Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - A Buddhist Recipe For Confidence | Ethan Nichtern

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Cultivating resilience in the face of whatever comes up.Ethan Nichtern is the author of Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds and several other titles, including the widely acclaimed The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path. A renowned contemporary Buddhist teacher and the host of The Road Home Podcast, Nichtern has offered meditation and Buddhist psychology classes at conferences, meditation centers, yoga studios, and universities, including Brown, Yale, and NYU. He has been featured by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, Vogue, and Business Insider and has written for the Huffington Post, Beliefnet, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and more. He lives in Brooklyn. Visit him online at http://www.EthanNichtern.com.In this episode we talk about:Authentic vs performative confidenceThe line between humility and confidenceA Buddhist list called the Eight Worldly WindsA slew of little practices you can do in order to boost your confidence (or resilience or equanimity)The meaning of self-confidence in a tradition that argues the self is an illusionRelated Episodes:A Buddhist Approach to Money Worries | Ethan NichternThe Dharma of the Princess Bride | Ethan NichternHow To Get Ahead At Work, Buddhist-Style | David Nichtern#574. Do You Feel Like an Imposter? | Dr. Valerie Young (Co-Interviewed by Dan's Wife, Bianca!)Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/ethan-nichtern-819See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How are we doing today? Confidence is a really interesting subject. So many people I know suffer from a lack of it, hence the joint interviews I've conducted

on this show with my wife on the subject of imposter syndrome. Many of us, however, also suffer from a surplus of confidence, which, interestingly, is often a surface presentation, papering over a deep lack of confidence. From the Buddhist perspective, however, confidence is not cockiness. It's something way deeper. It's a kind of resilience in the face of whatever comes up.

My guest today calls it, holding your seat. This is Ethan Nickturn's third appearance on this show. He's a Buddhist teacher and author. His new book is called, Confidence. We talk about authentic versus performative confidence, the line between humility and confidence, a Buddhist list called, The Eight Worldly Winds. That's a fascinating list actually,

and he built this book around that list, so we're gonna dive into it pretty deeply. We also talk about a slew of little practices you can do in order to boost your confidence or resilience or equanimity, whatever you want to call it, and the meaning of self-confidence in a tradition that argues the self is an illusion. We'll get started with Ethan Nickturn right after this.

But first some blatant self-promotion, this will be quick. One of the biggest problems that many of us face in terms of keeping our meditation habit going is that we don't know other people who do it and actually having that social support can be a huge, huge deal. And actually having that social support can be a huge, huge deal, which is the operating thesis behind the meditation party retreats that I've been throwing with Jeff Warren and Seben A. Selassie. We've got another one coming up on October 11th at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.

You can do it in person or online. BIPOC scholarships are available. Go to eomega.org for more information. Meanwhile, I want to put inga.org for more information. Meanwhile, I want to put in a summertime pitch for the 10% Happier App. Whether you're soaking up the sun or gearing up for fall, the library of over 500 guided meditations can help you stay relaxed and present. Download the 10% Happier App right now wherever you get your apps. Listening to Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice,

any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Listening can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits, and ultimately your overall well-being. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception, along with popular podcasts and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app. Enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things, household chores, exercising on the road, commuting, you name it. My wife,

Bianca and I have been listening to many audiobooks as we drive around for summer vacations. We listen to Life by Keith Richards. Keith, if you're listening, I'd love to have you on the show. We also listen to Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. And Yuval, if you're listening to this, we would also love to have you on this show. So audio books, yes, audible, yes, love it.

There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30 day audible trial and your first audio book is free. Visit audible.ca visit audible.ca. Audible.ca. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in

history. This season we are revisiting the life of Cecil Rhodes. From sickly child to diamond tycoon to leading colonialist in South Africa, he was a bastion of British imperialism. Over the past few years, campuses around the world have been met with students chanting, Rhodes must fall. His legacy has been completely transformed.

Follow legacy now wherever you get your podcasts. Ethan Nickter, and welcome back to the show. Thank you, sir. It's great to be back with you. Likewise. So why confidence? Do you prefer confidence or self-confidence? It's a really good question. I mean confidence because this is my fourth book in the mindfulness and Buddhist kind of realm and I always try to write something slightly different and something that I've really been working with. And I think specifically with confidence because it's been something I've always worked with

and struggled with. And whenever I talk to the many people I talk to about meditation, mindfulness, Buddhist psychology. When we delve one step below the basics, this idea of how to show up to life with confidence and struggling with confidence is almost always some version of where the conversation goes. So I wanted to really look into both what the Buddhist teachings might say about confidence, what my own experience is, what some modern movements in Western psychology may have to add. In terms of self-confidence versus confidence, I do think that the confidence that this book is about is about trusting ourselves. In the introduction, I talk about this seeming irony

or perhaps even contradiction or dissonance that from a Buddhist standpoint, one of the central philosophical and psychological insights of Buddhism is there is no solid self. So that question of if there's no self, how can there be self-confidence is an intriguing question. But I also think we don't have to get too philosophical about it. We're talking about having confidence in our own experience and our own ability to show up to whatever our mind and whatever the world throws at us. So I think they're one in the same. But we could definitely talk about what are we having confidence in if there's no solid self. Right. There are a bunch of things in your opening salvo there that I do want to follow

up on, but since we're on this self part. My take on that, I'd be curious to see if you think this is correct, is yeah, so in Buddhism there's a kind of often misunderstood assertion that there is no self, but actually there's no solid or separate self. So you can't find some core nugget of Ethan to the extent that Ethan exists, which he does, it's in relationship to the rest of the world, the rest of the universe. It's inextricably interwoven. That's one part of it. And even if you don't get what I'm saying, the other part of it I think is easier to get, which is that there are kind of two things that are true at the same time. One is that on the level of consensual reality, of course we all exist.

