There’s this book I love, and I go back to and back to, called “Comfortable With Uncertainty.” It’s by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, who’s also written really, really, really well known beloved books like “When Things Fall Apart” and “Welcoming the Unwelcome.” But this particular book resonates with me in part because of the title. It has been a real revelation of my own life how uncomfortable I was with uncertainty — how many places I didn’t go, how many things I didn’t do, how many conversations I wouldn’t have because I just couldn’t control the way they would turn out. And just knowing that — just feeling uncertain, feeling a little afraid — was enough for me to avoid the thing altogether. But you get older, and you begin realizing how much there is that you can’t avoid. You realize that discomfort is going to come for you whether you want it or not. I think it’s easy to go pretty far with the illusion that you can control what is happening around you, that there is some set of decisions you can make or choices you can make — find the people, the partner, the job, the success, the whatever — that’ll keep you safe. And then you keep getting older and you realize it’s not going to happen — that things are going to keep falling apart and coming back together and then coming apart again. That there’s no stable ground in the end to stand on. And so you have to have some real relationship with uncertainty, with discomfort, with pain, with suffering, with loss. And I’ve just found Chödrön’s, books and work to be maybe better than anything else for trying to force at least me into some more truthful relationship with that, which is not the illusion that I can make it not happen, or that with enough meditation or wisdom or anything else, I won’t feel it. But actually the recognition that the path to growth and to wisdom is letting yourself feel it. Chödrön has a new book out, “Another Kind of Freedom,” which is on these themes and many others. And it created for me this wonderful and unexpected opportunity to interview somebody from whom I have learned so much. It’s a really beautiful conversation. I found it really helpful. I hope you do, too. As always, my email: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Pema Chödrön, welcome to the show. Thank you. It is such a pleasure to have you here. I want to begin with something you say in your book, “Comfortable With Uncertainty,” because that book is important to me. And you write there that the central question is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear, but how we relate to discomfort. Why? Well, I think if you’re going to live in this age that we live in, discomfort is an ongoing thread for everybody through everything. And a big theme is how to get rid of it, how to get not be feeling uncomfortable, not to be feeling uncertain, how to not feel insecure. And so the approach that Buddhism takes is that there’s this expression about only way out is through. So that’s really the idea. You’re not trying to get rid of. You’re trying to become intimate with. And one of the things that I’ve started saying is that to get your nervous system used to certain things, if you try to just go about trying to change the outer circumstances, which of course I applaud people that try. But this is more a approach of working with what the outer circumstances trigger in you. And what they trigger is something physical in your body. And so if you can contact that and actually in working with a lot of people, it doesn’t seem very hard to contact because it’s kind of like if you say, what are you feeling in your solar plexus. People can go right there and then what do you say. What does it feel like. And there’s some version of contracted and tight is what people usually say. So this sounds like doesn’t sound all that spiritual or anything, but actually if you can become comfortable or let’s say, what would the word be. It’s not accepting exactly. It’s more willing to be there fully and completely with whatever it is you’re feeling with a unconditional I would say warmth is the word. I would use unconditional warmth towards whatever you’re feeling. That seems to be the way, not so much that you get rid of the feeling, but that it all becomes very workable. One word you use sometimes that really helped me is abiding. Abiding we were talking before this began about how I sometimes have trouble with the verbs here surrendering and letting go. right. But for me, discomfort, uncertainty, insecurity they are very. It took time to see this, but they are very physical. They are a contraction in the solar plexus Yeah, yeah. And it took a long time to see how reflexively I ran from that and tried to make the feeling go away. Absolutely right. That is what people do. You can count on it. Really tell me about the term befriending the warmth, because there’s two stages, as I read you to what you’re saying here. One is the don’t run from it. You are going to feel uncomfortable. You are going to have discomfort that is not an eradicable part of life. But then there’s this next move. You sometimes say, smile at it, befriend it. I wouldn’t say I’ve quite figured that one out. And maybe I’ll use an example like imagine somebody in a fight with their partner Yeah they’re angry, they’re hurt. They’re rehearsing all the things they should have said or all the things they’re going to say. Their chest is tight. They can’t stop thinking about it. What does it mean to befriend that feeling. Well, first of all, it means let’s go through the steps. First of all, you have to want to. And then the question becomes just I think it’s your question. Well, how do I actually do that. So the first thing would be some pause through meditation. One of the things you learn to do, it’s kind of very basic to meditation is something that I call letting the storyline go. If you meditate and you have an object of meditation that you keep coming back to then you begin to experience all your thoughts storylines as something that you can interrupt, something that you can come back from that you don’t have to keep following it and keep following it. Keep following it. So you see yourself going down a rabbit hole and you decide, no way am I going to go down that rabbit hole. So then what. So how do I not go down the rabbit hole. And then you go to your body and you find where in your body the pain. You’re holding the grievance or the sense of revenge, or the sense of regret that you didn’t say the right thing. You don’t really have to name it. But you, as you say, go to. What are you feeling like right now. What are you feeling. You don’t not conceptually. Don’t say. You don’t have to say mad or anything like that. What are you feeling. And then find that feeling in your body. So what you find is a contraction, some kind of tightness, a knot almost. And you can ask a person, well, where is it. Some people will say it’s all over my body, but usually they’ll say like it’s in my solar plexus, it’s in my throat, my stomach, wherever. Doesn’t really matter. But once you’re there, the attitude towards it is not that it’s something. That needs to be eradicated. Oh, let’s find it and then we’ll throw it out or something like that. The attitude more is that you send I like to use word tenderness towards it. You send warmth towards it. People do this differently. People find their own way to do this. If you want to conceptualize it, you would say you send it unconditional love. You send it unconditional warmth, unconditional tenderness. It’s like you’re not going to give up on yourself. What if you don’t feel unconditional love towards it. If you don’t feel