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10% Happier with Dan Harris
How To Deal With Difficult Emotions, Difficult Feedback, and Difficult Parts of Your Own Mind | Diane Musho Hamilton
01:07:32
Cross-training for your mind. is an author, award-winning mediator, and teacher of Zen. She is the author of three books on conflict resolution, relationships, and communication. Her latest book is , co-authored with Gabriel Wilson. Diane is one of...
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- [00:00]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Foreign.
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Dan Harris
It'S the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang. Today it's a conversation about how to deal with difficult emotions, difficult feedback, and the difficult parts of your own personality. And this approach involves something called spiritual cross training. If, like me, you do not love the term spiritual, you can just think of it as cross training for your mind, for your brain. As my guest, who is a Zen Buddhist teacher and also a professional conflict mediator. As she will argue, it's not enough to just meditate if you have no way to apply your meditation out in the world. In other words, if you haven't developed any sense of interpersonal hygiene. And said guest has tons of practical tips for getting started in meditation, which, by the way, she argues, you're already doing anyway, more on that soon. And she also has tips on how to get along better with people, including people who are saying harsh things to your face. Diane Musho Hamilton is a longtime Zen practitioner and teacher. Musho is her Zen name. She is also, as mentioned, a professional dispute mediator where she helps resolve everything from simple neighborhood disputes to complex multi party negotiations to highly charged conversations about race, gender and religion. She is based in Utah where she was raised in the Mormon or LDS Church, but she's now much more identified with Zen Buddhism. She's also the author of many books, the latest of which is called Waking up and Growing Spiritual Cross Training for an Evolving World, which she co authored with Gabriel Wilson. That book actually comes out in a few weeks, but you can pre order it now. Now in this conversation we talk about what she means by spiritual cross training. We talk about cultivating emotional maturity, the foundations of Zen meditation practice, integrating shadow and psyche, the key aspects of living with purpose, what it means to have a purpose, how to find your purpose, the value of setting intentions. Something I resisted for a long time, but I'm now fully on board with ethical action and community, the value of patience, and much more. Just to say, I first heard of Diane because of her appearance on the Waking up app run by my friend Sam Harris. Now that I no longer have an app of my own, I have been partnering with Sam who has put together an outstanding app that is filled with great courses and meditations and conversations. In fact, Sam and I recently worked with our mutual friend, the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein to put together an eight hour audio series on the Buddha's Eightfold Path, which is a kind of cookbook for enlightenment. And that course comes with a bunch of guided meditations from Joseph himself. You can sign up @wakingup.com 10%. That's T E N P E R C E N T. I'll put a link in the show notes but also say it again, that's wakingup.com 10%. Just so you know, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you will get a 30 day free trial and you will be supporting me and my team as well because we will get a portion of the proceeds from any of the subscriptions generated through that link. And just to say, if money's an issue, Sam offers scholarships. That's the same policy that I have over on danharris.com if you can't afford it, we'll give it to you. Diane Musho Hamilton coming up right after this. I have a strangely busy travel schedule coming up in the next couple of months, but the thing that I'm really looking forward to, the bright spot on my calendar is in a few weeks, I'm going to Montauk, which is one of my favorite places in the world. It's on the eastern tip of Long Island. It's primarily known as a summer spot, but it's actually beautiful year round. I'm going to Montauk with 1, 2, 3, 4, at least four families that are close friends of ours. They all have children who get along really well with my child. And we'll all be staying not at hotels, but in houses. I love being in a big house with lots of other people. It is so much more personal and intimate than staying in a hotel with other families. With many of these families, we've gone to places like Florida and gotten Airbnbs together. Being able to stay together in a beautiful place is so much fun and again, so much more intimate. And here's the cool thing. If you're going to be traveling soon, you might actually be sitting on an Airbnb gold mine. You might be able to put your own residence up on Airbnb so you can actually earn money while you're taking a vacation. I'm a huge fan of Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host we talk about it all the time here on the show. The Importance of sleep. As I often say, sleep is the apex predator of healthy habits. It's just so hard to function in the world if you're not getting enough sleep. And so many of us really are not getting enough sleep. Which brings me to one of the sponsors of today's episode, Cozy Earth. Their whole idea is that great days spread, start with better nights, and they've got all of these cool products to help you sleep well which will help you live well. They sent us a huge box of stuff which my wife and I dove into with gusto. Included in that box were some bamboo pajamas which my wife is very excited to wear. I don't wear pajamas per se, but I like to wear sweatpants and a T shirt and they sent me really comfortable sweatpants and T shirts which honestly since I work from home I wear during the day as well. They've got this bamboo sheet set which they sent us which is lovely, really soft and one key thing here is this is risk free comfort. If you're not sure you will love the stuff from Cozy Earth, you can take 100 nights to decide with their sleep trial and every Cozy Earth bedding product comes with a 10 year warranty. Prioritize your sleep. Visit cozyearth.com and use my exclusive code Dan Harris D A N H A R R I s for 40% off best selling sheets, towels, pajamas and more. And if you get a post purchase survey, let them know you heard about Cozy Earth right here. Sleep better with Cozy Earth. Diane Musho Hamilton, welcome to the show.
- [06:36]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I'm very happy to be here. Dan. Thank you so much for having me.
- [06:39]
Dan Harris
It's a pleasure. So the new book is called Waking up and Growing Spiritual Cross Training for an Evolving World. I want to hone in on this term spirit Spiritual Cross training because I love it. What do you mean by it?
- [06:53]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Well, I'll begin by acknowledging that my main spiritual practice, I was raised in utah in the LDS culture. But when I was in my very early 20s I lost a number of friends. Several of my friends died. I would say I was distraught, but I was also existentially curious and for whatever reason I wasn't able to find the solace I needed in the faith based religion and my upbringing. And so basically what I did is I somehow found the Buddhist tradition in my very early 20s. I think I was 22 when I first started to read in the Buddhist tradition. And then I went to Naropa Institute and studied it there. And so I had Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trung Parinpoche and then my Zen teacher, his name was Gempa Roshi. He's an American but very Japanese trained teacher. And then my third tremendous influence is Ken Wilber. And I don't know if you know Ken Wilber's work at all, but I have to credit Ken because Ken is the person who calls it spiritual cross training. He also framed waking up meaning what do we mean by spirituality? What does waking up mean? We can talk about it in different ways. You know, matters of ultimate concern or values of compassion, altruism, giving, generosity, those kinds of things. Or we can talk about it as identification with all that is that who we are as a self actually changes. And he calls that awakening or waking up. That's his definition. It's a little more accessible. Zen would prefer not to define it. So waking up is that experience of that kind of expansiveness where we're no longer locked in the straitjacket of egoic concern, and our attention is free to move outward, and it's free to expand. And there's a tremendous amount of relaxation and trust is another quality that arises. Growing up is actually developing the skills and the capacities and different behaviors that we need to support us in our journey, you might say. So cross training is really the expression that he uses for waking up and growing up. And growing up includes working with our embodiment, our cognitive maps. In listening to your book and listening to you, you have lots of good maps. And one of the things that he talks about is we need the right set of maps in order to grow. So that's what he means by cross training, is including those different dimensions that sometimes get left out of spiritual practice.
