February 5, 2019 • 45 mins
In This Interview, Dean Sluyter and I Discuss…
- His book, Fear Less: Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, Anger, and Addiction
- Right View and how it relates to having less fear in your life
- How right view is always liberating
- Asking, “does it help?”
- “One mustn’t assume burdens that God doesn’t lay upon us. The state of worry is not itself meritorious.” CS Lewis
- The problem with trying to control your mind
- Transcendental Meditation
- Hanging out in tasklessness
- The open space of awareness
- How thought doesn’t have to go away in order to meditate
- Relax your grip, and relax back into yourself
- It doesn’t grip you, it has no power to do that. You grip it.
- What it means to relax at the moment of contact
- Relax into it, stop the resistance of it
- Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional
- suffering = pain x resistance
Dean Sluyter Links
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Any effort to create a non agitated state of mind
is itself a form of agitation. Welcome to the one
you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
(00:24):
or you are what you think ring true, and yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
(00:46):
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
(01:14):
this episode is Dean Slider, an award winning author who
has taught meditation and awakenings since nineteen seventy. Dean leads workshops, talks,
and retreats throughout the US and beyond, and has been
featured in The New York Times, USA, Today in Style,
New York Magazine, OH, The Oprah Magazine, and many others.
He is also on the faculty of the West Coast
(01:36):
Writers Conferences. On this episode, Eric and Dean discussed his
book fear Less, Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, Anger and Addiction.
Hi Dean, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, it's great
to be here. It's a pleasure to have you on.
Your book is called fear Less, Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety,
(01:57):
Anger and Addiction. And we will go in to all
that here in a moment, but let's start like we
normally do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's
talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there
are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
(02:18):
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second,
and she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. Well, it's a very powerful story.
(02:41):
I can see why you've used this as the central
metaphor for for your program. Here, Uh, so many levels
to it. I want to go straight to a neurological level. Okay,
we could approximately, we can identify the aggressive wolf with
the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. And that's
(03:03):
the branch of the nervous system, which, when it's activated,
stimulates the fight or flight response that that you know,
whatever is stimulus is out there. We feel, okay, I
have to deal with this in a fearful way, get
the heck out of here, flight, or I have to
deal with it in an aggressive way. Fight. Now we
need that response. You know, we've got caveman cave woman
(03:25):
nervous system still. But unfortunately, in modern life, every time
the garbage truck goes by and you hear that roar,
our cave person nervous system interprets that as, oh, there's
the saber tooth tiger. So our sympathetic nervous system, our
fight or flight response tends to kick in inappropriately. So
(03:48):
the way we balance that the good wealth, so to speak,
is the parasympathetic system, and that's the branch of the
nervous system that does just the opposite, gets us cooled doubt,
gets us settled into the boundless, okay, nous of this
moment as it is the the fact that from a
(04:10):
bigger perspective, that we don't have to panic, we don't
have to run, we don't have to take arms against
what's going on. We can be in harmony with it.
And that parasympathetic system, that good wolf is the one
that we feed through meditative methods. Physiologically, the meditative methods
(04:33):
activate the parasympathetic system and tend to switch off the
sympathetic system. It's a great way for us to go
into this. You know, very early in your book you
you describe that the book is essentially going to focus
on two things. One is practice, so some of the
meditation practices that we can do, and then view, which
(04:53):
is sort of a way of looking at the world.
We're going to spend a fair amount of time on practice,
I think, but I thought let's start with view. Let's
talk about from your perspective, what is right view and
how does it relate to specifically having less fear in
our lives? Right right view? And we want to be
(05:15):
clear here by view We don't mean view in the
sense of opinion. By view. We mean it quite literally
seeing what's in front of you. That's what right view is.
Right view is seeing actual reality rather than our thoughts
about it or are feelings about it. I think of
reality as being what is laid out in front of
(05:37):
us in each moment, and then all our thoughts and
concepts are like a piece of tracing paper we've laid
over it, and then we've drawn all kinds of stuff
and made all kinds of notes and so forth, and
and we're always seeing reality filtered through all of them.
A wonderful example is from the Steven Spielberg film in
(05:57):
two thousand fifteen, Bridge of Spies. I cite this. I
have a chapter about this in the book actually titled
would It Help Uh? And that's the based on the
true story of Rudolph Able, the Soviet spy captured in
New York at the height of the Cold War, and
he's now on trial for his life, and the Russians
and the Americans everyone wants him dead because he's a
(06:19):
very inconvenient person. And his lawyer comes in and explains
all this to him. Fortunately, his lawyer is Tom Hanks,
so you know, probably things will turn out okay. Uh.
But but in any movie, that's right, that's right, you
want Tom on your team. So so Tom explains to
(06:39):
him the dire straits that he's in and and uh
and the spy was played by the wonderful um Uh.
Mark Rilans won an oscar for this role, actually, and
he digests this information for a moment and then he says,
all right, And Hank says, you don't seem worried, and
he says, kind of shrugs, literally says would it help?
(07:04):
And that's the best thing in the film. Actually, when
Mark Ryland's walk, when people spot them on the streets,
they say, hey, Mark, would it help? Uh? I mean
that cuts through so much confusion. I grew up in
a very political family, and I can remember my parents
screaming at the at the TV news, goddamn Richard Nixon.
(07:26):
Uh and uh. And even then I used to wonder,
do they know Nixon can't hear them through the TV screen.
So in this case, one aspect of view is just
seeing that that doesn't help, and that it's actually very right.
View is always liberating. Right view is always liberating when
(07:47):
when you see that that doesn't help. You realize, oh,
I can stop doing that. I don't have to cultivate
stopping that. I don't have to try to push down
my emotions. I just just let that go. I mean,
a very similar thing everyday experience is sitting at the
red You know, when you're sitting at the red light
and you're in a hurry and you tighten your grip
(08:08):
on the steering wheel, you're kind of straining forward in
the seat as you mentally try to make the red
light turn green faster. We've all done that. Now does
it help? No? And the and the extremely good news
here and again this is a matter of view. Is
is realizing that it never has helped, it will never
(08:30):
help you. Can you can just invest hundreds of man
hours or woman hours for the rest of your life
and trying to make the red light turned green faster,
It never will. Now, think of all the other kinds
of red lights in your life, the things that other
people do when you're going no, no, don't say that,
don't do that. It doesn't help you. Can you can
(08:52):
breathe out, you can let that go, And that doesn't
make you less effective in actually helping the situation. It
makes you more effective because you're not burning up energy
straining at this kind of unproductive response. Instead, you've got
more bandwidth open to look around and see, Okay, what
can I do that will help. Yeah. I had my
(09:13):
own version of that just a little while ago, because,
as you know, I was late to this interview because
I was stuck in traffic, and you know, I had
that moment of frustration starting to rise, and then the
you know, and then the realization like there's absolutely nothing
that getting upset is going to do about this. And
and sometimes I'm able to have that clarity of you
(09:35):
and and and other times, you know, I'm not. Um,
I think we're all that way sometimes. I also, particularly
like you quote another writer C. S. Lewis in the
book about this, and I'm just going to read, um,
just a short part of it because I think it's
so useful. And and he's basically talking about the slaughter
(09:56):
and the suffering of the World War Two giving way
to the Cold War. And um, this is what he
said in a letter to a friend. One mustn't assume
burdens that God does not lay upon us. It is
one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that
the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning.
I think each village was meant to feel pity for
(10:16):
its own sick and poor, whom it can help. And
I doubt if it is the duty of any private
person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help.
And then it goes on to say a great many
people do now seem to think that the mere state
of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think
it is. That's so profound, it's sure as thank you
(10:39):
so much for reading that. I just love that quote.
You know that was uh and talk about having all
the woes of the world that are do you know
that was way before internet. Every time I pick up
my phone, it's it's so easy to just swipe right
and there's the headlines, here's the latest disasters. Yeah, he
hadn't even in twenty four hour news. It's so staggering
(11:02):
it and it is one of those things that I
think that good people today wrestle with, yes, which is
I don't want to stick my head in the sand.
