CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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This is the podcast of the California Institute of integral studies where we bring you conversations and lectures from our public programs series featuring world-renowned scholars,  leaders, authors, artists, and thinkers. To make sure you never miss an episode of the CIIS public programs podcast find us and subscribe on iTunes or on our website at ciis.edu/podcast.

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Megan: Welcome, it's really nice to be with all of you. I wanted to first just put a hope out there that whatever we talk about today is for the benefit of you all and for our communities and for our planet. So I hope that we will take this as a kind of collective space to reflect and to integrate some of the work from this book that Tim has put out and so I want to do an intro for Tim maybe a little differently as some of you know who have read the book. He's very unabashedly and in his willingness not to extract the kind of raw human experience out of the path of mindfulness and self compassion and social justice. And so although he has a rather impressive professional background with working with Thich Nhat Hanh for 20 years and you know speaking in Ivy League schools and all of these wonderful things. I wanted to to speak to the kind of beauty of this text, which I'm sure you've seen is called how to stay human in a fucked up world and the beauty of that is the choice to claim the entirety of the human condition and to stay human. And and so I wanted to start by reading for everyone tends real human bio. And this is the one that gives us insight into the source of your greatness. The one that reveals the Arc of human liberation which contrary to the tales of Enlightenment and spiritual identity and Liberation that are constructed mostly with Palo Santo and Ganesha tattoos. This one speaks to something that can invite ordinary humans all of us into this process and so Tim describes this as a process that helped him change from someone with an intense amount of suffering and self-destructiveness to someone with real intimacy and Harmony in his life. And so Tim, this is how you describe your your experience. I can almost guarantee that when I was first exposed to mindfulness and compassion training as a 19 year old college student, I was a much more fucked up person than you are. I grew up poor in Boston with a single alcoholic mother. I was constantly bullied, homeless as a teenager, and I never knew my father by the time I got to college. I was angry, lonely and had few social skills. When a political science Professor assigned me to read Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh, it changed everything. I immediately recognized that mindfulness and compassion were exactly what was missing from my life. So I'd love to just hear from you why it's important to embrace what is authentic and our mistakes and our misfortunes. Why is it important to stay human?

Tim:  Yeah, yeah, it's funny because I've been thinking about the whole idea of something being important or not and like for me, I'm really happy. I think that our practices like our spiritual practice or whatever we're doing in our lives the more that it's rooted in something that feels like what what you want from your life or like who you want to be or or like like a your authentic aspiration the more actual energy there is two kind of drive it and I think the more that it's rooted in. Trying to be the right way or trying to practice right or what is the act like what's like, what is authentic mindfulness? What is like the right way to practice, you know, whatever I'm doing or what's like like those kinds of questions, I think can end up with us being driven by a sense of living up to other people's expectations. And as soon as that happens in our practice and our lives kind of become more dead, and I feel like for me. So when I think about my own practice of mindfulness in a t- and my meditation practice what it comes down to is kind of recognizing like who do I want to be in the world? When I was at in University, I was introduced to a medi- so my first meditation teacher, her name is Joanne Friday. She lives in Rhode Island near where I went to college and my experience of her and a lot of people that I've known who've gotten to know where over time my experience of her was. She just met me and I felt like she loved me as much or more than anyone that I've ever met. And I was just really thinking about wanting to be that kind of person in the world. Like what like what could I do? Like what kind of life could I live that would be more kind of valuable and fulfilling and you know for me at least then kind of being the kind of person who people meet you and they feel like you love and I was just like, okay, that's so what does she do? Like that's what I want to be and so a lot of it comes down for me to the ways that I've learned to practice that I find actually feel um offer me relief and liberation from the the ways that I'm not like that. Like all all the one of the things that Joanne would say is: If you're if you're ever interacting with somebody and it's you know, whatever it's not working for you and you're like I wonder is this because they're suffering she says that sort of ask yourself. Well, are they/do they seem like they're overflowing with joy and love for everyone they meet because if they're not they're suffering. Because that's what someone looks like when they're not suffering. And so, for me, it's this recognition that it's the suffering in me that kind of,  that's what's kind of getting in the way of being the kind of person that I want to be. And then over time recognizing that what actually that's suffering isn't that bad suffering is this part of life? That's really a part of our human experience that's asking for love. As opposed to like something to avoid or something to get away from or something that's sort of like wrong or you know, however you want to relate to it. It's not like it's not a mistake. It's like oh there's suffering and me which means there's a part of me that's asking for a love and understanding and what actually makes a mammal suffer less is love and understanding. And so I feel like that that for me and so that's led to this this kind of practice that really kind of looks at. Okay so where is like, where are the parts in me that are in need of love and understanding where the parts of me that are suffering and if I can attend to those in give them what they need, then the result is like a organism that's doing better. That's like has this more how I want to live.