I'm talking to you, you're talking to me, people who are listening right now who are producers and people who are out listening this asynchronously, who are consumers of the show, we all exist. On a deeper level, yeah, you can't find some little globule behind Ethan's eyes between his ears. That is the distilled Ethan that just doesn't exist. And it's kind of like the difference between me sitting on this chair and having confidence that it's a chair while knowing that at the ultimate level it's spinning subatomic particles. And so to me, you can get wrapped around the axle

in this debate about the self, but it's actually on some level, like could be a distraction in this conversation. Yeah, I think so. There's different ways that this is talked about. Mark Epstein talks about the difference between the functional self, which is you and I having

this conversation, living our lives, trying to figure out our experience. If there's no self, then whose podcast is this? What he says that Buddhism calls into question is the representational self. Another way that's put that I note in the introduction is that when you actually get into what Buddhist philosophy says, is it only questions certain aspects of the self, like its permanence, its independence, right? Its particular sense of singularity and like it's me at the center of the universe and sort of this feeling. And I think this really relates to confidence is, is the need to be seen as subjectively more important

than other selves, right? But at the same time, we're on this path and we're interested in these ideas and these practices because we do exist and we're trying to figure out how to be in the world. And we're not gonna transcend that experience, and all kinds of experiences come up that really make us have to figure out how to show up,

and how to work with things as they are, and instill a lot of fears in us, and we have to say, how do I work with those? How do I show up? So it's kind of moot, right? The question of is there a self in Buddhism is really about looking at the ways we act on the false belief that we are solid. But the idea that we're here and we care about our lives and we exist relative to each other and we're born and

we live and we die, that's just observational. That's just what's going on. So I think we could get a little too sophisticated. It's useful to get sophisticated and Buddhist philosophy does a really great job of getting sophisticated. But at the end of the day, it's sort of like, yeah, so now I have to put on my pants and try to be a grown ass person. You know, how do I do that? Exactly. Let me go back to some of the things you said earlier. You said that you've struggled with confidence for a while. What's that about? It's an ongoing struggle.

That idea of trying to figure out how to be and show up, show up to myself, show up in relationships, show up if we're trying to achieve anything. I mean, in some ways, wouldn't you say that your formative experience on the meditation and Dharma path was, you had one of the most famous panic attacks in Dharmic history now it is, right? Isn't that sort of a working with confidence and working with that struggle?

But I've had those experiences too. I show up to teach and go, why the hell does anybody think I know more than them? Why are all these people listening to me? You have longings to succeed and you say like, is this going to succeed? Are they going to answer my text? Am I going to get this book published?

Am I going to be a good friend or a good father? These are all the kind of questions of the struggle. So I think anybody who says they don't struggle with confidence is lying a little bit. Last night I was having some dinner with some friends and I was talking about, I like to brag about the fact that my wife is working on a book and the book's about imposter syndrome. And we've been running this experiment, well, I've been running the experiment, which is that every time we're in a social setting,

I tell everybody she's writing this book because I want to see what people's reactions are. And uniformly, women are like panting and just like, I need this book, this is such a huge issue. And men stare at us with bovine indifference. This is a gross generalization, but there is some rough gender breakdown. And this is obviously using the outmoded gender binary here, a gross generalization, but there is some rough gender breakdown.

And this is obviously using the outmoded gender binary here, but like among the men that I know, there are some who are totally open and willing to talk about their lack of confidence, but there are many who have just never thought about this before or were programmed or socialized us men to just raisingly display confidence all the time that it's not a thing where we feel comfortable looking at. Right, yeah, I think that's true.

I think, you know, again, insofar as generalizations and gender can be made, obviously, it's something I've heard some rough generalizations about patriarchy and so forth does create different roles. And a lot of the women I know sometimes feel like to even show up to something they have to show up perfectly right and men are just like I'm gonna just throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks but I also think if men are really claiming to not know what imposter syndrome is they're kind of lying well they may not have

heard the term, but usually once beyond that explains it to them, they understand. I'm surprised by how many men are like, yeah, that's just not a problem I have. And there may be a certain amount of denial rather than lying, or maybe there's some lying too. I don't know. One of the jokes, and this is a common joke that I hear, but like one of the women at the table last night was making the joke about how she wished she could muster

the same confidence as all the mediocre white men she knew. Oh yeah. Which is hilarious. And we got two of them right here. Exactly, everybody at the table last night who was pale said the same thing, yeah. Yeah, Lord grant me the confidence of a, you see that meme on social media a lot, Lord grant me the confidence of a, you see that meme on social media a lot,

Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man. That's another way of looking at this. I mean, part of the inspiration for writing this book was we live in the age of influencers. We live in the age where we saw our country saw the first reality TV president of all time. And I mean, as a man, I like talking about my struggles with confidence, because I think

we also live in an era of a lot of false confidence, a lot of performative confidence. Like I got this. Rather than, okay, I'm going to work with my heart, I'm going to work with my mind, and I'm going to show up to the struggle. One of the things I see on social media is there's certainly a lot of bluster, you're right, false confidence, curation, the building up of brands and personas that seem to be in a state of bulletproof bliss. There are, however, if you look at social media, there's a lot of people advertising

their mental health diagnoses as well. So there's like kind of a whole subgenre. It's maybe even now like the main genre of people talking about not how confident they are, but how messed up they are. Right, right. Yeah, and I think it's an interesting balance, right? You know, where if you look at the framework

of the Four Noble Truths that our teachings have, that the first step is always to acknowledge a problem, right, acknowledge some kind of dissatisfaction, teachings have that the first step is always to acknowledge a problem, right? Acknowledge some kind of dissatisfaction, some kind of confusion, some kind of struggle. So here if we're talking about confidence, that first step might be to acknowledge just insecurity, right? And I think there is a kind of, you're right, the diagnostic quality, there is more of that sort of in the mental health slash spiritual realm, there is more of this kind of diagnosis of, oh, I have the problem.

And on the other extreme, there's a lot of people saying, I'm fine, I'm good, or I have found the trademarked quick fix solution to the problem. The great thing about Buddhism is it doesn't promise easy solutions and it doesn't ignore the problem. So I think we have to work with that if we're going to talk about insecurity or difficulty with confidences. We have to say, okay, we can actually settle into the confusion or the suffering or the dissatisfaction here. And we can say, I would like to be able to, as I call it in the book, hold my seat more completely when life strikes, when I feel like an imposter or feel however I feel, and that will lead to some evolution so that I'm not stuck with the problem.

Right. Right. So it's not necessarily having a solution, it's about having a path, you know, and that's what I say in the beginning and end of the book. Confidence for me, it's not an end point, it's a practice. So when you say, Emma, are you a confident person? The Buddhist standpoint would be like, well, I practice confidence rather than I have it

or I don't have it, you know? I'm just writing that down, I like that a lot. It's not about having a solution, it's about having a path. It's like I have not solved confidence or I have not solved my relationship to the constant change in the universe.