I'm a caring person. There's lots of things that are
happening in the world, but I feel like this is
somehow eroding me. How can I respond to this in
a wise way? So what are some things you might
(11:22):
say about that? Well, the first part is, and again
this is a matter of view that uh C. S.
Lewis has articulated so beautifully that the state of worry
is not itself meritorious. The question is would it help?
It doesn't. And you know, kind of the reverse of
that is people feel if they're not worrying, then they're
(11:46):
being flaky, they're not being conscientious, and that's just not true.
They you know, if that were so, then the more worried,
the more stressed you became, the more you would be
helping the world. And if if we think of the
people who have really liked the great great political activists,
you know, and I had all my life, as I say,
(12:08):
you know, starting with the parents that I grew up with,
all my life, I've been around political activists. Um, and
if you think of the ones who have really changed
the world, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr King right, people like that,
Nelson Mandela, As soon as you think of them, you
(12:29):
know that they were not coming from a place of
stress or worry or rage or any of these. Just
you know, negative, negative toxic emotions that so many people
feel their activism has to come from. You know that
people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Dr King, they
were coming from a place of great silence inside and
(12:50):
really from a place of great love inside. And I
think that it's no accident that they're the ones whose
influence continues to affect the exactly I often think of.
Dr Stephen Covey wrote a book, The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People, which I think is a master work.
Gets classified as a business book, but it's not really
(13:11):
in any way, shape or form. But he expounds this
idea of circle of concern versus circle of influence. And
if you think of a big circle with a smaller
circle inside of it, the big circle is your circle
of concern, everything you're concerned about, and the smaller circles
the things you can actually do something about. And his
point is the more time that you spend in your
circle of concern, your circle of influence actually shrinks. And
(13:34):
the more time that you spend in your circle of influence,
the more it grows. And it it speaks to this
exact same point, which is that if I spend all
of my time worrying or being angry or railing at
the television or all of that. Then that dissipates the
energy that I can put into my circle of influence,
which is the place that I can actually make a
(13:56):
positive change in the world. Right absolutely so, So you know,
job one is you have to take care of yourself
and um uh, you know you need to have the
clarity and the balance and the groundedness and and the
genuine compassion to help others. Otherwise you're you're not going
(14:16):
to be making things better, You're going to be making
things worse. It seems like there's been at tension and
this has existed in lots of people for many years
between how much of their time needs to be spent
in contemplation versus in action, you know, in activism and
again to your point, looking at someone like Gandhi, who um,
I don't remember the exact numbers, but apparently spent several
(14:39):
hours a day off on his own in prayer or so.
I think it's one of those tensions that runs through
people in the modern world who are really trying to
live a good life. Is how do I balance those
two elements? Right now? That really brings things into my wheelhouse,
which is that I've functioned as a meditation teacher since
(15:01):
oh my, since nineteen seventy now, uh, and I've had
the incredible opportunity to teach all over the country and
in a few other countries and all different kinds of people.
I've worked for years with kids at a top, top
prep school. I've worked with kids at ivy league colleges.
I've worked with prisoners and maximum security, and with corporate
(15:24):
executives and creative artists. So I've had the great opportunity
to find out what works and to find out how
to share the skills of meditation in a way that
practical people living in you know, the actual world, not
living in a story book about about India in the
(15:47):
Middle Ages, but living in America in two thousand and eighteen.
How can actual people integrate meditative practice into their lives
in a way that they really can do it and
it really will do it, and that it's really a
fact to now. The key that I've been fortunate enough
to learn from my own teachers is to take a
(16:08):
natural approach to meditation. I wrote a book actually with
the title Natural Meditation Um. Usually when people hear the
word meditation, they think of trying to control the mind.
I mean, when I meet someone at a party, they say,
what do you do? I'm a meditation teacher. They say, oh,
I tried to meditate, but it was so hard. I
(16:29):
couldn't concentrate, I couldn't clear my mind, that I couldn't
make the thoughts stop coming. And that's the really kind
of most widespread conception, I would say, misconception about what
meditation is that you're trying to control the mind. Now
here's the problem with that approach, and there's no way
around this problem if if you take that approach, which
(16:51):
is that any effort to create a non agitated state
of mind is itself a form of agitation? Are right? Okay,
I'm gonna try real hard to just be. It's a
contradiction in terms. So the approach and natural meditation is
(17:11):
we start by noticing how the mind naturally works all
the time, and what the mind naturally is doing all
the time is seeking happiness, it's seeking fulfillment, it's seeking
that moment you know, after you you drink the tea
and you say ah, and you go through whatever you
need to go through. You you buy the tea, bags
(17:31):
and you boil the water and you pour the water
in the kettle. All that it's all aimed at getting
at that moment, to that moment of saying ah. Everything
else is a means to that end okay. And it's
because we're built that way. The mind is seeking that
sense of that sense of just o kayness, nothing else
that needs to be done for me to just bask
(17:52):
in this moment. The mind is seeking that all the time. Now,
the good news, as all the stage is, whether it's
the Buddha or Jesus or Shankarra or Louts or Socrates,
the Balsamtov, all the stages in their different language, say
one way or another that there is an awe that
(18:13):
never ends, that's not dependent on outer circumstances, and it's
your own inmost core of being. So all we need
to do is get the mind turned just a little
bit turned in that direction and let go of all
our effort. And then and then the mind's natural gravitation
(18:33):
toward that happiness, towards that piece and that silence, that
gravity just pulls us within. So when I lead meditation,
and I do this in workshops all over the country,
um and also I have a actually we have a
group that meets here in Santa Monica usually every other
Tuesday night, and now we broadcast that live on YouTube.
(18:55):
That will be tonight on YouTube. Actually, so what I
do is simply I gently guide people, show them how
to let go of effort, and then the gravity takes over. Now,
when you practice in that way, it doesn't take a
whole lot of time out of your day. This is
coming back to your presenting question here. When people think,
(19:15):
and you'll hear this a lot from people, oh yeah,
meditation has really changed my life, but you have to
practice for two hours a day. Now. The reason you
hear that is that the way most people practice meditation
trying to concentrate, trying to control the mind, that's very strenuous.
It takes a lot of effort. So they're sitting there
for an hour and forty five minutes beating their head
(19:37):
against the wall, so to speak. And then finally they
get so tired, the mind gets so exhausted trying to
do this unnatural act of concentration that finally the mind
gives up and it finally just sinks. And then that
last fifteen minutes is just ah, there, it is so
(19:58):
what fortunate well I've learned from my teachers is how
to skip the first hour and minutes, go go straight
to the to the just letting go and sinking part.
And that's how I teach meditation. What I thought was
(20:46):
interesting about your meditation, and knowing a little bit about
your past and your teachers, is that the style of
meditation you describe, the natural meditation right, sounds very much
like something I learned from Adi Shanty, like the way
he recommends a meditation. But when I first heard natural meditation,
(21:08):
I thought this guy might be a t M guy,
because that's the way transcendental meditation UM is often described.
It's natural, It's just natural. And I think based on UM,
what sounds like some of your previous work you you
did do transcendental meditation, is that, Yes, I learned and
practiced uh TM, and I became a TM teacher and
(21:30):
I worked in the TM organization. I taught probably a
couple of thousand people TM and all over the country
for for several years. So you're right, the basic principle
of effortlessness is there in TM, but it's not exclusively
there in t M. And one of the reasons that
I eventually went my my own way uh and and
(21:54):
stopped teaching through the TM organization. Um. There were a
number of and by the way, I still have some
of my best friends are our TM teachers. UM. But
I personally had to go my one was because they
started charging I thought too much money. Uh. And you know,
(22:15):
the the original idea was let's share this with everyone.
And secondly, there's a tendency there to feel that TM
is the only form of effortless meditation, that that we've
got a monopoly on it. And in fact they're right
that most meditation is taught in terms of effort and concentration,
(22:35):
but not Allso once I had to go my way
from from TM, that really form the direction of my search.
And I found oh here in within the Tibetan teachings,
there's this Tibetan teaching called so chen or um. It
(22:55):
goes by by other names in other schools of Tibetan
Buddhism um Haamudra or a Ti yoga. And oh here
in certain schools of the Indian uh philosophical teachings of Vita,
here's that that vein of effortlessness, of just being as well.
