Wondery plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris.
Hello, my fellow suffering beings. It is hectic out there. I'm talking about the news, but also the nature of our own little worlds, often our own interpersonal dramas. And then, of course, there's the tumultuous nature of our own inner landscapes.
all of the intracranial chaos, both reacting to and feeding the chaos around us. Today, we're going to talk to a renowned Buddhist teacher about how to be less anxious and more useful in the face of the various dumpster fires raging in the world, both externally and internally.
Orrin J. Soffer has been practicing meditation since 1997. He's also developed a fascinating subspecialty in mindful communication skills that I've personally found to be extremely powerful. He's got a new book called Your Heart Was Made For This, which lays out 26 qualities, many of them inspired by Buddhism for both navigating and positively impacting a chaotic world.
from managing how you interact with media to the role of expectations to the simple power of mindfulness. We also talk about aspiration as a powerful tool, how joy, even though it may sound a little saccharin, can help you persevere. And this is interesting how to reframe the concept of devotion, which might not go down easy for some of you, so that it can apply to your everyday life.
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That's code 10%, order using DoorDash today, in terms of plot. Orrin, Jay Sover, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much, Dan. Happy to be here. Happy to have you here. If I understand correctly, this new book was inspired by some tough stuff in the world and in your life, including the pandemic and one death and one birth. Can you kind of walk us through the biographical backdrop for this new work?
Sure, absolutely. I started writing the book in the summer of 2020 when everything was going haywire. My wife was pregnant with our first child. We had just entered a global pandemic. George Floyd had just been murdered on national television. And there were really awful wildfires out here in the West, some of the worst we've experienced. We had this one day where you couldn't see the sun. The sky was this kind of very eerie orange.
One of the things that I felt like I could offer as a meditation teacher was to write about how to handle what was happening and how to develop more inner resources in order to stay sane and balanced and also respond, hopefully, to what was happening.
All of this kind of unfolding also and including getting ready to have a child and bring a new life into this world started a kind of deeper investigation of how do I respond? How is this practice that I've been doing for 20 years relevant? How can we meet the really immense rapid changes that are happening around the world?
So the book grew out of that and out of my own investigation into how do we respond? How is our practice relevant? And it's kind of a natural progression in some ways. Like as I look back, I started meditating in my late teens. And then my first attempts at integrating the practice, as you know, because it's how we met was to begin doing communication work, looking at nonviolent communication and trying to bring the practice into relationships in that way.
And I've spent the last almost 20 years focusing on that. And then more recently, really looking at how do we bridge that gap from the interpersonal to more of the social and the collective. And that's really what I'm grappling with in the book, looking at not just meditation, but the whole realm of contemplative practice and how we can use it as leverage to respond to what's happening around the world.
You left this out and maybe this was for a reason and I don't mean to pick at a scam. No, I know where you're going. Yeah, so my father passed away. Yeah, during the final editing of the book. The book was already written and edited.
And the editing was really challenging. It really pushed me to my limits, which is one of the reasons I'm so excited about the book. I was editing the book in those early months of having a newborn with sleepless nights. I would sit up on the bed with my laptop as my son was sleeping next to me and edit the book. And then my father passed away suddenly earlier this year. And it really, really shook my world in a lot of ways. The first parent I've lost.
Then I went back and needed to update a few things. The book is dedicated to him in part because I feel like he embodied a lot of what I'm trying to transmit in terms of courage and integrity and unconditional love.
But I also gained certain painful insights about our relationship after he passed and some of the ways that my heart was not as open to him as I thought it was. In the wake of his loss, I really saw the places that I was still reacting to the things about his life that were painful for me, his inability to really take care of his health being the main one.
So I had to go back to a couple of chapters because I talk about him and our relationship throughout the book and integrate some of those insights about forgiveness and about mindfulness and how it reveals the different places in our hearts and in our world, our lives that need attention. But sometimes we don't see everything that we need to and we need
the feedback of others or unexpected events in our life to see clearly. So that's the relevance of that piece and didn't include it because it wasn't so much a motivation in writing the book, but more of almost like a PS, yeah. A PS that then had you do some
Retroactive editing to bake it into the momentum of the book you know this thing you said about your dad it just got me thinking that we had a discussion on the show recently with Sharon Salzburg about a common misunderstanding that people bring to Buddhism because in Buddhism we talk a lot about love and compassion.
And we also talk a lot about non-attachment, and people are like, how can I integrate those two? And it really is, and this is just what TLDR about, you can still care for somebody, but without being too attached to them being a certain way, and without being too attached to them writ large, because they, like you, like everyone, were all impermanent. And so when I hear you talk about your heart not being fully open to your dad, obviously that's not my preferred.
for a voyage, but I'm repeating back yours just for the sake of simplicity. Your heart not being fully open to your dad and because he was unwilling or apparently seems like not unable to attentive to his health. Yeah. And so I wonder if there was a bit of attachment in your love for him wanting to take care of his health more than he was willing or able to.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, another way that I talk about it just to re-language it is that I recognized afterwards that I was withholding some of my love from him because it was too painful. And yeah, absolutely, it's about equanimity or the lack thereof. And I'm sure you and Sharon talked about how to define that word attachment and the differentiation between
The Buddhist word we're translating and healthy psychological attachment, a sense of emotional bonding that we have with those we love. And I like the word Sharon uses to translate the Buddhist term, Upadana, which she translates as control. And I think that the way I understand it is there was resistance to the pain.
