Original subtitles

There's this book I love, and I go back to and back to, called Comfortable with

Uncertainty. It's by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron, who has also

written really, really, really well-known, beloved books like When

Things Fall Apart and Welcoming the Unwelcome.

But this particular book resonates with me in part because of the title.

It has been a real revelation of my own life, how uncomfortable I was with

uncertainty.

How many places I didn't go, how many things I didn't do, how many

conversations I wouldn't have, because I just couldn't control the way they would

turn out.

And just knowing that, just feeling uncertain, feeling a little afraid, was

enough for me to avoid the thing altogether.

But you get older, and you begin realizing how much there is that you

can't avoid.

You realize that discomfort is going to come for you whether you want it or not.

I think it's easy to go pretty far with the illusion.

that you can control what is happening around you, that there is some set of

decisions you can make or choices you can make, find the people, the partner,

the job, the success, the whatever, they'll keep you safe. And then you keep

getting older and you realize it's not going to happen, that things are going

to keep falling apart and coming back together and then coming apart again,

that there's no stable ground in the end to stand on.

And so you have to have some real relationship with uncertainty, with

discomfort, with pain.

with suffering, with loss.

And I've just found children's books and work to be maybe better than anything

else for trying to force at least me into some more truthful relationship

with that, which is not the illusion that I can make it not happen or that,

you know, with enough meditation or wisdom or anything else, I won't feel

it, but actually the recognition that the path to growth and to wisdom is

letting yourself feel it.

Children is a new book out, Another Kind of Freedom, which is on these themes and

many others.

And it created for me this wonderful and unexpected opportunity to interview

somebody from whom I have learned so much.

It's a really beautiful conversation.

I found it really helpful. I hope you do too.

As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.

Pema Chodron, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

It is such a pleasure to have you here.

I want to begin with something you say in your book, Comfortable with

Uncertainty, because that book is important to me.

And you write there that the central question is not how we avoid uncertainty

and fear, but how we relate to discomfort.

Why? Well, I think if you're going to live in this age that we live in,

discomfort is an ongoing thread.

for everybody through everything.

And a big theme is how to get rid of it, how to not be

feeling uncomfortable, not to be feeling uncertain, how to not feel insecure.

And so the approach that Buddhism takes is that there's this

expression about only way out is through.

So that's really sort of the idea.

And one of the things that I've started saying is, to get your nervous system

used to certain things. If you try to just go about trying to change the outer

circumstances, which, of course, I applaud people that try, but this is

more an approach of working with what the outer circumstances trigger in you,

and then the work becomes befriending or...

It's hard to find exactly the right word, but the idea is that...

You're not trying to get rid of, you're trying to become intimate with.

And this turns out to be completely accurate, that if you approach things

and kind of become familiar with what it feels like to feel insecure, let's just

start with insecure, is that okay?

If you become...

familiar with what it feels like to be insecure.

Not the storylines particularly around insecurity, but storylines are like

triggers. And what they trigger is something physical in your body.

And so if you can contact that, and actually in working with a lot of

people, it doesn't seem very hard to contact because it's kind of like, if

you say like, what are you feeling in your solar plexus?

People can go right there. And then what do you say? What does it feel like? And

There's some version of contracted and tight is what people usually say.

So this sounds like, doesn't sound all that spiritual or anything, but actually

if you can become comfortable, or let's say, what would the word be? It's not

accepting exactly. It's more like willing to be there fully and completely

with whatever it is you're feeling with kind of a unconditional, I would say,

warmth. is the word I would use, unconditional warmth towards whatever

you're feeling.

That seems to be the way, not so much that you get rid of the feeling, but

that it all becomes very workable.

One word you use sometimes that really helped me is abiding.

Abiding. We were talking before this began about how I sometimes have trouble

with the verbs here.

Surrendering and letting go.

Right, right.

But for me, discomfort, uncertainty, insecurity, they are very...

It took time to see this, but they are very physical. They are a contraction in

the solar plexus. And it took a long time to see how

reflexively I ran from that and tried to make the feeling go away.

Absolutely right.

That is what people do.

You can kind of account on it, really.

Tell me about the term befriending the warmth, because there's sort of two

stages as I read you to what you're saying here. One is the...

Don't run from it. You are going to feel uncomfortable. You are going to have

discomfort that that is not an eradicable part of life.

But then there's this next move.

You sometimes say smile at it, befriend it.

I wouldn't say I've quite figured that one out, you know, and maybe I'll use an

example. Like imagine somebody's in a fight with their partner.

angry, they're hurt, they're rehearsing all the things they should have said or

all the things they're going to say, their chest is tight, they can't stop

thinking about it.

What does it mean to befriend that feeling?

Well, first of all, it means, let's go through the sort of steps, you know.

First of all, you have to want to.

And then the question becomes just, I think it's your question, well, how do I

actually do that?

So the first thing would be some kind of pause.

Through meditation, one of the things you learn to do, it's kind of very basic

to meditation, is something that I call letting the storyline go.

If you meditate and you have an object of meditation that you keep coming back

to, then you begin to experience all your thoughts, storylines, as something

that you can interrupt, something that you can come back from, that you don't

have to keep following it and keep following it.

Keep following it. So it's like you see yourself going down a rabbit hole and

you decide, no way am I going to go down that rabbit hole. So how do I not go

down the rabbit hole?

And then you go to your body and you find where in your body

you're holding the grievance or the sense of revenge

or the sense of regret that you didn't say the right thing.

You don't really have to name it, but you say, go to, what are you feeling

like right now? What are you feeling? Not conceptually, you don't have to say

mad or anything like that. What are you feeling? And then find that feeling in

your body. So what you find is a contraction, some kind of tightness, a

knot almost.

And you can ask a person, well, where is it? Some people will say, it's all over

my body.

But usually they'll say, like, it's in my solar plexus, it's in my throat, my

stomach, wherever.

It doesn't really matter.

But once you're there, the attitude towards it is not that it's something

that needs to be eradicated.

You know, oh, let's find it and then we'll throw it out or something like

that. The attitude more is that you send.

I like to use the word tenderness towards it. You send warmth towards it.

People do this differently. People find their own way to do this.

