Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Actually Be Present | Matthew Brensilver

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

Tackling one of the best known contemplative clichés: being in the present moment and “inhabiting the now.”Matthew Brensilver, MSW, PhD, teaches retreats at the Insight Retreat Center, Spirit Rock and other Buddhist centers.He was previously program director for Mindful Schools and for more than a decade, was a core teacher at Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. Before committing to teach meditation full-time, he spent years doing research on addiction pharmacotherapy at the UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine. Each summer, he lectures at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center on the intersections between mindfulness, science and psychotherapy.  Matthew is the co-author of two books about meditation during adolescence and continues to be interested in the unfolding dialogue between Buddhism and science.In this episode we talk about:What being present actually means What to do when Buddhist teachings or meditation instructions feel out of reachWhat to do when a memory arises in meditation, especially a difficult one The brain's, at times, exhausting, evolutionarily wired tendency toward constant predictionThe benefits of going on meditation retreatsDistinguishing between true alarms and false alarmsRelated Episodes:Why Self-Hatred Makes No Sense | Matthew BrensilverSign 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://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/matthew-brensilver-rerun-2023See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing? Happy holidays. Today, we're going to tackle one of the best-known, contemplative cliches, being in the present moment, inhabiting the now. This is one of those vaunted states we're exhorted to aspire to, but are rarely given any practical information about how to actually achieve. Now, obviously, there are lots of reasons why you should want to be in the present moment, because really that's the only time it ever is but my guest today is going to make a very specific argument for the utility of being in the now In terms of your own psychological well-being. It's a fascinating argument. You'll you'll hear him make it the him in question here is Matthew Brantz over this is his second appearance on the show. He teaches retreat said spirit rock and other

Matthew Brinsel, over this is his second appearance on the show. He teaches retreat, set spirit rock, and other Buddhist centers. In this conversation, we talked about what being present actually means, what to do when the Buddhist teachings or meditation instructions feel out of reach. And then we start compulsively self-assessing against these teachings, which sounds familiar to me, what to do when a memory arises in meditation, especially a hard one, the brains at times exhausting and evolutionarily wired tendency towards prediction, the benefits of going on meditation retreats and distinguishing between false alarms and real ones. Just to say before we dive in here,

this episode is part of a two week series we're doing. We're calling Deep Cuts, where we dip into our archive for some of the strongest and most popular episodes that we think might give you a dose of sanity during the holidays. Hello listeners, this is Mike Corey of Against the Odds. You might know that I adventure around the world while recording this podcast, and over the years, I've learned that where I stay when I travel can make all the difference. Airbnb has been my go-to place for finding the perfect accommodations. Because with hotels, you often don't have the luxury of extra space or privacy. Recently I had a bunch of friends come down to visit in Mexico.

We found this large house and the place had a pool, a barbecue, a kitchen, and a great big living room to play cards. Watch movies and just chill out. It honestly made all the difference in the trip. It felt like we were all roommates again. The next time you're planning a trip, whether it's with friends, family, or yourself, check out Airbnb to find something you won't forget. What a life these celebrities lead. Imagine walking the red carpet, the cameras in your face, the designer clothes, the worst dress list, big house, the world constantly peering in,

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the podcast which tells the stories of our favourite celebrities from their perspective. Each season we show you what it's really like being famous by taking you inside the life of a British icon. We walk you through their glittering highs and eyebrow raising lows and ask, is fame and fortune really worth it? Follow terribly famous now wherever you get your podcasts. Or listen early and ad-free on Wondry Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Hello listeners, this is Mike Corey of Against the Odds.

You might know that I adventure around the world while recording this podcast. And over the years, I've learned that where I stay when I travel can make all the difference. Airbnb has been my go-to place for finding the perfect accommodations. Because with hotels, you often don't have the luxury of extra space or privacy. Recently, I had a bunch of friends come down to visit in Mexico. We found this large house and the place had a pool, a barbecue, a kitchen, and a great big living room to play cards. Watch movies and just chill out.

It honestly made all the difference in the trip. It felt like we were all roommates again. The next time you're planning a trip, whether it's with friends, family, or yourself, check out Airbnb to find something you won't forget. Matthew Brinselver, welcome back to the show. Nice to be with you, Dan. So, let's start at perhaps the granddaddy of all contemplative cliches, which is being in the moment, being present. How do you understand that phrase?

Yeah, I know. That's what the shirts say. The shirts say be present, but that is a deep question, actually. And do we understand the present as a kind of sliver of time that is sandwiched between the past and the future? How long is now? Is the present just a metaphor? Usually when people say be present, that's just a kind of direction not to be identified with discursive thought, that we are present when we are not identified with the narrative of the moment, and to not be present is to be absorbed and identified in the story of now, whatever that story is, and then to be present is to reestablish mindfulness to have some metacognitive awareness

of the phenomenal world of what's arising and passing moment by moment. And so usually, to be present just means don't be stuck in that bubble of thought, right? But to be present is a pretty radical gesture and it's one that takes us through all of the past and one that requires that we radically surrender the vigilance we have about the future. And so to be present in like the most radical way I was thinking actually during meditation this morning, this is what came up. To be present is to be willing to die, which is a maybe jarring way of formulating it, but to actually be present is to surrender the sense of vigilance of orientation, of tracking phenomena as threat and opportunity, and to be this like just profoundly porous, defenseless embodiment. And that's a lot to swallow in a way.

