Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How To Get Ahead At Work, Buddhist-Style | David Nichtern

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Buddhist strategies for making money and being creative.Meditation teacher David Nichtern believes that business can be, in his words, an essential spiritual practice. He has been practicing and teaching meditation for over 40 years. He’s also the author of a book, Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck. And he hosts a podcast by the same name. He began his career as a successful composer, producer, and guitarist. He’s recorded and played with Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, Lana Del Rey, Paul Simon, and others. Recently, he’s become an entrepreneur, founding an online mindfulness based education platform called Dharma Moon.You can check out the video series based on his latest book, here. And on June 14, David’s leading a 100 Hour Mindfulness Teacher Training. For more info, check out the Dharma Moon website.Related Episodes:Duncan Trussell on: Being a Spiritual Omnivore, Whether Psychedelics Are a Bridge to the Divine, and How the Gates of Hell Are Locked From the InsideA Buddhist Approach to Money Worries | Ethan NichternSign 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/david-nichternSee 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, gang. How we doing? How we doing? There is an assumption that I think many of us make, which is that work and spirituality, for lack of a better term, are necessarily, definitionally separate, even opposed. This is a huge theme for me in my own life and in the content I create.

How to bring the lessons I've learned from meditation, psychology, and Buddhism into the crucible of my work life. How to be sanely productive, how to be ambitious without driving myself nuts, how to figure out how much money is enough money. My guest today has been thinking deeply about this stuff for way longer than I have. His name is David Nicktern.

He believes that business can be, and these are his words, an essential spiritual practice. He's been practicing and teaching meditation for over 40 years. He's the author of a book called Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck, and he hosts a podcast by the same name. He's an interesting dude. He began his career as a successful composer, producer, and guitarist. He's recorded and played with Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, Lana Del Rey, Paul Simon, and

many others. He actually wrote that classic song, Midnight at the Oasis. He's the guy who wrote that. More recently, he's become an entrepreneur, founding an online mindfulness-based education platform called Dharma Moon. I found this conversation to be very helpful because I'm wrestling with a lot of this stuff at the moment. David Nickturn coming up.

First, though, time for a little BSP, Blatant Self-Promotion. I am doing two informal weekend retreats with my friends Seben A. Selassie and Jeff Warren. We call them meditation parties. They're going down at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. One is coming up in May and another in October. They're open for in-person and also virtual registration. You can find the links at danharris.com over on the events page. And by the way, if you are tired of listening to ads on this show,

go over to the 10% Happier app. If you're a subscriber, you can get these shows, all of them all the way back to episode one, without ads, and you get them a week before everybody else. Download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps and get started for free. Hello I'm Emily one of the hosts of terribly famous the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. Some of them hit the big time overnight, some have to plug away for years but in our latest series we're talking about a man who was world famous before he was even born.

A life of extreme privilege that was mapped out from the start, but left him struggling to find his true purpose. A man who, compared to his big brother, felt a bit, you know, spare. Yes, it's Prince Harry. You might think you know everything about him, but trust me, there's even more. We follow Harry and the obsessive, all-consuming relationship of his life. Not with Meghan, but the British tabloid press.

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In our latest series, we're visiting one of the rockiest sibling relationships ever. Okay, so I'm thinking Danny and Kylie no no no I'm thinking Anne Boleyn and the other Boleyn. No no Barry and Paul Chuckle. No it's Noel and Liam Gallagher. Now these two couldn't be more different but they're tied to each other in musical dependency. Despite their music catching the attention of people around the world, Liam's behavior could destroy their chances.

However, their manager saw an opportunity to build a brand around their rebellious nature. It's got fights on boats, fights on planes, fights on land. They just fight everywhere. If you like fights, you'll love this. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondry Plus, on Apple podcasts or on the Wondry app. David Nickter and welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It's really good to be here with you. I've watched your show quite a bit. I'm excited to talk to you. Likewise. So you've written a bunch of books and other things, but what I wanna talk about today is creativity, spirituality and making a buck.

Would you think it would be fair to describe that book as Buddhist career advice? No. The way I would describe it is if you took those three strands, those three sort of aspects of living, and you developed a braid with them or attempted to integrate them into one cohesive way of being, that's what the book's about. So it's not just how to make money teaching Dharma, it's not how to make a business more ethical and aligned, and it's not how to get your demos recorded by Taylor Swift necessarily either, but

any of those could be part of it. So Dharma Buddhism is part of it, but it's one strand among three. That's right and what we say is they have equal weight which is an unconventional perspective. Say more about how you think it's unconventional. Well just in my experience people are stronger in one of those three suits than the other or maybe two so if you put two, something that I started off my music career with was a very famous songwriter telling me that music business was two words. You know, you're putting those two things together. And there's a lot of people who are very talented

who have not put those two things together. At the same time, there's a lot of, I worked in the nonprofit world for many, many years, you know, working for $25 a week as the director of a meditation center in Vermont after living in Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles and scoring films and producing hit records. So the nonprofit world has also eschewed and pooh-poohed the kind of what I would call the quote unquote real world, and vice versa.

So I think we've arrived at a time where people are trying to really balance their tires on those elements of their lifestyle. And that's what we're all about at Dharma Moon. That's our project. So it is important to be creative, that's the magic. It's important to make a buck because you've got bills. And it's important to have ethics and Dharma and Buddhism

in there as a way to be as happy as possible because that will support the other two pillars and because you wanna do things that are good for the world. Yeah, and I would say we call it CSM for short, the CSM world. I would say you're a perfect candidate I'd like to invite you to come on to my podcast and talk about how you do it Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. I mean, I think one of the things I'd like to talk about today

but I don't want to lead with this but is Where the lines are where where it's appropriate to be making? What you know X amount of dollars if at its core what your product is, is Dharma or Dharma adjacent. And that's something that I've spent some time worrying about, but we'll get to that. Let me just stay at a high, high level with you first. You say there are two core principles in the book. One of them is as it is, and the other is, up to us.

Can you pick one and then the other and walk us through them? Well, you know, different language for depending on how somebody receives this information, but as it is in Sanskrit would be dharmata, suchness, the things the way they are, which is one of the big core tenets of the Buddhist teachings is you don't get to re-contour reality because of your wishful thinking. For example, you can't wishful thinking your way out of old age, sickness and death. That was a big part of the Buddhist teachings. So you have to deal with life knowing that it's impermanent and that you're going to

get old, sick and die. So that's as it is. That's a very blunt kind of reckoning with things the way that they are. And it involves to some extent cutting through, you know, kind of dreamy fantasy based neither spiritual or material outlook. It's blunt, it's direct as it is, it's very direct. It is what it is. And up to us.

Up to us means, okay, well, with that premise, with that ground, there's a lot of choices that we make. And even if you think you're in a safe, secure channel for following along with somebody who says it's this way, it's that way, really the most intelligent thing a good teacher can tell you is that it's up to you to find your way. And I believe that's what Buddha did and all the teachers I've studied with have also said that. It's your call. And the way my teacher used to say it is your guess is as good as mine.

