Vanessa Sasson: In the last years of me engaging with these stories, I’ve come to realize everything is in them. And so sometimes what is so complicated to understand philosophically, it’s really clear when you tell a story. We engage with stories in really easy ways, and they get imprinted on our psyche and we go back to them and we tell them again and we tell them again. And there’s something magical about the transformative power of a beautiful story when it gives us the mess. So you can have all this philosophy about renunciation, ordination, but when you tell a story about renunciation, you feel the complexity of it without somebody having to spell it out to you in complicated jargon.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Vanessa Sasson. Vanessa is a professor of Religious Studies at Marianopolis College. Her new novel, The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women, is an imaginative retelling of the first Buddhist women’s request for ordination. Building on years of research, the novel follows a group of women as they travel through the forest together seeking full access to the Buddha’s teachings. In my conversation with Vanessa, we talk about what we can learn from the first Buddhist women’s resilience, how contemporary women monastics understand this story, why she first started writing fiction, and the role of mythology in the Buddhist world. So here’s my conversation with Vanessa Sasson.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with scholar Vanessa Sasson. Hi, Vanessa. It’s great to be with you. 

Vanessa Sasson: Hi, it’s so nice to be with you as well. Thank you for having me. 

James Shaheen:  And very good to meet you finally. So, Vanessa, we’re here to talk about your new novel, The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women. So to start, can you tell us a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write it? And in particular, what inspired you to write it as a novel?

Vanessa Sasson: Yeah, so there’s a lot to that question. The story itself, I think it might help if I tell a little bit of what the story is about because not everybody is as familiar with it as some of us in the field are. The story is the first women who want to ask the Buddha for permission to join the order. And so we know that there are Buddhist nuns today, and we almost could take it for granted that there are Buddhist nuns all over the world. But their story of how they became nuns is actually a really complicated story, and in some ways rather painful. So if you look at the literature, the story of the Buddha is that he’s a prince in a palace. I think most of your listeners are going to know this. One day he has this vision of suffering and realizes that he wants to leave the palace and go and find the answer to suffering that he’s not able to find at home. And so he makes this great valiant departure and he walks away from the worldly life and he kind of charges into the forest where he lets go of everything and begins to practice and to try to figure out what is this answer that he’s looking for in his mind.

It’s very evasive in the literature what he’s looking for, but he’s looking for something profound, something that is going to free him. And the tradition tells us that for years he floats around the forest trying to figure out what this answer is and tries all kinds of techniques until one day something magical like this reflection of inner vastness happens to him that we don’t quite understand what it is. And so a lot of Buddhism is probably trying to capture what that moment was, but the story just tells us that it happens. And whatever this magical thing is that happens, he achieves it and he becomes completely and totally free.

And the idea is that this is a cosmic event. This is a social event. The whole universe is excited about his achievement. And so everyone notices that something really profound has happened. And people hear about it, and so the tradition is that—this is years after he left the palace, but rumors begin that he’s achieved something spectacular.

And so slowly the men from the palace that he left behind start wandering into the forest one at a time, one here, one there, individuals just going into the forest saying, “Whatever it is that you figured out, can I practice with you?” And so this becomes this quest to request ordination, to sit beside this man, this Buddha, this supreme being of the tradition’s imagination, and try to learn this evasive thing that he found.

And every time someone makes that request, and there’s all kinds of men that make this request, right? And you even have somebody like Angulimala, who’s one of the most famous characters of the Buddhist imagination, who’s a serial killer. Every time someone approaches him, in almost all cases, he’ll say something very, very simple to the effect of just “Come,” and so there’s this open invitation, this welcoming of just “Come sit with me and I will show you what I’ve done.”

And so this is how the early tradition imagines the building up of the first sangha, the first community. And so these men sit with the Buddha one after another and they create this kind of community that he will slowly build rules around and he’ll orchestrate and he’ll discipline and he’ll create a sangha. And so slowly we have this organic process of building a community.

The trick in the literature is that one day the women want to do the same. And so Tricycle actually, you guys did an excerpt of the book a while back and you came up with the best title. And I wish that that was the title that I thought we called it “When Women Showed Up,” and I was like, “Oh, that’s the title.” It was such a smart title, but it was that moment where the women want to try for the same thing. And so the story is that the women who are left behind, who are living in the palace, they one day wake up and they say, “Well, why don’t we try it too?” And this is headed by the very famous kind of leader of the women, the queen of the kingdom, Mahapajapati Gotami. And so she’s the one to make the call. And so she decides, “I’m going to go and ask him if I can do this too.”

And then we have this bizarre thing that happens in the literature where the text tells us that all these women showed up to stand with her. And we don’t know how that happened, so in my head I’m imagining this kind of gossip thread that has kind of spilled through the palace and everyone finds out, and so she leaves the palace. And there are 500 other women who have just kind of woken up and heard the news. And so there’s this very excited energy that I can imagine as they say, “Well, she’s going, so I think I’ll go too.” And so these women depart together, which is really an amazing thing and is very different from how the men’s community is formed. The men’s community is formed with individuals kind of showing up one at a time. But the women’s community arrives already formed in some ways, and the women’s community, if you look at the details of the sources, are from all walks of life.

So one of the texts that really inspired me for this is a text called the Therigatha. And it’s this beautiful book of really, really old Buddhist poetry. It’s about 2,000 years old. And we think it was actually produced by women, because the voices sound like women’s voices. And each poem in there tells us a different story about women’s lives.

And so you hear about women who joined what I call the Gathering, these women who showed up one after another. Some of them are queens and princesses and women of nobility, and some of them are homeless widows by the side of the road and some of them are courtesans and some of them are prostitutes. And so we get all these different kinds of women that kind of gather behind Mahapajapati Gotami and say, “Let’s go.”

And this is really quite radical because in a world like ancient India where everything is stratified and there’s so much hierarchy and there’s so many divisions, these women broke that so that you have homeless widows walking with queens and prostitutes and courtesans, and they came from different kingdoms. Some of those kingdoms were at war with Kapilavastu.

And so all these different women from all these different backgrounds decide to walk together and to go ask the Buddha the same question that the Buddha has been asked hundreds of times, hoping, I imagine, that he will say yes. But the devastating reality of the narrative that we have received from the tradition is that they go to see him, and he says something really evasive that none of us really knows what to do with where he basically says, “Maybe don’t ask the question.” And so it was this story of women being so eager and excited and being so radical in their collective vision of how they were going to organize themselves that really wanted me to imagine the story.

I had to imagine it. I had to tell the story. But it’s not a story with a super happy ending, so it was a complicated book to write, but it was a story I really wanted to write, which is why I wrote it.

James Shaheen: Well, that was so nicely put. That’s an excellent description of the book you’ve written. One question that forms the core of the book is how the Buddha could have said no the first time he is asked. So how have you come to understand this question? 

Vanessa Sasson: It’s a really hard question. I wrestled with that question for a long time because these women, they arrive and they’ve left home. And this is really important for the narrative is that there’s an understanding in ancient Indian traditions that when you take the path of renunciation, you leave home, you make this decision to leave home, to leave your world behind, you can’t just suddenly the moment it doesn’t go well go, “Oh, this was too hard. I’m going to go home now.” That’s not the idea. It’s supposed to be hard.

And so these women have done something really, really hard and very courageous. And they’ve left home and they’ve made this request. So they’re kind of in a limbo, like a bardo of some kind because they don’t belong anywhere anymore. They’ve left. And he must know this. And so they’ve arrived at his doorstep, basically, and they’re asking him, “Can we enter your world? Will you welcome us to practice with you?” So they have, even though they’re choosing a life of what we call religious homelessness in the literature, they’re still asking for some kind of home, a place that is going to welcome them so that they have a place to go to practice, to learn, to have teachings. This is what they’re looking for.

And he gives this really evasive question, and he does it in all the literature because we have multiple vinayas and in every vinaya there’s something really evasive about his response where he doesn’t quite say no, but he definitely does not say yes. He kind of skirts the issue. And this leaves the women nowhere. And that’s really, really hard about the story. So I’ve struggled with that question for a long time. Why did he do that? 

James Shaheen: You know, amazingly but perhaps not surprisingly, the question of women’s ordination is very much still alive in communities of women monastics around the world.

Vanessa Sasson: Absolutely.

James Shaheen: So what did you learn from talking with women monastics about the story of the first Buddhist women? 

Vanessa Sasson: Well, I mean there’s more to the story than this moment. We can go back to how it keeps evolving because it doesn’t stop there. So he’s evasive about his answer. He doesn’t give them a yes or a no, and what’s quite remarkable about these women is he gives them this evasive answer and he walks away and then they do something completely out of character, I think, in some ways with what the literature would have normally presented, but they just follow him and ask again.

They didn’t take no for an answer, which is really quite amazing. And he said this evasive no three times, and three is usually that lucky charm, and once you’re at three, it’s really I’m not welcoming you into the community. And then they just follow him and they ask again, and he finally says yes, but with strings attached.

So, I think the details of that story, the fact that he doesn’t say yes, he kind of says no, and they follow him to the next round and ask again shows me something about them being just courageous and smart and determined and refusing to accept the boundaries that they are being met with and that Buddhist women around the world are met with in monastic communities.

It’s different in every monastic community, so it’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to this. But the question of ordination for women is really complicated in a number of contexts. In some parts of the Buddhist world, ordination has never been given. So that’s the Himalayan traditions generally, just until last year. We just saw the first ordination of Himalayan women in human history happen last year. So that was a really exciting transformation of the story. In other parts of the Buddhist world, women have had access to ordination and lost it. And then in other parts of the world, women have ordination, but they’re bound by these regulations and these extra rules that really put them at a disadvantage.

So there’s a lot of difficulty at living a monastic life as a woman. And my experience has been, with this story and with the monastic women I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with over the years, that this story really resonates because it’s so familiar. Not just resonates like “This is our heritage story.” That too. But it resonates like, “Yeah, it was like that then. And it’s still like that.” The story hasn’t really changed in some ways. And so it feels very much like familiar territory for a lot of people who engage with the story. 

James Shaheen: Right, even when they do ordain, there’s often blowback. It’s still not an easy thing to do. You know, at one point in the novel, the narrator reflects, “We did not become as free as we hoped we might be, or as free as I thought we should be.” So there are many layers of freedom at play here. Can you say more about how these women negotiate the tensions between social freedom and ultimate liberation?

Vanessa Sasson: That’s a really important question. In some ways, my answer is samsara. I’ve been going back to that word a lot in the process of writing this book. If we go back to the story, what happens to the women in the early texts is they go back and they ask again for ordination, which, as I said, I think is a really courageous and kind of rule-defying move on their part.

And they do something even more courageous in that moment. In the Vinaya, which is the monastic rules where we get this story in part, there’s this wonderful detail that I really latched onto. And that is that when they go ask the first time and the Buddha is very evasive, the text doesn’t tell us that Mahapajapati Gotami is wearing robes and it doesn’t tell us that she has a shaved head. It just says that she goes and she asks. When she leads the women after he’s said no three times and they wander through the forest and they get to him again to the next place where he’s gone and they stand and they wait for the Buddha to notice them, which is, that alone, to me is a really powerful moment, this moment of the women’s silence and of their waiting. There’s something really powerful about them standing there and just waiting, like they’re going to wait until someone sees them properly. And so they’re standing at the edge of wherever the Buddha is in Vesali, and they’re waiting quietly.

And finally it’s not the Buddha but it’s Ananda who notices them. And Ananda goes to see Mahapajapati Gotami, and the text says he sees that she’s wearing robes that are dust-stained, that her face has tears on it, and that her head is shaved. And it didn’t say that before. And so there’s a real question of when did she choose to shave her head? When did that happen? And so maybe she had her head shaved before, but the text doesn’t tell us that. We know that it’s shaved now. And so there’s room in there, I think, for us to imagine the possibility that they were even more radical than I’m imagining, that maybe they thought, “Well, he didn’t say no, even if he didn’t say yes.”

And so they were going to take on renunciation even if they don’t get received by a community. And so they really are breaking these boundaries and saying, “We need this for ourselves,” but it’s such a difficult journey for them. So they have to just break one wall after another. And they don’t know if the wall they’re going to break is going to break them and what will happen to them socially if they take matters into their own hands. They’re ostensibly defying the Buddha, which is a really difficult story to tell in certain Buddhist circles. But they seem to do that. And then they present themselves again. And then when they ask, he finally says, “OK, I will see you.” But again, it’s such a fraught road to get to that final destination of ordination. It’s just not going to come easy. 

James Shaheen: Likewise, a lot of women have to challenge their teachers. I remember Rita Gross was told to stop complaining. And she said, “I can deal with samsara, old age, sickness, and death, but I can’t deal with the challenges that you’re presenting.” You know, that was a pretty clever way for her to navigate that particular exchange. But you also explore the many different types of freedom that the women are seeking and making the journey to ordain: freedom from hierarchy, from familial bonds, that’s a big one, from guilt, from shame. Some join the gathering as an escape from a life full of suffering while others join for companionship or even for food. Can you say more about these different motivations? 

Vanessa Sasson: Well, this is what’s so beautiful about the literature, and I think all of this is reflected like a mirror into the present moment because you see the same thing today is that the literature tells us about these women. They don’t all have these kinds of pure spiritual motivations. They get idealized by the tradition as time goes on. There’s no question about that. And they all become these perfected characters of the Buddhist imagination. But when you look at the Therigatha and its commentaries, you see so many of these women join what I call the Gathering, join this idea of entering the Buddhist sangha, not necessarily because they want spiritual freedom. Some do. Like Mahapajapati Gotami, I think she’s the embodiment of that spiritual ideal. But then you have the homeless widow by the side of the road.

So this one character in the Therigatha, her name is Chanda, and I’ve thought about her quite a lot. She’s just this homeless widow by the side of the road, and she sees the women and Patachara walking past her. And she says, “If I go with you, will you feed me?” And the women say yes, and she says, “OK, I’m coming.” And so it’s not always the loftiest of ideals. Some women are escaping brothels, and some women are escaping courtesan houses and bad husbands, and there’s one character in the Therigatha who puts a noose around her neck, and just as she’s about to pull it, she hears the Buddhist teaching and she thinks, “Oh, maybe I won’t do this.”

And so you have these women who are coming out of all kinds of situations and backgrounds and realities, and they’re not always doing this for some pure intention. They’re doing it because they need a way out. And monastic community can offer that in certain cases. And I think we see that today as well. I don’t know that everyone who becomes a monk or a nun today is always doing it for the highest ideal. Sometimes it’s to get out of their parents’ home or to get out of marriage or to get out of poverty or to get an education. So there’s a lot of things that feel like the story is still the same. It’s still hard. Life has not been cleaned up. We haven’t figured everything out. Monastic life is also still complicated, and we hit walls all the time. Rita Gross’s walls that she was facing are not that different from the walls that we see in the Therigatha that the women are banging up against and trying to figure out how to free themselves from.

James Shaheen: You know, while the novel weaves together the stories of many women in the Therigatha, it centers on Vimala, a prostitute who joins the gathering of women to escape her life at a brothel. How did you decide on Vimala as the central narrator of the book?

Vanessa Sasson: I sat with the Therigatha for a long time. I kept leafing through it, going back to it, and returning to it. It sat next to my bed for a few years while I was preparing this book. And so I kept looking at the different characters and trying to think, who’s going to be my narrator? Who’s going to do this for me? And whose voice can I imagine? Vimala was really interesting because she has so little information about her, which is part of what I really needed to be able to do this. I realized that I needed to have a background character. So this was a bit of a literary move more than it is some Buddhist academic move, but I was thinking from a literary perspective, I needed someone whose voice was not prominent in the tradition so that there weren’t a lot of expectations. about her because I kept thinking of Mahapajapati Gotami. She was an obvious one to tell the story. She’s at the forefront of the story, but she’s such an important character in so many women’s experiences and so many Buddhist minds. I couldn’t imagine taking on her voice. It felt like I was trespassing.

So then I thought about Patachara. And again, she’s such a big person for so many people’s imagination that I thought again I’m trespassing into someone’s life, and I don’t know if I can do that. And Patachara’s experience of suffering is so pronounced, I didn’t know if I could understand it, if I could imagine or if I had the courage to imagine the kind of suffering she was forced to endure.

So I had to find somebody whose suffering was not so elaborate that I couldn’t touch it and yet whose story was not so anchored in the tradition that it was going to bother a lot of readers because they have a different experience of who they think that character is. That was a lot of the literary decision making that went into it.

And then when I came across her, I found her so audacious. She’s standing at the door with all of her beauty, summoning men in with. She’s basically naked, just going, “Do you dare come to me?” And there was something about her that I thought was just fabulous but also broken, and I thought, “I can understand that.” So I thought, “OK, let’s do this together.”

James Shaheen: Vimala’s story also demonstrates the familiarity of suffering. It can be difficult to imagine an alternative when we’re so stuck in our own habits and stories. So how did the women help each other to imagine and actually enact different possible futures?

Vanessa Sasson: That’s a beautiful question. I think the great thing about this story is that the women did it together. That’s what I find so beautiful is that these women, they couldn’t have done it on their own. I mean, society wouldn’t have allowed it, first of all. The husbands and the temple priests and the brothel owners would have pulled them back. And so the only way they were going to have strength to pull this off was as a community. And I think that’s true so often. When you march, like if you go to a women’s march today, and I think this is like the first women’s march, it’s so exciting to be surrounded and to think, “OK, we will do this.” The “I will do this” is very isolating and you’re risking so much, and it’s very hard to ask an individual to risk so much. But if you’re standing with a group and you do it together, a lot more is possible. And I think that’s what this story tells us. When the men go, they go as individuals, one at a time. Sometimes two people will go together, like two friends, like Sariputta and Mahamoggallana. They go together, and they have an agreement to do it together.

But most of the men are going by themselves. The women go as a group. And I think that’s what helps them imagine because their world is not giving them much imagination for this. The world of ancient India, there were the Jains and they actually had a monastic women’s community before the Buddhists, but I don’t know how prominent they were, and I don’t know if it was something that visibly you would see every day as you’re walking down the street. And so for most people, I don’t think that imagination would have been there that we can really be free. We can really do something different and radical with our lives.

That’s hard to imagine even today for many of us. We just kind of follow the world that’s kind of under our feet. And yet when you’re with a group of women who are imagining something together, you lean on their shoulders and you do it as a group, I think it’s so much more possible then. So I think that’s how they did it.

James Shaheen: Well, this question may also have some contemporary resonance. As the group of women travel through different towns, they’re met with mixed reception. What do you think was so threatening or dangerous about a community of women trying to get free?

Vanessa Sasson: Well, you’re risking social disturbance. You’re risking roles having to shift, power structures having to change, hierarchies having to reorganize themselves. I think you change a lot that way. It’s a disruption, and disruption is difficult. So I can imagine that in some places, it would be exciting to see a group of people saying they’re doing something different and they’re going to try for something else. That could be really exciting to see, but it could also be really threatening and really scary to have a group of people saying, “We’re going to change the system. We’re going to try to do something else with our lives.” How do you respond to something like that? I can imagine this being very hard for a lot of people.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean, in some of the cases like with Vimala, certainly she was considered somebody else’s property, so it was considered a kind of theft to even leave. So you write, “To leave the home was to disrupt the way things had always been, to threaten cosmic harmony, to destroy the social bonds that kept everyone else afloat. These women broke all those promises and challenged every expectation the moment they walked out the door.” 

Vanessa Sasson: Yeah, I think that’s what it is. You’re changing something, and change is hard. It’s inescapable, but it’s hard. 

James Shaheen: You also say of the community of women, “They were a community of female renunciants who had renounced before they even knew if they were allowed.” How have you come to understand renunciation in the process of writing this book, and what is it that the women are renouncing? 

Vanessa Sasson: I think renunciation is actually really profound, and I think it’s something that I’m learning over time. I don’t think it’s something that I learned just once. I think when I was younger, I would have thought that renunciation is this very clear setup of either householder or renunciant, kind of like how certain binaries are created in Buddhist literature where you’re either a monk or you’re a householder. And that’s really simplistic, and it’s really a kind of black and white narrative. But the more I spend time thinking about renunciation, the more I think there is something much more nuanced about what the question of renunciation is.

So I think socially, there is a request, I think, in a lot of communities that the renunciation is to be welcomed. So these women are hoping that the Buddha will give them a spiritual home, even if they’ve renounced an actual home. I think that paradox is important, and I don’t think it’s a contradiction. To renounce but to be left in the middle of nowhere in the wild, very few people are going to have the capacity to meet that. I don’t know that renunciation is supposed to be so radically individual that you’re just supposed to hang in the middle of nowhere with no one supporting you. I think the reason there’s monastic sanghas is because you can renounce some things, but you need to be held still.

And so I don’t think of renunciation as as radical as I think I understood it in my 20s when I was first engaging with this literature where I thought it’s this kind of radical departure and you need no one. I’m completely on my own, I’m independent and individual. It’s very young, and it’s understandable and it’s idealistic, but I don’t think it’s true. I think even in renunciation, there’s a question of community and there’s a question of companionship and friendship and love and support that I don’t know that we’ve always had the language for in Buddhist studies or in Buddhist communities, but I think it’s really important. These communities were not individuals standing alone. They were together. And they were trying to renounce something else. They weren’t necessarily trying to renounce people. 

James Shaheen: Right, I think of this and I think this notion when we’re young that we’re going to go off on our own just affirms our worst tendencies, our hyper-individualistic bent, rather than actually the challenges in community. But a central component of renunciation is the tension between family obligations and the path to awakening. Can you tell us a bit about how this plays out in the story of the Buddha’s wife, Yasodhara? How does she navigate this balance seeking ordination? 

Vanessa Sasson: Well, so this is where I think Buddhism is actually extremely skilled and sophisticated is the story of Yasodhara and of all of these women who are leaving home, it’s complicated for them to leave home. Their renunciation and the Buddha’s renunciation, and there’s so many stories like this all through Buddhist literature, renunciation is a complicated ideal. Because when you do it socially, when you leave your home and your family obligations, you are disrupting everything. And so when somebody chooses a monastic life, there is a lot of loss for the family. They’re losing a worker. They’re losing someone who will take care of their parents in their old age. They’re losing potential grandchildren. There’s a lot of loss that happens with this. And even if you’re excited and proud of your child for having such a dedicated life, I’m sure that for most families, it’s still complicated to watch your child walk away and join a different family and a different community life.

So I think renunciation creates a disturbance in society that you’re constantly having to renegotiate. And you see it in the Buddha’s life story where he leaves home and he disturbs everybody. And this is the genius of Buddhist storytelling is they tell you that he’s disturbed everyone. They don’t give you this story where he thinks, Oh, I’m going to leave home and go live in the forest. And everybody goes, “Wonderful, we’re so proud of you.” That’s not the story.

James Shaheen: He’s supposed to be the king, the next king.

Vanessa Sasson: Right, he’s hurt everybody. And so he’s upset his father who expected him to take the throne, so now his father is stuck without somebody to take care of the throne. The royal subjects, the citizens, they’ve just lost their prince. Mahapajapati has lost her son. Yasodhara loses her husband. Rahula, who is just born, has lost his father. Kantaka, who’s this horse, this fabulous white majestic horse who loves the future Buddha, who loves the prince, he loses the prince too and he dies of heartbreak. So you have just this fantastic storytelling that happens in the literature where they tell you of one heartbreak after another. They don’t tell you everybody’s happy he becomes the Buddha. They tell you how sad everyone is to lose the prince. And to me, this is sophisticated, this is intelligent, this is telling you that yes, renunciation is a very profound, tricky thing to accomplish, and it means different things at different times in your life. It is going to upset everything around you, and it’s not going to be easy, and you’re going to cause suffering in the midst of you seeking your freedom for suffering. And that, to me, is the genius of these stories. 

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know it always makes me think of The Pilgrim’s Progress because I believe if I remember correctly he tears himself away from the family, and it’s a terrible scene, and it reminds me of that, although this is a little more elegant, frankly, in the telling, although the emotion of the scene is very real.

Vanessa Sasson: Oh, the emotion is terrible. There’s a scene in a Sanskrit text in the Mahavastu where Mahapajapati has cried so much that her eyes are covered with scales from all her tears. I mean, they really don’t pull their punches. They really let you feel the loss of this person that they all loved and that they all expected things from and who had responsibilities that he owed. And he broke the social contract. And the tradition stays with that story. They don’t say, “Oh, it didn’t matter.” They stay with the story, and all the beautiful early storytellers, they spend time telling you about the loss as it’s experienced by all of these different characters. Yasodhara’s loss is devastating and angry and accusatory, and she goes to see the chariot driver and she says, “How could you let him leave? Didn’t you tell him about me?” This is such a poignant moment in the biography of her to say, “How could you let this happen? I’m here. He’s not supposed to go. He has responsibilities to me.”

So when the tradition creates stories like this, it’s telling you this is a hard decision and it’s going to break a lot of things. There’s no way to be in samsara. That’s why I started this by saying that has been my word for the last few years. At the end of the day, samsara is always a little bit broken and not quite right. And I don’t know that we can get it right. I think the literature tells us it’s going to be a mess. And it is a mess. 

James Shaheen: We can’t quite fix it.

Vanessa Sasson: No, and so when these women leave, they’re having this aspiration and then they’re met with a new mess because samsara is ever present. That’s my only way of understanding this literature is that we were always in a space of things being not quite right because our greed and our hatred and our desire are fueling 90 percent of what we do, and so we hurt each other all the time. And so they want to create a sangha, and then that sangha is not quite what they had hoped for. 

James Shaheen: Right, you mentioned the messiness, so can you say a bit more about the messiness of community? 

Vanessa Sasson: If we pick up the thread of the story, when they go to see the Buddha and he finally sees them, Ananda notices that their heads are shaved and they’re crying. They don’t tell us why the women are crying. Are they crying because they’re so happy they finally reach the Buddha again? Or are they crying because they’re frightened that he might say no again? They don’t tell us. But there’s a well of emotion in these women. This matters to them for whatever reason, and for each one probably a different reason, but there’s emotion in this moment. This matters. They’re not just saying, “I want to do this because I want to get out of something.” They’ve come to a point now where the request is heavy.

And so finally, the Buddha—and in the text, it’s terrible. I had to actually soften the Buddha’s behavior and change it a little bit because I couldn’t live with how harsh some of this literature is because in the literature, he does not even go to meet the women. He does not even talk to Mahapajapati, his stepmother, directly. And I thought that I can’t recreate that myself. So I adjusted some of the story for my own kind of temperament. But the women are told in the Vinaya that they will get ordination, but they get conditions and these eight conditions or these eight heavy rules as they’re often translated, the garudhammas, have been a really difficult part of Buddhist history ever since.

And people have been discussing and debating them for 2,500 years, more or less, depending on where you want to place where the story begins. The eight rules are basically no matter what your situation, no matter how senior you are, you must always be inferior to a monk. And so the first of the eight rules is if a monk has been ordained one day and a woman has been ordained a hundred years, she must bow to him. And the seven subsequent rules are more of the same but in different technical color. And so you have these eight rules that basically determine that, OK, women can be ordained. They’ve finally made it into this community and they’ll have a spot. They won’t be alone in the forest by themselves, but they have to always accept that the monks are going to be above them.

And that’s a tough message to get out of an ancient text. I mean, every religious tradition has this kind of a narrative somewhere in its history and in its current reality. But it’s still very hard to digest this kind of unapologetic demand: if you want to be part of the community, you have to understand where your place is, and your place is not beside the monks, it’s behind them.

And monastic communities have been negotiating this story ever since. Do we have to still abide by this? Do we agree? Do we not agree? Do we want to? Do we not want to? This has been a big question for monastic communities ever since that was established whenever we want to decide that story was established.

James Shaheen: Right. So, what have you learned from talking with contemporary monastics about these eight rules? How do women monastics negotiate these today? 

Vanessa Sasson: Well, it’s different in every community, and I think it’s different for every monastic. I spent a summer years ago in Sri Lanka asking that very question. I did a whole research project on trying to understand what women’s relationship was to these rules and to the question of higher ordination. Every woman I spoke to had a different answer for me. For some women, of course, the Buddha would say this and this is the right thing and he said it, therefore I accept it. A lot more women were much more nuanced in their answers and said, “Well, we have the rules, so we have to follow them, but maybe one day it will change or there’s aspiration for it to be complicated or different one day.” Other women rejected it completely and said we were going to have full ordination and we’re not going to abide by these rules, and that’s the end of it, and it’s just a question of time before everybody figures it out. So you have a real spectrum of responses. There’s no one-size-fits-all on the answer to this question.

But what is consistent is that women have to think about this question—monastics generally and male monastics as well. They have to decide as communities, not just as individuals, how are they going to engage with nuns when they meet them? Will they require this rule or will they not require this rule? And what you will find in contemporary communities often is that there’s a lot of nuance in mini gestures or microgestures that most of us wouldn’t notice but that are forms of communication, a kind of nonverbal body language. So I’ve been told by many monastics that if they’re not in a formal setting, a monk will say that if they’re not in a formal setting and they meet a nun that they really admire or that they know of or they know is older than them in ordination, they will bow to them first.

And so there are these micro moments that happen that are really small that we might not see, but then in formal settings, they might feel like they cannot do that. So I think there’s a really wide range. Buddhist women in different countries have very different circumstances. And so it’s different everywhere, but the story is part of what it is to be a monastic. So the story is present; it’s just the response to it is varied. 

