing in the class. But there were also people who were in really acute distress, people who are processing divorce, loss of parents, loss of children, people who were in tears, people who are on the verge of breakdown, people who seem to be naming and attempting to release in that very moment, you know, decades of trauma and discomfort and sadness. And. And what was so interesting about watching these interactions play out is that I started noticing this pattern where on the one hand, Vinnie was having these very intentional, bespoke, personalized responses to each and every person, whatever they were bringing. But on a deeper level, it sort of seemed like he was always saying the exact same thing to everyone, regardless of what they were bringing to him. And the thing he seemed to be saying was, okay, can you be okay with what you just shared? Can you be okay with what's happening right now? Can you drop your resistance to what's happening right now? Can you surrender? And about six months in, I started finding this really remarkable that this was always his message and that we all kind of know on some level that we aren't in control of the world and that we can find a lot of peace and acceptance. But it's like when we're the ones in it, when it's our problem, when it's our struggle, it's really hard to get in touch with that thing that we otherwise know. And so I asked him about this, and this is where this clip is coming from. Was I perceiving this dynamic correctly and was there more to say about it? So here's Vinny completely.
- [32:43]
Kyra Jewel Lingo
I mean, again, we're back to relating to something or from it, right? So when we're in it, we think, no, no, this is outside of that paradigm. This is different because it was my dad or it was my son, or it was my wife, or it was my job or it was whatever it is. It's like, hold on a second, hold on. Just let's see what the actual feeling is and not our thoughts about it. Because, you know, the thoughts are very unreliable. So the first place we start is, is it okay to feel this way, right? Because we know that being internally conflicted hurts, right? When I'm wedded to the idea that this should be otherwise, it's refusing reality. And so there's a lot of ways to do that. I like the way in her book A Diary of a Zen Nun, Nan Xin, she put it a certain way. She said, by not quite accepting things that are so because they don't please me. We spend our entire lives making meaningless gestures somewhere next to reality, right? And there's just something about that. It doesn't matter how this doesn't jive with your idea of how it should be, right? Because there's not another world in which Vinny's taller, funnier, more charismatic, that fictional world that we can create, right, where my son treats me with the utmost respect at all times. It's like, bro, this is a complete fiction, right? So we notice, okay? There's a thousand ways to refuse reality. Can I stop doing that? Can I surrender that this is how it is right now? Because it's happening. So we're connected. We're aligning ourselves with truth. Oh, I'm super pissed or I'm super sad. There's grief here, right? So Thich Nhat Hanh said, things are as they are. I suffer because I imagine them differently. So taking that kind of responsibility for our state and not making it harder than it already is to feel this way. So the self aversion piece is like an added layer of conditioning. It says, no, no, no, I don't want to feel this. And so There's a part of us that's very internally fractured, so we want to. First thing, is it possible to allow myself to be permeable, to just see what is this thing I'm calling anger, sadness, grief, whatever it is. Can I actually have an experience, a direct experience, not via the mind and all my thoughts and fears and hopes about it, but what's the actual feeling in the body? Because I feel like the body is just a lot more honest. It's a lot more reliable. It's generally more present where the mind is in this dizzying back and forth with time travel. You know what I mean?
- [36:04]
Dan Harris
Vinny is a national treasure. I love how he jokes about his son the first time he was on the show. He has a little boy, as I do and as you do, although your son is not quite old enough for the verbal abuse that Vinnie and I experienced from our sons. But he first time he's on the show, he talked about the cruel tutelage of Valentino, which that phrase really stuck with me. My son, by the way, came up to me the other day and said, dad, I have a medical question for you. And he said, and this is one mommy who is actually a doctor cannot answer. And the question, daddy, is, can you see your feet? Which was a reference to the size of my belly. So. So I'm picking up on the funniest aspect of what he said. But on the serious tip, there is. I was thinking as I was listening to him that the phrase that works for me the best in this regard, and these are words that he used. But there's a phrase that Joseph Goldstein often uses in his teaching, which is it's okay. Which does not mean everything's okay. It means it's okay to feel whatever is happening right now. And that actually may be my next tattoo, because it's an incre. I come back to it all the time. And it's a two step. It's this incredible Buddhist two step or one, two punch of. Okay. The first thing is not to fight reality. It's okay to feel this. And then the second step is to investigate, like, how is this showing up in my body? What are the con. Constituent parts of what I'm calling anger or sadness or whatever. And in that second step, you can start to see that it's not a monolith. It's not a juggernaut. It's actually a bunch of flowing mental and physical phenomena. And then you don't take it quite so seriously. And then I guess the third step, as we discussed earlier, is then. Then you can take action from a calmer place rather than out of whatever emotion you didn't want to feel. And you're trying to discharge that energy by, you know, saying something stupid or doing something rash or whatever. Anyway, speaking of practices, I know that Vinnie followed up with some thoughts on how we can practice this. Letting go, letting be, equanimity, surrender, whatever you want to call it on the cushion. You want to. You want to tell us a little bit about that?
