Jack Kornfield in conversation with Dan Siegel at Live Talks Los Angeles

hi david icke hi so this is great you know we get this opportunity to explore your wonderful book all right and the notion of there being no time like the present can you tell us in the present what you were thinking back in that past present when you were told you call the book this right now it's great you know I'm happy to be here with you dan is one of my very dear closest friends and we're born just a day apart in July done a lot of things together and thank you all for coming out so I actually feel quite happy and I will tell a tiny story when I was in Washington with you for that minded Life conference with the Dalai Lama mommy's esteemed scientists and so forth like yourself Dalai Lama had these books on happiness that became bestsellers in the New York Times bestseller list and so the ABC or NBC one of the big networks came to interview a man named big camera and they went right up your holiness can you tell us this and that and they said now you've had all these books on happiness could you please it's a great journalists question tell us what was the happiest moment of your life you know Dalai Lama little impatient I'll says I think now because the theme of the book but in some way also something important for us we get involved in spiritual practices at least some people do of meditation and mindfulness and compassion training and various other things that you might do with the notion that someday when you really do it and get there and maybe you go to the Himalayas for a while and you that there will be something good at the end of the road but there's also something called living the fruit or starting just where you are because where you're going actually is here where else could you be which is so this is kind of a central theme of the book as TSL you would say the end of all our exploring is to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time and so the invitation is yes all those things are good your therapy and your dieting and you're working out and your trainers and your coaches and all those things like that it helps you a little bit little you know you're still sort of the same weird person you were but only a little bit better but the point actually is it to perfect yourself if anything it's to perfect your love and your ability to be alive and present where you are and that can't be taken from you or given to you when Nelson Mandela walked out of 27 years of Robben Island prison who has so much magnanimity and forgiveness in courage and graciousness he not only changed South Africa but he changed the imagination of the world and it shows that they could put your body in prison but no one can imprison your spirit and that spirit which was born into you that consciousness that came into take a human incarnation to take a kind of wild ride that you're having um that is free for you your ability to you can't always determine the outer circumstances but you have the the freedom of heart and mind to bring your spirit to whatever circumstance that is so that's a little bit of the theme of the book so what do you think makes it hard for people to do that if all you have is the present moment oh you know what what makes it so hard and because in your own journey you know where you discovered in college that something wasn't quite right and you went out on a quest that actually has influenced the entire Western world and there's what you brought back but what do you think makes it hard in general for people and a particular nerd journey to find this present moment beside they have no time like the present well first I'll tell a little bit of a joke because you want enough fun anyway so bad wrote to the IRS recently tax season as you know and he said I've not been able to sleep because I cheated on my taxes last year so I've enclosed an anonymous cashier's check for $3,000 if I still can't sleep I'll send the rest and this is a little bit of how we are as human beings you know the famous book be here now by Ram Dass actually let me ask you a couple questions before I finish answering this question Dan how many of you have some established meditation practice oh my god how many devote in la virgins yay fantastic welcome yeah so yes so to answering that question there is this beautiful book by Ram Das be here now that at that time was a great bestseller and and part of a cultural revolution that was bringing at least dinner during that time in the 60s a whole way of awakening consciousness and bringing in a spiritual dimension and then a question which US says if be here now is such a good idea why don't we do it yeah and I guess I'd say there are two three things that come one is because of suffering that the thing is that if you open your mind in your heart to be really present you get what sorbets calls the whole catastrophe you know you can't just open the door and say I only want Pleasant beautiful happy things that's not what happens when you open the door and so when you whether it's meditate or invite yourself to be more fully present the blessings are you see the eyes of your children or your lovers or your family or the people walking on the street you know you take in the amazing color of the Jacaranda x' and you watch the you know the fog kind of move across as it comes in from the ocean you know in the sunset reflected in the lavender colors in the and the puddles in the street this winter when it rained so much and the smells and you would come more alive in all kinds of ways and it allows you to be and you know as a neuroscientist all the five thousand different neuroscience research papers in the last couple of decades be more present more balanced more available there's a kind of intimacy with life that grows but it also means that if you have unfinished business of your heart and you start to sit quietly and put on the little half-smile from ticking on and say ah now I'm going to sit and be peaceful and there's grief that you've been too busy running around to feel or there's an sadness or regret or frustration or anger or conflict with someone or things that were unfinished that you feel betrayed about they're held in the heart or you've been running around a lot all the time doing all the things checking stuff off your list which we're trained to do in our culture and then you sit down quietly and your shoulders are tighten your back hurts and you jostle and it's not that you're meditating wrong it's your body saying you remember me you know I know you went to your yoga class okay but you've been running me around a lot and there's a lot in here and it starts to show itself so that's one of the reasons that it's hard because in some way to to meditate and we'll call mindfulness loving awareness is an invitation to come into the present for life itself which is magnificent and mysterious and it has unbearable beauty and an ocean of Tears and so it invites what we might call the great heart of compassion as necessary as anything in mindfulness to be able to hold it all so that's one reason it's hard because life has a hurry anybody not have that by the way you can have your money back okay just