Jack Kornfield Interview | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)

at this altitude this episode is brought to you by four Sigma deck you might remember four sig Matic for their mushroom coffee which was created by those clever Finnish founders and when I first mentioned that coffee on this podcast the products sold out in less than a week it lights you up like a Christmas tree which can be really useful however recently I've been testing the opposite side of the spectrum a new product and that is their reishi mushroom elixir to help me end my day to get to sleep as you guys may know longtime listeners at least I struggled with insomnia for decades I have a largely fixed that but still shutting off my monkey brain has never been easy still isn't easy very often and I found reishi which have been fascinated by for a few years now has been very very effective and calming their old formula however for sig Maddox old formula included stevia and I like to avoid sweeteners all sweeteners for a host of reasons and I then just ping them and asked hey guys I 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well they are the number one cloud accounting software designed exclusively for self-employed professionals that's many of you and used by more than 10 million people you can send invoices track your time and get paid very very quickly which suits the needs of a lot of freelancers a lot of entrepreneurs and beyond you can take pictures of receipts you can link your credit card and debit cards so all the things you buy automatically appear in your fresh books in the right category so on and so forth makes taxes easy makes invoices easy makes your life easier and also in fact I'd recommend a PDF they didn't ask me to read this part by the way they put the other PDF a while back called breaking the time barrier subtitle how to unlock your true earning potential so you can search for breaking the time barrier a lot of people ask me how can I get a 4-hour workweek with a service business and the story in that ebook its PDF is the short answer it's really really good so I think you should also check that out so breaking the time error check it out but also why not test out fresh books claim your 30-day unrestricted free trial at fresh ebooks.com forward slash tim and enter tim ferriss two hours in two S's in the how did you hear about us section that sounds like we're gonna get very little tracking that's a lot of work but just go to fresh books calm forward-slash tim and try it out because it is a very good product and i think you will find it simplifies your life enjoy hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers people who are excellent if not the best at what they do in many many many different fields and that scratchiness is Tim Ferriss coming off of antibiotics because I had some little gremlins inside me that I brought back from the Amazon that's a separate story in any case my job deconstruct that many fields and this particular episode we have a wonderful guest Jack cornfield Alice Walker calls Jack quote one of the greatest spiritual teachers of our time and what Jack trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand India and Burma shortly thereafter becoming one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West he is taught meditation internationally since 1974 that's before I was even a glimmer and my papa's ISO it's been teaching for a very very long time and he has had a profound and direct impact directly on my life so I'm thrilled to finally have him on the podcast to share our shared history his incredible stories and the practical tactics and very detailed techniques that you can use and we dig into all of that and you can also say hi to him on the Internet at jack Kornfield on twitter check it out Jack's history just a little bit won't spend too much time on it Jack co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre Massachusetts with fellow meditation teachers Sharon Salzberg has also been on this podcast and Joseph Goldstein and later the Spirit Rock Center in Whitacre California which is where I did my first silent retreat and we talked about that he holds a PhD in clinical psychology which is important to me and comes into this conversation because he's a very very diverse toolkit for dealing with many different types of personal challenges issues questions and so on and is a father husband and activist his books have been translated into 20 languages and sold more than a million copies he is prolific his books include and I pulled some of you for your favorites a wise heart that's number one and lamp in the darkness a path with heart after the ecstasy the laundry one of my favorite book titled small time and his most recent book no time like the present subtitle finding freedom love and joy right where you are he is quite possibly the most purely compassionate human being I've ever interacted with and compassion isn't a word that I used very much but Jack is unique and I'm thrilled to give you a window into his story and his teachings without further ado please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with jack Kornfield Jack welcome to the show oh thank you Tim pleasure to reconnect I have wanted to have you on the show for some time now and you've had certainly a tremendous impact on my life both through your writing and through firsthand in-person interaction which I think we'll touch upon but first I wanted to ask you a complete non sequitur from that which is something that our mutual friend Adam Ghazali suggested I ask you about and Adam for people who don't know him is an incredible PhD MD neuroscientist based at UCSF and he suggested that I ask you about hang gliding and I have no idea why he suggested that but I'm gonna start there and if it doesn't go anywhere we can we can change direction but I figured we would just start with that and then we're gonna rewind the clock but why did he suggest I ask you about hang gliding well it started many years ago when I cross country with a friend who had a hang glider and we would stop periodically and go off different hills and it was fantastic and then I wanted to do paragliding and started to learn it now because everything is developed in paragliding is like you know is a lot more official you need a license which I don't have but one of my favorite things is to tandem paraglide and go off the top of places like Grindelwald in in switzerland where you can take the ski lift up to 9,000 feet and then jump off and float silently like you're a bird among the clouds the birds actually do come by sometimes it's like check out what's this big bird flying up here you can catch thermals and go way up above the glaciers and it's one of the most thrilling and delicious experiences that I know that's incredible see you you first experience that at what age and probably it might you know late 20s and did some and then sort of put it aside and then I was traveling and teaching in Europe and I saw a sign for paragliding and I said oh gosh I really want to do it and started and now each time I go where there's high mountains and paragliding that's one of my things that I love doing you know there's something about I've had most people have these dreams once in a while if you're lucky a dream of flying or maybe in your meditation you have this sense of not being limited to your body and and this is the closest thing that I know because it's absolutely silent and you're floating there it's quite fantastic and this is something you still do mm-hmm and hope to do it and I hope to do it next summer when I'm back in the Alps and how old are you know 70 to 72 a good man well we're gonna then go back a bit in chronology and ask about childhood I would love to hear you describe your childhood what were you like as a child what was your upbringing like well first thing to say is I remember when I got to Dartmouth College in 1963 and I called my mom from the payphone in the dorm sometime in that fall didn't call very often but you know how it is and I said mom I said guess what there are a lot of other really fucked-up families beside ours so that's where we where we where we start so there yeah I'd three three brothers and my father was a mixture of a tyrant and a really abusive person and a brilliant guy I was born on and on a Marine base in toward the end of World War two and they didn't send him overseas to do they put him in the medical part of the Marines because he tested so high on their tests that they you know okay we're going to use him for something so he was brilliant in certain ways he was a biophysicist who helped design some of the first artificial hearts and lungs worked on the space program but also did other kinds of weird stuff like work for the army biological weapons people not making biological weapons but trying to design things that were kind of computer biological interfaces all kinds of creative stuff but he was he was all he had mental problems and so we didn't know when the car pulled in whether we were gonna get dr. Jekyll or mr. hyde he would come in and you know either he could shout the abusive thrill my mother down the stairs rant chase after us try to hit us whatever or we'd get this interesting creative person what we hardly ever had people come over when he was around during the daytime is the way we would because you never knew what you would get and so um our family life in my family life in some way was also there were great parts of it because I had my brothers and we were like our own gang we moved all the time but we had each other and because he was wacky as well as smart my father either quit or got fired every year or two and then we would go from one place to another I went to I don't know eight schools by the time I finished high school um so my childhood partly was there were the happy things of Raphael being a boy with with three other boys and adventures and then in the basement my father had all kinds of scientific equipment he had all this stuff from World War two this huge radio from a battleship that you could tune into a thousand different you know shortwave stations around the world um and projects he was trying to design stuff and so we learned from him you could pretty much take or design or do anything in the physical world and at the same time I felt like my whole childhood was also how to say it colored with the fear of his violence and his unpredictability so and I became kind of a peacemaker in the family we all sort of had our roles and now I do it as a profession right trying to kind of make it a little smoother between my parents so they'd kill each other and each of my brothers had their own strategy my twin brother who was a lot bigger and much more outgoing played football which I certainly didn't I was skinnier and you know I was in the orchestra and he was the football player but anyway I remember when he first got in a fistfight with my dad because my father was abusing our mom and my twin brother had been as young men sometimes - there's probably 13 14 and he grew pretty big and he was looking in the mirror you know making muscles in the mirror to see how strong he'd become anyway he just you know got into a fistfight with my father and I was both thrilled and terrified and but it worked in some way because of the abuse settled down quite a lot after that so that was his this strategy was just to get angry and then later kind of to go his own way somewhat more all the worlds all have been very close as brothers so there was that at the same time there was a lot of interest intellectual interest so we read and learned about all kinds of things both my parents were really interested in the world around us and so it was sort of this mixed thing of the you know the gift of being together with my brothers and a mom who was basically pretty nurturing although she kept trying to leave the him and never got it together I think it was too scary and the 50s to have four boys you know no job and so we were in the middle of this and the kind of healing that it took it took a long time to do the inner healing work from the pain of my family and I remember when I became a Buddhist monk and I was sitting these first years with my teacher ajahn Chah in the forest monasteries of Thailand on the border of Thailand and Laos and I've been sitting quietly and then some of these memories or energy would come or I remember one monk who had a hot near mind and the forest did something that annoyed me and I just got it raged inside and and I said and I went to the teacher and I said you know I'm really getting angry here and he smiled he said yeah where do you think that comes from or something like that and I said well I don't know I said I thought it was a peaceful guy who was never gonna be like my father I won't you know I'll be peaceful but it turned out I just stuffed all that stuff and so when I told it a teacher about he said good should go back in your Hut it's the hot season you get a little tin roof and close the doors and windows and put all your robes on and if you're gonna be angry do it right sit in the middle of that you know and sit in the middle of the fire and don't be so afraid of it because you're afraid of it you're just kind of keep stuffing it and on the other hand or if you're afraid of it it'll just explode there's another way to be with it and so that was the beginning of some healing just to realize that I could actually tolerate the suffering and the energy that was in my still carried from trauma in my body and heart so we're gonna absolutely come back to a jenshaw because I have many questions on that chapter in your life but just just so that I can create the proper visual in my own head so you sat there in your Hut in the sweltering heat with all of your robes on where were you angry in silence were you yelling well what I was I was pretty much angry in silence and that's an interesting question yeah I you know in the monastery the culture was not was not much that you would yell you could go somewhere about the forest and yell but it was it wasn't decorous or something people what the hell's wrong with that monk so mostly I was sitting in silence and then scenes would come and I would realize well you know I thought I was peaceful I carry every in every cell of my body I also carry both the pain and anger of my childhood and my father and just that the anger that comes with being a human being a human incarnation and I was never gonna have that but of course there was and it lasted you know this was I had days of and actually much longer weeks or months of waves of this coming and learning how to you know be present for it and not get overwhelmed by it so I want to backtrack and then connect those dots so between childhood and ending up in Thailand you mentioned Dartmouth earlier and from what I've read at least you were initially pre-med and then ended up Asian Studies could you describe that experience in Dartmouth or how you went from pre-med to Asian Studies well you know we all get turned in these mysterious ways in our life we think we're going one direction and then something happens unexpectedly and a gateway opens so I was coming from an organic chemistry class to the class that I'd signed up for out of interest on Asian Studies or Asian philosophy or something and it was an old professor I'm doctor wing Syd Chan who had come up from Harvard he was kind of emeritus there and he even sat cross-legged sometimes you know on the front of the room and would talk about Lao Tzu and Taoism and they talked about Buddhist teachings and how the Buddha taught suffering and its causes in its end and that really all of a sudden I sat out first and there's an end to suffering there's a way to do and he said oh there's all these teachings and practices where you can transform your heart and mind and I became thrilled about it and realized that whatever impulse I had to go to medical school probably part of it came from wanting to heal myself and so I started to take more and more courses and then it was it was the 60s and I became a card-carrying hippy card-carrying LSD taking hippy as a matter of fact and at the end of in yeah when I was getting ready to graduate there was still the draft and I thought well I definitely don't want to go over and kill people in a war that I that I've been protesting at protesting against so I decided to go into the Peace Corps instead and asked them to send me to a Buddhist country where maybe I could find it one of those old Zen masters that you read about and got assigned to Thailand and when I got there people you could kind of request where you went they and and I said send me in the most remote place you can I wanted an adventure but I also wanted to kind of reading all those old Zen stories I wanted to see if that that still existed so you know and there were little detours like being in haight-ashbury in the summer of love and things like that that definitely they changed my life also in a very deep way because for at least for a time there was a window when people were just giving things away there was such a sense that the world could be transformed some of it as we know very very naive but in the other hand it also felt like a greater sense of brotherhood and sisterhood than I had ever known except with my own brothers who I loved a lot and we've done a lot of things together and I started to feel like there are other ways for me and for the world to be and live and that was that was also very wonderful you mentioned you mentioned a three-letter acronym that we're probably not going to spend too much time on but I you and I you and I have had quite a number of conversations where I've wanted to ask you about some of your experiences with psychedelics including LSD but we've never really gotten into it so I figured why not do it in front of a few million people the the LSD at that point your experiences with that did that inform your decisions at all to then go into the Peace Corps and end up in a