Lawrence Levy: Beating Burnout By Just Being

Feeling burnout does not mean you're a failure. By practicing in the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, former tech executive Lawrence Levy found a way to apply Buddhist principles to the difficulties we have in our everyday lives. Tricycle Editor and Publisher James Shaheen talks to Levy about the importance of self-care in a mutually supportive environment and how meditation can help us tend to the conditions that lead to burnout.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Tricycle Talks.

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher of Tricycle the Buddhist Review.

Today I'm here with Lawrence Levy,

The former Executive Vice President and board member of Pixar and a co-founder of the Juniper Foundation,

An organization devoted to making meditation and Buddhist teachings accessible in a modern context.

At Pixar,

Lawrence helped turn the company into the media giant it is today.

He describes this period of his life in the book,

To Pixar and Beyond,

My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History.

Lawrence is also a longtime practitioner in the Gay Luke lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.

He's a teacher at Juniper under the guidance of Segu Chopal Rinpoche,

Also a co-founder of Juniper.

In our talk,

Lawrence shares his insights into a common problem,

Burnout.

Burnout,

He says,

Is a sign that our human needs are not being met and it's often caused when our life narratives are out of sync with reality.

Prevailing narratives such as the belief that perfection is possible,

That cognitive intelligence is more important than emotional intelligence,

And that certainty is always a virtue,

Prevent us from seeing the stressors in our environment and from paying attention to our inner life.

Lawrence Levy,

Thank you for joining us.

Oh,

James,

It's a pleasure to be part of this.

Thanks for having me.

Our topic today is burnout,

Something I hear has been epidemic for decades,

But has gone in many ways largely untreated.

So my first question to you,

Lawrence,

Is about a comment you made when you spoke to members of the medical community at the University of Connecticut not long ago.

You said that burnout is not a shortcoming or a failing,

But a healthy response to an insane world.

Can you say a little bit about that?

Yes,

You know,

I spent a good part of the last year or so really studying this problem of burnout,

Certainly within the field of medicine,

But also within any field,

There's plenty of it in my world here in Silicon Valley.

And I came to conclude that we look at burnout as this sort of negative thing,

Almost as though it's a weakness or something.

But I came to see it as not a weakness at all,

But in actual fact,

A healthy response to a toxic world,

To a toxic environment.

I think that burnout is a signal that it says my needs as a human being are not being met.

And I put it this way when I gave the talk to the physicians in Connecticut.

I said burnout is like the fever you get when you have an infection.

And you don't look at a patient that has an infection and say,

Boy,

They're really weak because they got a fever.

You just say,

Wow,

Fever is a sign that something's not right.

And that's what I how I think of burnout now.

It's a sign.

It's a symptom of something being wrong.

So what is it exactly that's wrong?

What are you identifying as the primary causes of burnout?

Well,

In terms of causing,

I think it has to do a lot with the strains and the toxicities of the environment that we're in.

And so we largely work in environments,

Whether it be school or professional life or work life or sometimes these days,

Even home life,

Where so much of the emphasis is on performance and the administration and the bureaucratic needs of what we have to do,

That the balance is out in terms of taking care of our needs as human beings.

And when that balance is off for too long of a period of time,

As it is in a lot of environments today,

Then eventually the body rebels.

And it says,

It's enough.

I can't handle this anymore.

So you talk about an emphasis on productivity,

A narrative of productivity as opposed to a human narrative.

And you also refer to outer mastery over inner mastery.

Can you say a little bit about those things?

Yes.

So when I talk about outer mastery,

I'm talking about basically the control over our outer world,

Over the material world.

And in the last 50 years or more,

We've become experts at that.

And we're living in a period and era of the greatest amount of discovery and prosperity that we've ever had.

Come here to Silicon Valley and you see more wealth,

More prosperity,

More invention than probably any other time in human history.

But what I also note and actually correlate with that is with for some reason in modern contemporary life with high levels of prosperity and invention come very high levels of mental anguish and stress and anxiety and loneliness and lack of loss of meaning.

And I began to wonder a lot about this.