unconditional love towards it, not a problem. Then you send. Then you send the warmth towards what does it feel like to not have unconditional love. I mean, what does that feel like. And then what would you say that would feel like to not have unconditional love Yeah to feel like you don’t qualify for doing this because you can’t send unconditional love. Let me try to think through how it feels for me. I think the idea of how it would feel to have unconditional love is so for a feeling like that, yes, is so alien that even trying to describe it is hard because the water I swim in is wanting certain feelings to go away. Yeah, right. And you’re a typical human being. I’m a typical human being. And, one thing that I have gotten better at over time has been abiding in those feelings and then recognizing that they will change. Exactly and that they will change more profoundly if I let them sit there. That’s right. But I certainly have not found warmth for them. I’ve become maybe better at attending to them. I think in some places you talk about sometimes noting feelings like that as a bell to pay attention. And I’ve gotten a little bit better at that. I have a physical relationship to uncertainty, which when I feel it, I now feel that is something that I should look at as opposed to try to get rid of. But I have a lot more trouble when people say extend unconditional, unconditional love. What about just a gesture touching it with your hand. That does help me. I do that. In other words, get away from concept and words altogether and just put your hand there. That can be very, very powerful to just do that. And sometimes people, they just express affection for themselves by, maybe touching the top of their head or I don’t want to get too corny with this, but some sense of being O.K with yourself. How do you help people learn to feel what they’re feeling in their body. It has taken me many years of therapy and meditation to even realize that I often wasn’t feeling what you felt, what was happening in the body, that I didn’t have awareness of it. I was reacting to it. It was there. right. I had a therapist once who was actually one of the people who really helped me work with this, but she realized about me was that the way I would talk about something and the way I would feel about it were very different. And she would start telling me when I was talking about something, she’d say, stop. Tell me the same thing, but have your hand on your stomach. Tell me the same thing, but have your hand on your heart Oh, really. And it was a very powerful practice because the feeling would start to come into what I was saying. Yes O.K. So you’re saying that for you, the physical gesture is actually very, very important in terms of it certainly helped me Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I found this exactly the same thing. And that’s where I’ve come to find out that if people just use gestures, that it helps a lot to soften up the situation, touching the heart or touching where the contraction is, put your hand where that is and have a sense of that hand being friendly. And the heart seems to be the one that is the really gets to people can be on the street and then someone, for some reason, they like something you just did or something. They’ll just touch their hearts. And I find it such a sweet thing, a way to communicate to people you don’t know on the street. Why do you think it’s so hard to feel what we’re feeling. A lot of times it’s trauma related that people are closed down at a young age around something or other. And so it’s like trying to open up a floodgate. And maybe people are scared, for one thing, to open up that floodgate. And actually, it’s not such a great idea to open up a floodgate. It’s more a good idea to put a little hole in it, in a tiny hole so that the whole thing is a gradual opening. So let’s say you’re there and you are feeling how you’re feeling and maybe you don’t like how you’re feeling, but you’re at least there with it. You’ve aligned that I find very evocative. You said I once asked the zen master kobun chino Rashee kobun chino Yeah how he related with fear. And he said, I agree, I agree. I agree Yeah it was such a beautiful answer. It was shorthand for this whole thing that we’re talking about. I stress the warmth and the friendliness because people seem to need that a lot. But the fundamental thing, if you’re saying, what are we actually trying to do here. It’s like agreeing rather than disagreeing, accepting rather than rejecting, staying with rather than running away. What are some other ways we could say. I mean, breathing into allowing, allowing is a good word Yeah allowing rather than disapproving or criticizing. And the thing is, what I like about this approach and what seems to be attractive to people, is it doesn’t matter where you are in the process, you can make friends with that. For instance, it might be very common for people who have low self-esteem, which is many, many, many, many people that they hear a meditation instruction. And then it’s just another thing to beat themselves up on because I could never do that. So then if I had an opportunity to work closely with someone, I would just say, well, then let’s just work with what happens in your body when you feel like you’re a loser or you feel like you’re can never get it right, or let’s go under the words of what is let’s get at what it feels like physically to feel like I. I’m always Messing up or I’m inadequate or there’s something fundamentally unlovable about me so somehow getting right to the core of a lot of the dysfunction that they might be feeling. So getting back to the original thing is, I think we all need a lot help to start to agree with what’s happening with us, rather than feel that it’s because it’s uncomfortable, that it has to be rejected. Everybody needs a lot of time and willingness and intention to be able to hold more discomfort. Hold more pain. It took me. It is still taking me a really long time to realize that what I am trying to do when I meditate is not to change how I’m feeling, right. I started meditating because I had and have a fair amount of anxiety and stress, and I started really seriously when I was starting a company and I was trying to feel differently right than I felt right. And for years and years and years and years, I was there in a practice of trying to feel differently than I felt. And I do think it is a very subtle and difficult shift, and one I’ve only begun to recognize needs to be made to this place of agreement that how you feel might change, but you’re not trying to change it. You’re trying to be in a space of accepting how you feel. So I believe you work with Will kabat-zinn. So one of the big things about why the stress reduction program that his father has, Jon kabat-zinn, one of the premises is he says to people just have to give up the idea that this is going to help you in any way. You have to give up the idea that there’s a goal here. We’re just going to be mindful of what’s happening for itself, for its own. Such a hard idea to give up, but he must have a lot of success doing it right because it’s in all the hospitals and everything. But that is a very important part of it, is you’re not trying to improve. And these are people with severe back pains mostly that no doctors could help. So all the exercises are for themselves alone and not to try tried to have get rid of the things. I’m sure it’s very hard, but I think that let’s just say it helps to be introduced to the idea. And people sometimes get kind of fascinated by the idea that there’s an alternative to well, to trying to get rid of it. Why Because they’ve