Welcome to In the Deep.
I'm your host,
Katherine Ingram.
The following is excerpted from a session of Dharma Dialogues held in Melbourne in November of 2019.
It's called,
Just Love What You Love.
There's a cartoonist in America.
He's retired now.
His name is Gary Larson.
Very hilarious.
One of his specialties was sort of anthropomorphizing animals and animal behavior.
So there's one of his many hilarious cartoons.
There's a genie standing over a little dog,
And the dog is on its back,
Wiggling its feet.
And the genie is saying,
Really?
You're going to use your final third wish on another belly rub?
So it brings up the question,
Can you just love what you love and be content?
Does it always have to be more?
Does it always have to be enhanced?
Or is it enough?
All the wonderful things you already love.
Right?
So many.
Too many to name,
Too many to count.
And isn't it funny how we can feel deprived?
Right?
We go around,
Something's missing.
Particularly because we live in cultures that are signaling that something is missing.
That's how they sell us so many things.
So you could use your third and final wish on something you already have.
Right?
Something that would look pretty good if you were on your death bed.
Any old ordinary rainy day.
So one of the things I speak quite a lot about is contentment.
It's a secret to happiness.
It puts you into feelings of abundance,
Actually.
That's how you feel abundant is when you feel content.
Often people are going the complete opposite direction,
Driving themselves crazy,
Running from one thing to the next,
Always hungry.
What if you really knew that this precious life that you've been granted,
Your birthright,
What if you really knew how precious it was?
Just even a moment's reflection will let you know.
And when you have some reflection along those lines,
You walk more lightly on this poor ravaged earth.
You don't have to keep extracting its resources.
You walk more in delight.
You walk more in wonder.
Right?
You walk more in gentleness.
Because we all know that when we feel pretty good inside,
It's a lot easier to be kind.
When we're rattled inside,
When we're unhappy,
When we're in our hungry ghost mode,
Never satisfied,
Something's missing,
We feel kind of shut down and agitated,
Angry.
And we get irritated very,
Very easily.
So everything I'm saying,
One of my friends long ago,
Ram Dass,
He used to say that he used to refer to himself as a rent-a-mouth.
Because everything I'm saying you already know.
But here's the thing.
We overlook,
We overlook the things we know in our heart of hearts.
Into our peril,
We overlook our priorities.
The kind of things that in times of emergency,
In times of stress,
Like that wonderful movie Love Actually,
In the opening scenes,
When they're talking about how when people were making calls from the airplanes that were about to go into the buildings on 9-11 in New York City,
All the messages were messages of love.
Everybody who called and left messages on their loved ones answering machines,
It was all messages of love.
Right.
We know it when we're pressed.
We know all these things when we're pressed,
But we really know them secretly all along the way.
And strangely we overlook them a lot.
So a gathering like this is a kind of Dharma bell.
Just to reset.
Hit the reset button.
Right.
Tune the frequency.
Fall into just simply being and being content.
Loving what you love.
And keep it simple.
That's another clue.
Keep it very,
Very simple.
If your mind starts jumping around into complication and building labyrinthine complicated systems,
There are going to be some big improvement project for yourself of you.
Right.
Run the other direction.
I didn't know what I was going to ask,
But since you've opened up with contentment and being aware of the hungry ghost.
And of course there are a few things in my life that I wish were different,
Such as,
I wish I could have a holiday soon or looking for a new mentor in my life.
And a few other things that I perceive are missing.
I struggle with that.
I hear what you're saying and I understand it conceptually,
Intellectually.
But then to really be okay with it is where my struggle is because I have a perception that it's missing for me.
Yeah.
I mean let's make a distinction between having general desires and inclinations to maybe have some sort of experience.
Those are fine.
Right.
It's more a background contentment that I'm talking about.
You can have preferences,
You can have desires,
You can incline to some plan,
But there can be a very light relationship with whether or not it comes to be.
Whether you get to go on the vacation,
Whether you get to find the right mentor or the right training or whatever.