- [09:28]
Dan Harris
There's a quote you use in the book from Gabriel Wilson. Here it is. What good is waking up to our universal nature if we can't enact this insight because our emotional and interpersonal skills remain undeveloped?
- [09:41]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah, that's right. And there's the research from Harvard, from George Valiant's work originally, that says that people. There's just this really high correlation between good relationships, altruism, and how people report happiness. We find that a lot of times the unhappiness in people's lives actually is in the interpersonal domain. It's with family, it's with our spouses or our kids. It's with the people we work with. And so to realize our nature and then to be able to express that is a value that I certainly learned in the Zen tradition. But some of the skills are ones that I actually learned being a mediator and a communicator. I wasn't taught those in the Zen tradition. I was taught to sit and to experience what is and to let go. Those are sort of the major instructions in Zen. But to learn how to listen, to learn how to clarify your message, as I've heard you talk about, to deepen your relationships, to express your care for others, to extend who you are to others, that's a different set of skills and it's often not taught. So in my experience, I've seen mediators who are great at the communication, but not as great at letting things be and not letting things ripen in a certain way, pushing peacemaking, if you will. And the flip side is also true that I've seen meditators who just don't have the skills to express as much as they might want to interpersonally.
- [11:08]
Dan Harris
I was just sitting here thinking about part of why I find this cross training analogy so powerful and really honed in on the Gabriel Wilson note about like, what good is waking up if you're being an asshole? That obviously is not what exactly what he said. That's my profane interpretation of it. I've honed in on that because that's what happened to me. You know, I learned how to meditate started in 09, so my contemplative career is still in its early stages and was at it for about nine years when it was made clear to me that I quite infamously got a 360 review, which is like an anonymous survey with your. With the people in your life. And it was made clear to me that I had done some waking up, but not enough growing up.
- [11:57]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Exactly. That's why Ken makes the distinction. Yes, that's exactly the point.
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Dan Harris
And so I think probably most people, it's the other way around. I'm just guessing. I think meditation is quite rare still. So I think it's probably the truth that most people have grown up over time and learned some basic interpersonal hygiene, but they need the waking up. So it's both sides are needed here.
- [12:23]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yes, absolutely. The thing that I would add to it is that having a strong body helps have a strong mind. So that the fact that these days that people are optimizing their bodies and how to work with themselves physically. And I talk to my students sometimes about going into the Zendo as though you're an athlete, because that embodiment really matters, because the stronger you sit in your body, the more the mind can relax and expand. So that's really important as well.
- [12:50]
Dan Harris
Yep. It's all part of what I often refer to as doing life better. And it's not just meditation. It's. It's lots of stuff. So the book follows sort of five part formula. It's got these five sections. And I thought we should, if you're up for it, just sort of walk through the five sections because I think it gives a real sense of what cross training in a spiritual sense would look like so the first is meditation, although in Zen it's called zazen. Can you describe a little bit what you mean by zazen and how it might be different from, you know, for people listening who might have done more like secular mindfulness?
- [13:27]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Sure. So there are two words that depending again on the type of Zen that you're practicing. The word zazen simply means cross legged sitting meditation. And so that means that you could be doing a loving kindness practice, you could be working with your emotions. In the Zen tradition, you might work on a puzzle, a koan, a story, but if you're sitting still as open awareness itself. Sometimes we talk about choiceless awareness, allowing things to come and go, and identifying with the very field of awareness that's referred to as shikantaza. Shikantaza means just sitting where you're not doing any kind of internal technique, but the posture, the breath, the experience of what's happening in the room, it's all AR at one time. And basically the key to this is the capacity to really just be able to let go. Sometimes I joke with my students that there's nothing more hellish than sitting for a long sitting period as a self. Now granted, selfness comes up when we're sitting, but usually when selfness comes up, it's striving. There's usually effort happening. There's usually, wish I were doing this better or wow, isn't this going great? Aren't I great? Whatever it happens to be. So that sense of identity relaxing and opening, where we simply allow all of reality to be who we are as we're sitting is what is meant by shikuntaza. There isn't an agenda we say letting go of a gaining idea. As you know, I listened to this in your book. You know, this part of us that wants to accomplish, wants to achieve, wants to accumulate, wants to, to grasp, is so deeply a part of us that shikuntaza means to really relax that and learn how to just simply be aware.
- [15:22]
Dan Harris
You might say, I could imagine shikantaza being frustrating for some people in that if there's no technique like focus on the breath and then every time you get distracted, start again, you could fall into a lot of doubt about, you know, what the hell am I doing here for sure.
- [15:40]
Diane Musho Hamilton
So I would say that learning some concentration practices early in the process is important because then one can engage a concentration practice or a noting practice and find stability. And in our tradition too, there's a lot of private audiences with the teacher. So if you're getting lost and confused, the Teacher will coach you in terms of how to stabilize the mind.
- [16:05]
Dan Harris
Would it be fair to roughly encapsulate this first section of the book, as it's important to have some sort of seated or formal meditation practice as a foundation for everything that's about to follow. But you're not super dogmatic about what exactly you do on the cushion.
- [16:25]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I think that's fair. Meditation, in my experience, does so many different things, if you want to think about it. But one of the things it does is it prepares the ground for our learning. Having listened to your book, one of the things that I took away is what a committed learner you are in the sense that once you got the idea that it might benefit you, and then you tried it, and then you challenged yourselves when there was doubt or obstacles, and you kept going. Meditation actually creates this kind of open space in the mind that really supports our learning. We become better learners. So if what we're interested in is transformation of the quality of our life and our ability to contribute to others in a new way and to feel our life force and to actively be able to engage our creativity, then meditation is the most important foundation for all of that. And I would say it's another thing that I took away from your book is just how much you appreciated the benefits of meditation. You sold me on meditation. I was glad you reminded me, you know, what is it we're doing? Why are we doing it? And it was really helpful. So I think as a basis for what we're discussing in the book, it is the ground. Absolutely. And you might say, in the Zen tradition, there's the circle, the wholeness. It's the beginning, the middle, and the end of practice.
- [17:47]
Dan Harris
Well, thank you for the kind words. I appreciate that. Do you have any practical tips for people if they want to get started in meditation but haven't managed to do so?