spent how many ever years they’re alive trying to get rid of it, and it hasn’t helped. So let’s try something different, don’t you think. So what attracted you to this side of it. I mean, something if you go through your book titles Yeah, just that. It’s like when things fall apart, comfortable with uncertainty. How we live is how we die, a different kind of freedom that one after another, welcoming the unwelcoming, the unwelcome. I know there’s been a real attraction in for you Yeah, that’s true in this idea that it’s going to hurt sometimes. And that let’s be O.K with it hurting sometimes. Like Trungpa Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, my teacher, he always used to say, lean into the sharp points. And that’s a great phrase. I think lean into the sharp points because it expresses what we’re trying to say here about leaning in rather than pulling back. So sometimes it’s just really physical. You have the idea, O.K, this is really hurting. And so some people would say, so I lean into it. Other people would say, I stop resisting. That’s what for me, that’s what it is. I’ve learned that anything unpleasant I can feel that I’m resisting. I don’t want it to happen. And then I just go through this process, which I’ve done so many times now, that I can actually do it. But I go through this process of relaxing with it, say not physically, not resisting like unknotting the stomach. Walk me through that process, I mean, I believe you have back pain. I do. We were talking about back pain a minute ago, too. When you’re in pain, what do you do. Some Some part of you must not want to feel the pain. What then happens in your mind or body. All right, so I stand up, I stretch, I do physical therapy. You’re not just accepting it and letting the pain be there. You are trying to change it to. I’m doing the smart things, or what the doctors recommend. And those things are really helpful. I’m a big fan around physical pain, but the attitude is the main thing. So I’ve given up the idea that maybe it’s all going to go away, and I live more with the idea, this is what I’m going to be living with for the rest of my life. So that’s a whole different kind more relaxed attitude about it. Do the physical therapy and things like this. But the attitude is you we might say agreeing, you might say making friends with. But for me, what I catch, what I catch is when I’m going like this, when I resist, I don’t want and I can feel that physically. And then I lean in, I lean in. So what is lean in mean. O.K, I’ll give an example. I don’t know if it’s going to answer your question, but Chogyam Trungpa once gave a talk and the topic of the talk was collaborating with reality, and he gave the example. This is what he gave the example that was very familiar with living in Nova Scotia in the winter time of walking, in the winter, when the snow and sleet is coming in your face. And it’s extremely unpleasant. And your whole body is as you’re in the dentist’s chair, you’re just like, tensing up. So leaning in means you physically stop resisting what’s happening. And you, you more like, relax with it. You relax with it. It’s the thing is that the contrast is so great between resisting and then relaxing that somehow it’s not that hard to do because it’s so, so tangible. This resisting thing, because I can feel everything in me is like pushing away and that’s like fruitless. I mean, it’s not going to help at all. Whereas as when I just let it be what it is, that’s another way to say it. Just let it be what it is and stop tensing against it. Then it becomes totally fine. I think about this when I walk home with my kids, half the days of the week I do pickup Yeah and I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old Yeah and we live in New York. And it rains like yesterday when we walk home in the rain. What happens is I’m sitting there trying to not get wet, and they’re like puddles. And they’re trying to jump in every puddle. And if they have their rain boots on, that’s great. And if they don’t, I’m like, don’t get your feet wet and you don’t get your shoes wet. But I’m often tensed up against getting wet and I’m going to get wet one way or the other. And they’re playing in the rain there. I like that. That’s a great. That’s collaborating with reality. That’s right. And I’m resisting reality. I don’t want to get wet. And they’re like, there’s so much water here. That’s so fun. See, it is a subtle shift. And mentally I think. And so for the kids it’s natural. And then somehow we lose it right as we get older. Seems like. But then you can go back. You can begin to be more joyful about what’s happening. I mean, I just had this experience with the sleet and everything, and I always used this image. So I began to it did feel like I was in a dance with the storm. There was something very joyful about it. Funny I think that’s what it was. It became funny. Like, I felt like I was in a New Yorker cartoon or something. And, but it’s more like your kids with the puddle that becomes enjoyable rather than a battle. So struggle is a helpful word, I think. You find yourself struggling and basically you pause and you find your way to not struggle. You’ve aligned. That, I is interesting, where you say, when we resist change, it’s called suffering. And I often find Buddhist teachers make this distinction between suffering and pain. And I’d love you to talk a bit about that. Pain is you put your finger on the burner and there’s pain you pull away. And there’s many, many examples. I have back pain, or whatever it is. So that’s pain. That’s like a direct experience. Then there’s suffering, which is all the storylines that we lay on top of it. And I call that unnecessary suffering, actually. But suffering in this case is optional because it’s based on the storylines you’re telling yourself about. Like, I talk to people say people are curious. We talk about back pain, spiritual discussions about back pain. But one of the things is just people are curious about how to be. Be with the experience without all the storylines because they’re saying to themselves things like this is going to get worse and I’m going to be disabled, or I’m not going to be able to do my work because of this or all sorts of disaster scenarios which are causing them so much suffering that that’s optional. That part I take this as a very important part of Buddhism generally, but you’re teaching in particular, working with this layer of resistance to what’s happening. And I struggle with this a tremendous amount. And it’s something I’m trying to work on where I’m in a situation that exists. It’s not a situation at this point, I can change. I have created the schedule. I’m going to the thing I have back pain, too. I’m feeling the back pain. Or there’s something in the future that I’m worried about happening, but it may not happen. I was just doing a governor’s forum in California, and I was worried on the flight out that I was losing my voice. I didn’t end up losing my voice, but I worried about it a lot. right. And there’s this layer of experience that for me is resisting, trying to make it different than it is when I can’t. And on the one hand, I I’ve become more attentive to how much suffering comes out of that. But I’m curious again, in a very physical or tactical way how you drop that layer. Because for me, the impulse to try to solve every problem or to treat even every moment like a problem, to solve or to perfect is very deep and reflexive right now. Would you say, though, is it possible to keep it going if you don’t keep feeding it with storyline. Is it dependent on Storyline. When you say to keep feeding it, to me. I am not feeding