That's not the tagline for, you know, that we put on the flyers for the meditation classes. And of course, I want to live, but there is a sense of just to be radically open in that way entails a willingness to care more about awareness than one's life, even if just for a moment, even if just for a moment. How is that for a starting point?

What have I done here, Dan? Well, we're, we're, we're, I know it's going to be a nice light conversation, frothy. I'm already enjoying it. So I guess where my mind goes, my mind goes in a million directions when I hear you say that, but one of them is, damn, I maybe I've never been present after all of these years of meditating, maybe by this definition I've never been present. Well, how we define mindfulness,

how radically we define presence, that's an open question. And sometimes I think it's very useful to define mindfulness in a very workable, accessible way. But then there are all other definitions of Satji, the poly word for mindfulness that are much more radical. And for me, in a way, we have to start the mindfulness path by defining it. But to understand what mindfulness is, in some sense, is the fruition of the path, not the starting point. I don't understand what mindfulness is, in some senses, the fruition of the path, not the starting point. I don't know what mindfulness is.

I don't know what you're going to ask me, Dan, or how stumped I'm going to be. I don't know what I've already backed myself into here in these first two minutes. It's like we discover facets of mindfulness every time we sit, every time we practice. And there's a kind of freshness of that. And we keep refining and bringing more and more depth and nuance, sophistication to what we even construed as the present moment or to be in some kind of presence. And so I do feel like, you know, one of the complexities of practice, we get so habituated and acclimatized to the notions of, oh, this is mindfulness, this is my technique, this is what I practice, that it can bring a kind of staleness in. And so I sort of challenge myself,

like, okay, I'm supposed to know what mindfulness is. I am a meditation teacher, but maybe I don't. Maybe I don't. And what are the radical possibilities on offer when we actually open up in this very strategic undefended way to what is actually here? So for anybody who's listening the way I am, you know, in the completely self-centered way of hearing you set the bar really high for mindfulness or being in the moment, being present,

whatever terminology you want to use. For anybody who's listening like I am and thinking, oh, I don't know if I've ever done that. I don't know how to do that. I think what you're saying is, with all of these ancient terms, mindfulness, concentration, compassion, you can have a kind of beginning definition for mindfulness. I often say it's the ability to see what's happening in your head and in your body right now without being carried away by it. You can have a beginning definition that's serviceable and works, but these are such rich, complex qualities of mind that over time you can see how vast they are and you can raise the bar higher and higher.

And you're just when you describe truly being president is in a way being ready to die. Well, that's just a profound understanding of a quality that all of us have been able to cultivate to one degree or another. Yeah, yeah. And I don't mean to sort of deify some exalted notion of mindfulness. And it's not like every time I sit, I like canceled my lunch plans or something. You know, it's like, no, I want to live, but there is this kind of radical surrender. And that is something that we can appreciate over time. And we don't have to set that as some bar that we're always striving to achieve and almost invariably

failing. That is just actually compounding the sense of self in the moment and that's really not necessary and so. I feel like when we hear certain teachings that feel kind of remote or there's some kind of reach for us how we relate to that is really important and if we. Turn that into another lesson about our own insufficiency. It just gets old and it's painful and it's not so inspiring. It's like, okay, I hear lots of teachings all the time myself as a student. And I'm just like, wow, that is there's a quality of curiosity and wonder. And there's not this sense of me, little Matthew, this incompetent meditation person who is aspiring to some ideal. That is just more static in the system.

And so, yeah, it's just whatever comes alive in one's heart, just follow the thread of that sincerity. So, if we hear you describing mindfulness or being present in this way, don't get caught up in trying to measure your practice against it. Hear it, let it wash over you, and have it be something of a directional inspiration. Check and see in your own practice. Is that something you can relate to? Do you see, perhaps in some moments, something approaching

that state arising in your own mind? Yeah, that sounds good. We have to be very careful what metrics we use and apply, and how often we sample the moment to assess our progress against some metric. You know, do sort of like what are our barometers for meditative progress? And I think the tendency is to have one barometer and to be checking it very frequently, far too frequently. It's like after each breath,

we check back to what our metric of spiritual progress is and ask. Am I more mindful? Am I more concentrating? Am I more like that thing I heard on 10% happier? And it's like, this is a call for one for patients. Of course, we have to adjust and we get feedback on our own practice and we change course in these things. But we don't want to be sampling data after every breath to see how we're doing. And then the other piece is that we usually focus too exclusively on one kind of barometer. Am I mindful in this way that I think

is supposed to be helpful? Or am I concentrated in the way that I think is supposed to be helpful? And the practice has so many mechanisms of action. There's so many ways it gets under our skin. There's so many ways in which it heals us and wakes us up that to focus exclusively on one metric does a disservice to all the other ways in which practice may be functioning.

to all the other ways in which practice may be functioning. And so it's just the caution about being too single-minded about how progress unfolds and being too compulsive about measuring that progress. A pitfall into which I have experienced many, many times and continue to experience. So let's go back. Let's veer away from, at least for now, from what our mutual friend, Joseph Goldstein calls the practice assessment tapes that many of us run. Let's veer back to the subject of being in the moment that Apex predator of all contemplative

cliches. And I'm trying to figure out where to go from here. DJ Cashmere, who is the amazingly named human being, who's one of our indispensable producers on this show, is the one who teed up this interview with you and he was inspired by having heard you give a talk on a meditation retreat that he attended that you were leading recently.