busy area it did and I've written a little bit about it in in a couple of different of my books chapters in books I've written because then most of Buddhist teachers and Hindu teachers of my generation also started psychedelics you know myself and almost all my colleagues you know in the spiritual industry that I'm in that was a beginning and for me it showed an incredible possibility that all is created out of consciousness and the possibilities of inner freedom and or basically I was able at the at the best of it to see my body and my personality and my history and realized that that's not who I am to become much more the conscious witness of it all to see yes birth and death and to go through those kind of death rebirth experiences that can happen at times in a deep session with LSD or death of ego or sense of self or removing and realizing wow there's a freedom and a life force that's what we're made of and that profoundly influenced my interest in spirituality and also interest in what the world can be now just a few days ago I was on Maui with my beloved wife Trudy and we were visiting spending time with Ram Dass who for listeners that don't know was the author of this bestseller in the 60s called be here now and it's now he's 86 and in a wheelchair but Ram Dass who had been at Harvard University and was one of the early explorers of LSD before he went to India and became a spiritual teacher in the living room while we were there two days ago Roland Fisher who is one of the senior professors in psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University Medical School Oh rollin rollin rollin rollin Griffiths rather than Roland excuse me Roland Griffiths and Roland laid out all the research that's happening now on the psilocybin that he's been doing and its success for people terminal cancer patients all losing a great deal of their the fears that they had working with people with severe depression and it was a beautiful session because you could hear how these sacred substances and these mind-altering substances when they're used in the right context can really transform human beings and NYU Johns Hopkins there's a whole series of studies that are happening now that are finally bringing it back into the mainstream I'd love to underscore just a few things that you mentioned number one Ramdas for those people who want to do additional reading formerly known as Richard Alpert if I'm getting that right yeah also has a fascinating story coming full circle with psychedelic research beginning I guess at Harvard in some respects so it makes sense to me why Rowland's research would be mo so meaningful to him and a number of other just just quick comments for people number one is if you're interested in in looking into these soul címon which is considered the active psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere I've actually been involved with crowdfunding and funding myself some of the research related to treatment resistant depression at Johns Hopkins with roland griffiths as the senior investigator and I'll be posting some updates to that but fascinating work looking at everything from and this is also as you mentioned NYU and at other very well-regarded universities alcohol addiction nicotine / tobacco addiction as you mentioned end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients the implications are are really profound and the data very very promising and I wanted to also mention to folks who are perhaps saying to themselves well I'm not interested in taking psychedelics myself that there are people I know good friends of mine who do not currently use psychedelics but had the ego dissolving experience of a non ordinary reality through psychedelics that then led them to become or contributed to them becoming very very diligent meditators us and Sam Harris who's a PhD in neuroscience and thought of are very well known as in an atheist or you know one of the Four Horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse along with Richard Dawkins and others is a very close friend and extremely diligent meditator he's written about how his psychedelic experiences which were in some respects very some of them uncontrolled and you really have a coin flip there it's in terms of which direction you can go but showed him possibilities within his own mind that then led to a very very I'm not gonna call it devout although I should just about her practice so I don't want to take us too far off the rails but you go to Southeast Asia well I want to say one more function where we move on because we are talking about this it turns out for those who are listening that set and setting an intention are extremely important if one uses these you know psychedelics like psilocybin or something to set the intention to learn to open to have a quiet it's not not as a party experience absolutely makes you know brings your attention inward and then all the kind of discoveries become right in front of your right in front of you but the other thing is that whether it's right for somebody to use psychedelics or to use meditation these are all invitations to step back and see the mystery of your life because we tend to live in the you know daily minutiae and checking off our list of tasks that we have to do in completing them work or you know or eating or all the kind of things that make up a day and we go onto automatic and whether it's meditation and difference or other spiritual disciplines or for some people it also can just be that they have what in Greek is called a kata Bassam below you know somebody close to them gets cancer or or is dying or they have some accident or something and all of a sudden you step back near like whoa life is uncertain the way I've been taking it it's not just checking off the list this is a mystery human incarnation and what am I going to do with it and wow look at this how did I get in this body look at plants and trees and and language the air coming out of your mouth you shape the different ways and it vibrates a little drum in the ear of someone else and I can say Golden Gate Bridge and they can envision it and you start to realize that all of it is alive and made of consciousness and then the whole sense of who you are and what matters begins to shift and you start to realize that life is not just getting through the hoops but it actually also can be a celebration of the heart of something that you have to bring to the world that you come out of life and my friend melanoma so may who's a west african shaman and medicine man also two PhDs a kind of remarkable guy he says with the dog rock people in West Africa that he's from that they say that every child comes into the world with a certain cargo as their metaphor like the cargo ships that ply the rivers of West Africa and that that they're given gifts to bring into the world and that we have gifts to bring to this mystery which include opening to it and as we do love grows connection grows and and a whole different way of being in the world happens that we need so much at this time so that's a little interlude there before we move on to then that your next question I welcome as many interludes as you would like to interject and I wanted to just ask you to say one more time that it was I believe Greek word for cotton baths which means a blow it's like something comes and it just sets your life spinning in an entirely different direction right like a catalyzing event and exactly I've had a few of those recently that I'd like to selfishly ask you about later but so I can bookmark just so I can bookmark this name Stanislav Grof if I'm saying that usually that's correct when just when did you meet him roughly what age or what date just so I can come back to it because this is another thing at meaning to ask you about for a long time and get into but I haven't had the chance so I had there's two things to say when I came back from the monastery and now it's you know I guess the year that I connect with Stan was maybe 1973 I made two really important connections I came back and start a psychology and graduate school um it was in Boston and first really important connection happened when I went to a meeting of the Massachusetts Psychological Association and there was this guy who looked like he he didn't look just like the straight psychologists and it turned out he'd just come back from India not long before name Dan Goleman who was it who was a graduate student at Harvard and he projected on the screen this Tibetan wheel of birth and death that you see in the Tibetan Tonka's that that normally would be taken as some kind of primitive icon iconic you know symbol and he said no no this is a psychological diagram the Buddha was actually more than anything else he was a scientist of the mind and a profound psychologist and here is how craving turns into contentment and here's how aggression can be transformed into powerful energy to heal yourself and others and he was going through this diagram and I went and I talked to him and he said oh you you come back from monastery you've got to come over and so he took me to David McClellan who had been the chairman of the social science and psychology department at Harvard at that time the one who hired Tim Leary and ROM das and then later had to fire them for their LSD work and his house he and his wife Mary were Quakers his home was a kind of soiree where Ram Dass and Tibetan Lamas like chögyam trungpa and I think Krishnamurti and various spiritual figures would come people were going to Indian coming back and and I connected with this whole group of folks who have now been friends for forty five years Richie Davidson was another that I met there who's now one of the preeminent neuroscientists in the world on studying contemplatively science and effective emotional neuroscience it was a whole collective of people Dan Goleman who wrote emotional intelligence that sold ten million copies and many others and then I got a job working for a nestled in liked growth center in Boston at that time because I was excited at all the new gestalt bioenergetics what are the things that are transformative here and they asked me to help set up programs and I thought well who do I want to who do I want to meet so I set up a program with John Lilly and I set up a program with stan grof who was still at Johns Hopkins and married at that time just married to Joan Halifax Joan Groff and we became friends and so we have Stan and I have now worked together for forty five years I went out to join him at Esalen for many many years spending many months together helping during his development of the holotropic breathwork that says this powerful breath transformation and he has been a partner in a heart trend for exploration and we've traveled where we've taught in Russia and in you know places in Europe and various places around the world so this is this is definitely a path that we're gonna come down and dig further into but I I'm gonna steer us to a John job because I want to know how do you land with the Peace Corps and ever more remote well what most people would consider a remote corner of the world and end up finding a living master how does that how does that actually happen I don't know I but I assume you didn't speak Thai at the time I did actually just lost the Peace Corps and then I had to learn Lao I did because the Peace Corps at that time it was a very early in the Peace Corps had really good language training they borrowed it from the Monterey Language Institute so you know initially I didn't speak that well but because I'd also studied Chinese at Dartmouth listen it came more easily and I was there working in these in the health rural health department on tropical medicine teams mostly malaria but also typhoid and the teams going out to different villages and taking drawing blood and giving out medicine and things like that and then somebody said there's a there's a Western monk in this province we heard about do you want to me too I said of course I do so I I went to this little mount and and walked up 2,000 steps to the old Cambodian temple ruined at the top and there was this very interesting guy who had just finished a couple years before the first Peace Corps I think in Borneo and then got interested in Buddhism and common ordained as a monk and I talked with him he's now his name da Jun su motto is his monks name because he's still a monk and he became quite famous in Thailand and then became the abbot of a temple in in England and I became friends with him and he said oh I found I found a really fine teacher he said you know a lot of them they kind of take you you're a westerner and they treat you special he said this guy doesn't treat you any differently than anyone else he just wants you to do that work you know and learn the learned learned the deepest way you can and he's in this forest jungle and I said I'm going there so having heard that I went and I visited ajahn Chah and he was a little bit like the Dalai Lama he was funny and wise and very warm-hearted but also very strict and very demanding but he did it in this loving way and I thought okay this is the real deal this guy looks like like what I was reading about in all those end stories I've read that he said to you and I'd love for you to tell us when he said this to you I hope you're not afraid to suffer if that's true when did he say that in why did he say then he so I visited him a number of times and told him I was going to become a monk and then I ordained in the village where I was living in the Peace Corps people wanted me to do that it was a beautiful ritual and then after some days made my way down to his temple and he said that's that was his opening gambit I'm walking in into the gate and I see him I bow as I'm here and he looks at me you know kind of leans back a little little skeptical if he said all right I hope you're not afraid to suffer welcome and it was it was a it was like you know you can come here just to kind of do some interesting cool anthropological experiment or something like that if you're gonna do it we're gonna put you through the training um and and and he did but he you know there was like this little smile as he said it like okay you are you up for it all right dude come on in well and what did what did the training can consist of what were what were some of the first things that you had to do and then what what was this suffering that he alluded to what were some exams well maybe some examples okay so of course the first training was just how to walk around and not have my robe you know fall on the ground and embarrass me and every one of those they come so they all loved it oh yeah right look at the Westerner he said he can't even chew gum and wear his robes right or whatever so part of it was just young familiarity of it at all truly and otherwise right um there were the there were the two kinds of suffering the big suffering of course was being alone with my own mind I mean there you go you know having to do hours of meditation when I didn't know what the hell I was doing and then as I talked about with anger or fear or confusion or you know all those kind of states learning to deal in a very conscious and mindful way and then more importantly in a compassionate way in a kind and loving way with all the energies that make up my humanity and argue Manatee and that means when you sit and you get quiet anything unfinished in your heart will also come up all the unfinished business so you know relationships that I'd had that ended badly in college or or certainly stuff from my childhood and family dreams that I carried things fulfilled and not all that comes up it's um yeah my friend Annie Lamott humorist and writer says my mind is like a bad neighborhood I try not to go there alone and there's some way in which in community sitting together with others in meditation and then sitting in my heart it was really facing myself and my full humanity that was that that was probably the most difficult thing because then you get insanely bordure insanely restless or and then how do you deal with all those energies normally when we're Restless or bored you know what do we do we you know open the refrigerator or you know go online or something because we can't be with our own loneliness or our own fear so it was the inner and then there's outer ones more than the outer one yeah the outhouses ones were things like hmm getting up the the bell would ring at 3:30 in the morning and I'm not an early riser by nature I got oh god here we go and we walk through it was actually very beautiful then we'd walk through the forest at night either by moonlight or sometimes you'd have a tiny little flashlight er and in one of the forest monasteries where there were a lot of cobras we'd have a little stick and you tap the path so that the snakes would know you work feel you coming and move out of the way you wouldn't step on them and then we would sit and silently for a couple of hours and then do an hour of chanting on a hard stone floor behind you so everybody else seemed comfortable and my body was killing me and then at least once a week we would sit up all night with the teacher and he would sit there comfortably meditating maybe talking with another colleague that it would come and we'd just be sitting and meditating and he would kind of peek over us like how are you doing I go god it's been four more hours whenever you when is he gonna let us go back to sleep and he didn't you know so sitting up all night it got very cold in the cold season and it got insanely hot in the hot season and somehow learning to live extremely simply with a set of sandals and a set of robes and an alms bowl and then you would eat what you got offered in the village and we would share it in that monastery with others around us and sometimes you'd get nice food and a lot of times in the dry season you get really really skimpy food and there wasn't that much to eat and so picture a day where you get up at 3:30 in the morning you know you sit for a couple