If you want to conceptualize it, you would say you send it unconditional

love. You send it unconditional warmth, unconditional tenderness.

It's like you're not going to give up on yourself.

What if you don't feel unconditional love towards it?

If you don't feel unconditional love towards it, not a problem.

Then you...

Then you send the warmth towards what does it feel like to not have

unconditional love?

I mean, what does that feel like? And then what would you say that would feel

like? To not have unconditional love?

Yeah. To feel like you don't qualify for doing this because you can't send

unconditional love?

Hmm.

Let me try to think through how it feels for me.

I think the idea of how it would feel to have unconditional love is so, for a

feeling like that.

It's so alien that even trying to describe it is hard because the water I

swim in is wanting certain feelings to go away. Yeah, right.

You're a typical human being. I am a typical human being.

And one thing that I have gotten better at over time has been

abiding in those feelings and then recognizing that they will change.

And that they will change more profoundly if I let them sit there.

But I certainly have not found warmth for them. I've become maybe better at

attending to them.

I think in some places you talk about sometimes noting feelings like that as a

bell to pay attention.

And I've gotten a little bit better at that. I have a physical relationship to

uncertainty, which when I feel it,

I now feel that is something that I should look at as opposed to try to get

rid of.

But I have a lot more trouble when people say... Extend unconditional love.

Extend unconditional love. What about just a gesture, like touching it with

your hand? That does help me. I do do that. In other words, get away from

concept and words altogether and just put your hand there.

That can be very, very powerful to just do that.

And sometimes people, they just express affection for themselves by, you know,

maybe touching the top of their head. I don't want to get too corny with this,

but some sort of sense of being okay with yourself.

How do you help people learn to feel what they're feeling in their body?

It has taken me many years of therapy and meditation to even realize.

That I often wasn't feeling what was happening in the body, that I didn't

have awareness of it. I was reacting to it. It was there.

I had a therapist once who was actually one of the people who really helped me

work with this.

What she realized about me was that the way I would talk about something and the

way I would feel about it were very different.

And she would start telling me when I was talking about something, she'd say,

stop, tell me the same thing, but have your hand on your stomach.

Tell me the same thing, but have your hand on your heart. Oh, really?

And it was a very powerful practice because the feeling would start to come

into what I was saying.

Yes, okay. So you're saying that for you, the physical gesture is actually

very, very important in terms of something. It certainly helped me, yeah.

Yeah, well, I found exactly the same thing.

And that's where I've come to find out that if people just use gestures, that

it helps a lot to sort of soften up the situation, touching the heart.

or touching where the contraction is, put your hand where that is.

And have a sense of that hand being friendly.

And the heart seems to be the one that really gets to people. You know, you

could be on the street, and then someone, for some reason, they like

something you just did or something, they'll just touch their hearts.

And I find it's such a sweet thing, you know, a way to communicate to people you

don't know on the street.

Why do you think it's so hard to feel what we're feeling?

A lot of times it's trauma-related, that people close down at a young age around

something or other.

And so it's like trying to open up a floodgate, and maybe people are scared

for one thing, you know, to open up that floodgate.

And actually, it's not such a great idea to open up a floodgate. It's more a good

idea to sort of like...

put a little hole in it, in a tiny hole, so that the whole thing is a gradual

opening. So let's say you're there and you're feeling how you're feeling, you

know, and maybe you don't like how you're feeling, but you're at least

there with it.

You have a line that I find very evocative. You said, I once asked the

Zen master Kobun Chino Roshi.

Kobun Chino, yeah.

How he related with fear.

And he said, I agree.

I agree. I agree.

Yeah, it was such a beautiful answer, you know? It was sort of shorthand for

this whole thing that we're talking about.

I stress the warmth and the friendliness because people seem to need that a lot.

But the fundamental thing, if you're saying, what are we actually trying to

do here?

It's like agreeing rather than disagreeing, accepting rather than

rejecting, staying with rather than running away.

What are some other ways we could say?

I mean, allowing?

Allowing. Allowing is a good word, yeah.

Allowing rather than disapproving or criticizing.

And the thing is, what I like about this approach and what seems to be attractive

to people is it doesn't matter where you are in the process, you can make friends

with that.

So, like, for instance, it might... very common for people who have low self

-esteem, which is many, many, many, many people, that they hear a meditation

instruction and then it's just another thing to beat themselves up on because I

could never do that. So then if I had an opportunity to work closely with

someone, I would just say, well, then let's just work with...

what happens in your body when you feel like you're a loser or you feel like you

can never get it right.

Let's go under the words of, let's get at what it feels like physically to feel

like I'm always messing up or I'm inadequate or there's something

fundamentally unlovable about me, you know? So somehow...

getting right to the kind of core of a lot of the dysfunction that they might

be feeling.

So getting back to the original thing is, I think we all need a lot of help to

start to agree with what's happening with us, rather than feel that it's

because it's uncomfortable that it has to be rejected.

Everybody needs a lot of time and willingness and intention to

be able to hold more discomfort, hold more pain, really.

It took me, it is still taking me, a really long time to realize that what

I'm trying to do when I meditate is not to change how I'm feeling.

I started meditating because I had and have a fair amount of anxiety and

stress, and I started really seriously when I was starting a company.

trying to feel differently than I felt.

And for years and years and years and years, I was there in a practice of

trying to feel differently than I felt. And I do think it is a very subtle and

difficult shift.

And one I've only begun to recognize needs to be made to this place of

agreement that how you feel might change, but you're not trying to change

it.

That you're trying to be in a space of accepting how you feel.

So I believe you work with Will Kabat-Zinn. So one of the big things

about why the stress reduction program that his father has, John Kabat-Zinn,

one of the premises is he says to people, you just have to give up the

idea that this is going to help you in any way. You have to give up the idea

that there's like a goal here.

We're just going to be mindful of what's happening for itself, for its own self.

That's such a hard idea to give up. But he must have a lot of success doing it,

right? Because it's in all the hospitals and everything.

But that is a very important part of it is you're not trying to improve.

And these are people with severe back pains mostly that no doctors could help.