James Shaheen: Yeah, people have said, I’ve heard them say, why don’t they just strike it on their own? But then they lose the support of their community and the financial support of the sangha, and it’s not easy, you know. Just doing that is maybe brave, but it’s not easy.

Vanessa Sasson: Well, also, in a way, it’s a very Western kind of response to things. I think we have a very disposable worldview. I think it’s a very contemporary idea of just if you don’t like something, throw it away. And I think that works in some people’s idea of Buddhism. They think, “Oh, Buddhism is about renunciation. Just throw things away.” But I think things are actually more complicated than that. So renunciation is not about throwing things away. I think it’s a transformation of a relationship. And that’s what I meant that the idea that was once binary in my head has become something much more nuanced. It’s not about me throwing my family away. You can’t throw your family away, you’re not supposed to dispose of each other. But is there a transformation of the relationship where you don’t feel as bound? Can you care for people regardless of who they are in your life and not because of who they are in your life? That’s something that doesn’t necessarily show in your behavior in a way that is obvious to other people, but I do think it’s an inner transformation and an inner reckoning with something more profound about renunciation. I do think you can renounce a lot without anyone seeing anything, without it being a big show, but I don’t think it’s about disposing. And I think sometimes we think that, right? You can dispose of the Buddhist sangha if you don’t like it. You can dispose of this. You can dispose. It’s not about disposing.

James Shaheen: Right, yeah, how often do we hear people say, “I’m out of here”?

Vanessa Sasson: Exactly.

James Shaheen: So throughout the novel, you also explore the role of stories, myths, and legends in shaping how we interpret the world and what we imagine is possible. Can you say more about the power of myths within the Buddhist world and within the world of this particular story? How does hearing other stories help the women to process their own? 

Vanessa Sasson: I am a fan of storytelling. I think stories are wonderful. So as a scholar of the tradition, when I came up into the field of academia, storytelling was not something that many people gave any credence to. This was something for old women by the fire. You didn’t take stories and narrative that seriously. What is interesting for scholars is philology and textual critical analysis and philosophy. These are the things that are kind of the highbrow of academia. What we didn’t do very much is give any time or attention to storytelling, because I think we thought it was like what you do for children.

But in the last years of me engaging with these stories, I’ve come to realize everything is in them. And so sometimes what is so complicated to understand philosophically, It’s really clear when you tell a story that we engage with stories in really easy ways and that they get imprinted on our psyche and we go back to them and we tell them again and we tell them again. And there’s something magical about the transformative power of a beautiful story when it gives us the mess. So you can have all this philosophy about renunciation, ordination, but when you tell a story about renunciation, you feel the complexity of it without somebody having to spell it out to you in complicated jargon.

So I think having these stories, telling these stories, we’re engaging with the tradition in really sophisticated ways sometimes. But we haven’t allowed ourselves to recognize that. When you go to most Buddhist communities, people tell stories. People have always told stories. I see it with my students. If I’m giving them philosophical statements or theory, half of their eyes glaze over and I know they’re thinking about what they did last night or wishing they could look at their phone. But the moment I start telling them a story, I see the change. I see that all of a sudden they look at me differently and they’re listening and their heads are cocked to the side a little bit and they put the phone down and they stare at me and I see the wheels are starting to turn in ways that I lost them a moment before. And so I know this is true. I know that we respond as human beings to stories and that sometimes that’s the best vehicle for us to get to the next stage of our lives. 

James Shaheen: So how did you start writing fiction? 

Vanessa Sasson: That was the first question you asked me, so now we’re finally there. I’ve been writing as a scholar and I’ve been doing academia for 25 years now, more or less, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. And I’ve had a great time in my field, truly. But I did get to a point where I felt like it was a repetitive act, and I felt like there was a kind of style to writing as an academic that’s very formulaic. It’s an important style, and you want to be able to master it so that you can convey things with precision. This is not to beat this down and say it’s not a good system or methodology. I don’t think that’s the case. But it’s repetitive. And there was a point at which I’d gotten to a point where I thought, “Is this all I know how to do? Is this the only way I know how to write or express myself or raise my questions?” And so there was certainly an existential personal question for me of just, What else can I do? How else can I express myself and engage with this literature? And then there’s other questions of Is this like the only way that this literature should be dealt with?

I knew that I loved stories and that I wanted to engage with stories, but as a scholar you’re not supposed to be the storyteller. So the only time we’re allowed to be storytellers is in the classroom. That’s when it’s allowed, and so we can all tell our stories in the classroom. But the moment the class ends, we have to get very serious in our writing.

But there’s something so alive and evocative about being with the stories. And so I went through a lot of questions about whether it was time to open the door to try something new for all kinds of reasons: for my own personal transformation, for my engagement with the literature, to fall in love with the literature again.

You kind of get a distance from the literature as a scholar sometimes because you’re so used to looking at it as your object that you’re in charge of studying, and there’s some control issues with that and all kinds of bizarre emotions that emerge. But if you let yourself become a storyteller, all of that goes away and you’re supposed to fall in love again, or you can’t write it. And I wanted to fall in love again. I mean, this was the literature that I loved as a graduate student that made me start this journey in the first place. And I felt as though there was a little bit of losing my way with my relationship with these stories. So there was a lot of that that was happening. There was a call to enjoy and not just be a professional all the time, to have the privilege of saying “I’ve had all this wonderful time as a scholar, I can do this and what a shame if I don’t.”

But then there were also political reasons for why I did what I did. The world of scholarship is very narrow. We talk to ourselves, we talk to each other, and I think that a lot of the time, what we work on doesn’t always move beyond our boundaries. And so there was also a desire to truly engage with the question of What do I do with this privilege of an education that I have? Is there more that I can do with what I have? So the question that I’ve found myself thinking about was if I had a responsibility to do something more in all seriousness. I was wondering if there was more that I do. I have all of this access to education, to literature. I’ve been thinking about this material for so long. Do I have a responsibility to do more with what I have? And so to reach outwards, which is a scary thing to do, because as a scholar, you get used to your small little network that becomes safe: I know how to do this, but maybe I should do a bit more. And all of those things were at play for me when I thought, “Let me try to do this.”

James Shaheen: Well, it’s pretty amazing. It’s a wonderful read. It really is. I so enjoyed having some of the women from the Therigatha or from the canon fleshed out and made real to me in ways that I really hadn’t thought about. And it’s amazing how similar some situations are today to how they were then. But I have one last question for you, Vanessa, if you don’t mind. The story is replete with jewels, prophetic dreams, tree goddesses, and the supernatural, not to mention the Buddha’s extraordinary perfumed chamber, which I really liked. This may come as a surprise to readers who think of Buddhism as an austere or even sterile tradition. So can you say more about the role of what you call the fabulous in the Buddhist world?

Vanessa Sasson: Yes. I love this question, and I’m so glad you asked it. I think we have appropriated or we have engaged with Buddhism in the West a little bit like what I was saying with scholarship, that we’ve put philosophy and philology on these kind of pedestals, that this is what real Buddhism is about, and that the renunciation is that binary renunciation and this almost like an extremely ascetic understanding of Buddhism. And it makes us almost feel bad all the time: all the things you have to let go of and all the ways you have to release yourself. And when I look at Buddhist literature, I don’t see that. What I see is gods playing in the sky and dropping giant flowers from the heavens and conch shells blaring and jewels.

I mean, just one of the most amazing descriptions, if you ever get a chance to look at some of the literature about the Mahabodhi tree. This is the tree that the Buddha achieves awakening under, and there are so many stories of him walking slowly toward this tree, and the path is lighting up like charms scintillating all around him. It’s like you can imagine each step the world gets brighter as he walks towards this tree. This is in our earliest literature. And then the tree itself is exploding with jewels and beauty and treasures, and the gods are all floating above the tree singing with excitement, “He’s coming. The moment is about to happen. He’s about to become the Buddha.” And so you have this joy, this celestial joy and excitement. The whole universe is excited that he’s going to become the Buddha.

And the literature is filled with this kind of imagery, and it’s beautiful, and it’s enthusiastic, and it’s joyful. It’s not dark. It’s not austere and individualistic. Everything is communal in Buddhist literature. He’s never alone wherever he goes. When he achieves awakening, all the gods are like watching in anticipation. The spirits and all kinds of things are waiting with bated breath. When’s it going to happen? I mean, it’s just these wonderful images of Buddhism that are festive and beautiful and shiny and fabulous. And I don’t know how we allowed ourselves to skip past all those descriptions. It’s like we read past them over and over again and yet they’re on every page of every Buddhist text. There’s this extraordinary abundance in a tradition that is actually speaking about renunciation. And that’s again going back to that sophistication that I was saying I see in the stories of this capacity to hold renunciation and beautiful cosmic celestial abundance at the same time.

And what better way to understand that than to have a visual, to see this tree and to see everyone excited about him achieving awakening? It’s not a dark, austere, difficult tradition in much of the literature. There are obviously exceptions to every rule, but I think we need to spend a little bit more time enjoying the beauty of these Buddhist stories and these Buddhist texts. And I don’t know why we don’t.

I mean, I remember coming across Yasodhara’s story more seriously and realizing that it’s so romantic. Why does no one talk about the Buddha’s relationship with Yasodhara as a deeply romantic tragedy? They were married for lifetimes, and then he leaves her in his last life. I mean, it’s made for an opera. And somehow we’ve bypassed it and just turned it into something really quite serious. And I understand why we’ve done that on some fronts, but I think we have robbed ourselves of some of the beauty that the tradition has to offer. And I tried to tap into a little bit of that in the book, and I feel like I didn’t even come close to what most of the texts do. So I just kind of popped in a little bit of it, but I hope some of that comes through, because that’s important to me. 

James Shaheen: Well, it definitely does. Vanessa, thanks so much for joining. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Gathering, available now. Thanks again, Vanessa.

Vanessa Sasson: Thank you so much.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Vanessa Sasson. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Oren Jay Sofer: I think so much of the exploration that I’m doing in the book and inviting people to participate in is really this deep inquiry into our values, into what’s most important and really who are we, who are we as individuals but also what are we as conscious creatures and the stories we’ve been told, the stories we’ve created about our limitations personally and as a species, to really push the edges and see that at the core, we all long to love and be loved and that when we are connected to our values, this whole beautiful array of human qualities from patience to courage to devotion to resolve flower inside and provide a robust foundation for us to engage and respond.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard Oren Jay Sofer. Oren is a meditation teacher and member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council. His work focuses on the relationship between contemplative practice and nonviolent communication. In his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love, he lays out 26 qualities of the heart that can expand our capacity to respond to the challenges of oppression, overwhelm, burnout, and injustice. In our conversation with Oren, we talk about how spiritual practice can help us navigate personal and political crises, the power of everyday devotion, how we can reclaim our right to rest, and how curiosity can open the door to empathy and connection. Plus, Oren leads us in a guided meditation. So here’s my conversation with Oren Jay Sofer.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Oren. Hi, Sharon. It’s good to be with you both.

Oren Jay Sofer: Thanks, James. Happy to be here.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s good to see you both.

James Shaheen: So Oren, we’re here to talk about your new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. So to start, I’ll ask you what we always ask. Can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Oren Jay Sofer: Sure. Absolutely. The book is really grappling with this question of what’s the role of our spiritual practice, our meditation, and the broader world of contemplative practice in the particular historical moment we’re living in. How did these skills that we develop in so many ways translate, do they translate into responding to the immense challenges that we’re seeing on so many levels in our world today? And for me, I was reflecting on this and really realizing that there’s been kind of a through line for me in my own practice with this book as kind of a natural development or most recent iteration in that development.

When I first started meditating when I was 19, not only was I trying to find my place in the world, but I was deeply troubled by the inequity in the world, the violence in our world, and so I was struggling with this question of how do I contribute? And the first thing that I explored and experimented with in a deep and serious way was meditation as a vehicle for understanding myself, doing some deep healing work, and positioning myself to contribute in a deeper way. Out of that came my exploration with nonviolent communication and looking at the gap between our meditation and our relationships. And so I pursued that for a decade or more and folded in trauma healing work as a way of expanding its relevance. This latest book and this particular phase of my life as a new parent, looking ahead to the future, is then really taking that next step from the relational to the social and the collective, saying how do we bring these qualities into our life and into our life as citizens?

James Shaheen: You open the book with a question: How do we reclaim our birthright to love while navigating a complex world in crisis? How do we make love our guide? So I’ll turn the question back on you. What does it look like to take love as our guide? And what gets in the way?

Oren Jay Sofer: I think so much of the exploration that I’m doing in the book and inviting people to participate in is really this deep inquiry into our values, into what’s most important and really who are we, who are we as individuals but also what are we as conscious creatures and the stories we’ve been told, the stories we’ve created about our limitations personally and as a species, to really push the edges and see that at the core, we all long to love and be loved and that when we are connected to our values, this whole beautiful array of human qualities from patience to courage to devotion to resolve flower inside and provide a robust foundation for us to engage and respond.

James Shaheen: One thing I can say about the book is I often ask myself, what do I say I value and how do I actually live? And I think your book contains a lot of  exercises about how to close that gap. You suggested if we do not shape our heart, the world will do it for us. That also resonated. So what do you mean by this? And how do we shape our hearts?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah. That’s a paraphrase of a teaching from one of my teachers, Ajahn Sucitto, the British monastic. I think what he’s pointing to and what I’m carrying forward is this understanding that there are so many strong forces in our world today from the media to technology to the education system to the economy that are attempting to mold us both inside and out. The entire education system in the modern industrial era is designed to produce obedient workers who are disconnected from their own power and needs and self-awareness. The persuasive design and technology, the attention economy, all of these are trying to make us docile consumers, and the systems that are destroying the foundations of life on our planet and that are wreaking havoc in communities around the world depend on us feeling disempowered and being obedient.

And so that quote is also coming from the Buddha. One of the epigraphs to the book is this teaching from the Dhammapada that irrigators channel water, fletchers shape an arrow, carpenters fashion wood, the wise train themselves. And there’s this understanding embedded not just in Buddhism but I think in all spiritual traditions and contemplative practice that the heart and the mind are malleable and that we can shape and train them and realize our potential.

So that quote there that you pulled forward is really looking at the tension between this potential we have to really blossom as human beings and the reality that if we don’t exert a force consciously and intentionally to train ourselves, then the larger forces of our world will inevitably shape us to fit into the mold that keeps the systems in our world going. And I think this is the promise of contemplative practice. This is the gift and the offer that’s a quite empowering and hopeful invitation. 

Sharon Salzberg: Well, speaking of invitations, you’re quoting what I have long said is my favorite sutta, where the quote that you use “If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it, but because it’s possible, I say to you, cultivate the good, the beautiful, let it guide your life.” So when I was very young and beginning meditation, I would read, “Abandon that which is unskillful, cultivate the good. If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it.” And I kept thinking, “The Buddha thinks I can do it.” And that was the part of it that just moved me so much. So I want to ask you what you mean by the beautiful. What do you think the Buddha meant by the beautiful?

Oren Jay Sofer: Mmm. I love that question, Sharon. It actually touches someplace very deep in me because, the word in Pali for beautiful, as you know, is kalyana. It’s two words, kalyana and kusala. These two words, skillful and beautiful. Our son is named after kalyana. So one of the things that’s been so moving to me about having a child in this first year of his life is getting to witness the purity of the joy and the delight and the inquisitiveness, the utter vulnerability of an infant, how raw we are when we come into this world, how dependent, how completely and utterly dependent we are on our caregivers.

And for me, that has been an incredible affirmation of what I’ve held to be true for so long in my own values, which is the sense that, at our core, there’s good and there’s beauty in our hearts. So I think to answer your question more directly, the Buddha points to what’s beautiful and good.

He takes a fairly pragmatic approach, as we know, of saying, Does it lead to the benefit, well-being, welfare of ourselves and others? Is it rooted in wisdom, compassion, generosity, and kindness, or does it lead to harm, confusion, ignorance? Is it rooted in, these qualities of not seeing, of greed and of hatred?

So cultivate the beautiful for me is saying turn toward that which has been there in our hearts all along that either has been covered over or hasn’t been nourished by our society, by our upbringing, by the different forces that we’ve encountered and do what’s actually going to nourish us and our communities and our worlds in the deepest way.

Sharon Salzberg: So you structure the book around twenty-six qualities of the heart, which you describe as distinct energy patterns that come into resonance with each other. Can you say more about these resonances and the harmonies that these qualities create?

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. I feel very inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching and the way he really popularized this concept that the Buddha used of seeds in our consciousness, that they’re all of these different potentials, these capacities that we have. I see these qualities as very potent seeds of transformation. Many of them draw directly from the Buddha’s lists and the sort of pedagogical structures he uses, although some of them are ones that I think are there in the Buddha’s teachings implicitly but don’t show up in any of the lists, things like play or rest. Anyone who practices knows how essential these qualities are. I talk a little bit about how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and so maybe I can give two examples, one from the roots I’m drawing from in the Buddhist tradition and then another personal.

The Buddha talks about the five spiritual faculties, which compose most of the first part of the book: aspiration, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. And he says that these merge in the deathless. It’s a very powerful quote, I think, from the Anguttara Nikaya, where he’s pointing to when we cultivate these qualities to their fulfillment, they carry us beyond what we can know with our thinking mind and culminate in a kind of very deep transformative awakening.

On a more practical level, one of the things that I grappled with as I wrote the book was what’s the place of the more afflictive emotions we experience, just in our individual personal lives, but also on a larger scale as we face deepening climate emergency and political gridlock. What about grief and anger and rage and fear and confusion? Where do these fit in? And so what I see in myself is that these different qualities work together to create a strong and powerful inner space to process the difficult emotions we have.

So compassion, courage, and patience all allow us to grieve in a deep way. I lost my father earlier this year. Just seeing how all of the different qualities of my own practice have allowed me to grieve in a deep way, to not be afraid of the pain, to have the patience to allow it to come and go, to have the tenderness for the deep hurt that’s there and the loss.

Another example would be the way mindfulness and kindness, when there’s equanimity present, can transform fear or anger into a kind of generative power. So they work together, and I see them almost like ingredients in a recipe allowing us to digest and metabolize things and produce something much more useful than any one of them individually.

James Shaheen: Oren, the book focuses primarily on the internal cultivation of the qualities you mentioned, but you also discuss their external expression and how they can support societal transformation. So how can cultivating these qualities support social change?

Oren Jay Sofer: Thank you. I think there are multiple levels to this, many ways in which the cultivation of these qualities support social change. One, for those who are already engaged in some form of social change work, and I define and understand that quite broadly. I think that there’s a tendency to conflate the work for social change with the kind of direct action. What I see and believe is that it’s much, much broader and we need so much more.

It includes everything from building community to working on policy to doing art that inspires us and helps us see things in a new way. So for those who are doing social change work, I think that cultivating these qualities not only provides a tremendous amount of stability and fuel so that we don’t burn out, but it also attends to the inner transformation so that we don’t unintentionally reenact the dynamics of control and oppression and domination that we’re seeking to transform. We just look back at history and see how many revolutions ended up unwittingly replacing one system of domination with another. And we see this in social change circles and in movement spaces a lot where the vision of what we’re struggling for gets undermined by us-them mentalities or by cancel culture.

So it allows us to imbue the means with the end, to ensure that we’re aligning how we’re working for change with our vision of the kind of world that we want to live in. For those who, say, don’t understand, see, or experience themselves as working toward social change, I think that these qualities and the practice of cultivating them opens us up to feel more agency and creativity, to have a vehicle for expressing our love and care in the world.

I think about the story I quote in the introduction of some of the origins of socially engaged Buddhism where Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the key figures in socially engaged dharma, talked about bombs going off in the villages and making the choice to go out into the streets with the monastics in his temple to help those who were hurt and suffering from the bombs. His quote from one of his books is that mindfulness has to be engaged. Once there’s seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what’s the use of seeing? And so I think that cultivating these qualities helps us to make that connection, to make that bridge from what we’re seeing to actually having the skills, the means, the energy, the hope, the will to move into action.

Sharon Salzberg: So let’s talk for a moment about aspiration, which you describe as an act that connects us with a sense of what is possible. And I’m sure you’ve heard me quote it a lot, where I say I think we live in a time of blunted aspiration. Aspiration is not greed. You know, aspiration is aspiration. So can you say more about that quality? And what do you mean by aspiration as a verb?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, well, there’s a certain irony in having you ask me that question. And for all of the listeners who don’t know why we’re laughing, Sharon’s book, Faith, is just such a gem of exploration, a whole book on this one quality.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you.

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, so I’ve learned a tremendous amount about it from you. And I think I’m really drawing a lot from your teachings in this. And as you say, aspiration is a verb. It’s something that we do. It’s not something that we have. It’s to aspire. It’s to connect with the energy of our life, that spirit inside that moves us. What I love about aspiration, and of course we’re translating here from the Pali from the term saddha, which you translate as faith, some translate as conviction or confidence. I really think about it as this stirring inside of our heart that yearns for something better and that longs for a trust that there’s something meaningful about being alive, that there’s something fulfilling, just, or good in this remarkable, mysterious experience of being conscious. And the deeply inspiring placement of aspiration at the beginning is to me so brilliant in the Buddha’s teachings because he makes that connection if we don’t have a sense of what’s possible, we won’t try.

And the story I always tell is a quite mundane one. When I was in college, I love Bob Marley. I always have. I love his music. I was at a party and I saw a friend strumming a very simple two-chord reggae song, a Bob Marley song. And I looked at her playing the guitar and I thought, “That doesn’t look so hard. I could probably learn how to do that.” And I picked up a guitar, got a Bob Marley songbook, and taught myself to play. There’s aspiration there. There’s that sense that I could do that. There’s something there for me. Had I never had that aspiration, I wouldn’t have ever learned to play. And so Munindraji, who you studied with many, many decades ago and who I had the good fortune of meeting at the end of his life, he was fond of saying any aspiration can be accomplished if you’re wholehearted and you know the way.

That stayed with me all of these years as this invitation to really look deeply and say, well, what is my aspiration? What is it that I’m here on this planet to do? And I think that this is something that if we all were able to really listen deeply and ask ourselves that question, we could change this world so profoundly because I think that what all of these crises and emergencies are calling for is not for all of us to do one thing or the same thing but for each of us to do what we’re here to do to find our vocation and to contribute in the way that only we can, whether that’s through parenting or teaching or artwork or social change, direct social change work, all of these different avenues.

I think we see how the articulation of an aspiration on a collective level can move entire populations and how in movements for social change, holding fast to that vision powers movements in the face of tremendous resistance and odds.

James Shaheen: Oren, you mentioned aspiration, and you also say that it can help provide us with the energy for change, which is a big deal because another major theme of the book is energy, and sometimes we think of energy in terms of all or nothing, and it can be very easy to get burnt out. So how have you come to view energy in a more sustainable way?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, I love exploring and talking about this because it’s present in our lives at all levels. I like to make the connection between the societal approach to energy. In Western society, there’s this kind of all-or-nothing model that comes from the fossil fuel industry, this extractive model of getting as much as possible as fast as possible for the most productivity accumulation, and I think we see the connections between that and how many of us are conditioned to live our personal lives with this sense of pressure to strive, this willpower, being over caffeinated, pushing past limits.

So there are many different ways, I think, to reclaim a more balanced relationship with energy for the kind of sustainable power you’re referring to. We can look at nature and the natural kind cycles of the seasons, the day and night, our very breath. All religious, spiritual, indigenous traditions honor cycles of activity and rest. This is a very potent investigation, I think, in each of our lives to explore how do we relate to our energy, how do we use our energy, and how can we start to reclaim our energy to see the degree to which we become disconnected from our bodies, from the rhythms of the planet and the earth and to start to reclaim that.

James Shaheen: Do you think that disconnection is what leads to burnout?

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. I think it’s one of the main factors. When we’re disconnected, we either are unaware of the signals that our body is sending us for our needs for rest, or we’re aware of them and we override them. And that’s one of the key things that leads to burnout.

I quote Angela Davis in the book saying anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn to take care of herself, himself, themself. And I think that the conversation about energy is deeply connected to the conversation about rest. And in order to have sustainable energy, we need to learn how to rest and reclaim our right to rest. And so once we start to examine that, we begin to see that self-care and rest and developing a more sustainable relationship with energy is actually a radical act.

James Shaheen: So learning to rest, now that you mentioned it, requires another quality, and that’s patience. And it can be particularly hard to practice when we feel stressed or under pressure. But you distinguish patience from passivity, which I think is an important distinction. So how have you come to understand patience, and how can practicing patience actually support us in responding deliberately?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah. Thank you. That was one of the most enjoyable and interesting chapters for me to write because a number of colleagues of mine offered feedback on the chapter on patience and just this very sense that you’re speaking to have teasing out the difference between patients and passivity.

And there’s that powerful quote from Dr. King from his “Letter to Birmingham Jail,” where he says, “Those who say ‘Wait,’ that ‘wait’ has almost always meant never.” And so there’s this way in which when we look at social transformation, sometimes patience can mean passivity and there’s a certain kind of healthy impatience with oppressive conditions that urges us to act, and yet at the same time there’s a need for the long view with patience and social change.

Coming from the lens of meditation and contemplative practice, one of the ways that I’ve come to understand patience is on the moment-to-moment level in relation to our resistance to whatever’s happening and learning to bear with the internal tension of resisting pain and unpleasant experience, whether that’s unpleasant sensation or the pain and rage related to oppression or the destruction of the earth. So there’s a patience on this moment-to-moment level that allows us to have more breathing room inside to tolerate the discomfort we experience, when we disagree with or dislike what’s happening when it goes against our values and that capacity to bear with the discomfort on a moment-to-moment level starts to open up more space inside to draw on other resources and to make a more wise and empowered response so we’re not reacting based on that discomfort and that resistance.

James Shaheen: You also mentioned the etymology of the word patience. Why don’t you say something about that?

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, absolutely. So it comes from to to suffer. To be a patient in a hospital and medicine is to be one who suffers, and so the sense that patience includes the willingness to bear with discomfort consciously as connected to the meaning of the word. And I think for many of us who are troubled about what’s happening in the world, one of the things that I see us being called to is also to be patient with not knowing. And there’s a sense that the more we’re able to be patient with not having an answer, with not being able to see the outcome, the more sustainable our energy can be because the more we are needing that certainty, the more strained our internal resources become, the less resilience we have to stay engaged.

Sharon Salzberg: You know, you use language in such an interesting way, like the association of aspiration and faith, the association of patience and rest, and I’m wondering if you could say a little bit more about rest. I mean, you’re a new parent. You’re not getting any rest. Many of us have quite a lot of responsibility or we’re just very busy. Rest is not the fundamental attribute of our day.

Oren Jay Sofer: Yeah, we are starting to get more rest. He’s sleeping through the night after a whole year. I’ve gotten my first few nights, a full night of rest. I think there’s a few things that are important to me in examining our need for rest and how to honor it. And the first is expanding our definition of rest. I love Tricia Hersey’s definition of rest in her book Rest Is Resistance and her social media platform, the Nap Ministry. She defines rest as anything that connects the body and mind. And I love that because it really broadens the sense of what it means to rest.

And I think if we take an evolutionary perspective, we can see that our ancestors engaged in activities that were a certain kind of downtime that was very regulating for our nervous system, whether it was threshing or weaving or toolmaking or engaging in chit-chat conversations. So any kind of downtime can be recharging.

I think it’s also important to be very real about the barriers that are there to rest. I think rest is a human need. It’s a right. It’s not a luxury. And yet the structures of our society often make it one where those who have access to rest are those who have resources. I think as a society we’re over caffeinated and underresourced because we don’t get enough rest.

There are very real economic pressures, particularly here in the U. S. where the social safety net has been stripped away, just to meet basic needs like housing and health care, and then there are all the internal barriers to rest, the way our sense of self-worth and belonging gets tied to how much we accomplish, how well we perform. There’s this experience of the busier we are, somehow the more important we are, so people feel proud of being busy and not resting. I’ve found that it takes a very deliberate effort to learn how to rest. It involves learning to honor our limits. What can we let go of and say no to? A lot of that rides on cultivating self-compassion, seeing the suffering of being tired and strained and stressed and actually being willing to not only do something about it but feel it.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why many of us don’t rest is that as soon as we slow down, we have to feel the level of deep exhaustion or the things that we’ve been avoiding. Other deep questions to investigate are how much of my activity is necessary and how much of it is self-imposed? Can I relinquish my need to please others to take care of myself? Can I lower my standards in order to get more downtime? What would it be like to not always be productive? And even though the rigors of parenting are intensely demanding, it’s also taught me a tremendous amount about letting go of being productive and just being in the moment because so much of the time that’s all I can do. I think that we can find rest in small ways in short moments if we’re willing to look for it and break from our habits.

Sharon Salzberg: Including our habit of speed and instant gratification.

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely

Sharon Salzberg: Right, in the light of not getting instant gratification, we may set out to be committed to the beautiful and some very unbeautiful things may arise. That’s just reality. And that has to be OK. We have to have a degree of compassion and understanding toward that. Otherwise our journey is actually kind of incomplete. 

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. I talk about that throughout the book really, but I think one of the places that I really try to make that point is in the chapter on mindfulness, because the commodification of mindfulness by the wellness industry I think is very dangerous.