So it's not so much that, yeah, there's an aspect of me wanting to control my dad, wanting to, you know, why won't you do what I want you to do? And it was a long journey. And I, you know, I feel actually quite proud of how far I've come or how far I came over the last 20 years since I started practicing and how much I was able to actually accept him for who he was. We grew very close because of that.
And yet still, because I care for him so deeply is painful to see someone we love not well. And so the withholding of my love, that sense of something not being fully open inside was about my own inability to tolerate the pain of feeling helpless in the face of his choices. Yeah, so self protection.
Yeah, yeah, some self-protection. And then the pain of regret, which is a very uncomfortable but powerful teacher. He's a tremendously generous person. His name actually means to give his first name. And even in his passing, he gave me a gift, which is this deep understanding of how to open my heart to the people I love and not take things for granted. He's present in my relationship with my wife and my son today because of that in a really beautiful way.
So the book is about how we use the Dharma in our own lives inside of our own minds, inside of our closest relationships, but also about how we engage with the larger world, especially at a time when it looks like everything's going to shit, or at least we can talk about that, actually, because I sometimes think we take
the pessimism will touch too far, but we can talk about that. If I understand correctly, deeply influenced by what's called socially engaged Buddhism, this idea that let's get off the cushion and out into the world, is the thesis there that if you're just meditating for stress reduction, you're doing it wrong? I appreciate that question. You touched on a lot of important things there, so maybe we can hit them one at a time and just start where you ended. I wouldn't frame it that way.
I think that meditating for stress reduction is a valid motivation, it's a valid reason. We all don't want to feel less stressed. But I think we're limiting ourselves if that's the only thing we're doing. And I think your own life and work is kind of a testament to the power of these practices to offer one thing that seems very simple and then to actually take us much deeper.
into powerful questions about what's my life about and how can I contribute in the most meaningful way. So the thesis of socially engaged Buddhism is that we have to apply the essence of Buddhist practice, which is understanding how and why we suffer.
and responding to that suffering to society. And if we're practicing in a sincere way, that starts to happen naturally, that when we start seeing more clearly and experiencing more compassion, which I know you've been exploring and reflecting on deeply for the last few years, there's a natural movement to respond to injustice or to pain in the world.
Tiknot Han, the Vietnamese Zen master and poet and peace activist. He was one of the founders of socially engaged Buddhism, and one of the things he said was that mindfulness has to be engaged. Once we see clearly, we have to act. Otherwise, what's the use of seeing?
And the example from his life was so powerful as he was meditating in the temple with his monastics in Vietnam during the Vietnam War and their bombs going off in the village. And there's a sense of what are we going to do? Are we just going to sit here and meditate? No, we're going to go out in the street and help people.
There's just this natural movement of someone's in pain. They need help. I'm going to respond. And so this is the teaching of socially engaged Buddhism. And I think this is an area where for a variety of conditions and reasons in the West, meditation becomes relegated to the domain of psychological well-being. And we limit the power
of these practices to actually inform our response to the challenges that we're facing today. Does that answer the question? Yeah, I think so. It's okay, especially at the beginning, if your motivation to meditate is to reduce your own suffering, stress, depression, anxiety, burnout.
anger, whatever it is, and the traditional teachings are that that's step one and there are many steps involved with, you know, improving your relationship to the larger world, which also, by the way, redounds to your benefit because we are intertwined.
Absolutely, and I would even say it's more than okay. It's actually encouraged. That's where we need to start. If we're drowning, we can't help somebody else. We need to be on solid ground first in order to help someone else who's drowning. The first step is to get some perspective
and get a handle on our stress, the overwhelm that we experience when we look at the news, the burnout we're going through from work, and actually develop more balance inside. That positions us to be able to be more effective in the world, whether we're looking at parenting, our work, or civil society. And so the book is really designed to look at both sides of that. It's looking at how do we strengthen our hearts? How do we develop the inner resources inside so that we're not drowning?
And then how do we investigate what's ours to do? There's way too much need in the world for us to try to do everything, which also means that there's too much need in the world to do nothing. So each of us, I think, is invited just by virtue of being alive today and caring to look and see what's ours to do. Where is the place that I can contribute meaningfully?
And the beautiful thing about that is when we get involved and we actually start to or continue to respond to what's happening in our communities, that brings energy. It brings confidence. It actually addresses the anxiety. So I was talking with someone last night on a call I was teaching. And this person was asking about a certain kind of deep fear and pain of being rejected.
that they orient to the world looking for rejection, feeling afraid of being rejected. And the response I gave was a classical meditation teacher response. It was acknowledged how that's trying to help you, to keep safe, and then practice loving kindness, develop more of a sense of belonging and well-being inside.
And last night I was lying to go to bed, I was falling asleep, and I said, oh, I missed the most important thing. I said, get involved with something, serve, help other people. Then you'll start to feel like you belong. You'll start to feel your own sense of self-worth and dignity, because that's part of what it is to be human, is to want to have purpose and meaning and to be connected.
And I think we overlook that a lot in meditation. We just focus on the internal and forget that actually holding the door for someone or getting involved with a local organization heals us also.
I meant all that I just just added this may be controversial in some circles you may not agree with it so maybe I'm wrong and you can disabuse me of this notion but for me I hear a kind of enlightened self interest at every point along that chain it is in your best interest.
to not be so fucking crazy, or depressed, or whatever. I'm speaking for myself here. It's in my best interest to not be so fucking crazy, because it doesn't feel good if I'm paying attention. And once I've calmed myself down a little bit, it is in my best interest to work on my relationship with people around me and people in the world, the larger world, or even just what in local,
situation, because that's going to make me happier. We're not calling for people to live lives of limitless self-sacrifice and self-mortification. This is actually put in the Buddhist say, good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.