it. The storyline feeds itself. It takes an enormous amount of mental energy for me to not have worried thoughts feed themselves. I don’t want to be thinking about this. I’m not trying to do it. That’s worried. Thoughts do feed themselves. Absolutely and part of the book, another kind of freedom, which is that commentary on the book. There’s this part, which may have had a big effect on me, where he talks about there’s nothing wrong with in this case, it was negativity, but let’s just say nothing wrong with back pain or nothing wrong with worrying about the future. Nothing wrong. But the problem is what he called negativity. That’s on top of worrying. Then there’s judgment about worrying. And it gets very. It goes way down the rabbit hole. So coming. It’s almost I think in your case on the airplane, it would be almost like meditating, getting back to meditation where you I don’t know what you do when you meditate. Exactly but do you have an object of meditation often. No, I tend to do noting. I continuously speak either aloud or mentally what I’m aware of at that moment and from which sense. So I’m aware of looking at you. I’m aware of hearing the sound as you affirm what I’m saying. Yes, I’m aware of feeling my fingers touch each other right now and just letting everything come into awareness, but doing nothing about it but doing nothing about it. O.K, so let me just propose. I think I could work with noting too, in terms of this, but just in terms more familiar ground for me. So what you did was say, O.K, I’m going to gently note or aware of my breath going out and coming in. And my intention here is to just as much as possible, stay fully present with the breath going out and the breath coming in. Nothing forced. Just natural breathing. O.K, so then what happens is you. The worry thought is like a magnet. It’s a very seductive the sirens calling you. He keeps pulling you off, so fine. That’s what happens. So then we just keep coming back to being present with the breath going in and breath going out, and then it pulls you away again. But you’re training in noting that you’re going off and then coming back. You’re training and noting that you’re going off and coming back. So you interrupt it. I guess you could say you just get the hang of what it feels like to not continue with the storyline, and then you might find but by the time you land in San Francisco or wherever you’re going, that there’s been a shift in your anxiety level, a shift in your obsessive thinking part, and that you’re more ready to just go in without hope and fear into the situation. You’re in a different place with the whole thing because you’ve stayed so present with what’s going on. I’ve become very interested in, and this is just my own experience of myself. But the difference between energy of doing something and energy of just allowing something to be there, and to me, a lot of the exhaustion from worrying. It’s actually trying to think about, well, what can I do about it. Do I need to be, sucking on a throat lozenge. When I go there, should I see a doctor and the kind of trying to actually solve it versus and this is true in a lot of areas of my life versus is just it’s there the notes are there. I might lose my voice. And that, I mean, of course, there are things in life that we want to change. You do physical therapy for your back. I work in politics. I’m trying to affect effectuate change, not just allow things to be the way they are. And on the other hand, you can, for me at least, how much I’ve trained the energy of trying to change things and solve problems and act and optimize. It’s made me realize how untrained for me, and unfamiliar actually, the energy of just letting things be. I’m sure. I’m sure it’s very unfamiliar. But are you attracted to it Yeah is it. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if I weren’t attracted to it. And so do you find that you can do it sometimes. Just be. So is the thing I’m starting to try to learn how to do. It’s been a big shift in my own meditation practice, so I do think probably the anxiety comes up a lot. I was anxious about coming over here. So what about it made you anxious. Well coming here. So unknown. I didn’t with the uncertainty. Actually, I didn’t have a storyline particularly. It was just butterflies in the stomach without I. My daughter asked me. Well, what are you afraid of. And I said, I actually don’t know. I’m just. I just am having butterflies. But I wasn’t having a problem with having butterflies. I think that’s what I’m trying to get at. It was just an automatic response. Nothing wrong with it wasn’t escalating into a big storyline or I’m going to be a big flop or he’ll ask me and I won’t be able to talk or it didn’t go any of those places. And so it just was I think we have these just old habitual responses to things, butterflies. No big deal. Butterflies is what I’m thinking in this case. So in terms of the worry, that’s no big deal either. But somehow it escalates and escalates and escalates. And that’s when the real unnecessary suffering gets strong. And affects you physically. And so you just coming back to it, what it feels like in my solar plexus or whatever, with a feeling of sense of humor, warmth, no big deal. Something more along those lines, you’re interrupting the tendency to escalate. So you’re actually practicing non-resistance. We’ve talked so much about the relationship to discomfort. What about the relationship to comfort I love it. Well, here, this is a really an important question. So let’s talk about comfort as comfort zone. That’s the expression that people use. Are you familiar with that expression. So everybody needs some time with the comfort zone because your nervous system needs it. Swimming in the ocean. All these things that soothe you need some soothing listening to music that you love and all these things. But there’s no growth in the comfort zone. Growth happens where it’s more uncomfortable and we call it challenge because we’ve come up against our edge a little bit there. And so you want your edge to expand. In other words, if today your edge is the sidewalk, then by this time next year you want to be able to walk five blocks or something like that Yeah somebody once said to me that the amount of growth you are capable of is a direct correlate of the amount of discomfort you’re willing to tolerate. Oh, that’s right on. That person was very wise. Who said that to you. That’s absolutely. Absolutely true. So I guess what we’re talking about then is to the degree that we can feel discomfort, to that degree we can grow and grow means let the natural change and evolution happen, rather than get frozen in views and opinions that keep you stuck in the same way for your whole life. Really, meditation has been coming in and out of this conversation. And what is the purpose for you of meditation. What are you trying to practice. There, there could be a lot of answers to that question. I think of it as a way to get to know yourself deeply, intimately, fearlessly. With an attitude of. Of friendliness. So a person who say, meditates, goes on a meditation retreat, let’s say, where you do more hours and then what it inevitably things start floating up. Like maybe they think this is all about getting calm and blissful, but then when they go on the meditation retreat, a lot of painful memories, regrets. Flashbacks, all kinds of stuff comes up. For instance, I once raised my hand with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and I said, Rinpoche, you’re always talking about making friends with yourself. But I’ve been meditating now for a couple of years, and I think I’m getting a lot of inanition