- [38:18]
DJ Kashmir
I'll quickly just draw attention to one other thing from the previous clip and then share a meditation practice that I learned from Vinny and let him riff on that. Just one other thing from what he just said, which I think is worth pointing out, is this idea of teasing out the story of what's happening from the direct experience of what's happening. So in that clip, he said, can I actually have an experience, a direct experience, not via the mind and all my thoughts and fears and hopes, but what's the actual feeling in the body? And this is something I tried recently. I was up in the middle of the night with the kids, and when I woke up in the morning, I had this whole story in my head about how exhausted I was because I'd been up in the middle of the night. And at some point, it just dawned on me that I hadn't checked in with my body at all. And I wasn't even sure that I was feeling that tired, really. I was just grasping the story of how tired I was, and woe is me. And the second I did that and sort of thought, oh, maybe I should see how my body's feeling instead of just telling myself this story about how tired I am. It was this moment of realization that actually I was tired, but I was nowhere near as tired as I was making myself out to be. So I think that itself can be a useful practice. When we find ourselves in a story about how things aren't the way we want them to be, it's just dropping into the body and see how we're actually feeling. Are we maybe more okay? To Joseph's point, Maybe it is okay. Maybe we are more okay than we think we are. There's another practice which I learned from Vinny during this course, which is called soft belly meditation. And that's what this next clip is going to be about. Soft belly meditation is something that Vinny learned from one of his first teachers, Stephen Levine. Stephen Levine actually wrote a book called A Year to Live, and that book is the foundation of the course that I took with Vinny and soft belly meditation is a very simple, very concrete meditation practice. Anyone, including a complete beginner, can sit down and try it today. And we can also link to a guided version of this in the show notes. Essentially, what you do is you sit down, you soften your belly, and then whatever comes up, you just practice softening your belly. And there's this sort of alchemical thing that happens where if you really just soften your belly over and over again and keep coming back to softening your belly, then all the phenomena and all the thoughts and worries that come up in the mind and in the body, they feel a lot less sticky and a lot less charged. I found this practice really helpful. I asked Vinny to talk a little bit about it. And so here's Vinny talking about soft.
- [40:50]
Kyra Jewel Lingo
Belly meditation, obviously standing on the shoulders of one of my first teachers, Stephen Levine. And he did. He taught soft belly for 50 years, 40 years. And he was working with people in intense situations, a lot of grief. He was working with people that were in cancer wards and age patients. He was working with people on the front lines. And he noticed that there's what he called an unattended sorrow in the belly, and that if we softened our belly, we can free ourselves in some way of that self aversion of not admitting how we feel, of disavowing this kind of emotional prohibition. So he was like, yo, there's a doorway and it's in the belly where all this stuff gets kind of marbled into the tissues. And I started doing it, you know, back in the mid-90s, and I was like, huh? I never really spent much time in the belly. I thought the belly was a place that holds your food, you know? But when I really kind of checked in, I noticed that what he was saying was right. There was a bracing and an armoring that happens in the belly. I could feel it even when I was safe in bed at home and just kind of like practicing before I go to bed. I could feel this tightness. I was like, wow, what is that? And so he put some language to it that really helped me. And I noticed that in my own nervous system after I do the soft belly, it just allows some of that to unwind. Doesn't mean, okay, I've graduated. I have abs of jello now. Right? It's not that fast. It's a slow process of just acknowledging what's here in, you know, on almost like a cellular level. Right. Because sometimes I don't have the language for it, but I can tell there's a sadness, there's a grief, there's an anxiety that's living in the belly. So that's how I'd say what it is. And a little bit of what I find as I practice it. Yeah, I notice myself reaching for it several times a day. But I'm a very aversive person, you know what I mean? Like I said, I have very strong ideas of how things should be. So whenever I'm in that kind of contracted state or that divided, conflicted state, it's like, hold on, hold on. You're still here. You're okay, bro. You know? So again, a little bit of the. Just presencing, what else is happening beside this story? Okay, I'm in a body, I'm breathing, I'm okay, I'm here. Okay, I'm grounded. I'm supported now. Talking myself down off the ledge once again and into reality. There's a paradox here because mainly what I wake up to with the soft belly is my own resistance. And once that's fully accepted, it really dissipates, you know. So that's. Again, you were talking about always asking people to surrender. Because I want their resistance to dissipate. Right. I want to alleviate some of that resistance because that's what's causing so much of the pain. That contracted feeling that just says, no, I'm not going to feel this.