Yeah. No, precisely. Yeah. It's one of the things I appreciate about the perspective you bring to these practices is it really speaks to that very, very fundamental natural human tendency to go, well, what's in it for me? Why should I do this? It's because it feels good to give. It is enlightened self-interest to use the Dalai Lama's phrase there. Yeah.
So you talked about the pessimism, the narrative about what's happening in the world, and I really appreciate that you say that because I'm not sure what all of your views are, but I do think we need a balanced view. And what I see a lot is unbalanced views that on the one hand, there's this extreme of just emphasizing the progress. Millions have been lifted out of poverty, life expectancy is greater, all of the benefits of
modern society, which are true. But there's also the other side, right? There's also the sense that something is deeply wrong in terms of the environmental crisis that we're living through, the political crisis around the world, the mental health crisis here and abroad.
Then on the other side, we have the sectors of society or the media that are only emphasizing that. Everything's going to hell. We're all going down and doesn't actually acknowledge the tremendous progress we've made and the good that's actually happening, the innovation, the creativity. I don't think it's either or. I think both are true. If we only focus on one side,
We miss the reality, which is that both are happening and we can engage with and be involved in both sides of it.
Amen, that's exactly where I am. I was just having this discussion yesterday with, I won't name this person because I didn't get her permission, but this is somebody both of us know in the Dharma world. And I was saying, and I felt a little unsafe and tentative saying it, but yes, I think it's true that there are lots of horrible things happening in the world, particularly with the climate, but obviously also political instability.
as well, polarization aided and abetted by social media. I'm worried about all of that. And the data around alleviation and reduction of poverty and the data around life expectancy, they appear to be quite strong. And on top of that, I think it's just, I'm wary of the overly dark view because we do have this
evolutionarily wired negativity bias. It helped us survive and I fear that that bias seeps into a kind of, you know, I'm seeing it with a lot of my friends, this really dark view of the world, this really dark view of the future, which is, it seems like half right. And I think we need to be both and just as you said.
Yeah, and I think that one of the things that I'm trying to promote and argue against in my book is the tendency to try to simplify things into simple binaries. It's either this or it's that and life is often more complex and nuanced. And I think this is an example of that. So even when we talk about the alleviation of poverty, at the same time, we're seeing some of the grossest income inequality in generations. Both are true. So there's nuance and complexity there. And that's what any
robust, healthy, grounded, contemplative practice will illuminate is that it's complex to be alive. And how do we contend with that? And how do we find our place within that?
How do you respond? Inevitably, there are going to be people, I can hear them typing their tweets right now saying or their exes or whatever they're called right now saying, well, easy for you guys to have a rosy view of the world because you're both rich white dudes. So maybe we have a bias and are missing key things.
Yeah. When I hear that, I need to look at, first of all, who's saying it and to make space to listen to where they're coming from. Say, I appreciate when people give me feedback or have a different perspective because it gives me an opportunity to investigate and learn. And yeah, to the degree that that's true, you know, we both have a lot of advantages because of our
various aspects of our identity and are gonna experience the world through that lens. It's one of the things I talk about in the chapter on mindfulness is that we need to apply mindfulness to our relationships and to investigate like what's the bias that we're seeing the world through. So I'm wanting to make space for other views and I'm wanting to also hold complexity. One of the things that I see destroying movements for social change
And its tragic and its ironic is the way that the narrative becomes this kind of us, them binary, you're either with us or you're against us, or the dynamics of cancel culture, or the right wrong, mentalities,
And if we're looking to actually heal and transform some of the dynamics that are creating so much injustice and oppression and suffering in our society and around the world, we also need to look at the roots of that in our own minds and how we create an enemy, how we reduce things to just saying it's either this or that. And that's one of the gifts, I think, of meditation and contemplative practice.
is that we're able to turn that critical lens inwards and see where am I coming from and how can I transform the way I'm showing up in the way I'm working for social change so that I'm not unwittingly recreating the very dynamics I'm seeking to heal or to change.
I think just to put a fine point on this, I think just a lot of things are true at the same time. And speaking for myself, because I'm not in your mind, I know I have lots of blind spots and biases. The problem is, I don't know what they are because definitionally blind spots are hard to see. And so I'm very open to being wrong on an ongoing basis. And I think in terms of the state of the world, it's to use your word. It is complex. And I actually think that's the
Sadest place to be when viewing things actually will keep you sane to be open to the complexity because choosing either side in a binary is actually going to make you more blinkered. Yeah. Coming up, Orrin J Sover talks about what inspired the title of his newest book and why the cultivation of attention and aspiration can be extremely powerful tools.
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The book has 26 Buddhist tools for dealing with a world that is complex, tumultuous. Before we dive into some, we'll do a sampling of some of the tools. But let's talk about the title. I gave you a little grief earlier about the word heart, which is the word heart. Yes, but this book is called your heart was made for this. And I'm not asking this to be a wise asset. Genuinely want to know what's behind the title.