checking here right and it's not because you're doing it wrong it's because you took a human incarnation say alright there's something to learn in this a second reason that it's difficult is that we live in what's called an addicted society that promotes the things that keep us busy and keep us busy with our fix's and consumer and you know multitasking and so forth Einstein said at least as reported in Scientific American a reasonably good you know source if you can drive safely while kissing a girl you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves alright but this is you know our modern society what we're we're multitasking we're kissing but also we do just texted us you know we're going to send it out on Instagram or snapchat or whatever it was a great kiss I'll tell you you know so we live in a society that's multitasking but that also promotes us to not feel because if we feel we would be saying no to the military-industrial establishment that's taking half of our tax money to the incarceration in these racist poverty prisons of millions of people to eating foods or buying things that have chemicals in them that we know are really bad for our children and for our own bodies all these kind of things it's better if we're distracted and that the culture would rather you kind of keep busy and not be to close attention and what's also true is that no amount of science and technology nanotechnology computers you know internet here you know I have the Great Library of Alexandria in my smartphone it's amazing right plus all the bad movies ever made no amount of nanotechnology Computers biotechnology space technology all these fantastic things is going to stop continuing warfare it's going to stop continuing racism it's going to stop continuing environmental destruction the outer developments which are so magnificent have to be matched now for you in kind with inner developments I love it when cell phones ring by the way it's really great things like a little alarm ago yeah here we are present sometimes I've taught with a friend and we have everybody turn all their cell phones on at once and then sit in meditation and we just listen to the rings you know but but cause going back to that thread because it's actually very tender thing and a very important thing one of the chairman's of the joint chief of staff said past that were a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants and what's being asked of us is to match the remarkable outer developments now with a shift of consciousness that's collective in humanity that's a consciousness of interdependence which is partly what you've done your life work on on the interpersonal neurobiology to know that they here that we breathe which dusted the tops of Mauna Kea and Mauna lo and came over the Pacific and ocean is in your lungs it also dusted the Fukushima nuclear reactor you know and it came across Beijing smog and Siberian open space and that we can't separate ourselves from the world as Mother Teresa says the problem with us or with you is that you draw your family circle too small this is your family so when one is invited to be in the present it means opening to the mystery to beauty and also to the ocean of Tears and so it has something courageous but also and magnificent demanding of the heart and it takes a practice to do it some some training you know I've learned so much from you Jack and you've taught all of us so much I remember that time when we read that meeting in DC we went from where the Dalai Lama was speaking to go I think it's some dinner or something at a hotel but as we were walking through the streets of DC an ambulance went by and you know I am a physician and as the amp is going by I'm going oh my god I hope they know the dose of what to give that person and thinking about all the different mechanics of the physicians stance and you were there you know with your hand on your heart saying I hope that person's could be okay and it was such a lesson for me about how distracted you can get a right I forget from the reality that there was a person in tremendous pain and I think if I had to summarize going through medicals would be not being present and getting lost in all the details and then losing track of how to connect that way so when you think back on your own life what was that moment for you that somehow spoke to you that said the path you're on was not the direction you want to keep on going and you had the notion or the idea or whatever you can tell us about that that got you to leave college and then to go out to Asia and to explore a whole different way which in those days I mean I don't want to say as a judgmental thing but it was just kind of weird you know right and zakaris fair assessment it was a sure shutter there wasn't you there are a lot of elements immediate what first of all just to pause with your lesson because I know and I've heard you tell the story he was in medical school at Harvard and he actually dropped out because he was going to try to visit a patient down the hall who had just died that you've been taking care of for many weeks and they said he was on rounds with another professor this man the family's there and this man died you want to just you know go in for a moment he got back in the professor looked at him and said do you want to be a social worker or f'ing social worker you know or are you a physician we tend to the body and you know don't you ever walk out on me like that that was when you exited medical school right and I tell the story first because it's it's a very compelling story and it also says something about your spirit that you couldn't do that but it echoes or amplifies what you were saying how about the kind of education that we have which is in part in education not so much to connect with one another or to feel in a deep way but to get things done but what what could we want to get done more than to connect with each I me there are lots of beautiful creative things to do but if we don't have that which is really another word for love you know what does the rest really get us so now I sort of wandered off from your question and whatever you want the reason Hey um yeah I was going to go to medical school too so I could have been you know one of you arriving a little generation could have brought us together I could have dropped out together exactly but what part of what got me to go to Asia was some combination of wildly interested curiosity desperation and LSD I mean look at us you know let's just the 60s okay so I'm taking organic chemistry and you know all the things that one needs to do to go to medical school at Dartmouth and then there's a professor who'd come up from from Harvard just start teaching maybe to start a department of Asian Studies they're wonderful old man doctor wing said Chan who talked about Lao Tzu and Confucius and a lot about the Buddha sometimes he'd even sit on the desk cross-legged this old man and give us lectures of like Dharma lectures of truth and it was beautiful and he started to talk about suffering and he said from the Buddhist teaching there is suffering in life and there are causes for it greed hatred anger confusion ignorance and