- [44:44]
Dan Harris
Yeah, let me just draw a line under one thing he said there and then also just add something. This is. I don't think it's an explicitly Buddhist thing he's modeling there. And I see Joseph do this too. Joseph Goldstein, and when he's talking about tough moments in his own practice, and we just heard this from Vinnie where he's talking to himself, there's this self talk. It's okay, bro. You're here. And Joseph, you can hear Joseph describing similar situations. And I don't think that's an explicitly Buddhist thing, but there is quite a body of modern psychological research to show that self talk of this variety can be very helpful. And so I just want to highlight what Vinnie's modeling there. Especially, you know, for me, as a kind of stereotypical male, you don't have to call yourself sweetie or give yourself a hug, Although especially on the hug side, like giving yourself a hug, there's actually some data to show that that could be helpful, which I hate to admit, but, you know, even if you don't want to give yourself a hug, just putting your hand on your chest, which is a thing that I do when nobody's looking, and Pair that with, you know, for me, I'll just be like, dude, you're good. And again, you know, just to get a little more fine grained on this data around self talk, using your own name or calling yourself bro or dude actually makes it more powerful because you're kind of distancing yourself from your own stories. It's. You're channeling the mentor aspect of your own mind to talk to the anxious part of your own mind. Yes. So just wanted to, just to highlight that. And then just another thing about how Vinny said, you know, when he's okay with his aversion, it kind of dissipates. This is a phrase that I've heard from Dr. Mark Epstein, the Buddhist psychiatrist who comes on the show quite a bit and has been a mentor to me, that there's something self liberating about mindfulness. Just seeing clearly what's happening in your head can allow it to dissipate. And so one phrase that I recommend that people experiment with dropping into their mind throughout the course of their day. This comes from a Burmese master named Sayada Utejania. And the phrase is what's the attitude in my mind right now? Or what's the attitude in the mind right now if you want to not take your mind so personally. And as I've often joked, this phrase is a little bit like turning a black light on in a hotel room and shining it on the sheets and seeing the.
- [47:07]
DJ Kashmir
I swear your metaphors just get grosser over time.
- [47:09]
Dan Harris
Yeah, yeah, this is gross out of control. It's not going to get better.
- [47:14]
DJ Kashmir
You had one about a dead whale recently.
- [47:16]
Dan Harris
Yeah, yeah.
- [47:17]
DJ Kashmir
I don't know, dude.
- [47:18]
Dan Harris
My mind runs toward the macabre. Anyway, so back to the black light in the hotel room. The point is, when you ask yourself, what's the attitude in my mind right now, you're going to see a lot of embarrassing shit, probably. And it probably will fall into one of three categories. Wanting or greed, hatred or aversion or delusion, slash numbing out. And when you see it, it can, to use Mark's phrase again, self liberate. All right, so I just riffed probably a little too much there, but dj, I know that you want to play us a little bit more from Vinny about the soft belly meditation.
- [47:51]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah, no, I found all that helpful. And yeah, just a little more here on soft belly before we move on from Vinny. So in this next clip, sort of asking Vinnie about the way that I've been employing soft belly. And basically, does this sound right to you? How does this compare with your experience? So you'll hear me first and then he'll respond. Basically, in my mind, like I'm saying something along the lines of, there's space for this.
