Jeff Warren: Being Human Takes Practice

Jeff Warren talks about exploring consciousness from the perspective of how to live a more fulfilled life, approaching this exploration with a spirit of adventure. He is a writer and meditation instructor. He is the co-author of The New York Times bestselling Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and author of The Head Trip, a travel guide to sleeping, dreaming and waking.
Interviewer: Serge Prengel has been exploring creative ways to live with an embodied sense of meaning and purpose.

Transcript

So Jeff,

What are you especially interested in these days?

Oh boy.

Well,

I kind of,

It's always practice.

That's the thing I'm most interested in.

What a practice is.

What the different components,

Qualities of mind and heart and attention that are being trained in a practice.

How contemplative practices meet psychotherapeutic practices,

Meet movement practices,

Meet art practices.

So what is the nature of practice?

And how to empower other people to share practices.

So thinking about what it means to be both a practitioner and a guide and a teacher.

So my latest,

I guess there's sort of a development as you develop yourself as a practitioner.

Where originally I was very centered and focused on what are the qualities within a practice that lead to a practice being transformative,

Being healing,

Being empowering.

And trying to identify what was unique in that and what is universal in terms of those aspects of a practice.

Now I'm really interested in,

Still interested in that,

But I'm really interested in the next stage up,

Which for me is around empowerment.

And what I see as sort of this movement that we're all kind of part of to democratize mental health.

Mental and emotional health.

We see that a lot in the trauma research and all kinds of different domains.

Even the rise of mindfulness.

So maybe can I stop you a little bit?

There's a lot in that.

And you're talking about practices,

You're talking about training.

But of course practices and training are not just something we do without any kind of a goal.

And so there's a goal of generally living better mental health.

And it's related for you to some kind of a sense of sharing that in order to create empowerment.

Absolutely.

It's connected.

So I guess maybe in the big picture,

The way I see it is I'm interested in the question of human fulfillment.

What do people find fulfilling in their lives?

And it's something that they will decide for themselves.

It's sort of an ongoing inquiry or exploration that we do into our own lives.

Understanding what your values are and what qualities and activities bring you fulfillment.

We can say we get clearer and clearer on that through our lives.

One principle that I hear come around again and again from practitioners and other teachers is this sort of two-part principle of on the one hand I would call it teaching your own healing.

That one way to make sense of your own challenges and suffering is to take notes on what you're doing to move through the experience to meet it.

And then that often becomes the inspiration for something you want to share with other people.

And our culture,

Our society is filled with examples of that.

A parent who's lost a child to a particular disorder who then goes on to create a group of parents to give more information when other parents are struggling with that.

Or the classic wounded healer in a psychotherapeutic and in a contemplative sense.

There's so many examples of ways in which as we learn to address what has been challenging for us,

We then begin to share what we learned and that creates a lot of fulfillment.

And I would just say that the flip side to that is.

.

.

Can I just stop you for a moment just for there?

Again,

There's a lot of stuff.

And you're starting from the perspective not of the pain,

But of the goal.

Which is having a more fulfilling life.

And so when confronted with pain,

The journey is wanting to make sense of it and share the experience.

So that then it goes further.

It's carried forward.

Yes,

Beautifully said.

And just as that's a way we might work with pain,

There's a sort of flip side to that of working with our own pleasure or kind of creative fulfillment.

And that is that there's something wonderful about being able to help other people doing the thing that you most love.

So,

You know,

This is service.

So the impulse to service that is supported by your own creativity,

By your own joy.

So you're an artist,

A painter,

And yes,

That's already something you do that gives you a lot of joy.

But for many people who as they begin to explicitly connect to the service dimension of being an artist,

The quality of sharing your gifts.

I mean,

There's so many ways in which art is its own kind of gift to each other and to the world.

As you connect more implicitly or explicitly with that,

Then it becomes even more fulfilling.

So all this is in the context of trying to get people to think about the idea of sharing a practice.

I think of this as the ultimate sort of creative thing that you have to share in life.

That it's a kind of a practice is itself a creative medium.

And that we go into an exploration of the components of what a practice is and we slowly begin to discover what practice kind of really works for us.

And then it becomes complete when we can share it with another.