And what I saw was that it's not that outer mastery is a bad thing.

On the contrary,

It's a great thing.

It moves us forward as humanity.

But when it's all about outer mastery to the complete exclusion of what I would call inner mastery,

By which I mean the sort of control over our inner world,

Then things become out of balance.

And we may have a lot of prosperity,

But we won't have the kind of contentment and fulfillment and joy that I think we crave as human beings.

Okay.

You know,

I'll get to the latter in a few minutes,

But I wanted to bring up something that I've also heard you discuss.

And one of your ways of framing this or understanding this overall was to point out that our narrative is out of sync with reality.

Can you talk a little bit about that and the stress that it causes?

Yes.

Well,

You know,

We know the Buddhist philosophy of the middle way or the insight philosophy and a lot of the insight philosophy is about how the way the world appears to us is not the way the world actually is.

And in fact,

That we're functioning by narratives more than we are functioning in reality.

And when our narrative is out of sync with the way things are,

Then we suffer.

This is one of the sort of theses of the middle way in a sense.

And so I took a look at what are some of the prevailing narratives that might be causing us to feel this experience of burnout,

Depletion,

Lack of fulfillment and so on.

And I came up with several.

And so an example,

One of those is what I call the narrative of perfectionism,

The sense that in whatever we do,

We have to be infallible at it.

And this is a strong current through contemporary life where performance and especially very high levels of performance is a prevailing narrative.

And we feel as though any mistakes,

Any shortcomings are beyond us or something we shouldn't have.

And the narrative of perfectionism is out of sync with reality because it's just not a reachable standard.

There is no perfection.

We can always do better.

And so what that does is basically leads to misery,

Leads to hardship because we live under a constant pressure of making mistakes.

We can spiral out of control or downward even with small mistakes.

And we sort of torture ourselves with self-critique in a way because we're trying,

Striving for a standard that at the end of the day,

We can never reach.

David Burns,

Who was a clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University,

Once wrote that perfection is man's ultimate illusion.

It just doesn't exist.

It's a con game.

And it's not that we shouldn't strive,

But if we strive under a current of perfectionism,

We're going to suffer as a result,

I think.

So in the case of perfectionism,

You're really associating that with a narrative of productivity,

Is that right?

And it's sort of a flawless productivity.

It's that word flawless.

There's nothing wrong with productivity.

It's when it becomes this sort of relentless quest for performance at all costs,

Never forgiving ourselves,

Not being able to tolerate any kinds of failures or setbacks.

That's where it becomes a problem.

So,

You know,

We associate productivity also with a particular kind of intelligence at the expense of,

Say,

You refer to,

Say,

IQ over EQ as another part of the way in which narrative is out of sync with reality.

Is that right?

I do.

That's another narrative that I talk about,

Which I would call the narrative of IQ over EQ.

IQ being sort of cognitive intelligence,

EQ being a sort of buzzword for emotional intelligence.

And I know that sort of emotional intelligence is pretty a hot topic these days.

You know,

A lot of schools,

A lot of paces are paying attention to it.

But in many ways,

I think we're just sort of merely paying lip service to it because in the training of people,

You know,

Whether in school,

Graduate school,

Or the professions,

Pretty much any endeavor,

The focus is on the cognitive part of it.

As in the case of physicians in medical school,

For example,

There's very little emphasis or training placed on the sort of humanistic,

Emotional sides of what it means to be a physician.

The same would be true of business school or these things.

So we end up emphasizing sort of intelligence above emotion.

And that leaves us with few tools to sort of cope with the things that are actually causing us stress.

Right.

And along with that,

And I think this goes well with perfectionism,

You talk about an insidious narrative of certainty.

You want to say something about that?

Yes,

It's another one.

We tend to be uncomfortable in the gray,

We want things to be black and white.

And so we traffic,

I would say,

In a narrative of certainty,

You know,

Where we have this vision that things are like this,

And we want them to be that way.

We want to be right,

Not wrong.

And in many cases,

You know,

In the field of medicine,

Just as an example,

It's actually more uncertainty than it is certainty.