(23:16):
So what I've done is to educate myself as much
as I can in those traditions and try and okay,
what's the essence? What did they all have in common?
And it's all this teaching of letting go, of just
being and again being in America teaching in two thousand
and eighteen. I always acknowledge that my my debt of
(23:38):
gratitude to those traditions. But we teach this in plain American.
You don't have to learn sanscrit and you don't have
to uh chant mantra, Tibetan mantras or so forth to
in order to practice like this. You can if you want.
I love my seeing mantras in the shower every morning.
But as I always say with especially with my guys
(23:59):
that I were within prison, everything's optional. Thank you. That
was helpful. I was just curious about that evolution for you,
because I could kind of see where it started. And
that's you know, the term natural meditation has often been
in my life. UM. I tried TM in UM in
nineteen seventy, UM, which sounds like about when you started
teaching it. I was um just experimenting, and I was
(24:21):
amazed I could find any kind of meditation in Columbus,
Ohio in nineteen seventy. So let's talk a little bit
then about natural meditation. Um, I just want to read
something you wrote, and then I'm gonna let you just
sort of talk a little bit more about it. But
you describe it like this, we'll be hanging out in tasklessness.
(24:42):
The Italians have a lovely expression for this. I'm gonna
probably pronounce this because I can't speak Italian, dol se
far niente. Okay, don't don't and you have to. You
have to. You have to wave your hand. Yes, there
you go. Don't sweet doing nothing. And then you also
go on to make this analogy, and I thought this
(25:04):
was a really useful because you're saying that if you
leave the mind alone, it's going to settle by itself.
And you say, think of leaves falling from a tree.
They tell the whole story. A falling leaf will reach
the ground in a percent of cases. And then a
little bit later you say, but rather than a leaf
falling to the ground, most people approach meditation like they're
pushing a boulder up a mountain fighting gravity, rather than
(25:26):
using it grunting away at whatever task they've set themselves.
And I think that's such a great way to sort
of frame up the way you think about this. And
now I'm wondering if you could talk just a little
bit about the practice of natural meditation. So listeners are
going to be intrigued by this. They're gonna hear, oh wow,
that that all sounds great. Boy, I have been, you know,
(25:47):
it does feel like I'm fighting my brain every step
of the way. Deems probably onto something here. What do
I do? And you can't teach all that in a
in a five minute answer to a question. But I'm
wondered if you could point in the right direction. Right.
Let me mention, by the way, that there's a page
on my website. My website is Dean words dot com
(26:09):
and there's a page they're called meditate now where I
have guided meditation audio tracks and anyone can stream them
for free. And uh and in those tracks you it's
you know, ten minutes or fifteen minutes, and I'm just
walking you through the thing. I'm guiding you the same
way that I know guide the groups and guide my workshops.
(26:29):
So we're going to talk about it in principle right now.
But people can get the direct experience by going to
that page on my website, wonderful, and I'll link to
it in our show notes for sure. Perfect, thank you.
So yeah. Tasklessness. The thing is, if you set yourself
any kind of task in meditation as meditation, then um,
(26:52):
there's something you're trying to accomplish, and you're creating more
agitation by by trying to create a non agitated state
of mind. Your any effort, any effort that you expand,
is a form of agitation, So you wind up chasing
your tail. If I had a dollar for every time
someone has said to me, well, I tried to meditate,
(27:13):
but it was hard. You know, what I want to
tell them is no, no, no, you tried to meditate,
and therefore it was hard. What I do is I
point out to people that there's a delicious, effortless natural
nous to the way we're experiencing things right now. Right now,
(27:35):
people who are listening to this, they're hearing the sound
of my voice. They are feeling perhaps a chair or
a couch or an automobile seat under their butt. They're
seeing whatever shapes and colors are there before their eyes.
And all of this seeing and feeling and hearing happens
(27:58):
completely completely automatically. They're not expending any effort in order
to have the awareness of the sounds and the and
the smells and the tastes and all of that. Also,
thoughts are there. Also feelings are there, and the thoughts
and the feelings come and go, just like sounds or
(28:19):
or shapes coming and going. There's nothing special about them.
They're just you know, in Buddhist psychology, thinking is considered
to be the sixth sense, so you have hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, thinking,
So thoughts, thoughts are just objects of experience passing through
the scope of our experience, the scope of our the
(28:41):
porthole of our awareness. Just like sounds. There's nothing special
about them, and there's something very liberating and knowing that, Okay,
a thought is there. It's just like a sound being there.
It's just like the texture, the temperature, the air being here.
There's nothing special about it. It's there's nothing I have
to do about it. It's kind of like sitting by
(29:01):
the side of of the lake and you know, you
see the breeze blowing the trees, you see the ripples
on the lake coming and going. Stuff is just slashing
around and we're just sitting there letting it be. There's
nothing we need to do about it now. If we
just sit in this easy way, another thing we may
start to notice is that as all these things come
(29:25):
and go within our awareness, there's one thing that does
not come and go, and that's our awareness itself. Awareness
itself is like open space, right, So if we have
objects here and think of the space of the room
that you're in. If we happen to move the teacup
(29:49):
to a different place on the table, or we move
our guitar from one corner of the room to another,
the objects are moving through the space, but the space
is not affected. Space is always open, it's always free,
it's always space. So our awareness is like space, and
all the different experiences that we have, all the things
(30:11):
we're aware of are like the different objects that sitting
in the space or moving through the space, and space
has plenty of room for everything, and space is not
affected by anything. You know, if I move the teacup
to the other side of the table, it doesn't damage
the space, it doesn't improve the space. So in this
(30:32):
way we can start to notice our awareness itself and go, Okay,
I can just rest in this awareness. I can just
rest in this openness. In this openness, I can just
rest in this natural spaciousness and let everything come and
go within this space in its own natural, frictionless way,
(30:53):
and know that I have no role in it. I'm
just the observer. I'm just the witness. Really, I am
the space because what is that, that's the awareness. I'm
the awareness that's aware of all this stuff. And just
remain like open space, just allow spaciousness to be there,
and whatever is there coming and going within it, let
(31:17):
it come and go within it. And I've actually done
some practices very similar to what you're describing, and was
startled by the fact that actually, some of the time,
for sure, there was a true settling. I was like,
holy mackerel, I'm just leaving my brain alone. Yes, so
(31:37):
you yeah, you did not do anything to make settling happen.
There's nothing you can do to make settling happen, because
any effort is going to be non settling. So and
in fact, often it sneaks up on people when you
lead them in this natural way. It sneaks up on
them and such so naturally and kind of organically and
(32:00):
incrementally that uh, you know, when I ring the little
bell to signal the end of the meditation. People go,
you know, they may startle a little, and I tell
them take the time, opening your eyes, and then they
raised the hands. They go, boy, how long was that?
And often they have no idea. Was it five minutes?
What was it an hour? And that's because you've just
(32:21):
settled deeply into the place, which is really where there's
no time, there's no space, there's no cause and effect.
You're you're truly off the grid, You're truly out of
the matrix. Sometimes people practicing in this way, you may
be practicing at home and feel, no, nothing's really going
on here, you know, I'm kind of wasting my time.
And then suddenly the phone rings you forgot to turn
(32:42):
your phone off, or the cat jumps in your lap,
and you go, uh no, no, no, no, I don't
want to come out of this right now. I guess
I really am settled. So let's talk about the times
(33:27):
that that is not the experience. So, you know, I
love that that idea of that thinking is a sixth sense,
because I do really think that is. I think it's true,
and I think it's a it's a great way to
look at it. However, for a lot of us, it's
as if like all our other senses are blind or
(33:48):
deaf or whatever they are, and so our sixth sense
is so hyper developed that thinking sense is what dominates.