Yeah, yeah, thanks. We'll just respond to the lead in there, the intro there. I wouldn't even call them Buddhist tools. While I talk about some of the Buddhist roots of the book, I really see them as universal tools and humanistic tools. Is courage Buddhist? Is curiosity Buddhist? No, these are core facets of our humanity. And that's really what I'm trying to speak to and offer is
a road map for strengthening these very potent transformative capacities we have as human beings, so that we can have the humility to take feedback when we're wrong or someone is seeing something that we're not seeing, and also to discern where the place is where I can plug in and contribute.
So the title your heart was made for this is a little bit of a play on words in some ways. One of the things that I feel and hear from a lot of other people is when the world appears in this very dark way of what is the future going to be, it feels overwhelming. And there's a sense of almost despair or cynicism, right? Like it's too much. There's nothing I can do.
And so on the one hand, it's a sort of hopeful message of like, actually, we have what we need or we can cultivate what we need to deal with what's unfolding in our lives and in the world. The reason I say it's a play on words is because at the same time, I'm trying to remind all of us that on an evolutionary level, we were not designed to live in the world we're living in.
We evolved to live in small communities with people that we know, to have a shared sense of meaning and purpose, to have periods of downtime that are restorative on a regular basis. We were designed to have information just about the things that we know immediately in our community, not to be bombarded.
with stories of tragedy from around the world that we oftentimes can't do anything about, nor to be sort of like molded and shaped by social media algorithms and technology. So in a very real way, I think that we find ourselves in a world that is at odds with our neurophysiology. So on this level, the title your heart was made for this is more pointing to our capacity to fulfill our potential.
that I really believe that our, and you can use a lot of different words for heart. You could say our mind, you could say our spirit, you could say our consciousness, you could just say being human, that we have this potential to be incredibly fulfilled, kind, and powerful creatures.
to really use our life to blossom, to grow in these amazing ways. And that's what our heart was made for. And that's what the book is offering, is this kind of instruction manual to realize our potential. And then that positions us to play a role in the healing and transformation of our lives, our families, and our communities.
Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it does, you mentioned I've been forever working on a book and it's actually a, it really kind of lands in the same idea that you're articulating here, which is that we are designed for this kind of engagement. And I often talk about how, especially men, we optimize for sleep and optimize for exercise and diet and all this stuff. And it's not just men. A lot of us are optimizing these days, but if you really want to optimize the thing,
thing to do is to work on your relationship. If you are looking to be happy, healthy, and live a long life, because we are such embedded creatures, we aren't isolated egos peering fretfully out at the world from behind our eye sockets, we're part of the world. And those relationships, it's not just your intimates, it's also
the larger world and so that is our design and because that's our design we're perfectly situated each and every one of us to deal with a world that can seem pretty shitty sometimes.
Yeah, you know, one of the things about having a kid that's been so enlightening in both the colloquial and sort of more technical definition of that word is seeing how innate these qualities are, you know, seeing our sons joy.
just at being and exploring the world and seeing how he's only one and how natural it is to want to contribute. So I was making breakfast this morning and I gave him the little box of almond milk and I said, can you put it in the refrigerator? Can you put it back? And he was so excited to walk over the fridge and put it in. I said, can you close the door to the refrigerator for me? And he's so excited to be able to close the door. It's like, we want to participate and contribute to those around us.
And for so many reasons and in so many ways that gets distorted and twisted by shame and obligation and duty and all of these experiences and messages we receive from compulsory education and the media and oftentimes our families that kind of covers over this very, very natural impulse to experience joy when we are connected and contribute.
So you've got these 26 tools, my bad for calling them Buddhist tools. These 26 tools very much, I think influenced by Buddhism nonetheless. Absolutely. Yeah, I won't hide that nor should you. Definitely not here. This is a friendly place for Buddhists and Buddhism. We're not going to get obviously to 26 all 26 of them and people should read the book, but let's touch on a few of them. You start with attention. Why attention?
Absolutely. What we pay attention to shapes our inner atmosphere and it affects the choices that are available to us. And specifically, there is a multi-billion dollar industry competing for our attention, right? We know that the more screens can capture our attention, the more advertising revenue and profit someone is generating.
So if you can influence attention, if you can control attention, you can influence action. So it's profit and it's also action, behavior. So I start with attention because developing agency over where we place our attention is the first step to empowerment and transformation. If we can't choose where we place our attention, someone else is choosing it for us or we are dragged around by our habits.
So the simple exercise or experiment I invite people to do and anyone listening can do this right now is to just notice what you're seeing and now notice what you're hearing. Notice the sounds around you. There you go. You just shifted your attention. You just chose where to put your attention. That very basic fundamental capacity that we all have, we can choose to strengthen it. And to actually choose where we're putting our attention is a radical act.
we can begin to make different choices that actually strengthen us rather than stress us out and leave us, you know, exhausted. So when you have five minutes between things, where are we placing our attention? Are we ruminating on all of the things that are worrying us and the things that we have to do? Are we picking up the phone and scrolling through a feed? Or are we able to really consider what would be useful right now? What would feel good and nourishing right now?
How are we using our attention inwardly? What are we thinking about? What are we focusing on? And how are we using our attention outwardly? Are we just using the screen to self-regulate? Or are we engaging with the things that are really nourishing in our world to actually recharge us, noticing the sky, noticing the trees, enjoying a breath of fresh air?
So when we reclaim our attention, we garner tremendous power and resources inside because we are taking back something that's fundamentally ours and that is a limited resource. Well, that is super helpful. Let me just play the not the skeptic, but the drowning person who might say, I got to look at a computer all day long for work.