In our world today,

For example,

Technology is going to do a lot more of the black and white things.

And you'll use medicine as example,

But like in when we use genetic testing,

For example,

This produces probabilities,

Not certainties.

When we're dealing with quality of life considerations for patients,

Disease or aging populations,

This is an area full of uncertainty.

So in many ways in our era,

Uncertainty is the new certainty,

And we need to get used to it.

Yeah,

You know,

You mentioned technology,

And I've heard you say this before,

We feel that we are controlled by technology rather than managing it as a tool.

Do you want to say something about that?

Yes.

Well,

I think that what I would call a sort of technology angst has sort of settled.

It's like a cloud has sort of settled over modern culture in a way.

We're at the very dawn of the era of some of these new technologies,

Even the computer era itself is still in its infancy.

But certainly,

With social media,

Smartphones,

And all of those things,

It's brand new.

And we're still sort of playing with these as new tools.

And all of these new technologies,

They tend to have some sort of dark side with them.

I mean,

Who knew that,

You know,

Facebook,

For example,

Would be linked with loneliness?

You know,

Facebook is the most connected technology force probably ever invented.

And yet there are articles and studies being written that show that over usage of Facebook produces feelings of loneliness because the quality of the connections doesn't satisfy that human need.

And so we have this technology angst.

And I think we have to sort of,

You know,

Get technology to work for us instead of the other way around where we are being controlled by it.

You know,

You've mentioned three of the narratives perfectionism,

IQ over EQ,

And a narrative of certainty,

As in many ways the causes of the burnout,

The stress,

The alienation we feel but you also mentioned just now Facebook and loneliness and a fourth narrative I've heard you mention is the narrative of individuality and of all of them that probably most disconnects us from others or at least it's a large it's a major contributing factor to the alienation and loneliness that we feel.

Do you want to talk about the narrative of individuality?

Yes,

In so many domains,

Now we sort of function as like an isolated individualistic pod.

Sometimes it feels like we're sort of walking around in spacesuits and we're driving sort of our own little cars on our own and making decisions on our own about you know what we should be doing and how we should be doing and who we should be doing it with.

And we've lost a kind of tribal or community mentality of living.

And so we've lost a sort of culture of mutual support and empathy and collaboration.

And more than anything else,

I think that we are deep down sort of supremely social and connected creatures and beings.

And when we lose our sense of connection and closeness and community,

It produces a lot of hardship and suffering and and that's what I call the narrative of individuality.

And I say that it's out of sync with reality because it's a story in our heads born out of performance culture as opposed to the way of healthy way of human living.

I would say that that notion of community and mutual support and collective gain is often lost when we talk about individuality,

Competition,

Zero-sum game.

I mean all of those things are so corrosive and in many ways are very associated or closely associated with performance culture.

Would that be fair to say?

Very fair to say.

And it's not just that it's disassociated or forgotten about.

It's that we've we're losing the skills of how to do it.

You know,

The maintaining closeness,

Community and friendship,

The bonds that keep us together is a skill set.

We have to develop it.

We have to practice it.

We have to learn it.

And you can be good at it.

You can be bad at it.

It's not difficult.

Sometimes it's as simple as smiling at a person in the grocery store checkout line or remembering that a friend is going through a difficult time.

So it's not rocket science,

But it's still something that we have to practice.

And in some aspects of contemporary life,

We've forgotten about that practice.

Right.

It's interesting.

I just thought as you were talking about how it's also important to keep in mind the sorts of people we should not be spending our time with.

Well,

Yes,

I certainly agree with that.

You know,

We tend to sometimes give too much power away to people that don't have our best interests in mind.

And so,

You know,

That could be a boss or a certain family member or a certain friend or someone that,

You know,

Was sort of yearning their approval or their acceptance or their advice or something like that.

But in actual fact,

They're not sort of in that inner circle,

That inner tribe of people who we really truly care about each other in a deep and meaningful way.

And so we're kind of putting our trust in the wrong places sometimes.

You know,

We talk about burnout sometimes so casually.

You know,

I'm so burnt out.