And again I know you're going to object to the
word effort, but that if we don't work on a redirection,
often we sit right in there. And and sometimes that
what I think about with the open space, right, that
(34:10):
awareness is our is our open space, um, and that
we can rest in that awareness and that these things
come and go. And you made the analogy of in
the room, like if I've got this teacup here and
I move it over there, Sometimes it seems like thoughts
aren't a teacup, that they are the size of the
room itself. Yeah. Yeah, Or it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex stomping
through the And so to your point, I think it's
(34:32):
I think it can't be stressed enough. That thought is
not going away, right, That's what our brains do, and
it and it doesn't write, and thought doesn't have to
go away, just as the mind. The the eye doesn't
have to stop seeing colors, and the ear doesn't have
to stop hearing sounds. The mind does not have to
(34:54):
stop entertaining thoughts. I mean, do you think that the
Buddha had to say, oh, no, I'm seeing colors in
this room. I got to close my eyes in order
for me to enjoy my Buddha hood. No, uh, it's
it's it's compatible with everything you know. But in giving
meditation instruction, I don't tell people, okay, just don't do anything.
(35:16):
You're absolutely right. When we're in that situation where it's
just okay, we noticed things are just easily coming and
going um uh, then then find there's nothing we have
to do. Just rest. Is that open space now when
the the when whatever is going on, the thoughts of
the feelings, whatever is going on, seems so intense or
(35:39):
so engaging, it seems like the Tyrannosaurus rects brand paging
through the room. Then there's one more instruction. First of all,
a couple of things not to do. The thing that
what what most people will try to do at that
point is find some way to slay the tyrannosaurs. You
can't it he's bigger than you or or else. Run
(36:02):
away from the tyrannosaurs. You can't. He will outrun you. Okay,
So here's the third thing, The third way is just
when you feel you're you're resisting something, or you're deeply
engaged with something, or you're struggling with something, a thought
of feeling, whatever it is. In meditation, simply this, relax
(36:22):
your grip, relax your grip on it, and then relax
back into yourself. Relax back into that open space of awareness,
and then don't worry about whether it continues to be
there or not, because no matter how big or intense
or troubling or whatever the thought or the emotion is,
(36:44):
it can't do anything to you unless you're gripping it.
We think it's gripping us. We think, oh, the tyrannosaurs
is gripping me. It's if you experiment around a little
bit with this, you'll find and this is a life
changing discovery. It has no power to grip you. Only
you grip it. And once you realize it's you gripping it,
(37:07):
then you realize you have the power to relax your grip.
I used to say let go, and you hear that
a lot in you know, the meditation world, in the
spiritual room. Just let go, just let go. That's valid,
but it gets misunderstood. I don't say let go anymore.
Because people here let go and they think, oh, the
thing has to go away. Let's say I'm trying to
(37:27):
let go, but it keeps being there. No, that's not
letting go. That's like requiring it to go away, which
is a form of holding on. So what you do is,
you know, like, right now, I'm taking a ballpoint pen,
I'm gripping it hard. So this is me, This is
my mind and meditation where I'm starting to engage with
this thing, struggling with it or or resisting it or
(37:47):
whatever it is. Now, if I relax my grip, it
doesn't matter that it's still there, because now my hand
is open to the whole space of the room. And
in fact, once I since I've relaxed my grip, eventually
the thing's going to fall away of its own accord.
But but that's none of my business. It doesn't matter
whether it falls away later or sooner. I love that
(38:09):
relax your grip, recognizing that, you know, feelings might not
be gripping us, we're gripping them. And I think that
let it go. The way I've learned to think about
it is let it be, like you know, because because
they let it go sort of assumes to your point.
Like I remember, like early I was, you know, I
was UM in a a for a number of years,
and that was such a big thing early on in
(38:29):
my recovery. Let it go, Let it go. You just
gotta let it go. And so I would try and
let it go and it wouldn't go anywhere, and I
would think I'm failing, you know, I'm failing. And I
just realized, like it was just I can't I can't
control whether it goes or doesn't go. I can just
control my relationship to it or my gripping or or
(38:50):
not gripping of it. Right, there's a related principle. And
actually I have a chapter about this in the book
UM titled Relax at the Moment of Contacts and UM.
And this came out of this is a I think
a wonderful story. Really years ago, I was practicing I kid,
it's a beautiful, very graceful martial art. It's a non fighting,
(39:14):
non conflict of Japanese martial art where when the other
person attacks you, uh, you joined the direction of the
attack and you go, okay, you want to rush in
this direction towards me, I'll just help you fly across
the room. I'll just help you keep going. And I
was in the dojo one day. I was practicing for
my next promotion test, and the particular thing I was
(39:38):
practicing is where three guys, one after another, all attack
me and try to tackle me. And I'm supposed to
be just helping usher them across the mat, and instead
I kept winding up grappling with them, and then the
first one would pull me down and the other two
would pile on top of me. It was a complete mess.
I was getting more and more frustrated and got up,
dusted myself off of getting I need to do this again.
(40:01):
And suddenly I hear the voice of my my instructor.
He's across the room and he calls out, dean, relax
at the moment of contact. And it came as a
surprise to me because I was so caught up in
in tensing that I didn't realize I was tensing right.
There's a catch twenty two there. That's why sometimes you
need outside intervention. You need that. In this case, I
(40:23):
needed the teacher to point that out to me. So
the next time the guy rushed me, instead of tensing
up and my shoulders rising up towards my ears and
my you know, my my gut tightening up. Instead, I
relaxed and as the guy and I did exactly the
same thing with pivoting my hips and using my arms
(40:44):
as I had before, only now at work. Now we
the guy just went flying across the room, and the
next guy and the next guy. Now, most people are
never going to practice i q do in their lives.
But the real i q do is life. The stuff
that's coming towards you can be the whatever it is
that makes you fearful, whether you're afraid of flying, or
(41:05):
afraid of public speaking, or afraid of you know, asking
that nice attractive person out on a date, or it
could you're you're probably the thing coming. Yet you could
be rage, you know, at the driver on the road
that's cut you off, Or it could be if you
you have a problem with with drink or with drugs
or anything any addictive cravings. When the the that craving
(41:30):
is coming towards you, that rather than do what we've
done before, which is just automatically tense up when we
have that encounter, do the opposite, very deliberately relax at
the moment of contact, just let the thing go past
you and It's so simple, but it's really powerful. Yeah,
that is such a great story that you tell. And
(41:51):
I that's such a great catchphrase, relax at the moment
of contact. And you describe another version of that in
your own life, which I've burienced often. Um, you say,
I once spentner winner in Southeast Iowa, and I will
say I've spent an entire lifetime of winners um in Ohio.
But that that idea of you know, we get cold
(42:12):
and we just tense up. Our shoulders are up, our
whole bodies tight, We're just clenched against it. And you know,
for me, I just found like when I when I
just relaxed into it and stopped the resistance of it
in such a way, you know, the experience of it changes.
I'm still cold, but I'm not miserable in the same way.
And I thought that was another example that you use
(42:34):
that that I've certainly experienced in my own life. So
interesting the way you put that, Okay, I'm cold, but
I'm not miserable, And that recalls a saying that you've
probably heard, which is pain as mandatory, suffering as optional. Yeah.
We interviewed shin Zen Young on the show, who you
probably have at least heard of through your meditation travels.
(42:55):
But he wrote out this equation, you know, um, suffering
equals pain times resistance, and it has lived with me
just constantly, and I it's a lesson I learned over
and over and over again, is that you know, yes,
I mean like I have, I have back pain, and
you know, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse, but it's
(43:17):
always worse when I am like resisting it, when I
am really like fighting it. It shouldn't be here. It
shouldn't be this way, you know. I just I find
that that non resistance is and it really gets to
the heart of your meditation method, right, it's the non
resistance of what's happening in the moment and just knowing
that whatever is happening in the moment is is here.
(43:39):
There's nothing. I once saw what I felt was the
perfect complete meditation instruction on the side of a carton
of Tropicana orange juice. UM. It said, nothing added, nothing
taken away, not from concentrate. That's great. Well, that is
a great place for us to wrap up because we
(44:00):
are out of time. You and I are going to
continue in the post show conversation and we're going to
talk about. You mentioned the idea of on roads to meditation,
ways to sort of go into meditation, and boy, that
has been something over the last year that has fundamentally
changed my meditation practice is having some of those, and
you've got some great ones. So we're going to discuss those. Um.
