Wondery plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and add free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
Hey, hey, two quick items of business before we dive in. First, longtime listeners might remember that back in 2018, we ran a podcast survey. We went out and asked you guys to fill out a survey to tell us what we're doing right and where we could improve. And the responses were incredible. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of you actually took the time to do this. We then made significant changes to the show based on your feedback.
uh... so now we want to do it again so if you've got the time we'd love to hear your thoughts and reflections uh... go to ten percent dot com forward slash survey ten percent dot com forward slash survey will put a link in the show notes second out of business is that uh... i'll be giving a talk here in new york city that's open the public if anybody wants to come it's on wednesday march fourth
at the New York Press Club and Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. There's pizza at 6.30 and then the event starts at 7 and I'm going to be in conversation with a really interesting mental health professional named Leslie Alderman and I'll be talking about meditation, journalism and much more. You don't have to. They assured me you do not have to be a journalist to attend this.
So that's the New York Press Club at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism on Wednesday, March 4th. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. All right, let's dive in. I'm going to keep my intro short this week because this guest is phenomenal. And I think it's going to be more interesting to hear from her than it will be to hear from me. But let me just briefly say that Valerie Brown's personal story is incredibly interesting. She overcame, as you will hear her describe it, some very serious early life trauma.
emerged from that to become a hard-charging lawyer and lobbyist, representing educational institutions and nonprofits and other institutions, and then had a moment of really kind of waking up to what her life was all about. She was introduced to the teachings of Tic Nhat Hanh, of their famous Vietnamese Zen
Master, who has established a worldwide community and written many, many books. And we have not actually talked that much about his lineage and tradition, which is a fascinating one. And you'll hear her talk about the impact that had on her life.
She's now a certified coach, sort of a leadership coach. She's no longer the hard-charging lawyer, although she's hard-charging as you'll hear. She's also the co-director of Georgetown's Institute for Transformational Leadership in Washington, D.C. And we talk about a lot of stuff in this interview, including sort of the process of waking up to what's really driving you in your life. And for her, it was a lot of fear and insufficiency. I think that may be true for a lot of us, definitely true in my case.
We talk about self-compassion, how important that is, and also the flag that sometimes self-compassion can actually reinforce the self. That and much, much more from Valerie Brown. So here we go. Valerie Brown.
Great to meet you. It's great to meet you. You come with such high recommendations from Jack Cornfield. That's a pretty good source of recommendation. He is a delight. He's an extraordinary teacher and an old soul. I'd be really curious to hear your story. I know a little bit of it, but I'd love to get dried out a little bit more. How did you get into meditation?
Yeah, so Like you and like like many other people I kind of stumbled and bumbled
my way into meditation, into mindfulness. And I'll use meditation and mindfulness kind of interchangeably. So I grew up here in New York in the People's Republic of Brooklyn. And so I grew up amidst a lot of violence, a lot of poverty. Brooklyn was not the swanky place it is today.
Yeah, I mean, now it's filled with artisanal chocolate tears and, you know, beer. Latte shots and yoga studios. Drone rasters. No, no, no. None of that was there at that time. It was a place that, you know, you wanted to get out of where in Brooklyn.
The epicenter of Hipsterville now, Bushwick. Okay, yeah. So I grew up on a lovely little street called Muffet Street. There is such a place. And my mother was a maid. My dad worked in the barry as a tailor. And so we grew up pretty thin on thin ice financially.
And I would say every penny that we earned went to putting us through Catholic schools. So I never spent a day in a public school. I don't know how my parents did it. But eventually they split up. My mother died when I was 16. My father kind of disappeared. And at 18, I became an independent student, meaning I had
no parental supervision and no parental support. Get out of curiosity, what would happen with your mom? She had a brain tumor. So that's a real trauma for you. Serious trauma. 16 years old. I grew up immediately. I went from doing what a 16-year-old, all the stuff that a 16-year-old would do to
in a grown up and sunk into a huge depression, huge trauma, huge depression. And what was going on with your dad that he disappeared? Well, that's a complicated thing. I think he, you know, he had his own ideas about how he wanted to live and it didn't include children and a wife. So he made that choice. So you're just alone, adrift, depressed, shocked.
Pretty much, pretty much, yeah. So it was, I remember the day I left the house. I grabbed some toys and like some clothes and stuff. And I put it in a sheet. I tied the sheet up. I threw it in the back of my boyfriend's truck. We drove away from the house. I never came back. I never saw him again. I never saw my family for many, many years.
Did you have brothers and sisters? I had three brothers. And they stayed in the home even after you were one of us. They stayed. I left. I got a room. At the time, I moved to Queens. So I got a room. I rented a room. I worked at Burger King by day. And I went to school at night at City University.
And the only reason I went to City University was because it was free. There was a special program called Open Enrollment. Anyone who graduated from high school in New York City could go to City University, all of the various branches, totally free of charge. That's how I went to school. And there's still a soft spot in my heart for Burger King. I don't need burgers.
but I still know how to fold a wrap. But yeah, so that was my life. That was not where I thought you were going. I thought you were about to say something profound about the nature of trauma and you extol the virtues of Burger King.
