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

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: 10% Happier with Dan Harris
Episode: How To Use Psychology and Buddhism To Handle Your Inner Critic | Amita Schmidt
Date: January 7, 2026
Guest: Amita Schmidt (Buddhist meditation teacher, licensed psychotherapist, former IMS resident teacher)

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Overview

In this episode, host Dan Harris and guest Amita Schmidt explore how modern psychology—specifically Internal Family Systems (IFS)—and Buddhist meditation can be synthesized to work skillfully with the inner critic. Drawing from decades of experience as both a meditation teacher and therapist, Amita shares her personal journey overcoming trauma and depression, practical techniques for engaging with difficult mental habits, and pointers for accessing a deeper, saner self. The conversation moves from compassionate self-inquiry to spiritual insight, offering listeners a toolkit for greater inner freedom and self-acceptance.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Why Integrate Psychology and Spirituality?

[05:15]

• Amita explains that psychology in the West, especially post-Freud, became increasingly scientific, sidelining its spiritual roots.
• IFS, created by Dick Schwartz, reintroduces a spiritual component via the concept of the “Self” as an organizing, wise, compassionate presence.
• Healing, she asserts, is “a spectrum—it includes psychology and spirituality. People don’t really want to talk about that in psychology.”

Internal Family Systems (IFS) Explained

[06:39]

• Dick Schwartz developed IFS, which posits we have an "inner family" of subpersonalities or "parts."
• The central aim is "self-leadership"—allowing a "wise self" (or Self with a capital S) to guide our actions rather than being run by our parts.
• Amita: “If you do have this inner asshole voice, you can not be blended with it...the wise self can take over and drive the bus.”

Amita’s Personal Path: Trauma, Depression, and Insight

[09:40]

• Amita’s journey was compelled by deep suffering: “I had two mentally ill parents and one who committed suicide when I was a kid. So I was very drawn to finding the end of suffering.”
• She combines therapy and meditation: “For the last, like, 45 years, I've just combined both. It's been amazing.”
• Chronic depression ended after an experience of acceptance and surrender: “I just thought, if I have to live with this... it's okay. And I think there was just this moment of surrender and acceptance. And then about two months later... the whole thing just unhooked, the whole depression, almost like a pattern, it just undid itself and it never came back.” [12:34]

Notable Quote:

“Sometimes really deep insights are slightly embarrassing. I just felt like, what, 20 years I've been fighting and struggling... and there’s nothing there. It was like a caboose unhooked from the train.”
—Amita Schmidt [12:54]

Buddhist Emptiness and Mental Suffering

[14:13]

• Sharon Salzberg clarifies "emptiness" in Buddhist terms: Even seemingly solid experiences like depression have no single, unchanging essence—they’re just dynamic processes made up of "shifting constituent parts."
• Amita connects this with the possibility of freedom from suffering: “There’s nothing here. This isn't real. And that’s supposedly when mind fell away too...[depression] is a precursor for letting go of our addiction to the thought mind.” [15:20]

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Practical Tools for Working with the Inner Critic

The “Tend, Befriend, Transcend” Framework

[18:42]

• Tend & Befriend: Work gently with difficult internal parts (starting with understanding).
• Transcend: Move into a deeper mode of presence and awareness.

1. Understanding the Voice in the Head

[19:36]

• The inner critic is usually a protective part developed to keep us safe, albeit through harsh means.
• Internet and social media culture have amplified the intensity of inner critics by stoking constant comparison.
  • “The comparing mind just gets so amplified by internet culture and social media...a whole new wave I saw in therapy.” [20:17]

2. Befriending the Inner Critic

[21:05]

• Don’t meet the critic with another oppositional part—instead, invite a “wise self” (the calm mediator) to talk to it.
• Often, under scrutiny, critical parts have a protective or even caring intent.

How to Dialog with the Critic:

• Ask, “Why are you criticizing me? What are you afraid would happen if you didn’t?”
• Use the “8 Cs” of wise self: Curiosity, compassion, calm, connectedness, courage, creativity, confidence, clarity. [25:36]
• Example dialogue:

  “If I didn’t criticize Dan, then he might mess up or he’ll be caught unaware. So often then when you find out what that part’s afraid of, then you address that fear.” —Amita [24:00]

3. Accessing the Wise Self

[26:37]

• Many struggle to access the wise self (“self energy”). Amita often works to open this capacity first.
• Techniques:
  • Visualize "big sky mind" — making your mind as wide as the sky/full of stars.
  • Ask yourself, “Is my wise self here now?” Or, “What would my eighty-year-old self say?”
  • Use self-compassion: Speak to yourself as you would to a friend, but beware of advice-giving, which can itself be a “part.”

Shifting from Psychology to Spirituality

[35:07]

• Before “transcending,” bring compassion and acceptance to your inner pain—don’t “spiritually bypass.”
  • “You have to bring compassion and inner generosity and kindness to the places we might have some pain...Not just like, hey, let's go to emptiness, or let's go to awakening.” —Amita [35:07]
• Sharon: “We need to start by calming the system by bringing love to the obnoxious parts...then move to a spiritual transcendent lens.”

What is Awareness?

[39:31]

• A core spiritual skill is recognizing awareness itself—the “knowing faculty of the mind.”
• Amita uses metaphors: the “blank canvas” or “movie screen” underlying all mental content.
• Awareness itself, unlike thoughts or self-critical voices, is always silent, spacious, and unchanging.