We often say that it's a bit of an exaggeration when we're simply tired.

Yet it is epidemic.

And in its extreme forms,

There's a true human cost.

I know you've looked into this.

What are we looking at in terms of cost?

Well,

I group these costs into different categories.

You know,

At one level,

We are creating the cost we feel in terms of like stress,

Anxiety,

Depression,

Mental anguish.

And so why is it that in contemporary society where there's lots of wealth,

Is there so much mental anguish?

Why are university mental health clinics brimming full of the brim with people coming in with anxiety complaints at a rate higher than any time before?

So there's a high cost in terms of mental anguish.

There's also a cost in terms of low levels of kind of meaning,

Low levels of joy,

Of fun,

Of play.

You know,

Quite a lot of life ought to be just fun and play.

And we kind of box that in for quite some time.

And in business,

It's sort of a badge of honor if you don't take vacation,

You know,

Unused vacation is a mark of honor that you're really dedicated,

But that means a lot less fun,

A lot less play.

And so those costs,

You know,

Take their toll on our experience as humans.

Yeah,

It's interesting you say that.

It goes back to this overarching idea of performance culture because play,

Fun,

Joy,

Those aren't things we typically think of as productive and yet they're so essential.

They're so essential and it's even worse than that.

We see them sometimes as weak.

So the more productive we are,

The more the grind we are,

You know,

That's kind of a sign of strength in contemporary life.

But if you say,

Hey,

I'm just feeling burned out and taking a few weeks off,

You know,

To go to a spa or read a book or something like that,

Then that's almost seen as weakness in our contemporary life.

And this is something,

A story that I think we'd be better off reversing it.

You're listening to Tricycle's editor and publisher,

James Shaheen,

In conversation with Lawrence Levy,

Author of To Pixar and Beyond.

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2018.

Now let's return to James Shaheen's conversation with Lawrence Levy.

You talk about outer mastery and inner mastery and you refer to the bureaucrat who is necessary,

Who is administratively useful and encourages or insists upon productivity.

Yeah,

There's also the inner mastery and here's where we start to find the antidote to burnout,

Or at least as you see it.

You referred to your arrival at one point at Pixar and you referred to Pixar as the starving artist.

I mean,

Maybe that's a good way for you to illustrate for us the difference between outer and inner mastery and their necessary dependence on one another in achieving balance.

Well,

I sometimes illustrate the middle way,

As you know,

Is a deep and extraordinary philosophy goes back 2000 years to these great Eastern philosophers and Buddhist masters.

But one way to illustrate it is like this.

You can imagine that there are two people inside of us and one person is a bureaucrat and the goal of the bureaucrat is to get things done.

There's just stuff that has to get done in life.

We have to wake up on time,

Get to the airport in time,

Make sure we have enough money in the bank and all of these things.

And the bureaucrat tends to be a warrior,

Very pragmatic person.

And then there's another person inside of us that we could call an artist or a free spirit.

And the free spirit doesn't care anything about getting things done just wants to live and love and laugh and play and connect with friends and create and enjoy smell the roses.

And one application of the middle way would say that the middle way is a philosophy of harmony.

And it says that anytime we're stuck in extremes,

Suffering will be the result.

So the middle way would say that if we're stuck in either of those two inner extremes,

Then we're likely to experience some kind of frustration and hardship.

If life is all about being a bureaucrat,

All about getting things done,

Then we may accumulate a lot of stuff when we have a lot of money,

Trophies,

You name it.

But we might one day wake up and wonder,

Did we ever truly live?

And if we're stuck in the other extreme where life is all about playing and creativity and love and laughter,

Then we may smell the roses a little bit,

But we might be frustrated for lack of momentum.

And what the middle way would say is we have to harmonize these two forces.

We need to push off of those extremes so that we can have enough momentum,

Enough bureaucracy in order to keep our lives moving forward and productive in those ways,

But without killing that artistic creative spirit inside of us so that along the way we remember what it means to love and laugh and play and have all those kinds of experiences.