there's a freedom from it that one can find in one's own life and heart and there's a path or or practices that bring that kind of freedom and I was sitting there my family of origin in one part there was good things about it of course but in one part was very painful my father who was a biophysicist and of quite kind of brilliant scientists in some ways was also paranoid violent abusive unstable you know now I just would have said okay he is mental illness in some way but he was a wife batterer and he was violent with us and it was so I got to college and I was carrying all that in me and of course we all carry our traumas not that your family is the same as mine who was it Tolstoy who said every every good family is the same that every difficult family is unique in its own way or something like that but we each carry a certain measure of sorrows because it's part of the human journey and when I heard that there was causes for suffering in the end to it I got really interested and I started to read Zen things and you know philosophy and psychology and as I read them I thought I wonder if there's still these great old Zen masters and teachers that that you read about in these books I wonder if you could find them so when I graduated it was during the Vietnam War time rather than go in the military when is the Peace Corps and asked him to send me to a Buddhist country so I could see what I could find and found a wonderful monastery there I worked for a couple years on these kind of village tropical medicine teams but I found this very wise teacher and there I had the other part of my education that you don't get in the Navy League school which is education about forgiveness education about compassion education about being present for my own body in the turning of the seasons education about love connection with one another education about healing how to deal with all the traumas that I and how to bring a loving awareness to them so that they would begin to unlace and a kind of rejuvenation of spirit would come I actually wrote something I was interviewed for the Dartmouth alumni magazine they put several of the weird graduates on the cover and I was one of them and part of what I said in that interview was you know that I you know I only got half an education there what I needed for now we might call it in the simplest way social and emotional learning really all the things about being a human being what are our values how do we stay true to ourselves I didn't get there but I got that second half of education in the in the monastery and then I came back and did the PhD in clinical psychology and so forth and a lot of it I think for all of us as we look at our journey was really about how do I transform myself and so those lessons that you learn because this comes up a lot as a question and I know you deal with it in this beautiful book you have the idea of no time like the present can involve meditative practice but as you've described in the book also sometimes psychotherapy I'm a little and how do you see those how do they complement each other how can one not be a substitute for the other what is the story of a psychotherapy and meditative friends I met all of the above kind of person basically so whatever helps some down with basically you know and also there's a model of human development I'd like to picture it in that way which includes our body and our emotions you know both well-being and healing includes our by the mental states includes our relationship in the Buddhist psychology those represent what are the foundations of mindfulness and it turns out that for us too to become happy and wise we need to actually deliberately attend to those different domains rather than doing a spiritual bypass or something like that so otherwise you've seen it you can have an Olympic level athlete who is just exquisitely tuned to their body who is an emotional idiot right or you can have a Nobel Prize Nobel laureate professor whose mind is brilliant and can't find their shoes right because they don't even know that they have a body really and so my head carries the head around so forth and it turns out because in my industry I get to hang out with Swami's and llamas and mamas and gurus and things like that that it's not that uncommon even in in this industry you know so you can have a great grooves and master and one who turns out to be really an idiot in some other way you've heard the stories you know that's true but if we are to really develop ourselves in some way that brings happiness and that's the point of it release says you're finding freedom and joy right where you are happiness it means to take life as we have it in all these parts to it are our own body and breath and experience our relationship to one another the kinds of states of mind that we live in and all of these the beautiful thing is that much of them are malleable that is to say we don't always get to choose the experiences that we have but how we work with the feelings and thoughts and even how we respond to our body is is amenable to becoming [Music] I was going to say becoming a temple you know become a place where we remember that life is sacred which our culture is forgotten in certain important ways and when we do this when we discover which takes a lot of self compassion because the judging side is also very strong when we meet ourselves that way in a whole way with loving awareness and compassion self compassion it allows us also then to see what's beautiful in others to see the secret Beauty behind the eyes of every person that we need and I want to read one story from this book if I may see how our time is going on and on here but it's fun because I'm having fun I don't know about you all um you guys have you fun is it okay so here's a story that meant a lot to me to have in this book Poonani Burgess is a Hawaiian educator and she says one of the processes I use to help people talk to each other deeply which is a kind of listening that we need so much in this time in our culture you know if we talk about what's going on outwardly the upheaval and the divisive nough sin the political sphere and in the social and cultural sphere you don't want to let it take over your heart if you don't want to let the terror colonize your heart you want to actually find that way to be centered in yourself and to carry what's beautiful that was born in you through the difficult time so when Zen master took not Han said put it this way he said when the Korea crowded Vietnamese refugee boats that was storms or pirates if everyone panicked all would be lost but if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered it was enough it showed the way for everyone to survive and we're on that boat you know the seas are up and all the kinds of media and publicity and political things are almost designed to try to make you terrified I mean this is it's not a new thing if you look at a hundred years ago HL Mencken great commentator said oh the whole aim of pop politics is to scare people so that you'll vote from in a particular way it's not like a new game but for you to become one of the people on the boat who's centered and calm that doesn't take that