The narrative there that mindfulness is about feeling good, which robs us of this potential for real healing and transformation and for a more integrated sense of being that allows us to respond and engage in a more whole and full way to recognize that the fear, the anger, the confusion, the doubt, all of the painful and uncomfortable experiences that come up in our lives and in our practice are not a problem or a failure but are actually part of the work.

And I think there’s a very direct parallel here to anti-oppression work and antiracism work and recognizing that the fear and the rage and the pain and the discomfort of looking at issues of privilege and power are a core and essential part of the work. As we accept that and shift the narrative of what does it mean to practice, what does it mean to be aware, to be mindful, it’s incredibly empowering.

I remember one of the most shocking moments for me in my early practice when I went back to India in my mid-twenties to practice with Munindraji before he passed. I had a really incredibly difficult time, and many of those suppressed emotions broke through to the surface in a kind of violent way, just untethered rage and violent images and voices inside of anger on the cushion. I got really destabilized, in the end deciding to return back home. And I talk about this in the book a little bit, actually, when I talk about energy and the need for balanced energy rather than pushing really hard with this all or nothing approach.

When I went to see Munindraji and broke down crying and told him how overwhelmed I was and how much anger and fear and rage I was experiencing, he looked at me from across the couch and he smiled. And he said, “When you tell me you’re suffering, I feel so happy for you. You’re making progress. You have to enjoy your suffering.” And he said, “You came here seeking enlightenment, and you think that means you’re going to feel peaceful and happy and good, but it’s quite the opposite. You need to encounter and feel all of the places that are preventing you from being at peace in order to find something deeper and more enduring.” And it was this total shift in my perspective to see, oh, I’ve been avoiding all of these things. And this is actually the way through.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, in the light of this conversation about integrated emotion and sort of quality of attention and almost like the holding environment we are creating, which can encompass the joy and the sorrow and the painful and the pleasant, I want to talk about the quality of devotion. Because it’s a tricky word in Buddhist contexts, as so many people tend to associate it with blind faith. Even when you referred back to my book, Faith, I thought, oh yeah, I got a lot of flack about that one. So I’m wondering about your own relationship to the word devotion, the concept of devotion, the practice of devotion, and how that’s changed as your practice has deepened and has also included these very difficult experiences.

Oren Jay Sofer: Thank you, Sharon. I love to talk about devotion because it has been such a rich part of my practice. My very rational Western sensibilities and my Jewish upbringing of bristling at the idea of bowing before a Buddha shrine or offering incense to shaving my head and taking robes and spending nearly three years living as a renunciate at the monastery. So I think one of the ways that I enjoy just highlighting the difference, and you pointed to this when you mentioned the title of your book Faith and how people bristle or react to that, is to just offer a few synonyms for the word devotion and to notice the different resonances inside with a word like sincerity, or wholeheartedness, or enthusiasm, or even reverence, or respect.

So to play with words again and talk about etymology, devotion contains the word vote. It comes from the Latin, which means that we commit. We commit fully. And to me, that’s what devotion is about. It’s a way of relating to anything with this quality of deep love and loyalty and generosity. When we’re devoted to something, we give a lot. We give our time, we give our energy, we give our attention. So we can be devoted to a life partner. We can be devoted to an instrument, to a craft. What I love about this is the understanding that devotion isn’t defined by the object but by the quality of our attention and the love that we bring to it.

And as you point out I think very appropriately, devotion without reason can be dangerous. So we see this throughout history. And at the same time, devotion can include the intellect without depending on it. I think we really need to look at the results of our devotion and see what is it leading to? Is it leading to good? Is it benefiting ourselves and others? And if so, then we can trust that what we’re devoting ourselves to is worthy. I think it’s a deep human need. And one of the things I talk about in the chapter is that particular passage in the Pali Canon that I had to reread the first time I came across it, where there’s this recounting of the Buddha’s reflections and thoughts after his awakening. And he essentially thinks, “Who or what am I going to be devoted to? Now that I’m awakened and I’ve sort of surpassed all of my teachers, what can I be devoted to?” It’s painful to live without devotion. And then he ultimately says, “Well, I’ll be devoted to this truth, to this way of being and living that I’ve discovered.”

I think that so much of the pain on a spiritual level in our world today comes from a lack of devotion, from an absence of the sacred, a kind of spiritual hunger, the sense of something missing without even knowing what it is. And then our need for devotion, our need to give ourselves to something larger than ourself in a wholehearted way gets misplaced onto work, onto substances, onto entertainment, and even into sort of twisted ways it gets misplaced onto self-judgment or being critical or feeling inadequate. In the book I’m really reaching to make this invitation to say what is it for each of us to be devoted? Where do we find that sense of wholehearted connection? Is it through relationship, art, music? Is it through our family? Is it through justice?

Parenting our son has given me new perspectives on devotion. When I was younger and practicing, I sat a few retreats with Thich Nhat Hanh and I felt so inspired by the mindfulness gathas he offered on washing the dishes like you’re bathing the baby Buddha. And I think as much as I integrated that into my practice, parenting has given me a new appreciation for it in two ways. One, there’s something different about bringing mindfulness and care and attention to the small acts when we have a lot of time to do formal practice. And it takes on a different quality when there’s no time to sit in meditation. Those moments of, say, washing a dish or brushing one’s teeth become imbued with a different quality of meaning and importance when that becomes our practice. It’s not like an extra thing. And then on the other hand, seeing how these small acts of changing a diaper or rocking my son to sleep can be imbued with so much love and can be a kind of act of devotion.

James Shaheen: So, Oren, you said so many nice things about so many nice qualities. I’m going to ask about one that’s a little bit more challenging. You write that we can never fulfill craving, but we can release it. Can you say something about how we release it, and how does renunciation, a word that also is a trigger for a lot of people, come into play here?

Oren Jay Sofer: Absolutely. Yeah, it was a very conscious choice to name the chapter renunciation rather than simplicity or letting go or these more palatable words for Western audience and popular world today.

Craving can be released is the understanding that it’s temporary. The Buddha likened craving to a fire that consumes everything in its path or to a bucket with a hole in it. No matter how much you put in, it’s always empty. If we study our experience, we start to learn the nature of craving and the nature of particularly sensory pleasure is that there’s this pattern of excitement and anticipation.

Then there’s this moment of a rush of pleasure and intensity, and then it fades, and we want another. We want another one. And if we can muster the patience, the mindfulness, the determination, the resolve to bear with the discomfort of craving, we see that it passes, that it’s not who we are, that there’s something larger within us than the craving, whatever it’s for, whether it’s for the ice cream or the relationship or the job. Not all desire leads to suffering, not all resistance is reactive.

So we hold on to a vision for equity, or a world in which we can breathe the air and drink the water and the food isn’t poisoned, where everyone has dignity and access to education and healthcare. We hold fast to that vision, but the craving is when there’s a contraction around it that limits our capacity to respond and to engage in a flexible way. And that’s what we study, and that’s what can be released is the sense of contraction around it, which narrows us inside.

James Shaheen: OK, I said that was the last question, but actually I have one more. The way you just spoke of that, you did some investigatory work. And the interesting thing to me is the power of curiosity. Curiosity, like what is this craving and looking at it? It’s interesting in that way. And I really began thinking about this when U Tejaniya talked about his series of depressions, and at one point he realized he couldn’t fight it, but then he became curious: What is this? And he began to investigate, and sort of as an ancillary effect, it lifted. Not because he wanted it to, but he became curious and began to investigate it. So I wonder if, to close, you can say something about curiosity and its power to break through, say, craving or many other afflictive emotions.

Oren Jay Sofer: Well, we can’t transform anything if we don’t understand it. In order to understand it, we need to get curious. Curiosity, as you’re pointing to in that story, doesn’t have an end or a goal. It’s just this openness to understand and to receive and absorb and learn. And there’s a certain kind of radical curiosity that we cultivate in contemplative practice that I think has a direct connection and support for social change, which is that we get interested in all of our experience, including what repels us.

It’s one thing to be curious about a beautiful sunset or a fascinating connection we have with a person in our life. And it’s another thing to be curious about someone who annoys us or about our back pain, our depression, or about a social condition that troubles us and keeps us up at night. So curiosity brings us into the experience of something to start to understand how it’s functioning so that we can engage with it in a more clear and skillful way.

It plays a direct role in nonviolent approaches to social transformation. King and Gandhi were both huge proponents of the initial stage of developing any strategy around a noncooperation campaign began with being curious and gathering information.

A strategic, principled nonviolent approach to any social change work includes curiosity and openness to one’s opponent and really understanding what their needs and values are, not creating an enemy in our mind’s eye, but seeing a potential partner to join us in beloved community. And so curiosity has that power to open the door to empathy and to deep connection.

James Shaheen: Oren, well, thanks so much for joining us. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Oren’s new book, Your Heart Was Made for This. And to close, Oren, would you be willing to lead us in a short guided meditation?

Oren Jay Sofer: Oh, of course. Absolutely. So for anyone who’s listening, just invite you to let your body become still, sitting in a comfortable position where you can also feel alert. Your eyes can be closed or just softly gazing down at the ground in front of you. See what it’s like to just feel the weight of your body resting on the earth.

You might notice your breathing or the sounds around you. Just feeling the steady contact with the places your body touches the ground and letting all of the many words that we’ve shared today fade, feeling this earth that supports us, that sustains our life, that offers us air and water, food, and shelter, this earth that our body comes from and will return to.

And just noticing what it’s like to reflect on and appreciate our intimate connection with the planet, this vast source of strength and energy, this deep source of quiet, steadiness, and rest. And perhaps considering how this can be a source of inspiration and guidance for you in your life. And whenever you’re ready, you can let your eyes gently open.

Thanks so much for having me on the show. Sharon, James, it was a pleasure to be here.

James Shaheen: It’s great to have you, Oren. Good to see you again.

Oren Jay Sofer: You too.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Oren Jay Sofer. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Lama Rod Owens: Do I have agency to choose my relationship to sensation, to thoughts, to emotions? Can I hold space for what arises, and can I move from reactivity to responsiveness? And for me, that’s inner freedom. And that’s what meditation practice is cultivating is that inner agency to choose how to be in relationship to whatever arises.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Lama Rod Owens. Lama Rod is an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. In his new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, he draws from the bodhisattva tradition to rethink the relationship between social liberation and ultimate freedom. In the process, he pulls from the wisdom of the Old Saints of Tibetan Buddhism and Black liberation movements. In my conversation with Lama Rod, we talk about why he believes that the apocalypse is an opportunity for awakening, the power of connecting with our ancestors and unseen beings, why the New Saint is not necessarily a good person, and how fierceness can be a form of awakened care. Plus, he reads a prayer from his new book. So here’s my conversation with Lama Rod Owens.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with Lama Rod Owens. Hi, Lama Rod. It’s great to be with you.

Lama Rod Owens: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me on. 

James Shaheen: We’re happy to have you on. So we’re here to talk about your new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors. So to start, I’ll ask you what we always ask. Can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Lama Rod Owens: Right, yeah. I think the first thing that I feel compelled to say about the book is that it’s a very different book than what you may be used to. And I think people will say, “Oh, this is a dharma book,” and then they get their hands on it and then after the first chapter or the prologue will say, “Oh, what did I get myself into? Can I return this book?”

But The New Saints really started coming to me right after my last book was published, which was Love and Rage. That came out right in the summer of the quarantine in 2020, of course, and afterwards, the murder of George Floyd. And then that’s what made the book so popular, you know, it’s just dealing with anger and activism.

But in that kind of renewed period of activism and organizing around Black lives, I really started asking myself these same questions that I ask myself when things happen collectively, like what is my role here? What am I supposed to do as a dharma teacher, as a person in this collective? And so this idea for a guide, a manual of sorts, started really coming through, and an articulation of the bodhisattva tradition was what I got really strongly.

I needed to talk about what it meant to be good, to do good things, to try to get free, and to try to help others get free, but I couldn’t just tell the same old stories again about the bodhisattva. I couldn’t go back into all that mythology that many people know from the tradition. So I said that there has to be something new. And so, of course, this phrase “the New Saints” really came afterwards. Like what does it mean to be a saint? And how can I take this ideal and really reinterpret it so it actually is about what’s happening in the world right now? It’s really about the contemporary experience of people in bodies, in the relative, in a world that seems to be really on the edge of something catastrophic. How can I write this in a way that helps people to not just manage what was coming up for them around fear and anxiety but really give people something that they can really work with in order to bring about a different future.

James Shaheen: Very well said. With these crises, it can be so easy to slip into apocalyptic thinking. But you suggest that we are not experiencing the end of the world, but rather, quote, the end of some provocative and desperately enduring lies we have told ourselves. Can you tell us more about how you’ve come to view the idea of apocalypse?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think we misinterpret the meaning of the word apocalypse. I think when people are talking about apocalypse, what they’re actually talking about is Armageddon, like armed conflict, war, global war, destruction of communities, and so forth.

That’s what people are really thinking about. But when we talk about apocalypse, apocalypse is rooted within the study of theology, and the root meaning of apocalypse, I think coming out of the Greek, is really about unveiling, awakening. It’s the energy, the action of pulling back the curtains and letting the light shine in. And if you’re so accustomed to the dark, the light will be a little hard to deal with. And I think that’s what’s happening. The truth is being revealed, and we’ve been living in a kind of dark delusion for a very long time. And so for me, having said all of that, I think the apocalypse is about coming back into balance. But that rebalancing feels really painful.

James Shaheen: It’s an interesting take on apocalypse, and it’s one that I think makes sense. You also talk of our present crisis as a time of spiritual warfare as much as it is one of political and social warfare. So can you tell us what you mean by spiritual warfare, and how is this a spiritual crisis?

Lama Rod Owens: That phrase, spiritual warfare, was something I really had a lot of anxiety around including in the text. And that’s something that up until now I would never actually use publicly. But for me, I can get really wrapped up in the political and social aspect of struggle in terms of systems and institutions that create harm. But because of my practice and because of my ancestry and just my natural inclination, I’ve been very concerned with the unseen and the impact that the unseen world is having on us and vice versa. And when I talk about the unseen world, I’m talking about this experience of ancestors and deities and spirits and formless beings who are still connected to this world and who I believe are impacting us in ways that we’re not extremely conscious of, but there are those of us who are. And so for me, spiritual warfare is really about how do I use awareness and love and clarity to bring a situation back into balance? And how do I develop a sensitivity to understand that I have to work between both the form world, the world of phenomena, and as well as the formless world in order to create the change that I most wish to see in the world?

James Shaheen: You know, you anticipated my next question because you suggest there are beings in the unseen world who want us to be free. I really like that idea—it’s a comfort too. So what does it look like to ally with our ancestors and unseen beings?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, interestingly enough, this idea came from my study of anti-slavery abolition and how abolition was very deeply connected to spiritualism, to the spiritualist movement that was really beginning to happen in the northeast in New York, Boston, New York, some in the Midwest, also in Europe, where particularly radical Quakers were getting involved in seances and talking to the dead and working with mediums, and that became a huge cultural phenomenon.

But what also began to reveal itself was that there were these beings in the unseen world, people who had passed on, who were actually really concerned with ending slavery. And they began to speak through these mediums and really began to inform the anti-slavery abolition work. From there, I was like, yeah, of course, freedom is really about working between these two realms. So when I talk about the unseen world, for me, I instantly think about my ancestors, these beings who are connected to me in some way, not necessarily by blood or genetics but beings who have chosen a kind of affinity with me based upon some shared characteristic. We’re members of the same communities, identity locations, of course, actual blood familial beings as well. And they choose us as partners to support us in doing the work of liberation because anything that we do to get free or to heal from trauma and from woundedness is also helping to free them because we share this kind of karmic, energetic relationship. And so when I connect consciously to my ancestors, I’m really connecting into a really powerful resource. And for me personally, that’s transformed my practice and my work around the work of spiritual liberation. 

James Shaheen: So with that help, you put forth the notion of the New Saint. So what is a New Saint?

Lama Rod Owens: The New Saint is just a rethinking of what it means to be a bodhisattva right now with a particular focus on relative justice and its relationship to ultimate liberation, with a focus on identity, so not bypassing the relative but working skillfully with the relative. It is phrased and wrapped in language that I wanted to appeal to young people. I wanted it to appeal to people who aren’t necessarily Buddhist identified, but who care about the world and who are interested in spirituality but maybe have never felt like the spiritual paths that they’ve explored really offered a clear insight into the integration of social and ultimate liberation together.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I think you are reaching young people because it was the young people in the office who said, “James, you’ve really got to read this book, you’ve really got to read this book.” I have so many books to read. And I said, “OK, I’ll read it.” And I’m glad they did. So in describing the New Saint, you draw not only from Buddhist understandings of the bodhisattva but also from the Old Saints who have influenced your path, among them the organizers and activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Audre Lorde. Can you tell us about how you draw together the lineages of Tibetan Buddhism and Black liberation movements in developing the New Saint?

Lama Rod Owens: I think for me, the social liberators and ultimate liberators are actually two sides of the same coin, and I think that, for instance, these great activists and organizers like Fannie Lou Hamer, I think they were deeply connected to an ultimate expression, to what they consider the divine, and they were pointing people back to that experience through the work of organizing folks and bringing awareness to systemic injustice. And I think that’s the same thing for Harriet Tubman, for instance, who I identify also as a bodhisattva who chose to incarnate as a Black enslaved woman in order to teach us what freedom actually really means and what it looks like and who was also just deeply connected to what we can call the ultimate source or the essence or to the divine or to the sacred. When I think about my teachers and my tradition and the people that I’ve studied in Tibetan Buddhism, the great saints from India and Tibet and so forth, I just feel like these beings in many ways were emanating as people like Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer and Sojourner Truth or Malcolm X or Dr. King and Audre Lorde. At this point, I don’t see any difference between the Tibetan saints and these social activist saints in Black liberation. They cared about people, and they wanted people to be free. That’s it. 

James Shaheen: You say something that at first sounds provocative, but really it makes sense: you suggest that the New Saint is not a good person. So what’s the difference between being a good person and actually practicing goodness?

Lama Rod Owens: I think it’s important just to get really clear about what goodness is because I think that goodness can become an identity location where people just kind of stick themselves, and if you stick yourself in a place of just being a good person, it becomes really difficult to see where you’re not practicing goodness, where you’re actually creating harm. And I think that goodness can be really quite performative, particularly now in the age of social media. You can create a social media page that makes you look really good and can lead people to think whatever you want about how you’re showing up.

But for me, goodness is something that I’m choosing second to second. It’s not something that I’m just at and planted in. When I talk about choosing goodness in the moment or in the second, I’m saying that I’m choosing the reduction of harm and violence for myself and against others moment to moment. And that has to be active, conscious engagement, and so it becomes more like a process, a continuum, a verb. It’s something that’s always being negotiated. It’s always being discerned. It’s never a place that I just go to and say, “This is it.” Every second is different. So I’m making different choices and understanding how to reduce harm in the moment.

James Shaheen: You say the work of the new saint is the liberation of all beings and phenomena. So how do you understand freedom, and how does freedom differ from, say, justice?

Lama Rod Owens: You know, as I was writing the book, I really began to understand that I’m much more into freedom than justice. And for me, justice feels like a stopping place like happiness can feel like a stopping place in our practice. You can get right into these things, into happiness, into equity, into justice and say, “OK, this is it.” But we’re still in this experience of delusion that we call samsara that in The New Saints I called the carceral state, which is this experience of delusion of not being clear about what’s happening and who I am.

So freedom is like, let’s disrupt, let’s transcend all the roots, all the causes and conditions of suffering, and to return back to remembering who we are so we don’t have to do this reality thing anymore, we don’t get lost in this cyclical experience that we can relate to as The Matrix as a cultural phenomenon, but overall, this carceral state, which binds us through delusion, and we’re policed by fear and doubt and so many other things as well. So to transcend everything is my understanding of freedom, to transcend duality and binaries, to return back to a simple state of being where we just are. We are.

James Shaheen: You just mentioned justice as a stopping point, and you wrote something that really resonated with me, but I don’t want it to be misunderstood, so maybe you can explain it a little bit. It’s not that we don’t care about justice, but you write, “We must give up on the idea of justice and commit to liberation, as some of our ideas about justice are not about complete liberation but the illusion of universal comfort for all beings.” I thought that was very interesting.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, so again, my goal, my agenda, which I think is the same agenda of Buddhism, is to actually transcend all of this, this whole cycle, and if you go for that, if you go for the goal of ultimate liberation, all this stuff is going to happen regardless. Justice is going to happen. Happiness, joy, comfort will actually happen as well as we’re moving towards ultimate freedom.

So don’t just aim for that. Aim for the very top, for ultimate liberation, and you’re going to get everything. So if you go for everything, you’re going to get everything. But I know going for happiness feels a lot easier, or going for justice seems much more doable. But I’m asking people to think much more expansively about the nature of existence itself, which, again, is what Buddhism is always asking us to do.

James Shaheen: You know, you write that your first experiences of freedom came in church when you learned about Jesus and about the Exodus story. How did those experiences shape how you think about freedom and abolition and spiritual abolition in particular?

Lama Rod Owens: Well, these were the earliest examples of freedom that I had growing up. I’m a Black man who grew up in North Georgia in a small Black community, I grew up in the Black church. My mother is a United Methodist minister, so these stories were quite potent for me and for a lot of Black folks growing up in this country. These are the stories my ancestors were given and offered and were allowed to study and think about.

My ancestors deeply identified with Jewish people, with the ancient Hebrews who were being held by Egypt, and the Exodus, when God delivered the Jewish people from captivity into wandering for forty years until they found Canaan. My ancestors were praying to be delivered out of slavery, just like the Jews were. And that, for me, of course, is the foundation of liberation theology, and that became so important for me in terms of really forming my understanding of spiritual freedom, spiritual abolition, that in that way, everyone who is not free will be set free.

And it takes work, it takes prayer, it takes this work of connecting to the unseen, it takes trust and devotion and the sacred or the divine. But if we can do that, then we will get free. And I still believe that. Even as a practicing Buddhist, this is a core belief: If I trust and have devotion in emptiness, which I often describe as God, or an expression of God, then I will get free. It just feels like an attunement to how things actually are.

James Shaheen: Right. You say the work of the New Saint happens on multiple levels: outer, inner, secret, and super secret. So what does freedom look like on each of these levels, and how do these levels inform and support each other?

Lama Rod Owens: This outer, inner, secret, and super secret comes right out of Tantric Buddhism or these levels of knowing and understanding. I wanted people to understand that there are layers here to this. Ultimately, yes, it is the experience of being beyond dualism. But in the body, in the relative, it’s going to look different ways.

So outer freedom is like, what does it look like to live in a culture, in a society where I have agency to make choices about the resources that I need? Do I have agency to make choices about my body? Do I have access to the other resources that I need to be well, like food, clothing, medicine, and so forth? Do I have autonomy to choose my path that feels appropriate for me, or is that dictated by other people and communities? So outer freedom is this relative freedom where we have the agency to make choices about what we need.

And then you start talking about inner freedom, and that begins to move into our experience of body and mind. Do I have agency to choose my relationship to sensation, to thoughts, to emotions? Can I hold space for what arises, and can I move from reactivity to responsiveness? And for me, that’s inner freedom. And that’s what meditation practice is cultivating is that inner agency to choose how to be in relationship to whatever arises in my experience.

And then you get into secret. Of course, that secret freedom is actually connecting to the state of freedom itself, which is emptiness and space and energy, connecting to that fundamental experience because that’s where we arise from. That is the nature of our minds and consciousness.

And then, of course, the super secret experience is like yeah, then we return back completely to this experience. So the secret and super secret are really about remembering who we are. It’s remembrance. I’ve gotten distracted through delusion, and I’ve gotten really attached to form, and now, I am actually letting go of form, letting form dissolve back into emptiness, and letting the sense of self dissolve back into this nature of mind itself, and I just abide. And that’s what I’m trying to get to: that simple abiding in a state beyond duality. 

James Shaheen: You know, if you ask somebody, “Do you want to be free?,” everybody will say “Yes, I want to be free,” but you describe what you call liberation pessimism. So why are we afraid of getting free?

Lama Rod Owens: I mean, when you start really wanting to get free, you start understanding that you’re going to have to leave everything behind. And even in this moment, I think about Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery, who left the plantation. And for me, that act of saying, “You know what, I’m going to be free regardless of if I die doing it or not,” I think that’s what really scares people. It’s like, what’s beyond this choice of getting free?

Because I know what everything else is. I’m in the world, I have this identity, I’m a part of things, I have stuff I like, but when you tell me that freedom is really the real goal, are you asking me to give up all this? And what I am actually saying is that no, I’m not asking you to give up anything. I’m asking you to transform your relationship to things, to actually remember that there is space and choice and agency in how I relate to everything. And if I can let go of the fixation, then I can reinvest energy and practice into this experience of who I really am, which is an expression of emptiness and space and energy.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, another challenge in getting free is the loneliness of the work. So how have you learned to work with loneliness, and what does it mean to you to choose aloneness?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, absolutely. I think when you choose freedom, it’s a choice that a lot of people aren’t making, and that really has come out of my personal experience, where I feel like I’ve been really misunderstood by people who care for me because I’ve chosen to work towards ultimate freedom, and that seems really foreign to people. Of course, one of those earlier decisions around getting free was entering a three-year retreat, which everyone thought I was like completely out of it. You know, my family thought I was joining a cult.

James Shaheen: I like your take on cults.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, well, in a way I was actually joining a cult. But people just didn’t get it, like why would you do something like that? And I would say because I want to get free. So that’s the loneliness of a lot of spiritual practice, because you’re doing something a lot of people aren’t doing. Even if you’re in community, even if you’re in sangha and so forth, there’s still a level of loneliness. Because yeah, we’re working together, we’re practicing together, we’re supporting each other, but we still have individual experiences that can feel really isolating, and we are asked to hold that and in these moments of isolation to still understand that we’re still connected, we’re still part of things, but this has to be a personal experience because we individually have to consent to the work of liberation.

It’s not a collective thing. It’s not just like getting a bunch of people together and saying, “OK, raise your hand if you’re ready to get free,” and you’re like, “I’m not going to raise my hand. I’ll just let them assume my hand is raised.” That’s not, that’s not how this works, you know, like we all have to say yes. And then those of us who say yes can form community together to support one another. But if some people are saying “Yes, or,” and if some people are saying, “Well, I don’t know,” then that’s going to create a kind of conflict that I think we see so much in our spiritual communities. But we haven’t been able to name that this is the core of the conflict, that people actually have different agendas being here.

James Shaheen: Right, you invoke Dorothy Day’s concept of spiritual loneliness as the long loneliness. So what are the particular challenges of spiritual loneliness, as well as its opportunities? I mean, I know sangha is a great thing, but even so, within sangha in the effort to get free, it can still be lonely. 

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, Dorothy Day has been an extremely important impact person who has deeply influenced my work as a former member of the Catholic Worker Movement. Being in the movement shapes so much of this work. But it really moved me when she wrote about the long loneliness, which was the name of one of her books, and she talked about this often, this solitariness, this aloneness. And so much of that for her was about doubt, like am I actually doing the right thing? Is this what God is calling me to do? But for me, when I work with the long loneliness in my practice, for me, it’s like, yeah, this is a path of developing a deep intimacy with my own experience, and that gets real isolating because I’m trying to figure out exactly what this experience is, sometimes out of the context of groups and communities. I have to know myself, and that means I have to sit with myself. And in meditation, I’m sitting with everything that arises, and that can be really exhausting and really isolating.

But more and more, if we really commit to this kind of work, then we feel the same way I have, that you begin to experience a really profound, intimate connection with all beings. I would go further and say a connection to all phenomena. And so at this point, yes, I can feel the loneliness, I can feel the aloneness that I choose, but I have never felt so connected to all beings at the same time, and both of those experiences I think happen and will continue to happen up until we reach the threshold of ultimate enlightenment. And then of course you cross the threshold, and you just let go of this illusion that you are separate to begin with.

James Shaheen: Right, you say that spiritual loneliness means that you’re touching into the formless expression of love, which takes you out of a linear timeline. Can you say more about this? What does it look like to be taken out of linear time? I just interviewed Jenny Odell, the artist and writer who wrote Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, and she very much responds to this notion of linear time.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, well, time is just a concept. I know we hear that all the time, but for me, when I touch into this nonlinear nature of time, it’s really this continuum is dissolved, and the boundaries between the past and the present and the future all just kind of get dissolved, which is really our consciousness. Once we let go of this kind of fixation to the sense of self, then we expand back into the boundless consciousness, which knows no limits, no time zones, no time limits or anything, and you’re experiencing everything at once. Time is something that we’re creating, and when we get really in tune into emptiness, it all dissolves. The sense of self that we’re still clinging to is disrupted.

James Shaheen: Right. We think of time as this incremental sort of commodified quantity that can be bought and sold, says Jenny Odell, and I think you’re along those same lines. One of the things I really liked is you refer to the New Saint’s magic, which depends on two practices, the expression of awakened care and the development of our capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity. So to start, can you walk us through what you mean by awakened care?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Awakened care is my experience of bodhicitta. I would say bodhicitta is the magic of the bodhisattva, but we would traditionally define bodhicitta as the awakened heart-mind. So it’s this view of deep connectedness, deep empathy, that we’re doing the work of liberation not just for ourselves but for all beings. When I am attempting to get free, that labor is also helping others to get free. For me, that’s the expression of bodhichitta.