(44:21):
I'll have links, as we mentioned in the show, notes
to your book, to your homepage all that. But I've
had a great time talking with you. Thank you so
much for coming on. Thank you, it's really been great.
All right bye. If what you just heard was helpful
(44:53):
to you, please consider making a donation to the One
You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot
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to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.
Any effort to create a non agitated state of mind
is itself a form of agitation. Welcome to the one
you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
(00:24):
or you are what you think ring true, and yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
(00:46):
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
(01:14):
this episode is Dean Slider, an award winning author who
has taught meditation and awakenings since nineteen seventy. Dean leads workshops, talks,
and retreats throughout the US and beyond, and has been
featured in The New York Times, USA, Today in Style,
New York Magazine, OH, The Oprah Magazine, and many others.
He is also on the faculty of the West Coast
(01:36):
Writers Conferences. On this episode, Eric and Dean discussed his
book fear Less, Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, Anger and Addiction.
Hi Dean, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, it's great
to be here. It's a pleasure to have you on.
Your book is called fear Less, Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety,
(01:57):
Anger and Addiction. And we will go in to all
that here in a moment, but let's start like we
normally do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's
talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there
are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
(02:18):
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second,
and she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. Well, it's a very powerful story.
(02:41):
I can see why you've used this as the central
metaphor for for your program. Here, Uh, so many levels
to it. I want to go straight to a neurological level. Okay,
we could approximately, we can identify the aggressive wolf with
the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. And that's
(03:03):
the branch of the nervous system, which, when it's activated,
stimulates the fight or flight response that that you know,
whatever is stimulus is out there. We feel, okay, I
have to deal with this in a fearful way, get
the heck out of here, flight, or I have to
deal with it in an aggressive way. Fight. Now we
need that response. You know, we've got caveman cave woman
(03:25):
nervous system still. But unfortunately, in modern life, every time
the garbage truck goes by and you hear that roar,
our cave person nervous system interprets that as, oh, there's
the saber tooth tiger. So our sympathetic nervous system, our
fight or flight response tends to kick in inappropriately. So
(03:48):
the way we balance that the good wealth, so to speak,
is the parasympathetic system, and that's the branch of the
nervous system that does just the opposite, gets us cooled doubt,
gets us settled into the boundless, okay, nous of this
moment as it is the the fact that from a
(04:10):
bigger perspective, that we don't have to panic, we don't
have to run, we don't have to take arms against
what's going on. We can be in harmony with it.
And that parasympathetic system, that good wolf is the one
that we feed through meditative methods. Physiologically, the meditative methods
(04:33):
activate the parasympathetic system and tend to switch off the
sympathetic system. It's a great way for us to go
into this. You know, very early in your book you
you describe that the book is essentially going to focus
on two things. One is practice, so some of the
meditation practices that we can do, and then view, which
(04:53):
is sort of a way of looking at the world.
We're going to spend a fair amount of time on practice,
I think, but I thought let's start with view. Let's
talk about from your perspective, what is right view and
how does it relate to specifically having less fear in
our lives? Right right view? And we want to be
(05:15):
clear here by view We don't mean view in the
sense of opinion. By view. We mean it quite literally
seeing what's in front of you. That's what right view is.
Right view is seeing actual reality rather than our thoughts
about it or are feelings about it. I think of
reality as being what is laid out in front of
(05:37):
us in each moment, and then all our thoughts and
concepts are like a piece of tracing paper we've laid
over it, and then we've drawn all kinds of stuff
and made all kinds of notes and so forth, and
and we're always seeing reality filtered through all of them.
A wonderful example is from the Steven Spielberg film in
(05:57):
two thousand fifteen, Bridge of Spies. I cite this. I
have a chapter about this in the book actually titled
would It Help Uh? And that's the based on the
true story of Rudolph Able, the Soviet spy captured in
New York at the height of the Cold War, and
he's now on trial for his life, and the Russians
and the Americans everyone wants him dead because he's a
(06:19):
very inconvenient person. And his lawyer comes in and explains
all this to him. Fortunately, his lawyer is Tom Hanks,
so you know, probably things will turn out okay. Uh.
But but in any movie, that's right, that's right, you
want Tom on your team. So so Tom explains to
(06:39):
him the dire straits that he's in and and uh
and the spy was played by the wonderful um Uh.
Mark Rilans won an oscar for this role, actually, and
he digests this information for a moment and then he says,
all right, And Hank says, you don't seem worried, and
he says, kind of shrugs, literally says would it help?
(07:04):
And that's the best thing in the film. Actually, when
Mark Ryland's walk, when people spot them on the streets,
they say, hey, Mark, would it help? Uh? I mean
that cuts through so much confusion. I grew up in
a very political family, and I can remember my parents
screaming at the at the TV news, goddamn Richard Nixon.
(07:26):
Uh and uh. And even then I used to wonder,
do they know Nixon can't hear them through the TV screen.
So in this case, one aspect of view is just
seeing that that doesn't help, and that it's actually very right.
View is always liberating. Right view is always liberating when
(07:47):
when you see that that doesn't help. You realize, oh,
I can stop doing that. I don't have to cultivate
stopping that. I don't have to try to push down
my emotions. I just just let that go. I mean,
a very similar thing everyday experience is sitting at the
red You know, when you're sitting at the red light
and you're in a hurry and you tighten your grip
(08:08):
on the steering wheel, you're kind of straining forward in
the seat as you mentally try to make the red
light turn green faster. We've all done that. Now does
it help? No? And the and the extremely good news
here and again this is a matter of view. Is
is realizing that it never has helped, it will never
(08:30):
help you. Can you can just invest hundreds of man
hours or woman hours for the rest of your life
and trying to make the red light turned green faster,
It never will. Now, think of all the other kinds
of red lights in your life, the things that other
people do when you're going no, no, don't say that,
don't do that. It doesn't help you. Can you can
(08:52):
breathe out, you can let that go, And that doesn't
make you less effective in actually helping the situation. It
makes you more effective because you're not burning up energy
straining at this kind of unproductive response. Instead, you've got
more bandwidth open to look around and see, Okay, what
can I do that will help. Yeah. I had my
(09:13):
own version of that just a little while ago, because,
as you know, I was late to this interview because
I was stuck in traffic, and you know, I had
that moment of frustration starting to rise, and then the
you know, and then the realization like there's absolutely nothing
that getting upset is going to do about this. And
and sometimes I'm able to have that clarity of you
(09:35):
and and and other times, you know, I'm not. Um,
I think we're all that way sometimes. I also, particularly
like you quote another writer C. S. Lewis in the
book about this, and I'm just going to read, um,
just a short part of it because I think it's
so useful. And and he's basically talking about the slaughter
(09:56):
and the suffering of the World War Two giving way
to the Cold War. And um, this is what he
said in a letter to a friend. One mustn't assume
burdens that God does not lay upon us. It is
one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that
the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning.
I think each village was meant to feel pity for
(10:16):
its own sick and poor, whom it can help. And
I doubt if it is the duty of any private
person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help.
And then it goes on to say a great many
people do now seem to think that the mere state
of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think
it is. That's so profound, it's sure as thank you
(10:39):
so much for reading that. I just love that quote.
You know that was uh and talk about having all
the woes of the world that are do you know
that was way before internet. Every time I pick up
my phone, it's it's so easy to just swipe right
and there's the headlines, here's the latest disasters. Yeah, he
hadn't even in twenty four hour news. It's so staggering
(11:02):
it and it is one of those things that I
think that good people today wrestle with, yes, which is
I don't want to stick my head in the sand.
I'm a caring person. There's lots of things that are
happening in the world, but I feel like this is
somehow eroding me. How can I respond to this in
a wise way? So what are some things you might
(11:22):
say about that? Well, the first part is, and again
this is a matter of view that uh C. S.
Lewis has articulated so beautifully that the state of worry
is not itself meritorious. The question is would it help?
It doesn't. And you know, kind of the reverse of
that is people feel if they're not worrying, then they're
(11:46):
being flaky, they're not being conscientious, and that's just not true.