Megan: There’s such a tendency to operate in the perspective of right and wrong, right? We're sort of filled with that and and or comparison right? Probably many of us have heard this phrase. Like “Don't should all over yourself” [Tim: Yeah] and I love this aspect of Buddhist philosophy that there is an invitation to shift from this kind of dualistic Paradigm of right and wrong to really observing cause and effect and to getting curious and I'm hearing a lot of curiosity and what you're saying about like, who am I really and what effect do I want to have on other people? I think you even mentioned in that question in here of just starting to ask yourself. What effect do I have when I leave a conversation with someone? and I think it's a really beautiful intention to put out their aspiration to put out there that they would feel fully loved and seen. Yeah, thanks for that. Let's talk about compassion [Tim: mhmm] as a force to prevent overwhelm and respond to suffering you mentioned about, you know, the kind of pervasiveness of suffering that's going on and how we can use recognition of suffering to unveil the needs that are there and respond to those either for ourselves or for others. I want to read a quote from the book that captures some of the essence of the core question of this book you say “Looking around today. It's hard to escape the conclusion that are world is exquisitely fucked but I refuse to let everything that's fucked up in the world strip me of my humanity” you outlined what is challenging about staying human in fucked up world by noting the critical role of how we respond to the immensity of suffering that we confront in our day-to-day lives. Of course, we know this may Encompass inter personal struggles, internal struggles, but also confronting the kind of socio-political and environmental degradation that that compose our current moment, You suggest that by responding with compassion we can prevent this overwhelm and not turn away from the suffering, you know, whether suffering looks like a kind of falling into despair or social social isolation addiction to social media. Maybe it looks more like the toxic righteousness that you mention where we have a kind of anger fueled self certainty and defensiveness that we bring to the table. At the same time, there is just as much value in bringing compassion to bare on suffering and these experiences of joy are what fuel the ability to hold that space of compassion you even mention a quote from Tallahassee. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world. Let's talk about why it's equally important to acknowledge and be present with both what's terrible and with what's beautiful in the world today.

Tim:  Yeah. Yeah, it's easy to sort of in a moment to moment way. It's easier to it's easy to like in some moments feel like everything in the world is awful and then another moments be like, no, it's not and it's sort of like we're like looking to kind of come to some certainty like define like okay, so like the world is this is like good or bad like the kind of like looking for that kind of place to land. So for me again, it kind of comes down to purpose it comes down to: We have a lot of different ways that we can live in the world and what I'm particularly interested in is I want to be able to..there's no way to get through life without being confronted by all of this suffering. Right. And so what we can do is do our best to avoid it and kind of like escape into whatever bubble of privilege that we can find to try to like distance ourselves . Or we can dive fully in and often kind of end up overwhelmed and like like helpless and and kind of feeling powerless, but the like what so You know one of the things that you study like resilience, it's a really interesting idea. And I think it's something that that we don't think I would like for us to think even more deeply about and to have a deeper conversation about because like when we when we talk about resilience when we talk about compassion something that I'm really interested in is, we know that everybody has a limited capacity to be present with suffering whether it's your own suffering or with some somebody else's Sometimes no matter who you are, somebody can be having a hard time and you can be present and helpful and sometimes we get overwhelmed and that's true for everybody. The question is sort of like Is it possible to develop that capacity to kind of grow my ability to be present and helpful in the face of suffering? The thing that's really interesting is We know in the field of Clinical Psychology, there is a test that's called the Facilitative Interpersonal Skills Assessment and what it does is it measures how you respond in highly challenging situations. So you get these prompts of people upset or you know, whatever like something one of them. It's a test for therapists. So it's often like one of them might say every time I talk to you I feel worse. Now I come to you to feel better, but I leave feeling worse. And then you're supposed to respond. And what we know from the literature is that when you assess this person's response based on their capacity to be warm and empathic, Alliance oriented sort of have maintaining kind of hope and positive expectations. These qualities that is perhaps the only existing predictor of clinical of efficacy for a therapist is basically your ability to demonstrate these personal qualities in a difficult interaction. There isn't really a word in the English language to talk about the set of skills that allows you to be helpful when someone's in distress. The close, so people like Richard Davidson use the word compassion to talk about that set of skills but there's a the issue with that word is that it's a really vague word and I have it's like when people take a word that's used very broadly and try to give it a narrow definition. It's always you're kind of begging for confusion and you're trying to kind of give like a sort of a specific meeting to a very general word. But I think The issue is that, there is a set of skills, a set of qualities that predict our ability to be helpful in the face of distress. And whether you want to call that resilience or compassion or something else, like whatever it is. Mindfulness is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls it, but again people have started using the word mindfulness to mean radically different things than what he means by it. That set of skills the the set of skills are the set of qualities that allow me to like someone says like um I don't trust you. Like I think you're phony, you're smiling at me right now, and I don't buy it. And the question is in that moment, do I view you as a threat? And my whole physiology engages in defensive tactics. Or do I view you as someone who's suffering and in need of care? And that sort of training ourselves in the ability. To like to experience suffering. In me or in another person and have that opening reaching out kind of response. As like and like growing that ability um is yeah, it's like, it makes the world more livable because what happens if your capacity to cope with suffering if your capacity to be helpful with suffering is just sort of kind of minimal, then you need to spend a huge amount of your energy trying to escape from your own suffering and from other people's. But like we were talking earlier about Equanimity. It's like if you're able to develop that these qualities in yourself that also in hard moments you're able to be present and open and compassionate. Then what that allows you is to be alive and human and and and in relationship and just more of the time.