of hours in meditation and do long than an hour long chanting on a stone floor then it's getting dawn and you walk barefoot you know three miles five miles ten miles with a almsbowl and a handful of other monks and get your food and come back whenever you've been offered and that's the food for the day and then you go back to your meditation or to the work of the monastery of sewing robes or drawing water from the well and it's you know muggy and 105 degrees hot season and then you go back and you join in the community for more meditation and then the teacher smiles and say how are you doing you know and then other kinds of practices for example we had a charnel ground there and so what grad a charnel ground which is where a cremation ground where people bodies would be burned and so on occasion would go to a cremation and then sit up all night and contemplate death and you know look at the body and then watch as it burned and then do these meditations where you would reflect on well this is going to happen to the body that you're inhabiting as well who do you think you are do you think you're this physical body made of you know hamburgers or lettuce or whatever you happen to eat is that your are you hamburgers and lettuce you know or or are you your feelings or you your thoughts who are you really born into this body like Cowen's yeah so anyways and the ALMS ball so you would be did you eat whatever you gathered in one meal was it spread throughout the well one meal you eat one meal a day which makes you very easy to makes your life easy and at the same that monastery things were shared there was other monasteries I stayed in where you would just eat what was put in your own bowl and you didn't have to eat everything that was given to you there were some things that were you know in the dry poor season there would be curries that were too hot for me to eat because they used the chillies to kind of preserve the preserve preserve the food but you know when when it was a really poor village or something you know they would have to make curries out of field mice or filled with bat or bats or you know I remember eating there was a curry that was made out of basically the grasshoppers that had come spread through and there was this whole big you know insect wave of insects that were kind of eating the crops and they've been collected them all and made a career out of it so you know okay this is this is what you get for your food today new I think I might take Supper's over the over the bats but yeah when it's really highly spiced you can't tell what it's mystery that's we all had mystery meeting middle school anyway this was like mystery meat on steroids exotic mystery mean what was the what was the longest period of time that you spent in silence during that time in Thailand well then I went to a Burmese monastery because I wanted to do this very intense meditative training and I spent about 500 days so unless less than a year and a half in silence the with the exception that I would talk to the teacher mm-hmm every couple days I'd have a little 10-minute conversation about what was happening my meditation and the rest I was just sitting and walking 18 hours a day when I could or or so sleeping a little bit and I remember at one point it was relatively early on I'd been sitting and walking and and pushing it as young men do you know I'm gonna get enlightened all of that not moving sitting with a lot of pain which is also part of what happened at at the forest monastery seeing on a stone floor for hours and without moving really had to learn how to deal with your own physical pain and I was exhausted from sitting and walking in my little hot that I had for that long retreat and after a couple months I thought I'm really tired I did I got a lie down but then I thought well but I'm not gonna nap for very long because I'm I'm on my way to enlightenment whatever I'm gonna do this right so I said all right I'll lie down on the wooden floor rather than on the little mat that I had and that way I won't sleep sit long and I'm lying there and then I wake up and I get up and I walk very slowly doing this mindful slow walking to the end of the hut and look out the window toward where some of the other monks and the teachers lived some some way down some way down through the trees [Music] and then I turn around and I start walking the other direction in this this meditation hut that I had then you could walk probably it was maybe 15 18 feet long it was long and narrow and I see this body lying on the floor and all of a sudden I go oh that's me and then I realized that I'm having out of the body experience and what had happened is that I was so intent I'm not gonna sleep long I'll get up very soon and that intention was really strong but my body didn't want to get up so I got up but it was it wasn't in my body and I walk very slowly and I appeared down at my body and I turned around and walked the other or walked back and then the second time I walked Becca I got closer and that I fell into my body and I woke up I said oh wow that's interesting but what I saw out the window wasn't just like a dream because I was watching you know my teacher and talking to these other monks and that I got up again and that's exactly what was happening and that was the first of a series of all kinds of very interesting experiences that happen and those the what would other examples of those types of unusual experiences be and did was it your time in Burma that found you experiencing these for the first time well first of all the first experiences even though I had experimented with meditation back in in Union College and so forth were experiences again that came through psychedelics and so I was familiar with all kinds of weird and and powerful and and mysterious or mystical kind of experiences but they but there's something about learning how to navigate it without taking a substance and learning that your own consciousness is the field that you can that you can learn to navigate first all the personality and emotions and history and so forth but then you start to realize that you're bigger than that that who you are is just your thoughts and feelings in your mind and so whether it's out-of-body experience or the experience of vastness of becoming the sky within which everything arises and passes or the experience of profound silence or of the void where you enter enter a stillness before experience even arises or the experience of luminosity where where my body would dissolve into light their time sitting as you get concentrated in Samadhi or concentration builds that your whole body and mind open up and you know first you get the elements your body can feel heavy like a stone the earth element or can fuel so light that you have to peak your open your eyes and make sure you're not floating because it feels like you're floating in the air or it can be filled with fire and you feel like you're in the middle of the raging fire or it can get icy cold you know or all kinds of vibrations and Kundalini energies and chakras start to open and sometimes it's present sometimes it's not you know as deep energies start to move through your body they also kind of push open the places that are held close so that when your heart starts to open in deep meditation sometimes it feels like you're having a heart attack that's physically painful because all the all the things that you've held around your heart to protect yourself start to loosen or when the energy hits your throat and it starts to open weird sounds come out you know and then you get to visions that come in that yeah you know brow chakra you start to see all kinds of colors and visions and hear things all possibilities of the play of consciousness can start to open after both period of silence but also really deeply training attention and concentration so these experiences just to put them in or at least part of what you said in context for people listening I there there are a number of things you mentioned but one in particular that in the chest that I experienced in the 10-day retreat done it spirit rock which which for which you are one of the the instructors of the lead instructor and I it was an incredibly powerful experience and listening to your description of some of the feelings it makes me want to go to the jungle and spend time doing this type of training however the ten-day retreat as you know from firsthand observation and interacting with me was incredibly difficult for me and terrifying it a number of points where I felt like I had crossed a boundary into maybe even madness where I was fearful I wouldn't be able to return from and so I'm curious to know during that period of time in Thailand and Burma could be afterwards as well but when you were in the in the jungle and doing this very intense work were there any particular points when you wanted to quit to go to go home absolutely I mean I remember I I got what I think was malaria I'm a really high fever and I was sick as a dog and I'm lying in the bottom of my little Hut there and high fever and shivering and ajahn Chah came to visit me and in the Lao language and he was he was also funny in quite blunt and the Lao language is a very straightforward kind of that sentence structures are fairly simple so he looked at me and he said sick huh and I said yeah and he said hurts all over huh I said it hurt us he said hot and cold yeah he said you know makes you afraid I not he said makes you want to go home and see your mother doesn't it and I'm not think there and then he looked at me and he said you know this is the jungle fever this is malaria we've all had it but now there's some good medicine I'll send the medicine monk over and in a couple days you'll be fine and then he looked at me and he said you can do this you know you can do this so I mean that was an example of why me go home what am i doing what kept what kept you going I mean I don't to interrupt it's like what kept you going I'm imagining 500 days of silence I could barely handle 10 days you know Tim I mean what's kept you going what keeps any of us going about things that we care about I had somehow I don't know kind of wacky but I think also important kind of passion to say I want to understand or I you know I've started down this road and I want to see where it goes and I think all of us find at a certain point in our life that there or if we're lucky that something really matters and you've done it in your work and your travel you want to explore what your human capacity is and I read read these old Zen stories and as I said I want to see if this is true I want to find out and then as I started things started to happen like that out of the body experience and rapture and changes in and openings and I realized there's really something to learn here but there are a couple of the things that that I want to add to this one of them that's the most important is that it turns out that it wasn't and it isn't so much about the actual experiences so ajahn Chah my teacher talked about how in his own training for the first eight years in the jungle he had been a very ardent meditator and had all kinds of insights and dissolving and samadhi and john experiences all kinds of somebody is a weak in some bodies yeah or sauna how would you try found some bodies it has a lot of meanings as a word but it it can mean profound states of concentration in which the mind is awls into light or into joy or bliss or becomes absorbed with anyone of all kinds of states so he went to the most famous teacher of that time another odd John Donne gentleman and told about all these experiences in the the master looked back into and said ha you missed the point these are just experiences you know it's like gone to the movies and you have a roommate to comedy and you war movie of a documentary you know and you have you know a Disney movie he said they're just movies on the screen some pleasant some unpleasant the only question is to whom do they happen turn your attention back and ask look to see who is the witness of these what is the consciousness that is knowing these ever-changing experiences this is where your liberation will come he said become his language if I translated is the one who knows become the knowing rather than the experiences and then you can tolerate anything and you can respond with love and understanding because you rest in the timeless consciousness which is your true nature so part of what I also learned in meditation and teach is that it's not so much about the experiences oh I want to have this or that experience but it's this profound turning back to ask Who am I what is this consciousness itself and that was born into this body that will leave it we can talk about death at some point if you want what is this mysterious consciousness itself so there is that and then that I also had the opportunity of being with a few other teachers and one of my the one of the people that I was very close to and inspired me profoundly was a Cambodian monk named Maha goes Ananda who was the Gandhi of Cambodia and when I met him we were living and training together in a forest monastery in Thailand and it was during the time the Khmer Rouge came to power and and eventually killed two million Cambodians in a kind of genocide and he was he survived because he wasn't in country but all 19 of his family members were killed his temple burned you know all the all the Buddhas texts and so forth were destroyed and when he was able to he went to the refugee camps refugees were pouring out of Cambodia by the hundreds of thousands and he went to the refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Cambodia I was able to go with him and at a certain point and he decided to open a temple in the middle of one of the biggest refugee camps here's fifty or a hundred thousand people these tiny little bamboo huts and got the mission from the UN HCR High Commissioner of refugees and built a platform with a little roof over it and put an altar with the traditional Cambodian Buddha on it and so forth but it was a camp with the Khmer Rouge underground lots of them and so they put the word out that if anyone went to be with this monk when they got out of the camp back to Cambodia they would all be shot so we wondered who would if anyone would come and went through the camp the day the opening day with a big kind of temple Gong ringing it and twenty-five thousand people poured into the central square around this little temple my god and he Lagos Ananda sat there and he was a scholar he spoke 15 languages and he was a you know extremely kind-hearted human being who had suffered enormous Lee and had transformed it into the kind of compassion that we think of with the Dalai Lama or something like that in fact they became friends and goes Ananda became the head of all in Cambodian boozin but there he was at this point sitting looking out at 25,000 people who had suffered immense traumas and you could see there was a grandmother and the only two surviving grandchildren that she had or an uncle in one nice and their faces were the faces of trauma and of survivors and I thought all right what is he gonna say to them and he sat very quietly for a long time just in their presence and then he put his hands together in this kind of modest way and began to chant in the microphone yet it sound system in Cambodian and in Sanskrit or Pali the Buddhist language one of the first verses from the Buddhist texts that goes hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed this is the ancient and eternal law and he chanted it over and over in Cambodian and in Sanskrit Pali and pretty soon the chant was picked up and in a little while 25,000 people were chanting this verse with him and I looked out and they were weeping many of them because they hadn't heard their sacred chants for years but also because he was offering them a truth that was even bigger than their sorrows that hatred never ends by hatred but by love alone is healed this is the ancient and eternal law and they were sitting in the middle of the the the healing energy of the Dharma of the teachings of the heart that can liberate us later on goes Ananda who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times spent 15 years walking through the killing fields and the you know mined areas and so forth leading people on foot back to their village and he said to the refugees you can't go back in a bus or the back of a truck or something like that you have to reclaim your land with love and so he would lead a thousand people and he'd be in the front with a bell and a gong and a few other monks and the whole way back they would be chanting the chance of loving-kindness so that by the time they got to their village whatever had been destroyed there was the sense that they were reclaiming not just the land but they were reclaiming their own hearts that's a beautiful really beautiful story and it it prompts me to ask a question that I struggle with answering myself and it's also a question many of my friends have asked themselves and I'll take a stab at it how do you decide when to do deep inner work and take an extended period to do that versus being in the world and trying to impact others in the world and to just provide a little bit of background on that I have friends who are building businesses or building careers of some type or families and I at this point do not have wife kids or company to build at least with a large organization and I've come back from various experiments so journeys experiences over weeks or months and shared these with them and they've they've expressed this longing this deep yearning to do something similar and then they ask this question like how do i how do i best decide if and when to do the deep extended work versus being in the world and i know it might be a false dichotomy you might not have to choose but I'll talk a little bit more just just to fill the space but the I had this experience personally not long ago when I was in South America and