That's a powerful thing to hear from somebody you hope is going to have a better guess than you have. Sometimes the way I think about this and this this is probably amateurish, and so feel free to correct me, but like we're all born unsolicited into this torrent of causes and conditions. And so many things are out of our control. Even the contents of our own mind, that's often out of our control. And yet, even within this flux, we do have some agency. And that's where you get into things like karma. And again, and I have a, to the extent that I understand karma at all,

it's sort of a very naturalistic, not metaphysical understanding of actions bring results. So anyway, does that gumbo of words make any sense to you? Yeah, and you're moving through a very creative zone to contemplate. How did we get here? What is happening and how much agency do we have? What kind of agency do we have to change our own mind and understand our own mind? And what kind of agency do we have to affect the bigger picture? So those are really good questions. And I like the fact that you're taking that as a gateway into understanding

karma, which is a very powerful concept. My other book is about karma. It's called Awakening from the Daydream. And it's about what karma is, but it is a cascade of causes and conditions resulting in this present moment being set up exactly the way it is. I use the analogy of a billiards game. The lay on the table. Did you used to play pool in college? I did. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lay on the table when you pick up the cue and you can't really change that unless you're cheating. You get the other person to look the other way, you know, but now you have a shot. You have a clean shot and you call the shot and you, and you, depending on how much skill

you have, how much mental acuity you've developed, physical acuity, you can affect that shot a lot of different ways actually. You have a lot of potency in that moment. If you get overwhelmed by emotional upheavals that are conditioned into you, your basic habitual patterns, the shot is going to be governed by the previous conditions as opposed to having a clean shot. So that's what we're trying to get our mind clean so we can get a clean shot with the existing conditions.

Does that make sense? It does make sense. I think I can imagine some people bumping on or getting caught on getting your mind clean, because as you know, one of the big pernicious misconceptions around meditation is that it somehow requires you to clear your mind, which as far as I know is impossible. It's not impossible.

Say more. It's not the path that one sets out in the beginning because the first step is to make friends with the mind as you know all the you know the Vipassana teachings that you've taken. You don't set up the mind as an enemy that you're gonna try to conquer, right? However, there can be over time some subsiding in the volume and irregularity and rabbit hole kind of quality of the mind and irregularity and rabbit hole kind of quality of the mind and the mind can become more steady and more clear.

There's no doubt about that. When you're with a great masterful, you know, somebody who's mastered meditation, their mind feels quite clear and stable and steady. It's observable, it's experienceable. No? No, I think you're absolutely right. I guess we're, as I understand it, and I am not a meditation master, and I've never inhabited the mind of one either,

thoughts still come. And one of the, back to this idea of like pernicious misconceptions, one of the problems that I run into in talking to people about meditation is they think that as long as thoughts are coming, they're failing. Yeah, that's a big problem. You're right. That's a big problem. And that's a beginner's problem. And what we would say, you know, in our world would be start by making friends with the mind the way it actually is when you sit down on the cushion and be gentle and kind towards yourself. No doubt about it, that's right. It's amazing how many years I heard those very instructions and did not fucking listen.

It took well over a decade for that to sink in. Yeah, I mean, have you ever heard the expression knucklehead? We're all knuckleheads in that way. We just can't hear what we can't hear and we don't know what we don't know. And it's amazing that the best gift you could ever give yourself is compassion towards yourself about that and towards other people. It takes time. It takes time.

And you know, all fairness, your teachers at some point should give feedback saying, hey, you've made a little progress there. That's okay. They're more ruthless because they're going like, okay, but my teachers have been incredibly kind to me actually. At the same time undercutting maybe false conceptions that I didn't need anymore. But I think kindness is the biggest quality of a masterful teacher.

It's what I've seen consistently over and over again in accomplished people is their kindness. And kindness doesn't always mean, and this is relevant to many of the other things we're going to discuss within a work context, kindness doesn't always manifest in the stereotypical understanding of kindness, which is like niceness and treacly sweetness. Kindness can take many forms. You know, Dan, I don't know if you've studied this particular teaching. There's so many wonderful teachings under the Buddhist umbrella, but there's one called the Four Skillful Actions, Skillful Means, and the notion is that compassion

can create different forms of expression in terms of how you act, how you behave. And they're basically pacifying, enriching, magnetizing and destroying. Have you ever heard this teaching, those four karmas? No, no, tell me more. It's called the Four Karmas and, you know, it's probably associated with the tantric tradition where you move into action as an expression of compassion, skillful means and compassion being the two crossed elements of it. But sometimes you just are being kind by being pacifying and allowing and leaving space for

somebody. That's kindness. And sometimes enriching is the action where you encourage them and you give them a, you know, kind of leg up and a sense of, yeah, you could do it, you know, and tell somebody to appreciate what they have, that kind of situation. The magnetizing is sometimes people get alienated

and they just feel they can't come in enough, close enough to the fire and you just invite them in. And the destroying one is the one you're talking about a little bit. We renamed it direct. You just tell the truth in a precise way. It's surgical, it's swift. I've seen it from both sides and it looks like the person delivering it is very kind, but the person receiving it might feel kind of cut or penetrated or even provoked. But that's a form of kindness too. Because it's a useful provocation, a constructive provocation.

Yeah, you're trying to help the person. Your motivation is pure in that sense, you know? Let's keep ticking through, because there are many ideas in this book of yours. You talk about manifestation. Just by way of some background here, this is a bit of a running debate we've had on the show between me and two teachers who come on quite a bit, Seben A. Selassie and Jeff Warren, who are very close friends of mine. And they both would argue that there is something to this idea of manifestation. I am hung up on having spent a lot of time when I was a network news correspondent,

when I would cover self-help hucksters who were selling this idea that you can manifest anything you want through the power of your thoughts, the power of positive thinking, the law of attraction, which in my view is a very dangerous thing to be telling people. You can cure your breast cancer by just thinking positively, or you can get that diamond necklace, etc. etc.

So when you talk about manifestation, what are you referring to? It's such a good point. What's interesting, Dan, is I feel like your arc is a little bit like aligned with the idea of cutting through spiritual materialism, that idea. Your voice has a kind of quality of let's not just buy into all this new age stuff and, you know, wishful thinking stuff. So I appreciate that. And it's my heart's blood, the cutting through spiritual materialism.

You know, let's not use this as just another way to manipulate and kind of build up the ego structure. But manifesting, so what I mean by manifesting is, well, we talk about in the book as joining heaven and earth. That's the metaphor I use and that's a classical metaphor. So you have some kind of vision, like for example, in your case, this podcast, you must have visualized it first. You have to visualize it first and then you manifested it.

So it's as simple as that. I'm laughing because you give me more credit than I deserve because it was more like I stumbled into it if I'm honest but your point is well taken. Yeah, yeah I mean even going forward like and this is what I do a lot with people I coach a lot with people one-to-one like okay, okay, well, what is this podcast going to look like in three years? And it's not that you come up with a rigid version of it, but you allow yourself to visualize and dream a little bit about a form.