Megan:  Yeah, some of the terms that come to mind for me are distress, tolerance [Tim: yeah] right? So which sometimes is defined in terms of our own ability to tolerate the kind of difficult or adverse internal experiences that we have and to not turn away from them. You know emotional approach is another way we try speaking about it and certainly in the resilience literature. There's evidence that the degree to which we’re able to approach our emotional experiences, especially our difficult emotional experiences that this is predictive of resilience outcomes, but it's really nuanced as well right? It isn't just always constantly turn towards in fact George Bonanno and others are looking at resilience trajectories and saying hey, you know, there's actually an adaptive quality to emotional avoidance at times or to turning away. We may need to do that to survive. And so you know to be able to discern what is the most adaptive characteristic at any given time which is sometimes called regulatory flexibility to be able to bring to bear the the skills and the coping strategies that are needed for whatever is arising but certainly to be able to have a kind of unconditional regard towards self and towards others invites into this space a sense of belonging. A sense of okay-ness that you know how you're showing up and who you are right now is acceptable here. And this kind of belonging uncertainty that we feel so much in culture today is actually having huge impacts on anticipatory of stress on stress out comes this sense of do I belong here? And so when we're able to open to one another in times of suffering when we're able to witness that difficulty and to be able to see the beauty in absolutely, everything is perhaps, you know, one of the highest skills we can have and this was kind of put to me by a teacher of mine of: I want you to be able to see the beauty and everything. And at that time I think it was about 23 and so it was a lot of like, I can't see the beauty and like cars and plastic and chemicals and like this and I was I was working on that a lot in my meditation of like, how do I like hold space for that and not turn away and not judge this thing and you know Embrace that it is here or or learn, you know from the emotions that are there that oh, this is something that really matters to me. There's a reason for this anger rejection and it's because something I love is at stake, right? the the natural world is at stake and so a few things happen that kind of helped me learn to embrace but one of them was actually down here walking in the mission. I lived in San Francisco at that time and it was evening time and I was walking down the street and I saw in the middle of the sidewalk from far away this like pile of gems. There's like just a pile of jewels in the middle, you know, and I'm like, what is that and I got a little bit closer to it and I'm like, how is there a pile of gems in the mission? You know,  did I consume a something? I didn't realize and, no it was someone who had thrown out their television and it was the screen of the television which is just made out of glass. I said just shattered on the street and I thought oh how funny that our perception of things, how we appraise what we're seeing shifts so much the meaning we give to it the way that we respond and when I thought it was a pile of rubies. I was like fascinated by this gorgeous thing and then it was a TV and I could feel the judgment that was there right the kind of condition habitual response pattern that tell me oh this modern technology piece isn't there. And so, you know, one of the protective factors I think that compassion and mindfulness offered to us is to be able to recognize to what extent we are appraising things as threats and it is that appraisal of something as a threat that is actually stimulating the physiological and neurobiological and behavioral responses that we have to stress whatever that word means anymore [Tim: yeah] Right? And so here with mindfulness we have an opportunity to sort of shift into a more present moment awareness to say how do I want to appraise or construe this situation? And so it was just a funny like, you know poke in the ribs from the universe of like: Oh really you don't think TVs are beautiful? [Tim: yeah, yeah] How about this right now?

Tim:  So the other thing that I wanted to say about so we were talking about like being able to look at what's beautiful and what's horrible in the world. The way that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about mindfulness practice is he'll say that there are basically two sides to mindfulness practice. There's the the side of mindfulness practice that's about cultivating joy and the side of mindfulness practice that's about transforming suffering and he'll talk about, he'll say if you focus on one and neglect the other you end up with bad psychic circulation, but I've always loved that kind of like term that he uses. But what he means is I think we all know if you try to just focus on what's good in life in the with the hope of kind of avoiding what's difficult that the you know, suffering doesn't go away and it kind of forces its way into your life and shows up in different ways. And then conversely there are a lot of people who just focus so much on either their own suffering or the suffering in the world to the point that they just get exhausted and overwhelmed and this sort of capacity to regulate to be able to understand. So if we were to take as kind of like two core practices. There's a fucking million ways to sort of train your mind, but at least from the way that that I've study with Thich Nhat Hahn. There's sort of these two core practices in the practice of cultivating joy comes down to training your attention to notice what's already beautiful in this moment. There are a lot of really beautiful people in this room who are gathered because they care about these kinds of issues and practices and it's just like it's fucking great. We're alive um that's really good. You know, we have a lot of needs that are met in this moment and there's a lot of beauty that's here. And so the practice of cultivating joy is the ability to notice that in the practice of transforming suffering he describes as the practice of recognizing and embracing suffering with love and compassion. And the question of like when to sort of move back and forth between am I focusing on the suffering that's present in me and trying to embrace it or am I focusing on what's beautiful in life and a lot of that has to do with you know, it's like a trial and error but there's like experiences of joy at the very least give us the energy that we need in order to be present with suffering because it takes energy to it's difficult. But that suffering that's in us needs our love and attention or it will continue to insist and kind of like look for it. So I'd say like that for me being able to move back and forth between those two core practices, allows for both of them to really be possible and to be kind of like, yeah to function.