The title of the talk was memory prediction, becoming, and the present. So I started at the present, the end of the list. But let's work our way through the beginning of the list. Let's start with memory. Because as you said, I think a lot of us feel like if memories are surfacing in meditation, well, then that's proof that we're doing it wrong because we're stuck in the past instead of militantly focusing on here and now. So what say you vis-a-vis memory and meditation? Well, at some level, we could think about the present moment as the culmination of the entirety of the past,

that the present moment is the kind of wave crest, and the ocean is the past. That what is here now, What is the present moment made out of other than the sum of the past, of all causes and conditions? And so this notion that we just sever ourselves from the past, from memory in some automatic way, and we force our mind into some slot that we define as the present is to my mind a mistaken notion. And the path of meditation, the path of mindfulness, the path into a deeper sense of presence takes us through memory and the past. It takes us through the anticipation and prognostications we have about the future. And so the sense that we should just utterly seclude ourselves from the past is not really viable.

I would say we really actually heal our past through meditation practice. There's some saying somebody said, forgiveness is giving up hope for a better past or something like this. But the truth is that we remember from a deluded viewpoint. And in ways, the experience, the intensities of any given life are just, they're just more than we could digest. And so life can feel like a meal that is too big to consume, basically. And we have these unfinished, undigested business of memory, of habits that have incredible inertia. And part of meditation practice is actually transforming our very sense of the past. And we don't do this explicitly. We're not trying to re-narrate our

past as we practice. But of course, as we sit and we try to be present, what arises is the kind of present, what arises is the kind of whatever is undigested from our day or our week or our year or lifetime. And what is kind of undigested, what has not been metabolized, what is still kind of electrified in our own histories, needs to be known and blessed with presence. We bless our past with wisdom and love. And so we're there innocently trying to be still to find some silence and whatever is incomplete in our own history calls out for our attention. And it calls out for a new kind of understanding, calls out to be known from the perspective of wisdom, to be known with awareness and love.

And this is actually how we complete our past. And so we don't have to do some explicit life review in our meditation practice, but it will organically happen. It will organically happen that the electrified memories of often some kind of pain, some kind of awkwardness, some kind of shame, some sense of loose end of our life that feels problematic. This will arise, the harm that we've done, the harm that's been done to us, this will arise. And just over the course of the months and years of practice, we will be asked to habituate to all of our memory. At one time or another, it will all return. And people feel like this is an interruption, kind of intrusion in their practice.

But it's actually what I would say is one of the core mechanisms of how we cultivate our own being on this path and how our past starts to become more and more whole. And in this way, it becomes less and less sticky. It becomes blessed with the wisdom and love that we've cultivated now, that we did not have when we experienced that moment, right? And so there is this sense of like integrating, gathering up the shards of our own history and essentially writing and rewriting our autobiography. And it happens quietly. It happens quietly. It doesn't

always happen so explicitly. But over time, the sense of our very life, our past, is written in light of, we would say, Dharma, in light of this path of practice. Coming up, Matthew Brantselver explained his contention that mindfulness practice is a kind of exposure therapy, and he illuminates the brain's exhausting tendency toward constant prediction, and he explains, what is meant by the phrase, liberation is the cessation of becoming. That's the kind of verbiage you hear escaping the lips of Buddhists all the time and he will unpack it. Hi there, I'm Guy Ross. And I'm Mindy Thomas.

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This is fascinating and it sounds right to me as an amateur meditator, but I'm going to press you to get really practical about some of the rather grand terms you use. That's not a criticism, but they are sort of big words. Like you talked about blessing the past with presence and wisdom and love and awareness. What does that actually mean and how does it get done? Yeah, so memory arises. And sometimes it's in the form of some explicit episode from our past. Sometimes it feels like just some lingering emotional, affective agitation or some energy coming through the body.

And in those times, it's important to be willing to experience the past in the present moment. So we give this kind of radical permission for the past to arise, that memory, those images that we have, the associated feeling, affect in our body, we give permission for all of that to arise without any sense of contention or fighting with it. And so we're allowing the fullness of the past to be known in the present moment. And then for me, it's like we're just allowing that past almost like an energy that is wire bound tightly in our own heart, mind, body to just unfurl in the space of awareness. And so it's not even explicitly trying to reconceptualize something that's happened in the past. It's allowing the energy, the intensity, the stickiness of memory just to be discharged in the present moment.

And sometimes, of course, we'll get stuck back in it and we'll be reliving it in a way that feels very first person. You know, all of a sudden, I'm there, I'm reliving it. And what he said, what they said, what she said, we're in the kind of of the protagonist of the movie without being conscious that we're watching a movie. And then we reestablish some mind from this. Ah, my body feels like this.