I have not solved anything, but I do have a practice that allows me to handle it better some percentage of the time. Yeah. Yeah. You have become one of the biggest voices in mindfulness and Buddhism in the North American world, but you often, I noticed you did this because my dad was just on your podcast, you often say, now I'm no expert in any of this, right? You take extra steps to disavow your expertise.

Is that, are you afraid of getting sued? I don't know. Honestly, that is, I might do it sometimes as an unhelpful, falsely modest tick. So I'm open to that, just as a brief digression. For a long time, I had this tick. Yeah,'m open to that. Just as a brief digression, for a long time I had this tick, yeah I think you'll probably hear it in some of my early episodes where I would just kind of lazily just refer to myself as an asshole a lot, which is funny

once or twice but then I got the feedback over time that like I was overdoing it and I really tried to pay attention to that. I mean sometimes I'll make jokes about being an asshole but like the shtick was getting a little tired. And so it's possible that that's happening too on the, oh, I'm no expert. But what I really mean by that word I'm trying to signal is that I'm not a Buddhist scholar. I have some understanding of the Dharma after having written a few books and 700 episodes or whatever many we've done on the show. I know a little bit, but I'm not a true Buddhist scholar, you know, the venerable Annalio who's been on the show or Bikkubodi or something

like that to come on the show and really know what they're talking about. And then the other thing is not only am I not a Buddhist scholar, I'm not a meditation teacher. I have not done the amount of training that you, Ethan, have done on the cushion to really present myself as a meditation teacher. So what I'm really trying to do is like caveat emptor here, like that and I wanna protect myself and the listener if I make a mistake. Right, right, right.

So there is an aspect of putting oneself out there that includes a little bit of humility and a little bit of context, yeah. That's a good word, humility, because the line between humility and confidence is an interesting one to look at because you can be falsely humble, and I've done that and I've made that mistake

and will probably continue to on bad days. But you do wanna be genuinely humble, and actually in some weird way, I can kinda connect that to being confident. Right. Yeah, I think in their true expression, they're flip sides of the same coin in a way, right? Because humble is the aspect of like, I don't know what I don't know. And the more you know what you know and can kind of settle into that and trust yourself,

that's the way I think of confidence is really when you look it up in the dictionary, it's about trust. So firm trust is one of the main dictionary definitions. So the more you can say, I know what I know, then you can say, I don't know what I don't know. And I also know about being a Dharma teacher and on the scholarly side of things that the more study we do of the mind and these teachings and other adjacent or related teachings, the more you realize that there's

different answers to the same question, right? And that's one thing I've noticed that really great teachers who know a lot usually say something like, well, if you look at it from this angle, it's like this. But if you look at it from this angle, it's like this. But if you look at it from that angle, because they've actually collected a lot of wisdom and information and they've seen it play out in different human contexts. You used a phrase a few minutes ago

that is key in your book, holding your seat. That's kind of a Buddhist term of art. What do you mean by it? There's a few threads coming together in the introduction of this book, but there's a metaphor for assuming one's meditative posture, right, that is called taking your seat. So in the way that I learned mindfulness meditation,

the instructions of posture and the step at the practice where you enter the practice and really arrange your posture is called taking your seat. And we could look at it just very functionally that there's points of posture, sitting comfortably, grounded, long spine, etc. In some of the classic texts, it gets very precise in terms of the different ways that the body is arranged But there's also an energetic quality of taking one seat like arriving and saying this is my spot This is my spot on earth and there's kind of an inherent act of confidence in that of it's not about Disappearing right I sometimes joke that Buddhist meditation should be called non

Transcendental meditation, not to at all dist TM. I know a lot of people who've gained a lot of benefit from TM, but the idea is that we are arriving in the body, arriving on the earth, and there's a real sense of kind of claiming one spot to the too-mediocre white guys comment. Our first black congresswomanwoman Shirley Chisholm has this famous saying, if they don't give you a seat at the table,

bring a folding chair, right? Which has this sense of like arrive, show up on earth. You're here, you can practice, you can be here, you belong here. And then as the experiences of a meditation session hit us, which are related to kind of in the book and in some of the Buddhist teachings, forces like wind knocking us off our seat, our ability to actually stay with those forces, which could just be an itchy

nose, could be really scattered mind, what we might call monkey mind Could be difficult emotions our ability to actually be present with those is Called holding your seat in the Tibetan teachings that I receive so taking your seat is arriving and claiming your spot and arranging your posture and then working with difficult experiences which could be pleasant, difficult experiences, or could be uncomfortable, difficult experiences, anything that knocks us off a little bit, when we can stay with that, it's called holding your seat.

You referenced the wind. The book is built around a Buddhist list. The Buddhists, as many listeners know, love to make lists. The Buddha himself loved to make lists and that tradition has carried on for 2,600 years. And I believe this is a list from the Buddha himself, the eight worldly wins. I actually really love this list and I love that metaphor of the win. Can you tell us what this list is and why you've chosen to build your book around it? Yeah, yeah. I love finding metaphors for writing and trying to convey these principles or these

teachings and this list has always been a lot of teachers talk about it, but I never feel like it's given the time it's due. I was just with our friend Sharon Salzberg on the Tricycle podcast, and she always refers to this as the vicissitudes, but you often hear teachers refer to it more poetically as the eight worldly winds. And these are basically four pairs. That's how this list of eight is built. Four pairs of experiences that happen to every human, right? And they are the experiences of being in the world. And in each of these pairs, one of the experiences refers to what we hope is going to happen, the more pleasant, the more comfortable, the more sought after experience. So that the wind that knocks us off our seat, but in a good way, you could say.

Falling in love has that sense of like, it feels really good, but you might forget to pay your rent when you fell in love, right? So it knocks us off a little bit, but in a good way. And then on the negative side is the feared part of the couple or the pair. So there's these four couples, and I wanted to dedicate like a lot of time to each of them because they really are the

experiences that when a person is trying to show up in the world and do something in the world, have worldly success in some way, are gonna hit us. Hope and fear, right? Desire and I don't want that. And so I, this also relates using the wind analogy to a body of teachings from the Tibetan tantric tradition, which are called the teachings on wind horse, which is how to ride the wind, which I talk about towards the end of the book, which is a pithy set of meditations for rousing one's confidence. Right. And I got the image in my head and kind of the central image of the early part a pithy set of meditations for rousing one's confidence, right?