Megan:  This might be a good time for us to just address sort of the difference between Hedonism and giving care to the cell for focusing on what's beautiful in life. I can imagine some people saying, `”Well, I don't have time to you know, sit around and think about was beautiful because there's so much horrible activities going on in the world” I need to address that so let's talk about that difference between Hedonism and passion and then even let's broaden it out to the social justice Arena and say, you know the difference between the idea of acceptance or forgiveness and kind of justification of what has occurred.

Tim:  Yeah. I think that we're all deeply hedonistic and the more that we can recognize that in ourselves the more that we won't see conflicts between caring for myself and caring for others. So when I'm engaging in any type of social justice actions when I'm getting arrested like whatever I'm doing why? Why am I doing it? Oh, well, I'm doing it because of the Injustices in the world. Okay, there's Injustice in the world well so why are you acting you're not like there are other people aware of this Injustice that aren't acting why are you doing it? And if we can recognize that I'm doing it because I like to, I'm doing it because I feel like living beings seek to reduce suffering and find happiness. We're often really fucking confused about how to actually go about that. But that's all that motivates life. We try to reduce suffering and thrive and that's and if we can recognize like one of the things that Marshall Rosenberg talks about on nonviolent communication is that we one of the most primary needs that a human being has is they need to contribute to life. And you can tell because when someone has that need met if someone tells gives you the feedback that like what you did just made my life way better, there's almost nothing that feels better than that. And so recognizing that my needs and others needs aren't separate and they're certainly not in conflict. And if I can see that whatever is motivating me is my model for how to suffer less and have more well-being and my model might be fucked. My model might be really sending me in the opposite direction and it often does but it's that's that's what's motivating it. That's what's animating me. And so if you see a conflict there. Between taking care of myself and taking care of others, recognize that those two things are both things that you want. And that drive you and then if you if you can just be like I want both of those things. Then it stops feeling like as much of a conflict and you can just want both and you can do your best to find strategies or actions that meet our collective needs. So I feel like I'm an Unapologetic Hedonist and I and when I see other people in that light, that's when I see your beautiful aliveness. Like when I see that you're you just like we all just don't want to suffer. We all just are doing our best to thrive and find Wellness. And like that's what's animating us and we might be really fucking confused about it. But that's what we're trying to do. And we're all in it together. And if I can see that motivating you, then it's like that's when I can see the energy of life in you that I can really love and appreciate and see the beauty in so like for the hedonist part, I feel like that's it really comes down to like looking/observing like what is the energy that is animating me. Why do I want to do anything? And this sort of idea that like I can find that kind of universality of motivations in anything. That's kind of motivating me and then I can see it in other people.

Megan: Yeah, it's important. I think to acknowledge sort of what motivates us and that's such a huge question and behavior change literature. But also just for ourselves like what makes me excited to get up in the morning? And our worldview is so sort of centered in individual self that there is the idea that selflessness and selfishness are somehow mutually exclusive to one another and yet when you see that, you know, my suffering is bound to yours and my liberation is bound to yours, then whatever I'm doing that is in service to healing will be ideally mutually beneficial to both. And in fact, there's really awesome literature coming out from Docker Keltner over just on the other side of the bridge there about the way that states of awe and wonder actually increase pro-sociality and you know our desire to support one another and to be in community. And so I think you know, one of the things I remind myself is like you can't truly give from a state of depletion and that usually when I am there’s sort of like expectation that goes along with it, right? And so much of life and I think so much of this practice of starting to understand how do we see reality and what's actually there and not just our expectations and our preferences is about learning to not become so addicted to our preferences that you know, I want things to be this way and my unconditional regard in my unconditional love for this world or for myself is dependent on whether my preferences are met and so there is this element. I think that leads into well, how do we learn to embrace negative emotions? How do we learn to embrace the situations where our needs are not being met or our preferences are not being met? And the degree, you know, there's certainly evidence to say that the more negative emotional states. We have the more health issues we have but that is completely Dependent on our evaluation again of negative emotions when we're able to actually embrace them as meaningful as helpful as even, you know, roadmaps to being able to meet our needs more effectively then all of a sudden they become something that doesn't hinder our health, but can actually have, you know, just clarifying and salutary outcomes for us. So you speak about this a lot, of course welcoming our negative experiences. What do you say to someone who's like “No, anger sadness don't want them” Who are these people who can Embrace their negative emotions?