And then you connect it to the earth in terms of like, you know, getting the right team together. You have a great team. They know what they're doing. Your sound guy, Kevin, knows what he's doing. If he didn't, you're not manifesting your vision. You know, you'd have to make some shifts on the earth level to manifest. So all I mean is just putting something on the road. You know, the Tesla, it's out there, you can drive them.

I was in LA and my friend took off the automatic driving thing and I freaked out completely. You know, this car is driving itself through LA. Can you imagine that? That's sort of a manifestation of something. To you, because the way you're describing it sounds quite earthy, naturalistic. Do you think that there's a metaphysical, magical component to it? What a great question. And I do have another chapter in the book. I mean, I felt like I

put it down in that book. I laid my experience out for anybody who wanted to know what I was into. And there's a chapter called, Auspicious Coincidence, which is a favorite topic of mine, called, Tendril in Tibetan, T-E-N-D-R-E-L. And I can tell some stories about those things and you could too. I'm sure all the folks here could. It means that things happen with a little bit of a sparkle to them when you're tuned up well and you might bump into just the right person at the right time or the right thing happens. So, I'll give you an example.

Can I give an example of it? Please, please. Yeah. So, Joni Mitchell is on my mind right now. Maybe not just mine, but did you see her at the Grammys the other night? I saw a picture of her in my Instagram feed at the Grammys. Yes. Okay. You've got to go back and watch the YouTube video of her singing both sides now at the end of this kind of highly steroid plastic you know kind of like

hyper thing and she sat in an armchair and sang that song everybody's losing their their cookies on it it's just so moving and it's not because she has that great voice that she used to have and it's not because she had the sparkle and the energy had the wisdom and the depth so I thought about Joni Mitchell and I told a friend of mine a story about Joni Mitchell the other day because that's my crowd. I was very active in the music world in the 70s and I was working with Maria Maldor and Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raid and Linda Ronsett.

Those were the kind of divas at that time. Very beautiful, colorful, fun time. And a friend of mine named Robin Ford, you may know he's a great guitar player, one of the really great contemporary guitar players, played with Joni on a bunch of her records. He played with Miles Davis. I mean, he's a really accomplished player.

And he and I were sitting in a restaurant on Eighth Avenue and 54th Street in Manhattan with another friend, another Dharma friend, Michael Carroll. And we go on, there's something called aimless wandering. Have you ever done that practice? No. Well, sometime let's do it together.

Okay. Aimless wandering. You just go, you just leave your house and you don't have an agenda. And that's all there. That's all you have to do. And then things kind of come out of the atmosphere that are, that have highlights in them and, you know, just start to notice things without having an agenda. So we went on one of our aimless wandering kind of jaunts. These two people in my energy sort of tends to ratchet up possibilities

and that. So Michael says, okay, there's this little bar on 54th Street and I go in there and all kinds of crazy stuff happens. And this is right after we were talking about Joni Mitchell in this restaurant and they were playing her record on the thing. So Joni Mitchell is completely, and Robin was talking about playing with her and there was all this kind of energy of like Joni Mitchell energy. And then we walk into this bar and she's sitting at the bar. What is that?

What is that? That's tendril, we call that auspicious coincidence. And not just, it's synchronicity, but with a real tilt to it. And I could tell the rest of the story. She was with a guy, she said, whenever I'm with this guy, we always have synchronicity happen.

It was just a cascade. So there's a dreamlike quality to that part of our experience that's pretty cool. You can't count on it. You can't make it happen. You just have to open to it. And what we say in my little gang is, listen to the melody of circumstances.

Listen to the melody of circumstances. Don't be deaf to it. And know that even if it's not good news, it could have been we bumped into, we got mugged or something like that. It still has some kind of quality of, if you're tuning into it, you'll get messages that way. So I would say there is a magic element to it.

And I have personally experienced it in many ways, no doubt about it. And can one be a better magician beyond simply tuning the mind and being awake as possible? That's the path. And also in our tradition, as you know, those are called siddhis, you know, powers that happen. We don't seek them out. That's a very serious warning to not try to become a magician. You know, you try to just pay attention,

be compassionate, always have compassionate motivation. That's very, very important. But if stuff happens, then you use it for the benefit of the whole situation or you just appreciate it. But if you go after those things, that's a dangerous thing. No doubt about it. I'm gonna say a few things and I'm saying them to you, but also I'm kind of keeping the audience in mind

in case there are people listening who are on the skeptical end of the spectrum. My take on all of this, because there are, you know, within the Buddhist tradition, and I consider myself to be a part of that tradition, relative newcomer, but definitely a part of the tradition, there are, the deeper you get, the more you'll hear about things like iddies or powers, superpowers, that could be developed through, you know, tuning up your mind in meditation and getting a more concentrated mind. And I was, this will surprise exactly no one, when I first encountered these ideas, completely dismissive. And now I'm respectfully agnostic.

And I have no evidence that these things exist. A lot of incredibly smart people who I trust really believe in them. And so I don't take what you or anybody else is saying at face value. I have no personal experience with any of this. And I'm sort of toying with a good natured openness. Yeah. So does that, how does that all land with you? It sounds sweet to me and good. And I'm a Jewish guy from New York.

I don't know where you're from. Are you from New York? I live in New York, but I'm a half Jew from Boston. Okay, I'm a full Jew, born in Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue and 16th Street. And what I mean to say by that, like I don't mean to, you know, hyper characterize any ethnic group, but I'm as hardboiled as it gets in a certain way in terms of buying anything from

somebody on the street or whatever. And none of that, my dad was a shrink. And he would talk a lot about magical thinking, you know, which is a thing in the psychiatric world of like people buying into these kinds of things. So I don't have any, unlike some very good friends of mine, I don't have any investment at all in, oh, it's, you know, twinkle toes came and, you know, delivered, you know, I could care less on a certain level, but I'm telling you things that I've actually seen with my own eyes. And I did have the good fortune of, and I call it dumb luck,

of having the Tibetan pantheon land on my head in the early 70s and met all the great lamas of that time. I saw them up firsthand and they don't emphasize the cities either, but they have them. And there's a lot of kind of significant expansion of what you might think is within the realm of what's practical.

But nobody banks on it. They also had more horse sense and more common sense than anybody I know. So those two things together is a hard thing to visualize. Like good ass common sense and a sense of magic. I do think they can go together. So you and I can keep talking about that over the years. How about that idea? I'm in, I'm in.

I'm laughing because I've been thinking about something that my teacher's teacher used to say to him. Joseph Goldstein was my teacher. He had a teacher named Munindra or Munindra G. And Munindra used to say to Joseph, or not to Joseph because Joseph always believed in this stuff, but he would say to people who didn't believe, you don't have to believe it, but it's true. And that always makes me smile.

Coming up, David Nickturn talks about how to get clear on your own worth and value and the benefits of looking at your habitual patterns up close even though it might be painful. 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 delve into the life of Alan Turing.