- [17:56]
Diane Musho Hamilton
You know, I work as a professional mediator. I've been involved in working with lawyers and judges and people in conflicts a lot. And sometimes I'll go to conferences and present to judges and lawyers and inviting them to sit down in the middle of a busy day or with a really crowded docket, or when you're managing lots of cases or lots of documents, it's not very likely. So what it is that I encourage people to do is to accept the idea that meditation is a natural state of mind. It's actually not a state because it doesn't come and go. It's the experience we have when this beautiful cognitive capacity that we have that's really late in our evolution, our capacity for language, mathematics, music, engineering, all of that, because it all requires dualistic thought. Right. When that quiets down and our senses open up and the mind settles into what I've heard the neuroscientists refer to as the experiencing network. When the experiencing network is online and the talking to ourselves quiets down, that is our natural state. You can experience that with babies, we experience it with animals. It's just something that is naturally available. So my suggestion to people, if they want to start meditating is notice ordinary things that you do where suddenly cognition quiets down. You find yourself relax and become present. So one thing could be looking at a sunset. Sometimes the horizon line, seeing the horizon line out in front of us will do that, where we just suddenly feel that expansiveness. Everything gets quiet and we're just appreciating the beauty in front of us. Some people experience that taking a long drive, they might be thinking for the first hour, 20 minutes, couple of hours, and then after that, suddenly they're just paying attention to the scenery and the road and there's a kind of a little bubble of happiness that comes up, a little sense that things are okay. You could start to notice that. You might notice it petting an animal, because we're not engaging cognition in any way, but we are making contact and we're exchanging and there is a back and forth going on. I sometimes will encourage people to notice what it's like to be with babies when you're with little ones, because you're not engaging that either. You might be doing it a little bit, but mostly you're not. And you can feel that whole bodied experience take over. And when that quiets and becomes even more deeply, we're literally touching our, what we call in Zen, our original nature.
- [20:25]
Dan Harris
Our original nature, which is pure awareness, unmediated by the ego.
- [20:31]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah. Or beingness, maybe.
- [20:33]
Dan Harris
I know so many people, including people who listen to the show, who are like, yeah, you talk about meditation all the time, but I'm not doing it. And for those people, it seems like you're saying there are lots of times in the normal course of your day where actually you are present, awake and aware. Tune into that and then maybe let that fuel the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 minutes a day that maybe you could do. Maybe that will boost your motivation to do it more formally.
- [21:06]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Exactly. So, for example, another one that often works for people is just that moment that you settle into the bath after a long day or the hot tub, and there's just that moment where suddenly you feel that relaxation come over you, extend that to five or 10 minutes. That's my practical advice.
- [21:26]
Dan Harris
That's great. And I would just add to that. You are going to experience distraction, at least most of us, when you slip into the bath, don't view that as the end of the meditation. It's actually that's. That is the meditation. You get distracted. You start thinking about something you should have said to your boss or whatever. Go back to the warmth and the relaxation. You start thinking about what's for dinner. Go back to the warmth and the relaxation. That is a huge part of the practice. Do you agree or disagree with that addition?
- [21:54]
Diane Musho Hamilton
No, not in the least, no. I always love the. The metaphor that our open awareness is like the sky and the thoughts are moving through like weather, so the sky's there. It's easy to just let go of the thoughts and notice the sky again, just like what you're saying. It's interesting because you might have this experience too, where people will often say to me, I really want to meditate. Oh, I should meditate. When you start with the assumption that you do already at times in moments, and it's just a matter of lengthening that, it just makes that uphill battle so much easier.
- [22:30]
Dan Harris
You're going to hear me start saying that publicly more frequently, and I may or may not give you any credit.
- [22:38]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I wouldn't want to burden you with giving me credit because believe me, I don't deserve any.
- [22:46]
Dan Harris
That's. I think it's a brilliant piece of advice. I haven't. I had not even heard that. Okay. Section number two is called Cultivating Emotional Maturity. This is where we get into the meditation is necessary but not sufficient part of the book, which is really where we're going to spend a lot of the remaining time. So what do you mean by emotional maturity?
- [23:08]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Well, the word maturity indicates growing up, not waking up. Maturity means that we move from a rather, let's call it immature or undeveloped experience of our emotions. I mean, if we think about it probably in groups, I'm in. Unless you were, you know, the child of psychotherapists. How to deal with feeling states is. I think they do better now, actually. It seems like their young children are learning how to work better with feelings. But for people that I work with, for the most part, they've never actually received any instruction on feeling. Right. So maturity is going from raw feeling and either avoiding feeling and not expressing it, or over identifying with feeling and then over expressing it and not really knowing how to capture what is inherent in feeling. An emotion which is life force and energy, which is a form of intelligence, and which is a lot of information. So it's important to be able to feel and really take in what it is the feeling states are giving us because they're more fundamental than our cognition, and they happen much more fastly. They communicate much more readily and quickly. And another thing they offer is tremendous connectedness, because when somebody in a group or in a room is feeling powerfully, everybody's attention moves to that feeling or that emotion. And I make a strong distinction between the two in my own work. So what emotional maturity is, is the practice, not unlike the rain practice that you describe in your book, that you learned at a Buddhist conference, but the ability to let the emotion in, to feel it, to be present to it, to notice the thinking mind, to notice what's happening in the body. And in the practice that I work with, Dan, it's slightly different, because there's a definite moment where you hit pause on the. And you move exclusively into the body. You really explore what the emotion and feeling states are in the body with cognition on pause, because what's happening is the story fuels the body and the bodily sensations, and the bodily sensations fuel the story. So if you hit pause on the story, you breathe and you feel, what happens is a certain kind of coherence enters into the. To the body and the mind. Then you'll find your thinking actually becomes more positive or more workable, you might say. One of my teachers said, everything is workable. You notice that your body and mind are more coherent. And so now I'm thinking in terms of what is it that I want to do? How do I want to handle this, as opposed to, why did that person do that to me, that sob, you know, whatever it happens to be. So that's the one thing that in the work that I do with emotions, the feedback loop between cognition and body is really powerful. So we learn how to stop it just to allow more coherence into the body and then bring the thinking back. So how to feel and how not to dwell and how to be able to communicate those feelings, those are all characteristics of emotional maturity.
- [26:13]
Dan Harris
I'd love to get you to describe that practice in more granular detail before I give you the space to do it. Let me just briefly. You mentioned this rain practice that I wrote about in 10 Happier, which was invented by Michelle McDonald and popularized by Tara Brock. And it's just an acronym, R Recognize A Allow. So recognize whatever you're feeling, A allow it to be there without fighting it. I investigate Mindfully, like. So use your mindfulness to see, like, how is anger showing up in my body right now? What kind of thoughts am I having? And N can either be non identification, not claiming whatever emotion you're feeling as yours somehow, or nurture, just hold whatever emotion you're experiencing with some degree of warmth. That's rain. What do you call your technique and what are the fundamental steps?