They you know, if that were so, then the more worried,
the more stressed you became, the more you would be
helping the world. And if if we think of the
people who have really liked the great great political activists,
you know, and I had all my life, as I say,
(12:08):
you know, starting with the parents that I grew up with,
all my life, I've been around political activists. Um, and
if you think of the ones who have really changed
the world, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr King right, people like that,
Nelson Mandela, As soon as you think of them, you
(12:29):
know that they were not coming from a place of
stress or worry or rage or any of these. Just
you know, negative, negative toxic emotions that so many people
feel their activism has to come from. You know that
people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Dr King, they
were coming from a place of great silence inside and
(12:50):
really from a place of great love inside. And I
think that it's no accident that they're the ones whose
influence continues to affect the exactly I often think of.
Dr Stephen Covey wrote a book, The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People, which I think is a master work.
Gets classified as a business book, but it's not really
(13:11):
in any way, shape or form. But he expounds this
idea of circle of concern versus circle of influence. And
if you think of a big circle with a smaller
circle inside of it, the big circle is your circle
of concern, everything you're concerned about, and the smaller circles
the things you can actually do something about. And his
point is the more time that you spend in your
circle of concern, your circle of influence actually shrinks. And
(13:34):
the more time that you spend in your circle of influence,
the more it grows. And it it speaks to this
exact same point, which is that if I spend all
of my time worrying or being angry or railing at
the television or all of that. Then that dissipates the
energy that I can put into my circle of influence,
which is the place that I can actually make a
(13:56):
positive change in the world. Right absolutely so, So you know,
job one is you have to take care of yourself
and um uh, you know you need to have the
clarity and the balance and the groundedness and and the
genuine compassion to help others. Otherwise you're you're not going
(14:16):
to be making things better, You're going to be making
things worse. It seems like there's been at tension and
this has existed in lots of people for many years
between how much of their time needs to be spent
in contemplation versus in action, you know, in activism and
again to your point, looking at someone like Gandhi, who um,
I don't remember the exact numbers, but apparently spent several
(14:39):
hours a day off on his own in prayer or so.
I think it's one of those tensions that runs through
people in the modern world who are really trying to
live a good life. Is how do I balance those
two elements? Right now? That really brings things into my wheelhouse,
which is that I've functioned as a meditation teacher since
(15:01):
oh my, since nineteen seventy now, uh, and I've had
the incredible opportunity to teach all over the country and
in a few other countries and all different kinds of people.
I've worked for years with kids at a top, top
prep school. I've worked with kids at ivy league colleges.
I've worked with prisoners and maximum security, and with corporate
(15:24):
executives and creative artists. So I've had the great opportunity
to find out what works and to find out how
to share the skills of meditation in a way that
practical people living in you know, the actual world, not
living in a story book about about India in the
(15:47):
Middle Ages, but living in America in two thousand and eighteen.
How can actual people integrate meditative practice into their lives
in a way that they really can do it and
it really will do it, and that it's really a
fact to now. The key that I've been fortunate enough
to learn from my own teachers is to take a
(16:08):
natural approach to meditation. I wrote a book actually with
the title Natural Meditation Um. Usually when people hear the
word meditation, they think of trying to control the mind.
I mean, when I meet someone at a party, they say,
what do you do? I'm a meditation teacher. They say, oh,
I tried to meditate, but it was so hard. I
(16:29):
couldn't concentrate, I couldn't clear my mind, that I couldn't
make the thoughts stop coming. And that's the really kind
of most widespread conception, I would say, misconception about what
meditation is that you're trying to control the mind. Now
here's the problem with that approach, and there's no way
around this problem if if you take that approach, which
(16:51):
is that any effort to create a non agitated state
of mind is itself a form of agitation? Are right? Okay,
I'm gonna try real hard to just be. It's a
contradiction in terms. So the approach and natural meditation is
(17:11):
we start by noticing how the mind naturally works all
the time, and what the mind naturally is doing all
the time is seeking happiness, it's seeking fulfillment, it's seeking
that moment you know, after you you drink the tea
and you say ah, and you go through whatever you
need to go through. You you buy the tea, bags
(17:31):
and you boil the water and you pour the water
in the kettle. All that it's all aimed at getting
at that moment, to that moment of saying ah. Everything
else is a means to that end okay. And it's
because we're built that way. The mind is seeking that
sense of that sense of just o kayness, nothing else
that needs to be done for me to just bask
(17:52):
in this moment. The mind is seeking that all the time. Now,
the good news, as all the stage is, whether it's
the Buddha or Jesus or Shankarra or Louts or Socrates,
the Balsamtov, all the stages in their different language, say
one way or another that there is an awe that
(18:13):
never ends, that's not dependent on outer circumstances, and it's
your own inmost core of being. So all we need
to do is get the mind turned just a little
bit turned in that direction and let go of all
our effort. And then and then the mind's natural gravitation
(18:33):
toward that happiness, towards that piece and that silence, that
gravity just pulls us within. So when I lead meditation,
and I do this in workshops all over the country,
um and also I have a actually we have a
group that meets here in Santa Monica usually every other
Tuesday night, and now we broadcast that live on YouTube.
(18:55):
That will be tonight on YouTube. Actually, so what I
do is simply I gently guide people, show them how
to let go of effort, and then the gravity takes over. Now,
when you practice in that way, it doesn't take a
whole lot of time out of your day. This is
coming back to your presenting question here. When people think,
(19:15):
and you'll hear this a lot from people, oh yeah,
meditation has really changed my life, but you have to
practice for two hours a day. Now. The reason you
hear that is that the way most people practice meditation
trying to concentrate, trying to control the mind, that's very strenuous.
It takes a lot of effort. So they're sitting there
for an hour and forty five minutes beating their head
(19:37):
against the wall, so to speak. And then finally they
get so tired, the mind gets so exhausted trying to
do this unnatural act of concentration that finally the mind
gives up and it finally just sinks. And then that
last fifteen minutes is just ah, there, it is so
(19:58):
what fortunate well I've learned from my teachers is how
to skip the first hour and minutes, go go straight
to the to the just letting go and sinking part.
And that's how I teach meditation. What I thought was
(20:46):
interesting about your meditation, and knowing a little bit about
your past and your teachers, is that the style of
meditation you describe, the natural meditation right, sounds very much
like something I learned from Adi Shanty, like the way
he recommends a meditation. But when I first heard natural meditation,
(21:08):
I thought this guy might be a t M guy,
because that's the way transcendental meditation UM is often described.
It's natural, It's just natural. And I think based on UM,
what sounds like some of your previous work you you
did do transcendental meditation, is that, Yes, I learned and
practiced uh TM, and I became a TM teacher and
(21:30):
I worked in the TM organization. I taught probably a
couple of thousand people TM and all over the country
for for several years. So you're right, the basic principle
of effortlessness is there in TM, but it's not exclusively
there in t M. And one of the reasons that
I eventually went my my own way uh and and
(21:54):
stopped teaching through the TM organization. Um. There were a
number of and by the way, I still have some
of my best friends are our TM teachers. UM. But
I personally had to go my one was because they
started charging I thought too much money. Uh. And you know,
(22:15):
the the original idea was let's share this with everyone.
And secondly, there's a tendency there to feel that TM
is the only form of effortless meditation, that that we've
got a monopoly on it. And in fact they're right
that most meditation is taught in terms of effort and concentration,
(22:35):
but not Allso once I had to go my way
from from TM, that really form the direction of my search.
And I found oh here in within the Tibetan teachings,
there's this Tibetan teaching called so chen or um. It
(22:55):
goes by by other names in other schools of Tibetan
Buddhism um Haamudra or a Ti yoga. And oh here
in certain schools of the Indian uh philosophical teachings of Vita,
here's that that vein of effortlessness, of just being as well.
(23:16):
So what I've done is to educate myself as much
as I can in those traditions and try and okay,
what's the essence? What did they all have in common?
And it's all this teaching of letting go, of just
being and again being in America teaching in two thousand
and eighteen. I always acknowledge that my my debt of
(23:38):
gratitude to those traditions. But we teach this in plain American.