So all the exercises are for themselves alone and not to try to have.

get rid of the thing. So I'm sure it's very hard. But I think that, let's just

say, it helps to be introduced to the idea.

And people sometimes get kind of fascinated by the idea that there's an

alternative to trying to get rid of it. Why?

Because they've spent how many years they're alive trying to get rid of it,

and it hasn't helped. So let's try something different.

Don't you think so?

What attracted you to this side of it? I mean, if you go through your book

titles,

Just that, right? I know. It's like when things fall apart, comfortable with

uncertainty, how we live is how we die.

But, you know, a different kind of freedom that, you know, one after

another. Welcoming the unwelcome. Welcoming the unwelcome.

I know. There's been a real attraction for you. Yeah, that's true.

In this idea that it's going to hurt sometimes.

Yeah. And that let's just, let's be okay.

with it hurting sometimes.

Like Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, my teacher, he always used to say, lean

into the sharp points.

And that's a great phrase, I think, you know, lean into the sharp points,

because it expresses what we're trying to say here about leaning in rather than

pulling back, you know. So sometimes it's just really physical. You sort of

have the idea, okay, this is really hurting. And so And some people would

say, so I lean into it.

Other people would say, I stop resisting.

For me, that's what it is. I've learned that anything unpleasant, I can feel

that I'm resisting.

I don't want it to happen. And then I just go through this process, which I've

done so many times now that I can actually do it, but I go through this

process of relaxing with it. You know, say,

Not physically not resisting, like unknotting the stomach. Walk me through

that process. I mean, I believe you have back pain. I do. We were talking about

back pain a minute ago too.

When you're in pain, what do you do? Some part of you must not want to feel

the pain.

What then happens in your mind and body?

All right. So I do, you know, I stand up, I stretch, I do.

physical therapy, things like that. So you're not just accepting it and letting

the pain be there. No. You are trying to change it too.

I'm doing the smart things, you know, or what the doctors recommend.

And those things are really helpful. I'm a big PT fan around physical pain.

But the attitude is the main thing.

So I've given up the idea that maybe it's all going to go away.

And I live more with the idea like this is what I'm going to be living with.

for the rest of my life. So that's a whole different kind of more relaxed

attitude about it. You do do the physical therapy and things like this,

but the attitude is, you know, we might say agreeing.

You might say making friends with.

But for me, what I catch is when I'm going like this, when I resist.

I don't want, I don't want. And I can feel that physically.

And then I lean in.

I lean in. What does lean in mean?

Okay, I'll give an example. I don't know if it's going to answer your question,

but Chögyam Trungpa once gave a talk, and the topic of the talk was

collaborating with reality.

And he gave the example.

He gave the example that I was very familiar with living in Nova Scotia in

the wintertime of walking in the winter when the snow and sleet is coming in

your face and it's extremely unpleasant and your whole body is as if you're in

the dentist's chair. You're just like tensing up. So leaning in means you

physically stop resisting what's happening and you're more like relaxed

with it.

You sort of relax with it. The thing is that the contrast is so great between

resisting and then relaxing that somehow it's not that hard to do because it's

so tangible, this resisting thing, because I can feel everything in me is

like...

pushing away.

And that's like fruitless. I mean, it's not going to help at all.

Whereas as when I sort of just let it be what it is, that's just, that's another

way to say it. Just let it be what it is and stop tensing against it. Then it

becomes totally fine.

I think about this when I walk home with my kids, you know, half the days of the

week I do pickup and I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old and

we live in New York and it rains.

Like yesterday. When we walk home in the rain, what happens is I'm sitting there

trying to not get wet.

And they're like, puddles!

And they're trying to jump in every puddle. And if they have their rain

boots on, that's great. And if they don't, I'm like, don't get your feet wet

and you don't get your shoes wet.

But I'm often tensed up against getting wet. And I'm going to get wet one way or

the other.

And they're playing in the rain.

I like that. That's great. They're collaborating with reality.

That's right.

And I'm resisting reality. I don't want to get wet. And they're like, there's so

much water here. That's so fun.

See, it is a subtle shift mentally, I think.

And so for the kids, it's natural.

And then somehow we lose it, right?

As we get older, it seems like.

But then you can kind of go back. You can begin to be more.

joyful about what's happening.

I mean, I just had this experience with the sleet and everything, and I always

used this image, so I was, I began to, it did feel like I was in a dance with

the storm, you know? There was something very joyful about it.

Funny, I think that's what it was. It became sort of funny. I felt like I was

in a New Yorker cartoon or something.

But it's more like your kids with the puddle.

becomes enjoyable rather than a battle.

So struggle is a helpful word, I think. You find yourself struggling and

basically you pause and you find your way to not

struggle. You have a line that I think is interesting where you say, when we

resist change, it's called suffering.

And I often find Buddhist teachers make this distinction between suffering and

pain. Right.

And I'd love you to...

Talk a bit about that.

Pain is you put your finger on the burner and there's pain you

pull away.

And there's many, many examples like I have back pain or whatever it is. So

that's pain. That's like a direct experience.

Then there's suffering, which is all the...

storylines that we lay on top of it. And I call that unnecessary suffering,

actually. But suffering in this case is optional because it's based on the

storylines you're telling yourself about.

Like, I talk to people, say, people are curious. We talk about back pain in a

spiritual discussion.

It's about back pain. But one of the things is just people are curious about

how to be with the experience without all the storylines, because they're

saying to themselves things like, this is going to get worse and I'm going to

be disabled, or I'm not going to be able to do my work because of this, or all

sorts of disaster scenarios which are causing them so much suffering.

That's optional, that part.

I take this as a very important part of Buddhism generally, but your teaching in

particular.

Working with this layer of resistance to what's happening, and I struggle with

this a tremendous amount, and it's something I'm trying to work on, where

I'm in a situation that exists.

It's not a situation at this point I can change. I have created the schedule, I'm

going to the thing, I have back pain too, I'm feeling the back pain.

Or there's something in the future that I'm worried about happening, but it may

not happen. I was just doing a governor's forum in California, and I

was worried on the flight out that I was losing my voice.

I didn't end up losing my voice, but I worried about it a lot. And there's this

layer of experience that for me is resisting, trying to make it different

than it is when I can't.