- [48:18]
Kyra Jewel Lingo
That's right.
- [48:18]
DJ Kashmir
You can let this go. There's space for this. You can let this go. There's a line from one of the guided versions of this that Steven did where he says, letting go of a lifetime of holding.
- [48:28]
Kyra Jewel Lingo
That's right.
- [48:28]
DJ Kashmir
And that phrase just plays on a loop. It's like a way to sort of physically start to touch into this unavoidable truth that everything is going to be in some way unsatisfactory, that everything is going to be in some way unreliable. And I often find it to be, like, the most. One of the most relaxing practices because it's so consciously not about striving or, you know, increasing your focus or something. I mean, it literally has soft in the title.
- [49:02]
Kyra Jewel Lingo
Yeah. I think it puts me in contact with my animal body. You know what I mean? There's something about it that's just like, dude, you have a nervous system, bro. But the line that you mentioned, what you just mentioned about a lifetime of holding, the line that gets me from it, what Stephen said, letting it all float in something softer, right? So that means there can be difficulties there, but it's floating in something bigger and softer. And I like that, you know, that way I don't have to push away the hardness, just have space for it to contain it, you know, hold it right, care for it.
- [49:47]
Dan Harris
Right?
- [49:48]
Kyra Jewel Lingo
I don't know, man. There's something about this conversation, dj, that feels like sometimes I could just be so loyal to my suffering. I think there's some nobility in that somewhere, you know, in my belief system, you know, some crossed wires. I'm like, no, this should be hard, you know? And so it is. Yeah. There's that Spinoza line where he talks about, you know, why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as if it were their own salvation? And I have seen that where I'm just like, no, I'm digging my heels in. I'm not going to. No, this is bullshit. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to stand my ground. I'm going to dig my heels in. This cannot fly, you know, I'm not signing off. I'm not consenting on this feeling. The only thing you're holding on to is your suffering. It's like, well, what actually lets go, you know, you talked about letting go of a lifetime of holding, right? And I think wisdom lets go. Having felt the pain of holding on, right. That's my experience. So can I connect with the cost of holding on? Right. Then compassion arises and then something bigger happens. Right? So the first part is like, is it okay to feel this?
- [51:14]
Dan Harris
Yeah. Back to that progression. It's okay to feel this. Can I investigate it and maybe see that this feeling is. There isn't any core nugget of anger to find. It's made up of these changing parts. You know, the feeling of razor wire in your chest, a starburst of self righteous thoughts or whatever. But there it's not so solid once you investigate it. And then he raised an intriguing question but didn't answer it there, which is, I think useful to highlight what actually lets go. Who is doing the letting go? I challenge you to find it. And that's a useful question, a useful inquiry, like who's feeling the anger anyway? Who's doing the letting go of the anger? And I think in the Tibetan tradition they say you should look spoiler alert, you won't find a you, but in the not finding is the finding. So some people like this exercise, other people don't. So it's optional, like everything we talk about on the show.
- [52:19]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah. I just want to say too, in terms of optional, if anyone who's listening does want to try this, just a few kind of postcards from someone who's tried it a few times. One thing to say is just I find this soft belly meditation in particular to be a really useful kind of escape valve when whatever other kind of meditation I'm doing is causing me too much agitation. So let's say I'm doing some really basic mindfulness meditation and I just cannot follow my breath for the life of me. Sometimes I'll just switch over to this because this feels like the lowest pressure kind of meditation I know how to do. And then the other thing just to say is it's funny, Dan, that Alexander is bullying you in this particular way about your belly in the context of this conversation, because I have noticed that I actually have a really hard time softening my belly. There was a time not too long ago where I was out on Lake Michigan on like a sort of pier and I had to be at least a hundred yards from another human being and I had a winter coat on and I just tried softening my belly in a public place and it was so hard.
- [53:27]
Dan Harris
Yeah.
- [53:28]
DJ Kashmir
And so I think just this notion of like how tightly we're clenching, how much shame we feel around our bodies, how much on a physical, a cellular level. We are resisting all day long. We're even sucking in our guts all day long. Like there's something to be said about, about exploring that and yeah, seeing what happens if you actually let your belly be soft and, and take a few breaths.
