From ABC, this is the 10 percent happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, today, we're going to talk about a massively useful acronym which could be deployed both on the meditation cushion and in your free range living.

The acronym is Rain are a I. And rather than trying to explain it myself, I will leave that to my guests today, who has become one of Rheins primary proponents. Tara Brock is an author, therapist and meditation teacher. She has a PhD in clinical psychology. She founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, and she's written a whole bunch of books, including her latest, which is called Radical Compassion.

We first posted this interview in January 20 20. Shortly after that book came out. In the conversation, we talk about what rain is and how to apply it in many areas of your life, including relationships. We talk about a Buddhist list called the Eight Worldly Winds, and we talk about whether most people harbor a suspicion that there's something fundamentally wrong with us.

But we start and end with a conversation on a touchy subject. In my first book, 10 percent happier, I poked fun. I thought gently. Atara, it turns out it didn't go down that well with her, although I didn't really know that until this chat. I really respect how warm and open she was during this rather tricky discussion. Stay tuned until the very end, though, when we fully wrap it up. One thing before we dive in to the episode, we would really appreciate it if you could take just a few minutes to do us a solid by answering a brand new survey about your experience with this podcast.

We care deeply, as I think you know about our listeners. We're always looking for ways to improve. So please go to 10 percent dot com forward slash survey. We'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you in advance. OK, here we go now with Tarbuck. Nice to see you and you I think this is the second time we've met, the first time we met in my memory was backstage at a meditation event. And I remember being a little hesitant because I saw you there and I thought I made fun of her a little bit in my book.

And I didn't know how it was going to go. But then you gave me a big hug. So where are we with that? Are you mad at me for.

It was a little it was actually a really great experience for me because, you know, it's fame and disrepute and, you know, and you made fun of me some. And you also appreciated the thing that most matter to me, which is the practice of rain. And I figured, you know, I can survive this.

Well, I've talked about this a lot on the show, so my apologies to folks who've had to hear me hold forth on this too much. But I got a three. Know what a 360 review is, if you ever heard.

Yeah, yeah, I got one. And basically all the people in my or many of the people in my life anonymously commented on my strengths and weaknesses. And one of the weaknesses was being judgmental. You, I think, were really an early victim of mine on this score in the meditation world.

So and there was a message for me in it, too, because I'm basically out to wake up and be able to present things in a way that are going to reach people. And I suspected for you my way was had too much of a kind of ugly, too sweet flavor.

And I realized, oh, there's going to be a messy people like Dan, that that's the way they receive it. And I think as we keep growing, we just get more flexible in ways we present things. So there was room for that.

Yes, I agree. I think, yeah, you have a way of talking about this that works for hundreds of thousands of people. My way of talking about it or thinking about it or acting it out in the world is very different. And that's the importance of having many folks out there talking about the Dharma I land on this.

Me too. Me too. It's really exciting to me, actually, and it's exciting when the dialogues happen because basically we're free when we all stretch.

Say more about that. Yeah.

The more first of all, as a teacher, the more flexibility I have in how I present things. In the more sensitive I am to the different ways people receive things, the more effective I can be. And as a practitioner, for instance, this morning I was talking to my husband about a book that right now I'm rereading for the twentieth time and it's I Am That by Three Saga. And it's a book about non dual reality, about seeing how really constantly looking at how am I getting identified right in this moment, like really seeing past the coagulation of self and recognizing, OK, I'm not this particular personality, I'm not this body and recognizing a larger sense of being ness.

And so we were talking about that. And I then I just said, you know, that is fantastic when my mind is quiet enough. But if I am caught in some anxiety for me to say, oh, I'm not, this anxiety actually is a subtle way of pushing it away. And what's more important is for me to feel the wave of anxiety and in some way say, OK, this belongs you know, this is part of this is a wave in the ocean, you know, and to actually feel it and in opening to it and not resisting the identification actually dissolves.

So the pathway taught in the book that I'm riveted by. Right. This moment isn't the pathway at any given moment, and nor will it work for many people when they're stuck in a certain way. So it's just having that keeping the whole domain of practice fresh. So in any given moment, there's an intuitive way to respond to what's arising now that actually deepens freedom. And not going by road really is is actually what works in the most deep ways.

So you talk about implicitly a change that I've seen you make in my observation of you as a teacher since the first time I saw you speak until reading your most recent book.

So in The Teaching of Rain Rahni, which we're going to walk through in detail, the first time I heard you speak, the NT stood for non ID. Now you teach it as nurture, which in your last answer, I think I heard you say that nurturing leads to the non identification if you can be cool with whatever is coming up. And you mentioned anxiety and you've talked about personally dealing with anxiety in your own life. If you can be cool with the anxiety, if you can, you know, be warm in the face of this unwelcome visitor in your own mind, that can ultimately, if I.

I'm hearing you correctly, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, lead you to seeing, oh, yeah, this is just a visitor. It isn't me. That's exactly right.

And if we bypass the nurturing and it's not like every time something comes up, we have to put our hand on our heart and offer all sorts of phrases of self compassion. But there are times that bringing a kindness and a warmth to what's there softens the resistance in a way that we're embodied and yet more spacious. And if we skip over it, if we go too quickly to saying, oh, this isn't me, I'm not identified, it's actually a subtle kind of dissociation.

We're not really embodied. So the more full freedom is to be with the wave and realize your Oceanus through the process of being with the wave, which for most of us takes some quality of kindness or compassion.

We're getting ahead of ourselves by getting to the end of rain before we've even done the AH. But I just want to I want to get back to our discussion about my first encounter with you in the way I wrote about it. You used a phrase that comes right out of the Buddhist canon of fame and disrepute, and I didn't wanna let that go by without letting you talk about it, because just to remind listeners, if they've lost the context, you said when you were reading what I wrote about you, you had this thought of, oh, this is fame and disrepute.

This is part of and you'll correct me because you're the Buddhist teacher here. But in my understanding of Buddhism, they talk about this thing called the eight winds. And I've always been fascinated by this because it's pain and gain and loss, fame and infamy.

And I don't know, there's a bunch of them, you know, but the piece on fame and disrepute is a really interesting one to me because we are all pretty conditioned to want to look good, to get approved, to be liked. I mean, it's so deep in us as social creatures. We are rigged to connect love with being impressive, achieving and so on. And so how we look to others really matters. And so for me to be scanning my own psyche and seeing how when people love what I'm teaching and tell me how I'm changing their lives, I you know, there's a swelling up and a feeling good.