Fill in the blank.
Desires are endless.
But can there be a general contentment that just says,
Life is good,
I'm so grateful.
Right.
So grateful.
And really move the attention.
You know this morning I was on the phone with one of my good friends who is a farmer in Armidale,
Near Armidale.
As you probably know they're in severe drought.
He and lots of his farmer friends are struggling.
He happens to be very,
Very lucky because he has a business that throws off plenty of money in case the farm fails.
But lots of his friends are not in such a position.
So he was telling me about all the different types of loss that they're experiencing.
I won't go through that list.
So he was saying that he's been rattled,
That his mind is rattled by it all.
And I said to him,
Can you move your attention to what's still in place,
To what's here?
And as soon as he did that,
He's thrown into his loving family,
His beautiful home,
All that's there.
Right.
And it was an immediate shift for him.
So it's really,
This is basically mind management.
Right.
So you can use your attention.
It can be,
Of course your humanness is allowed.
We all have desires.
We do have preferences.
Fine.
But a lot of people live in a condition of really torment because they have so many preferences or they have intense preferences and they're extremely attached to them and their entire identity is wrapped up in getting the thing they're after.
And sometimes you meet people who you've known them over time and you've seen okay,
They were chasing that thing and they got it.
But now they're chasing another thing.
The fire continues.
The burning is,
You know,
And my teacher Poonjaji used to say it's like being a beast of burden driven by a madman.
Go get that.
Now go get that.
Now go get that.
Never in moments rest.
Right.
So not to live in a state that says my life begins when I find the right mentor,
When I do the training,
When I get the house.
That's when my life will really be happening.
No.
This is your life.
This is your day.
This is your moment.
And if all of that gets added or whatever you're after,
It's a garnish.
That's it.
As we all know,
So many things we already chased.
Right.
And got.
So it really is about the contentment right now.
It is.
And as you said,
The rest is just a garnish.
Yes.
Definitely.
So really,
See,
Because our focus is on that glass half empty and all our energy in that beast of burden is right there.
And it's like we're just in that insatiable emptiness,
Not enough.
Yeah.
That kind of feels like the beast of burden,
The hungry ghost.
Never enough,
Never good enough and never enough.
Right.
And people do it in spiritual ways as well.
You know,
It's,
You know,
Long ago Trungpa Rinpoche wrote a book called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.
Basically,
People use spiritual hungry ghost activities.
Right.
An enhancement of me,
The grand me,
The spiritual me.
Right.
That's sneaky,
That one.
It is.
It is.
Yes,
It is.
It hides under the guise of some kind of noble activity,
Noble presentation.
Yeah.
So it all turns out that it's,
You know,
You find that it's all just very ordinary.
It's very simple.
All the things we already know,
Living in contentment,
Living in kindness,
Inclining to the greater good,
Which feels good.
It makes me think of the incredible ingratitude is really this ingratitude of what we have.
Yes.
Because we are not really taught to be grateful.
Right.
So we take everything we have for granted.
We live in a time of the most powerful media in history that is constantly signaling to us to want more.
And there's never been any kind of entrainment that has been more strong than what we are under this continual barrage of now.
And now we have it on all our screens.
It used to be,
It just was on the advertising media in some magazines or on the television or on some billboards.
But now it's a daily drip feed that we're hardly ever away from.
Right.
And it also comes in the form of all these little bits of information that we get addicted to.
Isn't it?
Another form of hunger where the mind is having to be constantly fed and entertained every minute of our waking time.
Right.
So it turns out that,
Again,
Happiness is downstream away from that.
It's in more relaxation,
More spaciousness,
More actual lived,
Felt experience that for many of us requires going slower.
Not for everyone.
There are people,
And I've known a few,
Not many,
Who can go at a much faster pace and still be really deeply profoundly experiencing what they're experiencing,
Living fully in their senses.
They're fairly rare,
I think.
But I think most of us would benefit by going a lot slower.
