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How do you sit quietly in the middle of a storm?
01:08:34
What if there was an event in the future, the outcome of which you couldn’t personally control, but it was still causing you anguish?
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- [00:00]
PJ Vogt
PJ welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. Each week we answer a question we have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. This week, a question that probably sounds like a very small one, but which to me feels like a very big how do you sit quietly? It's after some hats. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by policygenius. Each new year is an opportunity to reflect and plan for the future, like setting career goals, making financial moves, and most importantly, ensuring your family is always taken care of, no matter what happens. With policygenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Some options are 100% online and let you avoid unnecessary medical exams. Do you know that 40% of people wish they got life insurance at a younger age? Policygenius lets you compare quotes from America's top insurers side by side for free, with no hidden fees. Their licensed support team helps you get what you need fast so you can get on with your life. They answer questions, handle paperwork, and advocate for you throughout the process. Join the thousands of happy policygenius customers who have left five star reviews on Google and trustpilot. Secure your families tomorrow so you have peace of mind today. Head to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you can save. That's policygenius.com nerds this episode is brought to you in part by Nerd Wallet Listener. A new year is finally here, and if you're anything like me, you've got a lot on your plate. Habits to build, travel plans to make, mocktail recipes to perfect. Good thing our sponsor, NerdWallet is here to take one thing off your plate. Finding the best financial products, introducing NerdWallet's best of awards. List your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts, and more. The nerds have done the work for you, researching and reviewing over 1,100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balance transfer or credit card with 0% APR? They've got a winner for that. Or a bank account with the top rate to hit your savings goals. They've got a winner for that, too. Know you're getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself. So let NerdWallet do the heavy lifting for your finances this year and head over to their 2025 Best of Awards at NerdWallet.com awards to find the best financial products today I always get a little bit nervous, like reading an introduction in front of a human being.
- [03:00]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
I know, it's weird. It's very weird.
- [03:02]
PJ Vogt
It makes you read too fast. So just know that I'll read too fast, okay?
- [03:05]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Okay.
- [03:06]
PJ Vogt
I have some issues with anxiety. I know everybody does, but I suspect mine are unusually bad. Lately, I've started to wonder if curiosity, which is my job, and anxiety, which I consider my enemy, need, might not just be the same thing. Or if not the same thing, siblings. One the overachiever, the other a slightly destructive fuckup. The reason I think that they might be siblings is because one not bad definition of anxiety would be a condition that floods your brain with questions. What do other people think of me? Is everything okay? Am I safe? Or maybe a question a lot of people have today. What's going to happen next week? The difference though, between those questions and the questions curiosity asks is that those questions are, frankly, terrible questions. I say this as someone who loves questions, who spends my life inside of questions. I believe I have some standing here. I believe a good question takes you outside of yourself. It makes the world feel big and bewildering. Anxiety's questions narrow the world to a straw's aperture. Everything we are here to see, we become unable to see. And instead we are stuck somewhere else. Last year I was interviewing someone. We actually cut this part of the interview out when we aired it, but I was interviewing someone who brought up their meditation practice. He said every day he sits quietly for a short amount of time. And I told him that for me, meditation felt like the final boss in a video game, like the hardest last thing I was going to have to. At some point, my life got hard enough confront. And he was really confused by this answer. Sitting quietly in a room for 15 minutes instead of seeing it as a helpful exercise. That was the scariest thing in the world to me. His reaction really stuck with me. I kept thinking about it the day that I'm writing, the words that I'm saying is October 29, 2024. We are somehow exactly one week away from an election. The national mood right now feels like everyone is visiting the place I usually live. Anxiety. If you consume any media, the most asked question you'll find is an unanswerable, in my opinion, unhelpful one. What is going to happen next? So I thought maybe this is a week to finally talk to someone about meditation. I wanted to ask someone, how do you learn to sit? And I also wanted to ask, what happens to you over the years if you keep sitting do you mind saying your name and who you are and what you do?
- [05:29]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah. I'm Rev Angel Kyoto Williams. Most people call me just Rev or Rev Angel. I think what I do is I sit quietly.
- [05:41]
PJ Vogt
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams. She's an ordained Zen priest and teacher, also author of the book Radical Dharma, founder of Transformative Change, CEO of Mindful. I've talked to a lot of people overqualified to answer the questions I brought them.
- [05:57]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
But even for me, I help people understand a way of sitting quietly that is consistent with the life that they have and not some other idea that makes them go crazy and makes them feel like they want to run away or that it's the final boss.
- [06:15]
PJ Vogt
What do you mean when you say consistent with the life that they have?
- [06:19]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Consistent with the life they have means? I. I have this take on things, which is. Most of the instruction that we have received about meditation in the big mainstream world comes from largely monastic traditions, whether those are Eastern traditions, Buddhist, which is a lot of what we think of. Mindfulness meditation is hailed from Buddhism and Buddhist traditions, but also Western mystic traditions and so on. So they're largely the instructions that have been given to and received by monastics, people that have unhooked from life. They have reduced the number of hooks in order to have a life that is less friction. And that's most of what we have received. The instructions of people that have chosen fewer hooks, fewer decisions in life. They home leave, they go away, they cloister, they enter into a space in which they have fewer decisions, fewer things to contend with. They don't have children, they don't have partners, they don't have marriages. Many of the decisions that the thousands of decisions that most of us make each day are actually made for them by way of the structure and the container that they're in. And then there's this other direction, which is what I'm in, in the habit of working with, which is how do we stay in life with all the hooks and smooth out the scrunchy, squirrely, you know, jaggedy side so that there's less of us to be hooked into. So life's hooks remain, but we smooth ourselves out in such a way that our journey is less frictionful, it is less busy, less harsh on us.