And just to note that and also to notice that some people are giving me feedback of using a poem that was incredibly insensitive to a part of the population, are teaching something that for a traumatized person actually could make things worse. And then the sinking, the contracting, and to really become awake and free in the midst of that inflating deflating is absolutely essential for the ride if we're going to find any real peace.

But what I like about describing them as the eight winds and I can't remember all you get when you get blown by them, you get blown around.

It's also impersonal. The wind isn't you. There are times when you're going to have fame. It can be big fame, like the truly famous person or just sort of a good reputation in your circle of friends. And they're going to be times when you have a bad reputation and it's going back to your thing about not identification. And that to me there's freedom in viewing things that way.

I think it's the reason I often talk in an evolutionary way also is that we take so personally all the different emotions that are absolutely wired into our nervous system and have an intelligence. And yet, you know, we feel fear and it's my fear and I feel too much fear rather than realizing we'd be brain dead without fear and that every single organism on the planet has a version of it. So it's the same thing with the world it wins, whether it's gain or loss, fame or disrepute or feeling, fear, anger.

They're not personal, but it takes a lot to pay attention in a way that gets it. I mean, one of the things I'll often do in a workshop is I'll have people sit in a circle and write down three things they're really afraid of and fold the paper up and put it in the center and we'll mix the pile around. And then people just pick from the pile and they just read them out loud and everybody just listens as each person's reading.

And the realization that comes out of that really is I'm just getting it's not my fear. It's the fear, that sense of it just not so personal, which is why I really feel like we need to do these practices with each other, because it's not until we start sharing what's going on that we realize that what we've been taking so much as mine, I self is really part of our shared inheritance.

OK, so I'm going to further delay the diving into rain because you I suspect this is a habit of yours. You say interesting things and then I'm going to be forced to follow up on it.

Doing the practices with each other. I can't imagine in my, you know, endless skills of empathy that's sarcastic for my audience, that some people out there listening are thinking, well, you know, I meditate on my own.

I listen to some app or I I have a practice that I you know, it's been part of my life, but I'm in my living room doing this. I'm not doing it with other people. So does that mean I'm doing it wrong? No.

When I say doing the practices, in a way, I'm saying doing the path. And and what I mean is I meditate alone many days of the week. Sometimes I meditate with my husband. But it's more sharing the unfolding with each other, sharing what's happening, being vulnerable, real with both the, you know, what were the insights and also the blocks. And that's what enlarges us and allowed something. And this is going to be, again, tossing our sequence completely crashing at a little bit.

But one of the beauties of rain is that more and more people are doing rain partners where they're doing rain together, which I think just catalyses a whole other level dimension of waking up. So I can speak more to that at some point and I can direct people to the website. But we have people in our training programs. We have people in our local community pool actually all over the globe right now, are in pairs doing rain partners. And there's different levels of how you can do it.

And finding that, first of all, keeps them with the practice. It's like when you do something with somebody else, you're more accountable. You kind of go through the whole process rather than drifting and dropping it and makes a kind of container that's safe and friendly and conducive. And then in the sharing pieces, it actually when you start naming out loud something that's happening, you become more aware of it. It brings it more into the light of awareness.

So that's another piece of practicing together. I mean, the most obvious is go to classes, have small spiritual friends, groups or clusters that you meditate with, but more it's do the path together and do some meditations together. I think interpersonal meditations are part the going to be the wave of the future because we spend a whole lot of time getting more intimate with our own heart and mind. But we don't practice intentionally how we speak with each other.

So when I'm talking to you right now, am I actually in my body? And when you speak, am I really listening, putting down my ideas and taking it in? And when I speak, am I speaking from as much of a place of heart and presence as I can so we don't practice that that much?

It's hard. I've done some of this work diad work where you have to stare into somebody's eye and like a death stare, it's hard.

The resistant ones call it a death stare.

I'm just going to everything scale that through the rest of this conversation.

Yes, it's really, really hard. And yet, actually, I did find that it somehow reduced for me this sort of sitting there and then the aforementioned death stare with some stranger.

I actually think the first time I ever did it was you made me do it at this event I went to that I ended up writing about and I was so mad at you. I didn't know you, but I was really mad at you for making me stare at this nice young woman who was sitting next to me. I didn't know.

But over time, as I've been in other programs where I've been forced to do the diad work, it does kind of whittle away a little bit.

In my case, I'll just speak for myself at the inherent awkwardness that I've felt in myself of dealing with other people, because you really just mainlining wordless connection.

That's exactly right. And it builds your tolerance almost for the discomfort. Yes, that's right. It's affect tolerance. It's really being able to stay present when and not have it matter so much that it's uncomfortable. And then you start sensing once you relax a little, you can start looking and seeing vulnerability. You can kind of see the vulnerability. You were too busy in your mind to notice and you can see the goodness, which is what's so beautiful and see the sameness.

You can start sensing that that which is looking out through your eyes is the same basic awareness as mine and that that kind of catapults you into another place. But just to say, when I talk about rain partners, that's actually not a engaging process. People do it on the phone and they do it online and they do it in all different ways. It's more has to do with and moving from an inner kind of contemplation to sharing to energy sharing.

Ah, well, let's dive into how that works in a minute. Let's finally walk through rain as discussed. I had never heard of rain before, I heard you speak at an event here in New York City and it really is a profoundly useful schema. I don't know what that acronym, whatever you want to call it. So can you just talk through your history? How did you know?

I think it was Michelle McDonald who came up with it, the great teacher, Michelle McDonald, who's never been on the show.

She came up with the acronym and then Michelle came up with the acronym probably 99 early 1990s. And I began using it then and loved it. And both for myself and students, there are a couple of. Blocks are problems that people would run into and talk to me about, and one of them was that they said, well, what is not ID like? How do you how do you not identify? And I had to explain that not IDs is actually the fruit of what happened.

It's like you pay attention in certain ways on purpose. And then the fruit of that is this realization of, oh, I'm not that. So it's not a doing.

So that motivated me to shift the acronym around a little. But the other piece was that they couldn't really when they were investigating, they couldn't really get in touch with fully in their body with what was going on. And it really needed the nurturing to fully embody it. And so compassion was the missing piece. You know, if if we think of awareness as having the two wings of mindfulness or seeing clearly what's here and compassion, holding it with kindness, we need to bring in that wing of kindness, not just as a kind of background mood, but in an explicit way because we are so programmed to actually be turned against ourselves.

So it does need to be explicit. So one of the there's an attachment therapist, Louise Cozzolino, and she says that it's not the survival of the fittest, it's the survival of the nurtured.