- [27:05]
Diane Musho Hamilton
It's an inelegant title. And I will credit Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, because this is where I learned that process is in the Tibetan tradition. I'm going to use a difficult experience I had during the pandemic when my son, who has down syndrome, developed voices, so he developed a form of psychosis during the pandemic. This was a very emotionally overwhelming experience for me because, as you can imagine, I felt terrified. And I also had a lot of feelings of powerlessness. It was during the pandemic, so it was very, very difficult to get appointments with psychiatric people or doctors or whomever. So the whole thing was, like, super intense for me. Basically, what happens is one of two things will happen. We'll find ourselves either being numb and not really being able to connect, because in that case, what we're doing is warding off the feeling. Or we find ourselves overwhelmed and overcome wanting to maybe cry, or who knows? Just that sensation of this is too much. So then what happens is that one makes the decision to work with the feeling. And again, it can be the zoning out, or it can be the overwhelm, one or the other. For me, at that time, because it was so strong, I would lie down. But you don't have to lie down. You can sit down. So you can do it in a meeting if you need to. And basically what happens is you give yourself permission to feel the whole thing, to experience everything, which is the thoughts, the feelings. And those are anything that we label with an emotional label. Anxiety in the solar plexus, clenching in the jaw is a sensation rather than a feeling description. You feel heat in your face. You're angry at the system. You're terrified of the future. You're overwhelmed and powerless to do anything. Then, after experiencing the wholeness, then you hit pause on the story, the story of the future, the story about how bad the system is, the story about how this shouldn't have happened if I had done this or that. You hit pause on all the thinking, and then you just let yourself literally move into the body and just feel. And it's not easy to do when we're not practiced at It. So you use the breath. You know your sensations are jumping around, they're somewhat chaotic. You notice your attention moving from your head to your solar plexus to your gut to your heart to your limbs. So you just use the breath and allow yourself to feel as fully as possible. And I encourage people to just identify in very simple language what the feelings are. Terror, anxiety, anger, hopelessness. And then a little bit of breath and just. I'm just going to feel. I'm not telling any story now. I'm just feeling. And then I can feel some coherence return so that I'm breathing and I'm feeling. And now my cognition is going to be more trustable. So now I hit play on my thinking mind. And what I notice is I'm doing the best job I know how. I need to be patient. Isn't it great that I've got two or three people who are helping me get an appointment? I can deal with this. I've dealt with difficult things. I can deal with this. You just notice that it shifts. We sometimes call that prajna or wisdom. Like there's a quality in which that quality of emotional maturity emerges. Instead of reacting in a way that makes me feel like a young child, I'm actually responding in a way that is commensurate with my experience and something I feel I can deal with. So you literally will watch the whole thing transform. And you can do it in small ways when you're talking with your spouse, and you can do it in big ways, like I did when I was overwhelmed.
- [31:00]
Dan Harris
And you call this process transmutation of emotion, Is that correct?
- [31:05]
Diane Musho Hamilton
That's what I mean. It's not the best title.
- [31:07]
Dan Harris
It's not bad.
- [31:08]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I like it. I've got a few books and there's a chapter on working with strong emotion and the books on transmutation.
- [31:16]
Dan Harris
Just to re emphasize something you said earlier. This is something you don't have to lie down for. You can be in a meeting and run through this quite quickly, which is where you say, I'm going to drop the story. I'm going to feel the feelings. I'm going to get pretty intimate with how they feel. And there's something magical, even mystical, about doing that because it does allow some wiser aspect of your cognition to come online. And then you can make a better move having done that rather than reacting blindly.
- [31:51]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah, that's right. It does link into the fight or flight system, just in the sense that there are so many things that happen if we've got cortisol and adrenaline dripping into the system, including that our cognition becomes quite untrustable when we're in a state of panic, of really high levels of defensiveness, Our cognition is not very trustable. Like, we lose access to memory. For example, we're unable to remember. Sometimes you can't even remember why. For in a certain. If we're in a defensive state with our spouse or our boss, we can't even recall that we like them.
- [32:25]
Dan Harris
Yeah. I mean, so often for me, it's just like you're making people enemies in your mind.
- [32:32]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah, exactly. In your mind. Absolutely. That's what happens. But what's cool. And I think this is the case because a brain scientist told me this in a workshop that I was doing. But when we remind ourselves that we can be for someone, even if we're not feeling like we like them, if we remind ourselves cognitively, we're literally creating new neural pathways in the brain. So the old part and the cognition are starting to work together a little bit. So that's kind of cool.
- [33:01]
Dan Harris
My teacher, Joseph Goldstein, has this expression that I like that feels apropos. Don't side with yourself.
- [33:07]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Great. I like that. Don't side with yourself. Side with everything.
- [33:17]
Dan Harris
Coming up, Diane Musho Hamilton talks about integrating shadow and psyche. We talk about some practical tools to help you see the difficult parts of your own personality and not be owned by them. And we talk about the point of having a purpose. She gives us one simple question that you can ask yourself. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Therapy can feel like a pretty big investment of time and money, but in my experience, it is definitely worth it. I say this as somebody who's had therapy on and off for several decades, including when I was a child and who is now part of a family where we spend a decent amount on therapy, but it is really worth it. It is incredibly helpful for me, for my relationships, for the people in my family and their mental health. You can look at this in terms of the raw numbers here. Traditional in person therapy can cost anywhere from 100 to 250 bucks a session, which definitely adds up quickly. But BetterHelp online therapy helps you save, on average, up to 50% per session. So with better help, you pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, saving you big on cost and time. Therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury. It really is kind of a human right. With online therapy, you get quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it. And now it's within reach. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, you can switch therapists anytime. Your well being is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com happier today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelphelp.com happier. What if I told you that right now millions of people are living with a debilitating condition that's so misunderstood, many of them don't even know that they have it. That condition is obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. I'm Dr. Patrick McGrath, the chief clinical officer of NOCD. And in the 25 years I've been treating OCD, I've met so many people who are suffering from the condition in silence, unaware of just what it was. OCD can create overwhelming anxiety and fear around what you value most, make you question your identity, beliefs and morals, and drive you to perform mentally and physically draining compulsions or rituals. Over my career, I've seen just how devastating OCD can be when it's left untreated. But help is available. That's where NOCD comes in. NOCD is the world's largest virtual therapy provider for obsessive compulsive disorder. Our licensed therapists are trained in exposure and response prevention therapy, a specialized treatment proven to be incredibly effective for OCD. So visit nocd.com to schedule a free 15 minute call with our team. That's nocd.com section three is on integrating shadow and psyche. What does that mean?