had someone telling me in second Spanish which was not their native language this is an indigenous tribe but this Apple this mayor effectively who worked a lot with different plant medicines and he said that he recommended one 15-month diet very very strict 15 month period with many different restrictions no sex no alcohol no pork etc and to develop certain capacities and to practice in effect I mean at certain types of meditative practices so I struggle with this myself as well how do you how do you suggest someone think through so did you give up sex and pork I've done it for short periods at a time I'm not a year and a half I've done it for weeks at a time but not for 15 months but what appealed to me about that definitely not the lack of sex in pork I like both of those things it was he said that's something you only have to do once in your life and it opens doors and creates opportunities that are difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise so of course that's very tantalizing but 15 months is a really really long time to opt out of everything else and I'm not saying it has to be 15 months for some people as you know setting aside even 10 days to do a silent retreat is hard and I know there are things that they can do on an ongoing basis like morning meditation and so on but for those who are really drawn to this extended deeper work how do you think about and that that's why I go sananda brought it up for me she'd spent so much time outside of his country and then went back and was really on the on the ground doing work with locals how do you think about that or suggest someone think about it first my answer is yes you know because all of the things that you say are true that yes there you know most cultures encourage at some point human beings most wise cultures you can beings to step out of their ordinary roles and their ordinary routine whether you go to the mountains or the ocean you know or a temple or a change how you're living so that you can open up to the mystery and so that you also can open up to love because what I saw with my teachers and ghosts Ananda was wild logic cha another is that they were able to love no matter what it was really because they they inhabited consciousness in a very different way than just a small sense of self there was something much a possibility that we could live with forgiveness and love and be really effective in the world at the same time so they're not separate and that's sort of what your question is how do we live in the world and at the same time you know what trainings and how do we connect with something deeper and part of it is just intuitive you you know Tim you knew more you know or young children and so forth it's not the time to go on a long retreat your kids are your practice and in fact you can't get a Zen master who's going to be more demanding than you know an infant with colic right were you or you know or a teenage you know certainty it's just where you but with the young ones you know your Zen master might say you've got to get up early in the morning and you know once in a while you might roll over the kid is crying and sick you have to get up your family needs tending and that you know if you're even vaguely a responsible and caring parent as you that becomes your practice and if you think well if only I could be in the great Zen temple of Kyoto or an ashram in India or down in the Amazon with Tim you know taking ayahuasca or whatever the slant medicine they give you know your kid this can be like ayahuasca on steroids okay you wanna you want to face yourself and your own limitations and your own you know you want to look at the the small sense of self and find out how to live with it with a freer and bigger spirit here we've just hired someone to live with you and train you full-time so it's really you know and that's an important thing but but what makes it work is that you have that intention not just to soldier through it but to say let this be a place where I awaken graciousness and inner sense of freedom and peace as things come and go where I awaken the possibility of presence in pleasure and pain and joy it's our own gain and loss and all the changes that I find a an inviolable or a timeless place of becoming the loving witness of it all becoming the loving awareness that says yeah now I'm having a family experience and this is the place to find freedom because freedom is not in the Himalayas or in the Amazon the only place it's found is in your own heart exactly where you are and that's what goes on on to Todd and wonder Odadjian cha that's really what they wanted to communicate now that being said if you have an opportunity and you're drawn to it like somebody you might do you know Jack Dorsey yeah I do know Jack Young so Jack just did his first ten day meditation real good for him and he tweeted about I wouldn't say it otherwise but he tweeted about it and it was you know one of the top transformative experiences of his life and it's not to say 10-day retreats or the be-all and end-all they are they're very powerful and compelling but you even if you have a company or even if you have a family there might be a period of a week or some days where you can in fact get away and step out of those roles and turn inward and that can be tremendously valuable so I think both are important you just have to listen what that when the time is right so there are so many things that this this brings up the first though is just a housekeeping for people who may not recognize the name Jack Dorsey that's Jack at Jack I believe it is on Twitter of you might add then wonder how did he get that user handle well I use is one of the people behind Twitter so he is of Twitter and square Fame among many others fascinating fascinating guy so people can check him out the the comment on the infant being the full-time trainer working with you 24/7 reminded me also since you mentioned Ram Dass are clear of a quote of his that I like and I'm gonna paraphrase I'm sure but if you think you're enlightened go spend a week with your family which i think is a fantastic one and that's part of the reason and in you know some of the backstory but we all have I would imagine we all have tough things that happen to us experienced traumatic experiences as children have a lot of triggers related to family members typically and for me the force to break takes a number of different forms but that includes a trip every six months an extended trip of two to four weeks with my parents and my brother when he can make it so that's only after being introduced to meditation something that I would even consider as a practice and the the last point I'll mention just out of my personal experience is that a there's a piece of paper I have in my wallet and I've had in my wallet for a few years now it's getting a bit worn down it's a piece of construction paper and an ex-girlfriend gave it to me who who knew me very well and it says the task that hinders your task is your task that's a good reminder for me I wanted to ask you two questions that are personally important but but also may apply to other people the first is the question that I believe you mentioned ajahn Chah perhaps others have indicated is the question versus the the experiences or movies of these say out-of-body experiences and so on to whom do they happen right to whom do they happen is this a KO on like what is the sound of one hand clapping where there isn't really an answer your are you're expected to arrive at is it is the value in contemplating the question more than any answer yes both no yes but no yeah because it is it's a profound contemplation for us one of the great you know questions of human incarnation who are we how do we get into that how did you get into this body with the Wiggly things on the end of your limbs you know and those little bits of a clause that you have you know it's nails in a vestigial tail and a hole at one end into which you stuff dead plants and animals and glug them down through the tube I mean the whole incarnation thing is really pretty wild so who are we and then what are what how do we make meaning about what this is that this is a lifetime question and that way that it's a Coe on but in another way it also actually does have any answer and the answer of course has to be found by each person the answer to point toward it it's very clear that you're not just you're you know salad and vegetables and hamburger body and you're not just your emotions I hope because they're always changing and your thoughts good god I hope you're not your thoughts so you start to realize all right what is there then what is this self who am I in neuroscience you know there was a Time magazine issue on modern neuroscience where it said neuroscientists have searched throughout the brain over many decades now and come to the conclusion that they cannot find the self located anywhere in the neural mechanisms of the brain and that it simply does not exist but what does exist is the sense of self that's built out of a sense of identification with our thoughts and body and so forth it's all wise inappropriate we should be but we also know that it's not the end of the story and you know it from walking in the high mountains or listening to an extraordinary piece of music or making love or taking some some sacred medicine you know we're sitting at the bedside of someone when they die that mysterious moment when spirit leaves the body or when a child is born we have these moments where we open to mystery and realize that who we are is not just our personal history or our body and emotions that we become the consciousness itself the witnessing awareness that we are the loving awareness that was born into this body and that becomes actually a direct knowing a direct experience so there is a way in which we also can come home to ourselves and it brings a tremendous sense of freedom and well-being as all the movies of ever-changing life happen to us so that's why I said yes yes and no and both and a little aside thinking about you going back to your family as a practice and twice a year as your doing I just want to remind you and the listeners that Buddha and Jesus both had a hard time when they went back to their families so don't think that you know there's something wrong with you this part it's that's why they call it nuclear family I think the there's another I guess it's a word more than a question that I'd love to ask you to define and that is compassion or compassionate when you use that word or those words what what do you mean exactly or what would you like it to mean for people I would like to distinguish compassion from empathy and I'll use a simple illustration if you're on the playground and you see a kid being bullied and you feel oh that must feel terrible that hurts right that's an empathy and empathy can be useful it also can be you can get overwhelmed by empathy if you don't know what to do with it but there's some way in which you start to feel resonating you because we are not limited to these bodies we are actually an interconnected system of consciousness and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute but we all know whether it's mirror neurons from neuroscience or the field of presence as Neuros you know scientists like dan Siegel talk about extended presents that we can feel empathy with one other when someone says someone's angry someone's hurting compassion is the next step you you see or recognize you feel and then you care you care about it and you want to if you can do something that helps so that you see the kid being bullied and you realize I want to tell the teacher or the you know principal or I want to just walk over there and say something or intervene to help stop it and so compassion it's called the quivering of the heart when it wants to move to alleviate the suffering of yourself because you can have self compassion it's very important or those around you and it's born into and the earliest studies of the infant's you know at Yale and various places like that show that even very very very small children have this resonance and this kind of care and so it's not shut down in us we we're a species that's interconnected and we care for one another and this is your birthright this natural natural compassion and through practice and meditation you can reawaken it you can extend it and it can become your way of living and moving in the world as a little aside and I'll just bookmark this one just got back from a conference with our dear friend Adam Ghazali our mutual friend Richie Davidson who's another of the most famous neuroscientists especially in this area and a number of other some contemplatives and neuroscientists and some technologists from the valley and VC talking about how to build compassion into our interface with the technological world compassion tack and then from starting from the very simplest things of projects like can you build a Fitbit for compassion where instead of your body where you can either know moments CAIR around you or in yourself or be prompted to care for yourself you know or when you say to Siri or Alexa you know I'm feeling lonely or you know and so forth what kind of response do you get from them from the algorithms and all of that because the the UK England just appointed their first minister of loneliness for the country and I hope you think it was a joke but it's not it's like an old Beatles song all the lonely people there are 10 million lonely people in England they've estimated and this Minister has got cut and it's you know it's for isolation and loss of capacity and health and all kinds of reasons that loneliness makes things way worse but there's some way in which compassion is that which connects us and it's a beautiful thing even if you walk down the street and you see someone you know who's struggling and so forth doesn't mean you have to fix the whole world that's not your job that would be egotistical but you can reach your hand out and mend the things that you can you can tend the things that you can and you can do it not because oh you pity them those poor people but because they're your family you recognize that we're common humanity we're in this together I'd like to build on that and preface it with a comment on the text so you mentioned collaborating with Adam and well he's discussing the potential of combining or utilizing technology to help people to develop an and harness compassion and some folks listening might be like ow come on that's so pie-in-the-sky but I'd like to point out that you've already collaborated successfully with Adam on software like meta Train yeah Emmie di tra i-n which was one of the tools Adam has used in his end of one or end of two experiments in rejuvenating his mental capacity to I want to say in his 20s and Adams Adams one of those guys you can't tell if he's 28 or 45 he's just a silver fox who always looks too young so I don't but he's not he's not 22 but the Metatrader is one of the tools that he utilized and I don't remember the the name that he used for this run of experiments you might know that the training that he did neuro Man or something like that was very very successful so that you already have a track record of collaborating successfully with neuroscientists and technologists the on the the compassion front I'd love to use that as a segue to loving-kindness and by way of personal example I failed I failed as a strong word I quit I stopped meditating after many many attempts had a very absurdly high number of false starts over many years and it's it really stuck after a number of experiments and experiences I had doing three or four day trainings with say travel meditation and having the social accountability being accountable to someone else is very helpful but another turning point was experimenting with loving-kindness meditation and I think in part it succeeded because it took the focus off of me me me III and allowed me to focus on others but I'd like to read a brief paragraph from a profile of you in the New York Times's from 2014 and feel free to correct anything that is incorrect but I'll give it a read first and I quote in the West cornfield says quote we encounter a lot of intense striving ambition and a lot of self-criticism self judgment and self-hatred and quote concerned he initially turned to the Dalai Lama for advice but self-hatred was such a foreign concept to the Tibetan Buddhist that he wasn't able to offer any real insight over time cornfield and his colleagues began to believe that America's needed particular meditation closely I'm sorry practice closely linked to the concepts of self forgiveness and loving-kindness a training in the unconditional acceptance of imperfection without such a foundation says cornfield meditation can easily become and this is the part that I underlined and start without this foundation says cornfield meditation can easily become yet another form of driving quote another thing you do to make yourself better end quote instead of a path to true contentment so could you please describe for folks what loving-kindness meditation practice looks like and elaborate in any way that you feel might be might be useful or helpful for folks yeah and that meeting which was some decades ago was the Dalai Lama yeah he didn't understand when we talked about self-hatred he couldn't you there's no word for that very back and forth with his translator what does this mean finally looked up he said but this is a mistake why would anyone do this but many asked how many of you there was a group of us aware teachers have experienced this and almost everyone raised their hand so we see that when people begin in our culture and in the West to meditate or to turn in turn inward really that it's very common to encounter a lot of self-criticism self judgment or even self-hatred and you know they're all the causes from art these are all kind of conditioning that we got from from our childhood our education and so forth but what it means is that you're