in but allows yourself to see in this world in a different way and to know that sometimes there are big seas and terrible things but also that we can get through this especially if we get through it together so here's the story so Poonani Burgess says one of the processes I used to help people talk to each other I call building the Beloved Community there's an exercise that requires people to tell three stories the first is the story of your name's the second is the story of your community and the third story I asked them to tell is the story of their gift and my friend malla dilma so-mei who's a wonderful west african shaman and medicine man who also has a couple PhDs said for for his people the dog erat people in West Africa it said that every human being is born I love their metaphor with a certain car comes into this life carrying a certain cargo and your task is to deliver your cargo that's what you're here for there's some gift that you bring so she's asking what's your gift one time I did this process with a group at our local high school and we went around the circle and we got to this young man Caillat and he told the story of his name's well in the story of his community well but when it came to tell the story of his gift he asked what miss what kind of gift you think huh I'm in the special ed class I got such a hard time read I cannot do math why you make me shame for ask that kind of question what kind of gift you have if I have gift you think I'd be here the boy just shut down and I felt really shamed she says and all the time I've done this never happened and I have no intention to shame it's someone two weeks later I'm in our local grocery store and I see him down one of the aisles see his back and I think I've heard him enough and I start to go the other way but he turns around somehow he sees me and he starts coming toward me fast as he can and he says auntie auntie I've been thinking about you you know two weeks I've been thinking what my gift what my gift I say okay brother what your gift he says you know I've been thinkin thinkin I cannot do that math stuff and cannot read so good but auntie when I stay in the ocean I can call the fish and a fishy come every time and every time when my family hungry I can put food on our table every time and sometimes when I stay in the ocean and the shark he come and you look at me and I look at him and I tell him uncle I'm not going to take plenty fish I just got to take one to fish just for my family all the rest I leave for you and so the shark II say oh you cool brother and I've held a shark uncle you cool and the shark he go his way and I go mine and I look at this boy and I know what a genius he is but in our society the way our schools and our values are set up he's not appreciated at all so when I talked to his teacher and the principal I asked him what would his life have been at this Kirk Elmore gift based and what if we were able to see the gift that's born in each of our children and organize our culture around that level of values of our community was gift based and the gift of each that each person has to give contribute so there's something people sometimes think that a spiritual practice or meditation I'm going to close my eyes and kind of reduce the tension and stress in my life and get peaceful as if you're going to go to some other world this is it baby you know and the point isn't to get away or do some kind of spiritual bypass but it's to quiet the mind and tend the heart maybe open the heart so that you can live love this life live yourself and live with one another and care for this earth all of these things are inseparable kajak one question you know as you've been on this journey really into this idea there's no time like the present and you think about the different ways you've been able to connect not just within yourself but with other people like writing books so path with heart you know you've got really out in the world you started two major meditation centers for Insight Meditation Society IMS and Barre Massachusetts and the wonderful spirit rock up in Northern California you now are actually doing online work so Jack have some fantastic online programs like daily Mont what's called daily mindfulness daily mindfulness daily at work 10 15 minutes a day for 40 days just to help again quiet mind tend the heart learn how to actually embody this at work or wherever you are those kind of things yeah so in all these different ways of being an author of books being someone active and really creating centers that are deeply inspirational transformational for people who go and now with your online presence how how do you see our humanity where we're at now as a family a human family and where we need to go and I don't mean just the local politics because that would be really depressing but I mean the larger picture looking just past current thanks but where do you feel human evolution needs to be nudged to go in order for the impact you've been trying to bring to the world over these decades and you've done such a wonderful job at it what where do you think we need to go as a human family quite a big question as if I would know if you don't were in trouble we are in trouble but it's all right exactly okay just fine you know we're in trouble but we're also species that goes through trouble and those how to do it and in fact I remember I mean I'm going to let my politics out here and I'm not assuming that everyone in this room has the same political view that I do or voted in the same way that I did but after the election my daughter was who's an asylum lawyer was very upset because her values in her way of looking at the world she was really afraid for immigrants climate change a number of issues of it and she was weeping a lot and I went to visit her her sat with her for a bit and then at some point I took off this I had a different one a blessing cord that I gotten from the Dalai Lama that I've been wearing for a long time and I took it off and I tied it around her wrist and I said you know Caroline yeah you've got you've got one too and I said yeah and I said you know um we humanity has gone through many hard periods in my lifetime I remember back in the 60s because I'm now just about 72 and I remember the time when Kennedy was shot and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm and the you know the political polarization in the Democratic convention in Chicago and half the people half the young men I knew were getting drafted and sent to a war that we didn't understand why and why so many people not just the 50,000 Americans that died but the you know million or two million people in Southeast Asia who also died so it was a really really painful time and difficult time and we had to use those of us who cared so much about these things had to use whatever skill so we had to help make it somewhat better get us through it I said and then after a generation or two another hard time will come and it seems that that time is now uhm so I tied it on her a little and I said and you've been preparing your whole life to do this you know how to do this and it's your generations turn will support you I'm doing what I can but