- [36:18]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Well, Ken Wilber, who as I told you, is a big influence of mine, and he probably is considered to be one of the founders of transpersonal psychology because he has been very interested in the role that spirituality plays in healing and the role that psychology plays in spirituality. So he's kind of created that. I mean, he's been involved as one of those people that gets those two dimensions speaking to each other. Well, shadow is really, I mean, a term that comes from Jungian psychology, from Carl Jung. And the way that Jung talked about it is anything that is left out of the light of awareness will likely be projected out into the world and seen out there, but never seen in my own psyche. And so shadow work has to do with bringing those things, those parts of ourselves that we don't want to see into the light. You know, the one that everybody's been working on for the last you know, for a while, depending on who you are, is racism, for example. I'm not racist. They are. And then that gets enacted and you just plain don't see it. You just can't see it because you can't hold it in the light of your own awareness. The way that Ken talks about it is anything that can't be held as I, anything that is not me is going to be projected and not owned. So he feels like the shadow work is really critical in terms of spiritual cross training. One of the tendencies I think, that spiritual practitioners have is we have a tendency towards idealization. We want a better life, we want a better experience. We know it's possible. And to admit that there are parts of ourselves that are kept in the dark that are maybe not the best parts of who we are. And there's a very particular technique for working with shadow that Ken promotes and that I, in my work at Integral Institute, we develop together. We call it the three two, one of shadow, which is, you start in the third person and you just complain about somebody and this quality in them that you don't like. And then in the second person, you make a relationship to that and say in a journal, you talk to that part that you don't like or you don't want. And then finally, in the first person you own, that is you too. Now, it may be that you have a very small amount of it, even having a tiny amount of something that you see in others and you don't like just finding that in yourself. It's almost alchemical, like you literally, it will change the way you relate to them. It doesn't mean that they're not still jerks. It doesn't mean that they're not doing things that you wish they weren't. But if you can find even a drop of it in yourself, it will change your relationship to how you deal with them. So shadow work is really important in spiritual cross training.
- [38:59]
Dan Harris
We're at a time, I'm not saying anything that isn't blazingly obvious, but we're at a time of immense polarization in the United States, but also many other parts of the world. And when I talk about having some sort of empathy or compassion or understanding vis a vis people on the quote, unquote, other side, I sometimes get quite a bit of pushback. Oh, well, the people on the other side are never trying to understand me, so why would I do that? Or if I do this, you know, it's making me vulnerable. This is not a time for compassion. This is a time for action. And so I'm curious, how do you respond when you recommend 3, 2, 1, perhaps in a political context, and people push back on you?
- [39:43]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I don't think that political action means that we have to hate on each other. I mean, I think we can take really strong political stands and use all the tools available to us as a person in the media, just all the different ways that we have. And we may have to develop some new ones because we're so polarized. But hating at the same time we're doing that is destructive to everybody. That's just a given. I mean, the best way to think about it is if you're dealing with a child who's really upset. You set limits and you create boundaries and you don't tolerate it, but you don't start hating on the child. You figure out how to do it. It's a bigger demand to figure out, how do you do it? How do you accomplish it without engendering hate? Because hate is just by its nature destructive. Now, can hate be liberated? If you can experience hate and allow it to be liberated, and then maybe that's the kind of sense of righteous justice, of putting a stop to things, but if you literally enact it on others, it just is going to lead to destruction. We know that. We've lived through that. And do I sound like Pollyanna when I say that?
- [40:50]
Dan Harris
No, not to me. I understand. There are people listening who say, well, this is not dealing with a child. This is dealing with somebody trying to hurt me, trying to enact policies that would hurt me. And I get that. And I just wonder whether the most effective fuel for dealing with it is going to be rage and hatred and anger, or if it's going to be compassion for yourself, for the people you're trying to protect, and even for the other person. And that compassion as it pertains to the other person is not condoning their behavior. It's not inviting them over for dinner. It's kind of in the spirit of this great story that Sharon Salzberg tells. The meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg was on my mind because I'm having dinner with her tonight. She tells a story about having been over in India in the 60s or 70s and learning about Buddhism for the first time and hearing all this talk about compassion and piping up to one of the teachers, what do I do if somebody tries to mug me out on the street when I leave here? And the teacher said, you very compassionately whack them with your umbrella. And the point is, you can be fueled by Compassion and still take the same tough actions that you would take if you were fueled by anger or hatred or rage. It's just you're likely to be more effective. Less burnt out, less toxicity in the system. So it's not a quietude or a passivity or a resignation. It's about what's most effective for you.
- [42:20]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah, that's right. You know, anybody who knows me knows that I'm a hothead.
- [42:25]
Dan Harris
Really? Yeah.
- [42:27]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Saying strong no's and setting limits and saying, don't you even. I'm all about that. I just think that. But once it settles into their wrong and bad and deserve to be treated poorly, then we're in a different territory. In my own life, it's just proved over and over again.
- [42:44]
Dan Harris
Yep, that's the seas of war. Just getting back to something you talked about, like transforming, liberating, something like anger.
- [42:54]
Diane Musho Hamilton
All the negative emotions can transmute. So anger transmutes to clarity and to empowerment. Right. Grief transmute to compassion because everybody has lost something they love. Right. Fear transmutes to life force. So when the ego is stripped out of it, when you're no longer coming from a self centered place, but you're coming from a place of using the energy of the emotion for the benefit of the whole, you can experience these emotions transform. And that's training that I received from Trunkpa Rinpoche.
- [43:23]
Dan Harris
Let's get back to the shadow for a second. This is. But I'm sure most people in the audience are like, well, don't get back. I don't want to talk. I don't want to think about this. And yet if you don't reckon with the darker, more difficult aspects of your personality, they're in there. They'll be just working on you outside of your consciousness.
- [43:43]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah.
- [43:43]
Dan Harris
So it's valuable work to do. And I said, I think it might be interesting to hear you describe a little bit more about how we could do it. One of the things I believe you recommend is journaling.
- [43:52]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Journaling's a good way to get it out so you can write it, see it, read it. Here's a simple example. In my relationship with my husband, we have some issues that correlate to gender stereotypes. I'm always kind of asking for more communication. And I don't think he's actually asking to be left alone, but sometimes it feels like that he's asking to be left alone. Do you mind? So sometimes it's a good practice for me to take a minute because the accusation is you're not communicating enough. We're not on the same page. We're not able to execute together. I need to hear more of what's happening. Might be nice for me to just take a moment and go, wait a minute. Okay, what are the ways that I have not communicated in the last 24 hours? And then go, oh, right, I do that too. Even though my habit and my self identity is that I'm the communicator and he's the more autonomous one. There are plenty of times that I don't communicate, but I just don't see that in myself because I'm so identified. And that's the whole idea of shadows that I'm identified as the communicator. So the non communicator goes into the background and I don't see it in myself. So just a simple exercise like that can be really helpful.
- [45:06]
Dan Harris
Any other recommendations practically for how we can see the shadow sides of our personality and thereby be less owned by them?