Survival of the nurtured. Yeah. And so learning a pathway to self nurturing and it doesn't have to be I am sending messages to myself to nurture myself or I'm right now touching my heart. It could also be the pathway to nurturing, could be by imagining and sensing nurturing from some larger source. But finding some pathway to feeling nurtured helps to actually soften the self identity. It actually allows us to relax and open and sense a larger belonging.

I'm feeling a little bit like a failure as an interviewer because we still haven't done the hour of rain. We've walked through it.

So that was this is the background to how come I shifted the letters? But here's how the letters go. The R is recognize and that simply means that when you're in some way in reaction and suffering, you pause and notice something's going on. It's an OK, something's here going on. What's going on here? So you recognize what's happening and the AI is allowed, which means rather than what we typically do, which was we go into fight, flight freeze.

In other words, we in some way try to fix it, change it, ignore it, judge it. We do something. It's like a pause where we say, OK, just let this be here. Right now I use the language of yes, saying yes to what's right here, not yes, I like it. Ah, yes, I want it to always stay here. But yes, this is the actuality of the moment. This is truth telling.

So yes, let's let it be here that's recognized in the law that creates enough of a pause or space to actually deepen attention. Then we kind of make the U-turn and we begin to investigate. I see. So you have to kind of pause the action and then you make the U-turn. That just means instead of moving into the reactivity, you go from that pause to, OK, so what's really happening, if recognized, is the first step, the third step, which is investigators saying, OK, what's really going on?

Let's recognize even more deeply.

And do you imagine people doing this on the fly like in the middle of a conversation? If I start feeling that I am anxious as I'm talking to you, what I do, the rain while I'm maintaining the conversation with you? And is this also a formal meditation practice?

Both Yeah. And so once you've kind of gotten yourselves the sense of the how it works and it can become very, very like a light rain, I feel like I'm doing a light rain a lot. And it's an informal practice. You can leave to the day at any moment just noticing and letting be what's happening, but just sensing, OK, I'm feeling it here. OK, be kind. And then just sensing a little bit of a shift and you move on so it can be quick.

So now there's a few things with the investigating that are always misunderstood and really important to know. And that is it's not cognitive. Or at least 98 percent, it's not cognitive, 98 percent, it's really getting somatic, it's you're investigating and bringing the attention to feeling the throat, the chest, the belly. You know, how is how is this experience expressed in my body?

So the investigation isn't. Oh, I bet my mother is always saying mean things to me because X or Y happened in her personal. The investigation is what is anxiety actually like. It's a tightening in my chest.

That's right. What is this? How is it showing right in this moment? Now, there are some skillful ways that can support that that are investigating. Like, if I'm in a really bad mood, I'll sometimes ask myself, what am I believing right now? And generally I find, oh, I'm believing that I've failed in some way, that I'm falling short, that I'm not OK, I'm not enough, or I'm believing that somebody else isn't liking me or whatever, but seeing that bringing that into consciousness actually helps get back in touch more directly with what's happening automatically.

So that can be a useful piece. Another part of investigating I like is let's say I'm feeling anxious in this interview and I paused enough to say, well, how is that anxiety really expressing even in my face, you know, if I could wear and just let my face take the tightness of the feeling and let my body kind of. So when I'm guiding people in workshops, I'll actually get them to sculpt it because we are so sculpted. Yeah.

With their bodies and their face, like actually let their bodies and face take the full expression of the mood they're feeling.

And the reason why, Dan, is that were most people are most of us are pretty dissociated from our bodies and it takes some intentional extra kind of fine tuning to really draw the attention fully to what's going on. And if there's been trauma, it's really, really hard. And so there might just be instead of going into the body, there might with trauma, I really encourage people to go right into nurturing, to not even do the sequence of rain, to nurture first and find the pathways to self soothing, to safety, to, you know, get the parasympathetic going, calm down before they actually do the the real somatic investigation.

And that can be for weeks or months. It's not that useful if there's trauma to go right into investigating. Why not, because you can re traumatize unless there's sufficient stability and resilience and safety going in right to where the feelings are can overwhelm and then you just have another round of feeling powerless and unable to deal with it. So you want to take the time to do other styles of meditation that are more loving kindness, the nurturing domain, in order to build up enough sense of resourcefulness to then do the kind of investigating and unpacking that reigned us.

Now I think we find ourselves back in order on. And we did it.

We did. And I think there's a reason energetically, intellectually, we kind of leaned into an earlier and are now coming back because it is so important. So we started to recognize just seeing clearly what's happening, a allowing or accepting that it's not saying I'm psyched that I feel anxious right now. You're saying this is the truth. I is investigating again. That's not a cognitive process most of the time, although, as you describe, one can skillfully use thought to direct you to the direct experience.

But it is more of a sort of feeling what's actually happening in your body. And then we learn that and nurturing.

And there's a couple of final pieces on investigating that actually set the grounds for nurturing that are really powerful that I like to teach about, which is the certain questions you can ask yourself, like how does this place want me to be with it right now? Look, if I'm feeling hurt or if I'm feeling shame or I'm feeling anger or whatever, how does this place want me to be with it?

How does the anger want me to be with it? Yeah. How does the fear, the shame want me to be with it are another way of saying is what does this place need? What does it need right now? Because nurturing is really a response to vulnerability. And when we investigate and finally contact where we're vulnerable, where we're afraid, whatever it is, if we really feel it, there's a natural upwelling of tenderness.

And that really is the dynamic of compassion, which is compassion is a response to feeling the vulnerability. So investigate and get you in touch with the vulnerability. And those questions help you do that. What does this place really need right now? And often I invite people to ask that and put their hand on their heart at the same time, the kind of thing that would have freaked you out a number of years ago and still might get you like that.

So for the part of the population that is drawn to it, you're actually beginning to create a kind of nurturing atmosphere even when you ask that question. And then that question will invite forward what's needed. And for one woman I wrote about this in the book, who is really afraid of a CEO and her organization, and she go into meetings and have brain freeze and she was really qualified, brilliant woman. But his temperament intimidated her. And so I had her doing rain before she'd go into the meeting.

And she got to that anxiety and she felt it felt the clenched in her chest. And then she asked, well, what do you need? And the anxiety basically responded, I need you to be OK then. I'm here just to let it be OK that I'm here. So she just sent the message, you know, it's OK. This belongs. It's OK. This belongs. And there's a real power to the message. This belongs because in the moment that we say this belongs, it's metaphorically we become the ocean that has room for the waves rather than another wave fighting a wave.