Notable Quote:

“Your awareness itself is never an asshole. Pure awareness, it doesn’t even have any thoughts...awareness is almost like just the pure canvas it all happens on.” —Amita [42:51]

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Simple Techniques and Pointers

1. Labeling (Mindful Naming)

[47:08]

• When the inner critic appears, mentally note it “inner critic” or give it a playful name.
• Research (Lieberman, UCLA, 2007) shows labeling moves emotional processing from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, making it easier to handle.
  • “The minute you label, you’re like up on the bridge looking down at it, going, oh, there’s the inner critic.” [47:08]
• Useful in daily life, not just meditation.

2. Reframing the Critic

• Recognize that critical thoughts may echo cultural or systemic narratives—not “your” authentic voice (Sonya Renee Taylor’s “voice of the system”). [49:56]
• Imagine the critic as Siri or an AI chatbot: “Hey Dan, you look like crap.” When viewed impersonally, it’s easier to dismiss.

3. Spaciousness / The Airplane Hangar Analogy

[51:56]

• Expanding your sense of inner space diminishes the impact of upsetting thoughts.
  • “If you’re in a really small room...you have this big couch of the inner critic and a big easy chair of your anxiety part...But we put them in a big airplane hangar...how often are you going to run into them? ...It’s just no big deal.” —Amita

4. Acceptance and Surrender

[56:48]

• Fighting your inner critic strengthens it; softening and accepting helps it let go.
  • “Acceptance is kind of like a softening of all our parts so that we can just relax into what is the truth.” [56:48]

5. Directly Sensing Aware Presence

[58:47]

• Just notice: “I’m here now.”
• Before any mental noise arises, tap into simple, effortless being—“aware presence.”
• When the critic comes up, you can meet it from this place of awareness, which is larger and more stable than any thought or feeling.

Two Healthy Options When the Inner Critic Arises

[61:51]

• Greet it with love/compassion (befriend it, inquire: “what are you afraid of?”)
• Or, recognize its emptiness—see it as a fleeting process, not a solid “truth.”

  “It may seem solid, but actually...it’s just this little quantum burst of energy in the mind. It is, as Joseph [Goldstein] says of thoughts, little more than nothing. And when you view it in that light, it just kind of self-liberates.” —Dan [62:00]

Metaphor:

“That inner critic—it’s like one person in an empty stadium with a microphone...the stadium’s just this huge empty space of you, Dan, right? But this one dude, he’s got a microphone...So I like to think of both of these practices, like taking away the microphone.” —Amita [64:30]

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Key Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Healing is really a spectrum. It includes psychology and spirituality.” —Amita [06:00]
• “I had severe depression from age five onward...In my 40s, the chronic depression absolutely fell away. And for 20 years, it’s never returned. So it’s really possible to heal.” —Amita [10:40]
• “It’s all Dharma now, Dan. Everything is Dharma now.” —Amita [17:34]
• “Your awareness itself is never an asshole.” —Amita [42:51]
• “Acceptance is kind of like a softening of all our parts...when you make that vow in that frame of mind, that really can transform things.” —Amita [56:48]

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End Game: What’s Possible?

[65:21]

• How far you go with these tools is up to you. At the "end of the game," freedom is possible: “The end game...is truth, love, peace, joy—100%.”
• You can use these tools just to manage difficult moments, or embark on a path to deeper realization.

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Resources Recommended

• Amita’s Dharma talks: Dharma Seed
• Insight Timer app (Amita's guided meditations)
• Book: Deepama: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master by Amita Schmidt

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [05:15] — Importance of integrating psychology & spirituality
• [06:39] — Explanation of Internal Family Systems (IFS)
• [09:40] — Amita’s background and personal journey
• [12:54] — Turning point: insight and the end of depression
• [19:36] — Tend, befriend, and the psychology of the inner critic
• [25:36] — The “8 Cs” and dialoguing with parts
• [35:07] — Transition from psychological healing to spiritual insight
• [42:51] — Awareness as the “canvas” beneath the mental movie
• [47:08] — Labeling as a strategy for distancing from the critic
• [51:56] — Creating inner spaciousness: the airplane hangar analogy
• [56:48] — The power of acceptance and surrender
• [58:47] — Direct experience of aware presence

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Tone & Final Thoughts

The conversation is warm, practical, and relatable, with both hosts and guest sharing personal anecdotes and down-to-earth advice. Amita’s journey offers hope for those struggling with deep suffering, and the integration of Buddhist wisdom and psychological techniques makes the path accessible. Sharon and Dan keep the tone friendly and inquisitive throughout, continually translating complex concepts (like emptiness or pure awareness) into everyday language.

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Summary prepared for listeners who want both practical methods and a deeper understanding of how to relate to their inner critic in a wiser, more compassionate way, drawing equally on the insights of modern therapy and ancient wisdom.

Transcript

[Amita Schmidt]

Foreign.

[Dan Harris]

This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today?

[Dan Harris]

On this episode, we're talking about how to harness two incredibly powerful modalities to.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Deal with your inner critic, or frankly, to deal with any difficult part of your personality.

[Dan Harris]

My guest has been working for years in both psychotherapy and in Buddhism, and she very skillfully blends these two disciplines. Specifically, she combines Buddhist meditation with a kind of therapy called internal Family systems, or ifs. It was invented by a man named.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Dick Schwartz, who's been a guest on.

[Dan Harris]

The show a couple times. The basic idea of IFS is that we all have an inner cast of characters in ifs.

[Sharon Salzberg]

They're called parts.

[Dan Harris]

And there are ways to identify and work with these various parts, including your inner critic, so that you're not owned by your parts all of the time. My guest today is Amita Schmidt.