And I observed that.
I lead a lot of silent retreats over the many years and I noticed people get really,
Really happy just,
You know,
Looking at a grasshopper on a blade of grass.
It's sort of strange how that happens,
You know,
How you just get,
You get happier and more content with less.
Yeah,
With less mind chatter.
Yeah.
Which it seems to be like the answer if there's such a thing.
Yeah,
Yeah.
And it doesn't mean that you have to stop thoughts.
I don't know that that's really even possible.
But you have a different relationship to your thoughts.
You know,
You can have a much more free relationship with thought whereby you don't feel you're locked into a conceptual reality all the time.
The thoughts are just kind of background.
I sometimes describe it as you're on a train,
Let's say,
In the Italian countryside.
And,
Yeah,
It's already good.
And people are speaking Italian on the train.
And maybe you don't speak Italian.
Well you do,
Then this doesn't work for you.
Let's go to France.
But anyway,
So people are murmuring in French on the train and you don't understand exactly what they're saying.
There's just this nice murmuring going on and you're just looking at the countryside passing by,
Right?
And there's this pleasant experience of different levels of input into the awareness.
Your relationship to your own thoughts can be very much like that language going on almost in a murmuring in the background.
And the foreground attention is in present awareness,
Is in your senses,
Is in your noticing of little things.
Not having to name everything,
Not having to figure out how is it going to benefit me,
How can I use this,
Right?
Letting it wash through.
I like to say,
Letting it stream without downloading.
Let it stream.
You have to start to have a very different relationship to your thoughts,
To your desires.
A desire rises and you think,
So maybe that'll happen,
Maybe not.
I might do something to make it happen.
One of the things I'm very aware of with relationship to desire is the cost of desires.
Like almost every desire is going to cost either money or energy or time or all of those things.
Desires are expensive usually,
Right?
And then you get the thing and you have to maintain it somehow,
Whether it's,
Whatever it is,
You know.
There's a maintenance fee.
Or it's over very quickly.
Or it's over very quickly,
Yes indeed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah,
So this is not to make an enemy of desire at all or of enjoyment of life and of objects of,
You know,
Whatever,
The great movie or the great drama series.
All of that is fine.
But it's to understand its place and to keep falling back into,
This is your precious life.
This is the one you're having right at this very moment.
This is pretty good.
Yeah.
Another belly rub.
Thanks,
Catherine.
You're welcome,
Dear.
Catherine,
Just yesterday I was listening to your YouTube that you were doing on potential extinction or possible extinction of the planet.
Yes.
And as I was listening to what you're describing about contentment and desire,
What was coming up for me is I would imagine that you would see yourself as having a calling on this planet or having a purpose for your life potentially and that the work that you're doing around bringing that to people's consciousness would be a core part of that.
And I was just really curious about how you see all that distinction between a calling and a desire.
And the second part for me is when we do have a calling,
How do we maintain our contentment or our non-attachment when we can see that if we,
To honour that calling is going to take energy from us and it's going to take things?
I often describe it,
I had a session yesterday at the Abbotsford Convent and I spoke a bit about the difference between a push and a pull in your impulses,
Right?
So some things really feel like a real push,
A slog,
Right?
And sometimes we do have to do those for whatever reason.
But I often do wait for a pull before I get myself busy.
I wait for something to feel like a compelling attraction,
Right?
So I do like to,
It is a good feeling,
I admit to feel like your life is being well used somehow,
That your presence on this earth might be of benefit to somebody.
That does feel good and so that has,
For me that has a kind of pull in expressiveness.
But I've had plenty of times in my life where that wasn't the case so much and now that I look back on those times,
During the actual experience of that,
There was a fallow feeling,
Right?
This had a fallow feeling at the time.
But I look back and I realise something was germinating in me and it needed quiet to germinate,
It needed stopping,
It needed not knowing,
Right?
It needed no plan.
And sometimes I would have to float for quite a while before anything kind of got revealed.