Tim:  Yeah, nobody wants them. I mean, why would? Like if someone just like I feel a lot more skeptical of the people who are like, oh, yeah! They're great. I kind of I'm just like I don't like I think you're maybe saying something that you would like to believe as opposed to something that you really believe. We all do that, that's fine. I mean we and I feel like that that can be a good thing too it's like I'd like to believe this and so I'm going to act as I do I think There again, it can get kind of subtle but so when someone is saying like, how could I accept injustice? How can I accept? Yeah, so whether it's like a fucked-up situation in the world, I don't want to accept it or whether it's my own, you know rage. I don't want to accept it. The question for me is the the first thing that I want to that I want to see is like the part of that hates your rage, the part of you that hates this Injustice. I love that part of you. That's the part of you that just wants to suffer less that wants the world to be better and wants wellness, that’s fucking beautiful. Of course, you want that? So we love that part. Is it possible to at the same time love the part of you that's filled with rage? And the part of you that's filled with rage. What is it looking for? Like how is that how is that has the same motivation, the same aliveness in it the same drive to suffer less like the part of me. That's like yeah, like the that won't let go of that rage right? There's the part of me that hates my rage. Beautiful. Of course, you don't, you just want to be happy and there's a part of me that won't let go of my rage. Well, if I let go of my rage and money gets, you know, I'll be a victim. I'll get walked off, you know, people will walk all over me like what whatever it is It can be different things for different people.But the rage also just wants the same thing. That and if we can see that nature in whatever/however mind is manifesting. Mind can manifest as however the fuck it died it in a lot of different ways. And that's one of the things that I was talking with a friend about this earlier. So I was just for a few months doing some research at Google. I'm not there anymore, but I was doing some research we were I'm really interested in the idea of growing peer counseling and especially making it like really affordable and accessible and so we were like looking at ways to try to create high-quality easily accessible peer counseling and I'm going to be doing it in some other ways now. But some of the research that we were doing there, I,  we had this assessment tool that we built that had people go through these video prompts of like difficult interactions and had them kind of respond and I invited a bunch of meditators to try it out and what I found was about half of them were like top decile like really really great at staying present and compassionate when someone was upset and about the other half were like in the bottom decile. And when I dug in with them what I learned was, some people spend their meditation time getting really comfortable and taking care of their suffering and they get really good at being present with difficult emotions some people spend their meditation time avoiding their suffering and just trying to like get away from it and they train themselves in not wanting to go anywhere near distress and they get worse at it. I'm assuming or at least they or maybe they just don't get better, but this could kind of capacity to to get to know  our suffering and to see the beauty in it. Our ability to love,  to embrace our suffering with compassion really just comes from being able to see see it clearly. You know, it's this energy that just wants to be loved and understood like every fucking living thing. And we can as soon as we can see that that's what's animating it, then it's like that's all that then it's just like yeah, that's that's all I want for you and it's easy to have that kind of connection. But the problem is when we're attached to: I don't like how you're looking for love. I don't like how you're asking for love. You're asking for love or you're asking for safety or you're asking for understanding by telling me I'm worthless. So everybody, you know, whatever that strategy is and if we focus on how I don't like how you're asking  then we don't then we can't sort of look Beyond and see like what you're asking for and let me actually know how I can be your ally.

Megan:  As you're describing that, I'm thinking about an idea you put out in this book that you know our pain actually reveals to us what matters to us and what is important to us.  I'm thinking about how I think we often feel we don't have the energy to confront what is going on in the world today. And where does this energy come from? And I think what's so beautiful about this approach is that there is a deep energy you're calling at this animating principle within that and when we get to connect to it, it actually can fuel that and I think you know just call out as well the way that we've really demonized stress in our culture, which is very understandable because we see the ways that we are engaging in work lives and in relationships that aren't providing us with a sense of being met and being seen and being loved. In these ways that we're sort of so deeply longing for and so many moments and yet now we're saying, okay. Well if you're stressed something is wrong about that and you know, how many stress reduction programs are out there right now and so don't have the stress and in a sense. It's again this kind of culturally turning away from that voice within us that is saying hey something that matters here is at stake, right and when we can start to tap into oh this feeling of stress is actually just my body mobilizing energy towards action. And if I can take a moment to get out of my instead of Habitual thought patterns and responses in life and say what matters here? What is what is important to me? Then I can start directing that energy and mobilizing in a way that is hopefully more effective or more skillful, you know to we're always learning. You mentioned though that holding pain with compassion leads to transformation. Right bringing up pain without compassion is just rumination. So how can someone know in my ruminating or in my actually transforming something?