Not as in a dogmatic way of saying this is the practice you need to do,

But this is my work of art.

This is the way I've created a practice of my life.

Try it on.

Join me for a little while.

And in the trying on,

By the way,

Here are some interesting things you can think about for how to customize it and make it your own.

So then that person goes through a process of discovering their practice and paying it forward.

So this continual kind of creative exploration of the nature of practice,

A continual sharing and feedback around the practice and an empowerment of moving it forward.

That's the kind of like flow that I'm really,

Really interested in.

So how to do that in a way that has integrity,

That is about,

That's a really honestly does it,

That's based on where you're at,

That's done in a safe framework.

Those are the kinds of questions that I'm thinking a lot about and exploring.

So just I want to reflect that as you're talking,

I'm noticing not just your words,

But that your whole body is moving.

You know,

You use the word flow and there is something about your body,

Not just your hands,

But also your torso,

Your head,

You know,

Kind of having that dance and that flow of and so when you're describing the practice as art,

You know,

As opposed to something that's a stern discipline,

But something that flows from inside and is an expression of you finding your way.

I can have a sense of sharing it being,

Hey,

Look,

I'm enjoying this and then you're inviting say me or other people to kind of follow them on your footsteps and in following in your footsteps,

See my own way and each their own way,

You know,

Picking up from you what you have to offer that resonates with me,

But also feeling free to improvise in my own way.

That's beautiful.

Serge,

I need a pocket Serge to explain myself to myself because that is really nicely said.

And thank you for noticing that and I guess,

You know,

As you say it,

It makes me think that this is what I was sort of saying with the pleasure piece.

For me as someone who guides practices and facilitates meditation in particular,

I like doing it in a playful way.

I have a lot of energy and it's hard for me to do it to be always still.

I like to make it more of a dance and that's what is pleasurable and honest for me,

You know,

Is to connect to those qualities and there's something,

There is a kind of dance or sometimes there's almost a performative quality to it for me when I'm engaged that I really,

Really like just the way I love dancing and I do actually like dancing.

It's one of my,

In addition to being really interested in meditation,

I'm passionately interested in movement modalities and dance and you know,

Qigong and you name it.

Like I'm kind of interested in okay,

What can I learn here about this movement modality that teaches me how,

That helps me go more deeply into understanding what's happening even in the sitting practice.

Like what are the qualities that are being trained in these things?

So,

And that was a big actual breakthrough for me as a practitioner.

When I began as a meditator,

All my role models were,

They didn't look like me.

They were all very still and naturally relaxed.

I had all these ideals about how I needed to look like that even though I have wild amounts of energy and I'm ADD and I've got actually my own challenges,

A lot of them around that.

And so I had to find my way into what the right practice is for me.

And the right practice turned out to be something much more animated,

Although it still has stillness dimensions to it.

And that was just a long process of kind of,

You know,

What it's like.

You kind of have to see through your own ideals until you find what's really going on there.

There's that famous line by Miles Davis,

You know,

Sometimes you got to play a long time to learn to play like yourself.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

But so that's a very practical concern that many people have of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

You know,

I'm not this and I should be this image of a meditator if I have to do mindfulness.

And your own experience has been that actually you find you're more likely to find mindfulness in movement or even stillness in movement.

I would say both those things,

Yeah.

I mean,

I do really love a sitting practice and I think that a sitting practice in stillness is a really wonderful opportunity to explore your experience in a kind of pure culture in the sense that there are the least amount of distractions happening when you're just in stillness.

Of course,

There's still distractions,

Sounds around you,

Thoughts,

Inner feelings.

But when you try to implement a practice as you're moving,

The whole moving sensate body becomes a huge thing that you can get kind of preoccupied by and not be noticing so much the qualities that you're bringing to that enterprise.

Similarly,

When you're implementing a practice with another human being in front of you,

There's a lot more information.

Or you're trying to implement it out in the world in some way.

So the value of a seated practice for me is that it gives you a relatively simple forum to explore basic principles that you can then measure against these external things.

Just to give you one easy example,

You may be an extremely restless person like I am and it's good for you to be moving,

But I don't want to live with the condition in my life that I always need to be moving like a shark moving in the water.