- [08:16]
PJ Vogt
So just to make sure I understand, it's like there's sort of two paths that people might take. And one is you're kind of retreating a little bit, like you're making a life that's simpler and maybe more removed, and so it's easier to find this piece because, like, for instance, I live in a city, New York, that's like, it's a traffic jam and it's an assault on the senses. And I work quite a bit and like the world sometimes I perceive is just as a volley of elbows. And there's people who'd be like, well, just move upstate and find a quiet room to sit in. And what you're talking about is a kind of practice that allows you to still inhabit the world, but more peacefully.
- [08:53]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah. They're saying get less elbows. Right. Like, go someplace where there are fewer elbows.
- [08:58]
PJ Vogt
Yeah.
- [08:58]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
And I'm saying that that's most of what we've received in terms of the instructions. And that doesn't align with the lives that many of us live. Even if we move upstate, we find the elbows.
- [09:09]
PJ Vogt
Right. My idea that upstate is a place where life is perfect is pretty good in the idea that I haven't spent much time.
- [09:18]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
And so I'm saying that where I'm coming from is how do we live with the elbows? And we find a way in which we're able to navigate life and navigate the elbows and actually appreciate them and appreciate the ways that the elbows communicate something to us about ourselves, give us information, make us more curious.
- [09:39]
PJ Vogt
So I guess what I'm curious about, I'm curious both how you got to that understanding of living with elbows, but also even how to even go back earlier, what was your. You've spent a very long time thinking about these things and sort of inhabiting different spiritual and meditation practices. I'm using terminology that's unfamiliar to me, which is why I'm stumbling. But who were you before all of this? At some point, I imagine you were a person like anybody else, moving through the world the way, for instance, like I am right now. And something happened to make you curious, like, can you draw me a picture of you before you were a rev? And then what happened?
- [10:22]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, I was like you. I was. I hope I'm still a person like anyone else. And I was a New Yorker, and I'm always a New Yorker, by the way. All of us that are New Yorkers, we know that that's true. So I'm ever a New Yorker. I was a young New Yorker, though, and living in a post ed Koch era, and New York was kind of emerging from its dirty, grimy vibe. But I grew up in that. I grew up with the burnt out Bronx, the harsh be afraid we used to call Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn Myrtle Avenue. You know, I grew up with the New York of legend stuff. The place that is angry and harsh and rough, and you had to look over your shoulders and watch your back all of the time. And you kind of, you know, shuffling in with, like, millions upon millions of people. And it had a lot of elbows. And my life had a lot of elbows. I had a lot of elbows growing up. I was a latchkey kid. I grew up with single parents, swapped between them. My earliest recollection was living with my dad, who was a fireman. And firemen, for many of you that don't know, work either 9 to 6, you know, like 9 to 5 and 9 to 6, or they work from 6 to 9, which is 6 at night and then to 9 in the morning. And so babysitters, you know, handed off to other people, toggling between going to this person's house and that person's house and being taken care of in that way and learning quite early to take care of myself, to make my way home, to take care of myself before my dad could get home, which would be, you know, maybe 6:30, maybe 7, and doing that and understanding that is. That is just what my life was. And having to navigate all of the things that come with that. You know, the scary kids in school that were not very kind to you, you know, that you had to, like, just pay attention to and keep your senses and your wits about you. A different kind of curiosity about life. I got a curious. But what are they up to? What's going on there? What's in that shadow? What's happening? You know, I did a lot of raising myself in that way, in between the people that were, you know, taking care of me in little blocks of time. I was raising myself in that same space. That's who I was.
- [12:50]
PJ Vogt
And you're describing the thing that I feel like happens to everybody to some degree, but happens to some people more and at different times, where it's like life is teaching you an alarm system, and the alarm system might be the right alarm system for a time to get you through a place, and then maybe you get through the place and you still have the alarm system. You're just anticipating and predicting.
- [13:11]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, well, that's a very particular part of my journey, actually. And I. It's interesting of the many podcasts and things that I've done, I've not said a lot about this, and I think I'm just in this turn, you know, this kind of place in my life now, that maybe it's time to come have this piece come through one of the alarm systems. I was abused quite significantly when I Was young.
- [13:32]
PJ Vogt
Oh, I'm so sorry.
- [13:34]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah. I'm sorry for anyone that has to go through it. And those kinds of experiences in your life are real junctures of what's gonna happen with that, what's gonna be the path that unfolds as a result of that. One of the things that happened is that I. By a series of events, I ended up back close to the person that, you know, was discovered, and they were separated from me and so on and so forth. And then I ended up about 15 years old, back in the place close to that person's family, the place that I associated them with. Oh, and talk about alarm system. Yeah, I was on. You know, I considered myself a pretty precocious child. I was, you know, very, very intellectually and culturally precocious. And I was back in Queens, which felt like, you know, like back in the woods somehow. And I was like, okay, that's where I'm going. I'm going to high school in Chelsea, you know, in the midst of all the things. You know, growing up in Greenwich Village and, you know, sort of party vibe and everything is kind of the center of all of the things. And I was living. I went to live back with my granddad, and he lived in Queens. And I was on the bus. Two fair zone, for those of you, like, train and a bus. And I was on the bus, and suddenly I would feel this prickling in the back of my neck. And I found myself looking around for this person and talk about anxiety. I didn't know that that's what it was. I spent some. I don't know how long it was. You know, time is weird and elastic. I spent too long, for me, of a period of time feeling like I was truly looking over my shoulder at every turn and feeling this alarm system that was going off of, like, I might run into this person. What will happen if I see her? Where. What goes on here? What do I do? How do I manage this? And, you know, all of this. You can feel that, like, just the energy as I speak about it was like, that kind of energy. And I just decided, like, no. I decided, no, I'm not doing this.