Tim:  Yeah. So Thich Nhat Hanh  in the Yogacara school of Buddhism has this whole like description of we have there's a sort of how suffering and transformation works in this sort of their conception of consciousness. But the way Thich Naht Hanh will draw this diagram of: You have a seed of suffering in your store consciousness and a seed of mindfulness or compassion and your core Consciousness and When you get in touch with whatever pain is in you, maybe on purpose or maybe it just comes up, you know triggered and whatever way manifests. That's they describe that as sort of like the seed is watered and it manifests in the mind consciousness. Like In sort of a garden of your mind consciousness. And then what he said the way that he describes it is in that moment, if you are able to water the seed of mindfulness and compassion so that so this is the sort of your suffering that's kind of like the seed of your suffering is sort of manifested in your mind consciousness you water the seed of mindfulness so that it can fully embrace and hold the suffering that's present in your mind consciousness- that leads to transformation. When you bring up suffering and what happens is when he when they describe transformation what they mean is. Mindfulness and compassion embrace your suffering and then when your then what happens is the seed of suffering when it returns to your core consciousness becomes weaker, becomes less likely to manifest. However, if you water the seed of suffering in yourself and it manifest in your mind consciousness, and it's not embraced with mindfulness and compassion then every time it manifests to get stronger you're sort of saying anger, you're practicing grief you're practicing fear. If it's not if it's not held with mindfulness and compassion and then it gets easier to manifest into comes up more readily. So there's a, now the the nice thing and especially in a place like this we can sort of talk about the mindfulness and compassion that is holding your suffering doesn't need to come from you. It can come from somebody else. And in fact, it's like when we think about a therapeutic relationship we can think about that same principle that it's like I'm bringing my stuff. I'm manifesting my suffering and you're manifesting your compassion. And you know the mind is dual and permeable so that there's that, you know, it's transformed in that sense. But that's the kind of what actually does the work. The question had a no. Is really a question of feel of it's clear if you're really, like fully embracing, if I'm experiencing some grief in me right now and I'm really fully embracing it with compassionate presence. There's a sweetness and it's the image that Thich Nhat Hanh uses. It feels like you're holding a crying baby and there's like a comforting kind of experience that's there and and if you're not It's or it's a little bit unclear. But the question is sort of like does it feel like transformation? Are you over time, If you're practicing in a way that's over time, you don't feel that seed of anger or seed of fear in you becoming not as strong, then he would say well examine your practice and kind of like look at like is there something that's missing? Is there something you're misunderstanding and there's some really interesting data. Jaak Panksepp is one of the our first kind of Affective neuroscientists. He's like the person who coined the term Affective Neuroscience. Panksepp focuses focused as he passed away recently, but he focused his career on understanding sort of our basic emotional circuitry and like trying to understand what are the basic emotional circuits that all mammals share. And part of his research talks about there are two what he would call positive Affective circuits that all mammals have and they're the play circuit and the care circuit. If you're laughing and having fun, if we could image your brain with enough detail, then we would see that your play circuit is active if you're feeling warmth and love and  if we could image your brain with enough detail we would see that the care circuit is active and he described how when any sort of threat response when the brain is sort of activated in a threat response way whether it's rage or fear or grief. Activating one of those two circuits either naturally or using micro electrodes in animal studies radically reduced distress and reduced activity in the sort of threat related circuits. And basically he would sort of talk about care and play as being our primary emotional regulation tools that we have and which for me kind of maps on to practice and the sense of like in therapy, we often really focus on care, we focus on compassion, but for a lot of us humor is like just as helpful. Especially if you work in a high needs or like direct service kind of setting, what you find is often in those communities there's a really kind of often kind of dark sense of humor that develops and I remember I was working in Oakland at a intensive day treatment center for kid's and kind of talking with people about like the jokes that would happen and whether they were inappropriate or things like that and what was so we did his training on secondary trauma and the whole everybody on staff was just like this is how we don't get traumatized. The more that we can laugh about something the more that we don't take it home and so like that idea of understanding that care, compassion, and play or humor are like these kind of core tools for Affective um regulation. Yeah