I want to be able to be free in all conditions or more and more conditions and that includes the condition of being able to sit with myself.

So it's a real edge to be able to explore that discomfort in a seated practice.

Yeah,

So we're really absolutely emphasizing that there is a lot of benefit to stillness.

Maybe the idea I might want to explore here is the idea that maybe stillness is more difficult when there is a sense of coercion.

More than the only way.

But if you have permission to move,

Maybe stillness becomes something that's optional and does not have the dimension of coercion.

I'm curious about whether that's part of your experience.

Absolutely.

I mean I think it's part of the intelligent way in which you guide a practice,

Which is that you use invitational language.

You invite people to explore certain pieces but then you also provide a certain flexibility in terms of options so they can find the right way in.

So even when I guide a practice in stillness,

I'll orient people to many different kinds of objects and invite them to explore what works for them.

But I often include a gentle movement with the hands so that they can still be working with their eyes closed but even just to be able to slowly move the hands or something that might feel like what is needed.

In fact,

Of course you probably know this as a practitioner,

As you get deeper into practice you get these kriyas and these natural movements that want to happen anyway.

These sort of unwending tensions.

And it can be actually quite beautiful sometimes when you hang in a room with a bunch of really advanced meditators.

There's a sense in which they're kind of doing this slow nodding Stevie Wonder as their unwinding neck tension and sometimes arms float up and the body might start to rock back and forth.

And I think it's absolutely,

It's wonderful to be able to empower them to move with that if spirit moves them.

Yeah.

And so we're coming to that sense.

The phrase you use is to empower them to move with that if the spirit moves them.

And so we're rejoining that idea of spirit but in a non-traditional way or in a non-metaphysical way.

Yes,

Absolutely.

I mean that's really,

There's so much you can say about that word spirit.

What it is,

You know.

And you know,

It's funny because when I began practice it was more,

I had written a book about consciousness.

I was very interested just in the science.

You know,

I wasn't,

I was interested in how consciousness worked and what it was.

And so I kind of came at it really from a more science framework.

But through the course of researching that book,

This is 15 or almost 20 years ago,

15 years ago,

I started to actually practice and I started to meditate and I started to get a real first hand understanding of as opposed to an intellectual understanding.

And what,

One of the things that happened is even though I had considered myself very secular and from that world,

I started to have experiences of spirit.

You know,

There's kind of different ways to talk about it.

But I began to tune into that dimension of experience in a way that has really changed my life.

And I love trying to articulate that for people who come from more secular backgrounds.

You know,

It's just one of the things I really enjoy doing because I come from science,

I have a lot of those kinds of students which I love and I love trying to and I guess the way it happens for me is I just sort of say,

Look,

There's a difference between our objective understandings of reality and the brain and the body and what's going on and our subjective experience.

And this idea of spirit,

This is something that emerges within our subjective experience.

And we begin to orient through a practice to what is meaningful in our subjective experience,

You know,

And so how that kind of works.

Yeah,

Yeah,

So you certainly are not in the camp of being literal about spirit,

Far from that,

And putting it into the area of experience.

And where it belongs.

Where it belongs,

Yes.

And that sense of it emerging.

So that kind of,

I think I love the word emerging because it has that fleeting quality as opposed to something that either is or is not.

Kind of an implicit quality to it.

Yeah,

It's a process quality.

It emerges in,

Well,

Everything is in process and there are times when there's a sense in which there's a real immediacy or to experience that has that quality of,

I mean there's so many different ways to talk about it in dimensions of it,

But I can say for myself,

There are times when there's an immediacy in my experience where I feel like I am just emerging into the moment in this way that's very electrical and alive.

And there's a real sense of being,

Of sacredness,

Of feeling like,

Oh my gosh,

Reality is beautiful and I can't believe how lucky I am to be here.

And I feel very intimately connected to it.

And at the same time spacious.

Like I have space to decide how I want to respond to these things.

And that can be very,

Very,

All of this can be kind of mixed into a single gestalt,

Which is enormously fulfilling and wonderful,

But then it can kind of ebb.

And then all of a sudden it's not there so much.

And you're like,

What happened?

What happened to that Greek?