And then I'm exhausted at the end of the day and I just want to scroll and I know it's not good for me, but I get sucked in. And by the way, I've got all these other emails and texts I need to answer. So I got to be on there anyway. I don't see how I get away from this barrage. Yeah, I don't have the luxury to do that, right? Yeah. So there's two things here. One is not being idealistic and making choices where we have agency. So
The tendency to be idealistic, painting a picture that's not actually possible versus what's it like when you get up from your desk, say, to go get another cup of coffee, to just stretch your arms for 10 seconds. How does that feel? There are little ways that we can integrate these practices in the book into our lives that don't involve some Herculean shift.
That's number one. Number two is that all of the qualities kind of work together in the book. And this is one of the things I say in the introduction is that, you know, it's written chronologically chapter one to 26, but we need to use our own intelligence and start where we are. So there's a chapter on rest.
So when I hear what you're describing, which is the challenge so many of us are locked into, chained to a computer, working at a desk job, it's like, well, what's actually needed? Maybe it's finding more strategies for rest and it's being able to just shut your eyes for 30 seconds before you switch from doing this email to the next meeting.
So making it really manageable and also using wisdom around how am I training myself? And this is really one of the fundamental principles behind the book, which comes from Buddhism, which is that we're always practicing something. We're always practicing something. So are we practicing being
frustrated, stressed out, rushing, impatient, or are we able to practice being thoughtful with ourselves, kind, generous in small ways?
When we start to recognize that everything we're doing, and again, this is about attention, every choice we're making, everything we're doing is actually shaping our own mind for better or for worse. We can start making different choices, even small ones every day, so that we're growing stronger, more resilient, more flexible, rather than more strung out, more tired, more exhausted.
Extremely helpful. You don't have to make the Herculean shift, start small, insert little breaks of mindfulness or rest into your day and see what happens. Another entry on your list is aspiration. And I think that harkens back to a question you raised earlier in the conversation. I believe you use the words how to figure out what is ours to do.
Yeah, this is such a powerful capacity that we have as human beings. And I think one of the reasons why there's so much depression and anxiety, so much despair and hopelessness is the loss of aspiration. So aspiration is the sense of what's possible for us in life. It's a certain, almost a longing inside for something better, for something more fulfilling or meaningful or just or good.
And the reason it's so important is because if we don't have an aspiration, it's like our North Star. It's where we're headed. What's the point? What's the purpose? If we don't have that, we don't have energy.
aspiration brings energy. It invites us to really look inside and say, what's most important to me in my life? What am I about? So, you know, for those who are parents, just having that motivation, that intention, these are synonyms for aspiration, like, I really want a parent with care and attention and respect for my children.
And then we come back to that every time we get triggered. Every time you want to scream or lose your shit with your kids, it's like, wait, no, this is my aspiration. This is what I'm striving to offer, to bring into my life.
or just even something as simple as, I want to treat everyone I meet with kindness and dignity because I feel better. And that's the kind of world I want to create. So this functions on an individual level in terms of orienting us and our life and giving us a sense of purpose and energy. And it also functions on a social level. The Declaration of Independence is an aspiration. It's an aspirational document that has sparked movements for sovereignty and democracy around the world and revolution.
Dr. King's famous speech, I have a dream, it's an aspiration. So we see in social movements the articulation of an aspiration, you see se puede, the United Farm Workers slogan, galvanizes people behind a vision of what's possible. It actually energizes us and calls us to marshal our resources and say, let's do something different.
So we can do this personally in our own life and we can do it on a larger level. And again, it doesn't need to be grand, right? Like if you're stuck at home with long COVID, your aspiration might be, today, I'm going to go outside and look at the sun. It might be, I'm going to take a shower today. That's my aspiration. I'm going to do one thing to take care of myself. That's enough. It gets the energy going. It orients us. How's that all land with you?
That all lands really well. I mean, I found in my own life, motivation has been such an interesting area of investigation because I see that the more mindful I've become, the more I see that I have craven motivations. I want to get, I want to be successful. I want to everything I do to, you know, this podcast to be successful, social media, book sales, blah, blah, blah. And when I see that, sometimes I
and revolted and tell myself a story about how I'm a horrible person, which is stupid because motivation as our mutual teacher, Joseph Goldstein, likes to remind people is a range. And so, yeah, those craving motivations are going to be there for all of us, but there are wholesome motivations. You just have to look for those two and then do your best to emphasize and remind yourself
what your aspiration, intention, motivation is. And so little tricks like, you know, and this is something that courses in a big way through Buddhism of like reminding yourself all the time by setting your intention. My intention is to, well, to put it in Dharma, speak to alleviate the suffering of all beings or something like that. And that can be enormously energizing.
Absolutely, I would even take it a step further and say that those selfish motivations that arise, if we actually get curious about them and cultivate some empathy and compassion for ourselves.
we can start to recognize the really beautiful, healthy needs beneath them to go back to some of the non-violent communication models. I want to be the most popular, rich, and famous. It's like, okay, well, what's going on there? What do I really want? I want to take care of my family. Well, how beautiful. Gosh, I really want to be loved and seen. How tender. And we start to actually recognize that
Oh, wow, I am taking care of my family. Isn't that wonderful? Or, hey, I can actually receive the love that's already here in my life and start to feel fulfilled inside without needing to chase after that phantom of status and fame. So those very motivations that we might cringe when we recognize can actually take us more deeply into ourselves and become something quite liberating and empowering. Agreed. And that's really where I've come is to see
the various embarrassing parts of my personality with some warmth as parts of my mind that are doing their best to protect the organism. It doesn't work all the time, but it's been very helpful. Having said that under the rubric of aspiration, in a world where there are so many problems, how do we figure out we can't boil the ocean to expression? I hear a lot. We can't do everything. How do we figure out our bit? Yeah.