[Sharon Salzberg]

She's been working for decades as both.

[Dan Harris]

A Buddhist meditation teacher. In fact, she was a resident teacher at the legendary Insight Meditation Society for years. And and also as a licensed psychotherapist. In this conversation, you'll hear us talk about how psychology and Buddhist meditation can work together. The basics of internal family system, her own personal path through trauma, depression. And then a pivotal insight that changed everything. Why states like depression are not as solid as they may feel. How to work with your inner critic. Simple ways to access the sanest and wisest version of yourself. The shift from psychological healing to spiritual insight. The value of acceptance and surrender. Simple pointers for sensing what's called aware presence beneath all of your mental noise and much more. Don't forget to download my new app, 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign [e-mail] there's a free 30 day trial if you want to try before you buy. Right now we're running a seven day New Year's Meditation challenge with Joseph Goldstein, and It started on January 5th. But it's not too late to join again. You can sign [e-mail] we'll get started with Amita Schmidt right after this. The best B2B marketing often gets wasted on the wrong people. I can't tell you how often I'm scrolling and I get served ads for stuff I have no interest in. So when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over a billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role Seniority, skills, company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. It's why LinkedIn Ads generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of all major ad networks. Seriously, all of them. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com happier that's LinkedIn.com happier. Terms and conditions apply. I have to admit, one growing source.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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[Dan Harris]

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[Sharon Salzberg]

Amita Schmidt, welcome to the show.

[Amita Schmidt]

Thanks for having me, Dan.

[Sharon Salzberg]

It's a pleasure. Okay, so the core idea we're going to explore today is kind of the melding of or the integration of psychology and spirituality.

[Dan Harris]

Can you say a little bit about.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Why this is so important in your work?

[Amita Schmidt]

Well, I think during the time of when Freud came into psychology, he was really making an emphasis on having it be more scientific. And then you got pharmaceutical companies that came in later that wanted to make it scientific as well for diagnostic codes. So psychology got a bit neutered from its spiritual basis. Although of course Carl Jung still had some of that. So it's really nice that Dick Schwartz kind of brought that back in in a stealth sort of way via the Self and the concept of self, almost like having a spiritual component. So you really got, especially with Skinner. And a lot of the psychological tools were very scientific. And I think healing is really a spectrum. It includes psychology and spirituality. Although people don't really want to do that. They don't want to talk about that in psychology.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Bunch of questions for you. You mentioned Dick Schwartz and IFS and this notion of the self, capital S. Self. We have covered this on the show before and I'll put links in the show notes to our previous episodes on this. But given that many listeners may be.

[Dan Harris]

New or didn't hear those episodes or.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Don'T remember them, can you just describe who Dick Schwartz is, what IFS is, and what the role of the self is in that therapeutic modality?

[Amita Schmidt]

Sure. Dick Schwartz is the founder of ifs, or Internal Family Systems Therapy, which believes that you kind of have like an inner family you can work with. IFS is based on what's called self leadership, which the idea, instead of just having a bunch of parts inside, like the movie Inside out, it's to be led with something that's wiser and is different than all the parts. Kind of like I call it wise self. It's the sense that there's something else that is bigger and greater, almost like awareness itself, that can lead your part. So if you do have this inner asshole voice, you can not be blended with it and your wise self can take over and drive the bus. It's really about who's driving the bus. And you know, when you're. You have a bunch of parts here. You have a bunch of, you know, we often talk about, I have a part of me that feels this way. I have a part of me that feels that way. You know, a harsh critic. We don't want those driving the bus. So the wise self in IFS or Internal Family Systems, you're having the wise self drive the bus as much as possible. The other parts can inform the wise self. You know, your little kid could say, hey, I'm going to stop for ice cream, or I don't like this person, or I want to do that. But the wise self is the one driving and makes the decisions. And really the goal of IFS is to have self leadership, that wise self leading or driving the bus most of the time.

[Sharon Salzberg]

You mentioned awareness. We'll get to awareness later. That's a confusing term for some people, but sticking with IFS specifically and just to state it back to you, basically, Internal Family Systems and its progenitor, Dick Schwartz, hold that. Much like in the movie Inside Out, I assume most people have seen that movie. It's really good. And there's also a sequel that's really good. It's about the inner life of a young girl, and she's got an angry part and a joyous part and a fearful part. And that, I think is, you know, if we examine our own life experience, we may find that to be true for us. And Dick Schwartz goes further to say that there's this kind of capital S self, which, as you said, is the. The best, wisest part of ourself, which hopefully, through the practice of ifs and through meditation, both of which we're going to talk about today, we can learn to hand the reins, to give the steering wheel to the self. How am I doing?

[Amita Schmidt]

Yes. Great reframe.

[Dan Harris]

So for you personally, like, how did.

[Sharon Salzberg]

You come to this blending of psychology and the dharma or spirituality? Many people who have the training you do in the meditation world, in the Buddhist world, kind of just stick with the dharma. But you are going all in on this integration. Why?

[Amita Schmidt]

Well, I didn't have any choice. I had a lot of suffering. I had two mentally ill parents and one who committed suicide when I was a kid. So I was very drawn to finding the end of suffering, you know, and the Buddha talked about that. So I. When I read Siddhartha, I thought, oh, somebody can find the end of this suffering. And then at the same time, I was very drawn to helping others. In my senior year of college, we did a mental health family therapy program in rural Iowa. So I really saw the value of social work and therapy. So for the last, like, 45 years, I've just combined both. It's been amazing. And they just both kind of walked hand in hand. For me, I guess it was just because I wanted to try every tool I could to be free from suffering. I had very severe depression from age five onward. I had suicidal thoughts at age five.