- [15:45]
PJ Vogt
So. Okay, so you're at a point where you're a precocious, like, New York teenager. You have this problem, which is that you've had a traumatic experience, and you're having the thing that people so often have, which is like, your brain is trying to keep you safe, but the way it's trying to keep you safe is that it is imagining terrible things happening all the time. And you decide, this isn't how I want to be. What, what do you do?
- [16:11]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, I decide something more like, you know, in New York speak. Nah, you know, because by this time I'm, as I said, I'm precocious, right. So I'm 15 and I'm in high school and I was in 10th grade by then, so I had already moved forward some more and so was a little bit younger than people are typically at that time. And my crew, you know, who I run with, is even older than that. So typically I grew up in a, in a world of people that were maybe, you know, four to five years older than me. That was just how I moved through the world. And so that's also informed by that. You know, it was like, nah, this is not happening. Whatever this is going on, this is not happening. So my response to it is I've just got to go and face it. And so I went and went to her parents house and said, you know, where does she live? And turns out she lives literally blocks from where I was and got the address and you know, pulled myself together and did some of the self talk of like, yeah, you know, you know, like I'm not five anymore. You know, I'm this person, I have a life, I have friends, I have people that care about me and you can't hurt me, this person can't hurt me. And so I talked myself into that and I went, I rang the doorbell.
- [17:42]
PJ Vogt
You rang the doorbell of her home?
- [17:44]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
I rang the doorbell of her home and I sought her out and she wasn't there that particular day. But the point here was that I got to have a conversation with the person that created the conditions for the most terror and horror in my life and asked them why, what was this about?
- [18:04]
PJ Vogt
Nobody ever. It's so rare for people to get to ask that question. Can I ask what was her answer?
- [18:13]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Entirely unsatisfactory and probably untrue. But what she could offer at the time, which this piece is true, she was suffering. And that became clear to me that the piece of the suffering that she shared with me wasn't the entirety of it. And it was a very slim slice of it because I came to know her for a little while over a couple next few years. But it was clear that it was suffering and that she didn't know what else to do with her own suffering. And her own suffering, her own not knowing what to do was with the box that she found herself in of also kind of abuse within her family with confusion and you Know, trying to be in a relationship that was probably too soon for a person at her age. And at that time, that was the story that I told myself, and that's the story that I came away that this was a person that didn't know what to do with the suffering that they had. So all that they could do was to extend suffering to someone else. That that was the way that they found control. That's how she found control, was to try to control someone else. And that's what she did, is try to control me through these, you know, various forms of abuse.
- [19:27]
PJ Vogt
The way you just described it, is that how you understood it at the time?
- [19:30]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
I think in bits and pieces, yeah. I think it unfolded. I think that the abuse, as much as people speak about the horrors of abuse, I think it also gave me a window and an awareness and a tenderness about the frailty. Like how I wouldn't have used that word then, but, you know, how exposed we are and how easy it is for people to assault us. I had a sensitivity as a result of that abuse that gave me an insight and a career for what it means to be so tender. And so the very abuse that she visited upon me gave me access to a tenderness about the abuse that was visited upon her.
- [20:22]
PJ Vogt
Wow. Did you feel safe after that?
- [20:27]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
I did. Much safer, yeah. You know, safe is relative. For those of you who know I'm black, and so black in America is safe as that's a negotiated term. But I felt safer and I felt like I had claimed my life. And I think that that opened a path for me to make that my business, to claim my life. That every place and every turn where it felt like something else sought to determine, frame, feedback, what my life could be. I decided that, nope, it's mine. I get to decide. And I would. You know, people are weird when kids get abused. They don't. They didn't ask questions they didn't want to know. They wanted it to disappear and make it like it never happened. So no one had ever asked me about it or said, you know, what happened or how'd that happen? Or so all of the meaning making of it got pushed away. I didn't get to make any meaning. I think that's why I was able to ask the question and want to ask because I needed to make some sense of it. That's what we do. We want to make sense of this life with all of his hooks and barbs and figure out why me, you know, why did this, whatever was going on, why did this have to land Here with me. What was it about me, you know, that made me worthy of abuse?
- [21:55]
PJ Vogt
And that question felt gone after you spoke to her. Because it sounds like what you saw was just this person was suffering and you were just there.
- [22:06]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, I was in the space. It wasn't about me. And I carry that to this day. That, you know, most of the things that people are up to that are causing and creating harm is not about you. It lands on you. It landed on me, it landed on this body. And it has all of its impacts. But I now have a sense of, oh, I get to decide that I'm not going to land my suffering and extend that and have it land on someone else.
- [22:37]
PJ Vogt
And so then where did you take that lesson? Like, where did you go next?
- [22:41]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
So that lesson took me to so many ways of having more curiosity about the way in which the experiences that we have can be metabolized. Right. Like I met, I got to metabolize a tremendously difficult, painful, life altering terror in my life. And that metabolizing, that's the word that I would use now, led me to being able to take things not as a personal offense to me, but part of life that could either be metabolized or it could be something that I end up making me terribly ill and just hugging the toilet bowl of life, trying to vomit everything out again. And then rinse, wash, repeat, we just do it again and again and again. It doesn't go away. That's what I got. It doesn't go away until you metabolize it.
- [23:45]
PJ Vogt
How do you. In the project of metabolizing these things, I think what's often hard, I'm gonna say for people, but really it's for me, like, is that you can't always knock on the door. Like, how do you metabolize?
- [23:59]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah.
- [23:59]
PJ Vogt
If it sounds like part of the work is that when you suffer to not see your suffering as personal, but to see it as part of a chain of suffering and unskilledness and confusion. What if you don't have that opportunity to meet with the person? Like, how do you, how do you metabolize those experiences?
- [24:20]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, you mostly don't get the. Actually that's the truth is you mostly don't get that opportunity. I slipped it in and it's probably the most important thing. The answer was entirely unsatisfactory and likely untrue.