You know, this belongs creates just the space we need. It wasn't like the anxiety dissolved. It was more that there was just more space. And she wasn't as in the grip that was her end just to send that message. So there's a lot of different ways that nurturing emerges. For some people, it does include, you know, one hand on the heart or two hands in the heart. Some people put their hands on their cheeks for others, and it can be a combo.

There's a set of words that really are the message that a part of us most needs to hear at that time. For me, at times when I've everything I've tried in terms of self nurturing hasn't worked, I finally get down to this place of please love me. I'm just kind of asking the universe, please love me. And there's a sense in some way of something larger, some presence that is compassionate and tender and washing through me. So it's when I get very vulnerable and call out that I can feel that.

And then I realized that that presence wasn't outside me. It just appeared to be outside me. It's just part of my own heart. But at the time of being stuck, I needed to call out. So sometimes for some people, just kind of in some prayerful way, asking for nurturance helps. Some people have a friend they'll imagine holding them. So there's many, many different ways. But the nurturing tends to soften, as we were talking about, in a way that we actually feel enlarged, no longer hooked or identified.

So if it was anxiety, I'm not the anxious self anymore. I'm kind of that space of tender wakefulness that is aware of and kindly towards the anxiety. That is what I call after the rain. And I put that in quotes because people tend to after they do the and just go back into whatever's next in their lives, but not notice the shift that's happened. And for on the path of waking up, noticing the shift in identity, this is where non identification comes in and actually deepens our familiarity with who we really are beyond ego itself.

So after the rain are those moments when we just notice all. Who am I right now? You know, it's not no longer stuck in that small hooked place and there's usually some quality of spaciousness or openness or tenderness, more freedom. So I invite people to pause and rest in that and just really get familiar with it. That's kind of the instructions in the Tibetan tradition is when you touch a moment of freedom, just get familiar with it.

All right. So there is a lot there. And part I have a bunch of questions. I'm just trying to order them correctly in my head.

And one of them is. So you talked about some of the ways we can operationalize the nurture part of rain.

What about for somebody like me who does have a it doesn't resonate much with me the idea of putting my hand on my heart, although I have to bring Washam, who's a great teacher who's been on the show a couple of times, mutual friend. She's had me do that before and I'm embarrassed to admit it did kind of work. But I was in the middle of a deep that was on the seventh day of a Métayer retreat at that point. So it's not it's a little bit different from my regular life.

But generally speaking, I think I'm not alone in feeling like putting my hand on my face or my heart or whatever doesn't immediately jump out at something that I want to do. And the asking the universe to please love me too doesn't land for me is something that I would do.

So how could I do that?

And part of rain.

So then I would ask you, when in your own experience, have you found that there is something that you pay attention to that warms you, tender's you, softens you toward myself in any way, like with any person, in any situation, with nature, with, you know, is there anything that when you think of it, just tenderizes you?

Yeah, my son. Our cats. Yeah, animals generally. Yeah.

Those types of things I do to put it in the language you used before, I do see the vulnerability and then I think the compassion. Another way of saying that would be just the desire to be helpful arises on contract. That's right.

So that's an example of how connected with vulnerability brings your nurturing towards the world around you. Now, what happens when you're cut off in some way from feeling good about yourself? I mean, do you have times that you get caught in self judgment and you get turned on yourself?

Do I have times? I would say I have occasional times when I'm not OK.

So when you get hooked, what helps you? What helps you unhook? Rain, you know, I mean, you taught me ten years ago, I mean, I think it's become second nature now, but I've been doing it the way you taught me lo these many years with non ID. Now I have to say I don't have a history of trauma that I'm aware of. Right. So it, it's not triggering for me to go into not ID instead of nurture, but maybe there's a certain coldness in that through which so little.

So let's look at that for a moment. Who is it, is it your son or is there anyone else that when you feel them loving you, you can let it in? Yes, definitely my son, your son. Cats love me, it's a little annoying to work and they're jumping on my desk, my wife, my parents.

OK, so. And how old's your son? Five. OK, so when you see your son and your he's loving you and you're letting it in and what's he doing? How close is he? What's the expression on his face, what actually let you feel love and actually receive it.

We chased around a lot and he gets a mischievous look like you can't catch me and then I go catch him. So, yeah, something like that.

Or we in order to tire him out, I make them do wind sprints in the hallway of our before bed. And so sometimes we'll be running up down the hallway together and I'll see that he'll look up at me with a look of like, wow, this is awesome.

It's totally fine. Yeah. Yeah. So if you even right now just and I can tell you you were accessing it some as you were visualizing it, see him looking up at you and just so appreciating the fun and aliveness and just the good stuff you're bringing into his life. And how does that feel?

Very good. Yeah. So what you would do just to translate this is that if you're feeling really stuck and you're feeling down on yourself and you've done the investigating and you want to nurture, you might in some way imagine a sense in the background your son and just that energy and just let that add more information to your heart. It's like when we're down to ourselves, we're kind of our attention is very narrow. It's very fixated on what's wrong. And that's like widening the lens to something that's really good and letting it in.

So you're just adding a certain dimension of loving kindness into the mix to soften where you've hardened against yourself?

I think it's great that I could accept that I have no block with that.

Here's the thing, Don, is that most of us actually have trouble letting in love, like most of us have very limited number of people that we can even begin to let it in.

And even the people we think we let it in, we don't in a very physical, sematic way, actually let our body know, get washed over it, just not what we do. And yet when we're really hard and that's exactly what we need. I mean, the issues are in the tissues. They really are, you know. And, you know, for most of us in our parenting, there was some we might have had great parents, but there was some lack of really being seen or really being unconditionally, tenderly embraced.

And we all need that. So to the degree there was a lack, there's a kind of spiritual reparenting that we're doing with meditation that actually helps us to process that so we can inhabit our wholeness. And so we each need to find where in our life is there even a tendril of what we needed to experience that we can build on, because whatever you practice gets stronger. So for me, if I, you know, 10 times a day, imagine that washing through of love from some formless being, are you 10 times a day sends through your son or your wife just kind of letting in?

There is something our neurons learn about. There's new pathways that grow and we have quicker access to it.

And in a sense, then by channeling that look my son gives me when we're running down the hallway, I'm teaching myself through him how to provide this for myself. That's exactly right.

Because when you're using a bridge, I mean, in some way we're using whatever comes through in the universe as love. We're using that. But ultimately, it's inside us and everywhere. And we're just trying to access loving kindness and as direct away as we can.

I guess if I can unpack that, because I think what you just said is interesting. I want to see if I can restate it, because part of me was thinking, well, if I'm using my son's love for me, which is not always there because I love of times, he thinks I'm annoying. But in those moments where it's really obvious that, yeah, he's there's a lot of love in the room or in the hallway right now. I was thinking part of me was thinking, well, that's external.