I think that's really the question, Dan, for our times. And it's a kind of koan to use a word from Japanese and Chinese-chan Buddhism. It's a question that we hold in our mind that takes us to a different place to really just ask the question sincerely and learn how to engage with it in a very honest and whole-hearted way. So like some of the messages that run through the book
are things like take care of yourself. Listen for what you care about. Learn to recognize your own gifts and skills. What is it that you can offer? There's so many ways.
to contribute. And some of it, I think, is about learning to see ourselves not as isolated individuals, but as members of community as a part of whether it's our local community, our family, larger civil society. We have tremendous power when we start to see ourselves embedded in a network rather than as these isolated, separate people each trying to recycle or get off fossil fuels. That's not going to actually get us anywhere because the issues are much more
broad and complex and structural. So I think it's about the sincere whole-hearted engagement with the question and developing the capacity to listen deeply and trust ourselves. And I have a lot of faith and confidence that if we're each doing that, we will have this beautiful mosaic of skilled, empowered members of the world all working together to make changes.
Coming up, Orrin talks about how mindfulness is not just about feeling good, why joy, even if it sounds a little tweak, can help us persevere, and how to reframe the concept of devotion, sometimes a tough concept for skeptics, so it can apply to your everyday life.
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Work it our way down through your list. Another entry on the list is mindfulness. It's not going to be surprising that you put mindfulness on the list, given who you are and what you do. But you really do go out of your way to make a point that I think is something that people may need to hear, which is that mindfulness, given that the word has become so common these days and we have all these books about mindful parenting, mindful lawyering, mindful sex. It's not just about feeling good. It's deeper than that.
Yeah. And mindful this brings us into relationship with our life, right? It allows us to not just observe, but to actually feel what's happening and be aware of it, which is the first step of transformation, right? It's like James Baldwin said, not everything that is faced can be changed.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced. This is kind of a fundamental principle. If you want to be healthier, if you want to be happier, if you want there to be a world with clean air and clean water and forests for our children, we need to actually be aware of what's happening first before we can engage in it.
The word mindfulness has been sort of co-opted by the wellness industry and repackaged as this kind of very simplified pacifier, right, that's just about feeling better. And not only does that limit its potential benefit,
but it's actually dangerous because it disconnects us from at least half of what's true, which is the difficult things that we experience, the difficult emotions in our lives, the difficult conditions in our world, and engaging with those painful emotions or challenging circumstances are precisely what we need
to actually begin to heal and transform them. And so one of the reasons why I've been so connected to 10% happier is because I see the company and the app and the show trying to do something different. In spite of the somewhat cheeky title or name, like actually trying to present what mindfulness offers in a more thorough and robust way, that it's not just about feeling good. It's actually about engaging with all of what it is to be human.
So that we can live a complete whole life and respond to what's needed. Yeah, I appreciate that. It has been great to have you on this ride. Speaking of this, I think is directly relevant and it's a word you've referenced a couple of times in this discussion.
And it's another entry on your list of 26 joy and we're talking about the joy of working together in a project that we believe to be meaningful. But there are lots of flavors of joy. Can you talk about those flavors and why it's so important and relevant to this conversation about dealing with a jacked up world.
Yeah. It was really startling for me when my wife and I got married a little over two years ago now that I had to work to open my heart to feel all of the joy. I actually didn't have the capacity. I would get overwhelmed every time I practiced taking my vows.
or thought about standing up there in front of our community and exchanging rings, I would break down crying because I didn't have the capacity yet to feel grounded and stable and open and feel that much joy. I've been in love with this woman since I met her. I've been together for eight years and we were finally going to get married. I had to work to open myself enough to feel all that joy. And this was really eye-opening to me to recognize that
we can increase our capacity to feel joy. I think that we as human beings need joy as much as a plant needs water and air and light. It's innate to us. And if we don't have some joy in our life,
That's a very difficult and sad way of being. And there's the kind of surface joy of pleasures that are often tied to different privileges and advantages and the unequal access we have to resources. But there's deeper joy that comes from being in touch with life.
from having meaningful relationships, from giving ourselves to something wholeheartedly and feeling the sense of deep satisfaction that comes. And I think one of the tragedies of the influence of technology that we've already talked about and the power of social media is that we miss so much joy in our lives because we're too distracted or we're moving too quickly.
I think one of the challenges for all of us today is to learn how to slow down and appreciate life in small ways. And what that joy starts to do is it recharges us, it nourishes us so that we do have the energy to keep working two jobs and still raise the kids or get out and vote.
So one of the things that I see in my work a lot is that there's these kind of two traps around joy that people tend to fall into. So on the side of the kind of wellness industry, we get this narrative that we've already talked about of just kind of like feel good and be happy.
And we associate whether it's meditation or healing, just with feeling good. And then we cut ourselves off from anything painful. We try to put a false positive spin on it. And we're not actually available to the rest of life. On the other side, I think the problem that a lot of Buddhists fall into is associating spirituality or meditation just with suffering and being serious.
and actually feeling afraid of healthy pleasure or joy and get worried like this is going to feed attachment or desire as we start to cut ourselves off from actually feeling joyful and experiencing the beauty and the pleasure in life when the practice is actually feeling all of life. It's opening to everything which includes the pain and the joy. What do we actually do
to feel joy, maybe one of these easier said than done things. I think it starts by just learning how to be present and open. I think that, again, joy is a natural experience and capacity that we have as human beings.