And it required a great surrender whereby you have to be willing to just say,
Ah so,
This is,
I can't force this,
You know.
So to your question about purpose,
I go different directions with that concept because I think it gets taken on with what I would call a me project or somebody project,
Having purpose.
There's a way that people can wear it kind of in a heavy way.
But another way to feel into it is lighter and feels more like you're just,
You're just being,
I said yesterday,
Well used as good compost.
That's it.
You're like being good compost.
And that does have a pleasant feeling to it.
The reason it has a pleasant feeling is that you feel connected.
You feel connected here.
In any way you can feel connected.
I sometimes tell a story,
I tell a story in my book which I see you have,
Many,
Many,
Many years ago.
Lots of my stories start out like this.
I was living in Marin County in California and my boyfriend was living in the city of San Francisco and you had to go over the Golden Gate Bridge to get from one county to the other.
So at the end of the work day I would often go to his house because he had the better house.
It was always very fun there.
I would go to his house at the end of the day.
I would have to cross the Golden Gate Bridge.
And there was this African American guy at one of the tolls on the bridge who was so cool.
He was just this beautiful guy and just always in a great mood and always sweet and always with a smile on his face.
So I would try to get in his lane.
There were several lanes you could go through of the toll booth.
I would always try to get in his lane.
And I began noticing that he would reach into his cubby thing that he was in.
He had a bag in there and he would reach in and give kids in the car in front of me something.
I was wondering what is he giving them?
So one night I asked him as I was passing through and he showed me he had a bag of Tootsie Rolls and he said,
You know a lot of the little ones are on a long drive so I give them a Tootsie Roll.
Now probably these days it wouldn't be legal to do that.
There are so many restrictions but in those days you could.
And I thought to myself,
He is creating so much happiness with strangers he's probably never going to see again.
Just in his toll booth.
There are so many ways we can have a type of purpose and I spoke about it yesterday as well in just small kindnesses,
In just little moments of connection that light up your own heart and make your presence around and about in the town a lovely thing.
A moment of grace for someone.
A moment of grace for someone who might be struggling like my friend in Armidale.
Just a moment of reminder that there is a benevolence here as well.
Yeah.
I wanted to add on what you were saying around carving space to slow down and I feel I've probably been conditioned to be very effective and productive and efficient but the last five years or so I've put more conscious effort to slowing down but there's this pervasive guilt that arises when I slow down and through my own experience I find when I slow down there's more creativity,
There's more quality in which I'm able to fully live life and actually experience my potential but the guilt is always there and it feels there's a fear that arises that I'll be left behind if I follow with this feeling that feels really content,
That feels right and it feels like that's something inside of me is saying to slow down and just settle in and enjoy this moment and then the other side is guilt and fear that I'm going to fall out of the system,
I'm just going to become a bum,
My parents are going to wonder what the hell's happened and that is that it just always sits and it's a burden on my shoulders and I can't then fully appreciate that content that I'm experiencing.
And have you in the five years of slowing down,
Have you observed any greater let's say efficaciousness in terms of getting things done or?
It feels like the output is a different quality like what I'm able to produce feels like it's bigger in its essence,
It seems of a higher quality and it sometimes feels isolating because it feels like the output's not appreciated either,
Like it feels like I'm producing,
It's maybe in my head but it seems like no one seems to understand it but to me it feels compared to the little bits of unit of output that I was producing mechanically,
This output I'm producing now is so bigger and more beautiful but no one seems,
Well my outside world doesn't seem to match or appreciate it because it prefers these little quick bites that I used to do that felt like a robot.
And is that true of all of your outside world or just some of the outside world?
Just probably the professional life,
My work life,
Yeah,
Because socially it feels this,
I've chosen to carve out an outside life that nurtures and feeds into a more quality and slowing down.
Right,
Right.
I think it's important to ask yourself questions such as is it really true,
Right,
That I'm going to fall behind in the rat race?
Yes.
Right.