[Dan Harris]

Wow.

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

So I did at a point about 20 years in, after 20 years of therapy, I did like five three month retreats, silent three month retreats. And one point I was like, should I just keep going? I mean, is this even going to work after 20 years? You're like, you're looking at your watch going, when is the depression going to end? And because I'd been trying so hard and you know what happened? I think Dan was. There was a moment I was on a retreat actually where I was like, when is this going to end? And I've done everything And I worked 100%, you know, with three month retreats and doing my own therapy twice a week for 10 years. And then I just thought, you know, if I have to live with this the rest of my life, it's okay. And I think there was just this moment of surrender and acceptance. And then about two months later, there was just an insight where the whole thing just unhooked, the whole depression, almost like a pattern, it just undid itself and it never came back. And I know it's not that easy for everyone, but it was. I wouldn't have ever imagined that. Yeah.

[Sharon Salzberg]

When you say there was an insight we're at all unhooked, do you mean some sort of a key insight moment in meditations or maybe even an enlightenment experience?

[Amita Schmidt]

It was more. I just saw clearly. I wouldn't say an enlightenment experience, but I saw clearly that the depression itself that I'd struggled and fought with for 25 years or 20 years was empty. They always say that sometimes really deep insights are slightly embarrassing. I just felt like, what, 20 years I've been fighting and struggling with singing and there's nothing there. It was like a caboose unhooked from the train. And it was just a moment where I saw this unhooking and I just saw. I've been struggling and there's nothing there. Kind of like they talk about the five aggregates in Buddhism, like, don't ask me to tell them what they are, but, you know, intention, body, mind. It was like the Big Dipper. It was like, you know how you see the Big Dipper? And you know, you look up there and you see those, what, it's seven stars this time. I just looked up in there and there weren't depression, there weren't the Big Dipper, there was just seven stars. And I saw depression was just energy, low energy, negative Thinking a couple other things. There wasn't anything called depression that I'd been fighting. The whole thing, the coagulation of it all and the struggle with it all just fell away.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Just a note to the listener. Amita used the word empty, which is a Buddhist term of art. But she then went on to explain it, which means that it's her depression. Your depression, your anxiety, and everything we're experiencing, which feels so monolithic, so personally monogrammed, so like non negotiable, actually is empty of inherent substance. There is no thing you can put your finger on and call it depression. It's just a made up of these constantly shifting constituent parts. The same as, and this is a metaphor Joseph Goldstein, who has worked with both of us, often uses. It's like you look at the Big Dipper in the sky and seems like, yeah, that's a Big Dipper, but actually it's just seven stars, all of which of course are made up of their own shifting component parts, all each of those stars. So there is no solid Big Dipper and there's no solid depression. And that's a massive insight that can be hard won and kind of has to be molecular in order to for many of us, be super liberating or kind of unhooking. The way the caboose unhooks from the rest of the train.

[Dan Harris]

Would that be an accurate reflection of.

[Sharon Salzberg]

What you just said?

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, I mean, that's what it was for me. Remember, this is a journey of love and awakening and higher versions of truth and love and being who you are. So it's not like time lost. It's not like that was my journey. And it was my path, my spiritual path. And it was my psychological path. And it was fine. It wasn't like I thought I should have been doing something else. It's a divine path. So, yeah. The key is to not think there's something else. I remember early on when I was at the retreat center, I kept thinking, well, if only I didn't have trauma, I could progress further in insight. And then I realized, no, the trauma is part of my journey on the spiritual path. So it's important. I think, with anybody that's working with difficult emotions or trauma you don't think that's a separate path from your spiritual journey. They're the same thing.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

Oh yeah. I mean, I've been doing therapy, acting as a therapist for about 35 years. And so I'm pre Internet culture and man minute Facebook and social media people started coming into the therapy room and they were just more depressed and more self hatred because the comparing mind just gets so amplified by the Internet culture and social media. That was like a whole new wave I saw in therapy of dealing with kind of the fake news of people's social feeds. And then people were comparing themselves to that and it just created a whole disparaging voice inside for people that I hadn't seen before.

[Sharon Salzberg]

So how do we befriend this voice, which is so, so obnoxious, you don't.

[Amita Schmidt]

Want to meet it with another part. Often when we have an inner critic, there's several parts going on. We often have another part saying that voice needs to shut up now. And then you have a third part almost running between the two. Like this is often a civil war inside inner critic. It just doesn't is not a standalone. So you really have to bring this wise self to this inner critic and kind of find out first of all what it's trained to do, why it came online, what its job is. You remember, parts are not what their job is. Just because it's criticizing you doesn't mean that this is a mean part. It has a job to criticize you. And actually, it's kind of fascinating. You discover as an IFS therapist that actually a lot of parts are the opposite of the job they do. Sometimes when you can really talk to the inner critic, you find actually that it's being mean, but it's actually kind of a kind and caring part underneath it all. And that takes a lot of work to get to that. But it's fascinating to me that parts are the opposite of the job they do. So like I said a minute ago, you have a polarization. When you have the critic, you have another part saying, I don't like, like the critic. It needs to stop now. And then you have a third part that's not actually wise self that's trying to navigate between these two kids. They're like kids fighting each other. You know, Dan, you have kids, and you can't let them fight it out. So wise self is like this third thing that comes in. It kind of says, okay, you both have a piece of the truth, and I'm going to decide what happens next for Dan or Amita. And it makes the decision like a wise CEO or a wise parent when kids are fighting.