And then you can chase it,

Trying to find it,

Then you realize,

No,

You're not going to get to it by chasing it.

And of course there's all that learning that you do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so what you are very beautifully describing is a certain quality of experience that kind of suddenly appears and you notice it and as you start noticing it you kind of start living in it and you notice how wonderful it feels and then it disappears.

And so that being aware of how in certain condition that moment,

That quality of experience emerges.

And what's really interesting,

What's sort of paradoxical I mean,

What's really interesting is that the more you notice it,

The more it emerges.

The more you appreciate it and honor it,

The more it seems to show up in more and more places.

So it becomes at first that it seems to only emerge based on certain conditions,

Although there's always a grace quality that just can't be explained.

But over time it starts to become more and more available in more and more conditions until ultimately you might say that one direction in practice is that it becomes available in all conditions.

That it's independent of conditions and that's kind of the classic metric of contemplative transformation is how fully,

Or one of them,

How fully you've arrived to a relationship with what I'm trying to gesture to independent of conditions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that certainly is not through a process of forcing yourself to do that,

But of noticing it when it happens.

And as you notice it,

Then in a way you become more familiar with it and more able to find it and then you start noticing more all over.

Noticing it and also still doing the work of preparing the ground.

There is still a role for effort for being disciplined doing a practice.

It's that whole thing where practice doesn't make it happen,

Doesn't make the accident happen,

But it makes you accident prone.

And that's really the end.

And once you understand the skills involved,

I mean we're really talking about equanimity as the most important.

I mean both concentration and equanimity and clarity,

All those things.

But the capacity,

It's the skill,

Which is palpable in your experience,

Of suddenly opening yourself more to that experience.

Like you could be listening to me right now in a way where your face is sort of like moved forward,

There's a sort of tension there.

Or you can suddenly notice that's happening and kind of exhale and soften through the front of the body and let the image and the words sort of more passively move through you.

And you suddenly shift it into a more available place.

That's what I would call the foundation of equanimity in our experience.

The more you shift into that place,

The more that quality begins to or that whatever,

The sacred,

The stillness,

The spirit,

The sense of intimacy and connection with the world starts to become more and more palpable.

So what you described within the next,

The past couple of minutes was the practice.

You described how paying attention to what you do,

The quality of your breathing,

Your posture,

And slightly shifting it might actually give you a different experience of the world.

And that's a mindfulness practice.

That's it.

That's it right there.

I mean it involves the,

So my teacher,

Shinzen,

Shinzen Young,

Who's a wonderful teacher,

We should try to get him on your show if you like,

Because he's very articulate.

But he is sort of inspired by the traditional Theravada idea of the seven factors of awakening,

That there's these seven qualities of mind and heart that are sort of maximally present in the kind of ideal states of availability and mental health that they talk about in Buddhism.

And he distills it as clarity,

Concentration,

And equanimity.

That these,

That that's what actually mindfulness is in his definition.

It's those three different skills working together and mutually reinforcing each other.

And each of those skills,

It can be clearly described and clearly experienced in the moment.

As we,

Certainly as we develop more phenomenological clarity,

We can start to see when we're being clear,

When we're being concentrated,

When we're being equanimous.

And that's his operational definition of mindfulness,

Which is much more,

Which is a little more tangible than the more broader definitions that we often get.

And I found that to be helpful for me,

And I found it to be helpful for my students.

Although I also add in friendliness,

Because I think that compassion,

Friendliness,

Love,

Peace.

Yeah.

But so these can function as goals for practice,

But also as metrics to see,

You know,

How constant,

You know,

Oh,

I'm more concentrated than I used to be.

Or yeah,

You know,

There was a time where I would not have equanimity in doing this.

Wonderfully said,

Exactly.

It's both those things.

It's both,

You can start to notice in your life,

Because the effects of being more concentrated,

Of being more clear,

Of being more equanimous,

They're quite,

They're also,

They're palpable.

It creates certain kinds of effects in your life.

So they're measurable in a way,

In so far as our diffuse subjective experience is measurable,

Of course.

And they're also immediately accessible in a moment as practices.

They may start as slightly as ideals of practice as you begin to get familiar with them,

And they're on a continuum,

But you can shift into being more concentrated,

To being more equanimous,

To being more aware.