and proof, but that I am pretty messed up person. And then he said, O.K, so move closer to the feeling of messed up. That’s what that was his answer. One of my teachers is called sanni Rinpoche, and he has this expression being O.K with not being O.K, which I think I like that a lot because it’s very pithy. It’s kind of a fearless thing to see habits, to see your emotional reactivity, to see maybe selfishness. Pride rage about things that you thought you had worked through and all this kind of stuff. So to me, making friends with yourself is making friends with all of that, all of that unresolved and stuff like this. So meditation, it provides a. Forum or something like this for you to be able to see yourself very clearly. And then the instruction is to make friends or to agree with what you’re seeing, to not reject what you’re seeing. What about for someone who’s experienced with meditation, which I think is very common, is not that they get these fireworks of self self-insight. But they just realized they can’t take 10 breaths without their mind running away from them Yeah that’s true. That’s O.K. Yes, absolutely. I was kind of jumping ahead, I guess, a little bit in terms of what I was saying. One of the things Trump or Rashee says in myth of freedom is he has a whole chapter called boredom, and the chapter is about what a wonderful thing boredom is. Why is it a wonderful thing. He says, because it doesn’t feed the ego at all. There’s nothing about it that feeds the ego. And so he was really encouraging people that if you start getting bored, that is an excellent sign that your meditation is progressing and that sit O.K, sit through the hot boredom until it becomes cool. Boredom and so hot boredom is what we’re familiar with. Which is want to jumpiness, you want to get out of there, you want to. Boredom has this quality of just wanting to bolt, and cool boredom is you just. You sit there with the feeling of boredom. No problem. And I would hear these teachings on cool boredom. And honestly, I had not a clue what they were talking about. So I went to Mexico, where my parents had retired. My father had died. My mother liked to sit inside with all the windows. Shades closed in Mexico were outside of her door and the windows was like blazing with color and action. And everything’s happening and I’m young. And so I go there to be with her, and everything in me wants to be outside there. So for the first two days I was so bored and restless, and then I realized I came all this way to be with my mother. At some point, I just gave up the struggle and I was just there with my mother. And then it was so remarkable because I began to feel like I was sitting on a stage, and every once in a while the door would open and someone would a friend would come in or something, they’d have this conversation and then the door would close. And then we were in this nothing happening zone. And I just sat there with her, and then she’d start talking. And then that’s what was happening. The whole thing became kind of fascinating. Feels very similar to what you were saying earlier about the suffering was coming from resistance. That’s right. The suffering was coming from the resistance. And so I learned, I said, oh, this is cool boredom. I’m just here with it. And there’s no resistance. I actually think time is a very interesting dimension of all of this. Yes that when you talk about being I mean, everybody feels uncomfortable sometimes, but really, in a way, what we’re talking about here, what you’re talking about is being willing to feel like that for longer without acting. You have a line where you say the opposite of patience is aggression, the desire to jump and move, to push against our lives, to try to fill up space. You talk about refraining as a method of becoming a dharmic person, and in some ways, I don’t understand any of this as never acting, but as taking a longer space before acting. Before acting Yeah, absolutely. And that’s been a very important and transformative distinction, insight for me. And I’d be curious to just hear more from you on this dimension of time in action, along the lines of what I was just saying. It would mean that you are you’re very patient. Just tell me about how you understand patience. Well, first let’s start with impatience, because might as well start where we are. I experience as restless. And I was saying about boredom Adam wanting to get out of there, wanting to move to just get off the hot seat, And then patients would be sitting still with that restless energy. That’s how I would think of patients sitting still with the restlessness of the energy just sitting there with it in my mother’s living room, that’s how I experienced patients. So again, it’s growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Patience is part of it would be a necessary tool, I guess you could call it. Do you think that as a general capacity as weakened. And I’m thinking of something you wrote that I think about a lot. You wrote refraining is very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. It’s a quality of not grabbing for entertainment. The minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on, it’s a practice of not immediately filling up space just because there’s a gap. And we didn’t used to have the ability to fill the space of every gap Yeah, you were sitting in traffic and there wasn’t a lot to do. You were in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at. And now we have the world of distraction at our fingertips. We have AirPods in our ears. Just the daily necessity of sitting with boredom even has dissolved. That’s so true. And I think it changes us. It’s so true. And not for the better, I would say, less in touch with the richness of the world. So you were discussing with me earlier about going on the subway without your earpods and just sitting there and how rich an experience that was of just being there, the sights and sounds and what was happening, the drama and just the whole experience as being very rich and sometimes with students very often these days are really encourage them to one day a week or one morning a week, or take a timeout when they just go offline and go to the grocery store, offline, ride on the subway, offline, all your activities, but be there fully for what’s happening because you’re not engrossed in a movie or on a podcast or anything. It’s let’s not get crazy here and put you out of business as well. But how it is. Go on the subway or anywhere and everybody is somewhere else. And so I encourage them to be present without their device. But I’m trying to be realistic and just say, do it this short period of time, every Wednesday or every Wednesday morning or something like that. And yeah, it’s like my granddaughter when she was still in college and her teacher said, no, no devices in the room. And I said, couldn’t you just turn the sound off. She said, no, because it vibrates. So they had to leave them outside. My attention is different if I can feel my phone in my pocket. Yep so when I do conversations, my phone is here. It’s not in my pocket right now. It’s on the floor near me. Because my attention to you would be different if it were in my pocket. Of course, even knowing that the sound is off, even knowing I’m not going to check it. Exactly That’s what she said. And then she said, I never realized how I was training myself to be distracted. That was her vocabulary. And because it was so, so different, being in class without it even just in her pocket, as you say. So yeah, I think everybody could do themselves a big favor by spending some time offline and seeing what that’s like for them. And you could