But when I began to think about this in terms of the New Saint and this kind of reinterpretation of the whole tradition, I began asking myself, what is my actual felt experience of bodhicitta, more than just awakened mind, more than this altruism that we’re told to cultivate. And so the first thing I felt was love, this deep acceptance, this deep holding space for everything but also this wish for everyone and everything to be free. So that’s the first thing I felt.

I also experienced compassion, which is like tuning into the suffering of both ourselves and the world and actually committing to freeing ourselves and others from suffering. For me, compassion is the action. I am doing this to get free from the causes and conditions of suffering because everyone’s suffering and no one wants to suffer.

And of course, the other piece of this is joy. I feel deep joy for having the capacity to choose benefiting beings through my practice. I’m overwhelmed by that, and there’s deep gratitude in that joy as well. And of course, everything is based in emptiness, so we have the capacity for all of this to happen because of the profound potential of emptiness in space.

And so when all of this is streamed together or braided together, it begins to awaken care, a deep, profound care, the kind of care that says, “Yeah, I’m going to do everything that I can to get free because I care that much for myself and for others.”

An important point here too is that I have to care for myself enough to want to get free to begin with. And a lot of us aren’t there either. Some of us really don’t believe that we deserve to be free from suffering.

James Shaheen: I think that’s pretty common.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, and I know I had to get clear about that, too. Not only did I have to choose freedom, I had to understand that I deserve to be free. But that’s the first magic, this awakened care, which is an expression of bodhicitta. Of course, the second magic is moving from reactivity to responsiveness, which is what we’re trying to do in our meditation practice: to name and notice what arises and then choose how to be in relationship to what arises, to accept and then to respond not just habitually react.

James Shaheen: You know, Lama Rod, I have to say that when people pick up a dharma book, they’re not going to expect to read about Paris Is Burning or the television series Pose, although one of the actors in Pose, she is a dharma practitioner.

Lama Rod Owens: Angelica Ross, yeah, Angelica is definitely a practitioner. Well, there may be others who are practicing from that show that we’re not aware of.

James Shaheen: Oh really? Well, I wasn’t aware of that. But they also don’t expect to hear about fierceness, but you liken it to the wrathful expressions of Tantric Buddhism. It’s very playful and fun but also meaningful. And these are the most powerful forms of compassion. So how do you practice fierceness as a form of care?

Lama Rod Owens: Well, fierceness is an expression of wrath from Tibetan Buddhism. Wrath is an expression of profound, direct compassion. It has nothing to do with anger. I think that’s the misinterpretation of wrath outside of the tradition. Wrath is saying “This is what needs to be done, and this is what I’m going to do regardless of the impact,” but not necessarily the impact because practicing compassion in this really clear way will free people, but wrath means that there are consequences in terms of my relationship to other folks. And that’s what you’re risking.

If you say something that you know needs to be said to someone, then the risk is that that person may hate you. And that’s coming from personal experience as someone who’s been the recipient of wrath. You know, I have really struggled with feeling like I have survived some type of harm because it’s something that I am desperately trying to hide but needs to be revealed in order for me to experience some freedom.

And of course, that’s going to be met with resentment: How dare you name this? But of course, my experience has been so much more freedom and openness from having that named without my consent, but in a way, if you’re in a relationship with a teacher, then you’re consenting to that kind of dharma transmission. I work with teachers because they tell me the truth about who I am, and they point me in the direction I need to be going. And so I consent to truth being revealed about where I’m stuck even though it hurts like hell.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I’ve been nailed by my teachers plenty of times.

Lama Rod Owens: Oh, yeah, a good teacher has to do that. A good teacher isn’t there to make you feel comfortable. Again, the teacher is supposed to be helping you get free. That doesn’t mean I like it. But it means that I consent to it because I know that this is the only way.

Of course, you know, I feel that in my community. In the Black, gay, queer, gender-expansive community, there’s a fierceness, and that fierceness is really about surviving. It’s wanting individuals to survive, it’s wanting us as a collective to survive, so we go directly to the work that needs to be done. We say what we need to say, we do what we need to do, because that’s what we have to work with in order to disrupt the impact of really systemic violence and transhistorical trauma. We have to get clear and cut through it, even though it hurts.

James Shaheen: Again, that fierceness is evident in Paris Is Burning and in Pose, and I was happy that you brought those into it because as silly as it might sound when you look at it, that’s precisely what it is, fierceness. But you write that awakened care can cause us to lose a sense of agency so that we’re swept up in the agenda of the liberation of all beings and things. Can you say more about the loss of agency at play? How is it that we surrender to the agenda of liberation?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, you know, I talk about Toni Cade Bambara in that section. It’s a kind of profound awakening of something really avodic* and profound, and that’s how I understand care. It’s avodic*, it’s profound, it’s dynamic, and what I’m trying to do is really, when I say lose myself, I’m trying to dissolve the sense of self in this awakened care, and that’s going to get me into a quicker, more direct relationship with the essence or with emptiness itself. And I think in a way, we can describe that as the cultivation of virtue.

So we practice goodness, and that becomes a kind of pattern where we’re choosing how to reduce harm moment to moment, and that becomes a habit. We’re just attuned to choosing what’s reducing harm, and that for me is another way that we get swept up. We’re reprogramming ourselves to choose what is conducive to liberation. And I want to get lost in that so that everything I do becomes an expression of goodness and therefore an expression of virtue.

James Shaheen: I think the phrase you were looking for is I think wanting to make revolution irresistible.

Lama Rod Owens: Irresistible. Yes. Irresistible revolution. That’s what Toni Cade Bambara was always doing was to make this irresistible liberation like it’s the sweetest, most important thing that we could ever be doing, and it just becomes what we do and who we are. And over time, I think that’s what happens.

James Shaheen: You know, I think of the loss of agency in this sense too as if we’re losing ourselves or getting out of our own way in a very positive way. One stream of awakened care is love, and you describe love as a form of surrender and profound acceptance. Can you say more about love as a loss of agency?

Lama Rod Owens: Well, love is this kind of radical acceptance, as Tara Brach talks about in her work. For me, I realized that it’s hard to change when you haven’t really told the truth about what’s actually happening. And so this first expression of love is actually allowing ourselves to hold space for everything that’s arising. It’s just like this is it. This is how it is. I don’t have to like this. I just have to name it and notice it.

I think what keeps us from doing that really profound radical loving is heartbreak. When I start telling the truth about how things really are, then my heart is going to break because I have been so concerned with telling myself narratives about how I want things to be in order to feel good about what’s happening. So you let go of that and say, “This is it. This is what’s happening,” and my heart breaks, which is just the experience of having to touch into this deep disappointment. Once I start doing that, then there’s an honesty that awakens, and that profound holding becomes a love. This is what’s happening, and therefore, I can make a choice to change what needs to change now because I’m not lost in these delusions and narratives about how I think things are. I know how things are now. It creates a deeper intimacy with all phenomena, all beings, because you’re with the truth now, and you know that the truth is that everything and everyone deserves to be free.

James Shaheen: I mentioned love, but another stream is joy, and you write that for a long time you didn’t believe you had a right to joy, just like you didn’t have a right to beauty. So how have you reclaimed your capacity for joy, and how do you see it as essential to liberation work?

Lama Rod Owens: I think joy is a natural expression of our minds. I think joy is an experience that can connect us to this ultimate experience of bliss. I don’t think that we can actually experience bliss in the body, but I think that is the state of our minds. When we’ve transcended all dualities, bliss is the state, but joy points me back as an experience that I can feel.

And we need to connect to joy to hold the difficulty of the work of getting free. I tell stories in that section too just about how joy is used as a tool to help people do really intense social change work. We talked about agency, and the agency here, too, is that once you get connected to how things really are, it’s really hard to go back. You know, it’s hard to choose delusion once you have done the work to get clear.

James Shaheen: Yeah, delusion is wrecked for you.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, it’s just like, no. It’s like you’ve been driving a Hyundai your whole life and then you find yourself in a Mercedes and you’re like, why would I go back to a Hyundai? This is not to badmouth Hyundai but just to use as an example. It’s like you upgrade. You’re like, OK, I get this.

James Shaheen: So you also say that you never felt like you had a right to beauty, so part of the work of the New Saint is reclaiming beauty while also disrupting capitalism and overconsumption. So can you tell us a bit about what you call the Four Sweet Liberations?

Lama Rod Owens: That’s one of my favorite chapters. That chapter really came out of my deep love for André Leon Talley, who was a fashion editor and journalist, for many years one of the most recognized Black gay men in the fashion world, the only Black man in the fashion world for many years. And he’s someone that I deeply loved. But he passed away about two years ago, and I wanted to help people to understand what he offered me as a dharma practitioner. I considered him a teacher. I never met him in life, but he was teaching me about beauty, and this is where it gets confusing. He wasn’t teaching me to buy expensive things, but he was actually teaching me that beauty was always accessible as an experience, that I didn’t need to accumulate something. I needed to allow myself to surrender to being moved and opened by experiences, and that’s what I mean about connecting to beauty. I didn’t believe I had a right to experience the energy of beauty.

But in this whole chapter, beauty becomes one of these sweet liberations, along with leisure, opulence, and pleasure, these things that traditionally in Buddhist circles, we’re pushing away. We’re saying, “Oh, these are poisons, we’re not going to deal with these.”

But when we start talking about more tantric treatment of these energies, these are energies that are happening inside of me, so I want to be in relationship to these energies, and I want to embody these energies in order to open up these doors to emptiness itself through the practice of sympathetic joy, which is experiencing something pleasurable and then wishing that everyone was experiencing this. So it’s not just about me accumulating and holding on to really great experiences. It’s about me giving away the good stuff every time I get it, thinking about the collective, and that more and more decenters the sense of self and opens up the experience of space and emptiness. This is what the Sweet Liberations are trying to do.

They’re grounded in Black queer and gender-expansive life and culture. I talk about Pose and, of course, Paris Is Burning quite a bit. I wanted to write this chapter for people like me from my community, who feel like there’s no space for them in contemporary convert Buddhist spaces right now. This is for me a way that I’ve opened the door. This is a practice that comes, I think, directly out of Tantric Buddhism, working with energy and embodying this energy to connect to emptiness itself. And we can use our culture to do that. Our culture is full of wisdom that we can use to experience these higher states of freedom.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you talk about using the language of the people you’re speaking with, and I think that’s very much what you did. After all, the Buddha spoke in the idiom of the day. Back to beauty for a second, like love, you also describe it as an act of surrender, letting your guard down and expanding into the experience of the sublime. So how can beauty help us access the sublime or transcendent?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, I think it’s the way that we’re surrendering. We’re letting go of—well, I’ll just speak for myself. I’m letting go of the ways in which I’m protecting myself and guarding myself. I’m allowing myself to expand. And when I say allowing myself to expand, I’m actually letting go of the sense of who I think I am and then beginning to experience and touch into the actual expression of spaciousness. And when I do that, things get more fluid and more inviting. The world becomes less antagonistic, less rigid, less sharp. It becomes more translucent for me when I’m surrendering and opening.

And that is the experience of the sublime. That translucent fluidity really is about connecting to this ultimate experience of emptiness itself. But again, it’s not about materialism. You know, I talk about wanting a BMW. That’s something I’ve struggled with for years, and I’m like, well, I’m not trying to look good, I’m not trying to portray a certain image, and I realized I’m just trying to feel valued. Luxury things function to make us feel valued and seen and appreciated. And so instead of accumulating this stuff, which I can’t afford, I just connect to the energetic expression so that energetic expression begins to feed the sense of deep self-worth. And of course that self-worth is about me wanting not to suffer and wanting to actually experience ultimate liberation.

James Shaheen: OK, so let’s go a step further and talk about desire and pleasure. You say that yearning is the first step in touching the divine. So how have you learned to work with and channel yearning?

Lama Rod Owens: You have to want something. You have to want to get free. Desire or yearning is the last thing we give up before ultimate enlightenment. That yearning for enlightenment is going to take us to the threshold. And to go beyond that threshold, we let go of wanting to get free, which I think will be a really hard choice to make. But I am learning and training myself to yearn for what is about freedom and liberation and fluidity and movement, not to continue yearning for the things that are about creating rigidity and separateness or aloneness necessarily in a way that feels like suffering.

But I am yearning for the benefits of freedom. And I can yearn more for that because the more I yearn and the more I practice, the more I begin to experience what freedom is, and so I know that this is what I should be focusing on: not the rigidity, not all this other stuff, but this experience of getting open and clear and translucent and fluid. That’s it. And so I just start yearning for it. In the same way that we yearn for our bad habits, we can start yearning for these experiences of liberation.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you say one important practice of yearning is prayer. So first, can you tell us a little bit about the experiences of prayer you encountered growing up in church? How did these experiences shape you, and how have you returned to them? Because I found it very interesting that Buddhism allowed you to return to this.

Lama Rod Owens: Yes. Buddhism gave me permission to embrace the value and the importance of my ancestry, primarily because I was trained by Tibetans, not necessarily by Westerners. So my teachers were Tibetan, and I saw how they incorporated their ancestry and culture into the practice of dharma, which has given rise to Tibetan Buddhism. And I said, “I want to do the same for my ancestry,” because for much of my life I felt a little ashamed of having descended from enslaved people.

I felt a lot of shame around that, and I think Tibetans gave me permission to understand that I am only here because of the practice, particularly the prayers, the spiritual practices of my ancestors, and that transformed my relationship to ancestry.

I grew up in a culture of prayer in the Black church, and that prayer was rooted in the reality that we were not free, that there was a lot more to do before we experienced real freedom in this culture. That yearning to be free was on the one hand beautiful, but over time, it just felt too heavy. I was tired of yearning. I wanted to do. I wanted to actually do the things to get free, which led me into the study and embodiment of really quite radical social movements like the Catholic Worker Movement and Black Power Movement.

So the yearning for me turned into a yearning for social liberation. When I came into dharma and started practicing dharma in my 20s, that yearning was returned back to this yearning of just ultimately wanting everything to be free, not just Black people, not just queer people, but everyone, including the people who created harm and violence for us. Everyone needs to be free from suffering and delusion.

And so that yearning is what I begin to channel into my prayers and my praying with deities and rituals and ceremonies and so forth. My primary goal in doing everything is wanting people to be free, and my primary prayer is that everyone get free.

James Shaheen: You know, it was interesting, you talked about at one point, with all this praying, we’re still not free. So it left a bad taste in your mouth and you walked away from prayer. I thought it was a really beautiful thing that through Buddhism, you were able to come back to it. That was really moving to me. But listeners may be surprised to hear a lama talk of God so much. So how do you understand and relate to God?

Lama Rod Owens: You know what, one of my agendas in writing the book, like a sub-agenda, was really speaking to Christians because Christianity is one of my root practices as well. Being here in the South, I’m in Atlanta, and there’s this culture of people really trying to integrate Christianity and Buddhism, and I’ve come to a place where I understand this integration a lot more than I did as a younger person. And so I wanted to really offer this tool of integration for people. And it’s been done before. Thich Nhat Hanh did it. But I wanted to again offer this more contemporary integration.

But my other agenda too was to really give context to the rise of Christian nationalism that’s really impacting our country right now. And I wanted people to understand that it’s not the theology itself, it’s people. I wanted people to really have a clearer understanding of what God was from my perspective, which is that God is the expression of emptiness, space, and energy, and that Jesus was an embodiment of emptiness, just like our tulkus and rinpoches in Tibetan Buddhism. There’s no difference for me.

I wanted to offer something that could help heal many of us who were leaving the church with a lot of trauma, that God is actually this expression of liberation, not this expression of criticism and hate and exclusion, that God is always present as this experience of emptiness and space, which we can experience as deep acceptance or love. But I think it’s important for me as a teacher to really disclose how I’ve been deeply influenced by multiple spiritual and religious paths, not just dharma or Buddhism, and I think when I talk about young people, which is whom I wrote the text to, I think a lot of young people are really interested in integration of multiple paths.

James Shaheen: Well, certainly you do that. I mean, your core seems to be Buddhist, but yet it is shaped and informed by the other traditions that you come from. You know, you mentioned Christian nationalism, and in contrast to the emphasis on masculinity in really any form of nationalism, you describe sacred masculinity as an awakened state of masculinity freed from patriarchy. So what does this look like, and how have you come to work with the dualities of what you call the sacred mother and the sacred father?

Lama Rod Owens: That was so important for me to do in this work was to unbind masculinity from patriarchy, because for me, again, this is about balance. When I talk about sacred duality, for me, it’s rooted within the Heart Sutra of form and emptiness. It’s form and emptiness, that balance. And when I talk about the mother or the feminine, the mother or the feminine cannot exist without a balance of the masculine or the father.

Of course, systemic patriarchy has really informed or repainted the masculine as this expression of dominance. And so I am attempting to actually extract masculinity and reclaim it as a sacred masculinity that’s not about dominance. This is about balance. You can get deeper into these kinds of energetic expressions of the masculine. For me, the masculine is how am I connected into the sacred balance with the feminine, with the mother, not to dominate, but to balance, to hold, to see myself as the mother, as I’m embodying this kind of energy as the masculine or as the expression of the father.

And so for me, masculinity is about fluidity and movement and openness. It’s about structure as well. I equate sacred masculinity with form and emptiness with the sacred feminine or the mother. It’s easy to get confused about form. Form can get rigid without relationship with the feminine or with emptiness itself.

James Shaheen: We’re running out of time, so I want to ask one more question because there’s a whole chapter on it in which you discuss the complexities of devotion practices, particularly in the context of abuses of power within your own lineage. So can you tell us about your relationship with the Karmapa and how it has changed over time?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, of course, my relationship to the Karmapa is that he’s the head of my school of Tibetan Buddhism, the Karma Kamtsang, or the Karma Kagyu school in Tibetan Buddhism. I’ve been with the Karmapa quite a bit over the years, both in India and here in the United States. The Karmapa was the first teacher that I felt devotion toward. That’s the first time I felt devotion, and I couldn’t explain it. I just felt it as a deep falling in love with, a deep recognition that this person is the most important person in my life, an old relationship, really, that was starting over again. It was so familiar.

I wrote about my relationship to my root teacher, Lama Norlha Rinpoche, in my last book, Love and Rage, really trying to get at the conflict or the tension between devotion and calling out harmful behavior. But I don’t think I went deep enough in that work. And so coming back to the Karmapa, I was like, OK, I have to break through into this layer of helping people, particularly people outside of devotional traditions, to really understand the tension that arises when we are committed to someone as a source of liberation and someone who we consider enlightened but also who has done things that created harm for people and how this kind of enlightened nature can live alongside acts of harm and really trying to unpack that and really getting into some psychotherapy work, thinking about the shadow, thinking about one’s relationship to ego and how the ego, the sense of self, is important even for an enlightened being to stay close to because the ego is how we communicate. There’s no teaching and transmission that could happen if ego was completely erased. In a teacher’s experience, there would be no interaction. I couldn’t even register this person. So we choose to stay in a relationship to the ego, which is a risk.

James Shaheen: Actually, one of the things that came through in that chapter for me was not so much an idealization. It was more that you were getting at his humanity. 

Lama Rod Owens: Which is a risk.

James Shaheen: Yeah. To close, I wonder if you’d be willing to read a prayer from the book.

Lama Rod Owens: Let me just pull that up on my screen.

I evoke all those beings and sources of refuge who have ever loved me to come sit with me because it is now that I feel most alone. I evoke the Blessed Mother, the Sacred Father, the Spirits of Light, the essence of wisdom, my teachers and elders, the communities who have always caught me when I have fallen, the ancestors who have never stopped holding me, all the elements including the sacred earth who helped me to stand, and silence that wraps me in a space to be with my heart, and I call upon my own innate compassion.

To all those I have evoked, I offer my grief and what seems like my perpetual mourning in this body. I offer my fear, my numbness, and my inability to dream beyond shutting down. Most of all, I offer my fatigue. I am tired.

Today, precious earth, let me lie upon you and be reminded of my body and my heart. I want many things, but I need only one thing now: to give up to you what I cannot hold. I pray that I evolve past my belief that my pain is mine alone to carry. To my sources of refuge who have been evoked, you have taught me repeatedly that this is not the truth.

You have taught me that it is not my pain but our pain. You remind me that my worship of isolation is not conducive to my liberation. I want to be free, and so I offer to you what I struggle to hold right now knowing that you are only here to share this heaviness with me and to love me.

I am afraid of the world. I am afraid of people. I am afraid of what I must do to survive in the world. Even these fears, I offer to my sources of refuge. Today, my precious sources of refuge, in your love, offer me rest. In your love, never abandon me. In your love, haunt all others who feel lonely and tired. Please continue to haunt me in this life, in death, and into all my lives to come until one day I become a source of refuge for other beings. Yet it is also my prayer to become a source of refuge for beings right now in this life. May I and all others in this realm and beyond be blessed forever. I dedicate this labor to my descendants who will one day lead me into my ancestorhood.

James Shaheen: Lama Rod, thanks so much for joining. It’s been a great pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The New Saints, available now. Thanks again.

Lama Rod Owens: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Michael Imperioli. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Jenny Odell: You know, I think climate grief is so much grief for something, and I think in that acknowledgement is this recognition that you don’t really belong to yourself. I describe going to Elkhorn slew, seeing all of these birds. At that moment, there was such a profusion of them and they were so beautiful, but I also couldn’t see them not against the backdrop of loss. In that moment, I realized that it doesn’t really logically make sense to love anything, right? You know, from the point of total, utilitarian logic, why would you tie your fate to something that is endangered? And yet like that is the moment when you experience your deepest sense of humanity. 

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard writer and artist Jenny Odell. It can be so easy to feel like there’s not enough time in the day. In her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny examines the history behind our relationship to time, from the day-to-day pressures of productivity to the deeper existential dread underlying the climate crisis. In the process, she explores alternative ways of experiencing time that can help us get past the illusion of the separate self and instead open us to wonder and freedom. In our conversation with Jenny, we talk about why she sees burnout as a spiritual issue, the dangers of apocalyptic thinking, and how we can honor our grief without being overcome by it. So here’s my conversation with Jenny Odell.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with writer and artist Jenny Odell and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Jenny. Hi, Sharon. Great to be with you both.

Jenny Odell: Hi, likewise.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s great to see you.

James Shaheen: So Jenny, I’ll ask you what we ask everyone who joins us here. We’re here to talk about your new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, sure. So my previous book that came out in 2019 called How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and I think as I was kind of going around talking about that book and hearing back from readers, one of the pieces of feedback that I felt like I was getting was that even a reader who agrees with some of the points in the book about trying to think outside of the frame of sort of standard productivity and feeling like you always need to be producing something that these were ideas they could get behind but were having a hard time thinking about how they would make that work in their lives just in terms of time.

So I would hear from people who had children, multiple jobs, or maybe didn’t but were just thinking about someone in that position, like, what would that mean for them? And then at the same time, I myself was finding that I felt like I never had time. I was a full-time adjunct lecturer and also trying to make art because mostly my background is in art or had been up until that point, so it was honestly something that was annoying to me for a while. It’s like one of those questions that feels annoying until you realize that that is the question, that it’s something that’s worth pursuing.

You know, it was actually before the pandemic started that I wrote the proposal for this book wanting to think through not only a more equitable collective relationship to time but also how did we even get to the point where we think of time as money? What is that history? And maybe if we understood that more, it would be easier to imagine other ways of thinking about time that aren’t money.

James Shaheen: So let’s talk about other ways we might think of time because like everybody else, I’m one of those people who thinks there isn’t enough time in the day to get done what I think I’m supposed to get done, so I think of time in a linear sort of incremental way too just by default. So what are some of the alternative ways of experiencing time that you’ve found freeing?

Jenny Odell: I think that probably the biggest one was just acknowledging the social aspects of time. You know, if you look at time management, self-help books, a lot of them give the same—and they have for decades—given the same advice, which is to get a grid basically and log your time, and this is very much drawing from Taylorist practices in the factory and sort of like efficiency studies, and so that does give you the sense that time is stuff that you have—you know, I have mine and you have yours and there are ways of using it more efficiently but that have to do with just me individually.

And for me, thinking about how actually the way my time feels is very involved with other people, like who you answer to, for example, at work, women being expected to do more of the household duties, things that are social and have to do with power dynamics, whose time is valued, but also the fact that oftentimes, I think if you want more time or more control over your time, you need support from outside yourself, and that’s just a very different way of thinking about it than I have my spreadsheet of hours and I’m just not doing a good enough job using them efficiently.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you really trace the history of looking at time in that way, and especially during the industrial revolution, these self-help books and time management books began to present themselves. But you offer ways of thinking of time that are “not reducible to standardized units, but instead the very medium of possibility.” So can you say more about this? How can time be a form of possibility instead of something that we consume or don’t have enough of?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I mean there’s this kind of irony, I think, of that spreadsheet idea of time where, on the one hand, it feels like you should be going faster and faster, and it’s often the way of thinking about time that goes hand in hand with the idea of acceleration or productivity, but it’s also the form of time that just for me personally feels very related to determinism and feeling like time is going to plod forward in this way in these units forever until the end of time, right? And especially during the pandemic, the idea that every day was the same, especially without the social kind of shaping of time that we were used to. And so I find that that is a very deadening way of thinking about time. And it’s also one that, for me, lends itself to things like climate dread, the idea that everything’s always going to get worse, that it’s always constantly linearly getting worse, and so I think when I talk about possibility, some of that was just what I drew from looking at examples of time in ecology, just like neighborhood ecology, things around me.

I talk about this Buckeye tree. It’s a California Buckeye tree that I walked past probably every other day, if not more, during the pandemic and treating that as my clock or as a clock. It’s a notable tree because it goes dormant in the summer, so right now if you were to walk past it, it would look dead. But it has the most amazing, most fragrant flowers. It’s one of my favorite smells, and it’s very easy to kind of watch it go through all the different stages, and I literally picked one branch that I would keep track of, and I was surprised at not only how sort of nonlinear it is—like the whole tree doesn’t proceed at the same rate, right? Like one branch is flowering. Another one isn’t. The tree across the way hasn’t even started yet. But also just the the image right of the flowers appearing and then flowering and then the fruit appearing is there’s something about growth and development in that image of time that I felt like was a very important antidote for me to that other understanding of time that feels a lot more like squares extending into the future.

James Shaheen: Right, so it’s a sense of time that’s more consistent with the varying rhythms of life. 

Jenny Odell: Yeah. And new things appearing. 

James Shaheen: Yeah. So much of how we perceive time is linked to how we pay attention, which is something that you were alluding to, paying attention to that one branch, and you suggest that through close observation, we can “unfreeze something in time.” So can you say more about what it means to unfreeze something in time?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I think for me, it’s just an acknowledgment that other things around you are also changing and participating in time. So the complete opposite of this would be for me like a very alienated existence in which things in the world are just sort of there. Consumerism is a really good example of this, but I think there are less extreme versions of it. You know, even arguably someone who likes to go birdwatching like me, right, there’s still a way of looking at birds where you would just sort of see them as like automatons, like they’re just kind of there, they’re doing the thing that they do, whereas your life plays out in real historical time and those changes are meaningful. So for me, unfreezing something in time is kind of paying enough attention to something to break it out of that way of looking. For me, choosing that branch of that tree was a way of unfreezing it in time. I mean, you should see how many photos I have on my camera roll of this one branch. But it becomes, through that process of observation, the aliveness of that tree becomes a lot more accessible to me, and so it’s just sort of seeing something as a coparticipant with you in time the exact same way that time and life feels for you.

James Shaheen: That’s nice. You know, for Buddhists, this will be particularly interesting. Referring again to the act of observation that you mentioned, you write that we are “releasing something or someone from their bounds as a supposed stable individual entity existing in abstract time, seeing them not only as existing within time but also as the ongoing materialization of time itself.” In other words, attention can free us from the notion of a stable sense of self. So can you say more about that?

Jenny Odell: Yeah. I think that somewhere around that same part of the book, I quote Henri Bergson, the philosopher, saying that time is sort of inscribed in things, that things can be a register in which time is inscribed, and I’m thinking about actually recently I was at Fort Funston, which is in San Francisco, and I had not been there before, and all along this part of the coast, we have these kind of big sandstone cliffs, or cliffs of different kinds of rocks, and that particular spot, there is a cliff that has a lot of layers. Even if you don’t know, I’m very amateur at this point in terms of geology, but I’m very interested, and so there’s all these kind of obvious layers, but there’s one layer in the middle that’s very pronounced. It’s white. It almost looks like chalk, and I looked it up later and it turned out that that layer is from a volcanic eruption that happened pretty far north of here that blanketed everything with ash, this white ash. And then you see beyond that end, and then these other layers of rock are deposited.

I was just staring at this cliff for the longest time thinking like, I mean, we all sort of know that rocks are materializations of things that happened. Like if you want to describe what a type of rock is, usually the description of it is things that happened, right? But really just looking at this layer and thinking like that’s not a representation of this volcanic eruption, like that actually is the ash, and some of it had fallen off of this cliff face onto the beach, so I just picked up this piece of white rock and it was just in my hand. And so I think that that’s just like an amazing feeling, but also you at the same time can draw the same conclusions about yourself and that you are also in many ways a materialization of things that happen that is ongoing and constantly being built. And that is just a really nice, I think, counter to the way we’re treated as consumers and also on social media as kind of these fixed units that have very specific attributes.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, this really reminds me so much of the kinds of experiences that one can have in meditation. So it made me curious, aside from the clearly contemplative exercise with that tree, do you have a meditation practice that you do?