And on the one hand, I think I've become more attentive to how much suffering

comes out of that but i'm curious again in a very sort of physical or tactical

way how you drop that layer because for me the impulse

to try to solve every problem or to treat even every moment like a problem

to solve or to perfect is very deep and reflexive right

now would you say though is it possible to keep it going if you don't keep

feeding it with storyline?

Is it dependent on storyline? When you say to keep feeding it, to me, I, the I,

am not feeding it. The storyline feeds itself.

It takes an enormous amount of mental energy for me to not have worried

thoughts feed themselves.

I don't want to be thinking about this. I'm not trying to do it.

Worried thoughts do feed themselves, absolutely.

And part of the book,

Another Kind of Freedom, which is that commentary on Trungpa Rinpoche's book,

there is this part which may have had a big effect on me where he talks about

there's nothing wrong with, in this case it was negativity, but let's just say

nothing wrong with back pain or nothing wrong with worrying about the future.

Nothing wrong.

But the problem is what he called negative negativity.

On top of worrying, then there's judgment about worrying. And it goes way

down the rabbit hole, right?

It's almost like, I think, in your case, like on the airplane, it would be almost

like meditating, getting back to meditation.

I don't know what you do when you meditate exactly, but do you have an

object of meditation often?

No, I tend to do noting.

I sort of continuously...

speak either aloud or mentally what I'm aware of at that moment and from which

sense. So I'm aware of looking at you. I'm aware of hearing the sound as you

sort of affirm what I'm saying.

I'm aware of feeling my fingers touch each other right now and just sort of

letting everything come into awareness but doing nothing about it.

But doing nothing about it, right.

Okay, so let me just propose, I think I could work with noting too in

terms of this, but just in terms of more familiar ground for me. So if what you

did was say, okay, I'm going to gently note or aware of

my breath going out and coming in.

And my intention here is to just, as much as possible, stay fully present

with the breath going out and the breath coming in. Nothing forced, just natural

breathing. Okay, so then what happens is The worry thought is like a magnet. It's

very seductive, like the sirens calling you. It keeps pulling you off.

So fine, that's what happens. So then we just keep coming back to being present

with the breath going in and breath going out, and then it pulls you away

again. But you're training in noting that you're going off and then coming

back. You're training in noting that you're going off and coming back.

You interrupt it, I guess you could say. You just get the hang of what it feels

like to not continue with the storyline.

And then you might find that by the time you land in San Francisco or wherever

you're going, that there's been a shift in your anxiety level, a

shift in your obsessive thinking part, you know, and that you're more ready to

just go in without hope and fear into the situation.

You're in a different place with the whole thing because you've stayed so

present with what's going on. I think I'm very interested in, and this is just

my own experience for myself, but the difference between energy of doing

something and energy of just allowing something to be there.

And to me, a lot of the exhaustion from worrying.

Right. He's actually trying to think about like, well, what can I do about

it? You know, do I need to be, you know, sucking on a throat lozenge? Right,

right. You know, when I go there, should I see a doctor? And the kind of trying

to actually solve it versus, and this is true in a lot of areas of my life,

versus just it's there.

Like the thoughts are there. I might lose my voice.

And that.

I mean, of course, there are things in life that we want to change. You do

physical therapy for your back. I work in politics. I'm trying to effectuate

change, not just allow things to be the way they are.

And on the other hand, you can, for me at least, how much I've trained the

energy of trying to change things and solve problems and act and optimize.

It's made me realize how untrained for me and unfamiliar, actually, the energy

of just letting things be.

I'm sure.

I'm sure it's very unfamiliar.

But are you attracted to it?

Yeah. We wouldn't be having this conversation if I weren't attracted to

it. And so do you find that you can do it sometimes?

Sometimes. Just be?

It's the thing I'm starting to try to learn how to do. It's been a big shift

in my own meditation practice.

So I do think, you know, I think probably anxiety comes up a lot.

Like I was anxious about coming over here.

What about it made you anxious?

Oh, coming here? Unknown.

So unknown.

You weren't comfortable with the uncertainty?

Actually, I didn't have a storyline particularly.

It was just butterflies in the stomach.

My daughter asked me, well, what are you afraid of? And I said, I actually don't

know. I'm just having butterflies.

But I wasn't having a problem with having butterflies. I think that's what

I'm trying to get at.

It was just a...

automatic response, nothing wrong with it.

It wasn't escalating into a big storyline, oh, I'm going to be a big

flop, or he'll ask me and I won't be able to talk. It didn't go any of those

places. And so it just was, I think we have these just old habitual responses

to things, butterflies.

No big deal, butterflies, is what I'm thinking in this case.

So in terms of the worry, that's no big deal either. But somehow it escalates

and escalates and escalates. And that's when the real unnecessary suffering gets

strong, right? And affects you physically.

And so just coming back to what it feels like in my solar plexus or whatever,

with a feeling of sense of humor, warmth.

no big deal, something more along those lines, you're interrupting the tendency

to escalate. So you're actually kind of practicing non-resistance.

We've talked so much about the relationship to discomfort.

What about the relationship to comfort?

I love it.

Well, this is a really important question.

So let's talk about comfort as a comfort zone.

That's the expression that people use. Are you familiar with that expression?

So everybody needs some time with the comfort zone because your nervous system

needs it.

Swimming in the ocean, all these things, things that soothe you, you need some

soothing.

Listening to music that you love and all these things. But there's no growth in

the comfort zone.

Growth happens.

Where it's more uncomfortable.

And we call it challenge because we've come up against our edge a little bit

there. And so you want your edge to expand.

In other words, if today your edge is the sidewalk, then by this time next

year, you want to be able to walk five blocks or something like that.

discomfort you're willing to tolerate. Oh, that's right on.

That person was very wise and said that to you. That's absolutely true.

So I guess what we're talking about then is to the degree that we can feel

discomfort, to that degree we can grow.

And grow means let the natural change in evolution happen rather than get frozen

in views and opinions that keep you stuck in the same way for your whole

life, really.

Meditation has been coming in and out of this conversation.

And what is the purpose for you of meditation?

What are you trying to practice?