[Sharon Salzberg]

You said a couple of things in there that I'm curious to get to the how of. You said one thing about, you know, when you talk to your inner critic, it may reveal itself. He or she may reveal him or herself eventually to be a protector. And then the other thing you said is, you know, bringing the wise self to bear is, you know, to break up the fight among the parts is really, really the move.

[Dan Harris]

So I'm curious, like, how do we.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Do each of these again, just to restate them? One, how do we learn how to talk to our inner critic? And how do we access the wise self and bring it to bear?

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, well, one key is to realize that wise self doesn't have an agenda. You know, if you have an agenda to make that part stop, then you're in that other part, the virtuous one. So you have to really, you know, we talk about the eight C's of wise self. I think you've probably talked about that on the show. That's one way to bring that online and to make sure you're talking from that versus another part. But you really want to bring compassion to this part. And Curiosity. These are two of the eight Cs. I use those the most. Compassion and curiosity and calmness. You really want to listen. Hey, why are you doing that? Why are you criticizing me? What's that about? Could you tell me More about that. What are you afraid of? This is a key question Dan to ask. Apart is what. What are you afraid would happen if you didn't criticize me? Well, if I didn't criticize Dan, then he might mess up or he'll be caught unaware. So often then when you find out what that part's afraid of, then you address that fear, which is usually another part. You know, I don't want him to look dumb or I don't want him to make a mistake. Then you can talk with that part that's afraid of making mistakes and help that one calm down. So in a way that you always want to be doing this, though, with this wise self. And it's curious, calm, creative, connected. It listens. It's kind of like a good listener, like you. It reflects back. It's not trying to like shake this part to get it to change. And most people are subtly blended with a part that's trying to get the critic to go away. I think I was doing that with the depression my whole life. You gotta go away. Come on. Why aren't you going away? Right? And of course, then that purchase digs in deeper when you do that.

[Sharon Salzberg]

So you know, you're in the wise self when you're kind of inhabiting some of the, what you call the eight C's. I'll list them. Curiosity, compassion, calm, connectedness, courage, creativity, confidence, clarity. But I do want to push you a little bit. I love, by the way, you know, asking the question, you know, what are you afraid of? That's. That seems really fruitful. And just to say in ifs therapy, when you're working with a therapist, like, the therapist will actually have you do this dialogue out loud between the wise self and the part I've done this with Dick Schwartz, you know, live here on the show. So like I said, we'll drop links in the show notes. If you want to hear me kind of awkwardly go through this, you can, but this is also something you can do on your own. But I do want to go back to the question, like how, if somebody's new to all of this, how can you be somewhat confident you have some access to this elevated part of yourself that's characterized by the aforementioned eight Cs. How can you get there?

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of people, unfortunately, I notice, have very little access to self. Wise self. And that's part of the problem. Sometimes I'll come in therapy, I talked to some really high up guy and all these corporate things, and I said, how Much self do you think you have? He goes, 20%. I go, dude, that's not enough. Like, at least he was honest and he could see he only had like access to 20% and all these parts running around. No wonder it was hard for him and most people. Dan, I would say it's like 20, 30%. So I do a lot with trying to just build self energy before we even do much with parts because people just don't have access to it. Fortunately, meditation, I think, can build a lot of self energy too. But one of the ways I help people do is like, like that big sky mine that Jack Kornfield does or Joseph talks about. Joseph Goldstein talks about it too. Make your mind and heart as wide as the sky. You know, just that opening up. Because when we're trying to problem solve a part, often we get really collapsed. And so you want to open up. And in the Hawaiian tradition, they have something called kahi, which means make your mind and heart like the night sky full of stars. So it's trying to approach that part with that. But yeah, it's tricky how to teach people to have that wise self when they don't have access to it. They're just blended from one part to another to another, right?

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, I mean, some other tools are just ask, you know, is my wise self here now? I'll have people even envision like their self like 20 years from now. So if you were to think about like maybe a 70 or 80 year old you, how would he be with this? Sometimes I'll say, what would the Buddha do? You know, just trying to get some wise elder online. You know, we're not taught this in our culture. We're not taught how to access a wise elder. We don't even have a lot of wise elders in our family often. So it's how to get a wise presence online. So, you know, I bring up the Buddha as an idea. I bring up my wise older self. I don't really think parts are linear in time. So I think I do this a lot. I go to an older version of you, and people are almost always surprised. I'll say, well, what would your 80 year old, how does he look? How does he feel like? And if you checked in, Dan, you have an 80 year old that's like really mean and critical to you. Probably not. He's probably like been through that. He's just chill. And you can bring like him online too to help, like kind of strengthen that sense of wise self. That's your, your wise elder to come.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Dan Harris]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, I think that it's super important that you know we're all carrying some kind of pain or tension that before you look at transcendence, you have to relax your parts and your pain and tension, you have to look at where does it hurt? You know, you have to bring compassion and inner generosity and kindness to the places we might have some pain. Not just like, hey, let's go to emptiness, or let's go to awakening. It's so important that we look at the areas where we're carrying pain because we're all carrying some kind of pain often. So you're using this tendon befriend and working with parts or just bringing inner love to your system through psychology to help calm the system down and create safety for your body and mind. And then you can start looking at more the transcendent principles. If you didn't really do that first, it would be a bit of a spiritual bypass. It's important that you kind of do both.