You know,
Years ago one of my friends in Los Angeles who was an independent film producer,
He was always racing 10 steps behind himself.
I mean he was,
If you ever called him on the phone,
He was on several other calls at once and he'd say just hang on a minute and you'd hear him talk to the other person and then he'd talk to you and then he'd,
He was always late everywhere.
I got to the point where if he and I were going to a film together,
I would say not only am I going to go inside and get a seat,
I'm actually not going to turn around and look for you.
You're going to have to find me in the darkened theater because so many times I would meet him at a film and either he'd be 10,
15 minutes late and I'd be waiting outside and miss the first part of the movie,
But even if I went inside,
Then I'd be turning around.
Is he here yet?
Is he here yet?
Anyway,
So I was going to be leading a retreat in Southern California,
A seven day residential retreat and I said to him,
If anyone needs a retreat,
It's you.
And he says,
I have three films in the can right now,
I cannot,
There's no way,
Blah,
Blah,
Blah,
Blah.
I said,
You really should stop and I said,
And anyway,
It'll be really efficient.
And he said,
Oh yeah,
Right.
Well,
He came,
He showed up at the last minute.
He just appeared,
Very stressed,
Very,
Just very,
Very stressed.
But on the last day,
He had to leave a bit earlier on the very last day and we were all still in silence and he came over and whispered to me at breakfast,
This was really efficient.
So I saw him back in LA when I got back and he,
During the retreat,
Not that he was even trying to think of things,
But something was shifting such that he,
He made some very elegant,
Simple changes when he got back that just freed up more space,
Right.
It was like somehow the picture came clear,
You know,
Like one of those 3D images,
You know what I mean,
Those magic eye,
I think they're called,
Where you're looking at it it's just a jumble of geometric dots and then suddenly there's a deer in the forest,
You know.
That was how it was for him.
He,
Suddenly he saw things in a way that he hadn't seen because his attention,
It's like the brambles got cleared out of the morass of his mind.
And I rely on that as a guidance system entirely.
I rely on,
I know that if there's something confusing or a building of stress or anything,
I know that the answer for me is to get quiet.
That's where the revelation will be and it will be the clearest,
It'll be the cleanest.
It'll be the most comprehensive.
And you know that too.
You know it's its own reward,
The awareness starts to tune to this channel and realize this is the only sanctuary you're going to find.
The rest of it out there really is turning to dust and ash.
And you know there's only one true sanctuary in this,
You know.
It's living in your own deep integrity,
In the love that you can keep generating despite everything.
I notice that when I'm at work fixing doors,
I try and be as efficient as possible but sometimes then I'll make a mistake and I'll cause more issues for myself.
But if I break it down into small kind of segments then it seems to go,
And I go a little bit slower,
Take my time with it,
Then I become more efficient with work.
And in the last year I've been doing some writing and creative kind of stuff.
And it's really flowed when I haven't had,
When I have kind of naturally just kind of slowed down and not had too much expectation about what I'm going to produce.
So I know that it's good to slow down and pause and everything but sometimes there's a part of me that just,
I guess is conditioned to try and really push something or force something.
But then there's a fear of letting go of completely.
And it's kind of a hard one to… I say this again,
A fear of… Of letting go.
Of letting go of… Of trying,
Putting effort into something.
Because every time I do that I get some result but it's not the same as kind of being in a flow of allowing things to happen.
But it's just,
Yeah,
Maybe it's just a condition of,
Or being conditioned of,
You know,
You've got to try your best and do this and try and try and try kind of thing.
Right.
Sometimes I find it's a bit hard to let go of that all.
And there's a fear of,
You know,
If you don't try then you're not going to achieve anything.
Right.
Yes.
Yeah,
We're all afflicted with those kinds of pressures,
You know,
That we're often valued by what we do.
And I'd say the conditioning is a bit heavier for men as well in that regard.
So to allow the conditioning of that to be the case,
That's how it is.
And,
I mean,
So many people obviously have to make a living.