That's not me having love for myself. But you're, I think, saying, well, love is just sort of a force in the universe. However you get it into your tissues is fine. Right.

And there's no self loving herself, really. I mean, it's we're just accessing love and it appears to come through our minds, make it that it's your son or yourself or I might call the the beloved of the universe. And it's all just those are ideas. The thing we know is that there's some tenderness that's vast. That's really my sense is the source of who we are that we're coming home to. And so use whatever pathway used because you're not going to get hooked on those images of your son.

In fact, the more you as you use that, you'll find yourself receptive to love from many sources. And, you know, I can do something that'll totally get to you, which would be, you know, I walk in the mornings and I'll often pause and see a tree and say, we are friends. I'll just use the phrase we are friends. And it brings the reality of an affinity with I just read the over story, which was a fantastic it's a Pulitzer Prize winner about trees and connectedness.

But and I do it now with people. I do, you know, a clerk at the supermarket. I'll just mentally say we are friends and all of a sudden the reality of our interviewing becomes more evident. So I figure use whatever we can to. Open ourselves to something that's always in already here, but in our Strache and our tightness, we don't notice a comment and a question comment is a quote is coming to mind from a previous guest on the show.

I don't even know if we've aired her interview yet, but this person was telling me about something that a teacher said to her when she was complaining about how cheesy lovingkindness kindness practices in. The teacher said, well, if you can't get comfortable cheesiness, you can't be free. I think is really for me, that really lands. The question is, you said something like love. Is the source of who we really are. What does that mean? I knew that wouldn't go by question.

Well, my experience is that when I'm not. Caught up thinking about myself when I'm not inside, thoughts about myself, there's a changing flow of experiences that's happening and the sense of what it's all happening in is an awareness that is tender. In other words, it's awareness, it's pure awareness. But when that and I use the ocean wave metaphor, when that ocean perceives particular waves, the natural response is tenderness, so that when I'm free from self occupation, there's a natural love or compassion towards whatever is experienced.

And that's what I mean by the source. It's when we're not identified in a fear based way. There's a pure awareness that naturally responds with love. Much more of my conversation with Tara right after this. Great children's books open up new worlds for discovery with literati kids, your child can explore uncharted places every month with spellbinding stories hand-picked by experts. Literati kids is a try before you buy a subscription book club. Each month, Literati delivers five vibrantly illustrated children's books, bringing the immersive magic of reading right to your home.

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One of a kind book subscription. The Most Joyful Way to foster a lifelong love of learning. That's literati dotcom slash happier. You have a Ph.D. in psychology, is this feeling you have in any way backed up by. Psychological research or anything about the mind? No, and I wouldn't go out in that way because it's really an experiential path and all we can talk about is we're talking about now like what is absolute truth? And there's not going to be science or research that's going to point to, you know, what's the very nature of our beings.

I can point to the perennial philosophy that underlies most spiritual and mystical and contemplative practices, points to a oneness that it's not like the mind is in the body. It's like there is an awareness that is the source of all creation. But because the perennial philosophy says so, that doesn't mean it's proved by science.

But even the Buddha said, look, I'm going to say a bunch of things, don't take it on face value and come and see for yourself. Exactly.

A Persico. It's really just to keep turning the attention to what's right here in the present moment and to what's experiencing what's here in the present moment. And to have the intention to do it with kindness makes it a lot easier. So for me, I get that there is this. Awareness that's beneath all of you know, it's I don't know if that kind of. Spatial positioning makes any sense, but I know I'm having thoughts and most of them are self centered, but that if I dip below that level of discursively, there's this pure awareness of whatever.

I can hear the sound of my own voice right now. I can see you involuntarily, right. There's this awareness that just undergirds whatever is happening in my mind. So I get that.

But that that awareness is naturally tender.

I get a little lost on. My experience is that when I'm not caught in fear and grasping, they would not identify with the self then when awareness encounters something. In that encounter, the natural response is a sense of we and a sense of care connectivity. Exactly. It's everything's connected. Yeah. And there's some if you look at the development of the species, if you look at human evolution, you know, our brains are designed to perceive separation, were designed to experience a cell in here in a world out there.

And the primal mood of the separate self is fear. I mean, the fight flight freeze comes out of that. And so for millions of years, we were in these small groups and perceived other out there. You know, any group that wasn't part of our group was, you know, the enemy and bad, indifferent and not as human as us. And in group, there was a growing sense of collaboration because that's one of our defining features that went on for millions of years.

And it's only been the last 10 or 20 thousand years that we've expanded beyond kin relationships and felt a sense of way. But that's our trajectory. So this is actually what gives me hope is that and I ask groups a lot, I say, do you believe that consciousness is evolving?

Because I'm curious to see what people believe, that I feel like the consciousness in our species is evolving from a sense of separate. I completely self-centered and reacting out of the limbic fears to a sense of we that not only is collaborative, but actually cares like you are part of me. I care about you not because you're over there, but you're part of my heart. We're part of the same essence. And I think that's the direction we're going as a species.

And meditation facilitates it because meditation awakens the parts of the brain that need to be integrated and awake. So it moves us from kind of our limbic hijack place where we're really in reactivity to where we can kind of go meta to what's happening, become mindful of it and respond with compassion. And and there now is research that shows that meditation does wake up and integrate our brain in that way. And that gives me hope. You know, I'm looking at right now today than where we are in the news.

Like, it's been so disturbing what's going on in our world. And you can see around the world how much the fear and the limbic hijacks happening. It's not just the United States with a tendency towards, you know, fear and right wing and, you know, that whole thing. It's, you know, many countries around the world now. And when humans don't face their fears, when they're run by them, we've become incredibly dangerous. And so the only way out of tribalism really is training our hearts and minds.

It is the way out. And I feel like we're doing as individuals, we can kind of sense that that we expand and become more able to care about each other. And I feel like we need these kind of trainings brought into our group interactions, and they already are. This isn't I mean, whether it's truth and reconciliation or restorative justice kind of activities, our insight, dialogue or whatever, there's all sorts of group modes. But to me, that's the hope is changing consciousness that way, and that's what these practices do.

Related to the question I asked you before about you love being the source of all of who we are. You talk a lot in in the book about Buddha nature that we are inherently. Awakened and loving, but it's obscured by the ego, the sense of self, the, you know, greed in aversion and all the stuff we also evolved for, and I have an instinct that that's true just based on my own personal experience.