say, well, that’s when you get into being bored. But you could also say, well, but maybe that’s when you get into being alive more alive, because I mean, the Subway is such a great example of how fascinating, really totally fascinating to just be there because of the people. If nothing else, there’s so much happening from when you get on to when you get off. There is so much. I mean, sometimes things you wish weren’t happening, but nevertheless, to just expand that. We were talking earlier off the microphone about one thing I’ve been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on the subway and just yeah, be aware of what’s happening around me. And it’s interesting because a lot of the times I don’t really love what’s happening around me. It’s a rich experience, but it’s a boom box. Somebody trying to grab my attention with music I don’t really want to be listening to. It’s the screeching of the brakes. But there’s just a lot going on. And dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the right music or podcast my Kindle to distract myself in the right way and try to maintain a kind of like a hermetic comfort. It’s easier to stop. That’s been my big lesson from it. It’s not so much that I love every moment on the subway, but I didn’t quite notice how much energy I was expending trying to block it all out. Do you feel more relaxed. I do, yeah, I do it. And then I pick up my kids and I’m more present with them Yeah, yeah, because I just spent the last 35 minutes practicing being present. as opposed to practicing finding somewhere my mind would rather be. So it’s interesting because I would call that a form of meditation that you’re just present. It’s just it’s interesting because we didn’t used to have all these devices. I grew up before television, even so. But now that we have the devices, it’s very helpful, actually, to feel the contrast. Somehow it’s richer. You have a lovely line. I think it’s a line. Somebody told you that meditation is not a vacation from irritation. That’s right, that’s right. It’s the first thing I was when I first time I ever went for meditation instruction. That’s what the woman said to me. And then I later, I saw that it was from myth of freedom that Trump said that she plagiarized. But anyway, it made a big impression on me because that’s right. Meditation not a vacation from irritation. It’s just another way of saying the same kind of thing. But I have to say, even though I was introduced to this view or this attitude from day one. Took me a lot of years to really somehow have it penetrate and get to me that the path of non-resistance, it was in there, the seed was in there. But it wasn’t that I immediately was open to everything that was narrate that progress for a minute, because I mean, somebody listening to this, here you are. You’re a famed nun. And the idea of moving from I’ve never meditated to whatever you must be experiencing seems very intimidating. Like what. How would you describe the stages your experience of meditation or your relationship to it have gone through. So that’s a difficult question to answer because I’ve never actually given it a lot of thought. But let me just go back to remembering the first time I was taught to meditate. Well, yeah, sure, I could hardly stay with the breath for two seconds. But then that was like what I was saying earlier. It was just a revelation to see how I had no idea that my mind was like that. And instead of being discouraged by that because of what my teacher at the time was telling me and so forth, I was told, just expect that actually meditation is not about getting rid of thoughts. There’s always going to be thoughts, but you don’t have to follow them for an hour and a half. And so I would say in the beginning, my very wild mind and when I say beginning, I don’t just mean what, first month or something. I guess for a couple of years, maybe five years. I don’t know how long, but of course I kept at it and I did some long meditation practices. We had these month long meditation practices and I did that kind of thing. And then what started to happen more was a very important thing was I Trungpa Rinpoche used to talk about something he called the gap. You could call it a stillness. You could call it an openness, freshness. And again, I didn’t really know what in the world he was talking about. But he said, it could be possible that at the end of every breath there’s a gap before you breathe back in again. And he even sometimes gave a meditation like just natural breathing out and then pause, create a gap and then come back in. So he called that the gap. And it had supposedly very profound. But I didn’t have a clue really what he was talking about. And then I was in a meditation retreat, and we had a big fan that was going all the time. And so the hum of the fan became just background noise that was always there. So I was sitting there meditating, doing my practice, and the fan is going. And all of a sudden. It went off for just a second. I said, that’s a gap. That’s what he’s talking about. So then I understood what he meant by gap. He meant there’s all this noise, and then suddenly there’s silence. It’s like being in a use, the image of being in a sack or something like that. And it’s dark, and then there’s this little slit and you suddenly realize, oh, there’s a whole big space out there. It’s like that. Someone used this example that they were in a room with this teacher in Nepal and had his window was covered with a black plastic. And he said, think of that as just all the discursive thoughts. This black plastic, it’s just covering over and then you just make a pinprick in it, and then the light comes through and that’s like, oh, there’s a background here to this whole thing in a breath. So he said that you could at the end of every breath you could pause. And there could experience that gap, the gap of well, in the sense of the fan, it was just the sound was going. And then it stopped. So you could say in terms of chatter, it would be chatter, chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter. Chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter. But you’re not trying to prefer the gap. You’re just trying to discover cover that. Behind all of it. Say, if the discursive thoughts and emotions and everything are foreground. There’s also a background to the whole thing and that you could connect with at any moment. So I have a question about this. Like AI think, a question I really struggle with when I read his books, when I read your books Yeah I feel like there’s a shifting back and forth a little bit between this instruction of there is no good, there is no bad. It is not better to have mental chatter. It is not better to have spacious, mental quiet. It is not better to see the light coming through the pinhole in the black plastic over the chatter of the mind. It is not better to be looking at the black plastic. There’s this non-dualism. Everything is totally fine and in some ways the same because it’s all the ground of experience. And then also. And maybe it is better. So why do we even talk about gap then. Because it’s there, I guess. I guess because it’s there. But I think I’m asking it the underlying thing that is there. I feel like sometimes there is a conversation about something and worse, or that nothing is better and nothing is worse. And then sometimes something seems to be being described that is better Yeah, you’re absolutely right about that. And well, that’s where sense of humor comes in. And ability to be O.K with paradox and ambiguity and things not always being so neat and tidy like that. Because if you know the basic thing that struggle