Ah, there are memories of that. And oh, the kind of affective flavors of the mind and body feel like this. We become conscious of all of that, and we become willing to just absorb the kind of body blow of the intensity of that. And we, as one of my teachers, Shins and Young says, we love it to death. We love it to death. We normally try to hate things to death, but here we love it to death. We love it to death. We normally try to hate things to death. But here we love it to death. And this doesn't require us to tell some elaborate new story. It's like the intensity, the stickiness of the past is digested in this way. And over time, it's like less and less of our past feels electrified in the same way. It may

retain all of its poignancy, we are not severed from our past or something like this. We have learned a lot from it. We have learned what and who we can trust, what and who we cannot trust. We have learned so much, but the kind of gripping, re-experience and quality of the past is transformed. And in this way, I, it's often say mindfulness practice is a kind of exposure therapy. Yeah, it is an exposure therapy. Normally, we, in the clinical world, you do exposure therapy for some anxiety or post-traumatic stress of one

kind or another. And the idea is that avoidance and catastrophic thinking and ideas about our own lack of resilience keeps the psychological pain in place. We do not actually learn the important new lesson. The fear is kept in place by patterns of avoidance. And so the idea is instead to approach and to systematically desensitize oneself to whatever the feared object is. In meditation practice, it's not systematic desensitization practice, it's really unsystematic desensitization, it's unsystematic exposure, meaning whatever can disrupt my peace will. But that is a core element of practice. Whatever can disrupt my peace will. I just have to sit long enough.

And what disrupts my peace is not my fault and nor is it an accident. The nature of the pain that arises for me is different than yours. And it's not an accident that it arises in this particular constellation for me. Nor is it my fault. I don't know. There's something about that word blessing that I'm not an especially religious person in many respects, but that word feels right just in the sense of, I have this image of memory arising and like the way somebody gets knighted or something like that. I don't even know the what I'm talking about, but it's like I think of a sword touching one shoulder and another,

and I have this image of like, yeah, with memory, it's like we touch with wisdom, with deep understanding, and we touch with love. And in this way, we're really habituating to everything that might disrupt our peace. Anyway, I'm using, you said get concrete, and maybe I'm using more grandiose language, Dan, so do something for us. Do something. All right. Well, here's what I will do. I like, I really like everything you're saying. I'll do my thing of just dumbing it down even further because that's how I understand

things at the dumbest possible level and build from there. And so I would say the way I'm taking in what you're saying is I'm sitting there in meditation Kind of focus on my breath coming in going out I might then get ambushed by a memory of some horrible thing. I didn't set in grade and The blessing with wisdom and love and awareness and me sound I'd reached to some people But really it's pretty down to earth. It's like, okay, what's love, if not acceptance, right? I'm not fighting it. I'm just, all right, it's here.

What's wisdom, if not the decision not to take it personally? So I don't have to see this as my memory. I don't have to get sucked up in the story of it. I probably will for a few nanoseconds or so, maybe even 10 minutes. But at some point in my pop out and be like, oh yeah, this is, what is this memory consist of? Maybe a few shards of visual data, maybe some feelings in the body. So that's love, that's wisdom.

It's all happening right now, that's the present moment. And of course, all of this is awareness. And then once you've loved it to death, meaning you haven't fought it, you've seen it for what it is, a set of sensations, and then you go back to your breath. And then maybe something else comes up. And then you do this process at Infanitum, and in this way, you're really healing your

relationship to the past. Anyway, is that a recapitulation that is that bears some resemblance to the original? Absolutely. Yeah, I'm not pointing to some epically sophisticated mode of practice. It's more describing, I think, what is happening when we do practice. And we think that all the goodness comes from being with the breath or the anchor of attention, but so much goodness comes from migrating from it and discovering the stickiness of memory and beginning to actually understand

our past in light of our current wisdom because the painful episodes of our history at some level, they get encoded in a kind of more primitive frame of reference, and we really want to understand a certain kind of the innocence of our pain. What made that painful? We want to import some of the wisdom we have now into the lack of wisdom we had in that moment. That's what helps digest this. And this happens, I think, just in a organic way is over the course of practice. It's not a project that we have to do. We don't sit down and say, okay, I need to heal my past in this way. We just are willing to learn from everything, be softened by everything. And then, of course, we start to see that part of our fixation about the past,

maybe some small sliver of it is purely about the past, but so much of what we're doing is trying to leverage the past in order to ensure our future, that we bind ourselves to the past and the future in our attempt to secure the safety of the present moment. And so the past is often not meaningful, just in its own right. We're trying to extract some lessons in order to ensure that our future might be all right. And this is also such a natural habit of mind. And we see that we do tie ourselves to the past and to our future. And the present can feel very squeezed by the rest of all time, you know, what is past, what is future. And the present gets very claustrophobic. And so some part of our practice is about healing the past. And then

there's this other dimension of letting go of the future and entering the bottomlessness of the present, but maybe we're getting to the second word. I don't know what the title was. I don't remember. Okay. Well, we are getting to the second word. You're very, very kindly doing my job for me. The title of the talk that the aforementioned DJ heard on his recent meditation retreat,