[Sharon Salzberg]

This is where the word self gets a little tricky because we're using it. Or at least the way I'm thinking about this discussion is in my mind, I'm using the word self in a bunch of different ways. So there's the self as it's used in ifs, where they. You're calling it the wise self, or Richard has, you know, capitalizes the self. There's the way we talk about the self in normal conversation where it's just like referring to ourselves. Self, compassion, self love, self loathing, whatever, it's all referring back to this individual. And then there's self transcendence. This is where we move from the psychological to the spiritual, where you actually start to see that this reference point of a fixed and separate eye is when you pay attention in the right way, revealed to be an illusion. And this can be very healing. It can make all of your stuff less personal, less monolithic, more tractable, more workable. And I think what you were just saying right there is we need to start on the. The level of reality that is easily comprehensible to most of us. You know, the sort of psychological level that most of us sort of innately understand. We need to start by calming the system by bringing love to the obnoxious parts of our inner repertoire. And once we've done that, we can move into this sort of advanced level where we're looking at it through a spiritual transcendent lens, where we're starting to tap into this somewhat esoteric truth that the self is an illusion after all.

[Amita Schmidt]

Yes, well put.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Thank you. I always like the gold star.

[Amita Schmidt]

You do so well, at reframing.

[Sharon Salzberg]

This, my whole life is all I do is I talk to people like you and make sure that the people listening truly get it. It's like some sort of intermediary.

[Dan Harris]

So is there more to say about.

[Sharon Salzberg]

This movement from psychology to spirituality before we move into, like, transcending and how it's done?

[Amita Schmidt]

Well, I would say the overarching piece is really just knowing who you are. So often, you know, there's these blocks or pain points in our psychology, so we're kind of undoing those. And then spirituality is more going even deeper. Well, maybe we're not even this identity of self. It's this developing more flow and connection with the truth of who you are. You know, you're not the pain body. You're not your trauma pain body. But then you might be willing to. Not everybody wants to do this, but you might be willing to go further and say, well, gosh, am I even the ego self? What am I? It's not a question many people ask, but we probably should be asking it because the body and mind's going to go and what's still going to be here? I work with a lot of people that are nearing death in their 70s and 80s, and they really want to know this question. When my body mind goes, what's still going to be here? And of course, whatever that is is here now.

[Sharon Salzberg]

How do you answer that question?

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

Oh, yeah, I love those.

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah. And you could call that maybe pure awareness, like what animates our bodies, what's breathing your lungs right now, what's beating your heart, what's growing your hair? Those could be pure technical things, you know, Right. Cells. But what is animating the trees and you and me, what's making all this happen? The whole thing is like a giant air puppet. What's doing all that? You know, maybe that takes you to a more numinous presence. But I call it pure awareness. Because often, Dan, what we do is we identify my aware, Stan's awareness or Amita's awareness, and then we personalize it in an egoistic way. But I think there's something called the awareness that kind of is animating all things all at once. You know, whatever's breathing you and me right now is breathing everybody across the globe and breathing animals and the whales in the ocean. It's breathing everything at the same time. Like, what is that?

[Sharon Salzberg]

So. But I say this in a good way. This conversation is now veered into the weird in a. In a pre. And I love it. I'm here for it.

[Dan Harris]

But let me ask a sort of.

[Sharon Salzberg]

A grounding question, which is this notion of awareness. How is any of this relevant to the stuff we started talking about, which was the easily comprehensible, although painful reality of the fact that most of us have an inner hectoring voice. Voice who's kind of a dick, and we want to, you know, not be so owned by that voice anymore. So this awareness piece that we're talking about now, how is that relevant to where we began?

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, because ultimately, the inner voice you're working with, like, what's on the canvas? And, oh, the inner voice is mean, a heckler. But we're now we're looking at the canvas itself, the blank canvas. You know, your awareness itself is never an asshole. Pure awareness, it doesn't even have any thoughts. Might seem like it does, but if you look more carefully, awareness is almost like just the pure canvas. It all happens on the movie of you or the blank screen. You know, Ramana Maharshi used to talk about, you're this empty movie screen that then the movie gets played on. So we can change the movie and get better characters in your movie, you know, the inner heckler. But we can also look at, well, what's here that is the screen of it all. And that just takes you deeper because then none of these things apply when you're just that pure awareness. Dan, where's the heckler? No place. But what is still there? Maybe it's just presence. You know, some people might call this soul, which probably is a terrible word for your podcast, but it's kind of where you're free of all these components. So think of it like layers. You know, you're. You're solving the places where your psychology's kind of mucked up because you got some mean parts in there. And then you go down deeper, and you're just maybe kind of this loving kindness, but then you go down deeper, and maybe it's just. I don't want to say emptiness, but it's just something more universal there. Right. That's not about our movie. Maybe it's a universal movie we're looking at. I don't know if that answers your question, but we're moving away from fixing our movie to more like, what is happening here. Yeah.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Dan Harris]

You can easily break it down to.

[Sharon Salzberg]

24 frames per second.

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah.

[Sharon Salzberg]

And then we move away from like. So it's important to start with offering love to your parts. But what you can do on an even deeper level is put the whole movie through a cheese grater where it's like, yeah, none of this. I don't need to take this as seriously as I've been taking it.

[Dan Harris]

It's kind of like what you said.

[Sharon Salzberg]

At the very beginning of this conversation. My depression is empty. As soon as I see that my depression is as solid as a movie that's playing on a screen, then the caboose unhooks from the train.