And I got the image in my head and kind of the central image of the early part of the book. I love these characters. If you've ever driven past a car dealership or a mechanic or a car wash, you know those tube people that are blowing in the wind? They're really tall, wormy looking, and either they have an air blower running through them or they just go with the wind. And there's really this great metaphor for how life, when we get what

we want, it inflates us. You know, and the tube person, when animated by wind, they just kind of, yay, cheer. And then the animating wind leaves and they just get so deflated. And it's the deflated tube person is such a good visual metaphor for how it feels when we fail, when we don't get what we were trying to get, when nobody knows our name or nobody cares that we're here. So that sort of notion of working with this inner tube person and how to really make peace with having an inner tube person as these eight different experiences

strike us while we're trying to hold our seat in the world, that's really where the metaphor of the whole book came about. Well, I'm just going to list the pairs so people know them and then we'll go through them together. Pleasure and pain, praise and blame, influence and insignificance, sometimes called fame and disrepute, and success and failure. So those are the wins. And I like not only the win person that you're referring to, but also that the wind is impersonal and it's such a force of nature. And in some ways you can think of these ups and downs, these vicissitudes as

you don't have to add on the self, you don't have to make it so personal and in some ways it makes it easier to deal with. It's part of holding your seat. Right, right. It is impersonal but it also has this quality of anytime we take our seat in the world as a person it's guaranteed that we're going to feel these forces right there's no there's no way around them you know so in your view confidence is not like cockiness or and it's not comparative it's not relative I'm better than this person it's something deeper it's a resiliency in the face of whatever happens that you can keep your shit together.

Exactly, yeah, resiliency is a great word. This is related. So again, the notion of wind horse in the tantric Buddhist teachings has a lot to do with this. Looking to the earlier Buddhist teachings, there's this term that's usually taught in relationship to the Eight Viscissitudes or the Eight Worldly Winds. There's this term Upekkha or Upeksha in Sanskrit, which usually gets translated kind of, this is the one that

I find people are a little bit confused by. It translates as equanimity. And equanimity, I think, is a little misleading for me just because there's a sense of not being affected by the winds. And I like the idea of what what happens when we are affected? How do we work with being affected by hope and fear, pleasure and pain? If those dudes you're at dinner with really say, oh, yeah, criticism just rolls off my back. That's the point. I'd say, like, I think you're a dinner with really say oh yeah criticism just rolls off my back that's the point i'd say like i think you're lying sorry i think you're lying. Or there's some ignorance there's some avoidance going on. And so to really say well maybe that equanimity means this resiliency or maybe it means i can show up on a windy day and i can still work with it. So it's not necessarily, it's going to go perfectly, right?

It's just like, I can do the hard thing and show up to being a person. Let's go through the list. The first pair as mentioned is pleasure and pain. What is there to say about that? Oh, there's so much to say about pleasure and pain. And I think, you know, it's interesting how this list builds on itself because pleasure and pain, in a sense, are the most visceral, the most tied to our nervous system and our sense perceptions and our embodiment. And of all these wins, you could say these are the most consistent signals that we receive from our experience.

And you know, when we're doing a formal meditation, it's a really good chance to specifically work with, doesn't necessarily have to be pleasant and pain in the sense of like, pleasure, pleasure, but it could be comfort and uncomfortable feelings in meditation and just noticing how often we are actually struck by those and how often we lose our seat. One way of looking at pleasure and pain is the way our body responds to just stimuli for discomfort. I think about this a lot in terms of having a young daughter and myself sometimes struggling with this, like smartphone usage that need to kind of soothe the itch that we all experience

and how much we get thrown off of our seat scrolling, et cetera. You know, I think there's been a lot of really good research in recent years about how brain chemicals work, dopamine, cortisol, serotonin, etc. But I think in a sense, mindfulness of body is really designed to help us try to work with becoming less responsive to pleasure and pain. It's really interesting and in some ways I think counterintuitive what meditation practice does to our experience of pleasure and pain. It doesn't actually make us experience pain less.

No, I mean, one of the cliches is that it hurts more, but you suffer less. You know, that you can actually feel the pain, but you're not adding on voluntary suffering. Right, right. And so I mentioned the pain experiment that Dr. Richard Davidson did. I don't know if you're familiar with that experiment. It really illustrates this. He had novice meditators and more experienced meditators and a youngie Mingyur Rinpoche was sort of the like Jedi meditator level meditator in the experiment. But what happened in that experiment, I mean,

explaining in greater detail was basically they found that Becoming a master meditator increased the activity in the pain receptors during a painful experience, which is completely counterintuitive It decreased the rumination and bracing phases of having a painful experience, right? Which is maybe a little bit more expected but during an actual painful experience, right, which is maybe a little bit more expected, but during an actual painful experience, Mingyur Rinpoche's pain receptors spiked higher than somebody who had never meditated, right? This is not the way to sell mindfulness. I can't imagine the calm app being like, feel pain more, but that is sort of the key to suffering less, is like when pain is happening, is sort of the key to suffering less is like when pain is happening, feel it completely. And so I think that's really an interesting way of looking, which also means by the way

that when pleasure is happening, you would feel that more completely too. That's the good part. That's the very good news in that you would actually be paying attention. That's another thing with our smartphone usage. When you're on social media and you're scrolling, there is some of the most creative stuff. There's people making the most brilliant statements about the world. There's like your old high school friend with this amazing moment, something really meaningful happening in their life or their family's life, and then you just

scroll past it. So we don't experience pain enough. We don't experience pleasure enough because they're just knocking us around and kind of just being like, okay, give me another soothe, take away my pain. And when we can hold our seats, so to speak, there's a wider range of appreciation that develops. And, you know, that is definitely something that I think, I don't know if you would say that you're more able to appreciate pleasure and pain because of your meditation practice.

I would certainly say I am. This is not false modesty. I just want to acknowledge that my meditation practice is a lot younger than yours, but yes, I definitely noticed that particularly on the pleasure side. Interestingly, cause I'm definitely on the greedy end of the spectrum. I like pleasure. And so like tasting my food or, you know, getting a hug from my wife or son, like those moments feel better that I used to kind of scroll past them, metaphorically speaking. On the pain front, I believe you said this, I just want to reemphasize it that the good news on the pain front is yes, in the moment of displeasure, your brain is likely to recognize it more

acutely, but you'll have less bracing for it and you recover more quickly on the other side. I believe that's what Richie's work has shown. And so all in all, it's a much shorter experience. So I can notice this, for example, when I'm getting shots. I don't like to get a shot, but I'm much less freaked out beforehand than when it's happening, I do really feel it,

and then it's over. And so I'm not adding a lot of unnecessary suffering, extending the experience in either direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I worked with that recently. I don't know if you've been in a headfirst MRI, but a year ago I was. It was a really intense claustrophobia experience. And the way I worked with it was to settle in,

find my relative points of safety. They have a little mirror that you can sort of see your feet through and see that there's space there. So that helped kind of work with the initial spatial panic. They have a little mirror that you can sort of see your feet through and see that there's space there. So that helped kind of work with the initial spatial panic. And then just really tuning into the noises that were happening. It's like a set of musical elves who are trained by John Cage or just making all these like sounds in there.