I like you already. I mean, I don't eat meat either, but you know, some things are true. Yeah. So, you know, that was, that was the beginning.
That was the beginning. So I had a lot of trauma, which meant I did a lot of running. I ran from Brooklyn to undergraduate school and graduate school to law school.
You're not talking about jogging here. You're talking about escaping your past. Totally escaping. Running as fast as I could from the fear, from the poverty, from the violence, from all of that stuff that was so consuming that I didn't want. So I ran in the opposite direction of that and trying to really outrun myself.
And so I did a lot of running until I finally ran to the big and important job as a lawyer and a lobbyist representing all kinds of organizations and groups, college presidents, boards, educational institutions, totally high stress, high pressure. If the work doesn't kill you, something else is going to kill you. You're going to have a heart attack. How old are you at this point?
So that was all through my 20s, all through my 30s, all through my 40s. Okay, so that you ran for... Long time. Yeah. I'm pretty good at running. Yeah, well, but you come by it honestly. I mean, that's a rational response to a pretty deeply terrible set of circumstances. And also just you're probably too modest to say this, but the amount of success you achieved, given where you were coming from, is quite extraordinary.
So there's a lot to take. You're talking about the running and you're accentuating the negative parts of it. There's a lot to take pride in, I would hope, in what you're able to achieve over those years. Well, you know, I totally appreciate that. And now stepping back in kind of the role that I'm in now, I can appreciate that. But all those years when I was on the run in the back of my head, similar to the experience that you've often talked about, talked about,
I had this voice of what my friends call the medieval executioner. You're never good enough. You've got to do this. You've got to do that. You have to be better. And so this was my life.
And I remember an incident that was really a watershed for me. When I first began practicing meditation, I hadn't even thought about sharing the story, but it feels appropriate. So I'm brand new to meditation.
And I can tell the story of how I actually got to this point, but I'm brand new. Maybe it was the first or second time. The instructions were very simple that the instructor gave. Sit still.
When you get distracted, bring your awareness back to the breath, the in-breath, the out-breath. Pretty simple, right? I realized, you know, I thought I was on fire. I thought that, you know, there was somebody let loose a wild stallion in my brain. I mean, like everybody else, I just could not focus. I could not concentrate.
And I thought, oh, I'll go back next week, and I'll nail it. And 20 years later, I'm still at the same. I'm still at the same meditation. But there was one point, probably maybe a few months after I started practicing. There was a voice in my head that said, you better go and get milk.
Yeah, it was just this very ordinary voice. You better go and get milk. And then another voice came in and it said, well, why? And then the voice replied, well, you know, you have to be prepared.
And then the voice replied, well, why do you have to be prepared? And then the voice said, because you know you can't rely on other people. You've got to do it yourself. You have to be more. You have to have everything in place.
And I realized that's true. That's how I'd been living my life, just driven by the need, the desire to be other than who or what I am. That was like a deep wake up.
And it happened with a container of milk. I don't even drink milk anymore. But it actually applied to every aspect of my life. So I'm black. I had been straightening my hair for years. That was part of being acceptable to what I perceived other people. Now you don't straighten your hair, just for people who can't see you.
Right now, I have, you know, long dreadlocks, right? So a moment of waking up to fear and insufficiency that have been driving you your whole life. Yes. Yeah, that's, that's a big waking up, because when you don't see it, it just owns you. Totally. Seven days a week.
Totally. And it felt like the most obvious thing. And I think that's a part of insight. That's the power of mindfulness. I had a moment of awareness. I had a moment of concentration.
And I had a moment of clarity. And that led to an aha, a light bulb moment. That's insight. That's wisdom. And that's a beautiful thing when that happens. That's the power of meditation. Yeah. But is seeing it enough? What do you mean? Well, you noticed something huge, which is you'd had this
Program running in the back of your psyche for for a long long time and it had been you know kind of the puppeteer So you noticed that and and then what is that enough to right to change the way you live?
Well, that's a really important beginning to notice what you notice without noticing. We kind of don't get anywhere. So the noticing is like a really important step in the process.
It actually probably, way before the noticing, there's stuff happening. There's a kind of a longing. There's a kind of an energy. But because I was on the run, I didn't stop to look. I didn't stop to question any of that.
But the moment that I actually noticed, then that could lead to steps action, actually doing something about what I actually noticed. And that was great. And that then led me to
come into the Buddhist path or the Buddhist way. And again, that was stumbling on that. I was in my brother's apartment. He lives on the upper west side, close to the riverside church. And one day, this was many, many years ago,
There was an ad in the paper. This Vietnamese monk poet was giving a public talk at Riverside Church, and my brother said, well, why did you go on down and hear this guy? You know, I was very much ensconced, engaged in my big lawyer job.