So some doing has to be done.
You know,
You have to kind of sometimes push through things and try harder and this and that.
I think where the important issue is in this is how you're feeling underneath all of that.
Can there be a deeper peace?
There's kind of almost watching your personality or your manifestation in the world do its thing.
And yet underneath there's a really great okayness that admits to yourself that you love your life,
But that you have to do this thing or that thing.
You know,
I've met so many people over the years who had to do jobs they really didn't like,
But they make that decision because they have a family,
Right,
And they're doing it for their family.
So in surrender to your greater love sometimes you have to do things that you wouldn't choose if you didn't have to do it.
And it's just the what's so.
So then the question will be how much are you going to torment yourself about that,
Right?
Because that all ends up just being more suffering on the pile that is unnecessary.
Now I know that can be challenging sometimes when you're having to get up every day and do the same job you don't really want to be doing.
And yet there's this other benefit.
It does take a certain clarity of mind and deep intention to just not indulge the resistance.
I also have known a lot of people who let go of,
Like one of my friends,
Someone who used to come to Dharma Dialogues in Los Angeles.
He was a DP,
A director of photography for different advertising companies.
And they were doing a lot of overseas advertising for cigarettes because you couldn't do it in America anymore.
You couldn't do a lot of advertising for cigarettes anymore.
So they were doing it in Asian countries primarily.
He was getting big,
Big,
Big bucks.
So he was coming to Dharma Dialogues and he was very unhappy for ages about his job.
And yet he had a mother in an old age home and he was paying for all of that.
So he had all these reasons why he was doing it.
But he became more and more unsettled inside and more and more unable to live in integrity knowing that he's promoting this thing.
So finally after about two years of listening to him speak about this,
I said,
Why don't you quit?
And he kind of went into this whole thing.
And anyway,
A few months later he did quit.
And he went off to India and he hooked up with all these non-profits and began just sort of all these NGOs basically.
And he just began doing this service work in India.
And I saw him a couple years later after he got back.
He'd lost about 30 pounds.
But he was so chill.
And he was living on,
I don't know,
$100 a month or something in India.
I mean he had this completely different life.
Now he's an extreme case.
But it was interesting to see.
And I've seen other not as extreme cases where people have just said,
I'm just not going to push.
I'm not going to get all the stuff.
I'm just not going to push.
And I've found also that what has helped me when I remember is allowing myself to feel uncomfortable.
Yeah,
Sure.
Then it's kind of like on the outside it doesn't really matter anymore.
Yeah,
Very good.
Yes.
We can expect it.
All of us.
And how great the life.
There are times that we're just uncomfortable with something.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah,
Nice to see you.
I have a question around contentment and tragedy and how we arrive at contentment.
And I think there might be a process to this when we are experiencing something incredibly difficult and traumatic in our lives.
And the second part of that question is how we help another person to arrive at that place who is experiencing something incredibly difficult.
Yeah.
Well,
Contentment would be very hard to access in the midst of tragedy.
So we have to allow ourselves as humans to sometimes be in the storm of emotions,
Of grief,
Of sorrow,
Of raging against the gods.
Those are very human emotions and I would say that in the midst of it there's nothing much to be done but surrender.
With hopefully an awareness that the storm is going to pass at some point and not to have an agenda as to when it's going to pass.
Right?
Sometimes some storms linger as we know in nature.
Sometimes storms stick around a while.
It's also a good thing to have the awareness incorporate an understanding of not reinstigating the storm.
In other words,
If there's a tragedy and your awareness is moving through it as best it can,
To not keep going over and over and over,
Kind of as though you're being loyal to the tragedy and the feelings of it by keeping it storming.
Now,
There are certain categories I'm going to speak about in this.
For instance,
When a parent loses a child,
That's a big storm that may never fully,
Fully,
Fully calm down.
That there's some part of the system that is just dealing with sorrow.
And I have known a lot of people who have that terribly unfortunate situation.
Even they,
Though,
Can come to more and more peace in their lives.