Why are we talking about Alan Turing, Peter? Alan Turing is the father of computer science, and some of those questions we're thinking about today around artificial intelligence. Turing was so involved in setting and framing what some of those questions were, but he's also interesting for lots of other reasons, Afro. He had such a fascinating life.

He was unapologetically gay at a time when that was completely criminalised and stigmatised. And from his imagination, he created ideas that have formed the very physical, practical foundation of all of the technology on which our lives depend. And on top of that, he's responsible for being part of a team that saved millions, maybe even tens of millions of lives because of his work during the Second World War,

using maths and computer science to code break. So join us on Legacy, wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to hear about the $100 wedding dress that just saved Abercrombie? Or the tech acquisition that was just like Game of Thrones? Or the one financial equation that can solve climate change? Then check out our daily podcast, the best one yet, or as we call it, T-Boy. This is Nick. This is Jack. And we pick the three most interesting business news stories every day for the perfect mix. 20 minutes each morning, you're going to feel brighter. We call it pop biz, don't we Jack? Where pop culture meets business news.

So whether you want to kick off a conversation with your buddies, or you're going for that promotion at work, or you just want to know the trends before your friends, feel brighter by starting your morning with us every weekday. Listen to the best one yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your pods. You can listen to the best one yet ad free over on our companion meditation app, which is also called 10% Happier. You can listen to all the episodes, no ads, and you get to listen a week before everybody else does.

Download the 10% Happier app today wherever you get your apps. So let's just go back to business for a second. Not for a second, but let's go back in an abiding way. Your contention in this book is that business can be an essential spiritual practice. Can you say a little bit more about that? You know, right now we have this platform called Dharma Moon, which is also my son Ethan, who you know is teaching on that platform at this point. So it is based on the concept of the equal weight of the creative expression,

which is something that's not often emphasized in the Dharma world, like you're a songwriter or you're an artist or something like that. They don't give that a lot of weight. The spiritual practice and the business practice. So the course that we're teaching right now is called Creativity, Spirituality and Prosperity. I just took it a little. And the eightfold path,

which is the biggest iteration of what you're supposed to do as a Buddhist. You're supposed to walk on the eightfold path. What's in there? Right livelihood is right in there. Right speech, right view, right intention. You know, what do they mean by right? I mean like have your head screwed onto your body. You know, be a good person, be decent, be straightforward, be accountable for yourself. It's just basic guidance for living. So where else could you practice that better than in the business world,

where you spend eight to 10 hours of your waking day? And either you become divorced from all that and you develop some kind of split world, schismatic world, or you bring it to work with you, and you bring church to work with you. And that to me seems entirely important for our world right now. That schism seems to need to be healed right now. That's my view. I agree with you. And I just say for myself, it was my suffering in a professional context that brought me to meditation and Buddhism in the first place. And you were very brave to share that with the world. That took a lot of gumption, I think, if you don't mind me saying so.

Thank you. To open your heart in that way and your experience and other people resonate with that and they go, okay, this guy's honest. He's not just throwing some idealized version of himself out there. And you know who else did that? Mingeur Impache. You know, I don't know if you're familiar with him, but. I am, yeah. He's been on the show a couple of times.

You know, people should be honest about where they're at and then go from there. So I think bringing that into the business world, now it might shift. I wonder, did it shift your venue? Like did you, do you still work in that same world or not, not so much anymore? No, I retired a little over two years ago from the news world and now I'm a full-time, I don't know what I am, but not that.

But you know what? Here's a funny thing. You're also a young, from my perspective, you're a young man, you know, it know, it's funny how that goes. I think you probably don't think that, right? You think you're pretty far along or something? I'm 52 and my son is always pointing at me. I have a nine-year-old son who's constantly pointing out how gray I am. So I don't feel that young. Yeah.

But you're not that old either, in my humble opinion. And I wrote that book that we're talking about at the age of 71. And I wrote my first book, Awakening from the Daydream at 67, and I started dharmamoon.com at 72. We're three years old, this company, and we're building a whole company with a very adventurous concept behind it, which is to not do the Dharma but include it in a very open way that includes the creative juice. Because, you know, my whole life has been in the entertainment business, that's where I've been.

So I'm still in it, I'm in it, out of it. I've had, you know, incredible experiences there. I like to say that my life started off in the early 70s going back and forth between studying with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and learning about Buddhism and playing in a bluegrass band with Jerry Garcia. That's my life and it's been like that ever since really. You've learned a lot in that period of time and you're sharing it in your book and now in this interview with us. So let's go through some of your principles.

One of them is never negotiate against yourself. Can you say a little bit more about that one? I'm so thrilled that you're bringing these things up because a lot of thought went into like encapsulating whatever, you know, experience and perspective. So that is something actually, my lawyer, my music business lawyer taught me. She was a great mentor, and I had some serious opportunities at a fairly young age. I had a big hit record when I was like 26 years old.

I was nominated for two Grammys before I even knew what was going on. I'm sitting there and Paul Simon and John Lennon are making the presentation. It was like a very exciting time. And then I had opportunities that came up to write film scores. I wrote some film scores.

And we'd go into the negotiation, and Judy Berger is her name. She'd say, David, don't negotiate against yourself. And I think the simple meaning of that is let the other person do that. That's their job. That's not your job is to undercut yourself. So it doesn't mean you have an arrogant sense, but you have a sense of your own value and

your own worth. And you also try to align that with the situation and make a good deal for yourself in any context. You know, I went from making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Mulholland Drive to making $25 a month as the director of a meditation center in Vermont, which is where Ethan took his first steps in that cafeteria. And both were good deals as far as I'm concerned. So it's not so much about like how much you make or, you know, it's the holistic aspect of the negotiation, but you should not undercut yourself.

Let the other person take a swipe and then hold your seat, you know, and hold your dignity back and then be fluid. That's my advice to anybody negotiating. I think this gets into some complex and interesting juicy areas around confidence and knowing your worth. On my side, I sometimes mess up. I cross the line between, you know, a grounded understanding of knowing your worth. On my side, I sometimes mess up. I cross the line between a grounded understanding of knowing my worth and an inflated sense of my own value. And a lot of people I know, and this is a generalization, but many of them are women,

and I think I can safely speak for my wife on this score, don't have a grounded enough sense of their own value and come into negotiations and negotiate against themselves. So this idea of confidence and knowing your own value and your own worth, it can be messed up in lots of different ways. There's a lot of suffering on the menu in this particular restaurant. Yeah. Well, and the general topic is self-assessment, which is an important part of

our teacher training program. Everybody has to learn to self-assess. And you could either be ruthless with yourself, which a lot of people are. Let's face it, a lot of people are too hard on themselves. Or you could have an inflated sense of self-worth, but usually that's predicated on diminished sense of self-worth, right? Directly underneath it often, right? And I take your point about in the current social setting over the last 30 or 40 years has been a real shift in terms of empowering women in the workplace. I've been part of that. I was raised by that. My mother was the first woman producer on Broadway to win a Tony Award.