And to really tune into that and say, let me be present. Again, this is not false modesty, but the nice technician when I got out, because it was a long MRI, he was like, you stayed really still. Meanwhile, I literally almost had a panic attack at the beginning of it, but I was able to settle in by using this like, okay, let's really be present with the uncomfortable experience. It really shifted the experience. I have a root canal tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. Yeah, I struggle with that dentistry is not my strong suit.

Coming up, Ethan Nickturn talks about praise and blame, a practice which he calls preparing for the ouch. And we also talk about success and failure. Alice and Matt here from British Scandal. Matt, if we had a bingo card, what would be on there? Oh, compelling storytelling, egotistical white men and dubious humor. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you will love our podcast, British Scandal,

the show where every week we bring you stories from this green and not always so pleasant land. We've looked at spies, politicians, media Scandal, the show where every week we bring you stories from this green and not always so pleasant land. We've looked at spies, politicians, media magnates, a king, no one is safe. And knowing our country, we won't be out of a job anytime soon. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to your podcasts. In April 1912, the luxury ocean liner RMS Titanic embarked on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England en route to New York. Spirits were high, but as the ship sailed into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, danger was lurking.

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You can binge this season of American History Tellers on the Titanic early and ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Let's keep working down this list because actually a lot of points I want to get to. Praise and blame, tee that up for us. Yeah, yeah. So praise and blame, I think the words we use for each. Don't forget we've got the Meditation Party Retreat coming up in the not too distant future.

You can sign up at eOmega.org. Also over on the 10% Happier app. Don't forget, there are more than 500 guided meditations in the library there that can help you stay relaxed and present in the waning days of summer. Download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps. These couples really might unlock, you know, meaning for us. So criticism is another way of looking at this. And I think this one is so important because in terms of what we're hoping for

and what we're fearing, pleasure and pain are really tied into our physical body and our nervous system. Praise and criticism are really where our sense of identity starts to be social or interpersonal and reputational. Human beings are social creatures. We survive in our group identity. I mean, if we really didn't have to care what anybody thought of us, this probably would not be a wind that struck us.

But if somebody thinks we're great, it has a pleasant effect, because it might mean like we're gonna get something. If somebody is criticizing us, it might mean that our standing in the relationship is called into question. So it's interesting, because from here on out, the couples leave sort of the directness

of our physical experience and go into our sense of self. And here they start going into our sense of relational self, right? And so we're always giving and receiving feedback to the world. And I think this one is really fascinating because, you know, if you look at, say, feedback you get on your work, I always think it's fascinating to get, like, an email from somebody who's read something I wrote. The brain is lethal on this front.

Like, somebody can have bullet pointed, like, nine positive things about the thing they read, and there can just be one criticism in there. And before I even know what's happening it feels like my brain goes straight to the criticism right I don't know if yours does that too oh yeah so we're we're really afraid and I think this is because it has to do with our relational self of being critiqued in some way or being blamed blamed for something. You know, tell me I'm doing a good job.

Give me some validation. This is another pair of fear and hope, or hope and fear. It gets into our reputational self and how easily that's knocked around. I mean, this one is really fascinating because somebody says something nice, oh, I like your shirt, and the inner tube person just raves, and then somebody says just one little thing that we can interpret as a criticism,

and we lose it completely, just deflated for the rest of the day. What are your practices for dealing with this? There's a bunch of practices that I talk about, and some of them come from teachings, Buddhist and other teachings on listening deeply and right speech. But I think the most important thing here is, again, to prepare for the wind in each of these. In other words, if we exist in relationship, it means we are going to receive criticism at some point.

And to realize that each of these couplets kind of follow the same premise of pleasure and pain. So as long as we have a nervous system, we're going to experience pleasure and pain. As long as we exist in relationships, we are going to experience criticism and praise, right? So the first I would say is, the same way we have to know that things hurt,

whenever we're in a situation where we're going to receive feedback, I say we should prepare for the ouch. Something in there is gonna hurt. And if it doesn't, well, then we're just setting ourselves up to get hurt next time, because then we did one round perfectly,

and that cannot happen again. There's never been a human who never received criticism. So I think for me, it's like, rather than saying, okay, how am I gonna defend myself? It's just prepare for the ouch. And then I think really making friends with that inner tube person is important with all of these wins.

I think another important thing about receiving feedback is to know who we're asking and why. My friend Susan Piver, who's a writer and Dharma teacher and entrepreneur, she gave this really good piece of advice once. So she had a friend who, whenever she was working on an entrepreneurial project, she would ask what he thought thought but she would often ask when the project was in its very nascent stages and he would basically point out all the potential problems. And she realized that it was too early to ask him because his feedback was really helpful

if she could withstand it but the project hadn't gotten going enough in her head and she just needed more creative inspiration and time for positivity. And later on she learned, let me ask my critical friend so that his feedback could kind of fine tune and sculpt the finishing touches rather than undercut all the energy for the project. So I think knowing who we're asking for feedback, if it's something that we're trying to do and trusting the sources of feedback. I think another way to work with receiving criticism is to practice some form of loving kindness,

if that's a practice that we have for ourselves in receiving the criticism, and also to realize that maybe there is information in there that is useful. But on the other side of the coin, because we know about the negativity bias, which I think is so important, where we need to receive more validation than criticism,

to even receive the criticism, I think having people who validate us is really important. I think about this as a parent, like, yeah, sure, it's important to tell my daughter that she didn't tie her shoes properly because I don't want her to trip, but it's more important to say, it's so great that you're trying.