and polarization dualism pitting one thing against another, trying to get better, which comes from the place of feeling that you’re not good enough to begin with. That as long as you have the idea that we’re moving in the direction of you’re O.K just the way you are, and that’s a Suzuki Rashee choke. Suzuki Rashee was a Zen master in San Francisco, started the San Francisco Zen Center, and he had this expression. He looked out at the audience, his students, and he said, you are all perfect just as you are, and you could use a little work. And it is like that. And how do you understand what he meant. I understand that fundamentally we have Buddha nature. I guess that would be the kind of traditional way to say it. But you could say fundamentally, everybody comes from a has this potential for awakening from the sleep of confusion, let’s call it that, kind of glamorous language. But everybody has that potential. And you look out and you see a room full of Buddhas you see a room full of people that are awake but just don’t realize it. Something like that. And so you begin to say, O.K, I’m one of them. And I want to recognize more my true nature. I guess you could say. But the thing is, if you want to recognize the true nature by getting rid of the confusion, getting rid of the ego, let’s say it doesn’t work. The only way to actually have the confusion lesson is to become familiar, intimate with yourself just as you are, which is a lot of confusion and wild mindedness and boredom and all those things. And so if you have a view that there’s nothing problematic with any of that, then you can understand that my fundamental nature is one of his basic goodness. But I’m not recognizing that. And so the work is kind of uncovering what’s already here. Something like that. So it is ambiguous as a paradox. Earlier in the conversation you were talking about unconditional love Yeah and what you were saying there as I was trying to absorb it, made me think of it, that the thing that came to mind is how I feel as a parent Yeah O.K. That’s a good example. I want my children to be any different than they are. I want them to be. In some ways, absolutely don’t want them to be any different than they are. I love them just the way they are. And also, I want them to grow and there are ways that they can grow, but it doesn’t have any. It doesn’t come from a desire to change them like I really do. I really love them as they are, and I want them to grow and learn how to do more math and all the things that you do as a person and put on their own pants, tie their own shoes. So they’re both there. It was funny. It was the only it was the only experience I could come to that had both of those in my head Yeah, yeah. So it’s a good one. You could think of yourself that way. Just think of yourself that way. Does that make sense Yeah, that would be nice. Yeah you could. You used to be that little Yeah and but you don’t have to think of yourself necessarily as a little kid, but you could think of yourself as fine just as you are. And yet at the same time, let’s just say not wanting to harm people with my speech, not wanting to harm people with my actions, not wanting to be so critical minded about everything. So it is paradoxical, but the basic view is that there’s nothing wrong here. How do you think about the relationship between that kind of. Here we’re talking about is loving and changing. But the way I want to ask the question is more about the relation between abiding and acting. We’ve talked about abiding in difficult emotions and. And I think that a question that comes up for people and has come up for me is think about if your partner treats you badly and you think, O.K, I’m having these difficult emotions, I’m going to sit here and I’m not going to be reactive and I’m going to work with the texture of them and drop the storyline and touch the energy of the emotion Yeah and yet your therapist would say, well, maybe the story here is important. Maybe, this person is not treating you well. Maybe you are allowing it because you don’t love yourself enough. Maybe you. I’m not giving an example in my own life here. I’m just using it as an example. But there is something about the dropping of storylines that can become or at least I fear it can become also a way to accept situations that shouldn’t be accepted Yeah, yeah. To deny the responsibility for change. I hear you. How do you think about that Yeah well, one, I frequently get women in abusive relationships, and I always say, get out of there as fast as you can. They like, one woman stood up and she was saying that she has she described it as an abusive relationship with her husband for many years. And she said, so I try to work with it by just going to the feelings and all of this. And so what you’re saying there, I said, forget about all of that. Just get out of the relationship. You need to get out of the relationship and get some distance from it. And that is the most compassionate thing you could do for your husband and also for yourself. So I said, this is not the time to sit there and contact what it feels like in the body. This is time to just get out take the kids and go and just start exploring how you could do that, how you practically could do that, go to your mother’s or whatever. And she actually wrote to me later that woman and said that she had followed that advice and that it and thanked me, thanked me for some reason. She was willing to just take my word for it. I guess she was probably ready, but she would have been an example of what you’re talking about, where she was just using my instructions, but staying there, being beaten, it was crazy, crazy situation. So that’s an extreme situation, of course. But so how then do you discern when to act. Should be acting when you should be taking the storyline seriously versus when you should be abiding, feeling, touching the energy without the storyline. Line yeah, that’s a really good question. And this comes up a lot with protesting injustice in various forms. And so that conversation I’ve had with a lot of people and I always say, I say what they already but then we have a discussion about it and that is that you’re not effective. If you’re caught in strong emotions and you’re being carried away by the energy of anger or something like this, that you just can’t be effective, first of all, you’re not able to communicate. Someone’s only going to hear your anger, they’re not going to hear your words, and there’s no possibility of change. So first of all, I say try to experiment with ways that actually start to communicate to the heart of the people that you’re trying to influence for change. Try it when you’re angry. Try it when you’re not angry. Like, find out for yourself. That’s the only way it really lands in the body. So I’m encouraging the people to continue with what they’re doing. But not when they’re caught up in their clashes. That’s a Tibetan word for strong destructive emotions. And then in that process, they might go to the body, feel what they’re feeling, get got in touch as a way of being able to then walk through the door and have the conversation that doesn’t come from that place, and is actually curious to hear what they have to say, and is actually open to hearing what they have to say and isn’t controlled by Fear. It’s more like a willingness to take a leap, I guess you could say it’s interesting when you say isn’t controlled by Fear. One of the things I’ve experienced with some of your work, and some of this, is that there were a lot of actions I was not willing to take, because I was afraid of feeling the discomfort, the uncertainty associated with them. And it was