So this is pre-realization. We're going back in time just a little bit here. Well, you know, it was pre-realization, but it's all, you know, it was all these little steps and little moment. It wasn't like one boom, you know, the cup fell out of the cupboard and I became enlightened and, you know, I moved on. But what I meant was pre-milk dialogue. Yes, pre-milk. Hey, that's a good one.
yeah so your big-time lawyer lobbyists at this point you're at your brother's apartment and he sees an advertisement in the paper that for a Vietnamese monk who i assume is tick not on legendary exactly uh... advocate for peace uh... highly realized meditation teacher still alive although ill and practicing in southern living in southern france anyway
You're you see this advertisement. You don't know any of this stuff and clueless I assume what why did you decide to go given everything else going on with you because I love my brother and he said why don't you do that and Because I love him and he's always right. I did it
And it was just down the block. I mean, we were, you know, just a block away. So I figured, well, what the heck? I've got nothing to lose. You know, and I showed up as I was, you know, just like a bunker mentality, you know, of hard as nails, you know, the whole lawyer thing. I'm, you know, still on the run, you know,
Um, and so I'm sitting here there in this with hundreds of other people and Riverside church. And Tic Nhat Hanh is talking about what he generally does, you know, self compassion and compassion and, and peace and all of the stuff. And I walked out of the talk and I thought, what the heck's the matter with that guy? And you can hear the arrogance in that. And
And yet, a seed, a tiny seed, was planted that then kind of led me to the milk realization that led me to begin to want to understand more. So I started to attend retreats with Tiknad Han and with the community, the Sangha.
And so everywhere, Ticknod Han went, I went. Even though that first time he thought he was crazy, how did you get from thinking he was crazy to going on retreats with this guy?
Yeah, so what was obvious was what was happening in my body. I mean, I was the classic type A personality. I mean, I would park my car, headlights faced out so I could go fast and get out of wherever I was going. I would drive home at night with my heart racing. I could barely catch my breath.
you know, the medieval executioner in the back of my head, what did I miss? Who's going to miss, you know, who's going to notice that I screwed this thing up? And so to kind of get a sense of relief from that, I thought, well, I've got nothing to lose. Let me give it a try. And actually something else happened.
I got pretty sick with my job. I got to a point where I couldn't even walk anymore. I used to think I was involved in weight training and running at all of these kind of very
I don't know. It's not aggressive, but that was what I did for exercise. I thought that the only people who did yoga were people who couldn't run.
I mean it was just kind of nuts. But you were just like kicking on every level by conventional, in the conventional sense. You were checking all the boxes that our culture tells you make you successful. Absolutely. And this is what I believed wholeheartedly.
Yeah. And so, you know, I walk out of this public talk by this Vietnamese guy, you know, who's saying this stuff about peace. And I thought that guy was nuts. But I did notice what was happening with my body and, you know, kind of a sidebar to all of this.
I think I mentioned I have three brothers. So two have really serious heart conditions. One had a heart transplant a couple of years ago and the other one has end stage heart failure.
And so genetically, I probably have some of that going on myself. I don't. I can say that because I've had all the tests. But I think that that was what's happening for me. My heart was saying, you've got to do something. You've got to pay attention.
Um, and, and so there came that time when I really wasn't hardly even able to walk. And so I thought, well, I can't run. I can't go for long walks. Um, maybe I could do this meditation thing. Well, what had happened to you? You just were so run down with stress that you were totally run down with stress. Totally run down. Yeah. Actually, and so probably that's why your brother suggested you go to this thing.
He's a wise man. He was a wise man. He saw what I didn't see. You know, I'm unsure it was obvious to everybody except me. And again, because I was clueless, totally clueless.
So, you know, I have a lot of compassion now for that. But then I was just, I was obsessed. You know, I was living in fear. The fear that somebody else is going to die on me. Somebody else is going to abandon me. You know, and that was really driving me. So,
So meditation was kind of, well, I can't do all these other things. Maybe I could do that. And that's how I stumbled and bumbled my way toward meditation. It wasn't a conscious, I'm going to be enlightened. It was, well, I can't do these other things.
So what impact did it have when you started going to retreats with the aforementioned allegedly crazy Vietnamese gentlemen and meditating quite a bit? What happened next? That's a good question. Yeah.
So it was a really, you know, it was a slow process because I was a really hardened person. And in many ways, I still am. Yeah. So I want to shout out to that part of myself. I mean, I've only known you for about 20 minutes now, but I don't see it's not readily apparent. It's there. Yeah. I believe you. I'm just pointing out. Absolutely.
And so, what happened was, I would go to retreats. I would actually practice with the monastics in the monastery. We would practice, they're practice centers that Tiknot Han has founded. And so, I would go to the monastery on the weekends. I would go to retreats during the year with Tiknot Han in which we would practice
mindful walking and eating and speaking and drinking and resting and actually mindfulness in daily life. The formal practice of meditation obviously is something that we do but wasn't quite so much of an emphasis on the sitting practice and the formal walking practice. So that is of course done. But really on cultivating an awareness of
being alive, like in every moment. And what happened was I started to become alive. I started to become aware that
of little things. It's like I woke up from the deepest sleep. I started to notice just a leaf on the ground or a cloud in the sky. In fact, I can tell a story of the moment I knew the practice had penetrated me on a deep level.
And it's still a practice I have every single day of my life. So I had been practicing and going on retreats with Thai, Tiknatan, Thai as a teacher. We often call them Thai teacher.