That's something that is a practice.

Those are the skills that you're developing,

Like the muscle groups.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so we're coming back again to the notion of skills to develop,

Training,

Practice,

And relating this to empowerment.

You know,

As you pointed out,

You know,

It needs the effort to go.

And your goal is that sense of,

You know,

Bringing,

Sharing,

Contributing to empowerment through practices.

Right.

You know.

And that it's,

And that what's really,

You know,

One of the most empowering things we can do in our life is find our vehicle for those skills.

So I think that there's often a confusion in practices where people get attached to a vehicle or a form,

Say meditating on the breath or say a mantra or say a relational psychotherapy practice.

And I think that this form is what works.

And it might work for them,

But my metaphor would be that the form is like the vehicle.

And really,

If you look at the situation,

It's sort of like the world's contemplative and psychotherapeutic and humanistic traditions.

It's just this enormous wide open field of vehicles like that are,

You know,

The Yogic Namaste Monster Truck and the little MBSR delivery van and the Gestalt Party van.

You know,

The Primal Screen Hot Tub,

Whatever,

All these different techniques,

The forms that are moving along.

But insofar as any of those forms are successful,

They will all involve,

You know,

Two or three of these skills,

Like,

And among other things.

I mean,

They all have their unique things too that they bring,

But there are always some universal skill.

So the equanimity would be,

I would say,

Is always going to be universally present in any successful form.

The concentration,

The capacity to hold a direction and commit to a particular practice will also be there.

The awareness piece will often,

Is often there.

So that's what I'm kind of,

Can we tease apart the form or the vehicle from the skills?

And so the empowerment piece comes from saying,

Well,

What's your vehicle?

You know,

What works for you?

You know,

It doesn't have to look like a seated practice in stillness,

Although there's great benefit from that.

It might look like a movement practice.

It might look like a painting practice.

It might look like a relational practice of communicating and connecting.

It might look like a nature practice.

And insofar,

So find the vehicle that works for you,

But understand what the skills are that underlie that,

At least these three,

So you can be more intentional and deliberate and then successful in terms of the reinforcement of the habit.

So when you started talking about all these vehicles being there,

You know,

I had an image of being in the middle of Times Square,

And not just about the vehicles themselves,

But all the ads and the lights and,

You know,

Glaring and being just pulled in every direction and the difficulty of choosing.

So it's like going to a supermarket and you have 250 cereals to choose from.

But what you're pointing out is by having a sense of a metric of seeing what it is that a practice does for you,

You can actually experiment to figure out,

Yeah,

This one I have difficulty doing that,

And I might try getting a different delivery through that other vehicle.

Yes,

And thank you for saying that,

Because just the way you articulated that was really helpful for me,

Because I,

That's exactly why I focus on the skills,

Is because in our ADD culture of,

There are,

Because what I said there could be very overwhelming,

It's overwhelming to be in Times Square,

Which of these vehicles do I choose?

I don't know,

Should I try them all?

I feel like I've kind of tried them all.

It was where that went from being just overwhelming kind of thing to do that just made me more ADD,

Where it changed was when I started getting clear about the skills.

Because then those,

In a way,

Became the vehicle.

I always knew that whatever I was doing,

I knew what it felt like to be a quantumist.

So when I'm going to twist it up in a yoga pose,

I know what it feels like to breathe out and to relax and to release into that posture.

In the same way that I know what to do,

To do the same thing when I'm having a conversation with you,

Say,

I can see my own fixation arise to say something and I can back off and let,

Give you space to say what it is that you want to say,

And then I,

Then there's now contact possible.

These are both different,

Those are,

That's equanimity in two very different vehicles,

But it's the same thing being trained.

So that's,

I think that's a really,

That's a kind of,

That inoculates us against the overwhelm.

It doesn't mean it's still not going to be some overwhelm there.

I mean,

This is the core challenge of our time is that we live in a time of enormous options and opportunity and there is,

And we can't help that there will be some confusion there.

I mean,

I wish I could have gone back to the time when there was just one teacher and one technique and that was what,

How it was.