In order to feel joy, we have to be willing and able to receive to let things in. So we just had the autumn moon festival. The full moon of the autumn season is a big festival and Chinese culture and other Asian cultures. And the other night, my wife and I were going to bed and she said, let's go outside and look at the moon.
Now, if I say, I'm tired and I want to go outside, let's just go to bed. I miss the joy of not willing to be available to go and look to actually see it. If we go outside and I'm thinking about, I got to get up early and I've got that phone call and how am I going to do this? I'm not available.
if I'm able to be mindful, to be present, open, curious, and to just see the moon, to see it fresh. How many times have I seen the moon in my life? I'm 46 years old, right? I don't know how many times I've seen the moon, but that's all in the past.
I've never seen this moon right now on this night and I just open my eyes and see this big beautiful yellow orb in the sky. It's like, wow, look at that. And some joy arises because I'm available. I'm present.
Right? So, you know, drinking a cup of tea to be able to be present and smell the aroma and feel the heat and taste the quality of it. The joy arises.
naturally, just like a spring out of the earth, when we're available to receive the pleasure, the goodness, the beauty. I remember many years ago, my wife and I were living in San Francisco. I was walking home and I saw these two people saying goodbye on the street and someone was saying to the other person they were saying,
Thanks so much for the ride. They were beaming and they gave the other person a big hug and it made me so happy. Just to see like, oh, that's so great. That person gave them a ride and they're so happy, right? Just being available to the goodness that's actually here in the world and the beauty and the pleasure that's available to us as human beings in really small ways starts to bring joy.
But again, that goes back to mindfulness, to being present, which goes back to attention. Where are we placing our attention? Are we able to make choices that put us in the right place, in our own mind, to actually be available to what's here for us?
You also say in the book, don't force it with joy or with joy. Yeah, you need to be available to it, but you also don't want to like will yourself into it unnaturally and then beat yourself up if it's not coming, etc, etc.
Yeah, there's a certain kind of balance and a trust in the process. And I think there's also something to be said for, like I was saying before, it's not just about feeling good. There's a certain quality of joy that's almost like a deeper joy that moves into a kind of contentment that comes from being able to be present in our life with everything. There's a wholeness that comes from
opening to all of it, the blessings and the hardships. There's a joy that comes from not from getting what we want, not about what we experience, but how we relate. And this is a very kind of deep satisfaction from living fully and feeling the whole range of what it is to be human. So it starts with being available for the pleasure and the beauty and the goodness, and then it takes us deeper.
And the other piece here, so again, to sort of connect it to this larger question of how does any of this apply to the unraveling of so much in our world, we need joy to work for change. It's heart. It's overwhelming. It's disappointing. It's depressing at times. It's enraging at times. We need joy to work for social change, to think about the civil rights movement and all of the songs of joy.
celebrating the justness and the nobility of the cause, or that wonderful sort of pop slogan that is a kind of this condensation of Emma Goldman's work, the anarchist and feminist activist from the 20th century, whose kind of teachings on sexual liberation and creativity and radical anarchy was summarized in this phrase, if I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
I love that. Okay, so there's another entry on your list that could be tough for some people to swallow, at least initially. Perhaps myself included devotion. Yeah. What do you mean by devotion?
I love that you asked the question, Dan. It's one of my favorite chapters and favorite things because of precisely what you said that a lot of people pull away or get turned off by that. And I was very turned off by anything that seemed devotional when I first started practicing because it brought up all of these associations of blind faith and letting go of my own agency and intelligence and autonomy.
So I define devotion as our willingness to give ourselves to something completely. It's a way of relating to anything with love and loyalty and trust and generosity. So some of the synonyms that I offer in the book as a way of kind of getting a feeling for what I mean by devotion are sincerity, wholeheartedness,
enthusiasm, even reverence. So to be devoted to something means that we give a lot of our time, our energy, our attention, so we can be devoted to our family, we could be devoted to our craft, our work, and instrument.
So the devotion isn't defined by what we're devoted to, it's defined by how much of our heart to use that word we bring to it, how much love, how much attention, how much of our whole being are we bringing to the activity or the person or the thing. And what's so amazing about devotion is, number one, I think it's a very, very deep need for us as human beings.
there's a certain kind of hunger, a spiritual poverty, when we don't have devotion in our lives, when we don't feel like we can give ourselves to something wholeheartedly. It sort of erodes our capacity for fulfillment. And what comes into fill that void is all of the wares being sold to us by the media, by a growth-driven capitalist economy, by an exploitative,
world view that because there's this hunger inside to feel whole and to be fulfilled, sometimes we're not even aware of it. So we try to fill it with objects, with accumulation, with status. And what part of what we're really longing for is a sense of deep connection and sincerity in our way of being and life, our way of living.
So devotion, yeah, it's a deep need and I think it heals us. I think it brings us back into a sense of alignment.
What comes to mind when I hear the word in a Buddhist context is, you know, there is devotional practice that some of our, you may have done it yourself. And I know a lot of our mutual friends in the Dharma world have done where you, you really are like prostrating yourself in front of a statue of, you know, Buddhist deity or something like that. And I actually don't know much about this. So I'm not in any way disparaging it, but it makes me a little nervous. And so I guess you're not really talking about any of that.