- [45:16]
Diane Musho Hamilton
One bit of advice that I think is helpful is that when you're in groups, you know, we all need to belong to groups of people who are interested in this kind of learning. And when we're in groups that are interested in this kind of learning and everybody's working on how to liberate ourselves in order to contribute, then if we're doing that together, then everybody's got shadow. Everybody's seeing it. It's not such a. You don't have this dreadful experience of having been exposed. There's that way in which we still don't want to be seen. So working in a group context can be really helpful. Working when you get feedback that you don't want to hear, that's an interesting moment to use it. So I'll give you an example. One time I was working in a mediation and a woman called me later and was upset with me, and she said, I don't know if I can keep working with you because you're flirting with my husband in the divorce mediation context. And so my first response was completely defensive. I mean, the defensive thoughts that went through my head, the first thought was, you're the one who married him. Why would I be flirting with him? You know, it was like that and then kind of getting mad at her for bringing it up. And then so I just had it. I had the wherewithal to say to myself, all right, what's right about what she's saying? What's right about it? And when I just took that moment to feel what's right about what she's saying, I realized that she was Right. But the way she was interpreting it and what I intended weren't the same. So I kind of offered her a reframe where I said, you know, I can see why it looks and feels that way to you. Do you want to hear how I'm thinking about it? And she said she was open. She said, yeah. And I said, I think it's because he gets very somber and heavy, and it's hard to work. It's hard to move to agreements, it's hard to get settlements. It's hard to negotiate. So I think what I'm doing is trying to be playful. I think what you're seeing is me trying to engage him in a way where he's feeling a little more playful and a little less like that just put her completely at ease. That was. The end of that was amazing. So taking an interest, looking for what's right about it, even if you can't buy the whole thing, Is there any piece of it that you can see that sometimes can be helpful?
- [47:33]
Dan Harris
I love that. When you get tough feedback, just developing the habit to say, what's right about this?
- [47:39]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Just what's right about it, even a little, doesn't have to be the whole thing.
- [47:43]
Dan Harris
And also, just to emphasize something you said before in passing, that if you're looking to do shadow work, it's helpful to be part of a community that's also doing it because it normalizes it. You feel way less dysfunctional. And there's a ton of data to show that if you're trying to make any change in your life, the. The carpool lane, the HOV lane is the way to go. Yeah, I think a lot about how to create that kind of community. That's a huge project of. Of mine. Okay. Section four.
- [48:14]
Diane Musho Hamilton
It's like you feel like, oh, no, I could. I don't want to do this practice. It's way too involved.
- [48:21]
Dan Harris
No, I mean, I get that a lot of people feel that about so many of the things we discuss on the show, you know, because we're, as our executive producer, DJ Kashmir, describes us, as relentlessly practical. We are constantly coming up with, talking to people about practices they can do in their life. And look, yeah, all of these things are a pain in the ass. They're time consuming. But, like, what's the alternative? You want to just keep on suffering? Suffering, yeah. So I just leave that to you, listener. Okay, so section four is living with purpose and presence. What do you mean by that?
- [48:57]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I kind of like to think of meaning and purpose together a little bit, and I Like to think of meaning as that which gives us an internal experience that helps us to give significance to our life and our experience. And it also helps us participate in the greater stories of being human, greater sets of values. And I like to think of purpose as more what we're doing on the exterior and the way in which we have direction and we're moving in a particular direction. So a lot of times, one of the. A lot of times when people come to spiritual practice, what is true is that they want to meditate and they want to open and discover more of who they are. But almost immediately, there will be challenges around how they're manifesting in the world and what they're doing in the world. And, well, that should occur. You know, that if I'm changing my life and suddenly I find that I'm in a job that I don't want to be in. For example, I have a young student who's here at the Zen center here in Salt Lake City. He works for a brewery, a local brewery, which he loves. He likes the people. He doesn't mind making the beer, but it just isn't supporting the direction he's wanting to move in his life. And so just giving yourself permission to care about your life being coherent. You know, in Zen we say there's realization and there's manifestation. Realization, manifestation. So I've realized that I belong. I've realized that there's goodness. Realize that beauty matters. I want to be able to manifest that. And so my purpose and the way in which I'm using my energies in my life should be something that's on the table. And I'm not an expert in helping people identify their life purpose. But I do see it come up so much in my students that we do have lots of conversations about it.
- [50:44]
Dan Harris
There's a statistic in the book about having a sense of purpose being associated with health benefits like lowered risk of heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer's. I just find that so fascinating.
- [50:57]
Diane Musho Hamilton
People who are clear about their purpose, they enjoy life can be very simple. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It can just be something that you enjoy and feel very coherent and congruent and that you're helping with the big picture.
- [51:09]
Dan Harris
How does one develop a sense of purpose?
- [51:14]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Well, I can tell you how I did, but I'm not sure. It has a little bit of a fairy tale kind of quality. And in purpose, in this way, what I'm talking about is kind of vocation. What is my life's work, and where do I put my Energy and what matters. I had gone to Naropa Institute when I was young. I think I was 23. And so I had three really good years of meditation training and then came back to Salt Lake City. I think I was 26 or 27 years old. And I'd been trained to do massage. I had done environmental work. I mean, I had different jobs where I earned a living, different kinds of things, but I hadn't landed on what would be a genuine vocation. Like what was I really going to put my life force and my energy into? And then when my son was born, he wasn't getting enough oxygen at this altitude, so we had to move to the coast. So we moved to Seattle for a year just so he could grow and get bigger. And I needed a job while I was there. But this question about what should I do? And I don't know how it happened, but I decided to change the question from what do I want? Because I'd gotten nowhere with that question. I changed it to what are people telling me? What am I hearing? And when I changed it, I promise you, three times in a row, people pointed out to me that I was really good at helping people who are fighting. Like there was a fight between my mother and my brother. And I kind of said, hey, here's what she's saying, here's what he's saying. You guys overlap way more than you know. And my mother was just so relieved that she thanked me. I was in a group setting where some people were trying to make a decision. I helped them make the decision. And then there was one other experience. There were three. That was kind of the fairytale part. And right after that, I just happened to walk by the Seattle Dispute Resolution center and they were advertising for a job on their staff at the Seattle Dispute Resolution Center. So when I saw that I hadn't even thought about being a mediator, it never crossed my mind. I'd never known a mediator. I didn't even know it was a thing. And then when I got that feedback and I was carefully listening, then suddenly I was like, okay. So I applied, got the job. When I moved back to Utah after my son's year was up, believe it or not, I was contacted by the judiciary, by the state court administrator. They were looking for someone to direct the mediation program for the state. So that just was a magical thing. But I think for me, it had everything to do with not being so self centered about what I wanted and actually being willing to listen to what was I being told.
- [53:48]
Dan Harris
Coming up, Diane talks About the importance of setting intentions and the value of patience. Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24,7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.
- [54:30]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Have you ever done a daily purpose check in? You're a purposive person.
- [54:33]
Dan Harris
The history of my contemplative career is that I encounter ideas, completely reject them, and then ultimately adopt them and pretend they were my idea in the first place. So that just happens over and over again. And so the idea of setting an intention always struck me as like new age psychobabble or whatever. And so I was not into that. But over time and doing 700 interviews on this show, I heard enough people who I respected mention it that now before I get out of bed and before I do many of my daily activities like meditation or exercise or going back to bed, I will just say I'm doing this to make myself stronger and happier so that I can make other people stronger and happier.