I think about this as a Dharma teacher, like, you really have to praise people's efforts. And I think whenever we're putting ourselves out there, it's really important to have a sense of, okay, at least I did my practice, at least I showed up to this effort. So the flip side of this is, and this is because it's a relational wind, praise and blame, or relational pair, is we are not just in a position where we are receiving these experiences from the world. We

can also give them to other people, right? We can give people praise and criticism. So actually understanding that power of how and when we speak, I like to every once in a while just share my opinions when it's the right time to do so. But if somebody wants feedback on them, luckily for me, I'm a little exhausted about giving people feedback. So I don't feel the need as I once did to tell people what I think of them unless they asked me. And I think that's actually really an important aspect is to know when it's time.

I mean, we can always give people feedback when it impacts us. If they're doing some behavior, there's something that is actually our business. But to know when you're being asked for feedback and to know that you're actually putting a force into the person's being if you praise them, it's gonna have an impact if you criticize them It's gonna have an impact my great uncle Irv who was considered kind of a Mensch of the Jewish half of my family has great advice on right speech in this case when we're giving people praise and blame or criticism

He said don't ever tell anyone anything unless they have a place to put it. I Think about that a lot. I think that's really good Dharma advice From a secular Jewish man who's no longer with us Right speech is another Buddhist term it often it's described the Buddha said to his son in teaching him how to do right speech, say that which is true, that which is useful, and say it at the right time. And that kind of rhymes with what your great uncle Irv said. Yeah, and say it kindly, right? So say it, and I think that part is important because kindly doesn't mean you have to tell somebody what isn't true, but

say it in a way that you are at least acknowledging their effort and acknowledging their humanity. I find that in social media. I find these days it's almost useless to try to have dialogue about anything really on social media I mean social media is great for sharing what we're doing or what we think with the world But when it gets into dialogue You really have to try to establish trust and the only way to even have a shot to do that is to say I Understand you I care about you. I disagree with you, you know, and social media has turned into this like dunking space.

I watch basketball if I want to see people get dunked on. Yep. Okay, so we've gone through four of the eight worldly wins, pleasure and pain, praise and blame. The next pair is influence and insignificance, which I've sometimes seen listed as fame and disrepute. But we're in an era where influence or clout or fame is more sought after based on the survey data I've seen than at any previous time.

So this is a rich one. You want to say a few words about it? Sure. Yeah, I agree that we're in that era. So classically, as you said, this pairing, I think in most translations I've seen is fame and either infamy or disrepute, right? But I think also the era that we're in, you can do pretty well with disrepute. If you get hated by one group of people and liked by another group of people,

you can leverage sort of anti-heroes have a kind of fame. And, and really the fear is insignificance that nobody knows us. Nobody remembers us. Nobody finds our effort or our work worthy. And yeah, I was really playing off of, I don't think people will say like fame, I want to live forever. I want to learn how to fly.

It's more like, I think the word that is often used with people trying to put themselves out there these days, it's almost like our word for fame now is platform. To have some kind of influence, to be an influencer, not necessarily in the like social media. I said in the book that I believe the first person to claim the term influencer was Paris Hilton. I believe that's in my research, that's where that term came from in 21st century use. But you wanna be able to have recognition or some ability to shape and be known for doing something amongst a larger group of people.

You want an elevated platform. And the fear here is that we will be unknown. We will be viewed as insignificant. Nobody will notice our work. Nobody will notice our contribution. I think there's a real fear of aloneness in this, right? I use the example, kind of a more simple example for those of us who don't have any public facing platform

and don't want one, could just be how we want to have influence or renown within our family or in our work community. But the example I use is coming back from a meditation retreat. You come back from a week or two weeks or a month at a meditation retreat and there is this feeling of having had so many deep and rich experiences and time has moved in a different way for you and you really want everybody to have felt your absence. And so you get home and you know that all your friends and colleagues are going to want to be like, what was it like?

Are you enlightened now? And a lot of times the experience is just like, you know, on your block It just feels kind of empty, you know, maybe you miss some news Maybe some really crazy things happen in the world, but probably just the world kept turning as it was and then you are waiting for people to be like What was it like and the conversation when you come home turns into like, oh wait, you were out of town? I don't know if you've ever had that experience.

A million times I come home from a retreat and it's like, this has been this huge experience for me and I've been thinking a ton about all the stuff that's happening in my absence. And I come home and people are like, yeah, hey, welcome back. Oh, where were you? You know, or like, they don't even wanna talk about it,

which I get, I totally get. I now at this point don't expect anybody to give a shit, but totally, I totally understand that experience. So what is, you reference a few ways to deal with this pair of wins, significance and insignificance. And one of them is to, and you use this word already, but to contemplate aloneness. What does that mean?

Yeah, well, to realize what I reference here, and this is coming from actually a Disney movie named Coco, which gave me the idea that really, when we're talking about death in relationship to this experience, there's two deaths that happen for a human being. One is physical death and the other is reputational death, which means when nobody knows that we were here anymore, when nobody remembers us, aloneness, I would say, is a willingness to be okay when we are not interacting with other people and when other people are not thinking about us. I

think when we die and when we're unknown, which by the way happens to everybody, you know, I mean your other option is to be one of the very few people throughout human history who is known thousands of years after their death, but undoubtedly you're misremembered. Buddha, Jesus Christ, undoubtedly if they looked at the ways they're remembered now, they'd be like, my life wasn't like that. That's not who I was. We have to work with this real tender experience of, we will be forgotten. And I think a lot of the ways we seek recognition and seek to make an impact

is not necessarily about our work or our being, being of benefit to the people around us, but it's actually about not being forgotten. And when we're forgotten, you know, which is what we all experienced in the silence of a retreat, we are fundamentally alone with our own mind. It's just that tender moment where you're just here. And I don't know that I'm ever gonna be able

to explain my experience to anyone else, and maybe I won't have the opportunity. And so I think if we can contemplate aloneness and really say, what does it feel like When I'm with myself, which is one big thing that meditation is all about But I think a retreat actually brings this home even more What does it feel like and if I do have influence right if I do have a platform? What do I want that influence to stand for when I'm no longer

here and not just when I'm no longer here, but when nobody remembers me? So even thinking beyond the influence we want to have when we're gone and our name is on a building. When that building crumbles, what impact do we want to have? And I think the full meaning of aloneness is actually to be willing to tolerate, what if nobody knows me? Can I still make a positive difference, right? If the wisdom side of wanting to be known or seen is wanting to have a positive impact, then is there a way to think about that impact free from I can't stand the idea of not being known by other people? So I'm just trying to put a fine point

on this suggestion here. I think you're saying as a thought exercise, we should contemplate given the fact that the odds are incredibly high that there will be a time in a few decades, maybe it's a hundred years, maybe it's a little bit more, that even if our name is carved into the side of the building, nobody remembers who we

are, that there's nobody alive who has any memory of us and the history books say little, if anything about us. And so given that fact, what kind of influence do we want to have? Yeah. And also while we're here, how do we want to use whatever influence we might have as if we were already free from needing to be recognized? Cause I think we can use recognition very well. I think I'm talking to a person who's used their recognition very well, used their platform

well. That's not a false compliment, by the way. That's just genuine praise to your InnerTube person. We can use that well, but when we cling to the hope that everybody's going to know that we used it well, I always wonder how Taylor Swift feels. 80,000 screaming fans are going to scream for me. When that's the reason we're doing whatever we're doing, there's a corruption, right? Because we're chasing a hope.