I grew up with like the early stages of that what we're talking about and I like to coach men and women about what you're talking about and maybe you're right the masculine perspective is can do and maybe the female perspective is a little more vulnerable but they can also switch right it's not gender related it's more like mentality related. No? I think it's also part like how people are socialized and in this, you know, there's no shortage, I think, of residual sexism in the overarching culture and those messages insinuate their way into the minds of people. So I don't know if it's something essential about gender, but there's something, I think, pretty

obvious about how it's expressed in the culture now. Yeah, the culture is shifting right now, no doubt about it. And I've been alive kind of a significant amount of time. It feels like that. Anyhow, I'm going to be 76 in two weeks. And you look at it, you go, what has shifted in my lifetime? And I would say the paradigm you're talking about is in a serious shift mode right now as a result of the last 30 years of, you know,

a lot of people putting energy into it. I love it. I'll go on record as saying, we have a lot of women on our team. I like powerful women. I'm comfortable around that notion. I think it's changing. And watch out everybody. You may not be able to rely on

the old paradigm. If you need to cling to that, you better let go now. Yep. Let's go back to self-assessment though. What are some ways we can think about arriving at a grounded sense of our value that's neither inflated nor deflated? inflated nor deflated. Soften. Just be soft. Be tender. There's a lot of things, even body movement, that you soften into. I've been studying Tai Chi for 30 years. I love it. And it's all about softening. There's very little about that's tightening up. So if you look at even our physical model for strength, it's exoskeletal. You know, so I think if you want to find your self-assessment, if you just exhale, soften, allow yourself to feel yourself, you know, all those kind of things, you'll get there.

And even if you're arrogant, that's a good thing to do. I don't see it happening much with arrogant people. They don't soften, they don't pause, they don't rest, they don't yield. So I think it is the ascendance of what I would call feminine wisdom, just loosely calling it that, but really receptive energy, just receive. So then notice your body.

I think that's really been a good one to feel your body right now even just where's the tension? What are you fighting? What are you holding on to? And release that and be willing to cry, be willing to be soft, be willing to be wrong, all those things. We could use it, don't you think, the world? Yes, this is not my phrase, but it's been pointed out that we're living in a pandemic of certainty. Yeah, well of course there's so many expressions. I just did a podcast with Duncan Trussell, I know he's been on your show too. yeah, love that guy. Yeah, me too. He's a serious attempt to be himself and also to, to, uh, to learn.

That's a rare blend of authenticity and sort of receptivity. It don't always go together, but we were, we called it beginner's mind. That was the last, last night we had a info session for our coming teacher training program and he joined us. And we were talking about beginner's mind Which is you know I think you know is from the Zen tradition and it was a book by Suzuki Roshi a very famous early book in the iteration of Buddhism the West called Zen mind beginner's mind

In the experts mind there are few possibilities in the beginners mind. There are many and possibilities in the beginner's mind, there are many. And other expressions like embrace uncertainty is something one of my teachers says it's hard to do because you'll try to make a thing out of that. Right. We'll all try to like make that into a thing. We're, we're slippery. You know, we're just trying to get back to the, did you ever play this game when you were growing up of like, um, there's two bases and you throw the

ball and you just got to get to the base, but you got to run between the bases? And then if you get caught off the base, it's sort of a short hand version of baseball. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. That space between the bases where you're vulnerable, you know, is really, and then you try to just try to get back to the base, which you could use as a metaphor for ego. You just want to get back to someplace where you feel safe and predictable outcome, you know? So you have to be a little bit experimental, I think. I like people who are exploring and experimental.

That's why I like music and art and jazz and things like that. I think there's a training in getting used to being between the bases. What would that be? I think whatever way you're comfortable with, but being as systematic as possible about getting as comfortable as possible with discomfort and not knowing. Yeah, it'd be an interesting thing to dissect what you just said,

to get as comfortable as you can be with being uncomfortable. Isn't that what you just said? Yes It's a koan Yes, it is For me, it often takes the form of like I have claustrophobia So can I challenge that as much as possible? I have stage fright So my entire career has been a challenge to that and do you have it right now? No, not right now because I'm in I'm in my house in my closet.

And you know, this is pretty comfortable. But anytime I have to go, I found out the other day, I've got to go. I think like this coming Monday, I need to go on some local TV station. And I'm already nervous. So and that that show will have fewer viewers than this show. I don't know why, I'm nervous. But I was happy when I saw it on my calendar because, well, I was nervous when I saw it on my calendar and then happy because, yeah,

it's just another opportunity to challenge myself. And I see that as like a form of, this is a loaded phrase, but self-love. It is, or self-compassion. It is, that is taking care of yourself because your life gets smaller and smaller if you're not doing that. Yeah, and that, you know, some, in some iterations we call that the warrior's path, you know, path of warriorship, bravery, rising to the challenge. And there is, there are practices that I learned like called wind horse where you do raise your confidence

level to kind of almost psychophysical exercise, but it goes with interesting is completely linked with softening. There's this part of it where you just have to open and soften and the part that is so beautiful to link with that is being curious. So I like to say to people, yeah, you're making a challenge, but you're also being curious about what happens. And when you're curious, the world shifts a little bit. And, you know, like, what am I feeling when I feel claustrophobic? Not just it's bad, but what exactly is that experience? Become familiar with that experience. So,

you know, they say, you know, exploring fear, not knowing the nature of fear, you can't really experience fearlessness. That's the way I was taught it. So fear, not knowing the nature of fear, you can't really experience fearlessness. That's the way I was taught it. So fear is good from that point of view. Yes, yes. It's useful, but not if it tightens you up and you know, you can't check into it further. But what we're talking about is huge stuff. As far as I'm concerned, having that kind of fear, whatever makes, you know, some people

are afraid of height, some people are afraid of violence, some people are afraid of intimacy. Having that kind of fear is almost a mark of being a human being, don't you think? Absolutely. I guess what was coming up in my mind, and I don't know if this is a non sequitur, but I was just thinking about like any time I feel, I try to make a practice of this to be clear, I fail the vast majority of the time. But when I'm on my game, anytime I feel fear, dismissiveness, denial, rushing,

anything that's quote unquote unpleasant, usually that's a sign that there's something going on that I'm not looking at. It lives, remember that movie, It Lives? Comes to science fiction, it's alive. It's a sign that movie, It Lives? It's a science fiction. It's alive. It's a sign that you're alive. You know, you had Pema, children on your podcast several weeks ago.

She's kind of a genius in this space that we're talking about right here. She's not really, you know, all the time presenting like the nature of mind and the kind of, you know, more... She's saying what is happening in that space is something that you can become more familiar with and more friendly with.

And I think that's why she reaches a lot of people because it's not that climb every mountain kind of spirituality. It's like explore the valley. Yeah, didn't she write a book called the wisdom of insecurity? Well, and the one I was thinking about and the one we use in our course is The Wisdom of No Escape, which is kind of an interesting original book. But there's a teaching that you might have been exposed to called Shenpa in the Tibetan

tradition. Shenpa, have you ever heard about that? No. And you actually use the trigger like a fear or, you know, a habitual pattern that comes on real tight and real fast and real strong. And that's what reminds you to open up. So it's using the trigger as an alarm clock, which is very sophisticated in a way. Yes.