Jenny Odell: I do. It’s not a very consistent one. I wish that it were more consistent, but yes, I do try to meditate in the morning. I think that it’s really important for me as a grounding kind of practice, because I’m a very curious person. That probably comes across in the book. So my brain sort of wants to fly off in all directions all the time, and that’s definitely not helped by things like social media, and so I think that’s been—when I can keep the practice consistent, it’s been very helpful for me.

And then on the other side of things, I would say, I don’t know if I can call this a practice because it’s involuntary, but I very often throughout the day will be stopped by something. I live near one of those pedestrian stairways because I’m in kind of a hilly area, and the other day I was walking down the stairway thinking about something probably really silly, but it was very stressful to me at the time. My brows were furrowed. And a butterfly had landed on the steps in front of me. It’s a Gulf fritillary, I looked it up, but I hadn’t seen one around here before. I was unable to move. I just stood there for a really long time, and someone came up the stairs, and I am like one of those people who is just like, usually I would be like, “Oh, I don’t want to look weird or like I’m staring at something.” But I was like, no, I have to keep standing here looking at this butterfly because it was just like one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen.

When I was working at Stanford, this would happen to me a lot with birds because there are a lot of birds on that campus. So I don’t know if I would describe that as meditating, and it’s definitely not a practice, but I do think that I have kind of like contemplative moments that happen to me on a regular basis. And I feel like people who know me or who spend a lot of time with me kind of just have to put up with it. They know about it.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I would call that meditation for sure. I remember going in the Himalayas high up into the mountains and seeing a Tibetan Lama, a very venerated older Tibetan Lama who called that short moments many times, you know, many times during the day, if you’re lucky. I mean, there’s every possibility of just being distracted and not even noticing the butterflies. So there’s a practice there, you know?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I love that.

Sharon Salzberg: And as you mentioned before, this really intrigued me, the book takes place against the backdrop of the pandemic, which was a time where our usual notions of time were in some ways upended or broken open. I certainly noticed that. I kept thinking, “This feels strange. I usually, I guess, mark time by, ‘Oh, I have to catch that plane’ or ‘I’m going to see so-and-so because I’m in their town.’” And it was, as you said, the sameness of every day was kind of amazing. And so I’m wondering if you could describe how the lockdown changed your relationship to time as well as how you pay attention.

Jenny Odell: Yeah. I mean, I think I had the experience that maybe a lot of people who worked from home, especially on the computer a lot, had, which was I was teaching online, so I did have a schedule, but I wasn’t going anywhere, and so it felt like, as I put in the book, work and leisure were two different tabs on my browser, and so it felt very undifferentiated,, and I think also maybe because I don’t have children, we also don’t have pets, so I just felt like I was kind of in this apartment, this unchanging apartment, and that every day felt very similar and without time, I guess.

And so one of the things that I did was I put a camera on a tripod and just pointed out the window and started taking these photos throughout the day without really understanding why. I think I just did it out of instinct because I needed to see evidence of change, and because it was March, there was actually a lot going on in the sky in terms of clouds and just even watching the color of the sky change throughout the day, and realizing that I just really needed to see that, that not only was it changing moment to moment, but that you would never see any of those images again after that moment in the sky.

So I suspect that if I had written this not during the pandemic, I would have written some amount on this on unfreezing things in time and trying to be attentive to change. But I think that the way time felt for me during the pandemic made it a lot more pronounced, and it made it much more into, it was less of an intellectual exercise and more of a survival kind of thing. Like I actually need to see evidence of change and time for myself, and so I think the way that I wrote about it was different.

James Shaheen: You know, Jenny, you suggest that perhaps one of the gifts of the pandemic was the expansion of doubt, and you write, “Simply as a gap in the known, doubt can be the emergency exit that leads somewhere else.” Can you say more about how doubt can help us exit our current ways of seeing and being?

Jenny Odell: Yeah. I mean, something that this book and my last book have in common is a concern on my part about not having enough time and space to think through something in a nuanced way, even when you want to, just not being given the opportunity. The obvious example of that, which I wrote about a lot on How to Do Nothing, is being expected to have a take immediately on Twitter about something that just happened. You know, I love spending time in archives and going through really old texts and primary sources and things like that, and I think I’m aware of how much time and patience it takes to get to the bottom of something or to get to the roots of why something is happening now at a time when we’re often given very easy and inaccurate answers as to why something’s happening.

For example, fires in California obviously have so much to do with climate change, but there’s also a whole piece of it that was like land stewardship and fire suppression and things that are more detailed than just like the world is burning, for example. But if you go on social media, especially when we had that day here in the Bay Area where the sky was orange, there was a lot of, I think, uncritical apocalyptic language without the nuances and details of why this was actually happening. And so the time and space that’s needed to get to the bottom of things is something that I am constantly looking for and takes a lot of attention, and the feeling that you have time that I feel like is very hard to come by these days, harder and harder.

James Shaheen: Right, you know, you just mentioned the sky being orange and a sense of apocalypse, and you know, we had something similar here. The Canadian fires, the smoke from the Canadian fires came all the way down the East Coast. And you point out that it can be so easy to fall into apocalyptic thinking and what you call declinism, which you describe as the belief that a once stable society is headed for inevitable and irreversible doom. So can you walk us through some of the dangers of this view?

Jenny Odell: Well, actually, I think this can connect to what you were saying about doubt, which is that I think that declinism can kind of foreclose a really crucial space of questioning or imagination or whatever you want to call it that would allow you to imagine other pathways forward. You know, it may be the case that that space is vanishingly small, but it doesn’t matter. It’s very important. I think Rebecca Solnit has written really beautifully about this. What you believe very literally affects what it is possible for you to do, and that’s not just some kind of like hand-wavy thing, right? Really, you see that individually in people, what they think they’re capable of doing affects what they’re able to do. But I think it’s also obviously true collectively. So I worry a lot about not only giving up before it’s over but how the world looks to someone who’s given up. 

James Shaheen: We had Rebecca Solnit on the show, and she did talk about emergence and what the etymology of the word emerge was, and it’s very similar to your understanding of doubt as sort of a space or an opportunity. There’s hope there still. But you also mentioned an equally problematic idea, and that’s nostalgia, which freezes an idealized version of the past and replaces the reality of change with a static image. So from a Buddhist perspective, this feels like a fundamental resistance or denial of impermanence.

Jenny Odell: Yeah, and to go back to the fire example, when I’m trying to describe that nostalgia in the book, I give the example of growing up in California and my parents and I driving up north and seeing unbroken forests as far as the eye can see and me as a child already thinking, “Oh, wow. That must be what primeval California looked like, and trees are good. It’s good that we have so many trees,” which is true, but at that age I was not aware of indigenous land practices or how much more of those particular mountains would have been meadows in the past, meadows maintained through fire sometimes. And so I think declinism goes hand in hand with this idea that things used to be better. And again, I have to say, a lot of things did used to be better. But a blanket notion that things were stable and they were a certain way for a long time up until now, now we’re going over the edge, and I think it’s kind of a myopic view in both directions. I think I’m much more interested in a notion of history where every moment is actually very contingent and at every moment things could have gone different ways and that if you look at history that way, the present moment appears very different, to me anyway. It looks like it could also go a lot of different ways.

James Shaheen: I have a funny version of what you were describing driving on the coast and seeing all the trees south of Los Angeles in Orange County. When I was very young, there were orange groves and orange groves and orange groves. And I was nostalgic for that until I finally realized how utterly unnatural those orange groves truly were. Anyway, Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, well, I grew up in New York City, so when I saw a tree, it was like “Wow, there’s a tree.” So you also discuss the phenomenon of climate grief, which is something we’ve been exploring on this podcast recently, and it’s such a powerful question. How can we hold our grief about the climate without getting stuck in it? Or how can we honor sorrow without letting it overcome us?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, definitely. I just wrote the foreword for a book of poetry coming out next year called Near Earth Object by my now friend, former thesis advisor when I was an undergrad in the English department at Berkeley. It’s by John Shoptaw. I don’t know that he would characterize it as poems about climate grief. I think it’s about a lot more than that. But, you know, when I was writing the foreword and having read that book, it was very clear to me that poetry and poetics and art are really, really important parts of the answer for climate grief, as are collective practices and not mourning in isolation. 

The beginning of that book has a poem called “For the Birds,” and it’s just this amazing cataloging of birds that come to his bird feeder but are coming in fewer numbers. But it never sort of succumbs to either: it’s not like a nice poem about birds that doesn’t exist in historical time with the climate crisis, but it’s also not just a poem about there are fewer birds. It’s so suffused with the love of the person who’s looking at the birds who are coming to the bird feeder. And it’s talking about them almost like people. The poem describes seeing something that he thinks is a hawk and then realizing that they’re golden eagles who are refugees from the smoke from the fires. Reading that poem allows me to have all of the feelings that I need to have about what’s happening in their full spectrum.

And it’s not comfortable. But I don’t want to know what happens if I don’t have a place for that, and then because it’s a poem, other people can read it and we can talk about it. We can feel it together. And in writing that foreword, it made me aware of how important the arts are for expressing these feelings collectively.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s really such a powerful and important point. It reminds me, bell hooks was a friend of mine, and when I talked to her about this book I was writing about basically mindfulness and social change, she said she didn’t like the phrase social action because she was afraid it might only imply protesting and marching and things like that. And she looked at me and said, “What about art?” And just listening to you now, I had a whole new insight on one of the powers of art. I always thought of it as breaking boundaries and leading us to a new sense of possibility. But, of course, it’s not feeling so alone.

Jenny Odell: Right, and I think also giving us language because I think something that I observed when I was teaching college students, and I do briefly mention this in the book, observing the grief and the kind of despair on their part but also a kind of paralysis that I think happens when you don’t have the language to describe what you’re feeling. And then it just feels scary. It doesn’t feel like anything else. 

Sharon Salzberg: That’s wonderful. So you also suggest that grief can be incredibly useful as it can teach us new forms of subjecthood. So I wonder if you could say more about the types of subjecthood that grief makes possible.

Jenny Odell: Yeah. I mean, I think any experience of grief, I think climate grief is so much grief for something, right? I would say for someones. And I think in that acknowledgment is this recognition that you don’t really belong to yourself. I have a kind of similar moment in How to Do Nothing, I describe going to Elkhorn slew and seeing all of these birds. It’s actually a very similar feeling to that poem I just mentioned where at that moment, there was such a profusion of them and they were so beautiful, but I also couldn’t see them not against the backdrop of loss. and in that moment, I sort of realized that it doesn’t really logically make sense to love anything, right?

You know, from the point of just total utilitarian logic, why would you tie your fate to something that is endangered? And yet that is the moment when you experience your deepest sense of humanity. Just the experience of grief itself is like, “Oh, I care about something so much that it’s disassembling my ego.” That thing that you’re grieving for or that being has almost like the center of gravity is between you and that thing, and it has its own sort of like center. 

Sharon Salzberg: You know, climate grief can also lead to burnout, and you focus particularly on the spiritual dimensions of burnout. So I’m wondering how you see burnout as a spiritual issue.

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I mean, I can say for me personally, so much of this book but a lot of my work has come out of time that I’ve spent in the Santa Cruz mountains. I grew up right next to them, close enough to them to be familiar with them. And I have noticed that if I don’t go often enough, it’s not that often, but if I don’t go often enough, I start to experience something that I suspect is spiritual burnout. It’s become very clear to me that that place and the things that are in it and the relationship that I have with those things is a source of energy for me that I cannot create for myself and actually wouldn’t want to because I feel like that’s not even how that works.

I was looking at an old journal the other day, I think I was in the middle of doing press for How to Do Nothing, and I said they shouldn’t interview me. I wish they could interview the mountain. Because it didn’t feel like it came from me, and if it did, it came from the relationship between me and the place, and so I think that in a lot of cases, there’s going to be grief, but the thing that allows you to move forward through that is that source, the source of something that is giving you something that’s giving you energy, something that you feel so strongly about is kind of pulling you through it. I think you can actually bear a lot when something like that is in front of you.

Sharon Salzberg: You write that one component of climate nihilism and burnout is the inability to recognize the fundamental uncertainty that lives at the heart of every single moment, which in my mind brings us back to something you alluded to before when you said every moment is contingent, which also means there’s a kind of connection at every moment. Is that right?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, and that you are there. I think that in writing Saving Time, I realized how separate the time of my life had felt from historical time. Even if you read the news a lot, there’s still a sense that you’re not actually—there can be a sense that you’re not actually connected to that, that everyday life where you’re just kind of trying to make it through the day is not really connected in any meaningful way to the things that you see play out on the historical stage. And that is such a disempowering feeling.

The Sydney Writers Festival asked me and a couple of other authors to write letters to the future earlier this summer, and my letter to the future basically is this. It’s me talking to the people of the future saying that the thing that you and I have in common is that we live in a present and that every moment has been a present and that everything we do now just becomes the thing that someone in the future will take for granted, like all of the things, rights and things that we enjoy now, very much struggled for in the past.

I think intergenerational conversations are so important. My friend who wrote the poetry book that I wrote the foreword for is in his seventies, and I’m very lucky to have a handful of friends in their seventies. But I think that being able to take a longer historical view but within someone’s lived individual life, I think that makes it a lot harder to take 

James Shaheen: Jenny, you talk about burnout and the exhaustion that comes with that, but you also discuss another form of tiredness, what the writer Peter Handke calls tiredness that trusts in the world. Can you say more about this type of tiredness? How can surrendering to this type of tiredness actually open us up to something larger than ourselves?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I think I would describe that kind of tiredness as sort of releasing one’s grasp on the world—the acquisitive grasp, maybe I should specify, the kind of leaning forward, wanting something to happen in the next moment. When I was on a public radio show talking about How to Do Nothing, there was a woman who called in who had just been injured and I think was maybe also retired recently, and she said that she had been sitting in a chair in her backyard not moving and that a bird landed on her at one point because she was so still, and she said—and she was so sincere, she said, “It’s been like the best time of my life.”

If you were to ask someone, Do you want to sit in a chair? I mean, it’s probably also a really nice backyard. But you know, that kind of being released from this need to always get to the next moment, to always want something from the next moment. Because the thing that kind of goes with that tiredness that he’s describing is also essentially an egolessness. I think he says, “Now I was in the world again,” or something like that, like in releasing that clenched feeling of “I’m me and I’m trying to get through the world and I’m trying to get the things that I need to get” and just letting go of that suddenly, I mean, in my personal experiences of this feeling, all of the sensory details of the world kind of flood back in and you’re like, “Oh, right. I’m here, and these other things are here”, and time feels very different.

James Shaheen: Yeah, one of the times in my life that I was most relaxed was when I was very sick, and I thought, Is this really what it takes for me to relax? But Handke describes these experiences as enabling “more of less of me,” making room for everything else. So how can tiredness help us get out of our own way?

Jenny Odell: I think maybe it’s just by slowing you down. I mean, it could be just as simple as that. I describe in that part of the book having an experience like that, where I wasn’t sick, but I had pulled an all-nighter, and just the fact of being essentially immobilized on the couch. That was one of the first times that I saw the bird, consciously saw the birds I years later realized were cedar waxwings. But, you know, that being kind of my gateway bird experience, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that happened in a moment of openness, like forced openness, basically, where you notice things that are, I don’t know, outside of your own head.

James Shaheen: I remember those all nighters.

Jenny Odell: I can’t do that anymore.

James Shaheen: No, no, no. But you describe that experience as an opening onto infinity. Can you tell us more about that experience then?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I remember it very vividly because the project that I was doing, I was making digital art at the time, so I had not only pulled an all-nighter, I’d been on the computer a lot, and then I’d gone to my day job where I also had to be on the computer a lot of the time. And so I got home, and I saw this cluster of so many birds, I now know that they do this. If you see cedar waxwings, they’re always in a really big group. But they were at the top of this redwood, and I thought that I was hallucinating pears growing at the top.

I mean, I was very tired, and I had so little knowledge about birds at the time that I didn’t even know how to go about finding what they were. So, anyway, years later, I figured out that they were cedar waxwings, who, at least in this area, aren’t here all year, and in fact they’re not here right now. They should be showing up soon, I think. And they also just in general move around a lot. Like they show up in a tree and they eat all the berries and then they go to the next area and they eat all the berries over there. Their tail colors have actually changed in response to, I can’t remember what kind, there’s some kind of ornamental plant that people use in the U. S. and it’s actually changing their tail color, and so all of these things I think are examples of how the presence of these birds, it’s not just that they’re there, it’s an expression of things that are happening in the environment: it’s the time of year, it’s the things that are fruiting, it’s their own sort of whims and behaviors and preferences, and so it’s actually quite magical that they showed up in that moment. It pointed to a lot of other things that were also happening outside of me.

Like I was on, obviously, clock time. I had been trying to get something done on time. Meanwhile, there are these sorts of migrations happening in these larger climate patterns that were there all along. And it’s like I just finally saw it.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, moments like the one you just described seem to unsettle the boundaries between us. Can you say more about what these experiences have taught you about what you call the illusion of the bounded self?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I mean, even just what the self is is still a very active question for me. I wish I had it on my desk, but I literally just bought, I was at a used bookstore and I bought this reader that’s just different thinkers throughout time on what is a person and what is a self.

But I guess it’s only become more fascinatingly complicated for me through experiences like that. I am someone who has thought a lot about context, I think, for a long time. A lot of my art leading up to the books that I wrote kind of asked the question about how can you separate an individual thing from its context?

I was an artist in residence at a dump and I researched 200 objects, but their entire, like everything that I could find out about each one of them, and the conclusion that I came to was very similar, which was that this object you’re holding in your hand is the crystallization of economic patterns. People thought they wanted this or people thought they could get people to want this. These materials were available and cheap at this time, right, and hence you have this thing that seems like it’s just given, but actually all of these factors fed into it. So I think I’ve always been really interested in that in all domains.

So for the self, I do feel like I have some sort of core vaguely, but I do also feel like there’s Mountain Jenny, and then there’s Oakland Jenny, and there’s Paralyzed by a Butterfly Jenny, and I’m very different around different people, and I think someone could think that and come to the conclusion that like, OK, there just is no self. It’s all totally meaningless. I don’t really think that. I see it more as sort of like, I guess I have a very ecological view of the self, right, like it’s something that’s alive. It has relationships and balances and it can be out of balance, and it’s entirely made out of relationships.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, along those lines, in contrast to the notion of an isolated individual, you write that you’ve come to define being alive as an embrace. What does it mean that being alive is like an embrace?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I think of it as a mix of sensitivity and then also just, I guess, love. I mean, I feel alive to the extent that I would see the birds at the top of the tree, you know, and not just see them but also feel moved by them. I think that is the kind of engine behind, for me, wanting to see what the next day brings and also wanting to see how I change in response to those things because when I think of the opposite of that, I mean, I kind of alluded to it earlier, but my nightmare is a life of just feeling like I’m just an isolated unit that’s just incidentally here on earth for a while and like not feeling like I have any relationship to anything.

I mean, I’m someone who’s very fortunate to have been able to mostly live in the same place my whole life, and that relationship that I have to this place is so, so meaningful. It’s so much a part of who I am, and I feel like it’s actually something that someone said to me in the book signing line recently was, “I don’t just think that we see places. I think that places see us.” I think that’s sort of what I mean by the embrace is I want to feel like I’m sensitive to things that are happening around me, but I feel seen, that this is a reciprocal relationship, that I’m looking at a world that’s also alive.

Sharon Salzberg: You say that in order for the embrace to be possible, the forward-leaning ego that grasps that time has to die, at least for the moment. So how does this happen?

Jenny Odell: Well, I guess you could pull an all-nighter or get really sick. Honestly though I think that there are a lot of different things that could happen and they all kind of fall under the category of interruption for me. I mean, I guess I was interrupted by that butterfly, right? Having something that is enough of an interruption that it cuts through that drive that you have. And I think that honestly, those things can be big or small. I mean, I can think of times when I went a different way to work or something, you know, and then I just realized how much I wasn’t noticing and how much was going on outside of my little provincial way of thinking, and it sort of blew my mind, and all I did was I just took a different route to work. I think the pandemic kind of was that for some people. I mean, that was a huge interruption. It really rearranged people’s lives, and just judging from what I’ve seen in terms of people not wanting to go back to the office, for example, or just not wanting to go back to the way things were, that interruption really opened up that space, I think.

Sharon Salzberg: And to go back to love for a moment, you quote the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who writes that when we are actually seeing, we’re in a state of love and there’s no yesterday and no tomorrow. Can you say more about this state of love?

Jenny Odell: Yeah, I think one of the reasons it feels related to time for me and why I love that notion of the no tomorrow and no yesterday is because there’s nothing instrumental about love, and there’s so much right now that feels instrumental or wants to be instrumental. In How to Do Nothing, I talked about the idea from Martin Buber, which is I think related, of I-thou versus I-it, that having an I-thou relationship to something is much closer to what I was saying earlier about the center of gravity, and I-it is much more like things exist in the world for me to either use them or ignore them or discard them. But, you know, anyone who’s experienced even one second of love toward anything or anyone knows that the notion of gain or, I don’t know, strategy or anything like that really just doesn’t make any sense. Like it is the ultimate end in and of itself. If you’re there, you just want to be there, you know? And so it’s this weird thing where I have the linear timeline of my life and there are like these sort of developments and I have a career and all this, but I also know that these moments that I’ve had, these interruptions where I felt just like a feeling of love for the place where I was that did feel like it stopped time, I don’t really think of myself as having an age in those moments. It felt like they were all the same age. They’re very strikingly similar, and I suspect they will continue to be similar.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, I mean, I hope this isn’t too strategic, but I can see the path. It’s like interruption and being willing to be interrupted, because I think there is, if not agency, there’s some willingness there, you know? Otherwise we’d grab our mini iPad and go back to it. So it’s the willingness to be interrupted and the quality of attention and love.

Jenny Odell: Yes. And I also think something I’ve been thinking about recently is I think on top of that, there’s the sort of being able to catch yourself when you’re falling into that kind of trap of starting to think about everything in a really instrumental way. I say this because, you know, I go to the Santa Cruz Mountains a handful of times a year, and sometimes I’ll write a letter to myself when I’m there. It’s like Mountain Jenny’s letter to Oakland Jenny, right, and it’s like, look, it’s gonna happen. You’re gonna get totally buried in this stuff and you’re gonna stop paying attention and you’re gonna think these things that are right in front of your face are so important. And you’re going to feel vaguely miserable, but you’re not going to know why.

And it’s like you just have to like trust me, you just need to come back here. Just come back here, you know, and then when you get back here, you’ll remember and then you write the next letter, right? But lately, I feel like those are so separate, and I’m really trying to find ways of having more of those moments, you know, somehow even in the midst of the times when it’s the most difficult.

Sharon Salzberg: So it’s exploring practices that can help us enter the state of love and seeing, really, in the moment.

James Shaheen: So, Jenny, I was going to tell you about how bad I am at leisure. The book made me consider that. It’s yet another interruption of the butterfly sort. But, sadly, we’re out of time. I just want to thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a great pleasure. Maybe next time we’ll talk about leisure. And for our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Saving Time, available now. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation. So here I’ll turn it over to Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you. Thank you so much for an amazing conversation. Why don’t we just sit together for a few minutes? If you like, you can close your eyes. Just be comfortable. Depending on where you are, close your eyes or not. And just notice what’s happening in your body, what kinds of sensations are predominant, if any. You don’t have to judge anything or produce anything or change anything. Simply notice, observe.

And whatever sounds may be predominant. I’m sitting here in Massachusetts, and it’s raining and raining. Loud rain sounds. Of course, we might like certain sounds and not like others. But we don’t have to chase after them to hold on or push away. Just sit and be and be in connection with, unless you are responsible for responding to the sound, just let it wash through you.

Notice if you have a predominant mood, sleepy, joyous, intrigued, tired, again, without judgment, without chasing after something. You don’t even have to understand it in this moment. In this activity, simply be with. Observe. How is it? How is it changing?

Just see if you can settle your attention on the feeling of your breath. Just the normal, natural breath wherever it’s clearest or strongest for you. The nostrils, or the chest, or the abdomen. Find that place. Bring your attention there and just rest.

See if you can feel one breath without concern for what’s already gone by. Without leaning forward for even the very next breath. Just this one. And here we are. When you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze, and we’ll end the meditation.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Jenny. That was great.

Jenny Odell: Thank you.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you.

James Shaheen: Congratulations again on the book.

Jenny Odell: Thanks.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Jenny Odell. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Michael Imperioli: The goal of Buddhism is not to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to go next door or something. But I do think meditation can definitely help your focus. So I think art demands a certain intensity of focus and concentration, be it performing on stage, be it sitting down, writing, acting a scene, you know, the more focused you are, the more in the moment you are in responding in the moment to what’s happening in your mind and what’s happening, interacting with others, the better. And I definitely think meditation can help that.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard actor Michael Imperioli. Michael is best known for playing Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos and Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus. Offscreen, though, he’s a committed Buddhist practitioner. I first met Michael back in 2009 shortly after he came to Buddhism, and it’s been a pleasure to watch how his practice has deepened over the years. In my conversation with Michael, we talk about how he first came to Buddhism, what The White Lotus has taught him about craving and dissatisfaction, the dangers of instrumentalization of Buddhist practice, and whether he believes that liberation is possible in this lifetime. So here’s my conversation with Michael Imperioli.

James Shaheen: OK, I’m here with actor Michael Imperioli. Hi, Michael. It’s great to be with you.

Michael Imperioli: Hi, James. Thanks for having me. 

James Shaheen: You’re best known as an actor, of course, most recently in White Lotus and famously in The Sopranos. For our listeners, they may not know that you’re also a devoted Buddhist practitioner. First, I’d just like to ask, did you have a religious upbringing of any kind?

Michael Imperioli: Roman Catholic. My dad is still very devout. I didn’t go to Catholic school, but one day a week there was like a religious school after school at the church and we would go there so we could go through the sacraments like communion and then confirmation when I got a little older. To me it was more of a cultural thing than it was really a spiritual thing—for me, I mean. It’s different from my dad.

James Shaheen: So how did you first come to Buddhism?

Michael Imperioli: Well, when I was in my late teens, I started reading Jack Kerouac, who knew an awful lot about Buddhism. I mean, if you read his poems, they’re poems, but in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, you really see the depth of knowledge he had about dharma and then reverted to Catholicism towards the end of his life, though. I was very curious about it through his writing, and I bought a copy of the Diamond Sutra at St. Mark’s Books, which used to be in the East Village on St. Mark’s Place. And I really couldn’t penetrate it. And it was pretty much the sutra, not a lot of commentary. I still have the copy of it, actually. I’ve managed to keep it all these years. I really could not make heads or tails out of it. So Buddhism kind of stayed in the back of my mind somewhere till much later, I guess 2007, my wife and I started going to Jewel Heart, which was in Tribeca at the time, and Gelek Rinpoche was teaching there. And that was the first time we went to a Buddhist teaching. And he was really our first teacher. 

James Shaheen: So how long did you stay with Jewel Heart? Did you stay with Gelek Rinpoche until he passed away?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, we went to teachings of his, and I lived in Detroit for a year and his other son is in Ann Arbor. So I would go to teachings on the weekend and sometimes would have lunch with him and spend time with him. He was a really great influence. And just a good human being and a really good teacher. And we were also going to teachings of a lot of other Tibetan Buddhist lamas, and didn’t wind up taking refuge till shortly after that with Garchen Rinpoche, after we had met him.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, I remember Gelek Rinpoche’s place on St. John’s Lane, hidden away there, and it’s now the Village Zendo. They rented that space.

Michael Imperioli: It was funny, because when my wife and I first walked in there, we realized we had both been in there in the ’80s, before we knew each other, when it was Madame Rosa’s, which was a very decadent late night nightclub.

James Shaheen: I remember that. Yeah. You’ve come a long way.

Michael Imperioli: No mud, no lotus, as they say, right? There’s a good example of it.

James Shaheen: Absolutely. But I’ve heard you say that you came to Buddhism during the height of your success really. You say that something was missing. I’m curious because I always ask this question because I have to think about it sometimes myself. What was missing?

Michael Imperioli: Maybe it’s not so much what was missing, but there was no kind of satisfaction necessarily in the success that came. You know, I spent my late teens and twenties really only pursuing acting, basically. I mean, I didn’t do anything else. I barely traveled. I was in New York. I did every job I could. Becoming a  success really meant something to me, to be honest, not just working, I’ll be honest, you know, I really wanted a certain degree of success. I was driven towards that. And when that did come, both on a professional level, even a financial level, and I had at that time a family and kids and friends, many, many wonderful things that did bring some happiness.

There still was like, you realize that that wasn’t an end unto itself, that whatever achievement that was. And I just felt Intuitively that it was on a spiritual level, there was a wisdom maybe that was lacking, you know. Just doing another successful TV show or winning an Academy Award or something if that were to happen that obviously that’s not the answer or the end to something like that. Although if you’re pursuing acting as your life’s kind of passion, you’d think that would be, but it’s not.

So I started exploring a lot of different spiritual paths actually before Buddhism, not really committing to any reading books and going to a few meetings, seeing different people and going to a few centers. Like I would read stuff like Krishnamurti, and when I was reading the book, it made a lot of sense and it kind of touched me. Then the book would be over and I just felt, OK, now what? It wasn’t really a connection to him per se, to his teachings, like a direct connection to it, or a practice per se to implement into your daily life. And then when we kind of stumbled into Jewel Heart and Buddhism, I saw the potential for a path and a practice.