- [24:32]
PJ Vogt
Right.
- [24:33]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
That was the best gift of the whole experience. Had she said something that just made sense and it just like all lined up, I probably just would have gone on with my life expecting things to line up and make sense. Because it was unsatisfactory and because it was likely, as became clear very quickly, likely untrue. Other than the suffering piece, it was like all that was left was the suffering. The only thing that was solid and had meat was the suffering. And so what that gave me was the kind of access to the sense of like, oh, yeah, I'm not gonna get an answer here. This is not going to get an answer. Eventually we learn to in order to metabolize things that we are not given, like a data set and, you know, we can add it up and put it in a spreadsheet and it'll compute nice and neatly, is that we sit with it and then when we sit with it, we metabolize it in a way that comes with every single one of us as human beings. There's all sorts of things that can come about and disrupt our natural operating system of being able to metabolize life. We are all given that that is what we come with. I don't believe that whatever it is that is necessary for that is hidden under the deep ocean or in a cave in some mountains. It doesn't belong to some particular culture or some people or some time. Every single one of us have a navigation system for life itself that is endemic to who we are. It is our fundamental nature. It is our birthright. And then we have shitty things that happen in life that can disrupt it and throw that operating system offline. But we can go back and try our best to get it back again.
- [26:34]
PJ Vogt
After a short break, Rev before she was Rev decides to pursue sitting quietly more seriously. After an interruption, we'll return. Surge Engine is sponsored by Vuori. Vuori is a new perspective on performance apparel. It's perfect if you're sick and tired of traditional old workout gear, but everything is designed to work out in but it doesn't feel or look like it. It's extremely comfortable. You'll want to wear it all the time. I promise you it is more comfortable than whatever you're wearing right now. The product is incredibly versatile. It can be used for just about any activity, running, training, swimming, yoga. But it is also great for my favorite form of exercise, which is lounging on a sofa. Also, Vuori is 100% offsetting their carbon footprint. They're using better sustainable materials for their products. To empower your best active life, Vuori is an investment in your happiness. For our listeners, vuori is offering 20% off your first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. @vuori.com PJsearch that's Vuorie V u O-R-I.com PJsearch not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over 75 bucks and free returns. Go to vuori.com PJsearch and discover the versatility of Vori clothing.
- [28:11]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Where'd you get those shoes? Easy.
- [28:14]
PJ Vogt
They're from dsw. Because DSW has the exact right shoes.
- [28:18]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
For whatever you're into right now. You know, like the sneakers that make office hours feel like happy hour, the.
- [28:24]
PJ Vogt
Boots that turn grocery aisles into runways, and all the styles that show off the many sides of you, from daydreamer to multitasker and everything in between.
- [28:33]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Because you do it all in really great shoes.
- [28:36]
PJ Vogt
Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or dsw.com welcome back to the show. Back in the early 90s, when Rev first wanted to deepen her meditation practice, she started going to retreats. You might not be familiar with these until a few years ago, I wasn't. I've never gone. But people close to me have. What I understand is that at a retreat, people interested in meditating come together to meditate. A retreat might last five days a week or longer. If you go, you agree to follow a set of rules. You'll agree to wake up at the break of dawn. Often these retreats are entirely silent, meaning for the whole time you will not talk. At a retreat, you are meditating many times a day, Rev would say you are sitting meditation many times a day. In these sessions, you keep meditating until you hear a bell ring. There might be a walking meditation as well, or what's called a work meditation, where you're helping the center with chores. The people I know who have gone describe this experience of mostly being alone in silence in your own mind for a week, as exactly as excruciating as I imagine it. But they also describe it as beautiful, and most of them go back. I don't understand any of this at all. And part of the reason why I was talking to Rev, an ordained Zen priest, was because I was hoping to understand it more. She told me what it's like to go learn to sit in retreat.
- [30:17]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
It's like a pendulum swing between, like the most profound stillness you can enjoy, the feeling of your body or the movement of a butterfly, and utter excruciating. Why is that person coughing? Well, somebody please ring the fucking bell. And it's all the things in between and that's the best thing about it, is you realize that in this, you know, spaces that are set just so and everything is right and it's all prepared, you still manage to drive yourself nuts and to hate people and to love people. You do the whole gamut in there in a little, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, constructed container. And yet you manage to play out all of the shenanigans, do all the things. You hate people, you love them, you want to have sex with them. You want them to get as far away as possible. You know, the smallest things hurt your feelings. You get upset, you. You get cold and distant. You, like, you do all the things, and you realize, whoa, wait a minute. If all of this is. Even though I'm in a different space, maybe I have something to do with creating. Maybe that I have something to do with creating all of this, and it's not everybody else's fault. I might have to take responsibility for my life.
- [31:57]
PJ Vogt
I see. So it's like the thing that it offers, or one of the things it offers is that it's like you find out that even if everything we're taking away, like, the things we think the world is doing to us, when you take away the world, you see that we do them to ourselves. And so then it gives you a place to start to find a way to not do that.
- [32:19]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, well, first, it humbles you. You bring you to your knees, you know, and it's a space of reconciliation. You reconcile the distance between the truths and untruths of your life.
- [32:30]
PJ Vogt
Can you tell me a story about, for you, what it was like early on when you were sort of less skilled? Like, what it was like to do a retreat like that. Like, what you walked in with and what it felt like to grapple with it.
- [32:42]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
What it was like was. This is awesome. That's such a great question. It was this cycle of trying to find a way out.
- [33:01]
PJ Vogt
You mean, like, out of the physical location?