I know you know how to do this too and it was there was something kind of like a transmission that was something very tender to be able to say that to her but it also asks it asks for artfulness and I'll explain that in a moment but I want to try to answer your question a little bit more fully and then I'll get to that there's a wonderful book by the dai Lama and Archbishop Tutu was published this year called the book of joy and the basic question that cat is captured in that book - - came from South Africa to spend a week with the diorama last year and they asked how can you two men you two have lived through the apartheid of South Africa and seeing so many killings of people you know and you know gasoline poured on people and just horrible in many ways oppression and violence and you dial um I have seen your country you can't even go back the monasteries burn the sacred texts go on the you know your culture endangered how is it that you can laugh how is it that you can still be joyful that was the question of the book dial mo says at one point well you know they've taken so much for me they've taken our sacred texts they've taken our ability to practice our religion they've taken you know the freedom of my people and so forth why should I let them take my happiness an extraordinary statement and I think people go to see him by the tens of thousands not so much for the Tibetan teachings they're fantastic teachings which we don't understand half of them anyway like on what does he mean by that right let's be straight about this right and while but okay maybe nor just because he's the Nobel laureate you know great political spiritual figure I think people go to hear him laugh that I would pay a lot of money to go hear the Dalai Lama that someone who carries that burden of the world in the way that he does also can have such a joyful heart and the beautiful thing is that this is possible for you that you can be that person on the boat you can do the healing that's needed and the ten the things that are difficult and then you can bring something that's beautiful forth into the world now there's a little aside also before I get to the artistry part and that is one of the books that's been very meaningful for me and trying to answer your question I think of it is a book called the better angels of our nature by Steven Pinker it was a professor at Harvard the anthropologist historian you know social analysts and so forth and in it he chronicles the last with a lot of statistics the last few centuries of human-caused suffering of different kinds and he shows that no matter how much there's a lot of war going on now and we are a warlike nation and we're exporting killing machines by the hundred billions hundreds of billions of dollars all around the world and then we wonder why we don't feel safe I mean there is some little problem here but what he shows is that the amount of people killed in warfare has been gradually declining over the last two or three hundred years all told what he shows in another chart is that the freedom that women have has been gradually increasing over the last couple of hundred years there's still a lot of problems with it as you know but it's gotten better and better and better more freedom for more women children the kind of child labor and child oppression and so forth decreasing dramatically over the last few centuries slavery there's still ten million slaves in the world so it's not that we don't have a problem that needs to be honorably felt and acknowledged and responded to but at least in our popular global human consciousness slavery is basically not okay anymore I'm waiting for when war is not going to be okay you know to follow that but because it's diminished you know in a whole variety of other measures like that which show that in spite of these ups and downs and in spite of the war in South Sudan or Syria or you know on undeclared wars in the streets of our own inner cities in places that there's hope for Humanity that there also is with its fits and starts that there is a shifting of human consciousness now in Zen they say there are only two things you sit and you sweep the garden and it doesn't matter how big the garden is that is you quiet the mind and ten the heart you know and come into a place of presence for yourself and then this life with compassion and care and a kind of inner freedom that is your birthright you are born to be free and really you can learn this remember this you sit and you rest in loving awareness which is a beautiful way to describe meditation not looking for anything particular sometimes you sit with loving awareness and all your tears come or your anxiety comes or the pain you've carried for your longing and you tend it as the poet Rumi says don't surrender your loneliness too quickly let it cut more deeply let it season you like few ingredients can because we carry all these things every everything out there is not out there it's here it's enough so you sit and tend it all with a loving awareness and then you get up and you sweep the garden of the world and it doesn't matter how big the garden is if people are hungry you feed them and you have your particular gift you know it may be to make a beautiful garden or to raise conscious choking or to have a conscious business or to be a social activist or to be an educator or to to whatever your particular gift is and this from Barden burr Weidler who founded grandmother's for peace she explains I began to question what kind of a world I'm leaving for my grandchildren so I got a sign a grandmother for peace and stood on a street corner then I joined others kneeling as a human barrier at a munitions factory I was taken to prison strip searched thrown into a cell something great happened to me I realized they couldn't do any more I was free and now Barbara and her organization grandmother's for peace works in dozens of countries around the world so that was her response part of the themes in this book are that it's never too late this day is a new day for you every morning at breakfast you're born anew what are you going to do with it and I can say this because Trudy and I got married it's just a little less than a year ago we went to Hawaii and Rhonda stood awaiting for us and we swam in the ocean that day and then went to his garden and we've known each other for forty five years and it just took a while to get around to it you know but the anyway so far so good you know it's really really great really kind of wonderful it's never too late to start over again it's never too late to forgive and forgive doesn't mean that you forget forgiveness is a very deep process in which you have to both honor what happened and you might say I will do everything in my power to prevent this harm from continuing to myself for another but in the end it's simply not to carry hatred in your heart because the person who hate you they you know might be over in Hawaii having beautiful vacation you're sitting here I hate you I hate you I hate you who is suffering you know it's really for one - for what sown hard starting yeah exactly okay so Jeff when one of the things I know we've talked about before is the dalai