James Shaheen: So, you know, you mentioned your ambition, your desire to succeed in your career as an actor, and I remember many years ago, almost fifteen years ago, you sat on a panel with Gelek Rinpoche and Philip Glass, and I remember Philip saying that the very qualities that made him a success professionally were the same that he applied to his practice: attention, focus, discipline, creativity, among others. Has that been the same for you? I understand ambition is a tricky word, but the skills that you developed.

Michael Imperioli: No, I mean, ambition has a negative connotation in some ways, right? It can, but listen, to succeed at anything, let alone an art form or something, you need a lot of tenacity and perseverance and discipline and passion and creativity. A lot of those are positive qualities, you know, admirable qualities. So yes, I agree. I agree with Philip on that. Practicing Buddhism takes a lot of discipline. And it takes a lot of perseverance, and commitment, and creativity in a lot of ways, and open mindedness, and honesty. That makes a lot of sense. I’m glad you brought that up.

James Shaheen: You know, I met you after that panel that you were on with Philip and Gelek so many years ago, and I interviewed you in 2009, and the interview was pretty short. I’ve been listening to you on other podcasts, and it’s pretty amazing nearly fifteen years later to hear you talk about your practice with such commitment and depth now. So I was just thinking it helps me to see change in others that I often miss in myself. Do you ever feel that way? Because sometimes I don’t see the practice working. I’m not aware of it so much. I do it and I’m not so aware of it. And then looking back at that interview from 2009, you were a few years in, I believe.

Michael Imperioli: Barely.

James Shaheen: Yeah. And listening to you now, it’s like a world of difference. You know, that didn’t have to happen, but it happened. I guess you were karmically inclined, as they say, but do you ever see it in others when you don’t see it in yourself?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah. Well, especially my wife, you know, because we’re both, we got into it together. We practice together. We talk about it a lot. We go to teachings together and it’s a big part of our lives and I see it in her. She’s a very committed—she would hate me saying this—devout Buddhist and is very knowledgeable, much more than I am. God, would she be so angry that I’m saying this, but she reads countless Buddhist texts. And when I say change, I see it in simple ways about, like, when somebody annoys you, you have an awareness that somebody’s annoying you. When you behave in a way that you really shouldn’t have or felt was letting the afflictive emotion of anger or something get the best of you, seeing that and realizing, either making amends and realizing that’s not what you want to do and not doing it the next time it happens, or finding a way. In those very simple ways, I really see the practice. I mean, I see the discipline she has and the commitment to it. That’s very clear. But in those little ways, those day-to-day ways, I see it. And it’s very inspiring to me to see the changes.

James Shaheen: And so what sort of changes do you see in yourself, in your own life, in your own day-to-day?

Michael Imperioli: You know, I find that more positive people kind of come into my life. Kinder people, generous people, compassionate people. I found that to be true. And that’s amazing. Ultimately, the practice is, right, bringing awareness to your existence, right, to your minute to minute, second by second, day to day life, bringing some awareness of, OK, what am I doing in this moment, what am I thinking? I went for most of my life kind of justifying my emotions, my reactions: “Well, I did this because they did this and that’s logical. She jumped in front of me or took too long in the line in front of me at the coffee shop, and now I’m angry.” We can justify, and that’s fine, those emotions all the time, but you’ll be stuck there. You know, those things don’t go away. But yeah, somehow I found more positive people coming into my life.

James Shaheen: You know, I wonder, you mentioned that more compassionate and generous people come into your life. Do you think it’s also that you’re more aware of their compassion and generosity? That you’re more likely to see it?

Michael Imperioli: No, I know it.

James Shaheen: Just that that’s what you’re putting out and that’s what you’re receiving back. 

Michael Imperioli: I don’t know if that’s what I’m putting out, but maybe that’s what I’m seeking out. And by generous, I don’t mean financially. I mean, generosity of spirit and time. 

James Shaheen: I’m thinking in terms of dana, the Buddhist virtue of generosity.

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

James Shaheen: Yeah, so often I think about Buddhist practice and becoming a kinder, more compassionate person. I mean, I don’t think that’s a modest goal. I don’t think becoming a better person, a better husband, a better family member and so forth, I don’t think those are modest goals. That’s the bare bones of life. You know, I mean, you can have somebody practicing forever and then snap waiting in line, yelling at the cashier or something like that. So I don’t think that’s a modest goal, but. You know, more recently, I’m, this has been on my mind, and so I’ll ask you. Anne Klein, she’s a scholar and a Dzogchen practitioner and herself a Lama. She said she was recently challenged by her Dzogchen teacher when he asked her, do you have confidence that you can achieve liberation in this lifetime? Do you ever go there or does it seem too lofty? Personally, I’m a little bit shy about going there, although my teachers do. So here we’ve got this big.

Big idea, you know, and I’m nowhere close to it. I’m still focused on not snapping at my partner or the people I work with. And I consider it a victory when I have the intelligence and poise to make a decision not to be that way. And yet, sometimes I go back to Anne Klein’s teacher’s question, do I believe I can be free? Does that ever come up for you?

Michael Imperioli: I agree with you, by the way, that that’s not a modest aspiration, right? Working with those afflictive emotions, becoming aware of them. I think liberation is possible in this lifetime, but it takes an awful amount of commitment. I’m confident that it’s possible. I’m not confident that I’m going to get there, but I don’t really think about it that much. You know, it’s like, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said something, it’s in that documentary, I think, Crazy Wisdom, where he asked his sangha at one point, “You become enlightened. Then what?”

He kind of likens it to like you being present at your own funeral. The idea of you with this ego mind becoming enlightened, you know, they’re kind of conflicting things because enlightenment’s the opposite of that. So he’s almost saying you can’t really have yourself and your ego and be enlightened. He’s basically saying it’s not this better version of you. It’s not Clark Kent becoming Superman. It’s something else. One of the mahasiddhas I think said something like, “I’m not impressed with people who can perform miraculous deeds like drawing water out of the wall or turning the ceiling into the floor, something like that, but liberate one negative emotion, and that’s a miraculous deed.”

James Shaheen: I think it was Maezumi Roshi who said, “What are you so concerned about enlightenment for? What if you don’t like it?”

Michael Imperioli: That’s great.

James Shaheen: I always keep that in mind because on the other hand, sometimes I dismiss it too categorically. And I sometimes want to remember the possibility of being free is there, but I don’t dare hold forth on it or assume that this is going to happen. So on the note of negative emotions, you play Dominic Di Grasso on the White Lotus, and he seems like a case study in dissatisfaction, addiction, regret. Dominic can’t prevent the mistakes he has to make, although he pays for them in cash, and that’s both funny and at the same time, somewhat poignant. And it feels like fate, you know, phenomena just sort of unfolding. And yet practice is an opportunity to intervene. Most people won’t come to the practice. And I know you’re conversant with The 37 practices of the Bodhisattva. How do you think of that in terms of the bodhisattva vow?

Michael Imperioli: You know, the bodhisattva vow is a really big commitment. It really is.

James Shaheen: Kind of like enlightenment, you know?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, but it’s like you’re committing to, you know, because maybe when you first hear about Buddhism, you kind of think, oh, there’s a way to reach some heaven, basically, nirvana or something where all the suffering is gone or something. And then you take a bodhisattva vow and you realize, well, whatever that is, you’re not going to get there until everybody else gets there to some degree, and you’re hanging out for everyone else. But I think what the White Lotus really shows is those habitual tendencies that become so ingrained, both through your own, I guess, karmic imprints from if you believe in past lives, or just genetic in your DNA, or the learned behaviors that you saw in your younger years, you saw your parents or your family behaving in certain ways, or the culture you were in. And that those things can really stay with a person and stay in a family unless something kind of cataclysmic or some kind of light bulb goes off, or both, maybe at the same time.

I think the White Lotus, why it’s interesting to me, it’s like, here you have very, very rich people in the most opulent, luxurious, god realms surroundings. And they’re all miserable, pretty much.

James Shaheen: You know, an Italian friend of mine told me that that place is flooded with tourism right now.

Michael Imperioli: Oh, it is. It’s booked for years in advance. You know, because those things, although when you don’t have those things, you think this would really make me happy if I could live like this, if I could. travel first class and stay in the best hotels. And there you have a story of these people who actually do that and are not really very happy. There’s momentary happiness and there’s fleeting pleasures, but yet there’s some dissatisfaction that’s just not being satisfied.

James Shaheen: Right. There’s an interesting experiment I did when I was much, much younger, I found this apartment in New York, which was no mean feat at the time. And I really loved it. I had a view of the Hudson river and I was thrilled and I was excited because it even had a window in the bathroom, which in New York isn’t guaranteed by any means. And I remember thinking, I wonder how long before I take this for granted. I wasn’t yet a Buddhist, I didn’t have a practice. But it occurred to me, we fall for it every time. We think just this will make me happy. And in White Lotus, it’s really clear that’s at play. And what I said to myself is, I fall for it every time.

Michael Imperioli: How long did it take before you took it for granted?

James Shaheen: Oh, I think it must’ve been about six weeks. And all of a sudden I was in a mood again. You know, I thought, I don’t care about that window. I don’t care about the Hudson River. I got lucky to get this place, but I’m going to move. I stayed there for several years, but it’s like that. But when I see the character you played, it’s interesting because it’d be easy for me to hate him if I didn’t also identify with him. He wants his wife back, and yet he’s in the throes of this addiction and he can’t help himself and he can’t help his son. And it was for me such an accurate description of the samsara that we all live in. And again, I thought practice can interrupt that. It’s a possibility anyway.

Michael Imperioli: It is a possibility, but it’s even with practice, those ingrained behaviors, especially addiction, they’re very hard. Pema Chödrön talks a lot about how the path, a lot of it is one step forward, two steps back. And then maybe you go one step forward and it’s only one step back and you should rejoice in the fact that today it was only one step back. Like that’s progress.Especially things like addiction, like sex addiction and food addiction are very different than drug addiction or alcohol because you have to eat. You just have to find healthy ways to eat in ways that are not going to make you sick or make you die or whatever. And sex as well. I mean, most people are not going to become celibate. You want to integrate it into your life as a healthy element. And those things are tricky because they’re not just about abstaining really. Those things are a little tricky. And there’s a lot of gray area around them. I think practice can help because to really practice Buddhism in my point of view, it really requires real honesty with yourself. You really have to kind of have a bold, honest view of your own mind and your shtick and your things in many ways that people uncover through psychotherapy with psychologists and psychiatrists and things like that, but in a bit of a different way, in a very day-to-day way, sometimes a mundane way, but you really have to make a commitment to being honest with yourself. And that’s sometimes very hard.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, I found sangha and of course a teacher are essential in being honest with myself. You know how a teacher can say something that cuts right through your fabrications. That’s always an amazing thing. I remember once I was harping on something and my teacher looked at me and said, “Why do you care so much?” And all of a sudden it shattered. You know, I was sitting there seeing myself, this repetitive person harping on the same thing. And I had to really consider, Why do I care so much? But the practice is interesting in relationship with others and with the teacher, without which I don’t think I’d have made any headway at all.

Michael Imperioli: Oh, same for me. I don’t think it really exists outside of that.

James Shaheen: No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. And also breaking habits, whether it’s an addiction or anything else. the support of others I found essential. But just one more question about the character you played, Dom, because he’s a very nuanced character actually, he’s not just a shit, he’s also somebody who wants his family. Did it give you any insight into the nature of craving or dissatisfaction?

Michael Imperioli: You know, I was definitely familiar with that kind of pursuit of pleasure. And then the feeling of regret after when there’s something that you know is bad for you or that you know is wrong, but you’re kind of drawn to it, and then it’s like a hangover he’s experiencing that when he wakes up in the morning and then there’s two girls in the room and he probably went to bed smash drunk and was feeling kind of good and then woke up and it’s just like, “Oh my God, what did I do? And what did we do?” And, you know, that thing that was so pleasurable the night before that seemed so pleasurable now has turned to shit.

James Shaheen: Despair.

Michael Imperioli: Despair. You know, because the nature, as they say in the dharma, the nature of these things is not inherently real. I like pizza, but if I ate two pizza pies, I’d be hating life. You know what I mean? So the pizza is not, you can’t say it’s inherently pleasurable because it could also cause a lot of pain. It’s interdependence, right? Our relationships to it and how we relate to everything.

James Shaheen: Of course, until tomorrow, when you want pizza again, that’s the cycle. And then maybe you’ll eat three because it’s progressive desire.

Michael Imperioli: Exactly. 

James Shaheen: So Michael, in addition to being an actor, you’re also a musician. Can you tell us a bit about your band Zopa?

Michael Imperioli: Zopa’s an indie rock trio that was formed in 2006, and then we took a hiatus when I moved in 2013 for about seven, eight years. And then two and a half years ago, we started playing again. I play guitar and sing some of the songs, and it’s a very collaborative group. We’re influenced by some of the New York bands from the ’70s like Television and The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed and Patti Smith and people like that and then also a lot of ’80s post punk like The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen and ’90s bands like Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins and My Bloody Valentine and stuff like that.

James Shaheen: Some of your songs include traditional Tibetan chants. So how do you bring together these chants with this sort of post-punk indie rock?

Michael Imperioli: There had been over the years some Buddhist themes in the songs. And then we have a new song and the verses, there’s two verse sections and they’re the seven-line prayer of Guru Rinpoche in Tibetan. You know, it just made sense. There’s something cool about playing it live or people listening to it. Those mantras and prayers have a certain frequency and resonance that might touch people in some positive ways.

James Shaheen: Yeah, that’s a very direct example of how your practice finds its way into your work, but more generally, how does practice influence or shape, if it does, your artistic endeavors, whether acting or playing music?

Michael Imperioli: I think it, you know, meditation can, and I don’t really like talking about this because I really only know meditation through my practice, through Buddhism. I don’t really know meditation as a thing that’s separate from Buddhism. And the goal of Buddhism is not to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to go next door or something, you know what I mean?

James Shaheen: People do it.

Michael Imperioli: People do it. But I do think meditation can definitely help your focus. I think art demands a certain intensity of focus and concentration, be it performing on stage, as an actor, as a musician, be it sitting down, writing, acting a scene, you know, the more focused you are in the moment, the more in the moment you are in responding in the moment to what’s happening in your mind and what’s happening, interacting with others, the better. And I definitely think meditation can help that.

James Shaheen: So in other words, it kind of sounds like to me it’s an ancillary and unasked for benefit, but you point out something very interesting and important, I think, the instrumentalization of our practice in order to get something. And any of us can fall into that, but I likewise see my meditation practice, I cannot see it outside of my practice, and the wanting, the wanting, the wanting that tugs at me at the back of my mind is something I become aware of, not good or bad, I’m just aware of it. So I really appreciate that. And I like the Ferrari analogy.

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, because it’s like that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche thing saying it’s kind of like being present at your own funeral. You’re not doing this. These teachings and a teacher and the fact that this tradition, which goes back 2,500 years or whatever is still in the world, that there’s still a lineage and a connection to that wisdom and those teachings, it’s so unbelievably precious that to kind of, like you said, instrumentalize it for some worldly purpose really is kind of counter to it.

James Shaheen: Right.

Michael Imperioli: You know, Listen, if you’re really making a commitment to practice, at some point there’ll be shifts in everything, right? In the way you interact with the world and the way you perceive the world. Maybe. Little ones. 

James Shaheen: Yes, I don’t know if you ever read Huckleberry Finn, but I was a huge fan when I was a kid and he does get to show up at his own funeral. They think he’s dead and they have a funeral and they say all of the typically hypocritical things.

Michael Imperioli: That was really great. I read about a father who did that, who faked his own death and had his funeral and then showed up at the funeral a couple of months ago, I think in America.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s funny, there was a guy in the West Village who was thought to have died and it was a rumor, but a group of people went out to the pier to sort of memorialize him. And I said, “Well, what’s the source of this?” And the source was somebody who was marginal, but they had a funeral for him. And one day he showed up and everybody disliked him again after they said all these nice things. 

Michael Imperioli: All these really nice things.

James Shaheen: So the name of your band is also your dharma name, Zopa. So when did you receive the name?

Michael Imperioli: Well, the original name of the band was La Dolce Vita after the Fellini movie. But I never quite really liked that name. And then when we took that hiatus or right before we took that hiatus, we decided to change the name, which I think was good. When I took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche. I got the name Konchok Zopa Sonam. So Zopa is patience in Tibetan. And the day I took refuge, he said, “Patience is the key to your practice because when you lose your patience, you lose your love.” That’s what he said to me. And at the time, I was still very new to Buddhism. You know, I took that as a very Hallmark card kind of pithy nugget, you know what I mean? Like, oh, yeah, of course, you lose your patience, you lose your love.

James Shaheen: Kind of like lovingkindness. The first time I heard lovingkindness, I had a similar reaction.

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, like, of course, that makes sense, but I didn’t really take it into heart, really. And years later, I forget what happened, but I was like, “OK, the day you took refuge with him, he said this to you. So maybe you should give it a little bit more importance than you ever had. Maybe you should really look into that, about patience being the key to your practice. And since I had that thought about it, I started to just take it more seriously, to really focus on that as much as I can, or as much as my awareness allows me to. Again, Trungpa Rinpoche said something very interesting about patience. He said if you’re a dharma practitioner, patience is an obligation. It’s not just something you do out of, because you want to be kind or something like that. If you’re a committed dharma practitioner, patience is an obligation. Not only that, but it’s always an opportunity to practice. When you feel yourself becoming impatient, if you can become aware and choose to bring some patience into the situation, these little annoyances become opportunities for practice.

James Shaheen: Does patience find its way into your work and your process?

Michael Imperioli: Being on a set can be long hours, a movie set, a TV set, 14-hour days, and sometimes it’s very chaotic, depending on who’s running the set. Depending on that person’s temperament and ability, you know, a set can be tumultuous and chaotic, or it can be kind of efficient and, and kind of calm. And as an actor, sometimes you’re going to some difficult places emotionally. You need to find a lot of anger. You need to find a lot of sorrow. And you need to have some concentration and all this chaos is going around. And it’s very easy to have done that many times, but practice definitely can make the experience of being on a set and working on a set all day a lot more pleasurable in a way and easier. I don’t mean easier in making the work easier, but just if you realize it’s going to take time, people are doing their best and bring some patience to it, it can really help.

James Shaheen: I think about your playing impatient characters, so I wonder what role patience plays in playing impatient characters. And I think of something Mingyur Rinpoche instructed his students to do, and one of them was feel sad without being sad. And that kind of made me think of acting there. So be impatient without being impatient. So you’re playing this character. Are you really impatient or are you patiently playing out impatience?

Michael Imperioli: Well, you know, you understand being impatient so then you can play it in the situation. As you understand, it’s when your awareness shifts from something wider to something really, really narrow. And it just becomes about that grasping thing about whatever desire it is to be satisfied, right? I want that person to stop paying in pennies because it’s taking 20 minutes and I want to buy my soda and get out of here.

James Shaheen: You mean when they take out the little purse and start counting out the pennies?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah. That’s a great opportunity to practice patience, right? Because in your justification, you could say, “Well, this person should know, doesn’t this person care that there’s five people waiting?” You know what I mean?

James Shaheen: “Don’t they know I’m here and I need to go?”

Michael Imperioli: Don’t they know I’m here? Of course. So there’s lots of good opportunities for practice and to see your own aggression. And I don’t mean aggression necessarily in a violent way, but sometimes ambition can be aggressive. Sometimes, like you said, being in line in the store, there’s an aggressive quality to that. Why is that person taking 20 minutes buying that stupid thing and asking all those questions?

I keep going back to Trungpa. There’s a scene in that movie, Crazy Wisdom, I guess it’s early ’70s, maybe late ’60s, because it’s around the Vietnam War, maybe right after. And someone asked him about aggression in society. And he said, “I want to talk about the aggression in this room.”

James Shaheen: Right, and get to know it really well. You know, we recently had Meredith Monk on the show, and she said that a lot of our artistic practice is waiting, back to patience, and trying to get out of the way. Does this resonate with you and how you think about the creative process?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, well, especially on a movie set, you spend most of the time waiting. But even more, like if you’re writing. So when I’m writing, say I’m on a project that I’m writing and it’s going to take a few months or something like that, and you set up a schedule: I’m going to write Monday through Friday from 10 to 3. Chances are you’re not going to be literally writing fingers on the keyboard for five hours. And there might be a big chunk of that time where nothing’s happening, and you’re not really waiting for inspiration because you can’t wait for inspiration because you’ll probably wait forever. But you have to trust that there’s some kind of other process going on subconsciously and that the mind knows that those hours that you’re there, there is some kind of alignment that you’re in tune with. the story, the character, somehow, even if you’re not actively writing about or actively imagining it, somehow the consciousness knows that that period of time is related to that. You have to trust that. There’s a lot of waiting involved in that. Is she a Buddhist? I didn’t know that. 

James Shaheen: Yes, she is. She is a Buddhist. I believe Trungpa was her teacher many years ago, and she continues her practice now. She is very fond of Pema Chodron. And we spoke with her over the years. She’s been in the magazine several times.

Michael Imperioli: Oh, that’s cool.

James Shaheen: Yeah, she is. But, you know, during the pandemic, you started teaching meditation. So how did you make the decision to start teaching? And how has teaching changed your own practice? Earlier, I asked you about the bodhisattva vow and sometimes the impossibility of reaching people who simply aren’t turning toward the dharma, but here you are with people who are turning toward the dharma. That must be a joy.

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, it was interesting. I got onto Instagram right before the pandemic, like months before. And, you know, I would just really post other artists that inspire me and authors and musicians and filmmakers, actors, and I would post some Buddhist stuff. There’s a few great Instagram pages that I constantly send on my stories. And a lot of people started writing to me asking me how to meditate because they knew I was a Buddhist, because during the pandemic, people were very, they had a lot of time on their hands, they had a lot of anxiety and fear, and they felt that meditation could help.

So I would write back to people, very simple meditation instructions, people I didn’t know, you know, just fans writing in, and I would direct message people. It started happening a lot. So I was like, maybe I should just make a video and then people could just watch it rather than me typing in these things all the time. And I tried to do it on Instagram Live and it was a real disaster. And then somebody wrote to me and said, “Do you need tech help?” He said, “I work for Second City in Chicago and we do these Zoom webinars. And maybe that’s what you should do.” And then I wrote to my teacher and explained I’m on Instagram and a lot of people are asking me for meditation instruction.

And I said, “Should I do this as a class?” At the time, it was completely secular. Nothing about Buddhism, just calm abiding meditation. He said, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. You should do it.” And I found this, he was very young, I think he was only 25 at the time, Nick Solideo, who wasn’t a Buddhist or anything, but he was a fan of mine.

He said, “I could help you do this Zoom webinar. You can promote it on Instagram, but then people have to sign up. It takes a little more effort than just tuning into Instagram. They sign up and you do it.” And I said OK. And I started paying him to do this and we started in the pandemic. And a few weeks later he wrote back, he said to me, “I don’t want to be paid for this because he saw people were writing in that it was helping them,” and he said, “I don’t want to be paid for this.”

And I said, “Well, that’s really sweet and cool.” So we started doing it and I’d have like a question and answer thing. A lot of the questions were about Buddhism, particularly karma. Karma was a big thing they were asking about. And some other things about Buddhism. And I wrote to my teacher and I said, “You know, a lot of the students are asking about Buddhism. What do I do?” And he said, “If you talk about it, just keep the focus on the mind.” And he said, “Remember, Buddha is not the name of a man, it’s the name of mind.” So I’m not a dharma teacher by any means. It’s more like I’m a student maybe that’s been around longer. And my wife does it with me now. We really only try to, we’ll read some excerpts of sutras or other teachers and commentaries and stuff. but really only try to talk about my own practice and how I’ve implemented the practice in my life. I’m not a dharma teacher by any and in fact most of the time in pretty much every class I encourage people if they are interested in this to find a teacher from an authentic lineage. I offer some suggestions. But I also just say if you really are, you don’t have to, you could certainly meditate and not be a Buddhist and not study dharma, not take vows, refuge vows or anything. But if it does call to you, this tradition is alive and available, and really to find a teacher is critical if you want to follow that.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, it doesn’t surprise me that this began during the pandemic. We began airing live teachings during the pandemic and thousands came when we put Pema Chödrön up. 30,000 people watched. So it was pretty amazing. And tough as that was, it was an opportunity to do what we do. And it sounds like you did something very similar.

Michael Imperioli: And the class is still going on now, three years later. And a bunch of the people have become Buddhists. And some even have taken refuge with Garchen Rinpoche and other lamas too, which is pretty cool.

James Shaheen: What is the URL that our listeners can go to if they want to listen?

Michael Imperioli: They’re all archived on YouTube as well. But the website, if you follow me on Instagram, I promote the class and put up the sign-in link the day before. So on Instagram, it’s realmichaelimperioli. Speaking about 30, 000 people, we all talk about technology and how we’re afraid of it and how the negative, that’s one of the amazing things about technology is 30,000 people, many of whom might never had heard the words of Pema Chödrön or attended a Buddhist teaching or something like that and because of technology there they are, and that’s a good thing, right?

James Shaheen: Yeah, likewise we use social media to disseminate the teachings. We do the best we can in a pretty troubled world, I would say. But one last question. You’re a public figure, people notice you walking around, they know who you are and I think of the eight worldly winds two of which are praise and blame. How do you navigate the praise and blame? Because if you’re in the public eye, it’s got to even be more intensely present.

Michael Imperioli: You know, for a lot of people seeing someone famous or someone from a movie or TV show, especially a movie TV show that they liked a lot, for them, it’s a special kind of moment that makes them kind of happy, at least for that two minutes or something like that. So I try to focus on that. It’s like I’m not making them happy. It’s like their perception of the situation is what’s doing it. And if you can walk around town and people get happy because they see you, that’s very positive, right? And I also try to say  to remember that it’s their projection of whatever they’re responding to. It’s not my innate qualities per se. They’re seeing a lot of different things. They’re seeing a character. They’re seeing an idea of an actor. They’re seeing there’s a lot wrapped up in life. So I try to stick to the positive qualities of that.

James Shaheen: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. It’s been fifteen years. But it’s great to see you again.

Michael Imperioli: You know, that first time we met, I’ll never forget that one simple thing that Gelek Rinpoche said. You know, because people were talking about creativity, they were talking about lots of different things, and Gelek said, if you’re not becoming a kinder, nicer person, all of this is just blah, blah, blah at the end of the day.

James Shaheen: Well, that’s a great way to end. Thank you, Michael. It’s been a pleasure. 

Michael Imperioli: Thank you. See you. 

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Michael Imperioli. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Ross Gay: In this practice, I don’t mean to diminish the sort of fullness of life, the full complicatedness of life. But what I do mean to do is to attend very fully. That’s my hope. And by attending very fully, it also means I’m attending to what is astonishingly beautiful. So that kind of thing of, oh, you’re looking on the bright side of things, I say I’m not looking at the bright side of things, I’m just trying to look at everything. I’m very capable of looking at what’s miserable.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard poet and essayist Ross Gay. In 2016, Ross set out to document a delight each day for a year. After he published The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights, demonstrating that the sources of delight are endless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. With characteristic humor and grace, he chronicles his everyday encounters with delight, from the fleeting sweetness of strangers to the startling beauty of the falsetto to the unexpected joys of aging. In our conversation with Ross, we talk about why he believes delight is evidence of our interconnectedness, how he understands faith, and how to find delight even in awkward/unpleasant encounters. Ross also reads an essay from his new book. So here’s my conversation with Ross Gay.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with writer Ross Gay and my co-host, Sharon Salzberg. Hi Ross. Hi Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Ross Gay: Same. Good to be with you.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi. 

James Shaheen: I guess I should say welcome back, Ross.

Ross Gay: Thanks for having me.

James Shaheen: This is the second time. You know, first it was Book of Delights. Now it’s Book of More Delights, which is a delight.

Ross Gay: Very creative title. 

James Shaheen: Book of Delights 2, right?

Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah.

James Shaheen: But the world called for more delight. So can you tell me how this sequel came about?

Ross Gay: Yeah, and I talk about this a little bit in the introduction. Basically, when I was finishing the book, my buddy Patrick Rosal, he’s a writer and we share work and stuff. He asked me if I was going to keep doing the practice of writing. For people who don’t know, the premise of the book or the way the book works is that every day for a year, I write a short essay about something that delights me. And when I finished the first one in 2017, my buddy asked me if I was gonna keep doing it and I had other stuff to get to, but it did make me think, oh, maybe I’ll do it every X number of years. So I decided five years, and that’s kind of how it came to be.

James Shaheen: So is this going to be a lifelong practice as far as you can tell?

Ross Gay: It might be. Yeah. It might be, we’ll see. But it’s pleasant. I like to write essays, and it’s a neat frame for me to just be able to put a little bracket around things and to write essays. It feels like I get around to thinking about what I need to think about one way or another.

James Shaheen: Well, I’m all for getting these every five years, so thank you.

Ross Gay: Oh, good.

James Shaheen: This one is great. We’ll look forward to the next. But could you tell us more about the process of writing the delights? What constraints did you give yourself?

Ross Gay: So first thing is daily. I write them every day, and then I give myself thirty minutes to do them. And then for the most part, I write them by hand. Very occasionally I wouldn’t write them by hand, and very occasionally they’d take more than thirty minutes. That’s just the first draft.