If not,
Some of them,
I think,
Would say they don't have access to the kind of unbridled joy that they might have had in the past,
But that at least peace can come eventually.
But for many other types of tragedy,
There can come a deep surrender.
Like I lost my brother,
Who I was kind of the mom to.
So it was like losing a brother and a son.
He was 12 years younger and he died of a heart attack.
And he died at the age of 38 on a sunny day in North Carolina.
I get this call that my beloved brother was gone.
And the shock of it,
Literally,
I fell back onto a couch that was nearby.
And I have to say that it was like a storm that was raging in my system for weeks and weeks and maybe years.
And even now,
All these years later,
He died in 2002.
I feel like something changed in me as a result of that tragedy.
And yet I have a deep peace with it as well.
I experienced the sorrow and the loss of it without a fight.
Like I didn't have a story that it shouldn't have happened.
Are you following?
So that's,
I think,
A part of the suffering that I didn't have to bear.
Because I know that that happens.
It happens all the time.
People die suddenly in accidents,
In wars and everything.
So,
Yeah,
The allowing of whatever your system needs to process it is fair game.
What was the second part of your question?
How we help another person,
I guess,
Helping that experience.
So one of the things I intend when I'm watching someone in deep sorrow is not to try to take anything away or to put a happy spin on it.
Or even say too much,
That,
Okay,
This is going to pass and you'll blah,
Blah,
Blah.
But really to just be,
As one of my girlfriends who trained in hospice,
Her teacher said to be a non-anxious presence.
And that's it,
You know,
Just to be a non-anxious presence.
Someone that is just there being with,
Right.
The word compassion comes from,
Of course,
The Latin.
It actually means suffering with.
Isn't that interesting?
It's not usually how the word is understood,
But it actually means suffering with.
But another way to see it is to just being with the storm.
Yes,
I see,
We're in the storm now.
And sometimes there's a sense that it's a kind of amortization almost of,
Like I hear from screenwriters and people who do work in drama that one of the tricks when you're presenting a dramatic act,
So let's say there's a really sad component,
Right.
If the actor holds back the tears,
Then the audience cries.
You know what I mean?
It's like an amortization of it.
We're off now.
So sometimes I notice when I'm hearing a very sad story,
It sometimes will bring tears to my eyes with my friend or even someone I don't know well.
And I can see that there's a relief,
Not that they wanted me to suffer,
But that someone gets it,
Like,
Okay,
We're sharing this burden at the moment.
You're carrying a little of the weight of it for me.
So I would just say it's that kind of empathy.
My question is related with this containment sensation.
So I think that when I'm on my own,
I can experience this peace,
I can experience this connection,
But when it comes to being related with another person,
Especially in kind of loving way,
I find it difficult to control it in some sense.
And I feel lost and I feel that I,
I don't know how to say it,
But I place this experience,
This pleasure in the other person and I kind of lose the control of this inner peace.
And rationally,
I know that the steps to just connect freely to this person and so on,
But when I'm in the situation,
It's difficult for me not to raise expectation,
Not to try to accommodate myself to the other person's expectations.
You kind of give yourself away,
Huh?
And we're talking about,
Are you talking about a romantic relationship?
Yeah,
When it comes to romantic relationship,
Yeah.
That's a pretty common experience,
Either one or the others.
Yeah.
Well,
It's almost irresistible sometimes,
Isn't it?
You know,
And you're in the company of someone and we say,
I love you,
Part of what we mean is,
I love me when I'm with you,
Right?
And you'll just do anything for that because you really like loving you as well.
So then the question becomes,
Can you love you on your own?
And then you can be with another person who you can also love very much,
But you would only give yourself away to the appropriate level,
Let's say,
Not to the point where it would be uncomfortable for you or that you start to feel you're out of balance.
So how does that happen then?
And that goes back to this contentment I'm speaking about,
A feeling of fullness,
A feeling of you've won the lottery here,
By the way.