- [55:20]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Well, so I do do intention setting. And when I am doing mediation work or facilitative work, I'm bringing groups of people together. The first thing I do is ask them to identify what the intention of our being together is. Because the critical thing about intention is that when you're clear about it, it guides your attention. So, for example, I quit paying attention to what do I want and I started to paying attention to what am I being told, right? That intentionality of I can't arrive at this on my own, I need help, I've got to listen. So intention guides attention. And the clearer you are, the more your attention will know where to place itself or you'll know where to place it, depending on how you like to think about it.
- [56:06]
Dan Harris
I don't know that I could create a taxonomy where I describe the differences between intention, purpose and meaning. But. But I just find that stating my intention. Actually, I'll be honest about where I got this from. I got from Dr. Richie Davidson, the eminent neuroscientist, who's quite a dedicated Buddhist practitioner. And he just talked about like he just does it before he brushes his teeth. He just dedicates everything to the benefit of all beings. All day long, you know, we are so wired to be selfish, and that this is a great way to get your head out of your rear end on the regular. And I. I really have endeavored to integrate that into my life. And it's reminding me of my purpose. My purpose is to be useful. The Dalai Lama talks about wise selfishness. If you want to do selfishness correctly, you should be useful to other people, because that's what's going to make you happy. And so that's kind of my guiding principle.
- [57:01]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I like that in the Zen tradition, at different stages along the path, you take vows, if you will, or you receive the precepts, or you take vows. And I like to think of vows as an intention that's joined with the devotion of the heart.
- [57:17]
Dan Harris
An intention that is joined with the devotion of the heart. So it's not just cognitive?
- [57:22]
Diane Musho Hamilton
It's not just cognitive, no, it's heartfelt. And it requires your whole body and mind to inhabit and live that. Live that vow.
- [57:32]
Dan Harris
Is it true that within a Zen context, often these vows are taken in a group setting? I can imagine that supercharging it.
- [57:42]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah. It's very powerful. And, you know, when we do long retreats, of course, we recite the four vows at the end of the evening. Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Desires are inexhaustible. I vow to put an end to them. The dharmas are boundless. I vow to master them. The Buddha way is unsurpassable. I vow to attain it. End of the day, when the sun's gone down, you've been sitting together for a long time. It's beautiful.
- [58:30]
Dan Harris
Leads us to section number five, which is about ethical action and community.
- [58:36]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Sometimes I wonder right now where people receive their ethical training, because traditionally, a lot of our ethical training came from the religious traditions. If you're studying as a professional, of course you receive ethical training. Do no harm, you know, if you're a physician or if you're an attorney. But it seems like, along with civics, that ethical training seems like it kind of may have faded into the background a little bit. But ethics is really the agreements that we would make with each other in terms of how is it working, what are the rules of the road, how are we going to treat each other? So ethical training is a big part of, certainly of the Zen tradition. And in the work that I do, training mediators and facilitators, we also have a kind of ethical guidelines that we agree to in the course of the training. Like, the first one is to be for each other, because as I was saying earlier, you know, when we're triggered or upset, it's very hard to remember that we're for each other. So we practice that. We practice listening, we practice talking straight, giving really clear and congruent messages. We agree to develop an atmosphere of support and challenge because environments that are only safe actually will become heavy and kind of complacent if there isn't enough challenge in the system. That's how we learn, that's how we grow. So we need to be safe in order to relax, but we need to be challenged in order to be stimulated. So we've got to have both, but they have to be in right relationship to each other. We agree to offer more praise than usual because of our negativity bias. And we also agree to keep our agreements so that whatever the context is, to be able to establish kind of what the ethical agreements are. How is it we're going to treat each other in Zen, when you receive the precepts? There are 16 precepts that we do together. They're related to speech and action. And you know, again, just what, how is it that we're going to treat one another? But I do the same thing in other trainings because I feel like we've got to have a set of agreements so that we know, you know, so our intention is shared, I guess, just like what you were talking about.
- [60:41]
Dan Harris
You're right that I think ethics has a PR problem often because it can seem arbitrary, like a set of arbitrary rules that often serve the most powerful people or, you know, are based in like, like Bronze Age theology that may or may not have any grounding in truth. And, and so many of us rebel against ethics. But in the Buddhist context, ethics are actually another example of wise selfishness. It's like if you have these guard rails, you're less likely to spend a bunch of time in self laceration and shame and guilt because you're. What's that phrase? The Buddhist phrase? I like the bliss of blamelessness.
- [61:24]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Ah, that's nice. My son says, let's not play the.
- [61:27]
Dan Harris
Blame game in this last section. It's ethical action and community. So we've talked about ethical action here, but let's talk about community. And it's come up a couple times in this conversation. One question a lot of people have is, I don't even know where to start. I have friends, but they're not interested in this stuff. And so, like what? How do I build a community where this stuff is taken seriously?
- [61:52]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I would venture to begin by saying that there are many communities that we belong to. There's a lot of overlapping communities. So the community of our home, the community of two, if you have a partner or spouse. And it doesn't hurt to have certain kinds of ethical agreements in that container if you want a learning community where people are really working with their own minds and their own hearts. My biggest suggestion is just to experiment and try different kinds of practices out in different communities and see, you know, see if they. They're ones that work for you. I mean, the one thing I've learned being in spiritual communities is that it's a little bit of something that I teach about, which is that when we're. When we're meditating, we're cultivating the sameness, you might say, or the unitive experience of ourselves as the same, there's a tremendous amount of relaxation. Where we get in trouble is when differences arise. And that because we're kind of entrained to confuse conformity with unity, we don't know how to deal with our differences. But we evolve our nervous systems, get excited by differences and get excited by authenticity. And that's how we learn and change. So one of the things I'd be looking for is groups of people that know how to deal with conflict and know how to deal with difference. Because that's really when you get in trouble with groups. As long as everybody's agreeing and getting along, everything's fine. But the minute something arises that creates a disturbance or a little bit of turmoil or there's lack of agreement, even if it's in a book group, unless that group knows how to surface that distinction, be interested in it, maybe hear the opposite, and then integrate it as healthy, that is going to be a group that doesn't. I mean, conformity is the rule of the day. It may endure, but it will endure. Out of these rules around conforming. And then there's a lot of wanting to be able to be more authentic and not really knowing how to do that. For example, when I would teach sometimes at the law school or at the university, and I would ask people, what's your conflict style? Are you avoidant? Are you accommodating or fawning? Or are you. Are you a fighter? Always more than half, if not 60 or 70%, of people feel they're too accommodating. They'd like to be able to experience their differences more. But as soon as you express a difference, it can very quickly become a threat. And when it becomes a threat, we stop learning. We don't know how to engage. I'm very passionate about that particular skill set because it means that you can be the same and different. Conformance groups are only the same and don't allow for difference. If you only know how to deal with difference, you end up not having communities. But if you like sameness and you can deal with difference, that would be my test for the community I want to belong to.