which you were leading, was memory, prediction, the coming, which I'll get you to define at some point, and the present. So we've talked about memory, and then you brought us to prediction. And I believe one of the things you learned in your research for this talk, and just generally I know you're very interested in sort of neuroscience, is that increasingly neuroscientists are thinking of the brain as a prediction machine, and how else to form your predictions if not mining the past and the present? Yeah. So there's a lot of currency around prediction and predictive processing,

and this is a kind of theoretical and empirical approach to understanding a brain function that your other guests could speak much more eloquently about is really above my pay grade. But I came to it through the sense that the emphasis on prediction hues very closely to the phenomenological experience of trying to be present. And the sense of just the lure of the future, this sense of tumbling forward, the sense of the kind

of vigilance, which we don't even really notice until we sit down and try to be still. But then we actually can sense just how profoundly our motivational systems are oriented around ensuring more moments. And this makes sense as an animal contending with this tiny animal, me contending with unimaginably vast forces of nature, of change, of entropy. And I sit down and I say, okay, let me let go of the past, let me let go of planning and worrying and in a future orientation. Let me just be with the breathing. But there is a kind of ambient vigilance of any animal that is just oriented around survival and protection that is oriented around safety and safety is always about the future, right? I'm safe now in this moment,

but is the next moment going to be safe? And so safety is about the future, which means safety is about prediction. It's about what is happening next. It is about the trajectory of this moment. And does that portend okayness for me? Does it portend more moments? Is this moment on a kind of trajectory towards more safety. And one of the effects of that is it feels like the present moment is only ever a canary in the coal mine of the future. I know that is a weird image or metaphor or some what I've analogy. I don't know what it is, but that's what came to me.

I was like, oh yeah, each moment, the present moment just feels like the canary in the coal mine of the future. And so we're just trying to sense like, is everything okay? to sense like, is everything okay? Like, is the landscape of threat and opportunity okay? And to do this, we're modeling our sense of self, we're modeling our sense of time, we're modeling the directional trajectory, you know, the trajectory of this moment, and we're asking so compulsively, is this okay? Am I okay? Will I be okay? And this happens at the depths of our brain and our being. And so we start to become sensitive to this imperative around survival, around protection, around vigilance, and the kind of lore of the future. And so, to be present is to contend with these super potent forces of memory, of the future, of safety, of protection, and the path into a deeper

kind of presence takes us through all of this. So let me pause for a moment. That description of, am I okay? Am I okay? It's just kind of rock me back in my seat because yeah, I think that's what's coursing through my mind all the time. And it got me wondering about whether there's a link between am I okay and the obsessive self-evaluation that you referenced at the top of this discussion that many of us bring to our meditation practices and everything else. This kind of perfectionism,

is it linked to anxiety, as I say it, of thinking that's a pretty obvious question, but what say you? Yeah, yeah, I didn't make that connection, but I think you're right. The compulsive measuring, using the whatever metric, barometer, or of the success of our meditation practice, the success of our life is about ensuring that we're on the right trajectory. And that maybe at base is linked to safety and survival and the integrity of our own body and all of this. And yeah, we think we're just checking in on how concentrated I am, but we're really asking, am I going to be alive in the next moment or something like this, right? Is my life headed in the right direction? Is this moment headed in the right direction? And that is so innocent, we want to appreciate the innocence of that movement of the mind. And we want to appreciate the innocence of that movement of the mind and we want to appreciate the claustrophobia of it too. And the confinement of hallucinating the sense of self that needs fixing that is headed somewhere that has a past and is moving towards a future, I just become this enormous self-improvement project.

And I'm a mess. I'm always gonna be a mess. From that view, there are always gonna be loose ends. And I'm always going to be this discrete entity that is basically broken, that is aspiring towards some less broken state. And the whole gestalt of that mind state has some suffering in it. And so it's so innocent, but it's a very confined state when we find able for a few moments to drop the, am I okay? Am I okay?

Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Maybe that is the readiness to die that you discussed earlier. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. exactly. To be present is to consider what a futureless moment would feel like. And that's almost impossible to even conceive. But this is part of why we have

contemplations about death. Some of it is about the poignancy of whatever time we have left. Some of it is about the poignancy of whatever time we have left. Some of it is about cutting through the pettiness that will matter zero on our deathbed. But some of it is to consider what would be here? How deeply might the heart surrender if this moment were futureless. And so that is a very surrendered state. That is a very poorest state that is very undefended, all the ways in which we fixate the sense of self and we fixate a sense of time. Of this is what just happened. This is where I am now. This is what is coming, the way we fixate and orient to what we like, what we don't like, what is pleasant, what is not pleasant, where the threats and opportunities are of this moment. All of that just becomes this like incredibly compelling but claustrophobic cluster. And so to be willing to like live this moment

as if there is no future requires a lot of trust and a lot of devotion in a certain way. It's like we put all of our hope into the present moment. And this is why we practice in places that are conducive to safety, where we don't have to be especially vigilant. This is why the ancestors of this lineage practiced in seclusion, for example, and this is why we take the precepts we agree at the retreat where DJ was, we take the precepts, we agree at the retreat where DJ was, we take the precepts, meaning we agree at the very first evening, we agree, we are not going to harm each other, we are not going