- [33:04]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Everything. Trying to find a way out, trying to game the system. Whatever your shtick is, you're gonna see it, and it's gonna be, like, glaring. And so if seducing is your shtick, you're gonna try to seduce everyone and everything. Me, it was gaming. I was a good talker. And so internally and externally, I was gaming the system in every way that I could possibly find. I would, you know, sneak, like, extra bits of sleep or I would try not to be asked to do the things that I didn't want to do. I would sort of get myself into a little corner somewhere and try to disappear so no one would notice me to ask me to do the task that I didn't want to do. You know, you try to sit and look like you're sitting while you're really, like, you know, doing your taxes in your head. You know, sit there and it's like, yep, I look really still. Nope. They can't see that I'm so, so still. Okay. If I just move this little way, then I look even more still, and I look like I'm very concentrated. And I really. I mean, I want to say that that's not the very earliest, because the earliest, earliest you're just holding on by the seat of your pants. It's like, why did I do this? I shouldn't be here. I could just get up and walk out. Yeah, but everybody will see. But I could still just. I'm grown. I can just get up and walk out. You do that for at least four days, you know, well, what will happen? You play out fantasy. Well, what would happen if I just got up and, you know, and then you get to your clothes and you're like, okay, nobody's stopping you. You could pack your clothes and you have to make a decision.
- [34:48]
PJ Vogt
Yeah.
- [34:48]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
And you make a decision, and you make a decision, and that's all it's made up of, is making the decision to come back.
- [34:54]
PJ Vogt
And so at that point, like, you're walking up a mountain in a way. Like, you're going to these retreats and you're finding that the practice is worthwhile for you. What did it mean then, to decide to become a Zen priest? I don't know how that. Like, I know nothing. Like, how. What is. What was that?
- [35:10]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
It's like, I feel like it's. When you watch the movie, you're like, oh, I could be a wizard. I could be a mugwort or whatever they call that. I could be a wizard. That's it. You're like, oh, it's gonna be hard. And there's going to be the snake people and the rough people that are doing terrible things to me and playing jokes on me and stuff like that. Or I could go back and just be a human, you know, like, going to do. I'm going to do it, you know, and I might fall off my broom and, you know, end up being dragged. And I. I rather be a wizard, you know, I'd rather know what a little bit more about what's going on in this life and not feel so confused and put upon.
- [35:59]
PJ Vogt
So Rev chose the more interesting path. She studied the precepts she trained. Eventually she was ordained as a Zen priest. She was the second black woman recognized as a teacher in her lineage. That was three sentences, but they describe many years.
- [36:14]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
So I did all of that and I went through the ranks, so to speak. I hold the most senior title in the Zen tradition. It was a very small handful of black women that actually hold that role as sanctioned Zen teachers. And I'm one of them. And then I got a, you know, like, cool honorific. It's called Roshi, means old teacher. Not that old for those of you that can't see me. But I got, you know, so I hold that. And right around the time that I. I was heading towards that and they were, you know, I was getting the titles and all the ranks and I was like, I don't know about this, y'all. And in fact, I wrote an essay called I May Not Get There with youh. And it was saying that, yep, I. I did this thing where it's like climbing the mountain, you know, doing all the ranks and all the things. And I was like, I don't know if this is really what most people are going to be. I know most people are not going to be able to do this, what I just did. They're not going to commit the time, the energy, the, you know, whatever. And it's not because they're bad or because they're less or they're less deserving of liberation and freedom in their life. It's not because of that. It's because we haven't structured it in a way. And we are. I'm an activist, social justice y to all of that. And I was like, we are jacking the planet up and creating destruction at a rate at which this will never solve. And so this journey, this 20 year thing that I've done now 30 now 30 plus years, we are not going to be able to deal with the crises of the world and the planet if we don't have more people mature, right, Become more mature human beings, more kind human beings at a more accelerated rate. And we need something that will operate, forgive me for saying this, at scale.
- [38:13]
PJ Vogt
Enlightenment at scale.
- [38:18]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
We need to be able to. I don't know if that we. I don't think we need a thousand more Buddhas. I think we need millions more people that are, I like to say, aware, more aligned and more alive. And when we do that, it is not that all of our problems will disappear. We will learn to conflict well with each other. We will learn to conflict honestly with integrity and with a willingness to meet life as it is and not to abdicate to fantasies and the fictions that we're creating and getting ourselves looped into.
- [39:06]
PJ Vogt
To be clear, Rev still holds the title of Zen Priest. It's just that she's decided, in her words, to leave the track to help people find liberation where they are. Presumably this mission includes the slightly unusual choice to talk to doofy podcasters such as myself after a short break, where does someone go to sit quietly? You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Plus with Indeed sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@indeed.com listen just go to indeed.com listen right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com listen terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Looking to improve your diet in the new year?
- [40:36]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Try seeing a personal dietitian with Nourish.
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PJ Vogt
Nourish has hundreds of dietitians who specialize in a variety of health concerns including.
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Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Weight loss, gut health, and more.
- [40:45]
PJ Vogt
Meet with your dietitian online and message.
- [40:48]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Them anytime through the Nourish app.
- [40:50]
PJ Vogt
Nourish accepts hundreds of insurance plans. 94% of patients pay $0 out of pocket. Find your personal dietitian@usenourish.com that's usenourish.com My.
- [41:04]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Dad works in B2B marketing.
- [41:06]
PJ Vogt
He came by my school for career.
- [41:08]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Day and said he was a big roaz man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day.
- [41:18]
PJ Vogt
Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do get a hundred dollar credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be to be. Welcome back. So my life has begun to fill up with meditators. I mean, not fill up, but they've been sneaking in and you know, they still seem to experience the world roughly the way I do. They don't seem like, different, you know, in like a. They're not so different, but it does feel like they have access to a practice that. I don't know. It's like if you never jogged and everyone's jogging and they seem a little bit happier and they seem like a little bit like, fitter and like they're breathing a little bit easier. And I honestly don't understand the relationship between. I understand that the very few times I've tried to sit down in a room quietly, it has been surprisingly excruciating. But I don't understand the relationship between closing your eyes for 15 minutes or 20 minutes and contending with that feeling of wrongness or recentering yourself. Like, I. It's not that I'm skeptical of it. I'm really curious about it and I'm. I'm slightly in awe of it, but I don't understand it. And maybe it's something that you have to experience to understand, but I'm just curious about it. I know that's more of like a question mark than a question.