We're chasing this pleasant experience that cannot last. It's going to evaporate. And then we're either going to have to do something to rebrand our platform or remake it to get that attention back on us. And we do live in an era of intense attention seeking, I would say. It's nice to actually want to use whatever influence we have and there to be examples where we're trying to use it because we actually want to live a good life while we're here and we want to be a benefit when nobody remembers us. I'm trying to think about that from myself not to make this about me but just to understand

the concept better and use myself as an example. So you've said a nice thing, great for my inner two person about how using my influence well, but I for sure have what the buddhists might call some degree of bodhicitta a sense of wanting to be of benefit, but I also have an ego And that's there and I mean i'm aware of it I'm probably not aware of the full extent of it because if was, then I wouldn't be so yanked around by it. But I am aware that it's there, at least to the best of my ability. Yeah, I don't know that I'm doing everything. I know I'm not doing everything out of.

Uncut benevolence. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think we have to not make the perfect the enemy of the good. That is why imposter syndrome arises in some way. And I think that's right. If I can't do this completely ego-lessly, then why do it at all? And that's why I think of this as a practice and it's sort of not being fooled by the chase, right? If I'm chasing the recognition, you know, I'm chasing praise. If I'm chasing the recognition, you know, or I'm chasing praise, if I'm chasing pleasure, then I'm going to get stuck.

I'm going to get fixated on something that's disappearing. If I can move towards that with these contemplations of how can I actually live a good life and help, then we can actually use the ego in service of Bodhicitta. And it's almost like the ego starts to burn itself up as solar energy. Like, oh, I can use that. And as I'm using it, I can work with, okay, what do I actually want? I talk about this in the book, wanting to be a writer, which is something I wanted to be since like sixth grade. The particular reason I wanted to be a writer

was because I was an extrovert and an introvert because writing was a way that people could know and love your work, but not really know your face. That seemed perfect to me, like the ego of wanting people to know my work. But also through that, wanting to express something that's actually meaningful and beneficial, right? It's not one and it's not the other but if we're completely caught in hope and the mirage of hope like I'm gonna do So I'm gonna be the most famous

Buddhist ever Which is the thought people might have. I don't know, maybe the Buddha had that thought. That might have been why he started meditating. We don't know, actually. If we have that and it's not met with sort of like, okay, but what happens when you're alone with yourself? It just kind of goes out of control.

I think we can bring some real modesty to saying, okay, we do have these egos, we do want a platformer to achieve something. And at the same time, I can notice the false chase, right? And I can temper my ego with some compassion and some reality. Coming up, Ethan talks about the final pair of these eight worldly winds, influence and insignificance. We also talk about how to use the ego in service of other people and a set of meditation techniques called wind horse,

one of which we will do in real time. What's up guys, it's your girl Kiki and my podcast is back with a new season in real time. Amy Poehler, Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on. So follow, watch, and listen to Baby. This is Keke Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to The Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're gonna make some picks, talk some and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agar.

So here's how this show's gonna work, okay? We're gonna run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like, no offense. No offense Travis Kelce, but you gotta step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football.

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You can access bonus episodes and listen ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Let's get to the final two wins. Success and failure. Say more. Yeah. Yeah. Success and failure. So this is the most generalized.

Sometimes you see this one translated as gain and loss, but because I really wanted it to speak to sort of how we work with achievement as mindful people, I went with the translation of success and failure. And so this is the most generalized. Any endeavor that we have, any identity that we strive for any Project right we hope it succeeds and we fear that it fails. That's just being human and We all have a fear of failure. We all have a hope of success whatever we're trying to do or be in spiritual life We often have very highfalutin

or be in spiritual life, we often have very highfalutin hopes of like, I'm going to achieve enlightenment, which you tempered. No, we're just going to 10% happier. That's, that's my achievement. I don't know if that's gone up at all for you. If you've read, maybe it's gone down to 9%. I don't know. And we feel, and we fear this is going to gonna fail and I think this also the big thing to work with in this arena is How we compare successes to the perception of other people's successes. I tell the funny story of actually succeeding in getting a book published and feeling actually quite a lot of success and getting a book published and feeling actually quite a lot of success until I found out that an old friend of mine from college who was a writer I really admire quite a lot later

that day. So I got my book published, I was feeling tons of success and later that day somebody I went to college with won a MacArthur Genius Award for their fiction writing. And this is somebody whose work I love and is a good person. His name is Ben Lerner. Just that feeling of like deflation. Like I had gotten my book published earlier in the day by the same publisher as Ben Lerner and I felt for like three hours, I made it mama. I made it.

And then somebody I respect and admire got an even bigger worldly success and the two person deflated. And it didn't last very long. I wouldn't talk about it if it was like an ongoing thing, but it's so weird how we need to compare successes. And I think there's a few arenas in life where that makes sense. I think we set aside sports as an

arena where a healthy competitive structure exists, it's totally a construct. And when you look at things like writing a book, or being a decent meditator, or being a good partner, why would we ever compare like a relationship or a marriage to the health of other marriages? We're only married to that one person. We only need it to be good in that structure. We only need one person to think we're doing a good job

as a partner. We look at all these ways that when we enter this frame of success and failure, we're constantly looking over our shoulder and comparing to how we perceive other people are doing. And I think our world is really set up to exacerbate competition where there doesn't need to be any. And so we work with a set of practices in Buddhism that are sometimes called sympathetic joy or mudita. And it's specifically a way of working with envy or jealousy, which I personally, I think we've done a lot of work in spiritual and psychological spaces to talk about some difficult emotions. We talk a lot about anger. We talk a lot about anxiety. For whatever reason, envy and jealousy, it's just like people don't like to really talk about it.