only when I became less afraid of feeling that right that I could take those actions. There are many actions I could take to try to avoid those feelings. And I did take them. It didn’t work right. Or it worked in its own way. But yes, there were forms of change. And also, I mean, even in this work, forms of conversation that were not on the table, what does it mean. Not on the table that I just wasn’t willing to sit-in the discomfort of I see us confronting a certain personal situation or risking a certain outcome, or having a certain kind of political conversation across difference. Because it was because I didn’t trust my own ability to hold the discomfort of it. And it was and it’s an ongoing process for me, certainly, but getting more. Comfortable being uncomfortable has opened up a wider range of space in which I can act. There are actions. I wouldn’t even really let myself think about that now. You can, but that now I can because I’m not as afraid of them. I think a really good way to go about this is think like, O.K, where do I want to be in one year time. Or how about five years. Do I want to be stuck in exactly the same way, on this day 2027 or and on this day in 2027, will I feel that O.K, I’m able to sit with discomfort a little bit more than before. In other words, it’s like it’s a growth process. And I think you’re actually changing the DNA in some kind of way. It’s really fundamental what’s being changed. All these studies now about the brain and how meditation affects it and stuff. They have some interesting observations from that. And one of them is that there’s grooves in the brain that we experience as habitual patterns, and that every time you follow the habitual pattern in the old way, the grooves are getting deeper. And every time you even pause and consider an alternative, it opens up a New neurological pathway. And there’s an opportunity for change in that way, really at the level of your brain. So I found that pretty exciting to hear about that because it’s so optimistic. So you were saying one of what about meditation and what it is. And I was emphasizing in this case, it would be seeing what the habits are that you’re stuck in, that you keep making, that grows deeper and deeper and experimenting with how to open up New ones. And it says that all you have to do is even just don’t go down the rabbit hole and don’t do anything else that opens up New pathways. Just sit there with the feeling that is coming up in meditation, or just sit there and what’s so yeah, exactly. It both like intense and interesting about meditation is just sitting there and not doing anything with what’s going on in my head right now, which I find difficult Yeah, right. But I want to pick up on something you said possible. Very possible. And the more I do it, the better I get at it. Exactly let me, as we come to a close here, ask you about a very lovely line in one of your teachers books. He writes, one’s whole practice should be based on the relationship between you and nowness. Oh, I love that Yeah and just as nowness is a word I really love, I struggle a bit with nowness a lot. I struggle a lot with nowness. And that seemed like such a. It feels like one of those sentences that has a universe in it Yeah read it to me again. It says one’s whole practice. Whole practice should be based on the relationship between you and now Yeah and another place, he says, let the thread of nowness run through your whole life. But you don’t like the word nowness, so it doesn’t communicate. No, I do. I just struggle with achieving it. Oh I see. It’s a wonderful word. Well, you are achieving it on the subway without your devices. But I would just be curious on hearing your reflection, because this can all feel so abstract. But just what does it mean to have a relationship with nowness? Oh, well, it means that you. Basically, that you’re present instead of drawn off. And that being present itself can tune you in to a bigger perspective on your life. It’s like that. I was talking about foreground and background. It’s an example might be the difference between being all caught up in your thoughts and going to the window and looking at the sky and it’s like the astronauts experiences. They’re all out there and they’re having these amazing spiritual experiences just because they’re seeing the Earth from the perspective of vast space. And earlier astronauts had the same experience. They said, it’s just this one Earth. Why can’t we just all live on it together. It seems so easy from the perspective of infinity or that. And then you get back down on Earth and right away all that, your habitual patterns and things click in. You’re already stuck in fighting struggle and so forth. So in a way, I guess what it means with nouns is that you begin to have more of that big perspective that puts everything in perspective. And, and then you just go about your life, but all the time, at the same time, you’re a little dot, the Earth is a little dot and you are nothing in really tiny, tiny in the face of this vast universe that just expands forever and does not have an end. If you do this practice in a committed way. I mean, you’ve done it for many decades, if what it’s promising is not an end to pain. What it’s promising is not that you’ll always feel radiant joy or equanimity. Well, what is it promising. What are you trying to achieve or what is achieved amidst it. Contentment being O.K with how things unfold. Even if. Even if it’s disturbing. In other words, O.K with how things unfold doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t act, but it does mean that you aren’t struggling against what’s happening. Contentment so deep because you’re not struggling against the unfolding of your life. You’re more like letting it unfold and then doing things to fine tune it or uncover the openness and vastness of your mind and not be all caught up in the smallness of petty grievances and criticisms and likes and dislikes. And so somehow then all of that likes and dislikes and everything just have a lot of room to exist. And so there is a sense of less and less separation between you and your experience. And that has a lot of contentment in it, I would say. I can say definitely that I am deeply contented with my life, and I have a very good life, and there’s not a lot of horror in it or anything like that. But I do feel it comes from not from the outer circumstances, but from the meditation practice and working with my mind and knowing that the mind has so much power to make you suffer, or to help you stay awake and alive to your life. I think that’s a lovely place to end. Then always our final question what are three books you’d recommend to the audience? Yes, right. I recommend “Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior” by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which is an excellent book to be reading right now in terms of what’s happening in the world. And I recommend “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryū Suzuki Roshi, which is one of the very first books I ever read on Buddhism. Have you read it? Yes. And I recommend this book called “Enlightened Vagabond” by Matthieu Ricard. He collected stories about this 19th century eccentric Buddhist master, but very eccentric, and the stories are totally delightful. It’s like every story has a moral, so to speak, but funny. Very, very funny. And the man was a fabulous character. So I love those stories. And Matthieu Ricard collected them over many, many, many years, hearing them from his teachers and things. So those are the three books that I recommend Pema Chödrön. Thank you very much. Ezra Klein, thank you very much.