And I had taken a vacation in the West, in New Mexico, and I climbed up to the top of a really big mountain. I took off my backpack and I was kind of just like leaning up against a log, just looking up at the sky. And it really sunk in deeply.
Maybe for the very, very first time, I actually just stayed with the clouds and just noticed how they moved. And I realized very deeply how I had really been alienated from the natural world. I was alienated from myself and I was waking up.
And today, every day, this is my practice. I look at the clouds. I breathe in. I notice that it's that they're there.
Yes. So what that does is create a kind of deep sympathy, a deep empathy for the world, a kind of that matters. And because those things matter, then
I am invested. I want to take care of that. I want to steward that. I have a stake in that. Are you talking about the natural world here or other human beings or both? Both. It was expressed that on that day in the natural world, but it could be anything.
But so just to see if I can articulate back to how I would imagine this would work, you know, when you realize you basically been missing your own life for whatever 40 or 50 years, I don't know how old you were at this moment.
Yeah, I'm not good with numbers somewhere somewhere somewhere somewhere. You realize you've been missing your own life. You've been driven by these ancient neurotic patterns that were injected into you by the culture, by your circumstances. Again, not unjustifiably, but they're there. Sure. And you weren't even aware of them. And all of a sudden, you start to wake up from autopilot. Yeah. And you realize, yeah, well, there are probably several billion other people doing that in that same painful
sleepwalking situation and you realize, all right, well, maybe I can be helpful. You have the desire to be helpful because you recognize how good it feels to wake up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so then that was a real crisis, waking up. That was a problem. You think of being it? Yeah, very inconvenient.
It was very inconvenient. I don't know if you know a woman, there's a teacher who I've studied with who I really like. She's been on the show a couple times. Her name is Spring Washum.
She's a great teacher. And she said, I had a 360 review done. I've talked about this a lot in the podcast where basically I got a lot of people in my life to anonymously comment on how I'm doing. And it was awful. And I sent her the 360. And she said, Dan, insight sets you free. But first, it pisses you off. And I feel like that might have been what was happening for you. Absolutely. It's like, oh no.
Then the work began. You know, it's like when your, you know, it's kind of ignorance is bliss kind of thing. And then when I woke up, it's like a darn it. Okay. Now I could, I could unsee maybe, but you know, we can't unsee. And so then I had to figure out who am I.
If I'm not a lawyer, if I'm not a this, if I'm not a that, then who am I really? And that's, of course, a bottomless pit and a long-term construction job.
So that's the journey then that I began earnestly. So I let go of the lawyer job, which was extremely difficult because I had all the scaffolding in place.
you know, the pension and all of the stuff, right? And so letting that go was really terrifying. And I didn't want to just let go into the abyss. So I started looking around for what else, what else can I do? How can I earn a living and be true to whatever is emerging here?
So, one of the things that I did was I went to Georgetown, and I went to their Institute for Transformational Leadership, and started studying there, and I just went to all these really cool places, the Center for Compassion-Focused Therapy, the Ohai Foundation, to learn how to sit in circle with people. I went to the Center for Courage and Renewal, and all of these amazing people and teachers.
and just trying to figure out, well, okay, how do you become a person now? You attacked waking up like a type A lawyer. I guess I did. Then I was on the quest, but it was a different energy. Right. It was a different energy. I had different values.
which were continually being refined and thought through. And so now my work is one of the co-directors at this Institute for Transformational Leadership at Georgetown. So I work with people who are very much, you know, they're CEOs, they're all C-suite people who are in the throes of what I was in.
They're in a transition in their lives. I do a lot of leadership coaching, so I work with people who are in vocational transition, and I'm a Dharma teacher. Last year in 2018, the Plum Village community said, we'd like you to be a Dharma teacher, and I said, I don't think that's a good idea.
And they said, yeah, we think so. So it's one of those things where you don't say no. And it's a true honor. So my life is really devoted now to serving people.
I have a particular affinity and interest where people who are black indigenous identify as black indigenous or a person of color, people who are in exploring gender fluidity and gender expression.
You know, I'm very, very interested in leadership. I'm very interested in transitions, transformation. You know, written two books on transformation. I'm like really curious, how is it that people transform and how is it that people don't? What is required? You know, that's, that's something that I'm just really curious about. Stay tuned. More of our conversation is on the way after this.
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I love that the show is sponsored by Whole Foods Market. My family and I shop there on the regular. We stock up with our packaged foods, our prepared foods, like sushi. We love their chicken salad. We also get a lot of our natural cleaning products there. But today I want to talk to you about the fact that Easter is in full bloom at Whole Foods Market.
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that appeals to me as a deeply lazy person. When the brunch has to be perfect, go to your local Whole Foods market.
I'm interested in this sort of executive or leadership coaching you do. If I were to come to you and I'm actually the type of person who might come to you and I have an executive coach right now, but so you're lucky in that I'm probably not going to be knocking on your door next week, but maybe who knows, but I would be worried for the following reason.
You're sitting in front of me wearing robes right now, and you were a hard-charging lawyer and left and became a bunch of other things that didn't involve making a ton of money kicking butt at a law firm. I would be worried, okay, so are you going to guide me into something that is really scary to me, or are you going to help me just be happier while I am living a more conventional life?
Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I think the thing with coaching, as you know, since you're already engaged in it, is this is really about
The current state where a person is right now in their life and what is it that they want? What is the desired state? What does that look like? And that's really different for every person. And it's not up to me. It's not my journey. I might have some ideas, but the person isn't paying me or I'm not engaged in this because I've got a certain kind of
direction the person should go. I'm trying to invagel them into a cult or something. It's really about walking alongside of a person and saying, hey, do you see that over there? That's kind of interesting. What do you think?
I'm immensely curious about other people and what they think. Things, not just people, the natural world, the world around me. You know, like I'm just, oh, really? Okay, I hadn't thought about it that way.
And so really coaching is much about how do I transform my way of thinking, my way of being? Can I see things in a different way? And so in that regard, it's a lot like meditation, you know, thinking one way and then maybe getting an insight and thinking a different way.
So I read, you did a little bit of a pre-interview with my colleague, Samuel, who is a great producer on this show. And I read, you use the phrase, I'm just rifling through my notes here, when you talked about your coaching, use the phrase, the program is about building a whole human. And I was wondering, what does that mean? What are you actually trying to do?
That's great. And Samuel, he was a delight, I have to say. So there's a really wonderful quote attributed to Confucius. He said something like, to be a leader is to be a human being first.
And so my sense, and I could be wrong, is that at the Institute, what we're trying to do is build human beings. And this may sound really obvious, really like kind of obvious and low on the food chain.
But this is a remarkably important thing to do. We live in a world with tremendous anxiety, tremendous tribalism, tremendous divisiveness, tremendous stress. I don't have to go on about that. And so in many regards, we've lost that sense of what it means to be a human being. What does it mean to breathe and be aware that we're breathing?
to have a sense of clarity, of thought, and of mind. We live in a world with continuous partial attention. Our minds are constantly alighted to one thing or another.
walk and know that we're walking to sit and know that we're sitting. All of these things that create personhood and humanhood, I think, is something that, in a very virtual world, we are quickly losing. And so it's not just the head, but uniting that the intellect, the reason, and the heart.
to produce a whole human being, a leader who can be quite rational, quite analytical, can be visionary, who can look at the return on investment, but doesn't lose his or her heart in the process, has the capacity to tap into their own sense of compassion.
These things, I think, are very important.
In terms of being a whole human, what came up for me, because what I was going to ask you next was, well, how do you actually do that? One thing that came up as a possible answer, at least, the executive coach I work with, his name is Jerry Colona. Oh, he's fabulous. You know he is. He's a sort of Buddhist-inflected coach the way you are. And he does this thing at a noise, the hell out of me, which is a read me roomy poetry, which doesn't go over well to me.
And he knows that I don't like it, and he does it anyway. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and writing, right doing, there is a field. Are you quoting Rumi to me now? Sorry. I think it's required reading for all coaches.
Anyway, I'm going to forgive you. But he did this. He was triply annoying recently when he read me this poem, and I actually heard something in it that I really liked, which is, I think it's the poem is called The Guest House, and it's talking about how a true human, this is the room he's phrased, a true human welcomes whatever comes into the guest house of one's mind.
with hospitality. And so if you sit in meditation for more than 30 seconds, you're going to see some stuff you don't like. Your teacher, Tignan Han, has said if you sit and watch your mind for a period of time, eventually you will see Hitler. And I happen to agree with him. That doesn't mean you will necessarily see the desire to actually kill a person, but you will see the seeds of that kind of rage and destructive impulses, et cetera, et cetera.
and a true human per the aforementioned roomy welcomes that with some warmth because that's just what we are. And to become warmly acquainted with everything that's in here, even the stuff that you
Want to run from to call back to the earlier parts of this discussion running That is a whole or true human is that in line with what you're talking about when you talk about whole humans beautiful. Yeah, I it is and Though you describe that you know so beautifully and you know with great ease This is quite a high order to accept Not just accept
you know, tolerate, but how about love, the part of ourselves that we've thrown under the bus, that we'd rather not other people see. You know, for me, it was the part of myself that was never good enough. How about loving that? And so really, it was through Tiknata and the Sangha that I began to
not only embrace the stuff, bracing the stuff that I like, that's kind of easy, right? It's embracing and really, truly, deeply not faken it. That's the part of myself that I really don't want anybody to see. That's hard.
And so people come into the Institute and they've got the medieval executioner like running the show. Many of the people aren't even aware that there's a medieval executioner running the show. And so they get a first glimmer that there's somebody else behind the curtains and it goes from there.
creating a human being to realize that we have thoughts, we are thinking, and how are those thoughts actually being imprinted in the DNA of our body, my body?
And so one of the main practices that we have in the Plum Village tradition is awareness of the body. Actually, it's the first foundation of mindfulness. So it's really kind of cool because you go on a Plum Village retreat and very often we'll begin the retreat by going for a walk in the woods.