sitting there saying I'm not doing it right I'm no good you turn the meditation into one other one other thing that you don't do right because you can't control your mind the truth is that you can't control your mind easily that's not the point there's a different way of approaching your mind which gives you tremendous capacities but it's not oh I have to stop my thinking or I don't want to have these feelings and I hate having all these judgments I don't want to be so judgmental Islands toppled I hate this judging mind what is it just more judgment so instead as you become first able to become the loving witness the the mindful loving awareness that says oh this is the judging mind and it's been trying to protect me thank you for trying to protect me I don't need you now thank you all of a sudden there's a distance from the from the painful or destructive or or self-critical thoughts simply by witnessing and with loving awareness and acknowledging them this becomes the Gateway to the practice of loving kindness and self self compassion and very often people can't do it for themselves they feel that's too much of a stretch like why would I wish myself well it feels egotistical and so the way that this practice begins for in skillfully for such folks is instead to think of someone that you really care about a lot and to picture them remember them put them in your mind's eye and feel the kind of well wishing you would want for them you know may they be protected and safe from difficulty may they be held in loving kindness may they be well healthy strong and you wish them that may they be happy and you do this for a time a kind of inner well wishing and also maybe you feel as you think of this person that you care about if you let yourself also tune in to the measure of Sorrows they have the struggles that every human being has you know and it tenderizes your heart as you think of them because you don't want them to suffer you feel the kind of rising of compassion and care so may they hold themselves and compassion may they be safe and protected and well and you do that with one or two people that you care about for time and then you can imagine even as I'm describing this and you follow in your own heart you can imagine these two loved ones looking back at you with the same kindness and saying just as you wish us protection and safety and happiness and well-being and you know in compassion they gaze at you and they say you too may you be safe and protected and may you be filled with tender compassion for yourself and kindness may you to be healthy and well and may you be happy they want you to be happy I think about when I'm doing this I'm visualizing some loved ones and I know that as I do it I can feel they want that for me and then finally as you feel that from these loved ones you can put your hand on your body or your heart even if you like and take it in and and then begin to realize that you can wish this for yourself may I hold all of the joys and sorrows of my life with tenderness and kindness may I hold my struggles with compassion may be filled with loving kindness and loving awareness may I be safe and protected may I be well strong or healed and as you repeat these simple intentions that have been done for thousands of years it's as if your cells are listening and this is the research of people like Liz Blackburn and Elissa EPEL who who Blackburn got the Nobel Prize for discovering the telomerase and the telomeres at the end of the caps and DNA it turns out that your sounds listen to your heart and the to your intention that consciousness affects your body and little by little even though it can bring up its opposite I hate myself I've never be good enough and you see all those and you say thank you for trying to protect me I appreciate that may I be well may I be safe may I be held in love and little by little like water on a stone it starts to soften the places that are holding your lack of self forgiveness your lack of care and loving kind of starts to grow in you and it's a very beautiful practice there's lots of places you can find it on my in my work and teachers like Sharon Salzberg and I my children and Tara brach and and and so forth are there any particular do you have any guided loving-kindness meditations or audio that you can recommend people listen to I do and I don't know they could go on my website jack Kornfield comm I think they will be on there I do know for sure didn't have a whole series of great programs with sounds true sounds true comm that include meditations on the mind vast as the sky meditations on compassion and loving-kindness and I did a book one of the books I've done is called a lamp in the darkness and it contains I think eight or nine different I'm guided practices that you can get either with it on the CD but you can get it as a download basically and sounds true also has that and has a compassion practice and a grounding practice in a kind of vast sky like mine practice and so forth so you so you can look a look for all of those beautiful it's a beautiful thing is that you can learn this and I was a couple of years ago invited to be part of the first white house Buddhist leadership gathering there were a hundred and twenty Buddhist leaders from around the country from different communities I don't think that's going to happen again very soon but there it was and one could hope and we talked most of the communities did beautiful things that were involved in the soup kitchens and tending the homeless and projects you know to support healing for whether it was malaria are there other diseases in different other parts of the world and so forth all kinds of great stuff and certainly meditation and when I got to talk which was kind of a summary talk toward toward the end of it I mentioned that in the in this historical record whether it's true or not that the the text and so forth describe the Buddha meeting with kings and princes and men stirs and so forth and probably if the Buddha were were around now he would go to the White House if he were invited he certainly would have met with Obama and who knows now and he had advice about why society which he would give to leaders and he'd say if you can train your people to meet one another with respect to listen with respect to differences and to come together peacefully listening to one another and then then your process ID will prosper not decline and if your society tends the vulnerable among them the the young people the old people those who are sick it will prosper not decline and if your society tends the environment around it in a healthy way it will prosper it not decline and so these are these are principles of compassion and why society that you could read perhaps in a number of great traditions from the Iroquois nation or from the taoist sages but here's the beautiful piece yes these are these are good things meeting in harmony and discussing and harmony and being respectful for one another and so forth there are practices that you can teach and learn that develop this capacity so that in our elementary schools now you know through organizations like castle which is a consortium for social-emotional learning that's worked in you know 10,000 schools kids learn social and emotional learning they learn compassion and it changes their lives they're better academically and all these kids carry that you know the troubles of our times they hear the news they see the trauma even in their own family to teach you how to steward your own heart from when you're young and then these capacities are now be incorporated as we know mindfulness based stress reduction in clinics and hospitals and businesses in you know there's the mindfulness teachers that for the when the Seattle Seahawks won the championship or the the Chicago in the LA Lakers when there were championship teams they had a they had a meditation coach a mindfulness coach George Mumford a good friend and that these capacities can be learned wherever we are and they transform our life it's not just by accident or that you have this beautiful experience on the mountains or making love but you can make that alive for you through these trainings every day every part of your life Jack there was a question I was planning on asking at some point anyway and I think this is a good segue which is how can you get a busy person hooked on my fulness practice you know it would be a first step or how to start and since we're talking about loving-kindness I would like to give a bit of a hard sell for loving-kindness meditation is one option because I recall perhaps it was two years ago I was really beating myself up and for people who don't know this about me I've spent the majority of my life being the my own worst enemy in terms of inner dialogue extremely brutal and hyper critical and loathsome of myself in in so many different respects I was going through a particularly intense and difficult time with that inner critic just ruthlessly beating myself up and at that point another friend of mine chade-meng tan who created the search inside yourself classic Google he was a very early um engineer which became the most oversubscribed class for employees at Google recommended that I take a look at loving-kindness meditation and and I didn't have any particularly sophisticated approach to it but I decided with nothing to lose and that I was having so much trouble during that period sitting still and trying to focus on say the breath or anything like that that at night this was happened to coincide with book deadline probably not pure coincidence so that my beating myself up was exacerbated during that time that was a few years ago and I began at night in my case in when I would take a shower at night or sit in I very often go to hotels to write which is something Maya Angelou and a few others that convinced me might be a good idea that I would consider to people just like you had mentioned to people I really cared for and wish them well that's all I did and Jade had said to me mang is usually what I would call him that at one point a woman in one of his classes had done this for one day at work every hour on the hour she would just look out of her office and wish someone well that she could see in her mind's eye for 60 seconds or so and she says she said it was her best day of work in seven years and I found that unbelievable so I decided to try it myself and that week of just spending maybe two to four minutes at night before going to bed ended up being one of the most blissful weeks in memory certainly at that point in several years it was really profound and I couldn't pick out any other variable that had changed so for me I just want to for people who are listening and saying huh you know what I'm type-a driven super hyper competitor this doesn't apply to me that it very well could apply to you and that by taking a little bit of the harmful edge off you don't automatically remove your competitive edge and in fact I would argue just as you mentioned that the bowls and so on used to have or still do it used to have a mindfulness coach for competitive advantage that it can be another tool in your toolkit and doesn't take you out of the game so to speak it just makes you more aware of the games that you're playing so that's a long sort of infomercial sales pitch that I wanted to just make sure I got in because I discounted a lot of these practices for a very long time because I thought it would at best be a waste of time and at worse take away some of my skills or tendencies that allowed me to get to where I am so that that that is more of a confessional than a question but I would love to hear your thoughts any additional thoughts on on loving-kindness meditation but also any additional thoughts on how if you wanted to get a busy maybe even impatient person hooked on mindfulness practice what first steps or approaches you might suggest so a lot of different questions sort of woven into what you said and the first is that there's a kind of misunderstanding in our culture that love is a weakness and it's not there is a way in which it's the force that can be probably the only force that can meet the level of aggression or violence and other such things that are happening in you know in the world it's the power that lets mothers lift cars off their children or it'll let somebody like dr. Martin Luther King stand you know after his church was bombed and children were killed and say we will meet your physical violence with soul force we will not harm you but we will love you so deeply that we will not only transform ourselves but we will transform you in the process and so the notion that love is somehow a weakness I think we do everything out of love we want to be loved even in our you know ambition and our desire for for success underneath it is you know we want to be well we want to be find our happiness and that's part of part of love so it's it's actually a power and my colleague and friend Weston ascore went to interview Gary Snyder a couple of years ago Gary is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and environmentalist for 50 years when writing about bio regionalism and one of our great kind of elders in this environmental movement he said Gary what do you have to say to us now that oceans are rising the world climate is changing you know hotter and hotter the species extinction and gary looked back and he said don't feel guilty if you're gonna save it don't save it out of guilt or anger or fear those are the very things that are actually making the world worse save it because you love it because it's part of you because it met and that's that that is the is the power whether you're starting a company but also it's not just that you you know some vision okay now I'm going to become this wealthy you know playboy or whatever you know zillionaire then what is your life mean for you and what do you really want and when you listen there is something in you and it's part of your birthright to both be able to give your gifts but also to love and be loved in return and it turns out that it's a power so then what you talk about is that it doesn't take much to begin the training and you're you know two minutes or four minutes in the evening or this woman that are work taking once an hour you know 30 seconds or a minute to look at somebody there and offer a well wishing can transform everything for people who want the practical support because it is hard to do on your own if you go to sounds true calm and look up the programs that I have first there's a forty day program called mindfulness daily which is fifteen minutes a day or twelve minutes a day depending on the segment that both gives instructions in mindfulness loving awareness and loving-kindness practice and it's twelve or fifteen minutes a day and by the end of those forty days you really have learned the inner skills and then it builds up there's then a deeper training called power of awareness and for those who are interested we're about to open an online teacher training for people interested in mindful in in passing along mindfulness and loving kindness to others Jack just to interject for one second for people listening I will also link to all of these resources in the show notes which you can find at tim dot blog forward slash podcast so you don't necessarily have to remember all these things you can go to the URL and we will have direct links to these resources sorry to interrupt jack just wanted to make sure our people listening and with it then there is also of the programs there there's one called guy meditations that's you know a download it's like 10 bucks or something and it has a loving-kindness practice compassion practice of forgiveness practice I think it may even have a joy practice and and so forth so you can and it's really helpful to have guided meditations at first because otherwise your attention we have a very short attention span in modern society Albert Einstein at least according to Scientific American said if you can drive safely while kissing a girl you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves and we are in this kind of multitasking world with our devices and and we've forgotten how to attend our own hearts we've forgotten how in some ways to really be present for one another and more importantly for our own life and so getting guided meditations is tremendously helpful and doing these little mini practices that you talked about one minute two minutes several times a day can transform you now I was just gonna mention to people also if you look at behavioural change if you look at BJ Fogg formerly with the persuasion laboratory at Stanford you look at diet dietary change any of these things do doing less than you think you're capable of doing is a really good long-term strategy in terms of starting off rigging the game so that you can win in the beginning so that your pass/fail mark in your mind is a really really low hurdle so I just wanted to reiterate guided walk guided meditation don't white-knuckle in the beginning like make it bigger than easy as possible and the same principle friend from the ancient you know texts say that you start in the easiest way for some people kindness for themselves seems impossible but then you pick a child you care about or someone else or even when you do go to yourself you think of yourself when you were an innocent child and wish yourself well the game is to do wear whatever naturally opens the the Gateway whatever's the easiest for some people is their dog holman you know the most non-judgmental being in their life wags its tail and loves you and it doesn't care you know what's going on in your head so you take the avenue that most naturally opens your heart and then you do this just a little at a time as you said and it doesn't take long but the other thing that's important is that sometimes as you do it it can actually display or show you the hyper critical nature of your mind the shame that you carry and the you know the self judgement or