And it's just what you're saying, hey, something's happening here. Yeah. Yes. My suffering is because there's something going on that I'm not looking at. This little expression came to me on meditation retreat a while ago that if I'm suffering, there's something I'm not being mindful of.

Or aware of. Could you say aware of? Yeah, aware of. Yeah. You know, in the awakening from the daydream, in the six realms, that is the root cause of the suffering is avidya or non-awareness. You black out, you literally pass out, your awareness goes blank and you wake up into a world that is dualistic and needs all kinds of supply lines

and kind of confirmations to continue to develop. That original moment of passing out is called avidya marikpa in Tibetan, and it's just a loss of awareness. That is the root cause of suffering in terms of the Buddhist analysis. So you, I mean, from my point of view, you're exactly right about that. But it's fast. That's the one thing they don't tell you about. It happens really quick, like that.

Coming up, David talks about more Nick Ternisms and Buddhist slogans to help you infuse your spirituality into work. Behind every successful business is a story, and some of them may very well surprise you. Like how Chobani's first yogurt factory was discovered on a piece of junk mail, or how the founder of the multi-million dollar cosmetics brand, Drunk Elephant, was told by everybody, including her own mom, that the name sounded like a dive bar. On the podcast, How I Built This, host Guy Raz talks to founders behind the world's biggest companies to learn how they built them. In each episode, you'll hear entrepreneurs share moments of doubt, failure, and how they

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shocking firing, the chaos that followed and what it all says about the future and safety of artificial intelligence. Make sure to follow Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. And for more deep dives and daily business content, listen to Wondery, the destination for business podcasts with shows like the best one yet, Business Wars and many more. Let me tell you, Wondery means business. All right. Well, we're going to cover like a tiny fraction of the Nick Tern-isms I was hoping to get to, but let's keep soldiering through and see how many we can get to. One of them on the list is don't take yourself too seriously.

Can you say more about that? Yeah, maybe the right reading of this don't take yourself too seriously. Uh-huh. You know, that notion that there's some fixed big entity that is going to win or lose. When you're obsessed with winning or losing, you're taking yourself too seriously. When you're terrified, you're taking yourself too seriously. When you're experiencing aggression or grasping you're taking yourself too seriously, it's too focused on the notion of a self. So I would say, I think I quoted Bruce Lee there, by the way, he was a great, incredible teacher in a way. But when he says be like water, you know, that would be the notion of just flowing a little bit

more, which means you could laugh at yourself. You can appreciate a mishap or a mistake and go, you know, I'm not going to bury myself alive and cover my face with honey and invite a whole bunch of red ants to eat me alive because I just made a simple mistake. You can afford to be embarrassed. It's not that big a deal. You can tell somebody you love them even if you don't know what they're going to say back. Just like that kind of stuff. All right. I'm going to keep going. Here's another slogan from you. Don't bring things to a painful point.

Yeah. So that is a Lojong slogan. I think you know the Lojong. It's mind training. Lo is mind and Jong is like cultivation. And Pema teaches that quite a lot, but that's a Mahayana teaching. Already don't bring things to a painful point. Somebody's having a hard time, you know, give them a little break, you know. It's like if you're having a hard time. So it means not to stab yourself with reality and just kind of mutilate because of it. It could be an accurate perception even, but don't bring it to the point where you're causing harm with the clarity of your perceptions or your aggression.

So yes, lighten up, lighten up everybody. That seems like one that's easier said than done because I mean, we've talked about noxious implications or ideas that we imbibe from the culture and being hard on yourself, pushing, pushing, pushing, the always behindness, never enoughness. That's a hard one to get past. Everybody's talking about it too. You know, the waveforms that go through our communities, you know, of like topics, like trauma is a big topic right now. Yeah, we are arguably have been trained to be our inner voice to be harsh and critical.

And with that, there comes a certain sense of like dominance and accomplishment that maybe has a positive energy to it. If you can liberate it from the negative self-talk and just feel like, yeah, I could do this. But always using a metric to evaluate how well you're doing seems to be like a doomed perspective. You should just do your best. That's exactly what you should do. Do your best and try again. Try again. That might be worth saying a little bit more about.

It seems like you always have another opportunity to confront the same or a similar situation. Like here, I'll give you an example. So I'm in a leadership role. I don't remember really aspiring to that, but I always end up sort of being the producer or the person putting the stuff together. So I'm too harsh on people sometimes. I'm too fast. Oh, really? Yeah. I push too, I push people too hard and they go, come on, let's get, this is clear. This is obvious. Don't take 10 minutes to

say something that should take 30 seconds. So you got to know yourself. And then I think then the next time I meet with that person, I can take a slightly softer approach and more patient, but maybe deliver the message without the same amount of heat and aggression and spin. You always have another chance that way. You're married, right? I am married. Yes.

That's a good. How about that for another chance every day? Yeah, until she gets, you know, until she that for another chance every day. Yeah. Until she gets, you know, until she kicks me out of the house. Absolutely. Another chance every day. I don't see it. No, I don't see it happening either. I'm being, I'm being facetious. I, but you're absolutely right. It's, I heard a great thing once that somebody's shrink said to them, this person I know was in seeing their shrink and complaining

about something that they had done. So the patient was complaining to the shrink about this pattern that they just fell into again. Can you believe I did it again? And the shrink said, was it as bad as it was the last time? Yeah. Well, that's called the gradual path, right? You know, we have the sudden path and the gradual path as part of the Buddhist tradition. That's a gradual path, just gradually training,

kind of using the repetitive nature of reality to learn a little bit each time with the intention of shifting something, of transforming something. And then we also have the sudden path, which is just like, I guess the more Zen-like or, you know, the word Zen is Chan in Chinese, and it's Chen, like Zou Chen is that kind of sudden recognition of the nature of mind. That's what Zou Chen, I know you're interested in that topic, and Mahamudra, and it's suddenly waking up. It's just like there's no precedent to it. There's no gradual, there's nothing's repeating actually from that perspective.

This is a fresh moment in that perspective. There's no past, there's no future. But then we return to the relative perspective and so we gradually nudge ourselves towards enlightenment. This is such an interesting subject that we veered into here, this gradual versus sudden awakening. And again, this is not an area where I'm an expert at all, but my understanding is just chop wood, carry water. Do the practice.

Whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen. If you spend too much time thinking about, am I gonna get some bolt of insight, or am I gonna gradually get there bolt of insight or am I going to gradually get there? You know, one of my favorite expressions about this, it comes from Matthew Brentsilver, a great teacher on the West Coast of the United States who says, your progress is none of your business.