lama's surprise how in the West people talk about this hatred that people have not just for others but even for themselves self-hatred yeah liking you know their feelings not liking their body not liking how they fit in with the world not liking their job not liking how they disappointed their parents or their friends all these self judging things and that internal judgement gives so much suffering and so in a way what you're asking is that people begin by connecting inwardly to let that go in order also to let go judging others but what what in your experience is a teacher of you know no time like the present really being here and letting go of those judgments what have you found has been the most challenging part of that for people to let go of that self-hatred or lack of self-acceptance and to move into a state of saying look I embrace the present moment you know and I'm here loving however I am with people or you know what have you found has been most helpful what's most challenging I'm glad that you ask it in this way yeah the dynamic couldn't understand it all because there's no word for self-hatred in Tibetan said what is this self-hatred you know it took a long time with translator to figure it out finally he looked up after he got he said hmm but this is a mistake why I can't help why would you do this but it's ubiquitous and we've learned it and one of the gifts of meditation there you know is to be able to see the kinds of conditioning that we have and the judging mind is one of the strongest conditionings that you notice and it goes with you into the bathroom it goes with you into here your meetings at work and if they are with you on the highway it's like a close friend right and it's commenting back there and so the first step with loving awareness is just to know oh this is the judging mind sometimes you can personify and make a little figure for it sometimes you can give it a name helps because it gives a little humor about it like judy judy judy judy the judge judge judy thank you judy thank you yeah and then you can even say thank you for your opinion I'm actually okay for now right and so you start to change the mental spirit inside there you begin to realize that certain thoughts don't have your best interest in mind do you notice that and then when you become aware with love and awareness you can see it you don't have to you know um I'm I hate this judgement I want to get rid of Judge Judy I never want to judge any more I'm not going to judge I I hate being a judgmental person what's that this is more judgement right so it doesn't work that way thank you Judge Judy I appreciate it and I'm okay for now thank you so first they're seeing what's going on inside with the spaciousness of loving awareness which is awareness itself that is free like the sky and isn't tainted having a bit of humor about it and then self compassion because that judge for the other things that you find inside that are difficult they've tried to protect you you learn them in some way often from very young as a way to okay I'll do it this way and then my parents will you know might be angry or no one will hit me or I'll be a cos I'll I'll be accepted or loved or whatever you know children want and make me it protected you at a certain time in a certain way but doesn't help now really and there's something very different between the judging mind and the self judgment and clarity or discriminating wisdom which just sees the way things are this is healthy and this is unhealthy or helpful but this is the one that you know rags on you and beats you up and others and then the next piece that's really important and again there's beautiful trainings at inside LA for those who are interested in trudy teachers I teach there periodically there's beautiful trainings in mindful self-compassion and it turns out to be really revelatory for people to begin to change the world in some way you begin to change your own heart and to do that is to bring a quality of tenderness to your own vulnerability because you are vulnerable you know we don't like to admit it everybody is the poet Rilke wrote ultimately it is upon our vulnerability that we depend because we're vulnerable to one another all the time to the person who's driving on the other side of the street to stay in their lane or not to go through the red light you know or the air that comes from again whether it's Fukushima or the other parts of we're vulnerable to what's put in the soil and what's put in the water we are interval over and to accept that vulnerability in some way is to recognize alright this is our law as humans things change we can't really control them but we can bring our love to them we can bring our care to them and backstage somebody asked you know if I would tell the secret the secret I said how much did they pay you know secretiveness upset huh finding freedom and joy right where you are I think it even says happiness in that and other hardcover anyway yes the comment yeah here is the secret look at that they're all leaning forward afraid the secret is to act beautifully to plant beautiful seeds without attachment to the fruits of the action because the result is not given to you sometimes you go out and you try to do something great and it works a social condition or justice or things in your family or whatever and sometimes it doesn't it fails sometimes it brings out its opposite you all know that and as you do it you start to concentrate not on the results of the experience but on the values the rightness and the truth of what you're doing you listen as deeply as you can and you plant beautiful seeds and I believe it was Thoreau that said show me a seed that you're planting a true seed and I am prepared to expect miracles however long it takes if you plant a beautiful seed eventually something will come from it so it's not again living in the present it's not so much the result but rather quieting yourself and saying what is my best intention what is my my deepest intention to live and even in the Lillis way stand like if you're in conflict with somebody you're in an argument or somebody sent you something that's difficult before you push the send thing on that text right you know on the email or whatever before you answer that person who got upset with you take a breath just a breath or two kind of the mindful pause and then ask yourself what's my best intention here you know you got triggered somebody caught you off on the road in the morning you know you could reactor somebody said terrible to you what's my best intention and almost always if you quiet yourself and you listen my best intention is to make this work out that my best intention is to connect in some real way or my best intention I actually love this person often is to you know to feel that and then you notice when you reread the text before you press the send I should change a few of those words right and soften that a little bit or you reread that email I think I better say it in a different way because the tone of voice what did you mean can be like what did you mean or what did you mean I really want to understand you and that is the difference between going down a road of creating