self-loathing and so then you then you say well what do you do then or it brings it brings up its opposite is that's the place that you just breathe and hold all that stuff with thymus because this is our humanity and we all have some of that and the point isn't to get rid of it or judge yourself for having it or try to fix it it's almost as if you put your hand on your heart and you say you know this is like mindful self-compassion of deep training this is part of the measure of struggles that I've been given like every human being these things have tried to protect me and now I can hold them with tenderness and say all right you know thank you but I don't need your help anymore I can be kind to myself and and and in that way you're not trying to fix yourself or perfect yourself if anything you're trying to perfect your love this is Chuck I wanted to give you a credit for help that you gave me and also tactical advice that you gave me during the 10-day silent retreat but you give me a lot but I wanted to I want to highlight one that's related to what you just said I was going through a very very difficult time particularly days 7 8 9 and you you gave me the advice that you just mentioned and there's there's one component I want to really underscore for people and that is when you're for instance trying to do loving-kindness meditation and instead you get the opposite or you get this self ridicule who are you to try it to meditate in this self-indulgent way this is this voice starts to pop up that is angry or hateful whatever it might be the process of not simply dismissing it or fighting against it but recognizing it as a coping strategy that helped you in the past in some way that you developed because in my case you know the rage was a fuel that if I had it without which I probably would never have left Long Island where I had friends who later overdosed on opiates and so on so it was a gift in a way and a tool and as you said you can thank that response or that part of yourself and then put it and I remember you recommend it even visualizing and please correct me if I'm wrong or elaborate but visualize taking that part of you that is a coping strategy thanking it and then putting it say on a shelf where you can use it later if need be along with say other icons or figures who whether it's Buddha or other that that you recognizes wise and then continuing with the meditation so that thanking that part of yourself for the function that it once served even if it is not serving you now was such a key insight for me that then helped me to manage my internal states or observe and appreciate my internal states for the next several days where I really felt like I was lost at that point so that was a really direct tool that helped me tremendously yeah thank you for bringing it up because it's so important for people when we come to that hyper critical shame a shame place um we feel very vulnerable and we've been identified with it and because you needed it I needed these things for survival so and if you try to get rid of this stuff you just end up in a fruitless battle against yourself and it's just more judgment so what you described as saying thank you for helping me survive I appreciate it let me put it on the shelf or the altar I'll put it in the lap of the Buddha or whoever you know the goddess of infinite you hold it for me if I need it I'll pull it back and that sense that this isn't who you are it doesn't describe who you are it isn't who you are it was it was a strategy because we're vulnerable beings and you were tender as a child you know and you had to make sure you could survive thank you for that and now I have a different capacity and let me just talk about that capacity a little bit because the capacity for presence and the great heart of compassion that's said to be your birthright is a really mysterious thing and talk about identity and when my youngest brother's wife esta was dying of cancer and she was just a beautiful being and I spent quite a bit of time with her and with my brother I had gone home she was close to dying I'd gone home to sleep and I want to get up early and hurry back because it was very close and I got my car I had to stop at the drugstore to pick up a prescription hurriedly running you know dashing through the aisles and so forth and I'm at the checkout counter and all of a sudden my whole body relaxed and I thought oh esta died and I got out to the car and I called my brother I said how's it going he said Oeste died a few minutes ago and I said I know you know I'll be there shortly and that we've all had these experiences if I ask in a room how many have had this particular kind where you knew someone died when they died you know a quarter of the hands will go up why is this it's because who we are is not this body we are we are the consciousness itself and so with all these practices what they allow us to do is to step out of what's called the small sense of self or the body of fear and reconnect with the with a field of connection of interdependence of compassion and to take our history and to honor it but not be bound by it one of my favorite stories is around us again the wonderful spiritual teacher in the early years when he came back from being with his guru in India he was sitting up there and teaching you know devotional practices and meditation practices and he had a beard and white robes and a and and beads and he was sort of in the guru outfit and a woman in the front row raised her hand and say he robbed us robbed us aren't you Jewish what's with his Hindu stuff and Rhonda said well yes I am actually I was bar Mitzvahed as as I was - and there are many things I love about the Jewish spiritual tradition the generosity of it the the Kabbalah all the great you know teachings on the many stages and states of consciousness the Hasidic masters who are like Zen masters and then he paused and looked at and he said but remember I'm only Jewish on my parents side and there is something both witty which he was but also profound about it because we are not just our parental history or the historical circumstances of this place and body that we were born into and something in us knows this so that when you look at the there's a wonderful book that came out last year the year before called the book of joy which was a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu and both of them have marvelous laughs I think people go to hear the Dalai Lama by the tens of thousands not just for the Tibetan teaching some of which are actually hard to understand or even the fact that he's this Nobel Prize winning you know world figure I think people go to hear him laugh that somebody who's carried so much suffering from the loss of his country where he can't return and the burning of temples and texts and all those things and he had to - had a week together when they were asked and took in this in this book how can you be joyful how can you laugh like this when you live through apartheid and the death of so many people around you then Dalai Lama I mean they they banter back and forth them like brothers and Allah missus so much has been taken from me you know they've taken our sacred texts they've taken our ability to make prayers in public they've taken you know so much of our culture why should I let them take my happiness and then to to starts to laugh and giggle and say you know I've been through so much but I am NOT going to let myself live in that place I'm gonna let myself live in that which affirms life and in a kind of profound joy that we made it that we're still alive that we can contribute that we can be here in this beautiful earth and this shift of consciousness is what's needed for the world because if we look honestly no amount of technology alone is going to save us nanotechnology and space technology and biotechnology and world-wide-web internet computer or supercomputer technology is going to stop continuing warfare and racism and tribalism and environmental destruction those are happening based on consciousness of the human heart and so we are now you know these you've made these enormous developments outwardly where you have the Great Library of Alexandria and your smartphone in your pocket along with a million you know cat youtubes or whatever but there it is it's all in there and then what we need is collectively to develop a transformation inwardly of our inner life that is parallel to this enormous outer transformation and that's not you know one of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff some years ago said we are a nation of nuclear giants and ethical infants you know how old i don't know how old you manatee is but it's time you know it's time to grow up so so that this this work that we're talking about is both individual but as you learn to meet your own life with greater understanding and compassion it empowers you to move through the world in a different way and to help others do the same and then you get the kind of joy of tutu in the Dalai Lama that you're somehow part of an awakening that humanity now needs more than ever Jack I'd love to ask you and these interviews are always driven by some self-interest I always have something issue or challenge or problem that I'm trying to figure out so I reached out to someone like you to help me do it but I record the conversation as we chatted about before we hit record and you know this already but the last several years have been very very important for me in terms of addressing certain traumas and the last eight weeks in particular have been transformative in a lot of beautiful ways and the periods the the duration of periods within which I don't berate or attack myself have become longer but there are still times when the wheels fly off the car and this last week has been one such example and I tend to when I make a mistake or feel like I'm backsliding or relapsing to compound the problem by beating myself up which then I start to then I beat myself up about beating myself up and you know where that goes so let me paint a picture so I found out recently that my Japanese host father and I've been in touch with this family since I was 15 I'm very very close to them 40 now and I found out that he just was admitted because the host mother sent me an email to the hospital with liver cancer and this there they don't have the details yet I just sent a follow-up email they don't know what the prognosis is exactly but in needless to say the worst-case scenarios are certainly being conjured in my mind or the potential of those and then simultaneously have been contending with and I believe you have some experience with this contending with a what should be a very simple construction project of a cabin up in the mountains and it is it has been delayed and delayed and delayed and there have been cost overruns and cost overruns it cost overruns and promises made promises broke and expectations set expectations missed and a friend of mine called with a whole new slew of problems yesterday related to this place and I lost my for lack of a better term I mean there there are many other things going on simultaneously but I got really pissed I was like you know what this extending the olive branch being understanding can't gambit is not working with these people like I need I need I need to take out the baseball bat and like pull old Tim off the shelf who was just this like juggernaut head through brick walls and be like listen like if you don't do ABCD and E here well these are gonna be the consequences and then I'm like well wait I'm supposed to be compassionate but how do I not be a pushover and it turns into this big dramatic play inside my head and then I wait then this is gonna end soon I'm not going to keep going but what I then often do is self-medicate with caffeine and I think it's a way of feeling productive without actually being productive and it also creates so much volume on the noise I think I use it to tune out a lot of feelings so when someone relapse is there has this kind of experience what do you suggest to them I mean is there is there a particular pattern interrupt or approach that you've found helpful for regaining footing oh so there's a number of things to say yeah first of all you could call it relapsing or you could just call it like yeah this is being human the put one of the PO the most most beloved poet in Japan was a Zen master named ryokan and there's a two line verse that of his that I particularly find fitting for this where he wrote last year a foolish monk this year no change you know and you can sort of feel the humor and the tenderness in it and and there's a way in which you see your personality the point you know you have a body you have this particular body or bonus and you can transform it in certain ways within the limits of the body that you were given and similarly you have a personality and anybody who has a number of kids realizes that you don't come in tabula rasa that you actually this kid is born it has this kind of temperament so you have personality and just like you don't want to look too closely to the BA at the body sometimes you don't look back closely the personality either you know it has its foibles and its fears and you know all of that and so you start to kind of look at and say oh now there's a really good example of how neurotic I can get thank you thank you for reminding me you know and then you get a little sort of like the keeper of the zoo a little more tender with this those kind of creatures so that's that's it's bringing in the non judgment you know or the loving-kindness for the way that you actually are and not your ideal or bringing compassion you could say yeah this is a tough one in this triggered I got triggered so what now the other thing is that I have the same experience we had a big remodel of our house when I was some years ago and raising my daughter and and in my first marriage and we were supposed to go and teach and travel in Europe and this guy who was a good contractor but you know everything of course gets more expensive in you knew this and it kept getting slowed down I said you were gonna get this done so we could make these decisions go into Europe and it's not happening you've gotta hurry up I do that like three or four different times and it doesn't happen finally I go in I get pissed and I say listen you know you said our contract was gonna be done by and if you don't get this done by the time I'm gonna haul your ass in court didn't sue you because I I need this done and I'm not gonna pay you the goddamn money although he looked at me and he said oh you really want this done don't you yes next day there's a huge crew it starts to katella I realized okay what I've been sort of talking meditation speak yeah a nice get it done he was a contractor and I just had to peek I had to speak contractor ease get the goddamn job done or I'll haul your ass okay I get it yeah I'll send the team over and that's all it took so but there's something playful about that as well it's not that you can't I've seen the die llama get angry at people it's not that you can't use that power and that understanding you know when it's necessary to get to be very strong or forceful and you don't have to judge yourself unless you hurt people and then of course that's the misuse of it but it's just it's part of being human is there something you say to yourself when no I think I don't know you are certainly in person and any with any contact I've had of you with you one of the most compassionate people I've ever met and I don't use that word very much but your your presence of listening and being with someone is really incredible and I don't know how much of that is an intrinsic versus trained but for better for worse you're coming out of the womb I've been very impatient since day one so I worry about I can get my it seems like my default is the yell is is speaking contractor ease to more than just the the way word contractor is yeah I was putting off work is there some when I feel that the sensations of anger beginning to bubble up is there something that you would suggest as self-talk or just a temporary pumping of the brakes to make it an informed decision versus just a lashing out well I could give you an answer but in a minute I'm gonna guide you in a little practice perfect so that you can find that find the better answer first I just want to say that um that anger you know yes it's your habit or maybe your temperament that's energy and there's nothing wrong with energy you know it's it's the power that let you do all the kind of things you've done in your life that are tremendously you know creative or resourceful or daring or whatever kinds of things so you want to respect okay I'm getting filled with energy and and you you know might be and then you want to lash out but first you want to respect that energy Wow let me feel this in my buddy who anger how big is it move okay then your question is then your question is what can I do to modulate it I could give you you know okay take some breaths ground yourself look at that other person remember but instead as we're talking let yourself picture a circumstance recently it might have been with your you know the contractor is doing your cabin or something else and you're you know that uprising of the injustice of it and how right you are you know and how you're gonna get this goddamn thing done you know and how you have to have to be hard and strong you feel all that and feel that energy in your body first thing is just to remember what it felt like and now you're becoming the the kind of mindful loving witness of it and saying wow this is a lot of energy can you feel that and remember that oh yeah okay now next step is that the wisest you know figure you can imagine maybe it's the Buddha or or maybe it's I don't know it doesn't doesn't matter some great master martial arts master you know who's mastered themselves as well as there are comes to you and let yourself imagined somebody's gonna teach you how to