It's your birthright.
It was very lucky when you think about it.
I emphasize this quite a lot.
Do you know who Richard Dawkins is by chance?
He's a great biologist scientist from the UK.
He makes a similar point that the odds of you being here are phenomenally against.
I mean,
We thread a needle millions of times for you to be sitting there and for us to be having this conversation.
It's like our ancestry that had to get really lucky over and over,
Not just our human ancestry,
Going all the way back every time,
Every little cell division.
So here you are,
Lucky,
Lucky,
Also lucky to live in privilege,
Very lucky.
Lucky to be you.
You know what you've been through,
Right?
You know how you've had to keep showing up and be brave and what you've suffered and how many times you had to turn the other cheek and all those things,
Right?
So the first step really is making friends with yourself,
Feeling very content,
Feeling whole.
You're not some half that has to go around and find another half,
Right?
One of the sections in my book is the moon is always full.
You get it?
The moon is full to itself.
We call it a quarter moon,
A half moon.
That's only because we're looking at it from an angle.
But the moon to itself is always full and you are a full moon to yourself.
And if this one or that one,
Whoever it is,
He or she wants to show up for you and gets the beauty of your trip,
Well and good.
But your happiness doesn't depend on that.
Now I know when you're in the trance,
And a lot of it is hormonal,
If you're in the trance,
It's very hard to hear this and believe it.
I know that.
But it is true.
It is true.
So any time you find yourself feeling nervous inside,
Feeling scared that someone might leave you,
Or feeling that you have been,
You're losing your own self.
You're out of balance,
Right?
Use that as your Dharma bell.
Those feelings which you will feel in your body,
Use it as your Dharma bell to tell you,
Wake up,
Wake up sweetheart,
I'm having a nightmare,
Right?
That's your Dharma bell.
And then do whatever you can do to reset your attention,
Whatever reflections you need to do.
Can you please tell us about your book,
How you came about writing it?
I came to write it because I had been leading,
By the time I wrote this,
I had been leading silent retreats for quite some years.
And one of the things I would notice is that when you give someone half a chance in being,
You give them a context to just be simple and quiet and at ease,
These incredibly beautiful qualities arise on their own.
You don't have to practice them or think about them or anything.
So in my dream one night,
I was dreaming in the dream about this very point that I just said,
I was dreaming about what happens in retreats and how much I had seen people inhabit these qualities in retreat,
How effortlessly they come.
And I started in the dream saying the words of some of those qualities and I woke up out of the dream and I wrote down almost all of them.
And I said to myself in the middle of the night,
I said,
That could be a book.
And I went back to sleep and the next morning I looked at this list.
So I had written down these qualities like tenderness and delight and genuineness and discernment and wonder and silence and generosity.
These qualities just will come when you're in your right mind and heart,
I always say.
When you're at ease,
Those are the qualities that are your innate nature.
And I see it over and over again.
I make the experiment every time I have a retreat.
Sometimes I'll watch people arrive,
Like I said,
About my friend who is stressed and had this incredible clarity at the end.
Well,
That happens all the time.
People come in all kinds of states,
Exhausted or angry or whatever,
Depressed.
And then within hardly any time,
They're kind of floating along,
You know.
And they're in their,
They're almost like in their childlike nature,
Like with an innate delight and a sweetness.
So one of the things that I feel very heartened by is that almost everyone,
Not every single person,
Some people's conditioning is so rough or they're genetically just whatever,
That they don't have much access to their tender underbelly.
But almost everyone does.
But our culture and our pace of life and all of that is creating a lot of stress and we get kind of far from it.
So it takes almost an act of will to kind of come back and just sit quietly or go slower or just enjoy your coffee or just stare at the moon for a while,
All those things.
But those beautiful,
Beautiful qualities are very much our nature.
So as I was saying,
One of the things that's very heartening for me about humans,
Because sometimes I do get angry at our species,
But one of the things that is very heartening for me is that I see how beautiful we are given half a chance.
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