Megan:  :  So I wanna have us talk a bit about the role of social connection in all of this and social conflict in all of this. We know that social connection is a huge stress buffering element. So there's even, you know, a lot of evidence coming out now from some of my colleagues at Carnegie Mellon that’s showing that really what mechanism is driving this link between mindfulness practices and health outcomes really has to do with the fact that when I'm able to have this level of emotion regulation. I don't experience so much social anxiety. And so I actually get to have more social connectivity which means more social interactions on a daily basis, but primarily more meaningful social connections and social connection is a primary determinant of our health and well-being outcomes. More of a determinant than smoking, more of a determinant than wearing a seatbelt. And so perhaps you know, it's really this enhanced sense of connection that you know facilitated by play and other things that's actually helping us to benefit from these mindfulness practices more directly. So certainly there's this beautiful protective quality at the same time. We have a lot of social conflict and you've done a lot of work in the Occupy Movement. Tim was, you know, played a key role in the Occupy Movement and was actually facilitating a lot of the discussions and what you saw is bunch of people who could not agree on things, right? And so there's now the you know this opportunity to say, well, how do we come from a needs-based place? And you present this in your book of how do we recognize that each one of our needs, as an individual, is inherently valuable and sometimes we forget that and so we end up in these situations that are no longer dialogue but are full of conflict or defensiveness. And so you suggest okay, we need to really first work on ourselves in order that we can then recognize that the person in front of us who may have been developed in the mind as an enemy actually is just doing the best that they can to meet their own needs as well. Maybe really unskillfully, as sometimes happens, but nonetheless that's what they're doing. And so you suggest that you know, as a kind of key component to being able to work through social conflict is you know to recognize that both needs are valuable and although we may not meet them perfectly there is going to be a much better flow and alignment moving through if we can at least agree that each one of those is inherently valuable. Where have you seen this play out well? And do you think that this is you know, a key given just the degree of social conflict, the degree of political corruption, you know, can you speak to those who might feel like with how fucked up everything is, how is just being compassionate going to solve anything? So like how broad do you think this can go?

Tim:  So I have a couple of friends who are cloistered or Hermits. And so there's like that but it's a really difficult practice but there's like there is this the presence of compassion in somebody's own practice. I feel like is I don't know. I mean when I think about the sort of primacy of social interaction, I'm just thinking about like?  who's sort of a cloistered kind of hermit and like how joyful he is makes me just sort of like, you know, think about different ways of how that works when I think about conflicts. So there's a quote by James Baldwin. A James Baldwin quote that's like not everything that can be :not everything that you face can be changed but nothing can be changed until it's faced”. And so what I would say is like I feel really inspired in terms of living my life in such a way. That's about loving people. I like as my practice it’s like, okay, so when I think about how am I practicing, like the sort of gauge for that is like do I love the people in my life? Do I love the people that I meet? And that's hard and but a lot of it comes down to my capacity to be present with distress my capacity to be to maintain the sort of caring orientation when met with distress and we all have the issue. Is it denying your when you're at your capacity is not how to improve your And that's one thing so I feel like a lot of people know like oh but like isn't when you're like isn't isn't it important to be able to sort of withdrawal that's part of resilience like this sort of, you know, not always having this approach orientation. It's like yeah, I mean the idea is that like if you're thinking about a strength, it's like recognizing this is beyond what I'm capable of and kind of moving back into something and like taking care of myself is what's going to help me to develop that capacity greater. But I think so when we talk about the relationships in our lives and we talked about sort of our relationships in society, we have a lot of problems to solve. but when we face any type of frustration anytime reality isn't the way we want it to be there's some amount of distress that arises that's just fucking happens. Right? It's just like oh this isn't how I wanted it to be which is all the fucking time and there's something there's going to be some part of you that's like ugh it and that part of you wants some empathy. That part of you just wants somebody to be like, yeah, you really wish it was going to be different. That's great. You know you feel like it might have been better if it were different, sure. But the issue is every time we're facing problems together, the distress arises and if we don't have this capacity to be present with it and to have this sort of caring orientation to being able to my own distress into other people's distress then we're not even able to face the problem much less solve it. And so the the question and so it's the the question isn't so much like: Okay well, could we all just meditate all the time and our problems go away. It's like that's fucking stupid. But but instead the idea is like if you're finding that in trying to face problems, we're just getting we're like getting so upset that we're not able to care for each other. Then it would make sense to try to develop that capacity more. And to and to value that as sort of like yeah to as a way of improving our ability to live together.

Megan:  Yeah, I couldn't agree more that it's fucking stupid to think that to think that mindfulness is a magic bullet practice to make the world how we think it should be right? Comes back to the cause and effect. And so as you were talking about the growth of this seed and its fruits are really I was thinking about Sloka that has kind of carried with me and my practices from the yoga sutras is Tapas, Svadhyaya, Isvara Pranidhana. Tapas is the transformation and the old word the saying was just to cook to change the state of something. And so I think one thing to sort of recognize underlying this what do I actually have the capacity to change and Svadhyaya means to sit next to oneself right self inquiry. Isvara Pranidhana is the release. So I think, you know, maybe we can end with just a recognition that there is also uncertainty and many things that we cannot control right? And so the ability to use these practices to become more clear and discerning in those things that I'm able to change and to act on those with a conviction and fueled by an awareness of what really matters to me having come from going into you know, being with my emotional state but also the willingness to accept the things that are not in our control, you know in this we measure this as controllability awareness Some of the literature one's ability to actually discern which things you should take action towards in which things to let go of and that's actually a better indicator of Health in any particular coping mechanism. So maybe you can speak a little bit to this idea of uncertainty. Especially [Tim: yeah] I don't know what the climate crisis and the state of our world today. How can people use these practices to meet what is left unresolved in their hearts?