Well, that's kind of an absolute perspective actually, in a way. If it's a gradual thing, then your progress is something that you can lightly track. You know, it's helpful actually to see, am I rowing in the right direction or not, if it's a gradual path. So yeah, these two, this is, you know, probably we all have our favorite topics as we get into this stuff. Mine is absolute and relative truth or relational truth and the inseparability of those two. Can you describe, because some people listening might not know the difference between absolute

and relative truth. Yeah. And you know, that's why talking about it is interesting. So putting it simply, and it's a deep dive if you get into it, but absolute truth just means it's true. It is the way it is, and it doesn't have cause and conditions just means it's true. It is the way it is and it doesn't have cause and conditions and it's sort of, it can be experienced by us in different ways, but us experiencing impermanence, it's us experiencing absolute truth in a way. We can't change that. Absolute truth is not changeable, not negotiable, non-negotiable truth. And so, for example, from that perspective, ego is not an absolute truth.

The notion of a fixed self that's kind of heavy and permanently true and reincarnating lifetime after lifetime and was Shakespeare one time and a snail the next lifetime, that does not hold up in the absolute truth that there's some kind of fixed migrating self. That's a big innovation by Buddha, Mr. Buddha, that there is no fixed permanent self, Atman or that kind of thing. Now, the relational truth is you wake up in the morning and you've got to water your plants

and you cook your egg the way you like it, which is soft-boiled, but with a three-minute egg and if you get a four-minute egg, you're upset. That's not the absolute truth, but relationally, there's a certain navigation that's going on. And the fact that those two, you're not trying to bias towards one or the other is the real clinker. That to me is like an eye-opening thing that they're inseparable, which is the more sophisticated teaching about it. So you go, oh, I'm supposed to hold those two truths simultaneously, that there is no

self and yet I still have to go to the store and get some bagels for Sunday's brunch. How is that possible to hold those two? There's no you, but you're driving to this store. Exactly. One of the analogies that sometimes gets used is like quantum physics, and this is a rough analogy, but if you think about these, I'm sitting in a chair, you're sitting in a chair. On one level, on the relative level, these are chairs. On an absolute level, it's mostly empty space and spinning subatomic particles.

I'm sitting in the chair, and I also know that it's on the most fundamental level in substantial and there's no core of chairness to this chair. And that's a rough analogy for living between these two paradoxical truths. Well, and a fair metaphor, and to be clear about it, like since we're talking within the Buddhist context, it's not the only framework in the world, but Buddhas look in, where does it hurt? Where does it, as you said, where does the suffering kick in? And you said it's when you start to kind of not pay attention or not be aware of what's happening right in front of you. You create a cascading effect of some kind of dysphoria, really. You're out of sync with reality.

So all that these things are saying is these are enriching teachings. They're supposed to make you feel more, as you would say, happy, 10% happier, you know. And I told Ethan I was going to come on your program and say, we're changing Dharma Moon to 11% happier and we're going to put you out of business. Go for it. Go for it. Go for it. That'll put me between the bases. Yeah, you know, it's good.

But that 10% happier is a relational truth comment, would you say? Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. On the subject of the absolute versus the relative, and it can sound a little esoteric, but one application of it, for me, it's been useful to apply it in a work context in that, yeah, on one level, like my career matters. And there's some argument to, you know, building your resume and building the very, making the projects you're doing successful, however you want to measure that. And then on some other level, it's all a dream. And so I actually think that holding these two things at the same time can help me do something

that you mentioned earlier, which is not take myself or this whole enterprise too seriously. Yeah, that's why they're inseparable, because if you lean, and that's why it's called the middle way. If you lean towards the absolute truth, you become what's called an eternalist in the Buddhist way of looking at it.

You're looking for some ultimate solution and the tendency is you go, well, that little stuff doesn't matter much. And you see a lot of spiritual people that go, and that doesn't matter. Look at the guy, he's got this podcast, he's got this career, who cares? It doesn't mean anything. That's the eternalist view. And the other extreme is you just go, no, that's all bullshit and woo woo and new age gobbledygook. I got the real goods here. I've got $83,000 in my IRA account. We just tuned up the car, my kid is going to the best school, and you just invest completely in that reality.

So the idea that they're in conversation with each other, I think is the nuance that I find appealing about it. Yes, but I would argue that it's a conversation, and I suspect you'd agree with this, that this conversation actually has beneficial professional ramifications. and I suspect you'd agree with this, that this conversation actually has beneficial professional ramifications. By me it does.

From my perspective, I see suffering in a lot of people, they just don't have that together, that part of their existence together. They either through lack of confidence, lack of training, or a misguided view, you know, that it doesn't matter, that it's not important, have ignored and not trained properly in that aspect of living. And I've seen considerable suffering caused by that. And then on the other hand, people who are totally immersed in the material world,

who don't have a sense of openness or ease or spaciousness, also are suffering. That's been my life's experience to see those two extremes and trying to come into the middle way about that. Does it make sense? Yeah, it absolutely makes sense. One thing we talked about earlier was this tendency that we have to be hard on ourselves, to be, in my language, an asshole to yourself.

And so I'm curious, what is your advice for dealing with real world assholes who exist outside of our skulls, who can show up in a work context all too often? Are there, from a CSM standpoint, are there ways to deal with jerks? Well, I know this isn't going to come out right, Dan, but even assholes are empty. Yes. Empty is... You could just leave it like that. It's a Buddhist term of art, just for the listener, as a Buddhist term of art for, you

know, from an absolute standpoint, there's no essence there. So empty of essence. Yeah. standpoint there's no essence there, so empty of essence. Yeah. So, you know, do we run into difficult people from our point of view? Yeah, but it could be somebody's mother, you know, and somebody's son. Have you ever talked to somebody's mother who you think is an asshole and ask them, like, you know, your son's an asshole, right? You know that, don't you, mom? And they go, go who you talking about? It's very relational. I think yes. Yeah, you know, and so it's worthy of a second look, but it's also worthy of using Acuity prajna to discern what your interaction with them would be most skillful

What would be the right way for you interact with somebody who's maybe causing harm or difficulties or obstacles for you or other people. It doesn't mean you should be a wuss. We talked about that earlier. You can be tough, you can be precise, you can be clear, but you don't need to memorialize assholeness, you know. There's no museum for it. Meaning you don't need to impute some unchanging essence to somebody else. They are the way they are because of their causes and conditions. The question really is how are you going to deal with it? Essentially, yeah. I mean, isn't that the only choice we really have?