By the way, Plum Village is where Tignahan lives. It's in southern France. Exactly. And then it's also all become kind of the name of his lineage. Become, yes, yes. So... Going for, I interrupted you with going for a walk. Yeah, we could go for a walk. Taking in, and now, of course, forest bathing is all the rage. What? Forest bathing.
forest bathing, yes, forest bathing. Finding a little stream and bathing. Well, not quite, but there's a lot of science, a lot of research about what happens to a person when they enter nature, when they're around, when we're around kind of trees and grass and we really
pay attention to being around nature. Blood pressure lowers, heart rate adjusts. It has this calming and soothing effect. We don't have to do anything. Just walking in to a place like that. You already know what it feels when you're at the beach. That's forest bathing. That's forest bathing. Retreats will often begin.
that way or with resting, you know, with laying down meditation because our tie has said that resting, stopping, you know, which is a practice of not running and calming the body is really a precondition to healing. And so this is all about healing. How do we heal the body minds?
Let me just go back to whole human, true humanness for a second. Please. I have a question before I ask the question. I want to just make sure I'm using the term correctly. I think of this as a form of self compassion. Would you agree with that? This meaning becoming generating warmth for the parts of you that you're that you're ashamed of. I would agree with that. Yeah.
So I have a running, I don't wanna call it an argument, maybe a debate dialogue with my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who has, I think, justified, and I've heard this from other Buddhists, worries about self-compassion for the following reason. It can entangle you even further in the self, which is of course the per the Buddha, the root of our suffering. So what's your take on that?
Joseph Goldstein is so wise. You're going to give him a big ego if you hear this. I love that. I really love that. There's so much deep truth to that. Here's what I would say. When I'm speaking of self, from a Buddhist perspective, there are two elements to self. The first is the historical dimension of self.
And that's what we've been talking about largely. The person who grew up in Brooklyn, got a job in Burger King, parents died, blah, blah, blah. That's the historical dimension. Stuff happened. There's another dimension of self. That is the ultimate dimension. That is the dimension where there is no birth and no death. There's no up or no down. There's no coming and there's no going. And that
is the dimension that I'm talking about, the ultimate dimension. The dimension that that's the place of transformation as well. And so I think it's really important to understand that. So self-compassion can arise out of understanding that we both, we inhabit a body, but the self is also part of this vast ultimate dimension.
We get very caught and I think, you know, I think Joseph Goldstein is right in this very egoic kind of, I've got to self-improvement project and self-compassion can become a kind of self-improvement job.
But I think it's really important to keep in mind that we are also talking about the ultimate dimension of self.
So can I say a bunch of words and you can see if you, just to play off of what you just said and see if you think I'm heading and vectoring in the right direction. Sure. So it's often discussed what you just described in at least the school of Buddhism that I've come up in that there are two levels, two reality. There's the relative level, in other words,
Here we are in conventional reality. I need to, I'm Dan. I need to put my pants on. I have got the dentist appointment later today. I need to go to that. It's made under my name. I have my own personal history that's, you know, on some relative level, conventional level, it's true.
It is also true that this table we're sitting at is a table and conventional level, but on the ultimate level, it's mostly empty space and spinning subatomic particles. And that's true of the self, that if you close your eyes and look for the you, you won't find it. There's nothing to find.
And so these things are both true at the same time. Yes. And so you can do a kind of self-compassion that does take into account the biographical truth of your life. Yes. But I think Joseph's point, and it sounds like you're agreeing with him, is
That's useful and it is also useful It is also true that the ultimate form of self-compassion is to see that there's nobody there to begin with and Yes, there is somebody there of course on one important level that is true It is also true that if you look closely this self that we get so tangled up in this ego that causes so much pain really in some ways you can at least for a moment or two see that It's an illusion
Yeah, that's really quite beautiful. And I would truly agree with that. And again, I agree with the reasoning with what Joseph is saying, and extend it further from the perspective of the Plum Village tradition in Chiknadhan. It may also be other Buddhist sex and Buddhist religions, Buddhist variations.
But what I would say is that there is, from my understanding, the notion of when we speak of the ultimate, the ultimate dimension of self, we're really, you named it, a kind of emptiness.
Right. I think the word in Sanskrit is Sunyatta. Right. So there's an emptiness, but it doesn't mean that it's a zero. It means that we are empty of a self that is separate from everything else around us. We're full of
all of the elements. We couldn't exist if there was an air debris. That forms who we are. We have parents. They're part of our DNA. We're made mainly of water. And so we are full of all of these non-self, so-called non-self elements.
And so this is where people kind of get tripped up in a little dicey understanding of Buddhism. But really, we're quite full. And so if we look at it from that perspective, that we're deeply, deeply, inextricably interconnected with everything else,
Then we can say, yeah, I can have, you know, this thing happened to me. It wasn't great, but I'm connected to the whole human race because there's other people who've had something else.
And so we recognize we're not alone, right? We're not alone. Other people have had something similar. And I think that's really one of the beautiful things about self-compassion. We can take in for ourselves all the things that have happened to us and know that we're not alone. I think the term your teacher uses is interbeing.
absolutely interbeing, right? And this is one of the most basic understanding within the Plum Village tradition is that we are, we are connected. So Thay's Thich Nhat Hanh's good friend was Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And, you know, of course, Dr. King talked a lot about this. He used other language, but he talked a lot about my fate, fate as a black person in this country is bound up with the very people who hate me.
were connected. And so, you know, he knew that he wasn't trying to liberate himself alone and liberate only African American people. He was trying to liberate all people.