- [53:51]
Dan Harris
There was a moment there where you were like, yeah, your son's been bullying you around this issue. And I have noticed and I thought after the ellipses was going to be that you are putting on weight.
- [54:04]
DJ Kashmir
Shit runs deep.
- [54:08]
Dan Harris
All right, on that note, let's take a break. We're going to come back with the final Dharma maestro, a regular on this show person. We all have a ton of respect for Kyra Jewel lingo right after this. Coming up, we talk about the difference between surrendering, accepting, letting go, whatever you want to call it. We talk about the difference between that and giving up. And we dive into some eminently actionable suggestions for practicing surrender. This episode is brought to you by Hill's Pet Nutrition. Every shelter pet deserves a second chance. And you are making it possible for thousands of them every day. Because when you feed your pet Hills, you help feed a shelter pet, which helps make them healthy, happy and more adoptable. I am a huge, unrelenting, unreconstructed fan of adopting shelter pets. We've got three shelter cats marauding around our home. And actually my friend and former colleague Whit Johnson was here the other day. He's an anchorman at ABC News, but he's got a side hustle. It's not really a hustle. It's a volunteer gig on the side where he fosters puppies. And he brought a puppy here the other day to our house and we almost adopted that puppy, but pudding, that was the dog's name, went to somebody else. Anyway, I think it's really cool that Hill's Pet Nutrition supports animal shelters by feeding shelter pets. Hills has Provided More than $300 million in pet food to more than a thousand shelters. Over 14 million shelter pets fed and adopted. Science did that. Visit hillspet.compodcast to learn more.
- [55:52]
Sabine Selassie
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- [56:43]
Dan Harris
All right, we're back. We're talking about letting go. We're letting be with dj, who's our tour guide and guinea pig during this conversation. And as we've established, he finds an issue that's relevant in his life, and then he goes out and talks to a bunch of really smart people and then reports back to us. And so the next and final Dharma teacher is Kyra Dualingo. Dj, take it away.
- [57:07]
DJ Kashmir
So this first clip of Kyra Jewel is about the distinction between what we've been talking about this whole time, which you might call skillful surrender or acceptance or letting go. So there's distinction between that on the one hand and giving up on the other hand, which she argues is something totally different. So here she is.
- [57:29]
G
We're still caught when we give up. The situation still has us somehow. Whereas when we surrender and we say, look, this is. This is how it is, there's no way for me to kind of change this. We free ourselves, we free our energy up to, then relate to it differently. But when we give up, we're still somehow trapped in the story that this could be different. And I think, you know, the surrender piece, it's actually a power place. It's a place of power when we simply open to, yeah, this is how things are. It's back to the softening in response to the resistance or to whatever difficulty is there. When we soften, when we open, when we say, yeah, this is how it is, there's a relaxation that can come. We actually can access peace in the midst of something really difficult or really not wanted. There can be some equanimity, some spaciousness, because we are realizing we can. There's more room for us and for our experience. The giving up is no room, no space. It's like a collapse.
- [59:01]
Dan Harris
That's a really interesting distinction. I never thought about that before. Giving up resignation is, you know, you're still stuck in it. You're. There's a sadness, a fury even in throwing your arms up, taking your toys, and going home. As opposed to surrender, which she describes as a place of power, which is being at peace, having some sort of okayness with the situation.
- [59:24]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah, I had never thought about that either. The way that giving up still has some clinging in it. And that's why we talk to These folks. And just to say, too, she, she went on to say in the conversation something that felt important not to skip over, which is that sometimes giving up can be okay too. Sometimes giving up can be skillful too. There are moments in our lives where giving up really is the best we can do. Circumstances are so overwhelming that our best bet is to just down. Our best bet is to just walk away. And we might just need to be done with something, at least for the time being. And she says that can also be healed, that can also be worked with. So she's not throwing shade at giving up. But it is, I think, still a useful distinction that when we do have the capacity to practice surrender instead of giving up, that, that, that can be worth trying to do.
- [60:14]
Dan Harris
Well, let's pick up on that because that's pretty practical. And there are more practical things to say about surrender or letting go. Much of this discussion up until this point has been kind of about meditation practice. And I think now we're going to start talking about off the cushion or free range practice. So walk us through what Kyra said on this tip.