manage this powerful energy and see who appears somebody appears to you mm-hmm and first they look at you and they smile and they say yeah this is really this is the big energy and they appreciate you so instead of saying oh you're a doofus you know they say oh yeah you actually you actually carry some powerful energy and they acknowledge that they bow to you yeah Tim you got it all right and then you say yeah but how do I manage this when it takes me over and so this send master or whoever comes reaches under their robe and pulls out a gift for you which is a clear symbol of exactly what you need in that moment to help you regulate it so that you can keep the energy but do it in a way that doesn't cause harm to you or another and this clear symbol you'll be able to see it's just what you need so let yourself picture the gift that they put in your hand and let yourself imagine see envision picture what it what it is and if you can't see it clearly hold it up to the sunlight you'll be able to and then let me know what you get you want me to tell you what it is yeah yeah all right so the person who came to mind for me I went through a few was the creator of Judo fast know a guy named Igor O'Connell really saw a small guy who yes who could who could throw all the big guys and smile at the same time right exactly changed a lot also in Japanese government fascinating guy lease the symbol I don't know why this is to be honest but it's a pyramid the size was with straight edges about a little too big to hold in your palm that is blue it's like a almost a mixture of Scot pure sky-blue like blue bird blue with a bit of electric blue mixed in and it's sort of a smoky that's floating around inside this glass pyramid I've no idea why that's the case but that's what came up alright so we'll stay with it and then there's one more little piece so he gives you this this pyramid free-associate a little bit on here what it might possibly mean because these symbols are like dream images and they have they come from a deep place in your psyche and this pyramid has a message for you this blue pyramid just guess what it might be I think it's very very stable it's a little stream least stable structure and for me it also I could imagine it representing power also it seems like a very powerful symbol in many different cultures certainly yeah the blue the blue is a little easier for me it's a very cooling soothing color we're certainly red is the the colour of especially with a fire with the right the high resonance anger energy would be more of a red fire element so the blue would be a cooling or countering balancing force for that all right so now what I want you to do is imagine taking this blue pyramid gift which represents a kind of extreme stability and also a kind of power and cooling that's given to you by Chicago Cano and taking this into your body so that there you are filled with this energy and anger you know you've this huge wave of if you'd let that be there and you take this pyramid in and you let that energy be inside this stable grounded place of power and feel what it's like to be inside this blue pyramid with this energy and feel how it to feel how it affects it just notice as if there you're in that circumstance and now I'm remembering I am the blue pyramid with the and what do you you know what is if you like life that the most noticeable thing and you know I wonder of course how much of this is the the actual visualization versus the timeout right I permit myself to have but there's a there's very often a tightness on the left side of my chest right by the sternum what I feel when I start getting wound up that is absent when after taking this gift and then visualizing it being incorporated so that's what you what you're practicing you know and you know this very well in athletics that yes you practice things but other times you also practice envisioning whether it's playing piano or whether it's you know some some Olympic training that some of the times you just do it and through visualization and it activates a lot of the same neural circuitry so here you're starting to get the feeling of what it's like to be in the middle of this upwelling of anger and so forth and then taking a couple of breaths and feeling the blue pyramid and the connection with the earth and the stability of it and the power then of that presence that cools you and allows the anger to be there but not in the same uncontrolled way now there's one more thing and that is if you imagine again you got okano I believe you said it's Navis you got it he comes he comes up to you after giving you this gift and he touches you kindly on the shoulder and he has a few words of advice of how to handle this powerful energy that comes up in you because he knows all about it and what does he whisper into your ear kaalia well he whispers this this this came to mind immediately he says Zen yoga zaniel which is you know I still have this actually there too he has many famous quotes but he has what you might consider proverbs short aphorisms that I I've actually carried with me since I was fifteen but they're pack oh they're packed away somewhere I have two of them they're on cloth and the the first is still me about stole made a buck cannot other thoughts though it's means basically if you if you work hard you will achieve you will reach your your target it's not the best translation but that's the idea the other one is Zen neo cuisine you'll which is effectively the most efficient use of energy but it could also be the best / most benevolent use of energy and it's it's a principle of Judo but it's something that he applied to everything includes including education so it would be that very short bite-sized aphorism which is and I'm sure some scholars probably disagree with me but roughly translated here at least as I take it is the maximum or most efficient use of energy so take that in take his his intentions oh and Zen Yoko's nu the benevolent and efficient use of it feel the pyramid and now your assignment is that the next five times that this comes which it will maybe tomorrow or next week or so forth bringing the blue pyramid stable powerful cooling so the energy still there and then you hear his voice stays in yoko xin yo and you go oh yeah i can use this but i can use it in a benevolent way and try it five times and then then text me let me know what happened because that we're closing the loop if you do it and see now you've now you're responsible if you agree that you're gonna do it it's sort of goose it gooses the game a little bit you go okay no i better do it because i have to let Jax know whoever you know what happened and let me know what happened well i'll be able to i'll be able to use it this week because i'm flying out to the site of this cabin to meet with everybody and see what that so i'll have at least five opportunities to do that i mean the other thing that it's it's great and then that you can hear in this rather than by giving you a cookie cutter answer is that we actually have the wisdom that were seeking or that's available we have it in ourselves I mean you didn't have to fly to you know Kyoto and getting your time machine to go back and see you go to hell you know or whoever it happens to be the Dalai Lama or whoever happens to come to you the Buddha or some other great figure that actually the goddess of compassion that we carry that wisdom in our own heart and part of what these contemplative trainings do is they give us access just by taking a little pause it didn't take you 30 seconds okay he appears what do i do oh here's how my body would feel what what perspective should I bring ah here's efficient and benevolent use of energy okay now I remember so these answers for the for the questions of the psyche in the heart don't require going somewhere they asked us to quiet and begin to listen and as you do then you discover your own in your own inherent wisdom and your own compassion as well because the the benevolent use that he offers to you where does that live it lives in him it lives in you this is one of the one of the reasons I've wanted to have you on the podcast for so long is that for me you represent a very wide spectrum of tools you have developed toolkit that it has enabled you to work with everyone from the that the seekers of say the Buddhists along the lines of the Buddhist traditions to say adolescents are cutters to war vets with PTSD missing limbs and so on you've worked with a very diverse set of students and patients maybe even and that leads me to my next question which is after these experiences abroad why did you decide to pursue to come back why do you decide to come back to the u.s. period and then why did you decide to go back to school and study clinical psychology so um after the first five years in Asia there were a certain there were a few other Westerners who would become monks it was a handful and some were gonna stay for the rest of their lives I'd learned a lot and so that was kind of a choice am I'm just gonna stay and I realized no I want a family I want to love her you know I was a young man after all in just the celibacy for those years was actually pretty hard I want I want to see if what I have learned really translates into the life back home I don't want to just leave it and so I was some wrestling but it became very clear to me that I that I wasn't fit for the monastery for the rest of my life I had other not only other desires but also and longings but also were real interest to say does this work elsewhere so I came back I thought well what can I do I got it got a couple jobs and right away and of course what I knew how to do is be a student but I was now a student of the mind in the heart and I thought well how do I learn more about what happened to me in the monastery oh I'll study Western psychology and so that started me on that particular path and I learned a lot of complimentary things there's some very good trauma work in the West that I've learned about that really enhances the compassion and loving-kindness and mindfulness things that I learned in in the temple and you know now I've done a lot of years of teaching Eastern Western psychology together these principles that I've learned are spreading so widely in Western psychology I went to the largest therapy conference in in the country in December and down in Anaheim and gave a talk and you know here's a roomful of 3,000 or 5,000 people and I asked how many of you have some experience of meditation or mindfulness practice and the majority of the hands went up and that would not have happened you know 20 or 30 years ago so the eastern psychology is now becoming more invisibly woven into the understandings of clinical psychology and the rest and it's beautiful now I want to say something else you know when you talk about working with a variety of population you know yes people in prisons yes that's kids coming out of gangs but also um CEOs and there's a a dialogue that built for it and I did use that that time the chairman of Ford Motors he was actually the CEO perhaps before that but name is he's the chairman of Ford Motors and he talks about it too it was in 2008 I guess when the auto industry was just about to melt down and he called we'd had some contact he's a meditator and he said you know I'm gonna lose the my grandfather's company maybe the whole industry on my watch and it's hard to sleep what can I do and we did loving-kindness practices and and mindfulness practices together and so forth and I gave him some practices that he could use and it turns out that at whatever level you're on whether you're incarcerated or whether you're a CEO or whether you're returning that that these inner capacities that we have to be present without getting lost to bring a an understanding attention to these energies just as you were doing with anger in ourselves are really really liberating and sometimes you know what's needed like for the vets or the the people coming back from the war is also a kind of forgiveness practice in trauma work and we'll come together and you know they'll say things like I can't tell you what I saw because in fact people don't want to hear the horrors of war they can't tell the story and if they do often they reach Ramat eyes themselves and the people around them couldn't bear it but there's something worse because they'll say I can't tell you what I had to do and so it's locked up in their hearts you know and then what do they have they can drink or they can you know distract themselves or get in you know blind rages periodically but if you get a room of returning combat vets and hold it with a proper space of understanding and compassion not only can they tell their stories which they've never told but they can listen to one another and say oh yeah I've been there and all of a sudden they're not so alone anymore and and that release of the weight on their heart so there's a social dimension to trauma where we need to tell the story helps them release also what's carried in their nervous system and in their body and there's some some correlation between between those two together that becomes very powerful and we need that we need I do a lot of teaching of forgiveness practice and self forgiveness those are also on those those guided meditations that I teach and for a lot of us self forgiveness like self compassion becomes a very very important way to liberate ourselves from what we had to do to survive in the past so that we're actually free in our life how do you set the stage for instance with those with those vets what do you say to them or what what exercise might you do that opens a door for them so are these stories so a couple of images one with gang kids and then one with vets for for gang kids who come in or these kids who are trying to get out of gangs and might come with a mentor or something like that to some events we've had you can get these guys and they're you know they're their hoods are up and their hats around backward and they're lean back and saying like come on man you're gonna teach us meditation you're gonna teach us give us some poem stories or a bit this is bad we're out on the street people got nine-millimeters you know you got to give us something better than that so we try to make a setting that honors who they are from the very beginning or say well we can't talk yet about the real things that we came here to do because there are too many people in this room who have not been acknowledged and not in the respected so would you go out in the parking lot and pick up a stone for every young person you know who's been killed and we light one candle and put it on the center of a table say bring it back in and say their name and put their stone by this candle the simplest possible ritual and these guys and sometimes gals will come in and their hands are full of stones no young people should know that many dead people and and they'll say this is for Tito and this is for RJ and this is for homegirl and pretty soon there's a mound of stones and the names of people they've lost we're put into the the fabric of the air of that room and their hoods are no longer over their head so they're sitting up like okay this is a place where we can talk about what's really going on so there's something about making whether it's through as the simplest ritual or making a container in which people realize that this is a safe place to talk about what we've never done before with the vets one of the things that Michael Mead Louisa Rodriguez these guys from mosaic multi cultural foundation that I've worked with for years and are really wonderful Michael who's a you know a great drummer and a storyteller and mythologist who's also been working in prisons and with vets and gang kids for years he'll say let me tell you an ancient story of returning careers and he has a handful of stories from Africa or to bad or the Mayan tradition about warriors coming back you know with their hands covered with blood and you know their eye is filled with the the Mars with a martial energy that they would that they can't stop the violence because it's taken them over and here's a myth or a story that tells about how ancient warriors were brought back into their community I'll tell you the myth if you want to hear one of them oh yes please so here we are you know and there's these there's these vets and already stories have started to pour out about I can't tell you what I saw I can't tell you what I had to do and Michael stood up and he said let me tell you an old Irish story of a an Irish warrior named Coco Lane or I'm not sure how his name is pronounced something like that and he was the most fierce and famous of all Irish warriors and the Irish warriors were were mad men because they would go out they paint their bodies and then go out naked and sometimes you just see them coming and you'd run the other way but anyway there was some rotting King King King and army that had come to threaten their area and so kuku Lane went out and almost single-handedly chased them and defeated them but then he was coming back to his own town in a chariot covered with blood and his eyes blazing bearing down on his own town still possessed with the violence of war with the god Mars and they were all terrified he would come and do violence there too and so they round what can we do what can we do and they went to ask the old wise woman in the village and she said three things and so the first thing they lined up all the women in the village who bared their breasts and this slowed him down as if it reminded him of his mother's milk course thing and because he was slowed down and the second thing they did was take a rope and tie it around him and put him in a huge cauldron of cold water which hissed off his body and then they filled it three times with cold water and finding his body cooled down and then the third thing they did is they took him at still bound and they lay him on a carpet in the court of the local King and they sang to him the stories