- [64:46]
Dan Harris
That's really helpful. We've now marched through the five sections of the book. I have a few more questions on my side. But before I go there, are there any concluding thoughts you'd like to add about your latest work here?
- [65:02]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I think my concluding thoughts would be to not to be so overwhelmed by the different discussions and the different techniques and to really trust that with meditation as a basis and with the kind of curiosity and openness and capacity to learn that most of your listeners have, that you will be able to integrate and learn these things as the time is right. You know, it's not that you have to learn everything at once, but you'll suddenly, you'll take an interest in shadow work and you'll realize, wow, like there's something really that's getting freed up. Because I feel like I don't have to be. I don't have to idealize myself so much. I can have weaknesses or shortcomings and it's okay. Or I can expose my vulnerabilities or disclose my fears or my bad habits, whatever it happens to be. Again, it's one of the things Dan, in your book that I appreciated was just the raw honesty with how you experienced yourself. So please don't be overwhelmed. Just see it as a. You can learn these when the time is right for who you are and what's most important.
- [66:04]
Dan Harris
That's really helpful. So you've laid out a rather ambitious plan for cross training, spiritual cross training. And you're not saying we need to boil the ocean immediately. We should do this in our own time and let the benefits of whatever we've done fuel any future work.
- [66:22]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah, and just let your natural curiosity lead you, or your natural. Or the conflicts that you're dealing with or the challenges in your own psyche. What are the nature of those? Could be that you have really good ethical training. You don't need that right now. Or it could be that you're finding too many lapses that are creating difficult situations. So you want to learn that. So that would be the thing, is to see it as a kind of a lifetime curriculum and not something that you have to accomplish in a Short period of time.
- [66:49]
Dan Harris
Finally, you've mentioned before we started rolling that you had some thoughts on. You had listened to 10% happier the book before this conversation. You've talked a little bit about some of your reactions in the course of the conversation. But I do want to leave some space if you had more to say that you hadn't had a chance to get into yet.
- [67:07]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Having an experience where I decided to listen to it on tape, it's important to me when I have an experience to take a minute to really reflect on. Well, what do I feel like I received? And as I said to you before, I think the first thing I received is just your willingness to learn. You said it yourself that you get exposed to an idea or a possibility. You encountered some pain and some difficulty and you decided that you were going to really try to work on that. And then you might have a judgment about somebody and then you, next time you see them, something about that shifts and you let yourself shift and change. So the willingness to learn and the willingness to shift and be changed by your life and by your experience was one of the things that I really appreciated. The second thing I appreciated was your enthusiasm for the practice and not just your enthusiasm for yourself, but your genuine enthusiasm for others. I think I sometimes can be shy around sharing what I feel has benefited me because what do I know about you and I don't want to get in your world and your space, but the power of the vision, that this is really important for people to learn and to understand. I really felt very good about that. And then I thought the way you wrestled with the relationship between the contemplative life and that of a high powered media personality who's working in lots of different contexts and has to be on his A game, so to speak speak. And how do those things work together? In Zen, we'd say that was like a real koan. In the book, like how is it that I can realize and I can manifest and still bring a lot of energy, a lot of excitement and ambition to what I'm doing, but in a way that includes the whole that isn't exclusively about me. It's about the story, it's about the team, it's about the experience we're giving each other. It's about what I'm doing with my life force. And then I guess the last thing I would say is just, you're funny.
- [68:59]
Dan Harris
Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you very much. It does feel like another person wrote that book because it came out 11 years ago.
- [69:07]
Diane Musho Hamilton
It's been a long Time ago.
- [69:08]
Dan Harris
Yes. And this person needs to finish the sequel that's on my mind every day.
- [69:13]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah. Yeah. I did watch your most recent interview with Jay Shetty too. So I got checking out what you're thinking about these days.
- [69:21]
Dan Harris
Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Most. Most guests. I have many guests who come on who have no idea who I am. So that's a treat. So I appreciate it.
- [69:29]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Oh, I did watch your Panic Attack too. I watched some original things. I watched the Panic Attack and that was kind of interesting.
- [69:36]
Dan Harris
Yeah, panic attacks are usually interesting.
- [69:38]
Diane Musho Hamilton
I think it was cool that you're so open about it because honestly, I don't know that I would have known as a viewer.
- [69:43]
Dan Harris
Yeah, I think most viewers didn't know. I mean, I'll put a link to the Panic Attack in the show notes if anybody wants to watch watch it. Most years didn't. But my mom was watching and she knew and got me in to see a shrink right away. So that was helpful.
- [69:54]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Mom.
- [69:57]
Dan Harris
Before I let you go, can you please remind everybody of the name of your new book and any other books you've written that you want people to know about and any, frankly, any other resources you've created that you'd like people to know about.
- [70:08]
Diane Musho Hamilton
So the book that is being released this summer in June is called Waking up and Growing Up A Guide to Spiritual Cross Training for Evolving Times. And I have three other books. The first one is called Everything Is A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution. The second book is called the Zen of youf and Me. And it really explores this idea of sameness and difference and why our sameness is so good for us and why our differences are so essential and that we have to learn to work with them. And then the third book is called Compassionate Conversations. And it was written at the time that DEI was on the Ascendant. And I think that the healthy expression of DEI should always be on the Ascendant. I think the unhealthy expressions of it do need to go by the wayside. But so I'll stand behind that book. It's called Compassionate Conversations. And then I also have a website, dianemucho Hamilton and I train mediators and facilitators and do that every couple years. A seven month program. I invite people to have a look at that. It's called the Real Life Programs. And the website is Two Arrows Zen, Two Arrow Zen, which is in Salt Lake City and Utah. And also if you want to come and do a meditation retreat, we'd love to have you.
- [71:26]
Dan Harris
I'm going to put all of those links, including to the books, to two arrows to everything in the show notes. So if you don't have a pen handy, don't worry about it. It's all right there on your phone. Diane, it was a pleasure. Thank you for making time to do this.
- [71:41]
Diane Musho Hamilton
Yeah, it was a pleasure to meet you, Dan. Thank you so much for reaching out. I really appreciate it.
- [71:49]
Dan Harris
Thanks again to Diane. Built in. Don't forget to pre order her book. Also, if you want to hear more from her, you can go to the Waking up app wakingup.com 10% T E N P E R C E N As I mentioned earlier, I put a link in the show notes. And just a reminder, if you buy a subscription via that URL, you'll get 30 days free and you will be doing me and my team a solid because we will get a portion of any proceeds from the subscriptions that are generated through that link. And as I said earlier, if money's an issue, don't worry about it. You can go to the Waking up website and ask for a scholarship. That's the same policy I have over@danharris.com if you can't afford it, we'll hook you up. I've got a lot of cool stuff going on over@danharris.com you can get ad free versions of this podcast, live guided meditations with me, and more. And if you can't afford either my substack or the Waking up app, just make a request and we'll give it to you for free. Finally, let me just thank everybody who worked so hard on 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 Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote, our theme time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 247 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.