For some nervous systems,

That's what they need,

But I don't live in that time anymore and I would even say that other nervous systems need to do a little more exploring to find what's going to be the right fit and indeed to discover for themselves what the right fit is based on those skills,

Build your own vehicle,

Become your own lineage.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

So,

So,

Yeah,

Just,

I'm coming back to what you were saying just a moment before that and you were describing,

You know,

This thing and you say,

Well,

You know,

I can have the impulse to come in during a conversation and then I can hold back and,

You know,

That makes,

That's what makes the conversation possible.

And that's kind of actually the name of this podcast is Pause Fully.

And the concept is that,

You know,

The noticing moment by moment you know,

The impulse and then having noticed it,

Having the possibility to actually shift and so you're talking about doing that in life in general.

Yeah,

Continuously.

I mean,

That's the core skill of Mindless the way I see it and it's my core challenge as someone with impulse control issues.

Like,

I have a lot of energy coming through.

I mean,

I have a bipolar diagnosis,

You know,

So I get in these up and down states and I've had to learn how to track that up and down those energies and to not feed them because it feels really good to feed the mania or the hypomania because it's so fun.

But then there's the,

What comes up must go down,

There's the crash.

So I've had to back off.

And similarly,

I've had to learn how to like not feed the downward with the kind of the doomed despair that can actually,

You know,

Compound the challenge when you're in one of the lows.

So that's the,

It's like,

Okay,

Oh yeah,

I'm going there.

How can I back off from that?

Let that energy play itself out and if I can back off then it'll play itself out much more quickly than if I just am inside it.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

So very much also something that relates to the theme of empowerment about,

You know,

Noticing the rhythms,

Noticing the impulses,

Noticing these forces and finding a way to ride them just like riding waves.

Exactly.

And to ride them and own them too.

Because at first it can be something I'm just trying to manage it but there's a secret shame about being that way.

And I've had to learn to be more like nah,

Fuck that.

This is who I am.

If you don't like it,

That's your issue.

You know,

I'm trying to like,

I'll still try to be,

I'll try to be as best I can in integrity but I can't help that I'm I have these,

God knows the amount of struggle I've been through and how much better I am at managing it than I used to be.

So I've had to learn to accept that this is who I am and that it might be disappointing to some people or that's okay.

I mean,

This is all common sense from your psychotherapeutic perspective but that was a bit of a learning curve for me as a meditation practitioner and teacher.

Well,

If I put two hats on,

As a psychotherapist I know that.

On the other hand,

Looking at mindfulness traditions,

There is also something that's very imbued in the culture about mindfulness as something that's related to becoming a better person.

You know,

A little bit of holier than though or capabilities or,

You know,

Having a certain serenity.

And so there can be an implicit shame of measuring yourself to that image as an unattainable ideal and you being a flawed human being.

And so I really like that what you're talking about and related to that sense of empowerment is lifting the shame and finding a way to accept reality and dance with it.

Nicely said.

You're secretly a tantric practitioner in there,

Sairs.

I can see it.

I can see the goddess dancing behind your shining face there.

Hmm.

I want to just take a moment to see,

You know,

What needs to be said,

Whether we've come to kind of a natural ending,

Whether there's something else that needs or wants to be said or some kind of ending or more to come.

Well,

What I do want to say is what a pleasure it has been to chat with you.

I really appreciate the your ability to listen and respond and give feedback.

It's very focusing.

It reminds me a lot of the work I did with Eugene Gendlin's,

You know,

Focusing and it just really lets the conversation be what it is in this really interesting way.

In the past,

Because of the energies that I struggle with,

I can get fixated on a particular narrative or a particular story of something I think I need to say,

But I found chatting with you,

Combined with my own practice,

The own equanimity practice,

To be really a kind of different experience.

I really enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Well,

I really have enjoyed kind of that sense of dancing with you.

Thank you.

Reviews

I loved this! Many thanks to Jeff and Serge!

🤲🏻❤🤲🏻

This is a wonderful discussion. Light and powerfully deep at the same time!

Thoughtful and instructive. I resonate with the faster, pragmatic, accessible language of Jeff juxtaposed with the melodic, paced, reframed contributions of the interviewer. This is a good pair (for me). Thank you for the sharing.

Interesting! Thank you!

This was a really good talk..thank you