You don't have to learn sanscrit and you don't have
to uh chant mantra, Tibetan mantras or so forth to
in order to practice like this. You can if you want.
I love my seeing mantras in the shower every morning.
But as I always say with especially with my guys
(23:59):
that I were within prison, everything's optional. Thank you. That
was helpful. I was just curious about that evolution for you,
because I could kind of see where it started. And
that's you know, the term natural meditation has often been
in my life. UM. I tried TM in UM in
nineteen seventy, UM, which sounds like about when you started
teaching it. I was um just experimenting, and I was
(24:21):
amazed I could find any kind of meditation in Columbus,
Ohio in nineteen seventy. So let's talk a little bit
then about natural meditation. Um, I just want to read
something you wrote, and then I'm gonna let you just
sort of talk a little bit more about it. But
you describe it like this, we'll be hanging out in tasklessness.
(24:42):
The Italians have a lovely expression for this. I'm gonna
probably pronounce this because I can't speak Italian, dol se
far niente. Okay, don't don't and you have to. You
have to. You have to wave your hand. Yes, there
you go. Don't sweet doing nothing. And then you also
go on to make this analogy, and I thought this
(25:04):
was a really useful because you're saying that if you
leave the mind alone, it's going to settle by itself.
And you say, think of leaves falling from a tree.
They tell the whole story. A falling leaf will reach
the ground in a percent of cases. And then a
little bit later you say, but rather than a leaf
falling to the ground, most people approach meditation like they're
pushing a boulder up a mountain fighting gravity, rather than
(25:26):
using it grunting away at whatever task they've set themselves.
And I think that's such a great way to sort
of frame up the way you think about this. And
now I'm wondering if you could talk just a little
bit about the practice of natural meditation. So listeners are
going to be intrigued by this. They're gonna hear, oh wow,
that that all sounds great. Boy, I have been, you know,
(25:47):
it does feel like I'm fighting my brain every step
of the way. Deems probably onto something here. What do
I do? And you can't teach all that in a
in a five minute answer to a question. But I'm
wondered if you could point in the right direction. Right.
Let me mention, by the way, that there's a page
on my website. My website is Dean words dot com
(26:09):
and there's a page they're called meditate now where I
have guided meditation audio tracks and anyone can stream them
for free. And uh and in those tracks you it's
you know, ten minutes or fifteen minutes, and I'm just
walking you through the thing. I'm guiding you the same
way that I know guide the groups and guide my workshops.
(26:29):
So we're going to talk about it in principle right now.
But people can get the direct experience by going to
that page on my website, wonderful, and I'll link to
it in our show notes for sure. Perfect, thank you.
So yeah. Tasklessness. The thing is, if you set yourself
any kind of task in meditation as meditation, then um,
(26:52):
there's something you're trying to accomplish, and you're creating more
agitation by by trying to create a non agitated state
of mind. Your any effort, any effort that you expand,
is a form of agitation, So you wind up chasing
your tail. If I had a dollar for every time
someone has said to me, well, I tried to meditate,
(27:13):
but it was hard. You know, what I want to
tell them is no, no, no, you tried to meditate,
and therefore it was hard. What I do is I
point out to people that there's a delicious, effortless natural
nous to the way we're experiencing things right now. Right now,
(27:35):
people who are listening to this, they're hearing the sound
of my voice. They are feeling perhaps a chair or
a couch or an automobile seat under their butt. They're
seeing whatever shapes and colors are there before their eyes.
And all of this seeing and feeling and hearing happens
(27:58):
completely completely automatically. They're not expending any effort in order
to have the awareness of the sounds and the and
the smells and the tastes and all of that. Also,
thoughts are there. Also feelings are there, and the thoughts
and the feelings come and go, just like sounds or
(28:19):
or shapes coming and going. There's nothing special about them.
They're just you know, in Buddhist psychology, thinking is considered
to be the sixth sense, so you have hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, thinking,
So thoughts, thoughts are just objects of experience passing through
the scope of our experience, the scope of our the
(28:41):
porthole of our awareness. Just like sounds. There's nothing special
about them, and there's something very liberating and knowing that, Okay,
a thought is there. It's just like a sound being there.
It's just like the texture, the temperature, the air being here.
There's nothing special about it. It's there's nothing I have
to do about it. It's kind of like sitting by
(29:01):
the side of of the lake and you know, you
see the breeze blowing the trees, you see the ripples
on the lake coming and going. Stuff is just slashing
around and we're just sitting there letting it be. There's
nothing we need to do about it now. If we
just sit in this easy way, another thing we may
start to notice is that as all these things come
(29:25):
and go within our awareness, there's one thing that does
not come and go, and that's our awareness itself. Awareness
itself is like open space, right, So if we have
objects here and think of the space of the room
that you're in. If we happen to move the teacup
(29:49):
to a different place on the table, or we move
our guitar from one corner of the room to another,
the objects are moving through the space, but the space
is not affected. Space is always open, it's always free,
it's always space. So our awareness is like space, and
all the different experiences that we have, all the things
(30:11):
we're aware of are like the different objects that sitting
in the space or moving through the space, and space
has plenty of room for everything, and space is not
affected by anything. You know, if I move the teacup
to the other side of the table, it doesn't damage
the space, it doesn't improve the space. So in this
(30:32):
way we can start to notice our awareness itself and go, Okay,
I can just rest in this awareness. I can just
rest in this openness. In this openness, I can just
rest in this natural spaciousness and let everything come and
go within this space in its own natural, frictionless way,
(30:53):
and know that I have no role in it. I'm
just the observer. I'm just the witness. Really, I am
the space because what is that, that's the awareness. I'm
the awareness that's aware of all this stuff. And just
remain like open space, just allow spaciousness to be there,
and whatever is there coming and going within it, let
(31:17):
it come and go within it. And I've actually done
some practices very similar to what you're describing, and was
startled by the fact that actually, some of the time,
for sure, there was a true settling. I was like,
holy mackerel, I'm just leaving my brain alone. Yes, so
(31:37):
you yeah, you did not do anything to make settling happen.
There's nothing you can do to make settling happen, because
any effort is going to be non settling. So and
in fact, often it sneaks up on people when you
lead them in this natural way. It sneaks up on
them and such so naturally and kind of organically and
(32:00):
incrementally that uh, you know, when I ring the little
bell to signal the end of the meditation. People go,
you know, they may startle a little, and I tell
them take the time, opening your eyes, and then they
raised the hands. They go, boy, how long was that?
And often they have no idea. Was it five minutes?
What was it an hour? And that's because you've just
(32:21):
settled deeply into the place, which is really where there's
no time, there's no space, there's no cause and effect.
You're you're truly off the grid, You're truly out of
the matrix. Sometimes people practicing in this way, you may
be practicing at home and feel, no, nothing's really going
on here, you know, I'm kind of wasting my time.
And then suddenly the phone rings you forgot to turn
(32:42):
your phone off, or the cat jumps in your lap,
and you go, uh no, no, no, no, I don't
want to come out of this right now. I guess
I really am settled. So let's talk about the times
(33:27):
that that is not the experience. So, you know, I
love that that idea of that thinking is a sixth sense,
because I do really think that is. I think it's true,
and I think it's a it's a great way to
look at it. However, for a lot of us, it's
as if like all our other senses are blind or
(33:48):
deaf or whatever they are, and so our sixth sense
is so hyper developed that thinking sense is what dominates.
And again I know you're going to object to the
word effort, but that if we don't work on a redirection,
often we sit right in there. And and sometimes that
what I think about with the open space, right, that
(34:10):
awareness is our is our open space, um, and that
we can rest in that awareness and that these things
come and go. And you made the analogy of in
the room, like if I've got this teacup here and
I move it over there, Sometimes it seems like thoughts
aren't a teacup, that they are the size of the
room itself. Yeah. Yeah, Or it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex stomping
through the And so to your point, I think it's
(34:32):
I think it can't be stressed enough. That thought is
not going away, right, That's what our brains do, and
it and it doesn't write, and thought doesn't have to
go away, just as the mind. The the eye doesn't
have to stop seeing colors, and the ear doesn't have
to stop hearing sounds. The mind does not have to
(34:54):
stop entertaining thoughts. I mean, do you think that the
Buddha had to say, oh, no, I'm seeing colors in
this room. I got to close my eyes in order
for me to enjoy my Buddha hood. No, uh, it's
it's it's compatible with everything you know. But in giving
meditation instruction, I don't tell people, okay, just don't do anything.