- [60:34]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah, so Kyra Jul has a bunch of great actionable suggestions for how to practice with surrender. This next clip's very short, but I think there's two or three distinct things we can try baked in here. So maybe we'll rely on you, Dan, to do your summarizing thing. But yeah, I'll just, I'll tee her up for some of her practical suggestions. Here she is again.
- [60:55]
G
What's helpful for me is also just to be like, yeah, this is hard. This is not what we would like, or this wasn't what we planned for. And here this is. And so just a kind of acknowledgement that it's, you know, some kind of compassion that I'm struggling with this. So not necessarily expecting myself to surrender or beating myself up because I can't surrender to what, whatever is, but like just honoring that. This is really, this sucks. And you know, I'm struggling with that. And, and, and so when I just, you know, give myself the space to be with whatever is, that's the start of surrender. So if it's not surrendering to what's happening, but surrendering to my attitude about what's happening, that starts the softening process, then it's easier to get to, okay, this is just how things are.
- [61:54]
DJ Kashmir
It's a skillful lowering of the bar to say, you don't need to surrender to what's happening. Try surrendering to your resistance to what's happening. Just like on an energetic level that just feels less intimidating. Not necessarily any easier to remember, but less intimidating.
- [62:14]
G
Yeah. And, you know, for me, it's really like I experience immediately the pain of the resistance. And that's the diagnostic that shows me, oh, how can I meet this? So that what's already difficult doesn't have to go sharply up in difficulty because of my resistance. So the. That's where I shift, is noticing how painful it is to be in resistance to what's happening.
- [62:46]
Dan Harris
Okay, so you asked for some reflective listening from me, so I hear two things there. First is self compassion. She used the self compassion phrase that I use on myself a lot, which is, this sucks. Just giving yourself permission to acknowledge that you're in a tough situation, it's a. It can be a big relief. And it's again, self compassion is a much studied subject in the psychological field and that this notion of just giving yourself the. Doing yourself the service of acknowledging that whatever is happening right now sucks, that can be very beneficial. And the second thing is that using your resistance as a way to wake up, to put it in Joseph terms, to use struggle as a feedback because you use the word remember in there. Dj. And remembering, as we say all the time here, is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, part of meditative or spiritual practice or personal growth, whatever you want to call it, remembering to do the wise shit you hear on this show or elsewhere is so hard. And so actually noticing I'm suffering right now in some way, or I'm struggling in some way, I'm resisting, that can be an alarm bell, a mindfulness bell in and of itself. So that. Those are the two things I heard.
- [64:00]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. They're both really helpful. And I also appreciate this invitation that she offered, which came up with Vinny also, actually, which is just, if you really don't like what's happening, try, just try just surrendering to the not liking. You know, we don't. We don't always have to set ourselves the. The gold standard response as our goal. We don't have to start with accepting something that's really hard. We can just start with trying to accept the fact that it feels hard. And, you know, she actually told me. Kara Jewell told me a story about something that she experienced some resistance to recently, which I thought could be a helpful way to start to close out this episode. This is a story from earlier in the year, and I'll just give a little context and then hand the rest of the story over to her. So Kyra Jewell and her partner Adam, he's an Episcopal priest, they have been dreaming this dream for a while of starting some kind of retreat center, practice center together. And they'd even gone and looked at properties in upstate New York, not that they had the money to buy a property, but just sort of in this dreaming phase. And then this pretty incredible thing happened, which is they were gifted a monastery. There was a Benedictine monk named Brother Victor, and he passed away. And the monastery was essentially offered to them as a gift. But there was a catch. And the catch was that there was this hefty property tax bill of over $50,000. And the moment they took over ownership of the property, it was going to come due in a matter of weeks or else the thing was going to go into foreclosure. So it was like this incredible gift, and it came with this really significant caveat, what she called an unwished for situation, which she was experiencing some. Some resistance to. So the two of them, Khaira, Jewel and Adam, quickly launched an online fundraiser. They weren't sure if they could raise the money in time. And I'll let her take that story over from here.