[Amita Schmidt]

Right. So think of it this way. You know, it's almost like that voice talking. Whether it's saying good things or bad things to you or about you, but then you're here. You're just here. Right? And we often think, you know, we get involved with two voices talking, but there aren't two minds. There's the voice, the mind that da, da, da, da, da. I should do this. You shouldn't. Do that. But what is just here, no matter what voice is here talking to you, talking trash to you or not, Right. But you're just here. The voice might come, it might go. Might come, it might go. What is always a constant that's just here. Irregardless of the voice, irregardless of your psychology, irregardless of happy, sad, what about you is unchanging, is always here. And then in a way that can tell you more, maybe about the secrets of the universe, it's always just here with everybody.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, labeling is just simple mindfulness naming. So, like, you already did it. That, oh, there's an inner critic, there's an inner heckler. Whatever you want to call it, you're making a mental label of it. What that does is the minute you label it a, you're not caught in it. You're in awareness itself. So it's kind of a cheat code to just go to pure awareness, because the label itself has. You go to the awareness. You're not lost in that emotion. Think of it like the turbulent emotion is like a turbulent river. And the minute you label, you're like, up on the bridge looking down at it, going, oh, there's the inner critic. And they've actually shown that labeling in a study with Lieberman and UCLA in 2007. That labeling moved it to a different part of the brain where it was easier to process it. They had MRI imaging, and when you didn't label it, you were stuck. The inner heckler, you were stuck in the amygdala, which is kind of your fight or flight brain. But when you labeled it, it immediately moved whatever motion you were dealing with to the prefrontal cortex, which is the reasoning area of the brain. So the labeling really works to help you process it with a different part of your brain.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

No, I would say this is more daily life. So perfect analogy. Yeah. Oh, inner critic. You know, I had a very mean and cruel father, so I used to joke and I'd just say my dad's name because then I just go, oh, that's his voice, not me. Because it wasn't me. Your inner critic isn't you. And that labeling helps you see, oh, it's not me. And it's not to blame anyone from our past, but for me, it just helped me go that this is not even my voice. It just comes online. And maybe you had a really mean coach and you might joke it's his voice, you know? Right. But again, it helps you move away from it and get some breathing room and some space. And then you can have a choice how you want to respond to that voice. Voice. Do you want to believe what it says or do you want to say thank you and no.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Several years ago, I interviewed a very interesting woman named Sonya Renee Taylor. And she said, I wrote it down and I have not forgotten it. That when she notices self criticism in her own mind, she reframes it as the voice in her words, the voice of the system, meaning the culture wants us to be self critical because it gets us buying the next thing or swiping to the next video. That's the engine for the worst parts of capitalism. So if you can just reframe. Oh yeah, that voice that just said you look frumpy. Is my internalized Madison Avenue trying to get me to go buy some new clothes.

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

Literally. Because they're not alive.

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

About getting some space from it, which is really important. It's at the heart of all of this. Another technique that you recommend for getting some space from your inner critic is to think about.

[Dan Harris]

Well, I'll let you describe it.

[Sharon Salzberg]

You're using the analogy of an airplane hangar. Can you talk about that?

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah. Well, it's moving back from it, labeling it, seeing that, you know, the voice is no different than any sounds. It could be the same as a bird sound. It's just blah, blah, blah. Right. And the more you can back off and give some space with these voices, then you might still have the same inner critic. Let's say it's like a couch, but if you're in a really small room of Dan and you've got this tiny studio apartment, you have this big couch of the inner critic and you have a big easy chair of your anxiety part. Dan, you're going to be bumping into those chairs all the time. Your psyche is going to be running into them. But we put them in a big airplane hangar. The same couch of inner critic, the same chair of anxiety. How often are you going to run into them? You haven't gotten rid of anything. But there's so much more spaciousness in who you are. That mind that's, you know, the big sky. It's fine that the anxiety or inner critic's here because you, there's more of you here, a spacious awareness. There's just more presence, there's more love. So then the couch of inner critic and the chair of anxiety can be no big deal. It's just no big deal.

[Dan Harris]

Coming up, Amita talks about how acceptance and surrender can soften your resistance and help your difficult patterns fall away. And she goes over some simple pointers for sensing what she calls aware presence beneath all of your mental noise. It's that time of year to take care of you. And who better to help you do that than the top voices in well being? On Audible, you can level up your parenting, career, finances, sleep, relationships or mindset. The Audible well Being collection has everything to inspire and support you every step of the way. Hear the latest from best selling authors Brene Brown and Jay Shetty, Master nutrition with chef Jamie Oliver, hear nature sleep sounds from the sleeping world or get on top of your finances with Rachel Rogers. Plus, you'll find all the best parenting guides like raising good humans. With this at your fingertips, you can imagine more for yourself and your family. By the way, I'm creating an audible original with my great friend, the Great Meditation Teacher 7A Selassie, which will be.

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[Dan Harris]

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[Sharon Salzberg]

How important is. Here's another a word acceptance in all of this.

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, I think like I said with my depression when it fell away, I think the final step was just surrender acceptance. Because we're fighting. You know, they have that old saying, what we resist persists because we're fighting it. Then we're creating another part that's wanting it to go away. You see this a lot in addicts. I want to stop doing this eating this compulsive eating, right? And yet the compulsive eater part and it becomes this paradoxical struggle. And when you can just let go and ease up on the whole thing. And that wise presence can be here with it all. Okay, however long it takes, whatever it takes. This is my path and you're not fighting that path. Then it can really fall away. Acceptance is kind of like a softening of all our parts so that we can just relax into what is the truth versus thinking we know this part shouldn't be here or we shouldn't be doing this, or if you just relaxing in that whole process via acceptance. It's a willingness. I'm just willing to be here with whatever is however long it takes. And there's something about that when you make that vow in that frame of mind that really can transform things. I don't completely understand it, Dan, but acceptance is very transformative.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