There could be a lot of answers to that question.

I think of it as a way to get to know yourself deeply, intimately,

fearlessly, with an attitude of

friendliness.

So a person who, say, meditates, goes on a meditation retreat, let's say, where

you do more hours, and then inevitably things start floating up.

Like maybe they think this is all about getting calm and blissful, but then when

they go on the meditation retreat, a lot of painful memories, regrets,

flashbacks, all kinds of stuff comes up.

For instance, I once raised my hand with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and I said,

Rinpoche, you're always talking about making friends with yourself, but I've

been meditating now for a couple of years, and I think I'm getting a lot of

ammunition and proof that I am a pretty messed up person.

And then he said, okay, let's move closer to the feeling of messed up.

That's his answer.

One of my teachers is called Sonia Rinpoche, and he has this expression,

being okay with not being okay, which I think I like that a lot because it's

very pithy.

It's kind of a fearless thing to see your habits, to see your emotional

reactivity, to see maybe selfishness, pride,

rage about things that you thought you had worked through, and all this kind of

stuff. So to me, making friends with yourself is making friends with all of

that, all of that unresolved and stuff like this. So meditation, it provides

a forum or something like this for you to be able to see yourself very clearly,

and then the instruction is to make friends or, you know, to...

agree with what you're seeing, to not reject what you're seeing.

What about for someone whose experience with meditation, which I think is very

common, is not that they get these fireworks of self-insight, but they just

realize they can't take 10 breaths without their mind running away from

them, and they're bored.

Okay, yes, absolutely.

I was kind of jumping ahead, I guess, a little bit in terms of what I was

saying. One of the things Trungpa Rinpoche says in Myth of Freedom is he

has a whole chapter called Boredom.

And the chapter is about what a wonderful thing boredom is.

Why is it a wonderful thing? He says because it doesn't feed the ego at all.

There's nothing about it that feeds the ego.

And so he was really encouraging people that if you start getting bored, that is

an excellent sign that your meditation is progressing.

Okay, sit through the hot boredom until it becomes cool boredom.

And so hot boredom is what we're familiar with, which is like jumpiness.

You want to get out of there.

Boredom has this quality of just wanting to bolt, you know.

And cool boredom is you just sit there with a feeling of boredom.

No problem.

I would hear these teachings on cool boredom, and honestly, I had not a clue

what they were talking about.

So I went to Mexico where my parents had retired.

My father had died. My mother liked to sit inside with all the windows, shades

closed, in Mexico, where outside of her door and the windows was like... blazing

with color and action and everything's happening. And I'm young, you know. And

so I go there to be with her and everything in me wants to be outside

there. So for the first two days, I was so bored and restless.

And then I realized I came all this way to be with my mother.

At some point, I just gave up the struggle and I was just there with my

mother.

And then It was so remarkable because I began to feel like I was sitting on a

stage and every once in a while the door would open and a friend would come in or

something. They'd have this conversation and then the door would close and then

we were in this like nothing happening zone.

And I just sat there with her and then she'd start talking and then that's what

was happening. The whole thing became kind of fascinating. It feels very

similar to what you were saying earlier about the...

The suffering was coming from resistance.

That's right. The suffering was coming from the resistance.

And so I learned, I said, oh, this is cool boredom. I'm just here with it and

there's no resistance.

I actually think time is a very interesting dimension of all of this.

That, you know, when you talk about being, I mean, everybody feels

uncomfortable sometimes, but really in a way, what we're talking about here, what

you're talking about is being willing to

feel like that for longer without acting. You have a line where you say,

the opposite of patience is aggression, the desire to jump and move, to push

against our lives, to try to fill up space.

You talk about refraining as the method of becoming a dharmic person. And in

some ways, I don't understand any of this as never acting, but as taking a

longer space before acting.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's been a very important and transformative insight for me. And I'd

be curious to just hear more from you on this dimension of time and action.

Along the lines of what I was just saying, it would mean that you're very

patient.

Just tell me about how you understand patience.

Well, first let's start with impatience, because might as well start where we

are, right?

I experience as restless and, like I was saying about boredom, wanting

to get out of there, wanting to move, to just get off the hot seat, sort of.

And then patience would be sitting still with that restless energy.

That's how I would think of patience.

Sitting still with the restlessness of the energy.

Just sitting there with it, you know, like in my mother's living room.

That's how I experience patience.

So again, it's growing your capacity to hold discomfort.

Patience would be a necessary tool, I guess you could call it. Do you think

that that, as a general capacity, as weekend, and I'm thinking of something

you wrote that I think about a lot. You wrote, refraining is very much the

method of becoming a dharmic person. It's a quality of not grabbing for

entertainment the minute we feel.

a slight edge of boredom coming on. It's a practice of not immediately filling up

space just because there's a gap.

And we didn't used to have the ability to fill the space of every gap.

You know, you were sitting in traffic and there wasn't a lot to do. You were

in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at.

And now we have the world of distraction at our fingertips. We have,

you know, AirPods in our ears.

just the daily necessity of sitting with boredom even, has dissolved.

That's so true. And I think it changes us.

It's so true. And not for the better, I would say.

Less in touch with the richness of the world.

So you were discussing with me earlier about going on the subway

without your earpods.

and just sitting there and how rich an experience it was of just being there,

the sights and sounds and what was happening, the drama, and just the whole

experience as being very rich.

And sometimes with students, very often these days, I really encourage them to

one day a week or one morning a week or take an opportunity when they just go

offline.

And go to the grocery store offline.

Ride on the subway offline.

All your activities, but be there fully for what's happening because you're not

engrossed in a movie or a podcast or anything.

Let's not get crazy here.

I put you out of business, Ezra.

But you know how it is. You go on the subway or anywhere and everybody is

somewhere else.

And so I encourage them to be present without their device.

But, you know, I'm trying to be realistic and just say, do it this short

period of time, every Wednesday or every Wednesday morning or something like

that. And yeah, it's like my granddaughter when she was still in

college.

Her teacher said, no devices in the room. And I said, couldn't you just turn

the sound off? She said, no, because it vibrates. So they had to leave them

outside. My attention is different if I can feel my phone in my pocket.