But, so it’s a daily practice. At first, I was calling it a, I can’t remember, like a discipline or something. And then I said, you know, let’s call practice. And that’s how it goes. This year I wrote them all in notebooks, grade books that I got from where I teach. So, there’s a whole shelf of grade books full of delight.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I was listening to a podcast with Jennifer Egan and she talked about writing by hand. So I have to ask you, why do you write by hand?

Ross Gay: Until I wrote the delights, I had mostly written by hand, so that was familiar to me anyway. But as I was doing it, I did realize there was a kind of thinking that happens by hand that doesn’t happen on the computer. And a big part of that thinking is that I’m not deleting big parts of my thinking so I’m able to track the way that my thinking arrives where it does. And that to me is very interesting to sort of see how we got to where we got. And so when I’m doing it by hand, I think I’m more inclined to actually leave some of the remnants of that, some of the trail of how I got to where I arrive at.

James Shaheen: So the last time you were on the show, you had just published a book on joy. So I’m curious, how do you think about the difference between joy and delight, and how would you define each of them? Maybe that’s a tough question, but I thought I’d ask it anyway.

Ross Gay: No, it’s a good question. I like that question, and I don’t know. I’d ask it back too because one of the things I think of delight as occasional, like the hummingbird lands very close to you and you feel delight, which now I’m starting to feel like among the definitions for delight is something like the pleasant evidence of our connection or something like that. But joy, I feel like it’s just there and you can sort of enter into it. In a way, joy feels like the connection itself and delight feels like the little bells, you know, the little reminders that, oh, there’s this fundamental connection here. So that’s how I think of it: delight more occasional; joy, more ever present in a way, sort of waiting.

James Shaheen: You sound a little like Sharon now. Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, this is tough. I mean, words are fascinating. You know, there’s awe and there’s wonder and there’s delight and there’s happiness and there’s joy. And I remember a journalist once saying to me that no one was really interested in happiness anymore, they were only interested in joy. And I said I find that very unfortunate because I have the word happiness in most of my book titles. You know, that’s really a sad thing to hear. But part of my question is that you said that one of the unexpected perks of writing a book about delight is that readers will reach out to you to share their own practices of delight. And I’m wondering if you actually first found a different response from people using the word joy and using the word delight.

Ross Gay: It’s funny, I think what you’re talking about of people being interested in joy instead of happiness, people will have the same response to the word joy for sure and delight. They’ll think that I’m talking about something that is, I don’t know, that’s not serious, I don’t know. I was at a reading recently, maybe six months ago, and a woman was in the front row and she was just not interested. As I sort of explained what I was thinking about in these books, she actually softened and was like, “Oh, OK, I’m ready for this.” But she didn’t want to hear about just happy little stuff, so it was interesting.

Sharon Salzberg: One of the things you say, which is so fascinating, is that delight compels us to share, and so I think there must be quite a bit of discovery you go through as others share their delights with you.

Ross Gay: It’s one of the pleasures of this, which I could never have anticipated at all. One of the pleasures of having written these books is that people will say, “Oh, this delighted me, this thing delighted me.” You know, sometimes I’ll get a little letter or I’ll get, you know, people online or something like that. And it’s an interesting thing because that makes one’s life a little bit more pleasant. I did not expect that. At the same time, people also, and this feels very interesting and moving to me, people will also say that the book was a friend to me during this incredible crisis, and that feels also moving. That feels instructive in some way. It feels like there’s something really relevant and important to the thing of like what it means to be in the presence of people who are not dismissing or diminishing the suffering of each other but are also in the midst of it able to call attention to what is incomprehensibly beautiful, and that feels really important.

But also the other thing that’s been really interesting to me, and I hadn’t anticipated it, is that there are a lot of people who sort of say, “Oh yeah, we started a delight practice,” and it looks like any number of things. People get on Zoom doing a delight every morning or something like that. That’s another thing I could not have anticipated exactly. Although looking back, I see, oh yeah, it’s a kind of practice, it’s daily, it’s got constraints. It’s a thing that’s in a way easy to kind of plug into,

Sharon Salzberg: Another thing you say that’s very interesting is that you’ve come to appreciate how delight is given to us. So what does it mean for delight to be given to us?

Ross Gay: That follows the other thing, like the people will often thank me because they now have this delight practice that they do with their friends. And I try to remember to be like, this thing is given to me. All I’m doing is like paying attention. And in a way it’s sort of like that practice, which itself feels like a practice to remember that I’m just paying attention. I’m not making the stuff. I’m just paying attention. That’s how it feels like it’s given to me. You know, we have a garden, and this time of year, it’s amazing. Among the amazing things are these hummingbirds are showing up and I’m just paying attention. I’m just noting it. So in that way it feels like it’s given to me. So for whomever this book is useful and for those who feel like I’m giving it to them, I’m like, yeah, we’re all giving it to each other. And that feels like there’s kind of bounty, which feels nice.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, in Buddhist traditions, one of the sublime states is mudita, or sympathetic joy or appreciative joy, as it’s sometimes called, which is really joy in the happiness of others. Instead of falling sway to so much envy or jealousy, it’s really actually taking delight in the happiness of others. So I wonder if you could say something about that.

Ross Gay: That feels also like a thing that I learned writing the first book, which was that so often I’d be—there’s an essay in that first book where I talk about there’s a toddler walking down the row of an airplane and the adults couldn’t not freak out. They were just so excited by this baby. And I was in the midst of reading this book about something horrible, and eventually I had to kind of put it down to enjoy all of the enjoyment that I was in the midst of. And it was like this kind of wonderful, pure enjoyment, and I do feel like that’s a thing that I started to learn, that so much of my delight was actually delighting at the delight of other people in the way that we do when we let ourselves. It feels like it’s kind of built in, and it feels nice to sort of be practicing that built-in thing. 

James Shaheen: You know, you mentioned paying attention, I’m just paying attention, and I loved it when you wrote you’re not being optimistic, you’re just paying attention. So do you think delight has shaped or even restructured how you pay attention?

Ross Gay: Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Because there’s all these things that I feel like just by doing this practice, I’ve gathered a kind of reservoir of things that now I know, “Oh, that’s happening. That delights me,” as opposed to it’s just happening. I feel like it is a thing that I’m sort of like, oh yeah, that’s another thing that I love actually. Something like that. That’s one of the things that I found myself arguing a little bit with the delights as the kind of optimistic practice in part because in this practice, I don’t mean to diminish the sort of fullness of life, the full complicatedness of life. But what I do mean to do is to attend very fully. That’s my hope. And by attending very fully, it also means I’m attending to what is astonishingly beautiful. So that kind of thing of like, oh, you’re looking on the bright side of things, I say I’m not looking at the bright side of things, I’m just trying to look at everything. You know, I’m trying to look at everything. I’m very capable of looking at what’s miserable.

James Shaheen: Well, that’s kind of a default. I mean, that’s not hard.

Ross Gay: Yeah, that’s not hard.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, often what you’re fully attentive to is what we might otherwise take for granted or consider ordinary. But in your work, the common or the everyday becomes unfamiliar and new, and sometimes in a startling way. So I’m wondering how this relates to your background as a poet. We recently had the poet Jane Hirshfeld on the podcast, and she talked about the process of defamiliarization. Do you see a connection between your poetry and your openness to this type of wonder, or seeing in the common or everyday or the taken for granted something extraordinary?

Ross Gay: I think there’s probably something to the practice of writing poems, how I try to do it, which is to at least on one hand be, I mean, at the basic level, be trying to sort of make, handle, use language in a way that does in fact defamiliarize our understanding. I feel like that might be a way to think about it first.

But the other thing that I think about with poems is that it is, again, for me, the way I try to write poems is to pay attention to something with a kind of precision or a kind of accuracy or a kind of intensity that does make whatever the thing is transform in the process of my observation. I’m not trying to transform anything. I’m trying to pay very close attention to something. But by now I know that for the most part, usually when I pay close attention to things, they transform to some extent. You know, I do feel like writing poems can be a good practice for just noticing.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you describe ordinary experiences or sometimes experiences that might be negative in ways that show us how to take joy in them. I mean, I really laughed when you went camping. You and your partner were ill-prepared. You were wearing cotton, which, according to the veteran you come across, is lethal. I never thought of cotton as lethal.

Ross Gay: Who knew?

James Shaheen: And she’s basically berating you for being so ill prepared, and rather than taking offense, you see the humor and sort of the joy in that situation too. So I really appreciated that, and I got a good laugh out of it. You say that wonder is an experience where the world is made to you anew. Can you say more about what delight has taught you about being perpetually wonderstruck, even in the face of these situations that might otherwise be difficult? I have to go back to the camping one. That was so funny.

Ross Gay: It was funny. I think maybe one of the things about this practice—it’s funny the way you raise it makes me think differently—is that it might be the case that there’s always, like, I’m trying to think about the way that a practice sort of grounds something and it orients something and maybe it sort of puts guardrails on it in a certain kind of way like I know something about it.

But it might be the case that if, while I’m doing this practice, I’m wondering every day kind of alert in a certain kind of way to what’s going to delight me. It’s starting with a question: I wonder. I wonder what’s gonna delight me. And I wonder too, I’m saying that word a lot, if that experience of not knowing what’s going to delight you sort of prepares the ground of not knowing. The vocation for the ear is to not know. Maybe there’s a first knowing, which is like, “Something’s probably going to delight me.” But the not knowing is like, “I don’t know what it is.”

So the delight in a way, it feels like that practice of just being not sure feels to some extent, or maybe to a large extent, connected to wonder, which to me feels like a kind of fundamental unknowing. What do you think?

James Shaheen: What do I think? I think that that’s an excellent way to go about it, because if I already know, nothing’s going to be new. Nothing’s going to inspire wonder. I mean, this is the second time we’ve had you on, and I think you’ve become unwittingly more Buddhist, more Buddhist than me or Sharon. It’s just very interesting. Not knowing is something that comes up a lot in Buddhism. It’s like beginner’s mind, more or less. But I was really amazed. I thought if somebody berated me like that on a camping trail, I don’t know if I would’ve taken joy in it. But you’re really good at this.

Ross Gay: You know, it took some—I acknowledge that I’m like, man, she was really going after me.

James Shaheen: Well, that’s there too. That’s there too. But all of it is a joy. Or a delight, I should say.

Ross Gay: Yeah, that’s right.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, in my experience, that’s a really interesting moment when I realize that my habit, my conditioning is such to see what’s wrong and see what’s worrisome and I can complain about in contrast to what else happened today. And to realize that it’s like a rut, it’s a habit, and moving out of it takes not force or violence but intentionality. It’s like, What else happened today? Or Where is the good in this? And people think that’s hypocritical or stupid, like you’re just kind of walking around with a smile on your face, not really feeling anything, but it’s not true.

It opens us to parts of life or a truth that we’re not hanging out with a lot. You know, it’s kind of unfamiliar and, and there’s something whole about that and fulfilling. You also write very beautifully that one of the purposes of the beautiful is to bring us to wordlessness and grant us silence, which is another way of not knowing. I’m wondering how you view the connection between beauty and silence.

Ross Gay: One thing I want to say about what you were saying too is that acknowledgement of And what else? What else today? I wonder about that as an opening question as opposed to a closing question, like the question, What do we love? What do I love? as opposed to, all of which is also important, What is coming for me? But what do we love in common, or what was beautiful, or what was given to you?

Those things feel to me really like sort of opening questions that bring us closer to one another or help us to acknowledge our connection to another, which to me then sort of further inclines us to make connections. They grow the thing that they witness, it feels to me in some way.

But beauty and silence, that’s such a good question. That essay that you’re mentioning, it’s an essay about the mostly eighties pop group DeBarge, and I’m talking about the falsetto and that the falsetto sometimes is beautiful enough that it can kind of stun us into silence. You know, it might come back to the same thing that silence is evidence of wonder. It’s evidence of the unknown. Sometimes the beautiful or what is sort of startlingly beautiful, part of what makes it startlingly beautiful is that we can’t conceptualize it or we can’t wrap our minds around it, and so we get to just be silent in the face of it. I wonder if it’s that.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, so much of the book centers on the physicality of delight, and I’m wondering, how does delight feel in your body, and what about joy? Is it different?

Ross Gay: That’s also a good way of taxonomizing delight and joy. I do feel like joy is a—I’m more inclined to weep in joy. There’s something about that. In a way, it almost might be more like disassembling, joy. Like there might be something more in that beautiful way of sort of unbecoming with joy, whereas delight, again, it feels like a bell or something. It feels more like [gasp] kind of thing, that kind of sweet startling. But joy, for me, when I’m feeling joy and the experiences that I’ve had of joy and also the experiences that I’ve had that in retrospect may have been joy but were not, were terrifying, it feels like becoming something else, disappearing in some kind of way.

James Shaheen: Sometimes we feel ambivalent about joy or delight. We almost feel an inability to fully feel it or embrace it. We might even feel some vague sense of guilt about it. What about that?

Ross Gay: To me, that’s an immature—when I say immature, I don’t mean that with judgment. It feels like an immature understanding of what something like joy is or the way I think of joy. It’s kind of like a commercial where you’re dancing with your new car. If that’s joy, then that’s like, whatever, who cares. But when I’m talking about joy or delight, I’m thinking of it as being in the midst of our lives, which are full and complicated, and we know we’re going to die.

James Shaheen: Right, I tend to think that we suffer from a lack of it, frankly.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah. I mean, I understand the pattern just because I have it and because I work so often and with great joy with caregivers, people who, either in their families or in their professional lives, are really on the front lines of suffering. And it’s very hard to feel you do deserve this delight. The way I approach it is really trying to think through more deeply, like where does resilience come from? And what happens when that avenue is blocked and you’re not getting fed in that way and you get depleted and you get exhausted, even more exhausted and utterly crash in the end? And so I think you’re right. We don’t understand it quite, and so the word I tend to use is incomplete. Like, I feel good when I have something nice happen. That’s true. But I also feel good when I can breathe and connect and see someone else. I’m filled with some feeling, which helps me keep going.

Ross Gay: Yeah, for sure. I agree.

James Shaheen: Another recurring theme of the book is time, and you write that though the nominal subject of the book is delight, the real subject is the passage of time. Can you say more about how your relationship to time has shifted over the years? How have you been noticing time’s passage differently?

Ross Gay: Well, you know, my mother’s outside in the kitchen. She’s been here for five days. She just turned 82. Every time we’re here, we talk about my father’s death. He died nineteen years ago, and it’s a significant part of our experience. But you know, like to be with your mother, I just turned 49, and she’s like, “God, Rossy.” I think it’s probably the case for most people, but the older you get, the more you’re like, time, huh, this thing. The answer to your question is I don’t quite know. I do understand that sometimes, for instance, the fact of this book being five years after the first book, that’s why I say the nominal subject of this book is passed of time. Because a few times I’m referencing what happened five years ago, and there’s something that we just know embedded in that story is like, “Oh, and then if you do this every five years, there will be a last one.” It might be this one, but it might be like four down the road. You know, who knows. But that to me, in a way, it makes it extra interesting. And in a way it actually adds that layer that when you’re talking about delight and you’re also talking about aging, you’re talking about delight and you’re also talking about dying.

James Shaheen: Right, it does seem like getting older plays a larger role in this collection, and you chronicle what you call the many jewels of aging. Could you share a bit about how getting older has shifted your relationship to joy and delight? Has it changed how you’re experiencing these states?

Ross Gay: Yeah, I feel like one is that I’ve sort of given myself the task of attending to the states. I don’t know that when I was say 30, I yet had the wherewithal or the chops or the interest or whatever to quite be. It’s very interesting to me now, and among the reasons I think joy and delight are so interesting to me is because I’m deeply in belief of the fact that we’re all connected. I believe in this deep and fundamental connection. And I suspect when I was like a kid, I didn’t want to believe that. And I think there are probably significant parts of myself that still don’t want to believe that, but I feel like that’s probably where a lot of my pain in my life comes from—that I don’t want to be connected, you know, I want to sort of isolate.

So I think that might be one sort of significant way that the older I get my relationship to delight and joy change. I’m very interested in this idea of joy in part because I’m interested in spending my time paying attention to how we’re connected. It’s much more interesting to me now than paying attention to how we’re not connected, which I’ve spent a lot of time doing. But I feel like the much more interesting thing is paying attention to how we’re connected.

James Shaheen: Yeah. I mean, I think here of what they’re referring to is the epidemic of loneliness. It seems that people do not feel so connected. But you’ve also said the most interesting thing about us humans is that we die and we change, which resonates deeply with Buddhist teachings, although I won’t push any more Buddhism onto you, Ross. You seem a natural at this. How do you see our mortality as an occasion for joy?

Ross Gay: If that’s one of the grounds of our being together, it feels like that’s one of the things that we share, that for the start, I feel like there’s something really moving about walking down the street and seeing whoever it is walking toward me and being like, “Oh yeah, you too will die. We’re both going to be dead.” I think that’s an interesting ground to sort of operate on. I also think there’s also this sort of this shared fleetingness of things that if we can kind of get a handle of that, be less afraid of that, be curious about that, it also seems to me to be like a ground of sharing, to be practicing witnesses of how fleeting this whole thing is. That offers a kind of possibility for generosity, a different kind of generosity if we think that that’s another thing that we don’t share—I’m going to die but you’re not, or vice versa.

James Shaheen: We do sometimes go about our lives as if that were true.

Ross Gay: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Sharon Salzberg: You also write about how delight can occasion and be occasion by faith—faith in each other, and our capacity for “mutual, radiant, unpredictable. Sloppy mycelial, transgressive care.” Could you say more about how you understand faith?

Ross Gay: That feels like a lesson for me regularly, and maybe this is part of the practice of this delight thing. It’s interesting. In the first book I had this essay where I’d been writing a bunch of ideas for delights, just ideas, and eventually I had to get rid of them because that wasn’t the practice. The practice was to have a delight every day, and to have a delight every day was a kind of faith that there would be a delight every day, which I think comes from practice. I feel like in this instance, the faith follows the practice. The practice has provided the evidence that, oh yeah, you can have faith in this thing. So maybe that’s how I would say that faith and delight or faith and joy sort of arrive together, you know, or how they have a connection to one another. It feels very much that.

There’s another one in this book where I’m talking about my friend Kate’s cat got lost. In the essay I sort of reveal that every time I see a little sign on a telephone pole that says “Lost Cat,” I’m like, “Oh man, that’s a bummer. You’re never going to see your cat again.” And in a way I’m like, oh yeah, I have a kind of faith, and my faith in that universe compels me to contribute to that universe, which is to say that when I see a bummer, I’m not looking around for anyone’s cat. If my friend’s cat gets lost, I’m not helping them out. Right. You know? And I’ve been an asshole on account of that. My friend Kate, on the other hand, has faith in this other kind of cat-rescuing universe. She made signs, and her cat got back to her. And in a way, the other thing that kind of comes from that is that it’s a beautiful story, actually. Her cat got lost. She put up signs. She goes to the place where her cat got lost, which is behind a strip mall in a murky, swampy area. She goes out there at dawn one day shortly after the cat gets lost, and there are people out there calling her cat’s name.

That’s the kind of faith that she gave me, but I needed a reason to sort of have that faith. In a way, the thing that I’m thinking about in that essay is that often these things are given to you by other people. Someone has to teach you that, oh, when you put signs up, people kind of try to take care of you.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s interesting, I wrote a book called Faith, so it’s a topic I’m very interested in. And one of the reasons I wrote it, I realized later looking back, was that I have a kind of passion for redeeming words, words that used to maybe be useful for us in our lives or uplifting or opening in some way, and then through association and the different ways they get used, they get maybe a very negative connotation. Certainly that was the case when I was writing Faith. People would say to me, “Why are you doing that?,” my friends, and clearly for them there was an association between faith and being silenced and not being able to ask questions. And you are using it really in an opposite kind of way, bringing us to not knowing and opening and it’s very, very different.

Ross Gay: Yeah. I had a friend say something once, and I remember it kind of blew my mind when we were kids. We were in college or something, and he said that faith doesn’t exist without doubt. Something like that. And I remember that that was such a beautiful observation, like, oh yeah, there’s some degree of suspension.

Sharon Salzberg: And also questioning and opening. When I was writing the book, I had a freelance editor and she said, “What’s the opposite of faith? Isn’t it doubt?” And I said, well, no, not from the Buddhist perspective, because the right kind of doubt, which is a sincere questioning, not being cynical—we can be full of doubt, which is really just a mask for fear, like I don’t know if I can do it, so I’ll pretend it’s not worth doing. But when it’s the right kind of questioning and not knowing and insisting on seeing the truth for yourself, it only enhances faith. And then she said to me, “Well, if it’s not doubt, what is the opposite of faith?” And I had, as usual, one of those experiences where I just heard this word come out of my mouth, and that word was despair. Because faith is that which also connects us maybe to our inner strengths, to a bigger picture of life, to a sense of maybe the cat will come back. I don’t know that it will, it’s not that kind of faith. But maybe, maybe. And so the opposite connection is the severing of connection, which is despair.

Ross Gay: That’s right. And it comes back also to the second part of the question earlier about change, that nothing is going to change even in our relationships or in each other. In addition to just being sad, that is despair. It’s just like, no, this is never gonna change.

Sharon Salzberg: I’m also curious how you understand our messiness and unpredictability, which has come up a few times in this conversation.

Ross Gay: Yeah. That comes back to that change business. I feel like another thing that age has something to do with. I think getting older, our messiness and unpredictability, I feel like that’s a thing that, one, I’m more comfortable paying attention to in myself. You know, not totally comfortable, but more comfortable.

But also there’s a kind of notion that we are not one thing and that we are many things—and that we are many things in the process of becoming many more things. That to me, again, like the fact that we die, the fact that we change and we are not one thing, it’s so interesting to me, and that feels to me, again, like a kind of faith, a kind of faith that also inclines me to feel tender toward others when I can kind of hold that, oh yeah, we’re changing. We’re changing. I don’t know what I’m going to be tomorrow or next week, but I also don’t know what anyone else or anything else is going to be tomorrow or next week. That feels like, although again, it’s a kind of groundlessness, it feels also like a kind of potential for a kind of sweetness in a way. Like, oh, what are you going to be? Where are you going?

James Shaheen: You know, Ross, in this book, you begin with your birthday, and I was reading it on Sharon’s birthday and I thought, I wonder what he wrote on my birthday. So I’m a little biased, but I really liked what you wrote on my birthday.

Ross Gay: Which is what?

James Shaheen: It was February 1st. It was “My Neighbor’s Face.” And I was wondering if you could read that for us.

Ross Gay: Yeah. Let me find that.

“My Neighbor’s Face”

As I was walking home today, my neighbor pulled up next to me in his car, rolled his window down, and said, very gently, Hey Ross, while pointing at our car, which has a crumpled rear end, and the back windshield busted out. It’s a mess. He looked alarmed, worried, and concerned, which explains his tone of voice, solemn, soft, pointing from the seat of his car to ours, this dude with whom I suspect I perhaps do not share some values. Hang on. How long can I abide in myself the infantile, arrogant notion that I would know anything about anyone’s values without asking them what they value, myself included? I mean to say I bet I didn’t vote like my neighbor in 2020—maybe there was a sign or a sticker?—which, if we’re being real, might not actually have all that much to do with values; for political parties, and perhaps more explicitly the heads of those parties, do not have values, they have donors, they have shareholders, and they have promises, both parties, which more and more seem like one party, that they have no intention to keep. Oh, I guess I stand corrected: those are values.

But per values I would like to share with my neighbor, I aspire to share with my neighbor—along with knowing his name, which is sort of step one in being a good neighbor, which places me at step zero, trailing him on that front—let me simply report what he said to me, softly, just as I hope I also would do if I saw my neighbor’s car crunched up, making my face as loving and tender as I could, just in case of the worst, as he did, looking over at the wreckage, pointing: Is she okay? He didn’t mean the car (that would be a difference of values), he meant the most-often driver of the car, Stephanie. We then had a nice laugh about it once it was established all was okay, it was Stephanie’s very rubbery twenty-seven-year-old son driving, and he was okay, as was the driver of the truck who rear-ended him. My neighbor exhaled loudly, shaking his head, and said, Phew, it looked bad. Then he lauded the Honda, patting the door of the one he was driving, which, though I’d seen him driving it at least one million times, if you were to have asked me earlier, I would’ve told you, with great conviction, that he drives a Chevy or Ford. And after we were together praising the Honda—me mainly about mileage and how long they seem to run—he said something technical about axels or carburetors or WD-40 or something and I pretended I understood and nodded and laughed and thanked him for checking on us.

James Shaheen: You know, that’s really wonderful. One of the reasons I picked it, aside from the fact that it was written on my birthday, one of the reasons I picked it is that we live in such polarizing times and these spontaneous expressions of concern seem to affirm our capacity to care for each other, to feel connected, as you say, despite the fact that so much in the culture works against that. So that was really lovely. Thank you.

Ross Gay: Thank you for noticing that.

Sharon Salzberg: Before we close, I’m wondering what’s been delighting you today?

Ross Gay: Like I said, my mom coming here, she hasn’t been here for a few years, and to have her here, you know, we have a pretty sweet garden and we dug potatoes and made potatoes and green beans the other night. And just having kind of a slow, sweet time with my mother has been really, really, really delightful. Really lovely. 

Sharon Salzberg: So nice. So James, I want to ask you too.

James Shaheen: What delights me today? I was just about to say. This podcast today has really delighted me. It’s such a pleasure to be with you, Ross. What delights you today, Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, now you’ve pointed out several things. I’m delighted that Ross is with his mother. I’m delighted that this podcast has been so wonderful. And I’d say finding some space in my day has really brought me a lot of delight.

James Shaheen: Ross, do you have anything else to add?

Ross Gay: No, it’s been really nice. It was fun talking last time, and it’s fun talking because it feels like the deepening of the questions, so I’m grateful for the questions and to be in conversation with you all. It feels like keeping the unknown sort of fluttering, which feels lovely.

James Shaheen: Well, we’ll definitely do it again. I’m sure Sharon is on board with that too.

Sharon Salzberg: It was lovely. Does someone have to write another book or can we do it before then?

James Shaheen: Yeah, we’ll figure out a way. Okay. So, Ross, thanks so much for joining us. It’s truly a delight. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Book of (More) Delights, available now. We like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation. So Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you. Thank you all so much. If you want to just sit comfortably, you can close your eyes or not, however you feel most at ease. Just settle your attention on the natural flow of the in- and out-breath, wherever you feel it most distinctly, the nostrils, the chest, or the abdomen, and the operative word here is rest. We rest our attention gently on the breath. Sometimes the image is used of resting our attention lightly, like a bird settling on a flower.

It’s something so easeful out of recognizing that we’re breathing anyway. All we need to do is feel it. Nothing extra, nothing strained. You don’t have to get ready for even the very next breath. It’s just this one.

I’m going to ask you for a few moments to think of something in your life today or yesterday, something immediate that you feel grateful to when you notice it. It may be something you overlook. It may be something seemingly small. And it may bring up all kinds of feelings, like embarrassment, or this is stupid, or I’ve got to concentrate some more on the pain or my problems. Whatever happens, it’s fine. You can let all those feelings arise, but see what it’s like when you stretch a little bit and you kind of point the flashlight of your attention onto that which has been good. Something. Just one thing.

Because we’re not moving from the complaints, which are the only truth, to something that’s fanciful or funny. We’re moving to a truth that we may hardly ever look at. So let’s give it a little airtime. And you can bring your attention back to the feeling of the breath. When you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze, and we’ll end the meditation.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Ross.

Ross Gay: Thank you. 

James Shaheen: We’ll do this again. It’s a lot of fun.

Ross Gay: Good, yeah, for sure. Have a good one. It’s good to see you all.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Ross Gay. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Jane Hirshfield: There’s always the intention of questioning, perhaps, which is you say to each moment, “Who are you?” And I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being: not to have my first impulse be to assert something but to have my first impulse be to ask something.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Jane Hirshfield. Jane is a poet, essayist, and translator, as well as a Tricycle contributing editor. Her new book, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, invites readers to resist fixity and certainty and instead to dwell in not-knowing. In our conversation, we talk about the questions she’s been asking recently, why she views poetry as an antidote to despair, and how she sees the relationship between her poetry and her Zen practice. Plus, she reads a few poems from her new collection. So here’s my conversation with Jane.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with poet Jane Hirshfield. Hi, Jane. It’s great to be with you.

Jane Hirshfield: It’s wonderful to be talking with you again.

James Shaheen: So Jane, we’re here to talk about your new book of poetry, The Asking: New and Selected Poems. So to start, can you tell us a little bit about the collection and what inspired you to put it together?

Jane Hirshfield: Well, what inspired me to put it together was my editor at Knopf sending me an email saying, “Jane, you’re turning 70, and I think it’s about time you had a ‘New and Selected Poems’ out.” And I had said no something like five times before that, so I lost my excuse, which was I had thought it would be premature, and I could no longer claim it would be premature.

It’s an odd thing. Artists love having a big retrospective at a museum, and most poets really want a “New and Selected.” But I’ve always been a little reluctant to sum myself up in any way, and you can’t help but feel when you put together a book with fifty years of your own poems in it, there’s a little worry that it might be a tombstone volume. I’m quite happy that a little earlier this summer, I went off and wrote a bunch of new poems, and so I know that there is a future after The Asking. But maybe you wanted to know more about the book itself and less about the process.