to harm each other. No one here needs to fear one another. This is the commitment and explicit ethical commitment that we take. And there are many reasons we do that, but part of it is that there is no way to relinquish vigilance in the absence of some modicum of safety. And as we become more and more safe, as our inner life becomes more and more safe. We surrender more deeply into the present moment. And strangely, that also prepares us to deal with the lack of safety that is the human condition, and to contend with the forces of impermanence, of unreliability. This is what we're training ourselves to do, but in a way it's like kids are much better able to open to the contingencies, the uncertainties, the unpredictability of human life, if they have been protected from those forces for a time. You know, if a parent insulates a

child from all of the forces of uncertainty, of hardship, of suffering. They are insulated from that and that protected experience, hopefully, if they are fortunate, that protected experience allows them to actually open to the truth of the universe more fully. And so in the same way, we need to seclude our heart to actually open to the intensity of the human condition even more fully. Do we need to be on retreat to access the depths of what you've been talking about in this conversation? Retreat is helpful, but I don't think it's strictly necessary. I feel like everything I'm saying is on offer in just the rhythms of our practice, but I retreat is for most people is indispensable in the development of some of the understandings. And I don't think it's strictly absolutely necessary. But for most people,

just the sense of what mindfulness is, the radical potentials of awareness, don't usually dawn on people until they have some days of seclusion. And certainly in my own experiences, it was easy to think that I knew what mindfulness was because I had been practicing for a couple of years, I think, before I sat a first retreat. But I don't feel like I really started to appreciate the multi-dimensional depth of even what mindfulness is until I started to sit in retreat with some seclusion, with these

artificial set of conditions that help us relinquish some of the vigilance. I agree with that. I think you can get enormous benefits from doing mindfulness on a day-to-day or daily-ish basis, but you can get even more if you go on retreat. Much more of my interview with Matthew Brensover, coming up right after this. Quick reminder, we've got a great new year's coming up on January 3rd, right here on the podcast, featuring the non-negotiables where we compile

some of the smartest people we know and ask them about their must-have practices and principles featuring Esther Parall, John Kabatzin, Pemama Children and more, and over on the 10% happier app, we've got a New Year's meditation challenge for people who are imperfect, meaning everybody that kicks off on January 8. Let's go back to your list. We've covered memory and prediction one and two on the list. The third was becoming.

That's a bit of a term of art in the Buddhist world. What does it mean? Becoming is the sense of the continuity of self across time and the impaling force of the future, the future that is pulling us into it, moment by moment, that sense of what we had been discussing, that sense of the present moment merely as a kind of down payment on some future. And we live like that so profoundly without recognizing it, the sense of never exactly arriving, the sense of happiness always being momentarily deferred, the sense of,

I will get there some time. This moment is about some future when I might finally allow my heart to rest, but we never arrive. It's forever deferred, and we can live our whole life in that way, and there's a kind of tragic quality to that of never allowing the heart to fully rest because the present is only ever a down payment on

some happiness, some time, somewhere. And so that sense of me located here, happiness located out there, and I will get there, and it will be a journey. I will journey. The Matthew within Matthew, the little Matthew inside, will go from point A to point B, and then I will rest. That gives some flavor of the sense of becoming. And we can have that in our lives, of course, but also meditatively of just leaning into the next moment to the next, well, let me just get a little more concentrated here. Let me get a little more insight. Or what was Dan talking, let me get a little bit more of that, let me get a little, you know, all these things, right? We have sort of trying to extract something from the moment. And the gesture of awareness is to offer the heart up rather than extract something. But that process of extracting

something and getting somewhere, of moving somewhere, of finally arriving, of finally being able to finally arriving of finally being able to climb up on the bank of Samsara, you know, the bank of this human realm that never comes. We're always forever contending with the forces of change. There are no banks in this river. And it's like to envision our happiness as only ever being when we can climb up on that bank is becoming, is becoming. This sounds deeply ingrained. How would one even begin to transcend see through drop this pattern. I don't know, Dan. Right. That's not what you're supposed to say.

Oh, no, that's not. Oh, okay. Well, cut that. Definitely added that out. Here we go. Let me just, no, it is really deep, really deep. And I do not claim to have anything like uprooted that habit. I really feel like that is such a radical

relinquishment of the urge for another moment. It is in the deepest sense, like a total surrender of all territory of self. And that is not my experience, but I have a kind of reference for what that might be. And we can have some intuitive hit of what that can feel like in our own practice. The sense of actually in one of the sutras, one of the Buddhist disciples said, Liberation is the cessation of becoming. Liberation is nibbana is the cessation of becoming. That tumbling forward, that sense of leveraging the past in order to ensure a future of being stuck in time. We can have a sense of what it is like to be freed of this, and the kind of profound openness of just having some degree of freedom from that tumbling forward, from that becoming. And that doesn't mean that we are indifferent to death and life or something

like this. That doesn't mean that we do not still appreciate whatever time, whatever moments we have. That doesn't mean we don't plan and organize our lives and organize efforts to help alleviate suffering. We can do all of that, but there is a sense of respite from only ever living smashed between the past and the future. And there's a lot of relief that comes from this. And this is the same way, that feel without future.