Yep. So when I do conversations, my phone is here.

It's not in my pocket right now. It's on the floor near me.

Right. Because my attention to you would be different if it were in my pocket. Of

course. Even knowing that the sound is off, even though I'm not going to check

it. Right, exactly.

That's what she said.

And then she said, I never realized how I was training myself to be distracted.

That was her vocabulary.

And because it was so different being in class without it, even just in her

pocket, as you say.

So, yeah, I think everybody can do themselves a big favor by spending

some time offline and seeing what that's like for them.

You know, you could say, well, that's when you get into being bored.

But you could also say, oh, maybe that's when you get into being alive, more

alive. Because there's, I mean, the subway is such a great example of

fascinating, really totally fascinating to just be there.

Because of the people, if nothing else.

There's so much happening from when you get on to when you get off. There is so

much. I'm sometimes thinking, wish weren't happening, but nevertheless.

To just expand that, we were talking earlier off the microphone about one

thing I've been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on

the subway and just be aware of what's happening around me. And it's

interesting because a lot of the times I don't really love what's happening

around me. It's a rich experience, but it's a boombox.

you know somebody uh like trying to grab my attention with music i don't really

want to be listening to it's the screeching of the brakes but there's

just a lot going on and dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the

right music or podcast or thing on my kindle to distract myself in the right

way and try to maintain a kind of like a hermetic comfort it's easier to stop So

that's been my big lesson from it. It's not so much that I love every moment on

the subway, but I didn't quite notice how much energy I was expending trying

to block it all out. Do you feel more relaxed? I do. Yeah.

I do it, and then I pick up my kids and I'm more present with them. Yeah, yeah.

Because I've just spent the last 35 minutes practicing being present. Right,

right, right. As opposed to practicing finding somewhere my mind would rather

be. So it's interesting because I would call that a form of meditation.

You're just present. It's interesting because we didn't used to have all these

devices. I grew up before television even.

But now that we have the devices, it's very helpful actually to feel the

contrast. Somehow it's richer.

You have a lovely line.

I think it's a line somebody told you.

That meditation is not a vacation from irritation? That's right, that's right.

The first time I ever went for meditation instruction, that's what the

woman said to me. And then later I saw that it was from Myth of Freedom that

Chogyam Trungpa said that, and she plagiarized. But anyway, it made a big

impression on me, because that's right, meditation is not a vacation from

irritation. It's just another way of saying the same kind of thing, you know.

But I have to say, even though I was introduced to this view or this attitude

from day one, it took me a lot of years to really

somehow have it penetrate and get to me, the path of non-resistance.

It was in there. The seed was in there. But it wasn't that I immediately was

open to everything.

progress for for a minute because i mean somebody listening to this here you are

you're uh you know a famed nun um and the

idea of moving from i've never meditated to whatever you must be experiencing

seems very intimidating like what what how would you describe the stages your

experience of meditation or your relationship to it have gone through

That's a difficult question to answer, because I've never actually given it a

lot of thought. But let me just go back to remembering the first time I was

taught to meditate.

Well, yeah, sure.

I could hardly stay with the breath for two seconds, you know. But then that was

like what I was saying earlier. It was just a revelation to see how...

I had no idea that my mind was like that. And instead of being discouraged

by that, because of what my teacher at the time was telling me and so forth, I

was told, just expect that, that actually meditation is not about getting

rid of thoughts.

There's always going to be thoughts, but you don't have to follow them for an

hour and a half, you know.

And so I would say in the beginning, my very wild mind.

And when I say beginning, I don't just mean, you know, what, first month or

something. I guess for a couple of years, maybe, maybe five years. I don't

know how long, but of course I kept at it, and I did some long meditation

practices. We had these month-long meditation practices, and I did that

kind of thing.

And then what started to happen more was, a very important

thing was,

Trungpa Rinpoche used to talk about something he called the gap.

You could call it a stillness.

You could call it an openness, freshness.

And again, I didn't really know what in the world he was talking about. But he

said, you know, it could be possible that at the end of every breath, there's

a gap before you breathe back in again.

And he even sometimes gave a meditation, like just natural breathing out and then

pause, like create a gap, and then come back in.

So he called that the gap, and it had supposedly very profound, but I didn't

have a clue, really, what he was talking about.

And then I was in a meditation retreat, and we had a big fan that was going all

the time. And so the hum of the fan became just background.

noise that was always there. So I was sitting there meditating, doing my

practice, and the fan is going, and all of a sudden,

it went off for just a second. I said,

that's the gap.

That's what he's talking about.

So then I understood what he meant by gap. He meant there's all this noise and

then suddenly there's silence.

It's sort of like being in a—use the image of being in a sack or something

like that, and it's dark, and then there's this little slit, and you

suddenly realize, oh, there's a whole big space out there.

It's sort of like that. Someone used this example that they were in a room

with this teacher in Nepal, and his window was covered with black plastic.

Think of that as just all the discursive thoughts, this black plastic, it's just

covering over, and then you just make a pinprick in it, and then the light comes

through. And that's like, oh, there's a background here to this whole thing.

In a breath.

So he said that you could, at the end of every breath, you could pause and you

could experience that gap.

The gap of...

Well, in the tense of the fan, it was just the sound was going and then it

stopped.

So you could say in terms of chatter, it would be chatter, chatter, chatter,

chatter, chatter.

Chatter, chatter.

Chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter.

But you're not trying to prefer the gap.

You're just trying to discover that behind all in, say,

if the...

Discursive thoughts and emotions and everything are foreground.

There's also a background to the whole thing that you could connect with at any

moment. So I have a question about this. I think a question I really struggle

with. When I read his books, when I read your books, I feel like there's a

shifting back and forth a little bit between this instruction of

there is no good, there is no bad.

better to have mental chatter.

It is not better to have spacious mental quiet.

It is not better to see the light coming through the pinhole in the black plastic

over the chatter of the mind. It is not better to be looking at the black

plastic. There's this non-dualism, everything is totally fine and in some

ways the same because it's all the ground of experience.

And also, and maybe it is better.

So why don't we even talk about gap then?

Because it's there, I guess.

I guess because it's there. But I think I'm asking at the underlying thing that

is there.