- [42:48]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, I do think there's something of experiencing it. So there's state, then there's trait, right? So there's the state of meditation. There's people that, you know, practice meditation. They have a kind of meditation practice and letting that system, that operating system go offline for a while and not just keep churning and churning and churning and churning and churning and giving it a. Giving it a break and letting it reset so that you become a little bit more aligned and in tune with your own pace, rhythm, speed. And the frenetic pace, rhythm, speed, or sometimes the too slow pace, rhythm and speed of life, you recognize them as not being yours. And so you can stick closer to your own pace, rhythm and speed. And when we are more attuned to our own pace, rhythm and speed, then we feel happier. When we are more aligned within ourselves, within whatever confluences of this thing that we call. This fellow once said that the thing I shamelessly refer to as me. When we're more in tune with it, and we feel more aligned with it, with even with weird how weird we are and odd we are. And out of, you know, sync we seem with everything else, we feel more happy. That's our navigating system. Our navigating system says that you are here to be you. You're not here to be anybody else. You're not here to be me. You're not here to match up in Sync with my rhythm in the way that I am. You're here to be you. And that's telling that even when we don't seem to fit in whatever else is happening, that we are more. And this word is a funny little word for me, but I'll just use it happy. Right? We're more content when we are more true to ourselves. That is just real. And the other thing is we are more content when we're just doing what we're doing.
- [45:07]
PJ Vogt
What do you mean?
- [45:08]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
When we're not running other programs while we're doing what we're actually doing. So in other words, if we're not talking about what we're doing, questioning what we're doing, wondering about what we're doing as we're doing it, when we're just doing what we're doing, experience ourselves as more content.
- [45:29]
PJ Vogt
So it's like what you're saying is one of the things that people might develop from a practice like this is like the voice gets quieter or it goes away sometimes.
- [45:38]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, for sure. I would say that what the voice does is the voice syncs up and it's got something to do, which is the thing it's doing instead of watching the thing that it's doing. It's like we're separated from ourselves, literally, right? Because there's us doing what we're doing and then thus watching us and having commentary and having judgment about what we're doing and anxiety about what we're doing. And then we're like, wait a minute. Well, I don't think you should be doing that. It's like when you're watching a movie, you're like, wait, don't, don't, don't, don't. Over there. I. I know what's over there. I'm not sure what's over there, but I have a sense because I've watched this movie before. I've watched movies just that are like this. And so then I'm anticipating what might happen if that person. And you're getting all of the, you know, anxious feelings and the. The heart racing and the blood rushing of what happens. And when you're watching someone else and you're closely connected with the watching, but that's your life that you're doing. You can turn it off if it's Netflix or a movie or something else, but when it's your life, you live with that and you're just running on that fight or flight. You're running in the sympathetic nervous system all the time because you don't get to turn the movie off. And it's sometimes time to just join in and just be the character.
- [46:55]
PJ Vogt
And for you, for most of the time, you don't have, like, the voice in your head is in sync in that way.
- [47:00]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
It is very much in sync. In fact, the voice in my head just now was your voice.
- [47:04]
PJ Vogt
What do you mean?
- [47:05]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
So as you were speaking, the only voice that's in my head is your voice. I'm with your voice. Cause that's what's happening. So I'm in the habit and the practice of being with what is and not running commentary alongside, which for some people, maddens them because it means I respond to things slower as a result, because I have to then process. I'm with life, I'm with what is happening. Not watching life and being a spectator. I am in my life, I being alive, rather than being a spectator of my life, that's sitting there on the sideline, you know, annoyingly having all kinds of judgments and interventions and, you know, postulating about and perseverating about what's going on or what could happen and what might happen and what happened, why didn't I do this or that? You know, you can feel the energy of it. It's just. It's maddening. And when you throw that offline, you just get this.
- [48:11]
PJ Vogt
So when you sit, what do you hear when you sit quietly?
- [48:18]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
So when I said earlier that the instructions that I think most of us get is, you know, we think and even sit quietly, right? So that conjures up all sorts of weird stuff for us, you know, and so then we sit there. We're actively trying to be quiet. And so then we're in a little bit of a battle. So here's the way that I come to it. We're super stealthy, right? Like the ego structure or that extra voice. The sideshow is super stealthy. It's faster and smarter than us. And so my approach is you have to kind of get out of the way of even getting out of the way. And the way to do that is to have one single instruction. And the one single instruction is that you just return. You just come back to yourself. Just come back. Everything else is a sideshow. Everything else that you're doing is a sideshow or a rationale for the sideshow, or it's a judgment of the sideshow, or if it's the judgment of why you should have the sideshow, or maybe the sideshow is worthy this particular time. And it's all a sideshow. All of it is a sideshow. There's just your life. Can we just pause and say, you've just got a life and that's it? That's it. And when I'm fully in my life, that's kind of enough for me. It's just my life. It takes up all my time, takes up all my energy, it takes up all my attention. If I'm fully online with my life, that's all I need, is my life. I don't need the sideshow, I don't need the conversations, I don't need the judgment, I don't need the perseverating, I don't need the postulating. I don't need going into the past, projecting myself into the future, wondering about that. I can just take up the full ass space of my existence with facing my life and meeting my life, just what's right here. So rather than sit quietly, I just invite people to come back to themselves because that's what we're trying to do. It's kind of a shortcut. Instead of doing all these other things that are about coming back to your life, how about just come back to your life? Just come back. You don't have to sit quietly. The way that I say it is you're getting quiet enough to hear yourself. Whatever is happening, you can hear it. And you're getting still enough to be able to feel yourself. Because if you've got a lot of things happening and moving around so that you can't even feel the condition of yourself, then you're not even in the game at all, right? So enough means just enough for you. And if you can feel yourself and hear yourself when you're running, that's awesome. That's good enough. You don't have to sit in a room if you're on a bike and you just go. And it's just like, wow, I can feel my senses. I feel my heart, I feel the quality of my skin, I feel the temperature, I feel the air moving through my hair. And I'm in this body. That's still enough, that's quiet enough. And that's the point.