And maybe I don't know, but maybe this is of use when we really don't have another moment. Maybe this is of use when it is our time. And I feel kind of compelled to develop my heart in such a way that it retains its integrity even as my life ends. Just to pick up on that phrase of, I think you said, developing or cultivating your heart, I think as we roll into the final sections of this interview, I wonder if there will be a sort of yearning on the part of listeners for some thoughts about how to operationalize all of this because what you've talked about has been incredibly, in my opinion, resonant

feels really true as I keep saying. And I wonder if you have some thoughts about how we can do a better job with whatever amount of practice we're up for to bring these things to life for ourselves. Yeah. So I feel some some ambivalence because on the one hand, I know I'm like super vague and impressionistic and kind of very unclear about how to actually operationalize any of this. And this is a problem that I have as a teacher, Dan. This is a theme of self-critique that I contend with at various times. And I sort of try to psych myself up to get more concrete and operationalize something. And I can't always get myself to do it. I can't always get myself to make it more concrete. So let me say a little bit. So on the one hand, I'm very sympathetic to the desire to have practice instructions. but I think one of the implications of what we're talking about is that practice itself can be hijacked by the tides of becoming. And so some of what I'm pointing to is actually just to have a certain faith in the practice that I'm trying to unpack the mechanisms of it in a way

that are hopefully resonant. And this is the genius of this path. It's already encoded in the logic of the instructions. It's not something else that we need to do, that we need to busy ourselves with. It's happening. It is happening wordlessly. And that is just purely a reflection of this kind of lineage, you know, and the genius of it, really. But yeah, there are also things we can do. There are. You got me again. Yeah, I'm going to get it just grudgingly. I'm so I so rendered you down. So that means the audience I'm here to serve. I'm a conduit. I love it. I love it. No, and I do feel like it's important for me to be able to articulate it in concrete ways to make sure that I understand it clearly enough. So I think we can look at this sense of this total non-rejection of memory, this radical permission for memory to arise, and for the affective resonance to blow through the

space of awareness, just to let it blow through. And then this pull of the future, the sense of this tug of ensuring that this moment is okay, that this moment portends more moments, that arises as a kind of agitation, and it arises as a kind of a way in which we're modeling the present moment. Literally sometimes in our own mind, we're like with imagining the present moment, we're imagining the outlines of our body, we're imagining the room, we're imagining what's coming next, we're imagining where that pain is in my knee as I'm sitting,

we're literally have like a model of all of this, right? And we're trying to translate that, we're leveraging that model into a kind of estimation of the safety of this moment. And the practice is to metabolize, to economize all the agitation of that, all the phenomena of the predicting and the modeling of the self of the next moment, all of that is phenomena arising and passing. It comes in the form of subtle images we have of kind of dreaming of my own body. You know, like this is what it looks like. I'm literally picturing that with my eyes closed. I'm literally picturing the room. I'm picturing the bird of the sound that I just heard. And I'm trying to not be surprised or startled by anything. It's like, how do I not

be surprised by the next moment? And that impaling force, we recognize that as the gestalt of a certain kind of fear, that to me is even more fundamental than ignorance in our suffering. It's said that ignorance is the kind of wellspring of all suffering, and that may be, but to me, for my money, even more fundamental is the kind of basic ambient fear this urge towards safety and security.

And so we actually notice the gestalt of that in our body and mind. We know that as phenomena arising and passing. And if we can feel safe enough, if our inner life feels safe enough, if our past feels safe enough, we can begin to surrender some of the vigilance. And so for me, the way it looks is a certain kind of ambient, affective agitation or fearfulness or defensiveness that I can like sense. It's not mystical. It's like the sense of needing to defend, of being vulnerable, you know, and rather than try to shore up and become invulnerable, we become more vulnerable. We actually move towards the vulnerability. We surrender more and more deeply and it takes some trust in this path of practice, some trust in the logic of the practice, but we are bringing mindfulness, equanimity, love to the energies of the coming. It's very helpful when teachers do what you just did,

which is to name and crystallize a mental trend or phenomena that I may have a kind of ambient awareness of, but not actually anything remotely resembling a clear seeing of. And so you've just named it, and what we can do is bring that into our practice, into our lives as something we can try to spot as it arises and bring a kind of warm acceptance of as a way to hopefully over time turn the volume down on it. My close. Yeah, I think that's right. That's right. We greet the vulnerability of our animal condition with a lot of acceptance and love and patience, and rather than demonizing ourselves for always shoring up our boundaries, always becoming territorial in one way or another. We see that, and that is born of a certain suffering and compounds a suffering, but we see that

in the kind of innocence of the movement of our mind in this way. And so, yeah, of course we do this, of course we do this, right? And of course, the urge around safety takes all these defensive forms and takes all these maladaptive forms and actually compounds suffering even in trying to alleviate it. and actually compound suffering even in trying to alleviate it. We just have a kind of infinite forgiveness for our own human fallibility and those movements of our mind. We love them to death. Where are you on the gambit that some teachers and therapists will suggest of giving the fear or giving that animalistic self-protective character in our mind a kind of name and greeting it warmly when you see that character rearing its head.