I feel like sometimes there is a conversation about better and worse or

that nothing is better and nothing is worse. And then sometimes something

seems to be being described that is better.

Yeah, you're absolutely right about that.

Well, that's where sense of humor comes in and ability to be okay with paradox

and ambiguity and things not always being so neat and tidy like that.

Because if you know the basic thing that struggle and polarization,

dualism, pitting one thing against another, trying to get better, which

comes from the place of feeling that you're not good enough to begin with.

As long as you have the idea that we're moving in the direction of you're okay

just the way you are.

And that's a Suzuki Roshi joke. Suzuki Roshi was a Zen master in San Francisco,

started the San Francisco Zen Center. And he had this expression. He looked

out at the audience, at his students, and he said, you are all perfect just as

you are.

And you can use a little work.

And it is sort of like that, you know? And how do you understand what he meant?

I understand that fundamentally we have Buddha nature. I guess that would be the

kind of traditional way to say it.

But you could say fundamentally everybody has this potential

for...

awakening from the sleep of confusion, let's call it that, in a kind of

glamorous language.

But everybody has that potential, and you look out and you see

a room full of Buddhas. You see a room full of people that are awake

but just don't realize it, something like that. And so you begin to say,

okay, I'm one of them.

I want to recognize more my true nature, I guess you could say.

But the thing is, if you want to recognize the true nature by getting rid

of the ego,

let's say, it doesn't work. The only way to actually have the confusion lessen is

to become familiar, intimate with yourself just as you are, which is a lot

of confusion and wild-mindedness and boredom and all those things.

If you have a view that there's nothing problematic with any of that, then you

can understand that my fundamental nature is

one of basic goodness, but I'm not recognizing

that. And so the work is kind of uncovering what's already here,

something like that. So it is a paradox.

unconditional love.

And what you're saying there, as I was trying to absorb it, made me think of

it, that the thing that came to mind is how I feel as a parent.

Yeah. Okay, that's a good example. I don't want my children to be any

different than they are. I in some ways absolutely don't want them to be any

different than they are. I love them just the way they are.

And also I want them to grow.

And there are ways that they can grow, but it doesn't have any, it doesn't come

from a desire to change them.

Like, I really do. Like, I really love them as they are.

And I want them to grow and, you know, learn how to do more math and, you know,

all the things that you do as a person and put on their own pants.

Tie their own shoes.

But so they're both there. It was funny. It was the only experience I could come

to that had both of those in my head. Yeah, yeah. So it's a good one. You

could think of yourself that way.

You know, just think of yourself that way.

Does that make sense? Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah.

You could. You used to be that little, you know.

But you don't have to think of yourself necessarily as a little kid, but you

could think of yourself as fine just as you are, and yet at the same time,

let's just say.

Not wanting to harm people with my speech.

Not wanting to harm people with my actions.

Not wanting to be so critical-minded about everything.

So it is paradoxical, but the basic view is that there's nothing wrong here.

How do you think about the relationship between that kind of... Here we're

talking about loving and changing, but the way I want to ask the question is

more about the relation between abiding and acting.

We've talked about abiding in difficult emotions, and I think that a question

that comes up for people, and that's come up for me, is, you know, you think

about if your partner treats you badly, and you think, okay, I'm having these

difficult emotions, I'm going to sit here, and I'm not going to be reactive,

and I'm going to work with the texture of them and drop the storyline and touch

the energy of the emotion.

And yet your therapist would say, well, maybe the story here is important.

Maybe this person is not treating you well. Maybe you're allowing it because

you don't love yourself enough.

I'm not giving an example of my own life here. I'm just using it as an example.

But there is something about the dropping of storylines that can become,

or at least I fear it can become, also a way to...

accept situations that shouldn't be accepted. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. To

deny the responsibility for change.

Yeah, I hear you. How do you think about that? Yeah.

Well, one, I frequently get women in abusive relationships.

And I always say, get out of there as fast as you can.

Like one woman stood up and she was saying that she

has She described it as an abusive relationship with her husband for many

years. And she said, so I try to work with it by just going to the feelings

and all of this.

And so what you're saying there, I said, forget about all of that. Just get

out of the relationship.

You need to get out of the relationship and get some distance from it. And that

is the most compassionate thing you can do for your husband.

and also for yourself.

So I said, you know, this is not the time to sit there and, you know, contact

what it feels like in the body. This is time to just get out. Take the kids and

go and just start exploring how you could do that, how you practically could

do that. You know, go to your mother's or whatever.

And she actually wrote to me later, that woman, and said that she had followed

that advice and that it...

And thanked me, you know, thanked me.

For some reason, she was willing to just take my word for it. I guess she was

probably ready.

But she would have been an example of what you're talking about, where she was

just using my instructions, but staying there, being beaten, you know. It was

crazy, crazy situation. So that's an extreme situation, of course. So how

then do you discern when you should be...

acting when you should be taking the storyline seriously versus when you

should be abiding, feeling, touching the energy without the storyline?

Yeah, that's a really good question.

And this comes up a lot with protesting injustice

in various forms.

And so that conversation I've had with a lot of people, and I always say,

you know, I say what they already know, but then we have a discussion about it.

And that is that you're not effective if you're caught in strong emotions and

you're being carried away by the energy of anger or something like this, that

you just can't be effective. First of all, you're not able to communicate.

Someone's only going to hear your anger. They're not going to hear your words.

And there's no possibility of change.

So first of all, I say, Try to experiment with ways that

actually start to communicate to the heart of the people that you're trying

to influence for change.

Try it when you're angry. Try it when you're not angry. Like, find out for

yourself, you know? That's the only way it really lands in the body.

So I'm encouraging the people to continue with what they're doing, but

not when they're caught up in their kleshas. That's a Tibetan word

for strong, destructive emotions.

And then in that process, they might go to the body, feel what they're feeling,

get in touch as a way of being able to then walk through the door and have

the conversation that doesn't come from that place, and is actually curious to

hear what they have to say, and is actually open to hearing.

what they have to say, and isn't controlled by fear.

It's more like a willingness to kind of take a leap, I guess you could say.