Yeah, well, it's important to probably try it right now. I call it aware, presence or awake presence. It's not a belief, it's not a thought. That's your mind co opting. It's. It's just here. Like notice it doesn't take a lot of effort for you and I just to be here right now. Just feel that we're just here. And your awareness or your tension. Awareness. Tension's a little different than awareness, but it's just here. So notice this is not a belief, this is not a thought. Your where presence is just here now without any effort. So right here, visible in the here now you can see it now your inner critic might come in on top of that. But before any voices come in, just notice you're just here again like that movie screen before the movie starts playing. It doesn't take any belief. It's not hard to find it. We make it complicated in the mind trace the AI mind trace the coming and go. Well, let me tell you about. You know when you're doing an AI search now it's like, well, do you want more about this? So here we are, we're just here and then the mind comes in and tries to go, well let me tell you more about this aware presence and that's fine. But come back to the simplicity of it all. It doesn't take any effort just to be.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

So your presence is just here. Then a voice arises. And whether you want to call it that wise self we talked about or just your Buddha nature, just that, like seeing awareness, then you're meeting that critic. I mean, there's two levels to this. You can meet it with that IFS type wise self, or you could just meet it like the Buddha did with, oh, this is just empty. There's nothing here. And then the voice will just fall away. So when the inner critic comes up, it's like a thought form, right? And then you meet that with awareness. And either the thought forms, you can just meet it with pure awareness, or you can meet it with compassion, connection, like we talked about earlier. What's it trying to do? How's it trying to help? Or you can just meet it with kind of a pure, empty awareness that just is like, doesn't even have to do anything with the inner critic. It just. The inner critic will arise and pass away on its own in the spaciousness of you.

[Sharon Salzberg]

And so if I understand you correctly, you're saying, look, in these moments where you notice the inner critic. And I think this is true for any difficult part of your personality. But we're really focusing here on the inner critic. There are two really healthy options. One is to greet it with love and compassion and warmth, to ask, what are you afraid of? It's such a great question to be in dialogue in a warm way. And then the other move would be, what? And think in Buddhist circles is often referred to as wisdom, which is another funny word, because I think people hear that word and just immediately imagine, like, Dumbledore or something like that. But wisdom in this sense is really seeing it from a perspective of depth where it may seem solid. The voice that tells you, hey, you look like shit today, may seem solid, but actually, if you pull back to the airplane hangar perspective, it's just this little quantum burst of energy in the mind. It is, as Joseph says of thoughts, little more than nothing. And when you view it in that light, it just kind of self liberates. It just fizzles on its own. How did I do there? Is that my close?

[Amita Schmidt]

You did perfect. That was perfect. I would add an analogy to that. That's kind of a common analogy. So whether it's the noise in your head or you and I were like making a lot of noise, screaming, yelling, right? It's all going to default to silence. You and I could scream and yell till kingdom come. We all could. And guess what? The default is silence. So that voice could yell at you as much as it wants, but eventually it's going to come back to this pure awareness. Like you just said in that second part, it's going to default to silence. I mean, you could see a great example of that. Everything defaults to stillness, even though it might not sound like it. You could be at a loud party. It doesn't seem like it. Your mind can be like a loud party sometimes. But this is kind of like what Joseph's saying. It's all going to rise and pass away. And you can just wait in that space where it all passes away in two. Right? I heard once a nice analogy too, that inner critic. It's like one person in an empty stadium with a microphone. And I really like that because the stadium's just this huge empty space of you, Dan. Right? But this one dude, he's got a microphone and kind of like the wizard of Oz. It sounds like he's taken up the whole stadium. So I like to think of both of these practices, like taking away the microphone.

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

Great question. What is the end game? It really is what you want it to be. It's like an awareness video game. You can go to amazing levels here. You can just decide to transcend your depression and your anxiety, or you could go to complete freedom, you know, full arhunt, full awakening. It's up to you how far you want to go in the game. The very end of the game is truth, love, peace, joy, 100%. It's tricky because I think the end game, you see people that have really walked it all the way through to the end, like Ramana Maharshi, or maybe even the Dalai Lama, they just exhibit truth, love, peace, joy. Truth, love, peace, joy. That's all there is. And people that are really walking the talk who have really done the psychological to the spiritual a hundred percent. I mean, they're just free, free. And then that manifestan is truth, love, peace, joy. Just over and over and over again.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Toward the end of every interview, I asked Two questions.

[Dan Harris]

One of them is, is there anything.

[Sharon Salzberg]

You were hoping we would get to that we didn't?

[Amita Schmidt]

Hmm. Nope. I had no ideas what would happen. I just wanted to connect with you. I just wanted to connect with who you were.

[Sharon Salzberg]

Yeah. Well, thank you. And the second question is, you know.

[Dan Harris]

People want to learn more from you. How can they do so what have.

[Sharon Salzberg]

You, you know, do you have a website or do you have Dharma Talks people can go listen to? Any other materials that you've created that we should know about?

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Sharon Salzberg]

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

[Amita Schmidt]

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

[Dan Harris]

Thanks again to Amita Schmidt. Awesome to talk to her. Don't forget to check out my new app, 10% with Dan Harris, which you can score over at Danharris. There's a free 30 day trial and if you sign up right now, you'll be able to access our seven Day Meditation Challenge with Joseph Goldstein. It started a day or two ago, but it's not too late to join. What Joseph has created in this series of guided meditations is really cool.

[Sharon Salzberg]

You should come check it out.

[Dan Harris]

Finally, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasily. Our record recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our Managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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