Well, so thanks for raising that and just being so explicit about it. What I'm doing is I'm starting there because that was my introduction to it too. I'm Jewish. I went to India and started meditating and then I hear all these statues and people bowing and I was like, whoa, this is not cool. I am not bowing to that statue.
Everything, every cell in my body was like, this is not what a Jew does. You do not do that, right? And so I started there and then started to learn more about, well, like, what is that about? Like why? What does that mean? And what's the purpose? So it can be that if that's the language that speaks to us.
But what's important about that is not the statue or the bowing. What's important about it is what is it evoked inside? What is the purpose of that? The purpose of it is a sense of whole-heartedness and a sense of connection to something larger than ourselves.
So we can meet this need for devotion through religious observance or spiritual practice, but of course, that's not for everyone. That's not the language that our heart speaks. I find it difficult to find another word for it.
If that doesn't speak to us, well, there's so many other ways to be devoted, right? We can be devoted to our spouse. We can be devoted to music. We can be devoted to justice. We can be devoted to parenting, like washing dishes and changing diapers can be devotional acts. I think of that beautiful line from Rumi, from Coleman-Bark's translation, there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Or one of my favorite teachings from the Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, when he marched with Dr. King in 1965, he said, I felt like my legs were praying. That's devotion. We are giving ourselves wholeheartedly to something because we value it.
I'm being repetitive here but just to sum you up I think well we may have some reaction some of us to the idea of devotion it really is speaking to universal need of being part of something larger than us. Being part of something larger than ourselves and this experience of wholeheartedness and sincerity being able to give ourselves to something completely which unifies us instead of always being.
fragmented inside or trying to get somewhere else. It's that experience of gardening and you get totally lost in it or taking a walk through the park and just enjoying the trees and the breeze and you're devoted to being present and appreciating the park. So wholeheartedness or sincerity as the other aspect of it. But it really does come right back to the core thesis of the book, which is
A good life, a happy life, happiness, broadly understood is one where you are taking care of yourself and paying attention to the world and engaging in things that bring you out of yourself. It's that paradox. It's that exchange.
Yeah, it's integrating both. And again, it's that sense of like so much of the limitations of either world that we look at, whether it's the world of wellness and healing and spirituality or the world of social change is the lack of integration of the two being able to take care of ourselves and give to the world of being able to give to the world and take care of ourselves. Is there something I should have asked today but failed to ask?
I mean, I guess I touched on it, but it could be fun to talk a little bit about how being a new parent has shifted my perspective and challenged me as a longtime practitioner and teacher.
Yeah, I mean, that's interesting because you're 45 or 44 when you had your first kid and you'd had all these years of meditation practice being in these somewhat austere renunciate environments. And all of a sudden you're like surrounded by baby products and baby poop. And it ain't as dignified as a meditation retreat.
Not at all, no. And it is its own kind of very intensive meditation retreat in a very real way, particularly the early months. My wife and I sometimes joke about being older parents that we traded energy for wisdom.
to the degree that we actually have some wisdom. I mean, it's been incredibly humbling. Some of the hardest parts of it have been seeing my own limitations, my own impatience and anger and reactivity when I'm under slept or stressed out, seeing some of the unconscious sexism or kind of conditioning of patriarchy in my relationship with my wife.
I identify as a feminist. I'm all about trying to understand how the world shapes our experience based on our social position and to see just some of the assumptions that creep in unconsciously around power, like I know what's right or even who gets to speak first. That's been very eye-opening and humbling.
that has also been just this tremendous gift and a real teaching on so many levels. All of the years I've spent training in nonviolent communication and teaching about how it's not selfish to have needs and we can't really get along and have meaningful relationships if we're not able to
acknowledge and own our needs and talk about them with one another. And then to have this utterly helpless, entirely dependent, needy creature appear in our lives and to see how much generosity and tenderness that need called forth in me and my wife and my mother-in-law was just so beautiful.
And then to also see like how so much of what I have believed for so long about the goodness of our hearts, the goodness of being human, to really see how true it is in having a baby and seeing just the joy.
of just being here, seeing how other people interact and relate with him has been remarkable. So many of the defenses and social barriers fall away when I'm out on the street or wearing him in the carry or something and people see this little happy baby and just their faces just beaming and seeing the goodness that's there underneath
distress and the harriedness and the anxiety and all the difficult things that are part of being human also, but that cover over that innate brightness and goodness. Well said. Congratulations again on the new book and obviously on the new baby. Before I let you go for real, can you just remind us of the name of the book and point us to any other resources you've created and put into the world that we should know about?
Absolutely. Thanks. So the book is called your heart was made for this contemplative practices to meet a world in crisis with courage, integrity and love. And it's available anywhere where books are sold. But if you go to my website or in jsofer.com, you can get a free guided meditation series when you order the book, which is like a little bonus companion for the book.
And I'll be teaching online and in different parts of the country for the next many months on the book. So feel free to join me at an event somewhere and check it out. Congratulations again. Thank you, Aaron. Thanks, Dan. Yeah, thanks for having me and thanks for the rich conversation.
Oren has been a frequent flyer on this show, so if you want to take a deeper dive into his work, we'll include some links to his previous episodes. In our show notes, you'll get to hear him talk in greater depth about his work on the overlap between mindfulness and interpersonal hygiene or communication skills, which, as I've said before, have been immensely helpful for me. Thanks again to Oren, and thank you most of all
to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% Happier is produced by Lawrence Smith, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davey, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production. And Kimmy Regular is our executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts. Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme.
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