Tim:  Yeah, yeah, I I think that went one thing that happens whenever whenever we're trying to develop our capacity to be present with suffering, we always end up kind of confronted with what's in philosophy called theodicy, which is basically just sort of like well, why is there suffering like like why do we have to go through this? Why is there pain in life? What's the fucking point? Like what like my mind tells me everything would be better if there weren't pain. And so how am I supposed to feel okay? And I think mean even from like a kind of Ericksonian standpoint like art sort of the first stage of psychosocial development and Erikson's trust versus mistrust in this sort of idea of like, how can I feel a basic sense of trust in everything that I can't control? When I when I recognize that just like the there's a lot of pain in the world. And so we all have different ways of relating to this. But if we want to be able to develop this kind of equanimity that allows us to be present in different situations like we need to be able to look at what we can't control with some amount of trust that it's okay that I can't control it. And I feel like when we start to get into developing sort of these like states of of equanimity and compassion we hit that at some point of like I don't like not being able to control things and I don't trust that they're going to be okay. Our minds have in many ways developed. To try to come up with some sort of constantly tell us how life could be better. to come up with ideas or images or models of what would be better. And that's really what a human mind is supposed to do right? The whole point of having a mind is: I'm noticing that there's a sensation of hunger and my mind’s  like, oh there's food over there go get it. Right. It's like, you know, what would be a better state than this? is the one I'm picturing. And yet that capacity that allows us to do so much that capacity that allows us to be like, you know, what would be better than right now? It's the thing I'm imagining. It also ruins fucking everything it like it makes it really hard to have any type of equanimity because your mind always has a picture of how the world could be better than it is. And you say the world is perfect as it is in your mind's like I could fucking easily picture a better world than this. Um, but it's something that we have to face at some point. The world is precisely as it is. It's not under our control and to the degree that I really believe there are elements of the world that are unacceptable. I won't be able to really be here in them. Like I'm going to be caught in that. So it's kind of like what you were talking about in terms of like plastic and cars and like when you were when you were younger, so the first step in that practice is kind of recognizing that aversion. It's beautiful, it's perfect. It's like that part of it is like  I would like the world to be the best it possibly could be. That's what I'd say. That's like great. That's what you're supposed to do that that's what your mind is supposed to do is like be like I'd like the world to be even better than it is. Thank you. But then the so then you then the question so the first thing that happens when you kind of recognize when you kind of like appreciate your aversion is it comes down a little bit? It's a little easier to kind of see the world as it is. It's like you're not so deeply kind of viewing the world through that prism. But then eventually we do end up having to like there's a in the book I quote. There's like a one of my favorite headlines for the onion ever was God admits he's addicted to killing babies. And it's like that's true. like bad shit happens and we have to sort of like look at it. And like how is it possible to feel some equanimity to feel some acceptance to feel to sort of to have some like I can feel okay. I can feel some amount of trust when we see that's what's happening. I don’t have an answer. The practices that really helped me. There's an idea in well, there's an idea in many schools of Buddhism that suffering is what makes compassion possible. There's an idea in Tibetan Buddhism and they're a little like I come from a Zen lineage. There they have a harder time with teleology but Tibetan Buddhism or happy to create myths about you know, sort of why things are the way they are. There's an idea in Tibetan Buddhism that the human realm is the ideal realm to be born. That if you're born in a Hell realm or an animal realm is not as good but also if you're born in a Devar realm in which anything you want just happens as soon as you want it. There's no opportunity to develop anything that would be that we would consider a virtue. There's no opportunity for patience or compassion or anything that you anything that you like about yourself comes from the fact that you experienced suffering. There's a saying in Buddhism that “All compassion comes from suffering and great compassion comes from great suffering.” and when we think about the people in our world that kind of exemplify great compassion; people like Nelson Mandela, people like Thich Naht Hanh. They’re people who suffered really deeply and it's not true that all suffering turns into compassion. We wish that were true and it's not. But I can say I believe that it's true that all compassion comes from having suffered and it's about Can we turn our suffering into compassion? and so they have this sort of theodicy that we have that life gives us enough, life gives us suffering in order to be sort of fuel. For us to develop virtue for us to develop what you know, the what's beautiful about being a human. And whether that's true or not, I find it a helpful way of thinking and an A way that kind of inspires me. I mean that look whether you want it or not life, gives you just big fucking piles of suffering. And if you can be like, okay, I know I'm tasked with transforming that into compassion. Then it can at least like be an orienting way of handling it when it's given to you. And so for me, it's like this like well, yeah, I'm not in control of the transmissions that I'm given, the suffering and the beauty that I'm given, but what I am in control of is what I do with them and so what I want to do is I want to appreciate everything beautiful that comes into my life and I want to embrace and transform whatever suffering comes into my life. And just like because I feel like that's you know, that's what it means to sort of fully live a life as a human.

Megan: I really appreciate you being here. And can we give a round of applause to Tim Desmond?

[Audience applauses]

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