And so this is a very, very basic understanding. It's not that we're zero. We're actually the opposite. We're quite full.
you brought up Martin Luther King and uh... you had mentioned this earlier when i back when i said there are forty things i want to ask you about you talked about one of the the uh... things that's really a of interest to you in a priority for you is bringing this practice into uh... to groups that are most of the time when you look at a Buddhist meditation teacher in this country it's a white person or an Asian person uh... you've been very interested in bringing it to black people indigenous people
and more. And before we started rolling, you were talking about this as an edge. This is an edge in the meditation slash mindfulness world. So hold forth, if you will. Yes, it's very true. Certainly when I first began practicing, well, I was a closet meditator when I first began. I mean, it was just not acceptable today. Mindfulness is mainstream. Meditation is mainstream.
But yes, I mean, when I first started going to retreats, I saw very few people who looked like me, but I'd also say, you know, with a sense of cultural humility, that the Plum Village tradition
is deeply rooted not only in Buddhism, but in the Vietnamese people and Vietnamese culture. And so I have to begin with a kind of cultural humility. Obviously, there's a lot I don't know. I'm not Vietnamese.
But what I would say is that among certain populations, myself, being a black person, among indigenous people, among marginalized people, and among the general population, there's a lot of studies, ACEs, adverse childhood experiences. So we know that something like 60, 65, 70% of the general population has experienced trauma.
And certainly I would say people who are black, indigenous, or person of color have experienced trauma, trauma in the form of racism. And I think mindfulness and meditation can be so incredible in helping to heal this racial divide.
First, in helping the person who has been traumatized heal their body, heal their mind, calm down, release tension, have a sense of their own self-worth.
You know, so this is truly important. Before we go out to end racism in the world, we need to begin to touch our own suffering and to begin to heal that. And then when we've strong enough, then maybe we can work on healing the racial trauma in the world, which, you know, what do they say? The impossible will take a while.
So, you know, but it doesn't mean that we don't try. But it begins with healing ourselves. Right now in the United States, there's a lot of polarization. People don't talk to each other.
And so I do think that mindfulness can be really helpful in having people engage in these courageous conversations. Now to cast back, my whole professional life was as a lobbyist. A lobbyist is somebody that goes between warring parties, Democrat and Republican, to kind of get them to talk to each other or to get them to do things that they otherwise wouldn't do.
And so I really do believe that the tools, the practices of mindfulness that allow a person to listen.
with and notice when we're being triggered and take care of the energy, the fire that's coming up so that we can sit and tolerate somebody saying something that we might disagree with. That's a really important skill to keep going back to our breath, even when the person is saying something that might be racist or dead wrong.
Can we go further and say to ourselves, can I have compassion? What be curious about how did this person come to these ideas, these beliefs? So these are the kinds of skills that we're going to need as we go into 2020 and people around the country start having these discussions about who do we want to lead our country?
So, what are the characteristics? What is at stake, not just for the person who leads the country, but for our society? As you look at the depth of the, and I see this first hand quite a bit because I'm a journalist and I'm sometimes out in the country talking to people, as you look at the depth of the divisions in the country and
the animosity, the fact that we can't even agree on a common set of facts upon which to have the discussion, the sort of media-fueled silos that we're in, where you can curate your own information environment so that you never get any differing opinions. And we also self-sort geographically, so we're surrounded by people who agree with us.
Given the death and breadth of these problems, do you think how realistic is it that meditation can make a dent? Yeah, I think that's a really important question and kind of the way you phrase it, it feels overwhelming. But there are some things that we can do, and there are small steps.
And there are people who are doing this. I'm well aware of organizations and groups. And so kind of go back to what Tip O'Neill said, that all politics is local. So it begins with local people talking to themselves, not buying in to the idea that we are divided. But beyond that, Tic Nhat Hanh has offered a practice that I think is really important. It's very simple.
So when you're in the midst of heated belief, somebody said something to you about some other thing, gun control or abortion or whatever, and you're dug into whatever the position is, ask yourself this question, am I sure? Is that really true? Am I sure?
Just that, that puts a dent into the solidity of this fixed mindset that says it is permanent, it is pervasive, it is personal, it's always going to be this way.
That is scalable, I think, beyond just hard discussions with people with whom you disagree in a political or racial or gender environment. It's scalable right back to what we were talking about before to leadership. And that by leadership doesn't even necessarily mean you're in a C-suite, it could mean you're an employee at any level in an organization, you're a parent, you're in a volunteer organization, whatever. You may ask yourself in moments where you're
wrapped up in your self-hood, your ego has dug a trench and you're taking shots out of it. Am I sure? That's the kind of a good humility that you can introduce into the mind stream. Absolutely. If we could start a movement and a movement of, am I sure? Allowing for the possibility.
And so this is kind of like the arch enemy of polarization, is to plant that curiosity. Curiosity kind of opens a door, right? And this is the root of meditation, is to practice this open, curious kind of people call it beginner's mind, not fixed.