But I don't know if there's any evidence for it. As far as I know, there are at least two ways to think about this, probably more. There's the Buddha nature argument, which, again, I don't know if there's any way you would know the evidence better than me, because you're a trained not only in the Buddhist tradition, but in psychotherapy. And then there's the two wolves idea that we have a wolf of greed and hatred and we have a wolf of sort of compassion and generosity.

And the one that wins in that fight is the one you feed, give you a sense that you can train up the better angels of our nature, take them to the gym, as it were. And then there's also then the Christian view of original sin that we're actually now fundamentally that seems to be the spectrum, you know, either fundamentally good to it's a mix and it's what you're trained to fundamentally bad. And we can only get to the good part by accessing God.

So I think I know where you are on that spectrum. But what's your sense of where the evidence points?

It's kind of what you asked before it comes back to come and see for yourself that it wouldn't matter what belief system I have and that I'm not as interested in talking about beliefs and what is more primary? Is love more primary? I don't think that serves as much as saying, look, we've all had tastes of when we're more who we want to be. Everybody has we know what it's like when we're caught and we act in ways that we regret and we know what it's like when we feel generous or kindly are creative or joyful.

We just know it's more we feel more at home with our being when we're more who we want to be. And there are ways of paying attention that can cultivate that. So I'm ultimately much more pragmatic. We could get off the air and I could talk about the cosmology, but I don't think that's as useful. I mean, my big inquiry, Dan, is how do we wake up caring more? I mean, our world's in trouble. How do we wake up, Karen?

Because more there's caring and a sense of it's all of us will respond so that we wake up in the morning caring or wake up the sense of caring that's inherent in every human being.

Wake up the sense of caring in all of us. Yeah. How do we expand that and how do we widen the circles of our caring? Because, as Einstein said, it's generally pretty limited to those in our tribe. And that feels like the most compelling question for all of us.

And if I'm hearing you correctly, you can have a metaphysical debate about what are we like at our core? Do we even have a core? Is there about in nature? Are there two worlds? Is there original sin? Yeah, fine. We can get into that or you can ask yourself a very simple question. What feels better when you're a jerk or when you're not? Yeah.

What feels more true or at home? Where do you feel most at home. What do you want? Who do you want to be? And we can be encouraged by the trajectory of evolution. I mean, I, I loved reading sapience and I love reading evolutionary psychology because it does show that we are not quite as much controlled by our limbic system. We have more choice. There is less violence in the world. And where we see it, it's very gripping and painful.

And so how do we keep waking up from that? One of the things you also talk about in your book is I think this is a quote, One of the most challenging Blocher's for us is the belief that there's something inherently wrong with ourselves. After my 360, I struggled a lot with the sense that I'm inherently selfish. And I know you've talked about I think this is a phrase you've used the trance of unworthiness. So how universal do you think?

Because I was caught in this thinking of I'm actually uniquely selfish, which is total navel gazing and getting caught in the self. How universal do you think this suspicion that there's something fundamentally wrong with us is and how do we deal with it? I think it's super pervasive.

I'm not an expert on cross-cultural comparisons, but everyone that I've worked with and, you know, I'm doing teacher training with people from 50 different countries and so on. Everybody I've worked with has that's an element of what people struggle with is some some sense of I'm not OK.

Does it take many flavors to like I'm inherently a bad person or I'm inherently sort of not up to the job? Are there a bunch of permutations of this?

Yes, absolutely. Some it's like I'm fundamentally flawed and it's disgusting and shameful to get those kind of twist to it, to smell shame. For others, it's like the chronic never enough and the striving and the frustration. But it's not as deep a twist in the psyche. And I think that partly, you know, parenting, you know, it all comes from whether we had a basic sense of trust and belonging early on. And so our culture right off the bat is a set up for not belonging, because to be part of anything, you have to meet these standards that are imposed by the culture, including have a certain kind of intelligence.

I mean, we worship a certain kind of intelligence and we have a huge percentage of our kids that go through school and they don't have that kind of intelligence and they come out feeling like they're stupid. And that is really and that's that really saddens me. Well, that's just one level. Then we have the kind of body of woman supposed to have or we have, you know, just basically looks are we have the most insidious level of messaging from the culture, which is like racism, like this grouping of people is inferior.

And that message gets sent through every institution to African-Americans that you are less than. And that creates a huge, huge grip of something's wrong with me. So it's like Toni Morrison said, you know, to be American means being white. Everyone else has to hyphenate. So all our non dominant populations on some level are getting the message less then. So we get messages through the culture. We get messages through our our parents. Be this way in order for me to love and respect you.

And we come out of that shaping a self that we hope will get as much love and respect as we can. But in that process, underneath feeling like the who I really am is not OK. And for many of us, selfishness is the big one.

I mean, that that for me is the big one, really, that I thought it was I had a sense that there was a little bit more of a male thing now.

Well, we're all androgynous in our own ways. But no, for me, it's the self-centered ness. It has been a big one.

And because it's you don't come off as self-centered. Well, thank you.

That really helped boost me. OK, my sentence is swelling like crazy right now.

Right. That had the opposite effect. Yeah.

So I'm so interested in that. You have some fundamental suspicion that, like, you're incurably selfish or self-centered.

Well, because I do I know that this ego by nature is selfish, I mean, ego by nature is concerned with ego. So what I've come to peace with is that ego is not the exclusive identity of what I am. And so if I can hold it with humor and kindness, I'm OK. Right, either way, what I just said took decades. I got onto the spiritual path and I was joined a Kundalini yoga ashram and, you know, it had to be the most vigorous yoga around.

And, you know, and I was one of these very vain yogis because back then I was super flexible and I I was kind of like teaching it, but showing it off. And, you know, I was very I was off by myself. And of course, I have a genetic disease that now I can't do yoga at all because I'm my connective tissue to lose. So it kind of swung on me, which is really interesting because I was so identified with being good at it.

But then I got identified with being good at other things.

So, you know, but all along I started realizing how much underneath I felt shame at my sense of importance or pride or self-centered ness or whatever it was. And that's what got me to write radical acceptance was the sense of being stuck in a self I didn't like. And radical acceptance basically helped me see how it was a trance that most anybody that is identify with their self doesn't like their self. Now, they might sometimes be on an inflated self-importance thing, but underneath that there's doubt and shame.

So if we have an identity with self, we don't like that self and a part of the spiritual path of seeing that trance, of not liking ourselves and with wisdom and compassion opening to something larger but transcending the self, really transcending the identity.

But the way it happens is by bringing kindness to the very feelings of shame or self dislike.