That's why I wanted to tell that particular story about envying someone who had great success because I think we need to talk about it more. And the practice of mudita is actually flipping the frame and when somebody has a success that we perceive ourselves wanting, ourselves feeling less than or not enough in relationship to actually flip the frame and say, I hope this brings them joy, may they enjoy this success. And the other part of I think working with comparative mind is whenever we perceive somebody else as succeeding to really tune into what is it that I long for, right? In this case, it was, my friend was, is a really talented fiction and poetry writer.

I love writing fiction and poetry. I don't get to do it enough. I wish I got to do it enough. I wish I got to do it more. So actually all that was there when I tuned in very quickly to wishing this person joy was I want to write more poetry. I want to make time for that. I don't make enough time for that. And that's all it was. So I think there's something about comparative mind is that it tells us what we long for, but then it ties that longing into another person's perceived happiness rather than working with

our own longing. Yeah, but you say in the book, and I like this a lot, can you turn the person you're jealous of into, instead of being a source of exasperation into a source of inspiration. Right, right. Yeah. And it's easier when we don't feel hurt and resentful of the person when it's just like, ah shit, I wish that happened to me, which is a lot of what little moments of envy and jealousy feel like. I think sports is a good metaphor because when you look at rivalries in sports, there usually is a sense of gaining inspiration from one's rival, right?

They're actually pushing you to be better. So it's actually in some ways a very healthy relationship. Like if you look at like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, they had a very close relationship and they actually, I don't know if at Kobe, Bryant's Memorial, Michael Jordan was just sobbing, crying because they had pushed each other in a, in a really healthy way. Right.

And inspired each other. And I think, you know, when we're outside of sports, we can actually appreciate other people's successes and say, what are they doing well? And how can I allow that to inspire me? So we've worked our way through the eight-wordly winds. And, you know, in the course of that discussion, you've talked about some practices that we can use to ride the wind in a more effective way.

In the book, you talk about some other tools. You call them the four powers of confidence. They are compassion, lineage, kind of thinking about your forebears, awareness, mindfulness, which is just coursing through this entire discussion and wind horse, which you did reference at the top of this discussion, which is this Tibetan notion of being able to repeat a phrase here, ride the wind in an effective way. Can you, as we wrap up here, say some more about this? Sure, sure. So Wind Horse is a set of meditation techniques that were specific to Tibetan or Vajrayana Tantric Buddhism and were taught in the Shambhala tradition and have a lot of tie-ins with indigenous Tibetan cultural wisdom as well. And basically these are considered pithy meditate, when they're done as a meditation, they're considered pithy instructions, meditations that

a person can do in two minutes, three minutes. And I offer one version of that in the book. And they're often done as preparation when we have to show up and do something hard in the world. So one could do them, you know, at the end of a longer morning meditation session, when you're going into your day and you're feeling deflated, or you could do them before a difficult meeting. I often will do wind-horse meditation before I'm teaching as a way to work with the little bit of I mean Lingering nerves, you know, I've been teaching now 22 23 years but still every time you have to show up with other people that Those winds are hitting you internally. And so wind horse is based on the principle of

and I like that it ties into this metaphor of the eight worldly winds, of taking the emotional energy of whatever is arising, acknowledging that, focusing oneself quickly and then softening towards whatever's happening and then rousing one's awareness to meet the moment as it is. There's a lot more to the principles of Windhorse, but it's a meditation that I wanted to share. There's different forms of it, because I do think it's so helpful and effective to those times where we need a brief meditation that allows us to really acknowledge what we're experiencing right now, and rouse ourself and open our heart and open our awareness to meet the moment.

There's a lot more to be said about Wind Horse, but I think that's enough for now. Well, don't leave us hanging though, give us the fifth instruction. All right, you wanna do it together? Sure. All right, we'll do the three step version. So just wanna invite everybody who's listening

to take your seat. So since we've been doing a lot of talking and listening, you may notice that the energy is more towards your ears and your head and your brain. So just see if we can bring that down to the earth for a moment. That which is connecting us to this actual spot in our life. Now quickly and as fully as you can, bring your attention to your heart center. Almost like a tea light candle lighting up in the heart. There's a sense of strong focus for a few moments. Not furrowing your brow, but just really bringing everything to the heart.

And then soften that focus. Stay in the heart and just feel, feel your heart. There's any strong emotions, just notice that. There is nothing, just notice that. Soften and feel the heart for a moment. And then the final step, staying in the heart center, but now we are going to expand awareness in all directions. So if you are used to meditating with your eyes closed or downward gaze, just for this brief period, I'd invite you to look straight ahead so that there's a sense of really being in the space that you're in.

And without pushing, just from the heart center, see if your awareness and presence can go out in all directions, opening to what's in front of you, the side body, space behind you. This is called opening out or radiating out. Just see if we can stay in open space for 10 or 15 seconds. Okay. You can do that in two minutes. So bring your attention fully to the heart center, soften, feel what's in your heart right now. And then the last step, the sense of expansion, raised gaze, opening out to space, radiating out. And the idea is this is a way to build your inner resources to deal with whatever noxious

winds might be headed your way. For sure. Yeah. The inner resource, yes. Having good supports on one side, having friends who are there to support and love and help us is useful. Having a strong self-compassion practice is useful. Working with resting and awareness is very useful. And I think having a strong sense of

what Buddhist teachings talk about, and I spend a whole chapter on this in that second half of the book, one's lineage, one's ancestors, all of the beings we can call on when we're having a difficult experience or need a little extra help who have our back. And then I think something like this practice where we actually say, all right, this is hard. I have to gather myself and open out. That's another way of looking at that.

Very simple in the book, there's a five step version of the Wind Horse Meditation, but gather at the heart, feel, open out. It helps, I find it helps. I feel like a wind horse I feel like rainbow bright actually, but alright. Yeah rain. I I mean, I'm more of a care bearer, but nice I Picture you as a rainbow barfing unicorn, but wow why am I barfing Dan? That's what they do on the means they barf you know oh a rainbow barfing a unicorn okay Wow no a psychedelic unicorn barfing a rainbow oh okay okay all right

Ethan thank you Dan thank you so much for having me and thanks for having this podcast thanks again to Ethan if you go to the show notes, I'll post some links to my prior interviews with him plus my interview with his dad, David Nickturn. Oh, and I'll also post some links to the interviews I've done jointly with my wife, Bianca, on the subject of imposter syndrome. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our managing producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.