And,

You know,

I often say,

You know,

This was the secret to Pixar because when I first joined Pixar in 1994,

It really was the quintessential starving artist,

Incredible creativity,

No momentum.

And the company as a whole was extremely frustrated by that.

And so despite all that great creativity,

The overwhelming feeling was frustration for lack of momentum.

What we really did at Pixar was put enough administration,

Strategy,

Structure around that,

Those creative forces to give it momentum without killing the creative spirit.

And in many ways,

That's also some one of the secrets at least to overcoming this kind of burnout problem.

Right.

You talk about an organizational culture that can achieve the kind of balance that you're referring to.

And I imagine that's what you achieved at Pixar,

Which turned it into the company it became.

That's true.

I mean,

There were elements.

Pixar worked very hard on its culture,

And it's a constant balancing act.

And it's,

It's like meditation.

It's constant effort.

You can never take it for granted.

You have to come back to it every day.

But Pixar built an extraordinary culture of collaboration because in any endeavor where you're striving to do excellent work or something like that,

It's the product of these forces that have tension against each other.

In Pixar's case,

There are creative forces,

Technology forces,

Business forces,

And they tend to pull against each other.

And it requires a culture of collaboration and all to just kind of resolve all of that.

And we were successful at creating that there.

Okay,

So I'd like to talk a little bit about the antidote.

You know,

When you talk about how we respond to burnout in a healthy way,

In terms of treating it,

You begin with meditation and more specifically,

Buddhist meditation.

How do you see that?

I do.

And it's sort of Buddhist meditation philosophy has sort of been the object of my study and much of my life for the last 20 years.

And,

But my starting point for this is to ask,

You know,

How do we move to a healthier narrative?

How do we move to a healthier way of being in a toxic kind of culture?

And the first thing I would note is that there's no magic wand.

There's no quick fix for this.

It's very easy to pay lip service to sort of self nurturing and sort of throw in a meditation class,

You know,

On a Thursday night in a yoga class on a Monday night.

There's nothing wrong with any of those,

But I think they're not by themselves enough.

Sometimes I call that checkbox meditation.

You know,

I've meditated today,

I've done my yoga class today.

That's great,

But it's kind of like throwing a bucket of water on a forest fire.

It's not a strong enough of an antidote.

And my sort of years of studying and looking at this and working with a teacher on this is sort of brought me to conclude that self care,

Self nurturing,

This antidote to burnout that we're talking about has to be a continuous habit of self nurturing and mutual support.

It has to be continuous.

It has to be the right kinds of things.

And we have to do it with others in a,

In a mutually supportive environment.

It's,

It's much like food or exercise.

It's,

It's no good going to the gym once a month.

Um,

It has to be regular.

And it's the same with this.

And I think there are three elements to it,

You know,

That,

That I call meditation,

Learning and connection.

And then perhaps we'll get into those.

So you look at meditation as one of the solutions to the problem of burnout,

And yet you see it as so much more.

It's not simply another technology that we deploy.

That's right.

Not at all.

I think if we see it just as a technique or as a technology,

Then then it actually becomes limited.

And in actual fact,

It can even add to our stress because that was just something else that we have to do.

Uh,

The,

The way I see meditation is more as a,

As a really a meditative life is really a,

It's a way of living.

It's,

It's a way of experiencing life.

Uh,

I don't think we just meditate for 10 minutes a day and then go on with our lives.

Um,

I think we bring all of this,

This meditation,

This learning,

Um,

To inform and infuse and,

And replenish us all the time.

Uh,

You know,

Meditation is really a tremendous means of sort of personal replenishment.

Uh,

Otherwise,

You know,

Life can deplete us.

So where do we go in order to gain that replenishment?

Well,

Meditation and these great lineages of practice and learning is a great way to do that.

You know,

When I sit down to do my meditation in the morning,

I feel like I'm sitting down in like a palace of,

Of,

Uh,

Of,

Of wisdom and insight with all these great masters.

And I'm sort of tapping into this and it infuses and it informs my life all the time.

And I feel it's a way of living,

Uh,

Not just a sort of technique that I'm trying to use to decrease stress,

For example.

Right.