- [51:41]
PJ Vogt
When Rev uses that word, point, she's referring to something specific. I might use the wrong words here, so you'll have to forgive me, but my understanding is that she means a particular place where you learn to rest your attention and awareness. A place you will drift away from, but which you'll learn to return to. I'm describing a place I'm trying to learn to get to. But the instructions for getting there, as I've heard them, go like this. Find a place that's quiet enough. Get your body into a position that's comfortable enough. Find the specific place rev specifies your lower belly. That's the place where your attention is supposed to rest. As you breathe naturally and as you find your attention awareness moving away and it will to a to do list to questions about what's going to happen next week or what happened in the past, you'll just gently return to point. That's the whole thing. But I'm at the very beginning of trying to understand it. So it feels very strange to try to explain it. But the most basic instruction is just return.
- [52:50]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Meditation is not for me about sitting quietly or becoming quiet. It's about the choice that when you find yourself anywhere other than where you intend to be, you come back. That's what I did when I was a kid. I was like, I don't want to be there. I want to come back. I am out here someplace else tripping on some other possibility that hasn't happened. I don't know if it's going to happen. I'm just going to come back right here.
- [53:24]
PJ Vogt
I'm curious how many people come to you like me. Like, whether election week for people who have a meditation practice is sort of like January at the gym. Like just like a lot of nervous people being like, help.
- [53:36]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I don't personally entertain it anymore. Like, it's not how I face the world, but I always get my most podcasts and everything right around in January, right when everything jumps off. It's like prayer, you know, it's like, you know, you lose your keys and suddenly you get religious. I need to pray. I need to do something. But that makes sense, you know, it's when the bottom falls out, we feel the bottom is falling out, or we fear the bottom is going to fall out beneath us, that we want to find some ground. So it's right. It's the right thing to do. Whatever brings you there, whatever throws you over the edge, that's the thing that should get you there.
- [54:19]
PJ Vogt
The thing I've been most like astounded by in the people in my life who have been drawn to this hasn't. It's funny, like, I feel like this not the sales pitch, but the sales pitch a little bit is feels like maybe it would be easier to live in your own mind, which for me is very attractive. But then what I've seen some people growing into has been instead meditation. That's about compassion. That's like about not just being in your own mind as Easily. But extending compassion to people who might be difficult or just far away from you. And I was wondering if you could talk about compassion practices.
- [54:58]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, I would love to say that compassion naturally arises out of every type of meditation. I don't think that's actually true. I think there's ways that people can meditate and use very focused meditation. Right. Where it's about focus and concentrating attention, that if there's no moral container, there's no moral container. And it doesn't necessarily cause compassion to arise. So yay for your friends and the people that are like this. This comes along with it as well, because they. They clearly have enough of a moral container, either that they brought to it themselves or that's coming along with it as they teach. That is the ideal if we want to be useful for humanity. Meditation that doesn't cause and incite compassion to arise is not going to be of much use to us on the planet, frankly. Meditation is not in and of itself like, it's just going to be good. It makes us better at something, but not necessarily things that are pro social all the time. We pitch it as pro social, but we should be clear about that.
- [56:14]
PJ Vogt
You could be like an executioner who was living in the moment, and you would still be an executioner.
- [56:19]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Totally.
- [56:20]
PJ Vogt
But what about. I mean, like, I guess one of the things that I was at, I was, I won't say dragged to, but I attended as, like a. As a. As I just like was going with my editor Shruti to this event that was a bunch of meditation people. And they were speaking and I found it interesting. And it was nice to be among people who were not my people, who were like, trying to ask and answer some of the questions I care about. And the moment that stopped me short was somebody, I think it was an audience member asked one of the people on stage. They said, well, you know, I'm somebody who's trying to practice compassion meditation. And how do you. When you sit and you try to extend compassion to, you know, difficult people, what do you do about Donald Trump? And I had a moment. It was funny sitting in the audience. The first feeling I had was like a groan, which was interesting, where I was just like, how come we have to talk about this right now? Or maybe it felt very like we're in Manhattan where everybody's of the same tribe and everybody agrees that the same person is bad and there's something. But then really sitting with the question for a moment, I thought, like, it's a great question. It's a really Hard question. Like, how do you feel compassion towards people who have become an avatar of people who just, like, inflict suffering on a really wide scale? And I think, like, I live where I live, and I'm in the tribe where I am. And so, like, it's, like, not hard for a person to predict, like, most of the people in my life what they want to happen in a week. But everybody in the country right now has kind of been. Everybody feels like the world's about to end. Maybe you feel like the world's about to end because Donald Trump's about to be elected, or maybe you feel like the world's about to end because Kamala Harris has been elected. And it feels like a moment of. I think most people feel alienated, and most people feel like, who are these people? Even if they don't agree which the people are. And I'm curious whether your meditation practices, when. When you think about having compassion for people where you really disagree with them, or you really feel like they are moving through the world without compassion and just like, kind of like human bulldozers, but those feel like the people that you're supposed to aim it at. And again, this is more of, like, a series of statements that are shaped like a question mark than a question. But, like, let me put it as a question. Okay. You, I assume, have a smartphone.