I haven't got my mind made up. I don't know if I'm an expert. Let's hear what you have to say, you know, which goes back to coaching. What do you think? Just that. Um, but what happened is that we get fixated. We've, you know, the narrative we've made an assessment.
Or actually, we make master assessments. Master assessments, like all X and so are a certain way. And then we walk around with that. It becomes hardened and fixed. And then this gets very, very difficult. And this is when tribalism and polarization happens. And so I think
That practice of, am I sure? I think is an antidote to that. Yeah, it's also annoying because I love being right.
It's totally inconvenient. So much of this stuff is as we as mindful of your time here. So yeah, is there something that I should have asked, but didn't is there an area that you came in here thinking that maybe it would be nice to discuss that I haven't given you a chance to.
Well, not that you haven't given me a chance to, but one thing, I'm sitting here with a brown jacket on and with lots of buttons from the various rallies and marches and so forth that I've attended.
And this really goes back to the heart of the Plum Village tradition. The jacket is brown because it's the color of the earth, and it's a reminder that we're here to serve people, to be of service to people as best we can. We take care of ourselves first, not in a narcissistic way, but because this is important.
And that we have this aspiration to help people as best we can. But also, you know, Ty was the founder of, is largely attributed to engaged Buddhism.
Right. And this comes out of his time in the 1960s as a young monk during the Vietnam War, bombs falling, people running, all of that stuff. He could have stayed in the monastery. Safe. He didn't. He left the confines of the monastery to help people. He got engaged. And so this is the heart of our practice. We practice with ourselves, strengthen ourselves, but it is to serve people to engage in the world.
And I would also say that the other really critical element, because you've written a book on happiness, is happiness.
In the Plum Village tradition, we're not so much concerned about insight because insight naturally arises from mindfulness and concentration. We're really interested in how do we cultivate happiness and share that with other people. So in the United States, we're really good at pursuing happiness, the great external things.
not so good in generating happiness from within. And so this is the heart of the practice. How do we generate within ourselves with what we got going on right here, right now, the good, the bad, and the in-between? How can we generate happiness that we can share with ourselves and for other people? When these two are connected, just as you just said,
you can generate happiness in part lots of ways but in part through meditation in this process of waking up to which is to really simple things that are actually like proof that you're alive and by the way this this this is all this and this is later than you think and all ends pretty quickly and actually there's a way in which that can make that realization can make things much more vivid so that's step number one step number two is
get engaged doesn't your your not being prescriptive in terms of how one should engage or what side you should be on the issue on the issues but get engaged help other people out that uh... that flows naturally out of getting happier and and by the way it then becomes a virtuous cycle because well there's a ton of science that shows as as species that was evolutionarily hot hardwired for
cooperation and connection, the more we are involved in helping other people, the better we do ourselves. And so, yes, I salute your final point there. Did I miss anything in my summary? I don't think so.
The last thing I want to do is, yeah, I we have the semi facetious closing segment. We call the plug zone. We like to get encourage our often modest guests to plug everything they do. We have two of your books. One's called the road that teaches lessons and transformation through travel. And then the mindful school leader practices to transform your leadership in school. So I've just plugged two of your books. What else should we know about if we want to learn more about you?
Yeah, so one of the things that I really love doing is accompanying people on pilgrimage as a form of transformation. So every year we take a group of pilgrims, of people who are interested in experiencing El Camino de Santiago in Spain, a thousand plus year old path
of transformation and work with them to transform their lives. So it's a time for reflection, but yet also a time that's very engaged in being completely immersed in the natural world. So it's really a wonderful experience. And so that's in the road that teaches. Yes.
Yeah. But both books are about how do we transform? Yeah. I've done a lot of work with school leaders and as a lobbyist, as a lawyer, and so the mindful school leader really came out of
Seeing that there was a lot of mindfulness practices for teachers, for students, but almost nothing for the school administrator, for the principal, for the assistant principal, they all wanted it for the teachers. They all wanted it for the students. And then I'd say, well, what about you? And like, I'm too busy, you know, so time out. I, you know, let's start, let's start here. And what about, are you on the internet? Do you have a website?
Right. I do. It's a lead led smart coaching dot com. Great. Smart coaching dot com. Thank you. Such a pleasure to sit and talk to you. It has been a pleasure. Big thanks to Jack Cornfield for making the connection. Gratitudes. Yeah. All right. This has been great.
Big thanks to Valerie. Love that conversation. Also, thanks again to Jack Cornfield for recommending Valerie to us. All right. Just one quick thing before we go, I just want to remind you about the survey we would love you guys to weigh in. It'll just take you a few minutes. If you can weigh in, tell us what we're doing right. Tell us where we could improve. You'd be doing me a solid.
10% dot com forward slash survey, 10% dot com forward slash survey. No voicemails this week. If you have a question for me or for a meditation teacher, you can leave us a voicemail at 646-883-8326. And as always, big thanks to the folks who put together the show, Ryan Kessler Samuel-Johns, Grace Livingston, Lauren Hartzog, Tiffany Omahundro, and we'll see you next week.
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