more suffering or going down the road in which we actually listen to each other there is Thomas Merton a sacred Beauty in every human being he said then It was as if I could suddenly see the secret beauty in those in front of me that purity that was born in them as a child that no experience no trauma no difficulty no education nothing can touch he said when we look in that way and see the beauty with that kind of respect and kids in the beauty in the eyes of another he said the only problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other oh you and you and you amazing that you're in there and you how did you get in there all hi fantastic look who this is and there's something I'm going on but I cannot going on um that's why we're here yeah there's yeah there's something about being seen by an and you know one of my teachers I would go and he would take my hand and there was something about the way he held my hand he wouldn't let it go you know it was like okay we really are here here we are and there was so much love and caring only when I kind of dropped down all right now I'm really here with you Dan you know hey it's great we've had some really good run we have beautiful things together yeah and it just you go oh yeah here we are we're in this together as as human beings so meditation is not so much about having some particular state because it'll do everything you know your mind has no pride I'm sure you've seen that and it could do anything but to be able to sit with compassion and tenderness and a frozen s-- to become that person on the boat is a beautiful thing yeah beautiful you're right Ted am I getting a flash from you about going to QA with that yeah great helpful question so first before we start with the questions let's just give a moment just reflecting on all that Jack and share with us tonight I love it you led the meditation I can retire it's great beautiful teeth project hey thank you [Applause] thank you Dad so I think kid is the master of the talking stick if there are any questions in the audience I'm happy to bring the microphone to you unless I miss it you brought up with the notion of Auto this was already like very close to your lips like an ice cream cone yeah okay exactly unless I misheard I thought you said something about art fulness could you expound on that a little please yes I'm happy to do that so again after the presidential dictor or or signing of the presidential order to not allow immigrants from these predominantly Muslim nations to come in as you recall there were a lot of people who are even on flights who are stuck at airports and so forth and I went down to the San Francisco International Terminal because lease for my own personal politics I want I really want to be welcoming to everyone it's just you know it's our family and so and she's a young lawyer who does Asylum law she went to Berkeley and now her people you know she's her clients are like a gay guy from Uganda who would be stoned to death if you were sent back she sees all these people whose lives are in danger from Syria or Salvador wherever and tries to protect them so we went down and there was this whole cadre of young lawyers it was great there was more lawyers there than there were people detained you know and they're offering their free services okay I'll take but anyway did they run into the grandmothers rupees there yeah they were them too yeah and there was like 1,500 or 2,000 people there at San Francisco after all right and then at each of the exit gates and so forth every three or 400 people and at the gate where we ended up people had their usual signs you know and there was a plethora of creative signs and they were chanting no band no fear refugees are welcome here the gate where we were had a New Orleans Jazz Band in the middle of it so we'd be chanting no bad no fear and then the drummer would kick in with the rhythm and then the trumpet player would play a riff on top of it and the sax player would go on and pretty soon we were chanting and singing our chant with this great jazz band kind of doing music behind it the cops were smiling I mean everybody was happy it was like we're not here against something we're here to promote something that's bigger that we invited you to and this is Molly Ivins who was the columnist for The New York Times humorous Texas you know renegade wonderful liberal that she was she says so keep on fighting for freedom and justice beloved's I like that she says beloved's but don't forget to have fun doing it the outrageous rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce and when you get through celebrating the sheer joy of a good fight be sure to tell those who come afterwards how much fun it was you know because there's some way that we can let the terror come in to us or even with our own personal traumas we become really loyal to our suffering and you're bigger than that you're there's a spirit that was born into that enviable spirit a mysterious beautiful consciousness and when you learn to rest in that loving awareness yes you you heal yes you deal with trauma yes there's very difficult things to tend to but you know like to to you can come to it or Aung San su Chi you know 17 years of house arrest and she said well in the way it was like a retreat for me because I took it that way you can deal with it in a fair very different spirit hello my question is in regard to life experiences do you find that there is a certain point in terms of whether it's a lesson or insight that you have in spirituality we're complete opposites are almost the same whereas in psychology it drops off at that point am I able to explain that properly can you can you tell me what makes you ask just my own experiences I think you get to a point where you see things the good the bad all aspects of your experience and like you said there is joy with the sadness there everything is really together nothing is separated what you might think are on the opposite extremes of a spectrum are actually together there is no space and I think that well I would like to ask you if in psychology if that's even if it even comes close to because it's almost like a an understanding that's beyond comprehending it intellectually so thank you for that it's beautiful what you said and wise and you know fortunately there are you know five hundred kinds of meditation so you can't say I practice meditation it's like I practice sport well what is that you know do you surf or ping-pong or climb Mount Everest there's lots of sports there's lots of kinds of meditation and there are many kinds of psychology and some of them are very narrowly focused and some of them do have a deep spiritual understanding but the the depth of your question is can you look at this mysterious life and see that it's woven between with joy and sorrow gain and loss pleasure and pain Fame and disrepute sweet and sour night and day this is what you can't have one without the other and so then the heart starts to get wise which is what you're saying it has this perspective of understanding and think this is what makes up a human life and then how do i navigate this if you don't have some tools of training of mindful