- [65:59]
G
What I realized a few weeks in. I mean, really just a week in after the fundraiser started, we were reading Brother Victor's book on the Beatitudes, and he was talking about how blessed are the poor in spirit means you realize that you cannot provide for yourself alone, that you need, you know, God or the sacred or the divine or something larger than you in order to survive. And basically inter being this perspective. And it hit me as we were studying this. I said, oh, you know, this debt that we have inherited from Brother Victor is actually a gift because we were having the opportunity to get in touch with all these people who wanted this vision to come to fruition. And we wouldn't have reached them, we wouldn't have been in touch with them if we hadn't owed the money. So I'm just sharing this because it was a moment of surrender where I realized, oh, actually, owing this money is a gift he gave us because it's a chance to really inherit the earth, you know, of inherit these beautiful bonds of community that wouldn't have been created, cultivated, strengthened, without this difficulty, this being in need. And we raised all the money we needed for the property taxes in time. Now we still have a huge fundraiser to do for renovating the buildings, building new buildings. So that's our next phase. But it was a moment of realizing, oh, rather than seeing this as a. As a negative or As a, you know, a minus, I could see it really as a plus. So just wanted to offer that as another surrender is like a shift in perspective.
- [67:52]
Dan Harris
That's interesting for me to hear right now, just because as I've been very open about, I've come through a very difficult stage in my career, separating from what used to be known as the 10% Happier Meditation app and starting my own thing@danharris.com and, you know, I am in, in need in many ways. You know, I don't have an app anymore and I'm really starting over and going public and asking people to follow me in my new thing and then also trying to promote it by really doing a lot of talking to friends of mine who work in the media or have their own podcasts or public platforms and talking to them about can they help me promote this thing? And it really. I hate that feeling. I'm kind of the guy trying to raise $50,000 for the property, you know, and. But hearing her describe it as well, actually, when you're in situations like this, you are jarred out of a not very helpful illusion. The not very helpful illusion, I think, which predominates in Western capitalism is that you can be, you know, an island unto yourself, self reliant, individualistic, Marlboro man roaming the prairies with nobody, no help required. But actually, when you're in need, you are thrust into reality, which is that of course, everything is utterly and non negotiably interdependent. So anyway, just a long way of saying useful story for me to hear.
- [69:24]
DJ Kashmir
Yeah, yeah. It reminds me of some wisdom we've heard on the show before from maybe more than one Dharma teacher. I think Matthew Hepburn has said this and maybe others of just this idea that so many of us think that asking for help is bad. We've been conditioned not to do it. But actually generosity feels good. And so when you're asking for help, you're giving someone the chance to be generous. You're giving them the chance to feel good. The other thing that's coming to mind as I'm listening to her tell this story, I've listened to this clip of her telling the story quite a few times over the past couple months as we've been putting this episode together. And it just sort of struck me at some point along the way that when we think about the scope of our personal lives, surrender exists on a spectrum. So there are these sort of micro moments of surrender. Can I be okay with the fact that I got a mosquito bite? Can I be okay with the fact that, you know, I'm awake in the middle of the night when I don't want to be all the way up to these sort of more macro levels of can I be okay with my own mortality? You know? And I think there's a vast middle. And in this particular story, the thing that she's surrendering to is not a single moment of discomfort. It's an entire circumstance in her life that she's going to be wrestling with for probably months or years, which is the financial realities of trying to actually execute on this dream. And I've started playing in my own life with, you know, what does it mean to surrender all along this spectrum, surrender to the little moments that are bothering me, surrender to the big things that I'm terrified of, and surrender to the things in the middle, too. One really concrete example of this, which might sound completely ridiculous, but for the longest time, Dan, I have been trying to figure out when in my day to meditate. I've been really committed to trying to meditate every single day if I possibly can. And so often I find myself squeezing in five minutes around lunchtime or five minutes right before I go to bed or something. And on the days when I meditate at the very beginning of the day, I almost always feel like I have a better day. And the reason I haven't been meditating first thing in the morning every single day for the last basically nine years is that I just had this story in my head that I'm already waking up as early as I possibly can. I'm already so tired I can't afford anymore. And a couple weeks ago, I just had this moment of what to me felt like a moment of insight. And to everyone else might sound completely absurd, but I just had this moment of, oh, I just need to wake up 20 minutes earlier. And that it's actually important enough to me. I'm going to surrender to the fact that it might make me slightly more tired. I'm going to surrender to the fact that I can't line up my life in such a way where I'm going to wake up when I want and have room for everything that I want. And I'm just going to try setting my alarm 20 minutes earlier. And it's. And it has been wildly helpful to just make a little bit of peace with the fact that in my ideal world, I would wake up slightly later than this, but I'm going to go slightly earlier in order to get a bigger benefit in return. And that's what I've been doing. Every day and my life is better because of it. And I'm really scratching my head about why it took me nine years to surrender to the fact that if you want to do something before everything else, you have to wake up earlier to do it.