One interesting way to look at it may be,

It's not so much that I bring my meditation to my life,

Rather my entire life is brought to the practice.

My entire life is brought to the practice.

That's exactly right.

You know,

I was at a retreat once with my own teacher,

Sege Rinpoche,

And somebody asked him,

You know,

How often do you meditate?

And he said all the time.

And it's like,

He doesn't sit in meditation,

You know,

With his eyes,

You know,

Focused on an object,

You know,

24 hours a day,

But that space,

That way of being is something that he never lets go of.

And so that's an example of that.

Okay.

So that's meditation.

Why don't you take us through learning and connection?

So say we have a meditation practice,

Right?

This is a contemplative practice.

It's like our space for self nurturing.

It doesn't have to be a lot,

But it doesn't have to be regular.

But a lot of the questions,

You know,

What do we bring into that practice?

What information,

What ideas are we,

Are we bringing into that,

That contemplation?

And that's where the learning comes in.

And you know,

This is where some of the great Buddhist texts and things like that can really help us,

You know,

You know,

Ask questions like,

You know,

What is peace of mind?

What is compassion?

Is compassion just being nice to everybody?

I don't think it is.

So what in fact does it mean to be compassionate?

Can we be compassionate or is that just sort of the expression of our ego?

What is emotional harmony?

The Buddhist teachings have a lot to say about emotional wellbeing.

And you know,

What does it mean,

For example,

To be irrationally angry versus to stand up for ourselves when there's an injustice?

There's an important difference between those.

You know,

Quelling our sort of emotional anger doesn't mean we become weak or meek and not at all.

We're engaging these practices to become stronger,

Centered,

Grounded human beings.

So there's a lot to learn about these things,

Which is one of the things I love about this tradition.

And then the connection part is acknowledging that we have to have a sort of nurturing,

Supportive community to do this with.

We have to help each other.

That includes teachers and guides who can help us along the way,

As well as friends,

Spiritual friends,

A safe space that we can be and learn and gain from each other.

You know,

And there was a book by Johann Hari called Lost Connections.

It actually was published this year.

It's a book on depression.

And he makes a point in there that says,

Happiness is a social thing.

And so whatever we think of happiness and contentment and the meaning of that,

I think it turns out that it's something that we do together.

And,

You know,

If we see our both agitation and the joy of our life as something that we share with a network of people around us,

That's the thing that will make a difference.

And that's also probably where we work with others to change a system that is the cause of this kind of burnout.

Yes.

Well,

The system is a problem.

And I hear this a lot,

Which is like,

What good is any of this if the system is just constantly pressuring me,

Whether it be a hospital system or a school system or a startup in Silicon Valley or whatever it is,

There's a corporate sort of system out there that is imposing itself on me and making all of this very difficult.

And I totally get that.

I mean,

The system is obviously a co-conspirator here.

It's a co-conspirator sort of everywhere.

That's what's creating this toxicity because the system itself doesn't really care about us in the ways that we're talking about.

It doesn't necessarily care whether we're burned out or not.

So we need to change the system to make it more human.

And I think that over time,

I hope at least that over time,

We will get better at that.

But there is danger in sort of blaming the system for everything.

We don't have to change the system to at least value self-care and to do something about it.

We don't have to change the system to be a friend to a colleague,

To smile at people,

To embrace people,

To engage people in a friendly way.

And we don't need to change the system to at least see ourselves and those around us as human beings first.

And whatever else we happen to be doing second.

And so there's a lot that we can do in the meantime while we're also working on the system.

Yeah,

You know,

In terms of how we see ourselves and each other,

You used a few lines that were descriptive of a particular person and in two very different ways.

For instance,

You said she is a patient or she is a human being who suffers.

What's the difference there?

Well,

Yes,

I gave this little thought experiment to the physicians out in Connecticut and I gave two actually.

And the first one I said to them was to do a meditation and actually contemplate the difference between these two phrases.

The first phrase is I am a doctor.

And you can replace the word doctor with anything.

I am an executive.

I am the editor of Tricycle magazine.

You can put anything you want in there.