Right. Yeah, yeah, the idea of name it to tame it kind of, it's better to give it a name, maybe even slightly playful name or something rather than just to be lost in a Morpheus nameless dread. Yeah, I'll take a name over a Morpheus nameless dread. I think that's right. And sometimes we have to appreciate that our labels can outlive their usefulness too. That our labels are useful for a time. They concretize something, but then the flip side is that they kind of reify something. So we just want to be sensitive to when our labels and when our kind of conceptual categories are useful and when they are actually solidifying something in us that is actually, that is indeed more amorphous or something like that. Yeah. And in this, I mean, it's important to say a lot of what we're doing is learning to

distinguish true alarms from false alarms, right? It's like in the end, we're actually habituating to false alarms and true alarms. but it's important to acknowledge like yeah The body is the alarm bells are going off all the time and so often they are actually false alarms It's not actually an existential threat. It's just an egoic threat, right? And it's just a threat to our control or something like this It's a threat to the sense that we shouldn't feel pain or whatever, but it's not a true alarm, right? It's just the sense of this moment is a kind of prediction of future harm or something,

but it's actually okay. And so we're learning to de-escalate some of the arousal around these false alarms. And then at some point, we are really meeting the true alarms, the things that actually are a genuine threat that do represent the end of our life. Our practice calls us into that terrain too, but importantly, there's millions of false alarms that we want to learn to deescalate because one clinical model of pain, there's a saying like pain is the prediction of bodily

harm, pain is the prediction of bodily harm. And to deescalate from the catastrophizing and all of this, it's like, okay, let's just use that framework. Okay, pain is a pretty, is this okay? Is this actually represent tissue damage or some existential threat? No, my knee just hurts like two out of 10 on the pain scale. I'm okay. And so, all right, I'm being told that this portans disaster, but can I de-escalate that? And a lot of times, we fail to distinguish between the two out of 10 and the eight out of 10, or something, it all feels catastrophic. And so, the false alarms need to be distinguished from what are really true threats.

And for the true threats, that requires different medicine. It really is often just about making sure people are safe and protected. Just the last question from me. We've worked our way through the list of four. We started at the end of the list, just as a reminder, the list is memory prediction becoming in the present. We started at the present. I just want to end there and just open the floor to you just in case there's a way in

which you want to tie a bow around this and bring us back to the present moment. Is it perhaps correct to say that the punchline here and I don't want to be glib, but I can't help it because that's just my wiring is that if we can bring this warmth and wisdom and by wisdom, I don't mean like to conjure images of double door in the minds of the listener, I mean, just seeing things as they are, seeing that they're not as solid as we might think they are, that they're passing, et cetera.

So, subrings and warmth and some wisdom to whatever's coming up in our mind, that is being present. that is being present. Yeah, what's coming to me is that, right? It just is embedded in the logic of the instructions themselves. And so, yeah, we have to understand, you know, what is happening to us, what has happened, what we let go of, we have to understand the fruits of the practice. We want to get the kind of final vision of what we're doing, but it's okay to be patient

and hold open the questions and instead just do the practice. I think Sharon Salzberg said, for a long time, I was trying to do the practice and make it work. And then at some point, I just was doing the practice. There's just a lot of brilliance in that refrain from her. So where does this leave us, Dan? This is typical of me, but I wonder whether you didn't really take the bait on it, but it does feel to me like if we can have what

meditation teachers call an open heart, not my preferred phraseology, but just sort of an attitude of, as you keep saying, sort of warmth and wisdom toward whatever's coming up, that feels like the way to inhabit the vaunted present moment more and more over time. vaunted present moment more and more over time. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. What the present is changes over time. It changes over time. How we conceive of that.

How we experience that changes over time. But yeah, that sounds great to me. Anything that you wanted to say that I didn't give you an opportunity to say, no, I don't think so. I don't think so. We got't think so. We got all four words. We got all four words, Dan. Dan, that I will ask you this. This is you've been on the show before you've I've already subjected you to this, but it's possible that people won't remember what you said the

last time I asked you this question. So can you please remind folks if they want to hear more from you, learn more from you, how can they do so? My website is my full name dot org, Matthew, Brent solver dot org. That would be the best avenue. And if you don't spell that correctly, Google is your friend. Also the show notes of this podcast are your friend because we'll put a link to it right there. Thank you for spelling my name correctly, Dan and the show notes. You're assuming we will do that, but we'll do our best. And if we make a mistake, we'll hold it with the loving acceptance and an open heart.

There you go. Open heart, Dan. Just bring it. Yeah. Surrender. It's such a pleasure. Always Matthew to have you on the show. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you. It's such a pleasure. Always, Matthew, to have you on the show. And I really appreciate your time.

Thank you. Thank you very much. My pleasure. Delight to be with you and talk about these things. Thanks again to Matthew. Great to talk to him. Thanks to you for listening. Really appreciate that.

10% happier is produced by Justin Davy Gabriel Zuckerman, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor Kevin O'Connell as our director of audio and post-production, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, Alicia Mackie leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts, finally Nick Thorburn of Ireland's Rotar Theme. If you want to hear more of Matthew, go to the show show notes and we'll put a link to his other episode. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and add free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon music.

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