(35:16):
You're absolutely right. When we're in that situation where it's
just okay, we noticed things are just easily coming and
going um uh, then then find there's nothing we have
to do. Just rest. Is that open space now when
the the when whatever is going on, the thoughts of
the feelings, whatever is going on, seems so intense or
(35:39):
so engaging, it seems like the Tyrannosaurus rects brand paging
through the room. Then there's one more instruction. First of all,
a couple of things not to do. The thing that
what what most people will try to do at that
point is find some way to slay the tyrannosaurs. You
can't it he's bigger than you or or else. Run
(36:02):
away from the tyrannosaurs. You can't. He will outrun you. Okay,
So here's the third thing, The third way is just
when you feel you're you're resisting something, or you're deeply
engaged with something, or you're struggling with something, a thought
of feeling, whatever it is. In meditation, simply this, relax
(36:22):
your grip, relax your grip on it, and then relax
back into yourself. Relax back into that open space of awareness,
and then don't worry about whether it continues to be
there or not, because no matter how big or intense
or troubling or whatever the thought or the emotion is,
(36:44):
it can't do anything to you unless you're gripping it.
We think it's gripping us. We think, oh, the tyrannosaurs
is gripping me. It's if you experiment around a little
bit with this, you'll find and this is a life
changing discovery. It has no power to grip you. Only
you grip it. And once you realize it's you gripping it,
(37:07):
then you realize you have the power to relax your grip.
I used to say let go, and you hear that
a lot in you know, the meditation world, in the
spiritual room. Just let go, just let go. That's valid,
but it gets misunderstood. I don't say let go anymore.
Because people here let go and they think, oh, the
thing has to go away. Let's say I'm trying to
(37:27):
let go, but it keeps being there. No, that's not
letting go. That's like requiring it to go away, which
is a form of holding on. So what you do is,
you know, like, right now, I'm taking a ballpoint pen,
I'm gripping it hard. So this is me, This is
my mind and meditation where I'm starting to engage with
this thing, struggling with it or or resisting it or
(37:47):
whatever it is. Now, if I relax my grip, it
doesn't matter that it's still there, because now my hand
is open to the whole space of the room. And
in fact, once I since I've relaxed my grip, eventually
the thing's going to fall away of its own accord.
But but that's none of my business. It doesn't matter
whether it falls away later or sooner. I love that
(38:09):
relax your grip, recognizing that, you know, feelings might not
be gripping us, we're gripping them. And I think that
let it go. The way I've learned to think about
it is let it be, like you know, because because
they let it go sort of assumes to your point.
Like I remember, like early I was, you know, I
was UM in a a for a number of years,
and that was such a big thing early on in
(38:29):
my recovery. Let it go, Let it go. You just
gotta let it go. And so I would try and
let it go and it wouldn't go anywhere, and I
would think I'm failing, you know, I'm failing. And I
just realized, like it was just I can't I can't
control whether it goes or doesn't go. I can just
control my relationship to it or my gripping or or
(38:50):
not gripping of it. Right, there's a related principle. And
actually I have a chapter about this in the book
UM titled Relax at the Moment of Contacts and UM.
And this came out of this is a I think
a wonderful story. Really years ago, I was practicing I kid,
it's a beautiful, very graceful martial art. It's a non fighting,
(39:14):
non conflict of Japanese martial art where when the other
person attacks you, uh, you joined the direction of the
attack and you go, okay, you want to rush in
this direction towards me, I'll just help you fly across
the room. I'll just help you keep going. And I
was in the dojo one day. I was practicing for
my next promotion test, and the particular thing I was
(39:38):
practicing is where three guys, one after another, all attack
me and try to tackle me. And I'm supposed to
be just helping usher them across the mat, and instead
I kept winding up grappling with them, and then the
first one would pull me down and the other two
would pile on top of me. It was a complete mess.
I was getting more and more frustrated and got up,
dusted myself off of getting I need to do this again.
(40:01):
And suddenly I hear the voice of my my instructor.
He's across the room and he calls out, dean, relax
at the moment of contact. And it came as a
surprise to me because I was so caught up in
in tensing that I didn't realize I was tensing right.
There's a catch twenty two there. That's why sometimes you
need outside intervention. You need that. In this case, I
(40:23):
needed the teacher to point that out to me. So
the next time the guy rushed me, instead of tensing
up and my shoulders rising up towards my ears and
my you know, my my gut tightening up. Instead, I
relaxed and as the guy and I did exactly the
same thing with pivoting my hips and using my arms
(40:44):
as I had before, only now at work. Now we
the guy just went flying across the room, and the
next guy and the next guy. Now, most people are
never going to practice i q do in their lives.
But the real i q do is life. The stuff
that's coming towards you can be the whatever it is
that makes you fearful, whether you're afraid of flying, or
(41:05):
afraid of public speaking, or afraid of you know, asking
that nice attractive person out on a date, or it
could you're you're probably the thing coming. Yet you could
be rage, you know, at the driver on the road
that's cut you off, Or it could be if you
you have a problem with with drink or with drugs
or anything any addictive cravings. When the the that craving
(41:30):
is coming towards you, that rather than do what we've
done before, which is just automatically tense up when we
have that encounter, do the opposite, very deliberately relax at
the moment of contact, just let the thing go past
you and It's so simple, but it's really powerful. Yeah,
that is such a great story that you tell. And
(41:51):
I that's such a great catchphrase, relax at the moment
of contact. And you describe another version of that in
your own life, which I've burienced often. Um, you say,
I once spentner winner in Southeast Iowa, and I will
say I've spent an entire lifetime of winners um in Ohio.
But that that idea of you know, we get cold
(42:12):
and we just tense up. Our shoulders are up, our
whole bodies tight, We're just clenched against it. And you know,
for me, I just found like when I when I
just relaxed into it and stopped the resistance of it
in such a way, you know, the experience of it changes.
I'm still cold, but I'm not miserable in the same way.
And I thought that was another example that you use
(42:34):
that that I've certainly experienced in my own life. So
interesting the way you put that, Okay, I'm cold, but
I'm not miserable, And that recalls a saying that you've
probably heard, which is pain as mandatory, suffering as optional. Yeah.
We interviewed shin Zen Young on the show, who you
probably have at least heard of through your meditation travels.
(42:55):
But he wrote out this equation, you know, um, suffering
equals pain times resistance, and it has lived with me
just constantly, and I it's a lesson I learned over
and over and over again, is that you know, yes,
I mean like I have, I have back pain, and
you know, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse, but it's
(43:17):
always worse when I am like resisting it, when I
am really like fighting it. It shouldn't be here. It
shouldn't be this way, you know. I just I find
that that non resistance is and it really gets to
the heart of your meditation method, right, it's the non
resistance of what's happening in the moment and just knowing
that whatever is happening in the moment is is here.
(43:39):
There's nothing. I once saw what I felt was the
perfect complete meditation instruction on the side of a carton
of Tropicana orange juice. UM. It said, nothing added, nothing
taken away, not from concentrate. That's great. Well, that is
a great place for us to wrap up because we
(44:00):
are out of time. You and I are going to
continue in the post show conversation and we're going to
talk about. You mentioned the idea of on roads to meditation,
ways to sort of go into meditation, and boy, that
has been something over the last year that has fundamentally
changed my meditation practice is having some of those, and
you've got some great ones. So we're going to discuss those. Um.
(44:21):
I'll have links, as we mentioned in the show, notes
to your book, to your homepage all that. But I've
had a great time talking with you. Thank you so
much for coming on. Thank you, it's really been great.
All right bye. If what you just heard was helpful
(44:53):
to you, please consider making a donation to the One
You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot
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to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.
Host
Eric Zimmer
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