But I am a doctor versus the other phrase which is I am a human being who works in the field of medicine or I am a human being who works at a startup or who teaches people or whatever it is.

So I am a doctor versus I am a human being who works in the field of medicine.

And what I think we find if we meditate on that is that when we self identify with the word doctor or whatever it may be,

What that does is constantly affirms that performance narrative.

And when we self identify with the word human,

It opens up a whole world of possibilities for how we may act,

Behave and see other people.

And the same is true for the one you mentioned.

If you do a similar meditation on the difference between she is a patient because to a doctor,

A patient might just be a number,

Just a disease state.

That's it.

How do we treat the disease versus the other statement,

Which is she is a human being who is suffering.

Again,

It opens up a world of possibilities.

Yes,

We have to treat the disease state,

But the person that's experiencing that disease is a human being.

And there's a whole lot of other factors that might go into how that person is experiencing that disease and how we might treat it.

And so these are the kinds of changes in narrative that can really make a difference in our lives.

Yeah,

That's very consistent with with Buddhist thought.

I think there's a much stronger solidification around an identity like I am a doctor than something as fluid opening and evolving as a human being say.

And even so,

We're still identifying as something but but the latter identification seems much more useful for our purposes anyway.

Yes,

Not just useful.

I think more in sync with reality.

You use the word as fluid and flexible when you when you describe,

You know,

Being a human being.

That's exactly right.

As human beings,

We are in constant transformation and constant change.

We are emotional beings.

We are imperfect.

We make mistakes.

We need each other.

We have all of these things as human beings that are more in sync with the way things are than these other narratives of,

You know,

Doctor,

Executive or whatever it may be.

So these shifts just like the Buddhist training tries to do for us is to try to unlock us from these kind of extreme positions and put us more into this kind of Yeah,

It's not as well defined,

But it's more real.

It's who we are.

We're kind of messy.

And it gets us more in touch with that.

Yeah,

It's a greater degree of acceptance of uncertainty,

I would say,

And potential.

Absolutely.

And greater degree of acceptance of all of these things,

You know,

That that make us human,

You know,

Let's take an example,

You know,

Right right out of the heart of Buddhist thought,

The first noble truth,

The truth of suffering,

The truth of suffering says,

You know,

It is just part of being human to suffer.

You know,

I think the Buddha was one of the first people,

One of the first humanists,

One of the first psychologists to kind of look into the human heart and say,

Wow,

It's frail in there.

It's it's challenging in there.

There's a lot of suffering in there.

But we don't like to own that because we feel vulnerable about it,

Or we feel shame or we feel weak,

Or we have all of these stories that sort of block us from the nature of that humanity,

You know,

That the Buddha and other masters really pointed out 2000 years ago.

And when we begin to own that more,

You know,

When we begin to just cast aside,

You know,

The the shame and the denial and all that and accept our humanity,

I think we make for more hope,

A better future,

More more joy and,

And contentment in our lives.

Well,

I think that's an excellent place to end on that high note.

So thank you,

Lawrence Levy for your time and for your wisdom.

I hope we have a chance to talk again soon.

I'd love it.

Thanks for having me.

You've been listening to my conversation with Lawrence Levy,

Author of To Pixar and Beyond on Tricycle Talks.

We'd love to hear your thoughts about the podcast.

Write us at feedback at tricycle.

Org.

Tricycle Talks is produced by Paul Ruist at Argo Studios in New York City.

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher of Tricycle,

The Buddhist Review.

Thank you for listening.

Reviews

26.4.22
James, to you and to mr. Levy -
That conversation was very educational, interesting, wise and useful.
Thank you both🦉
Orly
Israel

I love the idea of shifting the narrative and the expectations by changing the "I am" definition of oneself. I am a teacher vs. I am a human being who teaches (or, even better, who facilitates learning) a subject I know more about than the other human being working with me. This is so beautiful.

Very Interesting thank you!

Insightful and inspiring. Well worth the 30+ minutes.

Amazing. Clear discussion that sheds lots of enlightenment. I can’t wait for more from tricycle.