It's interesting. When you say isn't controlled by fear, one of the things

I've experienced with some of your work and some of this is that there were a

lot of actions I was not willing to take because I was afraid of feeling the

discomfort.

the uncertainty associated with them.

And it was only when I became less afraid of feeling that that I could take

those actions.

There are many actions I could take to try to avoid those feelings, and I did

take them.

It didn't work, right? It worked in its own way, but yes, there were forms of

change.

And also, I mean, even in this work, like forms of conversation that were not

on the table.

What does it mean, not on the table? That I just wasn't willing to sit in the

discomfort of confronting a certain personal situation or risking a

certain outcome or having a certain kind of political conversation across

difference because I didn't trust my own ability to hold

the discomfort of it.

And it's an ongoing process for me, certainly.

getting more comfortable being uncomfortable has opened up a

wider range of space in which I can act.

There are actions I wouldn't even really let myself think about.

That now you can?

That now I can because I'm not as afraid of them. You know, I think a really good

way to go about this is think like, okay,

where do I want to be in one year time?

How about five years?

Do I want to be stuck in exactly the same way on this day, 2027?

Or on this day in 2027, will I feel that I'm able to sit with

discomfort a little bit more than before?

In other words, it's a growth process.

actually changing the DNA in some kind of way. Like, it's really fundamental

what's being changed. All these studies now about the brain and how meditation

affects it and stuff, they have some interesting observations from that. And

one of them is that there's grooves in the brain that we experience as habitual

patterns, and that every time you follow the habitual pattern in the old way, the

grooves are getting deeper.

And every time you even pause and consider an alternative, it opens up a

new neurological pathway.

And there's an opportunity for change in that way, really at the level of your

brain. So I found that pretty exciting to hear about that because it's so

optimistic. So you were saying what about meditation and what it is, and I

was emphasizing in this case it would be seeing.

what the habits are that you're stuck in that you keep making that grows deeper

and deeper, and experimenting with how to open up new ones. And it says that

all you have to do is even just don't go down the rabbit hole and don't do

anything else.

That opens up new pathways. Or just sit there with the feeling that is coming up

in meditation.

Or just sit there. For me, some of what's so both intense and interesting

about meditation is just...

sitting there and not doing anything with what's going on in my head.

Right. Which I find difficult.

Yeah, right.

I want to pick up on something you said. But possible, right?

Very possible. And the more I do it, the better I get at it.

Exactly.

Let me, as we come to a close here, ask you about a very lovely line in one of

your teacher's books.

He writes, one's whole practice should be based on the relationship between you

and nowness.

Oh, I love that. Yeah.

Nowness is a word I really love. I struggle a bit with nowness. I struggle

a lot with nowness.

It feels like one of those sentences that has a universe in it.

Yeah. Read it to me again.

One's whole practice should be based on the relationship between you and

nowness.

Yeah, in another place he says, like, let the thread of nowness run through

your whole life.

But you don't like the word nowness, so it doesn't communicate to you. No, I do.

I just struggle with achieving it. Oh, I see. It's a wonderful word.

Well, you are achieving it on the subway without your devices.

But I would just be curious on hearing your reflection, because this can all

feel so abstract, but just what does it mean to have a relationship with

nowness?

Well... It means that you, okay, basically that you're present instead

of drawn off, and that being present

itself can tune you into a bigger perspective

on your life.

It's like I was talking about foreground and background.

It's like an example might be, The difference between being all caught up

in your thoughts and going to the window and looking at the sky.

And, you know, it's like the astronauts' experiences.

They're all out there and they're having these amazing spiritual experiences just

because they're seeing the Earth from the perspective of vast space.

And earlier astronauts had the same experience. They said, it's just this

one Earth. Why can't we just...

all live on it together. It seems so easy from the perspective of infinity or

like that. And then you get back down on earth and right away all your habitual

patterns and things click in. You're already stuck in fighting, you know,

struggle and so forth.

So in a way, I guess what it means with nowness is that you begin to have more

of that big perspective.

That puts everything in perspective.

And then you just go about your life, but all the time you know at the same

time you're a little dot, the earth is a little dot, and you are

nothing, really tiny, tiny, in the face of this vast universe

that just expands forever and does not have an end.

If you do this practice,

In a committed way. I mean, you've done it for many decades.

If what it's promising is not an end to pain, if what it's promising is not that

you'll always feel radiant joy or equanimity, what is it

promising? What are you trying to achieve or what is

achieved amidst it?

contentment, being okay with how things unfold, even if it's disturbing.

In other words, okay with how things unfold doesn't mean that you wouldn't

act, but it does mean that you aren't struggling against what's happening.

Contentment is so deep because you're not struggling against

the unfolding of your life.

You're more like letting it unfold and then doing things to fine-tune it

or uncover the openness

and vastness of your mind and not be all caught up in the smallness

of petty grievances and criticisms.

uh, likes and dislikes.

And, uh, so somehow then all of that likes and dislikes and everything just

have a lot of room to exist.

And, uh, so there is a sense of less and less separation between you and your

experience. And that is very, has a lot of contentment in it. I would say, I can

say definitely that I, uh,

I'm deeply contented with my life. And I have a very good life, and there's not a

lot of horror in it or anything like that.

But I do feel it comes not from the outer circumstances, but from the

meditation practice and working with my mind. And knowing that mind has so much

power to make you suffer or to help you stay

awake and alive to your life.

I think that's a lovely place to end. Then always our final question.

What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Oh, yes, right.

I recommend Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa

Rinpoche, which is an excellent book to be reading right now in terms of what's

happening in the world.

And I recommend Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Suzuki Roshi, which is...

one of the very first books I ever read in Buddhism.

Have you read it? And I recommend this book called Enlightened Vagabond

by Mathieu Ricard. He collected stories about this

19th century eccentric Buddhist master,

but very eccentric, and the stories are totally delightful.

It's like every story has a moral, so to speak.

But funny, very, very funny.

And the man was a fabulous character.

So I love those stories.

And Mathieu Ricard collected them over many, many, many years, hearing them

from his teachers and things.

So those are the three books that I recommend.

Padma Chodron, thank you very much.

Ezra Klein, thank you very much.