and myths and songs of warriors who had protected the kingdom and then come back and released the violence and the fears that they carried and planted their crops again and loved their families and resumed living in harmony with the community from which they came and they told the ancient stories and sang the songs for three days and nights and when it was over cuckoo cuckoo laying eyes opened they let his they untied him and he was back as a normal human being again and after Michael told this story to vets who've been telling and terrible accounts of things that happened in this room a hundred men stood up and we'd been working with a simple African chant a song that was really an African chant of a prayer you know earth hold me for this living is hard we all sang to the vets together for a long time as if we could sing them back into their bodies from this as if they were lying there in the court of the King so this is and you ask the question how do you how do you make a setting that allows people to truly feel that they can tell their stories and be held in compassion whether it's the grief of these gang kids that no one's really given them the place to give voice to you know or the vet who says I can't tell you what I had to do that's very powerful and it makes me also think back to conversations I've had with Sebastian Junger who was a wartime journalist as co-produced and shot a number of really hiring documentary films including Restrepo and most recently wrote a book called tribe that touches on some similar topic area and leads me to ask you are there any rites of passages or rituals that you feel would be useful for every man or woman to experience infra and this is something that I've felt a longing for and a lack of since my teenage years because I I'm not Jewish did not have a bat mitzvah Bar Mitzvah I don't know if that serves that purpose in the in the Jewish tradition necessarily but are there any any rituals or rites of passage that you think we could use in let's just say the United States that would be helpful to whether it's a specific population specific group or anyone so what you're talking about is a really big subject at the subject of initiation and unfortunately bar mitzvahs at least when I was in where as was a relatively lightweight and meaningless thing you get up there and you recite your you know Hebrew portion of the Bible and now you're a man and they give you a bunch of presents and there wasn't a lot of meaning in it but the problem that you raise is that of the lack of initiation and what's true is that it's been forgotten in our culture one of the few places you get initiation is going into the military that's not initiation but a lot of these gang kids for example they're trying to initiate themselves which can't really happen you need elders and you need it in a ritualized way don't go on that you know if you're in the Masai tradition in East Africa the Maasai people as everybody's heard you know a young man at a certain age of fourteen or something will go out and kill a lion to prove that they're now an adult member of the society and that they're brave and that's part of their initiation of their initiations for young women as well and it's not just in Africa the Mayans had initiations and in Thailand when I lived there back starting in the 1960s at that point almost every young man and many young women when they reached the age of 1920 they became a monk for three months or for a year and lived in an austere way and it was part of their initiation to learn both the inner life of themselves and also a kind of discipline we don't have it and because of it you know kids are trying to initiate themselves on the streets by you know shooting somebody or doing something you know that shows that they're brave but it's not a lion it's another person or it's you know trying to get the attention of the others and say prove how how powerful or strong they are so we desperately need these and we need them built into our education and to our psychology and I can't give you a simple answer but one of the people who has the most intelligence about this is a man a colleague of mine named Michael Mead and if you look at mosaic multicultural foundation his writings on initiation and what's possible here and the things he's led are very very inspiring so that's a place that I would look that's a good starting point wonderful I will certainly find that well Jack I think we could go for hours and hours and hours and I always love chatting with you and I'd love to perhaps even consider doing a part two sometime but given that we've already gone for two-plus hours I want to ask just a few more questions and I'll actually start with just reading something very short which is from your 2017 year end message and it says I think this is just to inject some more optimism into our conversation which we've already had plenty of but this is this is just a small portion of your urine message Martin Luther King jr. describes our collective journey with hope quote the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice end quote and Pablo Neruda explains further you can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming renewal is happening this is back to your voice take quiet time to listen to your heart to meditate and to rest amidst the great turnings feel the renewal of spring that can be born in you align yourself with goodness let yourself blossom like a lotus or whatever unique flower you are shining in the world offering tiny seeds of love amidst it all blessings to you in 2018 Jack and I I want this this note to then lead into and certainly welcome to comment on that but which book you would recommend of yours people start with or where they start with all of the many materials recordings readings that you produce because you're a a fantastic writer and a prolific writer you have some of my favorite book titles I've ever heard by the way including after the ecstasy the laundry which maybe we could touch on but where would you suggest people start of the many things that you've that you've written and shared with the world and and if you have any comments on that year-end message you're welcome to share that as well so for books if you want something simple I have books like you know an introduction to meditation that sounds true publishes or I have a little book called the art of forgiveness loving-kindness and peace which is very simple stories and practices if you want something that's richer and fuller then you could look at one of my bigger books like a path with heart or the wise heart the guide to the two principles of Buddhist psychology and again I think lots of stuff online and sounds trues particularly a good place to go along with my website then and that 40 day mindfulness mindfulness daily which is like it's like 30 bucks or something in you you know is a really wonderful way to start in terms of what I had written about the trusting heart one of the greatest Zen texts from thousand years ago says to be awakened or enlightened is one with the trusting heart and mind and that doesn't mean that that we won't go through hard times we always have and we will again and we are now in many ways but that we also have born within us the capacity to meet these difficulties with understanding and with courage with compassion and to transform them and in that way one of my favorite recent books is called the better angels of our nature by Steven Pinker and he's a remarkable you know professor at Harvard an apologist historian talking about the growing consciousness of humanity in spite of the kind of wars in conflict and environmental things there are so many good things that have happened that he charts over the last few centuries of the development of you know certain certain abilities for peacemaking there's actually less war than there'd been the you know respect for for women the reduction in you know child labor all kinds of things and and in that same regard there's a wonderful book called bury the chains which is about the ending of slavery in the British Empire starting with this handful of men who met in a British tea shop or printing shop and spent 30 years riding around the country bringing ex slaves who were well spoken to talk about the Middle Passage and that you know the horrors of slavery and so forth and even though the British Empire's economic engine was built around slavery and sugar by the end of their work thirty years that the British Parliament come out one slavery in the British Empire it's you know decades before it happened in the US and the Quakers were a big part of this and the Quakers famously wouldn't take their hats off for the king but when what is his name Thomas Clarkson who was the center of this group trying to end slavery and going everywhere to do it when Thomas Clarkson died that all the Quakers of the England England took their hats off because he heeds freed so many spirits in so many lives so the possible we have these amazing possibilities as human beings and we're just growing into them now culturally and it's about time but it's it but there they are possible and we each have a have a contribution to make in it Jack I'm gonna ask you one more question before we wrap up with just letting people know where they can find you on social media and elsewhere on the website and so on but last question is one I like to ask and this is this is a metaphor but if you could have a short message on a billboard in other words get them get a message out to millions or billions of people it could be a few words one word a phrase a quote of yours a quote of someone else's what might you put on that billboard well two things come to mind one is a question that when I sit with sat with people many times at the end of their life that they that they then ask of themselves silently or aloud is did I love well because in the end what matters really well the Billboard would have a question rather than a statement and it would have a question something like how could I love myself better or what you know so that it actually it's not that I'm gonna tell them something they already know this but I'm gonna remind those who read that there is something that's asking to be awakened in them how could I love myself and this world better and then you know or what gets and you know then you go what gets in the way of that and how could I love that too how could I love myself in this world better hmm well Jack I want to of course thank you for your time today but beyond that I want to thank you and this is this is very very much from deep in my heart thank you for helping me to learn to love myself better and quite frankly to see something in the first place that is worth loving that's not where I've spent most of my life so it's turned into if not my I hesitate to say my top priority because I'm worried about sounding it self-indulgent but it's become one of the most important and fruitful tasks in my life is asking that question how could I love myself better or how could I learn to love myself better so thank you very very sincerely for that and that the words don't do it justice but that's all that's the best I can do right now remotely is to is to put it into words so thank you for that thank you Tim this was this was a pleasure to do and what I feel and I know is it as you tend your own heart I'm in a wise way then it makes you available to bring the gifts the many gifts you have to the world you personally and others but to do it in a way that's on the carrier wave of connection and love and it transforms everything so thank you - well Jack I you know I'm looking at a text thread of ours and I'm feeling the necklace around my neck which is really a thread a red phone that was used to close the one of the elements of the closing of the 10-day silent retreat and I shot you a text not too long ago asking what the three knots meant because I'd forgotten and this is what you wrote back first not equals refuge in whatever you hold is most inspiring and sacred second commitment to compassion for self and others third following your highest intention and the intention that I've set at the end of that ten day retreat was to learn to love myself so I could love others more fully but I realized that maybe what it is is learning to love myself so I can help others learn to do the same and you've been an integral piece of that and I just love that I have the opportunity to introduce you and your work and these traditions to more people and I will certainly be linking to where everyone can find you online but are there any particular best places just to reiterate where people can find you and I'll link to these in the show notes jack Kornfield comm and also look up jack Kornfield on sounds true comm for those programs that I talked about and then spirit Rock org which is our great Meditation Center in the Bay San Francisco Bay Area absolutely stunning stunning beautiful vacation worth visiting just to bathe in the scenery but many more reasons to to visit as well well Jack thank you again and thank you thank you Tim it's a pleasure and to everybody listening you can find show notes links to all the resources books and everything that we discussed at Tim blog for slash podcast and until next time thank you so much for listening hey guys this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet Friday do you want to get a short email from me and would you enjoy getting a short email for me every Friday and that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that I've discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird that have somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend so if you want to receive that check it out just go to 4-hour workweek dot-com that's 4-hour workweek calm I'll spell out and just drop in if your email and you'll get the very next one and if you sign up I hope you enjoy it this episode is brought to you by fresh books man oh man do a lot of listeners to the podcast and readers of mine love fresh books to the extent that I ended up meeting with the CEO not very long ago why are they so popular well they are the number one cloud accounting software designed exclusively for self-employed professionals that's many of you and used by more than 10 million people you can send invoices track your time 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reishi which have been fascinated by for a few years now has been very very effective and calming their old formula however for sig Maddox old formula included stevia and I like to avoid sweeteners all sweeteners for a host of reasons and I then just ping them and asked hey guys I would love to experiment with this and maybe actually suggest it but I'd like a version without sweeteners if you'd be open to it too much of headache don't worry and they are always game for experimentation and so they created a special custom version without the stevia without sweeteners now it is part of my nightly routine their ratio elixir comes in single serving packets which are perfect for travel and in fact I'm about to leave the country right now and I have a packet in front of me that's just gonna sit in the end of my carry-on bag you only need hot one and it mixes very very easily here's some recommended copy that they put in the read so I'm gonna read it and I'll give you my take quote a warning for those in the experimental mindset reishi is strong and bitter in parentheses like any great medicine so if the bitterness is too much I recommend trying it with honey and or nut milk such as almond milk and quote so I'm gonna say no you should suck it up and you should drink the tea because it's not that bitter and maybe should take the advice of all Chinese people when they're criticizing youngins when they say boo and I'm sure it cool which means you're not able to eat bitterness bitter is in many cases an indication of things that help liver detoxification and so on not saying that's the case here but I've tested this ratio chert on family members on friends everybody has liked it it's a little bit earthy it's not that hard so I would just say suck it up and know don't put in honey or nut milk or any of that just drink the goddamn tea it's delicious I think if you like to err that kind of stuff that type of tea you're gonna dig it so just try it okay back to then my read if you'd like to naturally improve your sleep both on set and quality I think naturally you might just enjoy this ratio lecture without any sweeteners it has organic reishi extract organic field mint extract organic rosehips extract organic Tulsi extract and that's it no fancy stuff no artificial whatchamacallit anything so check it out go to for stigmatic comport slash ferrous and get 20% off this special batch I don't know if they're gonna be making much more of this since it was made specifically for you guys so do me a favor and try it out so that they continue to be open to experimenting with me to create products for you guys specifically check it out for sick at matok that's fo you are SI g ma TI c calm for Sasha Ferris f e RR ISS and get 20% off the special batch and you must use the code Ferris to receive a discount fer are ISS so again go to 4 Sigma to calm forward slash Ferris and then use code Ferris for 20% off of this rare exclusive limited run of reishi mushroom elixir for night time routines without any sweeteners enjoy [Applause]

Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 31,626

Rating: 4.7049179 out of 5

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, forbes, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, best-seller, public speaker, angel investor, ferriss, twitter, Facebook, stumbleUpon, evernote, uber, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast, The, Tim, Ferriss, Show, The Random Show, Jack Kornfield

Id: dmV699nDuTQ

Length: 182min 4sec (10924 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/fallleavesarepretty]

Kornfield is always great. Pretty inspiring listening to him.