presence and steadiness and compassion you're like a boat without a rudder everything that comes I hate this and I like this and you're just thrown around but when you have the perspective that you describe so beautifully really you see that it contains all this and sometimes the hardest things are also the ones that crack your heart open you know that's the crack where the light gets in as Leonard Cohen sings they're the very things that bring you to understand the kind of unshakable spirit of art that you get through that most difficult thing or they're the ones that teach you the big compassion or the big lessons of forgiveness so you can't even tell when you're in it you just know it hurts or it's painful or it's difficult but to know that you're all going to have all this anybody not have praise and blame and you but not have pleasure and pain you know I think you all have birth and death is coming you know it is let's get real about this and so how do you navigate and you navigate with the heart really and with that kind of wise understanding you you gave such beautiful voice to so thank you for that we'll do two more questions thank you thank you both for your time here hi hello oh there you are way back there in Iowa New York but yeah Iowa okay you are wherever thank you do you have a morning routine that you practice if you mentioned all the drawers in our attention I wake up and check my email now I'm addicted to a don't dopamine hit so just curious what your practice is is there any recommendations I don't have really much regular very much regular routine because I travel a lot and I'll teach beyond these intensive retreats or then I'll be doing other kinds of things so it varies a good deal when I can I like to sleep late you know they used to ring the bell at the monastery at 3:00 or 3:30 in the morning in the forest and it was a magic time to walk down the path and sit you know in the stillness of the forest and the moonlight in this jungle forest monastery but every time the bell rang a call caught it's too early you know so I don't have a particular routine but I you know because of what you say and I know this from others that for many people reading the news or checking email is a little bit toxic let's get real again about it and so it may not be what you want to take with your morning hour you know of tending and brushing your teeth and tending your body and maybe doing your yoga or meditation or taking a walk or tending your garden or your children maybe that's not the way that you want to wake up and people are very different that's a beautiful thing some people are morning people some people are evening people and so forth but I think in this circumstance and culture that we live in as Einstein talked about with that little quip that there's some way in which we actually need to pay attention to the rhythm of our own life which your question points to so beautifully so thank you and our final question for the evening hello thanks so much for sharing everything you guys have it's been incredibly insightful my question is something that I've noticed I guess it stems from a realization that there's really kind of two modalities that I'm always struggling with on a daily basis and delenn that to mow down two modalities it's like a one portion of life I'm trying to be this technician right I'm trying to be orderly and do things in the proper way and fit in and then I also have this artistic side to me and so I'm struggling back and forth between being artistic and being a technician and I seem to be doing the wrong one at the wrong time maybe you could talk or elaborate on knowing how to balance those two personalities if you will together well we live in a very divided society in not just politically divided what you talk about but in which we have our body taken care of if we go to the gym or exercise our work is at our workplace you know education is when you're in school spiritual things are a church or temple or mosque or something like that all these things are kind of separated and so it's not surprising to experience those separations in ourselves we have all of course these different capacities remember when dr. Martin Luther King said if a man or woman sweeps the streets for a living they should sweep the way Michelangelo painted the way Beethoven composed music the way Shakespeare wrote his poems and plays that there's a possibility of bringing a spirit of the sacred if you will into almost any activity and this is a beautiful thing to know that it's possible and if you know if we had a longer conversation I would say can you remember some moments when you were doing the technical part that you also felt that there was some sense of dance in it or music or if you were in your body you were in a flow you were in a can you remember those and if you can those are the seeds of something that can grow so that those pieces start to get woven together what's also true is that you know because we're in LA and half the waiters are also writing screenplays and you know trying to get their acting parts or their music part or whatever so I'm just playing with you because I don't know what your art is particularly but it's also not such a bad thing that we have to have a day job even a mundane day job I mean I say that I have really a beautiful job people are on their good behavior around me it's like cool you know what I get paid not very much for this tonight frankly but anyway I get paid with your with the pleasure being with you but um you know we have we have to do all of those things and to be able to do them not as oh I have to do this in order to do that but let me bring something some beautiful spirit this is really what we learned in the monastery that each thing that you did how you folded folded your robes or how you work with the food or how you encountered one another those very mundane things were also places that we could bring care and attention and it was a quite beautiful thing to do so all of this in some way is nothing that you've not heard before you know I don't think I've said anything tonight that you don't already know in your heart if anything this is just a kind of reminder it's like bedtime story so read that one again right it's something that you know and part of the reason that we come together I think my friend Annie Lamott the humorist says my mind is like a bad neighborhood I try not to go there alone but that it's not exactly the note I want to end on did I actually think we come together in love I think we come together to meet one another and to remember what's possible and to be reminded of that with one another so that when you walk out of here in the you know almost summer even it we are go back to see whoever you go back to see you tonight or tomorrow or something that there's a sense of presence and tenderness for that and for the world that you live in that you can plant beautiful seeds so thank you [Applause] you

Channel: LiveTalksLA

Views: 36,465

Rating: 4.7814727 out of 5

Keywords: Jack Kornfield, Dan Siegel, No Time Like the Present, Atria

Id: PllGY76nZvg

Length: 73min 57sec (4437 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2017