We're back at and we're back again. Yeah. That's why for me, radical compassion, the book, it just it feels so essential that any transformation we make requires cultivating a quality of self kindness.

Just to clarify for listeners, you wrote Radical Acceptance many years ago and the new book is Radical Compassion. I just want to make sure.

Thank you as get them both clear. One was first I have a phraseology that came to mind when talking about this in my own phraseology, which you may not like, given our differences in terms of getting stuck in your own stuff and how that can have so many deleterious effects internally and then externally.

The way I've been kind of thinking about it in my head is the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your you know, it's that's just the way I think of it.

But I love that. I love that because the other side of it is when we're turned on ourselves, it feels horrible.

And the way that I end up working my way out of it is I'll give you an example. I got sick in my early 50s for about six years and it was a spiral down. And I went from being athletic and, you know, very vigorous to, you know, really not knowing if there was a way out. I lost mobility.

You know, I'm much, much better. What was it? Can you say what it had to do with the connective tissue disorder where. But I just went into a spiral of pain and fatigue and just it just yeah, I just got worse and worse. So I'm telling you this because I would go through all these, I would feel miserable, but then I'd get down on myself for being a bad patient like, you know, here I am irritable and I'm impatient and just being down on myself for the way I was dealing with illness.

And I would often go into what did I do to create this, you know? So I turned on myself. And the way I started practicing down was I would see myself caught and I'd kind of name and recognize and allow a chance of unworthiness, shame. And I'd investigate it. And I'd feel just how painful it was to not only be physically miserable, but to be turned on myself. They call it the second arrow. You know, the first arrow is that I was feeling miserable the second as I was blaming myself for it.

And when I could get really in touch with how many moments I have suffered from being down on myself. And just like think of the landscape of your life and think of how many moments, instead of appreciating somebody else or the mystery of the night sky or whatever it is, there's been that self oriented down on cell feeling. It's a real deprivation of life moments. And so when I could get in that honest recognition of the suffering of being down on myself, that's when I'd start getting tender.

That's when I could then say, oh, I'm sorry, I care about the suffering in some way. And that would. Yet as soon as I could really directly contact the vulnerability and offer kindness, I was no longer living inside that bad self.

But is there like a schizoid old thing of offering? You said this before, a self can offer kindness to itself or I think you said something along those lines. How does that work you I'm saying I'm sorry to myself.

In a way, what's happening is you've investigated and there's contact with the suffering. So awareness is contacting suffering and awareness, and you kind of get enlarged when you can see something directly and that's the whole power of mindfulness, is once you recognize that you're no longer as identify with it, you're resting in a larger awareness. And one awareness directly sees the suffering as suffering. Not well, I deserve this. Are will you have it worse? But ouch.

This hurts. When awareness gets that, then there's a tenderness that emerges. And then when that tenderness expressed and you can just use the vehicle of words, oh, I care about the suffering. The eye is really coming from a larger place. It's almost like awareness is offering care, and I often think ultimately when I'm meditating, one of the ways I kind of wake myself up is to say it's not like I'm meditating. Awareness is meditating. I mean, awareness is speaking right now, awareness is experiencing this moment, but it feels like a self for a while and in the vernacular we say I'm offering myself kindness.

But by that moment, the eye is really resting in a larger space of awareness. This is, I think, one of these things that if it's confusing to you as a listener, it's it's just one of these things that becomes clear. You're trying to add words on to an experience that is very hard to describe in words. And so you just have to kind of practice over time and you start getting tastes of the type of thing you're describing.

That's right.

Not a thing you're describing. Well, what it is, is that there's a sage that was once people bring their troubles and he would swear them to secrecy and say, OK, I have just one question. And this question is, what are you unwilling to feel? And when we investigate and actually start to touch what we're unwilling to feel touch into that vulnerability, directly contacting what we've been pulling away from actually frees us up. It's like when the resistance is gone, the demons are gone, you know, so there is more space and it actually becomes more natural to offer care from that space so you can actually feel it.

So it's getting me thinking about part of your book has to do with fear. You write about fear and bringing rain to fear. And that leapt out at me because I've had panic attacks quite famously or infamously I had one on television, but now I get them in elevators.

So I've been walking a lot of flights of stairs recently because I had one, a bad one about six months ago, and it kind of messed me up. And I was reading a book recently by a guy named Barry McDonagh.

It's called The Dair Response. He's got his own Dair is his reign. And I don't know if I would be able to reproduce it, but part of his I think the R is run toward it. And I've been practicing this in elevators. His attitude, and I think it might be a little bit at an oblique angle from nurture, but his attitude with panic is say to yourself, bring it on, do your worst. I'm going to count to ten and see how it's just going to be a set of sensations.

You have one hundred percent track record of surviving panic attacks, so invited in and turn the hunter panic fear into the hunted. And I have found that to be in my early explorations. Really interesting.

Tell me how it goes for you, because it fits in with I mean, a lot of desensitization modalities are just like that. You turn towards it, usually do it gradually, ratchet it up. But it's like, you know, if a dog's running at you whistle for it. You know, if it's racing toward you, it's like in some way you're reversing your conditioning. And the conditioning has locked into place the panic.

But it also picks up on. Yes. What you just said. It also picks up on some things you've been saying throughout the course of this interview, which is it's like this unwillingness I've had to accept the discomfort. Yes. The fear of the fear. Yes.

And reframing it as it's going to be a set of physical sensations that you've heretofore been unwilling to fully experience. But if you not only have a willingness to experience it, but you're inviting it in saying, come on, let's do this. If I'm going to have a panic attack, let me just feel it instead of feeling the tiniest little bit of it. And then it's spiralling out of control from there because I'm just unwilling to. I literally the other day I was it I got stuck in an elevator and in my own building and I am not a strong person.

You've met me. I'm not big. I was able to tear open the doors because I was that scared.

Yeah, but what if I had just said. All right, well, we feel this it would have made it an entirely different, but I guess my point in bringing all this up was. Is that too aggressive, the attitude, the come on, bring it on, turning the hunter into the hunted rather than nurturing first?

I don't think of them as either. Ah, and it's really case by case for some people, that's exactly what's needed in some way to just fully inhabit your confidence and courage and just go at it is actually the energy that can undo the old conditioning for another person. It could lead to a panic attack that would increase the feeling of trauma. So and for many people, surrounding it with nurture and nurture, again, can be something a message in look, you've done it before.

You can do it. You've got you know, it's the message that our heart and mind needs in the moment. And I think of the same thing with love and kindness, that there's not a loving kindness practice. It's whatever way we pay attention that in some way wakes up, our heart opens, our heart softens, our heart gives us courage. So for you, it sounds like it could be a real match. Yes. For this particular story.