Yeah. And yet it's interesting for me to reflect on how I, as an alleged Buddhist, run afoul of that injunction. You know, like I, in my mind, am putting people in the asshole category, even though I know it's all empty, it's all insubstantial, but it's a habit that's hard to break. Yeah. You know, Ethan, Ethan Nicktern, on his podcast, The Road Home, if it's okay to say that,

the last talk he gave was on basic goodness, which is a really profound topic related to what we're talking about now. And it's a really good iteration of the premise that permeating our entire reality is some kind of wholesome, potentially really, really ripe, beautiful, expansive, informative, brilliant quality called basic goodness. And I also share that view. So even assholes have basic goodness would be the way you'd have to say it

in the terms of what we're talking about now. But I like the even assholes are empty. I like that better today. All right, we only have a few minutes left here. So let me, let's pick one last topic. I'm picking somewhat at random, but these are the words that are screaming out to me for my list of questions in front of me. And I want to say again, we've touched on a minority of the very interesting points

that you make in this one of your books. But one of the things you talk about is the importance of being daring. You call it the dignity of outrageous. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, that comes from a particular teaching which is sort of the warrior ship path. A good book on that is Shambhala,

The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogam Trungpa. If somebody wants to get, look get tuned into that kind of perspective. And in training a warrior, you cultivate certain qualities, which start with humility. That's the first one, and it's symbolized by a tiger. And then the lot of snow lion symbolizes a kind of perky or sort of game, playful kind of energy. And then the outrageous or daring is symbolized by the Garuda. These are ancient symbols that are everywhere around Asia and somewhere in the West too,

there's corollaries to it. But the outrageous one is like the celestial hawk, the Garuda doesn't need to land. It's airborne, it's like refueling in the air, like a 747, you know, and that means it doesn't need to be confirmed all the time. It doesn't need, oh, good boy, good girl, you know, you did well. It doesn't need confirmation. You know how people give you confirmation? You don't need that anymore.

And the outrageous, there's just a sense of spontaneity that is governing and you trust yourself and you trust the situation But it's it's pretty advanced in a way because most of us doubt ourselves So then you go back to the kind of trap of doubt and then if we're not paying attention you go back to the mindfulness exercise so it's a way to Calibrate certain aspects of your path and you can think about this Dan. I'm sure times where you just took a leap I bet you did and you just went I'm going about this, Dan, I'm sure times where you just took a leap.

I bet you did. And you just went, I'm going, I'm doing this. I'm going here. I'm doing that. I'm going to talk to this person. I'm going to start this podcast, whatever it was, there's a leap involved. No? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I don't know where I... I'm thinking about that. And I'm like, where does that confidence come from? Because I definitely am not the celestial hawk who doesn't need to land and get pellets of affirmation from literally anybody who's willing to offer me one. Are you sure? Nothing in my life has indicated that I am immune to affirmation.

Have you always sought affirmation at every stage of every adventure? No, no. And I guess that's true even right now. I'm you know, I, I'm thinking about the most the biggest creative project on my plate right now is a been working on a book for five or six years, and nobody's seen it for the last year and a half because I've been rewriting it and I haven't been like, every day showing a new sentence to my wife. yes I guess it's true. And at some point you'll take the leap with it right or not? Yes the whole thing is a leap because you know you know from writing a book but from reading several books that it's a leap

and in this case I'm investing an enormous amount of time so there's a huge opportunity cost and I'm willing to do that because I don't know where I'm getting the confidence or the willingness to make this leap. Because there's actually not a lot of confidence in there. I can't pound the table and tell you this book is any good. I just know I kind of feel like I have to do it. There's a little baby Garuda in there, isn't there? I guess so. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah. And you know, there's another chapter in the book and you know, I don't know if

this one appealed to you or not. It's called Don't Polish a Turd. Did you see that one? Yes, it does appeal to me. Yes. Please say more. That's kind of one of my favorites. And I'll tell you where I got that from. I was doing the music for a couple of soap operas for a while in New York. And I was doing the music for One Life to Live and the producer Linda Gottlieb, who was the producer of that movie Dirty Dancing and she'd just come off of that. She used to say that to us. We'd work on a music cue for a long time and change the baseline and change this and change

that and she'd say, stop polishing a turd. At a certain point you go, I'm not going to finish this. I'm going to start something else or fresh. So that's the counterpoint to that. And that's common sense. But a lot of us think our first draft, we're polishing a turd and that's too soon. Yes. Too early. You got to find the right moment to stop polishing a turd or to take the leap.

So I guess, Geruda on one end, turd polishing on the other end, you figure it out in between. There's something good that's happening. The key words there are you figure it out. And I guess that goes back to doing the basic wood chopping of having a mindfulness practice to be awake and aware so that you have some, you know, intuition for this. Well, mindfulness, in which we, our whole platform at Dharma Moon is based on mindfulness, but there's a lot more to the Buddhist art than mindfulness. It's really a foundational practice and compassion, skillful means. There's a lot of cultivations that go from it.

None of it gets to first base without mindfulness. Like I say, you're in baseball, you want to get the first batter as somebody who can get onto first, whether they're small and they can walk or they can sneak their way to it or hit a little dribble ball and get on there. Mindfulness is a little bit like that. You need to get on base. But I would say if people just stop there and think mindfulness is the whole iteration of the path, they're missing opportunities to go further.

Yes. Well, that's certainly been my experience. Before I let you go, two little questions. One is, and this might not be a little question, but is there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to? I think I would like to invite people to come check us out on dharmamoon.com. So that's something that me and a lot of people are including, Ethan and a lot of the other people are putting a lot of energy and effort into it. And we have a great mindfulness meditation teacher training and we've trained thousands of teachers.

I think that's a specialty of what I have to offer at this point in my life, particularly training the next generation of teachers. So I guess getting a little word in about that would be it. And otherwise, I just got to say, it's refreshing talking to you. Thank you. It's like, for me, my experience was like drinking cool water. It feels fresh and clean and honest. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you this way.

Thank you. Thanks, I've enjoyed it as well. And you did me a favor because you asked, you answered the second question I was gonna ask you, which is, I was gonna try to get you to plug what you're working on. So you mentioned Dharma Moon, but maybe also mention again the names of your two books. Yeah.

So the one we've been talking about is creativity, spirituality, and making a buck. And that's about the integration of the three principles as we discussed. They're both on wisdom publications, and they're both available as audiobooks that I read and that one is also available as a downloadable video series on our website dharmuwin.com. And the first book I wrote was called Awakening from the Daydream which is about the Buddhist Wheel of Life. It's a re-examination in contemporary terms of the six realms and kind of beautiful description of karma.

And I tried to make it very contemporary and up to date so people could access the information without getting lost in the museum aspect of the whole thing. So those are the two books. And I'm spinning out from what impressed me early on at this point. I'm going with teachings I learned very early in the early 70s, because that's what made a dent in my flow. And so I'm trying to like, kind of relay those along to the next generation. That's my objective right at this point.

And have fun. That's what we say. That's important. Agreed. David, it was fun to talk to you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks again to David Nickturn. A couple of things to say here before I let you go. I put some links in the show notes to a

podcast episode I did with Ethan Nickturn, David's son, also a podcast episode I did with Duncan Trussell, who's a great comedian and podcaster and is a student of David's. So those links are in the show notes. Also just want to remind you, David has a book called Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck.

That book is also a podcast and a video series. So we'll put links to those in the show notes. And finally, this summer, he's doing something called the Summer 100 Hour Mindfulness Teacher Training. It doesn't start until June 14th, but we'll put a link if you wanna sign up for that. 10% Happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman,

Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer, Alicia Mackey leads our marketing, and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts, and Nick Thorburn of 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

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