- [58:47]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
I do.
- [58:48]
PJ Vogt
And you open your smartphone and, like, one of the apps pushes you a notification that's just like, here's the last thing Donald Trump said, and it's horrible. And, you know, a part of your brain comes online. What do you do with that part of your brain? What is the way you talk to yourself or what is the way you think about that?
- [59:06]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
I'm from New York, so I say, oi, oi. And then I put it down.
- [59:16]
PJ Vogt
Yeah, it's like, return.
- [59:18]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, I'm just like. I put it down. I want to. Actually. I feel a lot of compassion toward him or for him. It doesn't mean I have to keep him close or, you know, make him my bedfellow or want him to win the presidency. But I feel a great amount of suffering from that human being, and mostly because I believe. I don't believe much, but I do believe that human beings are designed to be human. And so when they're acting outside of humanity in ways that are in conflict with humanity, then there's something wrong. And I feel badly for that. I feel badly for anyone that's been fashioned or shaped in such a way that the demands of their nervous system express themselves as operating against humanity. I feel for that. And if I didn't feel for that, I kind of should just jump off of this whole ship and get out of here because then it means that I've lost a hope and aspiration for us to do better. When I take it as somehow it's okay that that person is like that and they're just a shit because they're like that and I can write them off, then I've lost aspiration for all of us, honestly. Or I've decided that I'm gonna partition and cut everybody up into the, like, the. The. The ones that deserve to be here and the ones that don't because they align with my values, beliefs, orientations, wishes, wants. And I'm queer and I'm black and I'm like. I have like so many like, of like points on the little like, marginal spectrum. I would just suffer immensely if I spent all my. Spent my time, not even all some of my time suffering because of what other people are doing in ways that are contrary to the way that I want to live my life. I take it that just they're doing their thing. And I put my time in, my effort, in my energy, in. To try to slow down the wheels that are grinding some of my freedoms to a halt the best that I can, and then try to advance and accelerate the ones that open up portals to evolutionary leaps to something else like marriage equality that just leaps us forward despite our best intention, many people's best intention, to keep it from going that way. Then I just play that. But you know what? None of that is my life. That's not my life. That's the structures and the contours that we're living within and operating within. But I think the trait of. I don't want to say meditation. I would say liberation. The trait of liberation is to not mistake the mechanics and operation stuff for who I am. I don't mistake all of the things that are happening. I have to contend with them, but they're not who I am. I get to keep being me. I get to keep choosing who I am and how I show up. And when I find myself veering off the track of how I'd like to show up in relationship to life, then I return, get back on track, return.
- [62:29]
PJ Vogt
What do you think people come into meditation typically wanting, and do you think that they get the thing that they come in wanting?
- [62:37]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah, I think they come in wanting escape. Escape, quiet. Right. Which is escape. And if they mature, they don't get it. And if they don't mature, they do. So if you don't mature, you do get the escape. And when you mature, you don't get the escape. And when you mature more, you don't.
- [63:09]
PJ Vogt
Want it is what you're describing that you're able, it's like you're able to sit more fully and completely. I guess. People talk about wanting to be in the present more. Everybody says it. It's like this, I always joke with my partner, I'm always like, you need to be in the MoMA. But like what it really means to be in the present is to. It's to not turn away from what hurts as well as what is beautiful about it.
- [63:36]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah. And not just not turning away, to like welcome it. Right. Welcome it as an understanding of it's the flip side. It's just another facet of the joy and everything that we want to welcome. You know, that's like, oh yeah, that comes to that too. That's my favorite thing to say. I'm like, oh, that too, like, and that too. Yeah. And then you take a breath and you make more space in your body, your heart and your physicality and yeah, welcome it. We don't get a single direction door where we can let all the good stuff in and you know, keep out and ward off the bad stuff. It all comes in.
- [64:15]
PJ Vogt
How should I start?
- [64:17]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Well, you started already. You returned. You know, that curiosity that you have, that yearning to find yourself is all you need respond to it. It's like, oh, where am I? What am I? Okay, right here.
- [64:42]
PJ Vogt
That's the whole thing.
- [64:44]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
That's it. There are courses. If you want 14 week courses, they're there. But you know, I don't know, call me lazy, call me expedient, interested in scale. That really is it. What we're building on is the motivation to heed it. You have it, it's there, we all come with it that you ask the question. It means you're already there. What we build is the motivation and the practice to heed it. And to heed it so much that it becomes second nature. And then to heed that so much, that becomes back where it belongs, which is first nature.
- [65:32]
PJ Vogt
It's so intimidating. But I really, I'll try it.
- [65:36]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
I hope so. I hope it's a little less intimidating. You know, it's intimidating because we are intimidating. Meeting ourselves is intimidating. That's the thing that's. We find out, it's like turns out none of that other stuff and we spend a lot of time fabricating things to be intimidated by. But it turns out that the most challenging thing is to turn around and just meet ourselves where we are.
- [65:59]
PJ Vogt
Yeah.
- [66:01]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Yeah.
- [66:09]
PJ Vogt
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams. You can find her online@revangel.com if you visit, you'll find audio recordings of instructions for pointe meditation. Also, on November 16th she's holding a half day sitting meditation. It's over. Zoom. You can join from home. If you want more information, you can also find it on her website. Rev thank you.
- [66:34]
Rev Angel Kyoto Williams
Thank you.
- [66:58]
PJ Vogt
That's our show this week. If you are getting any value out of this show and you would like to help us make it, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You get ad free episodes of the show as well as the occasional bonus episode. Mainly you vote for our existence. If you want to sign up for Incognito Mode, go to Search Engine Show Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt and Shruti Pinmaneni and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perillo and John Schmidt and to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Matt Casey Moore Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney and Hilary Schaf. Our agent is oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJVote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcast Podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.