Yeah, yeah. So another thing in your book is and again, this is probably phraseology I wouldn't use, but nonetheless, it's meaningful to me, which is discovering your deepest longing. You talk about that.

Yeah. One of the stories I tell in there is a palliative caregiver who reported that the greatest regret of the dying was I didn't live true to myself.

And in a way, that's not just the dying. I mean, it's like I think I run into a lot of people that on some level are disappointed in their lives. They feel like they're skimming the surface. They're just batting away at the problems, but they're not arriving and really living according to who they know they can be. So that chapter on really discover your true longing is that question kind of like if you're at the end of your life, looking back, you know what would really most matter, what would most matter today?

What would most matter with you and I speaking here together, like really what would most matter? And so that we get aligned with what we care about and not hijacked by the habit of kind of chasing after immediate gratification or defending ourselves or avoiding what we're afraid of. So it's a very powerful in Korean in the Buddhist tradition, connecting with aspiration, connecting with what your heart really longs for is really what energizes on the path. That's what will have us stay with meditating because we'll remember it's not a discipline that's, you know, punishing or something.

It's because we love waking up. We love truth. You know, this fascination with what's real. I love love. You know, it's like remembering that keeps us so that our days are really aligned in a meaningful way. There's a section in the book about rain in relationships, how does that work? In the same way that rain helps us face and process and wake up to our own fears or hurt or whatever, because that's what it's really doing, it's it's having us be with the stuff we don't want to be with, but in a way, so that we can find out, discover a larger sense of our own presence.

Stuff comes up between people that needs the same attention.

So, for instance, with my husband, with Jonathan, who's sitting in the news, happens to be listening right now.

You know, we we have certain dynamics or patterns that will replay where we get stuck. And one of our practices is will do the time out, the official time out, where we each do reign inwardly in our own way, where we'll, you know, feel where we're caught since the beliefs that are going on. Breathe with it, bring care to it. You know, just hold it ourselves so that we're not speaking out of a stuck place.

And then when we start naming what's going on for us, it's without as much blame. The other person can hold it. There's more of a container for us to do it together. So if we're doing rain together, we may both be sitting together, working inwardly, and then we can exchange what's going on in a way where we have a lot more resources. We have a kind of a joke, which is the first person who can roll reverse wins.

And what that means is that can really see it through the other person's eyes that can say, I get why that hurt you. You know, I get why when I said it with that judgmental tone that would have made you pull back and not want to do what I wanted to do, you know, so it brings empathy and compassion to do around together.

Feel like we could do a whole separate interview on this subject, which reminds me, you should come back more often.

Oh, that's sweet, because I'm passionate about what we can do in relationships. And we started much earlier talking about rain partners. And again, this comes back to the state of the world. And is that I feel like as long as we're living from fear defense, we're going to keep on hurting each other as individuals and a globally and learning to do these kind of practices with each other creates a sense of we that that then ripples out. And so Rain Partners is really powerful for that, because then you can start moving to the world.

And one of my favorite lines, and this is from Ruby Sales, which is a civil rights activist, older woman icon. And she has this phrase, where does it hurt? She brings it to white America, the white America that's most caught in the grip of racism and asking where does it hurt? And she senses a kind of a sense of meaninglessness and spiritual pain in certain segments of white America. But moving through our lives and being able to see somebody who's in some way just see where does it hurt.

And one of the metaphors I love the most is if you imagine walking through the woods and seeing a dog who's by a tree and you go to pet the dog and the dog looks at you like fangs bared and so on, and and then, you know, you get angry at the dog, but then you notice that the dog's paws in a trap and then everything shifts and you don't necessarily go really near the dog because it might be dangerous, but your heart has shifted because you see that the dog suffering.

If we can learn to move through the world and when somebody acts in ways we don't like, instead of locking into our judgment, fight flight, freeze in some way, ask where does it hurt? The world would be a different place, really would. Let me say one final thing I've realized I've actually had some anxiety during this interview, I don't and I kind of landed on me midway through why it was and I think it was that you described that I hurt your feelings and that made me feel bad.

So I want to apologize for that.

Wow. So I want to slow down here because. Oh, mostly I feel touched and I want to say thank you. Thank you for coming on the show. Yeah, no, it's there's something beautiful about like I wasn't even going to go there. I wasn't going to bring up the past. And the fact that you did is modeling really what we've been talking about, which is to go go into the elevator or go towards a dog that looks dangerous.

You went right towards where it was most vulnerable, but in so doing, you created more connection. So thank you.

Well, here's the beginning of an ongoing relationship. I hope I'm on for it. Thank you.

Final thing before we let you go, I want we force all of our guests to shamelessly plug. Many of our guests don't like doing this. And I sense you're probably one of those people. But can you just list the books you've written, including the new one, and give us the name of your podcast and your website where we can learn more about you just so that we have it all.

OK, I told you I was I had my selfish, self-important self, so I'm not actually minding it. All right. No. In fact, I love to invite everybody to Tabarrok Dotcom. And that's my Web site. And I have a weekly podcast that I give a talk Wednesday night in Washington, D.C. area. And you can download it from my website or you can go on to Facebook and downstream and just become part of Lifestream, become part of the week weekly event.

So that's one thing. The books are radical acceptance, which was two thousand and three, which is really how to really see the transfer of unworthiness and wake up out of that true refuge, which was 2013, which is when I got really sick. And how do you find a way to face when life is most difficult and find peace and joy and freedom in the midst, and then most recently, radical compassion just a few weeks ago, which is really learning to love ourselves and each other into healing, and it's really for the rippling out for our world.

So those are the primary things to plug right now.

We'll put links to all of this in the show notes. So if you didn't have a pen out, don't worry. It's right there on your phone. Thank you again for doing this.

Thank you. You're totally mine, too. Thank you. Thank you again to Tara, that conversation was well worth reposting, I believe, before I let you go, though, a quick announcement. We are on the lookout to hire a senior meditation producer to work on courses and other content for the 10 percent happier app. This is a great opportunity if you're really into the Dharma and you also have some experience with curriculum design and content production. If you want to check it out or if you want to share this with somebody you know who you think might be a good fit, go to 10 percent dotcom jobs.

Of course, that link will be in the show notes. This show, by the way, is made by Samuel Jones, Cashmere, Maria Wartelle and Jan Plant with audio engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. And it's always a big thank you to my guys from ABC News, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Coming Tuesday, this march to ABC, a show by black people for all people about the black experience in America, and there will be news so full of a soul loving nation.

We're ready for this.