- [72:51]
Dan Harris
I mean, I think the answer is pretty simple. It took you nine years because we're hardwired to resist stuff that seems unpleasant. So the reframe would be, wow, you did this 30 years before the actuarial tables would say that you're gonna, your life will end or something like that. You know, like that. It's amazing you did it at all given how counterevolutionary it is.
- [73:12]
DJ Kashmir
Well, there was a moment in what you just said, Dan, where you said, I think the reason is pretty simple. And you paused slightly and I thought you were going to finish the sentence, but with it's because you're an idiot.
- [73:24]
Dan Harris
I think that was implied. DJ Just for everybody listening, I've learned a lot about how to manage by talking to experts in the field and that, you know, calling people idiots is right there in all of the textbooks as a good thing to do. So learn from me. DJ Great job with this. Great job with the whole series. Hit us up on dan harris.com DJ will be in the chat today on the day this posts as he has been on on the other days when these other episodes have posted. And just let us know how you think this format is working. Final thing to say, though, traditionally when we have guests on we we ask them to enter into what we jokingly call the plug zone. Our guests are not actually on with me right now. You're the one on. We're playing clips from the guests. Can you plug their stuff for them?
- [74:12]
DJ Kashmir
Happily, yeah. So if you're interested in what Kyra Jewell is doing in upstate New York or just interested in her teachings in general, we'll link to her fundraiser, her books, her past episodes in and her website in the Show Notes. If you're interested in that Year to Live class that I mentioned from Vinny, he's starting a new cohort of that in early January, I believe the signups are live now. We'll put a link for that in the Show Notes. We're also going to do a very special episode about some of the key teachings from that course that's going to come out right around New Year's, so stay tuned for that. And we'll link to his website and past episodes in the Show Notes as well. For Matthew, we'll link to the information about the online Sangha. He does every week on YouTube as well as his website and I didn't interview her directly, but we'll make sure to link to Sabine Selassie's substack in the show notes and some of her past episodes.
- [75:10]
Dan Harris
Also, everybody should check out Sabine's newsletter on substack and obviously I have my own website, danharris.com, which is powered by Substack as well. And Seb and I are trading content back and forth all the time and so she actually has a guided meditation available on danharris.com on letting it be. Thank you DJ.
- [75:32]
DJ Kashmir
Thank you. And thanks to Marissa and Sam and all the folks who have helped in one way or another putting this series together. Really appreciate it.
- [75:41]
Dan Harris
Don't give other people credit. You're an island unto yourself. You're self reliant and nobody else helped.
- [75:46]
DJ Kashmir
That's right up there with calling people an idiot, right?
- [75:48]
Dan Harris
Exactly.
- [75:49]
DJ Kashmir
Good advice.
- [75:54]
Dan Harris
Thank you dj. Also thank you to Vinnie, Matthew and Kyra Jewell. We will drop some links in the show notes to previous episodes with DJ, Vinnie, Matthew and Kyra Jewell. Also DJ will be in the chat today over@danharris.com come ask him questions about letting go. Before I go, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir, Luke Ngo is our Executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey@wondery.com survey make this holiday season wow with a brand new way to play from Wondery.
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DJ Kashmir
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DJ Kashmir
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The full wow in the World toy collection today@Amazon.com wonderykids I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US History. Presidential lies, Environmental disasters, Corporate fraud. In our latest series, the Houston Astros shocked Major League Baseball by going from last place to winning the World Series in just four years. This remarkable turnaround seems to vindicate Astros general manager Jeff Luno, whose unconventional use of data and the latest technology stirs controversy around the league. But when two reporters uncover that some players and coaches have been using that technology to cheat, it casts doubt on the Astro's culture of winning at all costs. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery. You can join Wondery plus in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today.