James Shaheen: I do want to know about the book. The collection is called The Asking, and questions have been a central theme of your work, and they’re at the heart of the new collection. So what are some of the questions you’ve been asking lately?

Jane Hirshfield: Well, that’s a wonderful thing to ask, and lately and the book are two different questions. You know, I always title my books last, so first you put it together and then you see what’s in it. And as you have also noticed, questioning has always been important to me. And that goes back to—well, it probably goes back to childhood because I was always asking questions in childhood, but as a practice issue, it goes back to my very first week of Zen practice when I was a guest student. Actually, my second week.

I was a guest student at Page Street. My first week I was a guest student at Tassajara Monastery. And there was a guest student tea. Soto Zen is not Rinzai Zen. One doesn’t work with koans as the main focus of meditation. Stories are told and thought about, but it’s not the central practice. And nonetheless, the teacher suggested it’s a good idea for you to always have a question in your practice. And over the years, that central practice question has evolved. For a very long time, it was a question that I actually ended up writing about in a special section for Tricycle, which is What is the emotional life of a Buddha? So I looked at that question for many years until I felt that I had saturated myself in it and come up with my own answer to that, which is what’s held in the essay. And then I had to find a new question. And so the new question of the last quite a few years is one that is I think widely shared, which is, “How can I be of service?”

I look at this world from the perspective of someone who, when I was young, just starting adulthood, the very first Earth Day took place in 1970. And I thought it was going to be attended to. You know, we had seen the first picture of the whole earth. We understood in 1970 about the crisis of the biosphere, about extinctions.The science of climate change has evolved a great deal since then, but we really understood since far before 1970 that the fossil fuel economy was not good for living beings, not good for us in terms of the economics of it, not good for us in terms of the environmental damage of it, not good for us in terms of our relationship to our sources of happiness, our sources of resilience, of taking care of things, as if this Earth and our lives were not disposable.

And so over the decades, I entered in great hope that this was all going to be addressed, and disappointments have been endless. And so in recent years, my question has been How can I serve? How can I help? What can I do? How can I add my one molecule to the tiller of change?

James Shaheen: Right, in one of your poems, I sense some frustration. You’re admonishing us, all of us, including yourself, not to pretend that we didn’t know.

Jane Hirshfield: Oh, yes, yes. Should I read the poem? That’s a pretty central poem.

James Shaheen: Sure.

Jane Hirshfield: So that poem is “Let Them Not Say,” and I wrote it in 2014 as a poem about the crisis of the biosphere and climate. And when I wrote it, it frightened me and I felt it had worked to do, and I didn’t just send it out to be published anywhere. I held onto it because it felt to me like a poem that wanted to do some real work. And as it turned out, it ended up going out from the Academy of American Poets on their Poem-a-Day, which goes to many, many, hundreds and thousands of people now, on the day of the last president’s inauguration, so January 20th, 2017. And so a poem which began as an environmental poem became also a political poem. It’s a poem looking from the point of view of the future, which will look at us and know what we did or didn’t do.

“Let Them Not Say”

Let them not say:   we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say:   we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say:     they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say:     they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

The poem is hoping to make itself incomprehensible. If the poem were fully heard and acted upon, someone reading it two hundred years from now, should say, “What was she so worried about? Why was she so worried?” I hope it is a poem that will become meaningless for having been written.

James Shaheen: Well, thank you. That was lovely and chilling, and we warm ourselves to it.

Jane Hirshfield: Well we do. You know, I fly in airplanes, I turn my lights on. I am complicit.

James Shaheen: Yeah. So you write from your earliest work, you have investigated justice. It’s always been a concern in your poetry. So how do you understand justice? I’ve often thought about this because in Buddhism I try to understand where the parallel is to our own sense of justice in the Western cultural sphere. So what is the relationship between justice and asking?

Jane Hirshfield: Well, justice is one name for the paramitas, for the world going rightly or wisely, however you want to translate the paramitas or the eightfold path. Justice to me is what things look like when each of us recognizes our inseparability from the whole, and each of us is able to live inside some sense that that is actually how we are enacting our social contract with one another, our compact of coexistence, not only with human beings but with all beings, with the planet itself. You know, I love that a very few countries have begun to give the environment legal standing as if it were a person in their justice systems.

A river needs justice. A human being needs justice. Even a mosquito has its own sense of justice, I imagine. And sometimes these things are at odds, and always it is difficult. It is just difficult. Perhaps the closest we can come to actual justice is to say we tried our best, that we are always aware that we did not enough, and we are always trying to do better.

It has to do with dignity. It has to do with equity. I think often these days of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how if a person does not feel safe, is not housed, is not fed, they cannot act in ways that allow the next levels of the hierarchy to come into being because they are frightened or they are angry.

So taking care of our most basic needs in a way where you don’t have the 0.1 percent having so much more than any human being or family could ever need and then so many people homeless on the streets of San Francisco or New York or Los Angeles, that’s something about justice.

There’s a piece which people can find if they look for it. The title is “Justice for Windows,” and it was published in Virginia Quarterly Review, and it talks about the different systems and understandings and evolution of justice, including the Buddhist system of justice, which seems to me to actually be karma, that Buddhism doesn’t have Western retributive or even restorative justice. Buddhism has the idea of karma as how justice works in our lives, and I tend to think of karma in a way that has less to do with future lives and more to do with this very moment. If I behave badly, I feel the stab of that immediately. I don’t need to be reborn as a spider.

James Shaheen: You mentioned people are frightened and angry, and that probably describes all of us, to some extent anyway, and I wonder what you see as the role of the poet and what you call failures of justice and compassion.

Jane Hirshfield: Poetry can be used in many ways for many purposes. You know, I don’t want to pretend it is completely an act which always includes interconnection and empathy and all of the values that those on the path of practice are trying to raise in one another and in ourselves. There are war poems. There are angry poems. There are silly poems, which might be more neutral. But for me, when I look at how poems work in our lives, I see in their very fabric there is empathy and interconnection. The very act of entering another person’s language and hearing it inside yourself as if it was your own is an act of permeability and a recalibrating sense of we are not separate from one another.

And similarly, inside a poem, all of the devices of poetry, the sound devices, the music, the landscape of metaphor, and how we take in an image. If you read a line about a mountain, you cannot understand the mountain without becoming it for an instant within yourself or becoming the creature walking on the mountain and feeling that steepness in your legs and seeing the sharpness or smoothness of the surfaces or seeing the many beings who are inhabiting the mountain with you.

And so simply to actually participate in any work of art is to lower the barricades between yourself and other beings. And so poetry, by its own fabric of what it is and how it works is already, I choose to believe, is an act that moves the psyche towards the values of practice, the hopes of practice, the vows of practice.

Then within particular poems, for me, I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, every poem I write is an act of trying to discover a larger and changed and new way of seeing in the face of the evidence and experience of existence. And so many poems are written when I feel inadequate to some event. So for example, the poem that I read at the start, “Let Them Not Say,” that was written out of grief and the sense of my own impotence before the disaster that we are all witnessing more and more, 2014 until now. I mean, you today in New York are in the extraordinary heat emergency, which has been in this country and in the world going forth all summer this year. Everywhere people are experiencing unprecedented heat spells lasting longer temperatures, higher health conditions more perilous.

And we look at this, and the question is, “What can I do?” Because I am a poet, I can do a few things. My daily practice for many years was to take some political action every single day having nothing to do with being a poet: donations, sending letters, sending postcards. For the moment, I’ve pretty much settled on postcards, helping people register to vote or encouraging people to vote. But then sometimes I get to do something as myself, not just as one more set of hands pitching in in a way more intimate than the donation I might also be making. And when I’m doing it as myself, this is what I am. I’m a poet. I’m not a union organizer. I’m not a giver of speeches or recorder of TikToks. And so what I can do then is write a poem and make that poem available and say that poem when the opportunity arises and hope that because the poem changed me first, that it might help change someone else once it’s been written.

I write them to change myself. I write them to see more clearly, largely, compassionately, less from the small self and more from the large self. And so those changes are in the poem because they are why it became a poem in the first place, and perhaps someone else reading the poem will go through the same experience and move, for instance, from anger or incomprehension to compassion.

James Shaheen: You’ve written about writing poetry as an antidote to despair. So I think of that from your personal point of view. That’s really wonderful. I think it has a like effect on the people who read it. Certainly when I read your collection, it worked in that way. Without diminishing the sense of urgency, the despair was somewhat attenuated with this call to action, and I found that very important. But while poetry is often marginalized in our culture, although there remains a strong interest in it, it really does ripple out in unexpected ways. I was in Shakespeare in the park a few days ago and watched Hamlet, and it’s like the English language’s greatest hits. Nearly every line is a proverb, and I thought, whether people look at this or not or listen to this or not, the ripple effect of that poetry has shaped the language itself. So I wonder sometimes how you think of that ripple effect. Whether people read it or not, it does have an effect. I hope that inspires and encourages you.

Jane Hirshfield: Well, it does, and also I’ve always loved something that T. S. Eliot said, which was that it doesn’t matter who writes the great poems, only that they be written. And so I take great solace from the lines that other people write. As a poet, if you’ve written one line which actually outlasts your life and goes on helping people, that’s pretty extraordinary. Maybe I will; maybe I won’t. I’ll never know about it. But I do remember so clearly when September 11th happened, two poems circulated so widely. One was Auden and the other was Adam Zagajewski.

And those poems, people needed poems in those moments. And the poems were there to serve. And that is the point of poetry: to be there, yes, for the people who read a poem every day or every week or pick up a book once a month perhaps or find individual poems in the pages of Tricycle and other journals, and every once in a while one truly reaches them and then they copy it down or they give it to another person. But every person, I believe, at the moments of greatest change and greatest crisis, they are thirsty for a sentence or two which will companion them and help them find their way through the tunnel. And so poems are almost always read at funerals and memorial services, and poems are almost always read at weddings.

And again, to be unseemingly personal about it, Tricycle published a wedding poem that I wrote. A friend was on their way to France to another friend’s wedding and asked me if I could suggest a poem, and I looked and looked and looked at all of the usual suspect wedding poems, and I was quite dissatisfied with all of them. I finally gave him a poem by e. e. cummings and said, “I think this is the best that I can find for you. You might want to change this one word.”

Having done that and having thought I had discharged my responsibility to this request, I then started thinking, Why am I so dissatisfied with all of these poems? What is it that makes me feel they’re not right? Because people have been reading them at weddings for a long time. And you know, it usually had something to do with either it was for too specific an occasion, you know, written for one particular couple and one particular occasion, or they seemed to me poems better said by one beloved to the other beloved and not by a member of the witnessing friends and family.

And then I, being me, had the question, Well, what would a wedding poem look like? What do I think would make one that worked? And I sat down to my great surprise and wrote one and gave it to him, and he loved it and he read it at the wedding. And then it sat in a drawer quietly steeping, because it’s not a regular lyric poem. It’s different. It’s a ceremonial poem. It’s a ritual. And it might have sat in that bottom drawer forever, except Tricycle had for a while, on the inside back cover you were offering things having to do with rituals, and I was asked if I had something to suggest and I said, “Well, you know, this poem is completely non-Buddhist. There’s nothing dharma, you know, explicit about it, but it certainly is a ritual. Would you like it?” And I gave it to you, and it started getting read at weddings all over after that and now has become itself one of the usual suspect wedding poems. It’s quite extraordinary.

James Shaheen: Well, like the wedding poems, some of your poems read like imagined rituals or liturgies like “Spell to Be Said Before Sleep” or “Invocation.” So I’m curious, how do you think about poetry in relation to ritual and prayer, and are there any Zen rituals that inspire your poetry?

Jane Hirshfield: Oh, that second question. I’ll answer the first one and then I’ll try to have my unconscious be working on the second one. So a poem is very much akin to a ritual for a rite of passage. I’ve been very interested in rites of passage ever since I took an anthropology course in high school and read, a man named Turner wrote a book called The Ritual Process, and that was kind of a life-changing book for me, not least because it talks about how in any rite of passage, there is a moment when a person is no longer the old self and not yet the new self. They are in a state of threshold of liminality, and that idea has informed my life ever since.

And I think that perhaps the strongest experience of liminality I have ever known in my own life was a Buddhist rite of passage, so I am getting to the second part of your question, which was when you go to Tassajara, to the monastery, when you go to enter to stay there as a practicing student, you do what in my era was five days of what’s called tangaryo. Tangaryo is a ritualized reenactment of the earlier practice of a monk would simply arrive at the monastery gate and sit outside until taken in.

So there is no form. When you are in the zendo sitting your five days of tangaryo, the only requirement is that you not leave. You stay on your zafu. There are no defined meditation periods unless it’s an hour when the rest of the sangha is also in the zendo for meditation. But for long hours in the middle of the day, there’s no kinhin, there’s no walking meditation. There’s nothing but you sitting there, and you are so much no one that the year that I was there, they were doing construction projects in the zendo while we were sitting there. You just didn’t count. You were no one and nothing. And it was physically for me almost unbearable because I don’t have a body that was actually meant to sit with its legs crossed. I never have, even from childhood. And so in all my years in the monastery, I was there for three years and I don’t think I sat more than three periods of zazen when I wasn’t in pain. Always, there were pain issues.

But I adored the experience of being no one. It just felt, this is a paradoxical thing to say, it felt such a deeply human thing to not be Jane, to just be this ignored intention, the intention to manage to stay to practice. And so of course that was informing and life-changing.

And part of what I was informed of by the ritual of tangaryo, and also seven-day sesshins, which were equally quite difficult for this body that was determined to stay on the zafu and wasn’t built for that, I learned that pain doesn’t matter so much, no matter how hard it is, that you can survive it.

In any period of zazen, part of what is being learned is that whatever your experience is, you can simply stay with it. You need not run away. You need not be frightened. You need not reject it. Your only job is to stay on the meditation cushion and be with it and notice that eventually something will change because something always changes.

And I think that was a very good instruction to me for practice, for leading my emotional life ever going forward, and for what it is that I am interested in as a poet, which is to not turn away from anything.

There is a famous sentence from the Roman poet Terence, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I think sitting on the zafu and seeing who visits and who you are in all of those hours and weeks and months and years from when I was 21 years old and arrived at Tassajara until now, this is identical to the practice of writing poetry, which is that you see what arises, and you notice if there’s anything you might want to do to help what arises unfold into something larger and deeper.

And so there’s always the intention of questioning perhaps, which is you say to each moment, “Who are you?” You say to yourself, “Who am I?” You say to each other person that you meet, “Are you a Buddha? What is your teaching? What is this teaching?” And I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being: not to have my first impulse be to assert something but to have my first impulse be to ask something.

James Shaheen: You often write about approaching something you haven’t looked at closely before or something you’ve taken for granted, and sometimes the result is destabilizing. It causes us as readers to look again at what we think we know. Whether it’s a leaf, a frozen egg, or a cat on a shelf. Suddenly the common occurrence becomes unfamiliar. And I was wondering if you could say something more about the process of defamiliarization.

Jane Hirshfield: Well, I think that is one way that poetry is very much like the awareness that comes with practice, which is—we could name it perhaps Suzuki Roshi’s beginner’s mind—that you are always hoping to be inside whatever moment it is you find yourself inside of as if it were new to you, as if you didn’t know what it is, as if you weren’t able to think about making your grocery list while you’re washing the dishes.

Just to be in this moment is always to see it newly and freshly, and that is the goal of practice, and that is the goal of writing a poem. If I see nothing new, if I see nothing unfamiliar, if I make no discovery, there’s no poem to be written. And so every poem makes some kind of a recalibration of my understanding of experience.

If you are reading it on the page, it’s because I saw something I hadn’t seen before, and then when I look at the poem after it’s written, I think, “Oh, maybe somebody else will find this interesting also.” And so then I will publish the poem.

James Shaheen: That is what the effect of “Two Kerosene Lanterns” had on me. I love that poem because I thought I was familiar with that. Maybe I was familiar with one aspect, and that became a habit, and I was no longer able to see anything else. So why don’t you read that poem for us? Because there’s a perspectival shift that really all of a sudden it’s from the view of the cat.

Jane Hirshfield: Yes, and I will add that for me, there was a real question which led to that poem. So first, actual experience happened. I’m describing something which very much did happen. And after it happened, what I thought was, when something like what’s described in the poem occurs, why do we not only close our eyes, we actually put our hands over our eyes? It’s perfectly useless. You know, it’s not as though broken glass was going to come flying up into my eyes where I was located. And we do this for emotional crises also. We literally put our hands over our eyes and I was thinking, what is that? And that became this poem.

“Two Kerosene Lanterns”

The cat walks the narrow shelf beneath the window
where many delicate things are arranged—polished ammonites,
a dried starfish, three turtle netsuke,
a few curls of birch bark, two long-unused kerosene lanterns. 

As if on their own, two hands fly up to cover the person’s face,
to cover the eyes already closed. 

The crash, as it must, arrives. 

The hands lower slowly.
The cat sits on the floor in the room’s middle, calmly licking one paw. 

The law of cats is simple: one arrangement becomes another. 

People are strange. 

James Shaheen: I love that.

Jane Hirshfield: Thank you. So my question about why was I covering my eyes becomes the cat. Cats are very good practitioners of, you know, things change. And, of course, that kerosene lantern is the same lantern as was in the earlier poem, the kerosene burning in “Let Them Not Say,” and those go back to when I was at Tassajara. It was before the era of solar panels and batteries, and we all lived by kerosene light for three years. And so kerosene lamps have stayed with me. If I swiveled my computer, I could show you the lamp. It’s still right over my shoulder.

James Shaheen: It didn’t break.

Jane Hirshfield: Something else did.

James Shaheen: About breaking up the familiar, it also happens at the level of syntax and grammar, and I guess we often find this in poetry, but sometimes in reading your poetry, in fact, you did a short interview with us that’s in the August issue. You dropped verbs and initially the managing editor and I said, “Wait a second. This has been dropped. A word has been dropped.” And then we realized, “Oh, she’s doing this several times.” What was unfamiliar and jarring sort of developed its own rhythm, and we looked at things a little bit differently. So what can you say about dropping those verbs, say, and all of a sudden we’re forced to pay closer attention?

Jane Hirshfield: I think you might’ve just answered your own question. It is all about attention. It is all about distillation. So often when I teach poetry, one of the things that I tell my students is for every moment of your reader’s attention, you must give them more than the moment of their life that they have given you.

Part of it is you have to, by using language with more concentration and distillation to it, you are inviting people to give you that attention, which you then must repay more than amply. There’s a cowboy saying of putting ten pounds of rice into a five-pound sack. And, you know, in cowboy context, I think that’s meant to be an insult. But in practice context, it’s high praise.

And the other thing, of course, is that no act of communication is one-sided. It always is a collaboration of two. And if you say everything, if you spell everything out, you become incredibly tedious, and people tune out. Nobody likes to be lectured at. Nobody likes not to be left to draw some conclusions of their own.

And so I leave gaps in my poems all the time because I trust you to fill them in. I trust the intelligence and fullness of the reader, of the listener, to bring themselves into this collaborative conversation you’re making, whether it’s in a podcast or in a poem on a page. You get to do your own part, and I rely on you doing your own part.

James Shaheen: It seems like you also sometimes trust the earth itself to fill in those gaps in the poems. Is that crazy or what?

Jane Hirshfield: No, that’s so poetically said. I’m very impressed. Yeah, we do. One of my lifelong abiding support teachings has been, again, something I heard very early in my entrance time to Zen practice, which was the suggestion that Buddhist practice rests on a tripod: great effort, great faith, which I think can be translated as great trust, and great doubt. And the idea of those being the three legs that one works with has been really central to me.

Don’t-know mind, as we all first heard, I think, from the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, it is no different from the Romantic English poet Keats talking about negative capability: if someone is going to be an artist, they must be willing to live without irritable reaching towards fact and reason. That was Keats’s phrasing of it. And I think abiding in uncertainty, abiding in doubt, questioning everything is central, but equally central is the trust that you will not fall into an abyss if you surrender your certainty.

Certainty makes me at least at great risk of arrogance and wrong-headedness. I’m quite worried about people who are utterly certain that they’re right because people who are certain that they’re right will do terrible things in the service of their certainty, whereas people who have a little doubt—What if I’m wrong?—then there is some possibility that we will not do terrible things because we believe in the rightness of our cause, because we believe that ends justify means. No. Means are our lives. Means are the moments of our lives. How we treat one another in any moment must be the embodiment of whatever it is we hope for, wish for, but perhaps are not so certain of. I could be wrong about all of this.

James Shaheen: What you make me think about when I’m caught in my habitual way of thinking, I usually think I’m right and I’m usually pretty unhappy and very inflexible. But that brings something up. You talked about living in the wilderness in your early days of Zen practice. You mentioned the lanterns. You had no electricity. I think you had to fetch your own water. There was no heat. And being a Californian myself originally, I know how cold and damp those nights can be. And you invite it after a while, the discomfort. You look forward not masochistically but with curiosity about what that discomfort is. And because you were talking about certainty, I wonder about the discomfort of sitting with an unanswered question, that doubt that you talk about. How can we learn—I mean, I don’t want to be comfortable with it necessarily because that might defeat the purpose, but there is a discomfort. We naturally as people reach for answers. Sometimes I wonder, how do we then just sit with it?

Jane Hirshfield: How I have come to feel about all of the difficult emotions, and amongst them is not only the discomfort of uncertainty and doubt, but also, to me, the two excruciating difficult emotions are anxiety and embarrassment or shame. They are almost unbearable. And what I realized at some point was this is information we need to have. It is useful information. Evolution made us social creatures, beings who need to know when we have transgressed. If you are not able to feel discomfort, to feel anxiety, to feel embarrassment, how would you know that you weren’t following the eightfold path with great fidelity?

Another sentence I remember from those days was the teaching that the reason to follow all the Buddhist vows, the prohibitory vows, not abuse the senses, not abuse sexuality, don’t kill somebody, don’t take what isn’t given, and, my favorite one for its complexity, don’t possess anything, not even the dharma. I love that one. The teaching was, if you do any of those things, you’re going to spend your time on the cushion being disturbed by them. And so being disturbed is information we need because it tells us that we might want to do something differently going forward. It’s useful information. All the negative emotions and all the positive emotions are useful information. They’re also, of course, the very texture and fabric of our lives.

A favorite poem, not by me, but one I co-translated for the collection, The Ink Dark Moon, is a poem by the thousand-year-ago woman poet Izumi Shikibu at the Heian court in Japan. And what she said was, “Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.” And that was a life-changing poem for me to read. When I went to translate it with my co-translator, I had all the words.

I knew something was there, but I knew I didn’t understand what I was meant to be taking from the data my co-translator had given me. And it took me a week to figure it out. And then when I figured it out, I understood what it is saying is if you live in a house which is impermeable to the cold winds and storms and difficulties of this world, you will also wall yourself off from the moonlight, from everything you want, from awakening, from enlightenment, from the fullness of love, whatever the moonlight might stand for to you.

You don’t get part of a human life without feeling all of it. You don’t get to love without knowing that you are going to lose the one you love or they will lose you. It is inevitable. This is how our lives unfold. And so it really led to what you were describing a little while ago, this feeling of saying yes to the difficult, affirming the difficult. Poem after poem after poem in the book is me finding my way to that again because you don’t get to solve these questions once. They will come back to us all of our lives.

James Shaheen: What I really love about the Shikibu poem is that the house has to be ruined in order for the moonlight to get in. And also it reminds me of Leonard Cohen talking about the cracks are where the light gets in. It’s a similar kind of sensibility.

Jane Hirshfield: Yes, almost the same image.

James Shaheen: Yeah, and I’m sure he read the poem, at some point anyway.

Jane Hirshfield: Oh, I wonder. I’d have to look at when he composed that song versus when The Ink Dark Moon was published. I don’t know offhand what year he wrote that particular song. It was late though, so maybe so. On the other hand, all these truths are available for anyone to find.

James Shaheen: Before I ask you to read a few poems, I just wanna ask you about one line that I remember you said. I couldn’t find it online, and so maybe I’ve got it wrong. You tell me if I do, but when I read your book, this latest collection, I’m not thinking about Zen. I’m not thinking about Buddhism, and I remember your one saying that in the end, there is no Zen; there’s just life. Is that right?

Jane Hirshfield: I believe you. I don’t remember most things I’ve ever said, but that sounds like me because I’ve always felt that any human truth has to be available whether you have a particular vocabulary description of it or not. If there is truth in Zen, it must be available to people who live in places where they never would’ve heard the word “Zen” or any of the dharma teachings. If there is truth in the dharma, it is a human truth, and it can be found.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Jane. So to close, would you be willing to read a couple of poems from the new collection? The first would be “Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me,” and the other is “Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting.”

Jane Hirshfield: Yes, I’m delighted to do that. And the first poem, the last line of it is where the book found its title. I tend to write a poem every New Year’s day. They don’t all see print. This one did.

“Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me”

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, 
fractured? 

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. 

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. 

For years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question. 

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised. 

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For years, each day, something. 

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, 
bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend— 

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet       didn’t it give you the asking 

“Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting”

Each morning
waking
amidst the not-ever-before,
dressing inside the not-ever-again. 

Under sunlight or cloud,
brushing the hair. 

Not yet arrived
at the end-crimped finish,
drinking coffee
and buttering toast. 

Permitted to slip into coat, into shoes,
I go out,
I count myself part, 

carrying only
a weightless shadow,
whose each corner joins and departs
from the shadows of others. 

Mortal, alive among others
equally fragile. 

And with luck—
for days even, sometimes—
this luxury, this extra gift: 

able to even forget it.

James Shaheen: Jane, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Jane Hirshfield: Well, thank you. I have always loved any chance I’ve had to do anything with you and the Tricycle community. I so appreciate this conversation, James. Thank you.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Jane. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Asking: New and Selected Poems, available now. Thanks again, Jane.

Jane Hirshfield: Take care.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Jane Hirshfield. To read an interview with Jane in the August issue of Tricycle, visit tricycle.org/magazine. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Anthony Back: You know, when I was a young physician, I was trained that care was all the nice things that you did, and really now I think of care as it is the way I bring myself to the room to meet this other person and the way I can stay there regardless of what is coming up for them because the more that we can both be present with everything, the more I think the potential for kind of healing there really is.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard Tony Back, a palliative care physician and practicing Zen Buddhist. Tony currently serves as co-director of the University of Washington Center for Excellence in Palliative Care, and he leads retreats on being with dying at the Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. In our conversation with Tony, we talk about how he came to Buddhism, how Buddhism has changed how he relates to feelings of powerlessness as a physician, how he deals with burnout and moral injury, and what James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have taught him about how to pay attention. So here’s our conversation with Tony Back.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with Dr. Anthony Back and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi Tony. Thanks for joining us.

Anthony Back: Thank you.

James Shaheen: So you’re currently the co-director of the University of Washington Center for Excellence in Palliative Care and a professor of oncology and medicine, and you’re also a practicing Zen Buddhist. So to start, how did you first come to Buddhism?

Anthony Back: I came to Buddhism really out of a sense of trying to survive. I was a young oncologist. I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the amount of suffering and death that I was dealing with, and I thought, “How will I make a career of this? How will I keep doing this day in and day out?” And that led me to mindfulness and Jon Kabat-Zinn and then to Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya Zen Center.

James Shaheen: So it started out as a coping strategy and then became a committed practice.

Anthony Back: Totally. It started out as “How am I just going to get through the day” and over time deepened into this other practice.

James Shaheen: Right, so you were already an oncologist when you came to Zen practice. How did you come to medicine?

Anthony Back: I came to medicine because as a young man, my mother had died of a pre-leukemia syndrome when I was in college. She had been sick for several years. I had kind of a vague idea what was going on, but my parents were very concerned about my success and not distracting me and not making me sad, and so they didn’t really talk about my mother’s illness much. I didn’t talk to her directly about it very much, and I didn’t really get a lot of information about it. But I got a phone call when I was a sophomore in the dorm. You know, in those days you went to the phone at the end of the hall. And I heard from an oncologist that all of a sudden she had really taken a turn for the worse. She was in the hospital. There was something going on with her spleen. And that was how I found out it was really serious.

James Shaheen: So around this time, you wrote your senior thesis on James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, two of my favorites as well. How did the study of narrative influence how you think about illness and medicine?

Anthony Back: Oh, it has had a huge influence on me, I mean, what I learned from both Joyce and Woolf, because what I really studied was how a sense of personal identity was rendered in that stream of consciousness narrative technique. What I took away from that was the incredible richness of just one moment and the incredible particularity that different people have because of their background, because of their surroundings, because of everything about them. It made me really clear that someone else’s experience was totally different than mine and that in fact there was something amazing happening all the time in the background that I couldn’t really see very easily, that I couldn’t perceive. You know, in Joyce there are all these different chapters of all the fantastical and sometimes fanciful and sometimes poignant worlds that are going on inside people’s minds. And in Virginia Woolf, what I got was this sense of actually how interconnected we are, that there are these kinds of invisible ways of being that we are together with each other, and I didn’t really realize at the time—I was just very interested in what they were doing with narrative—that that actually really stuck with me in a way, and for me it was a real preparation for mindfulness and the inquiry into my own mind that that practice became. 

James Shaheen: Just to go back to Woolf for a moment, what really resonates there with many Buddhists who like Woolf are these moments of being that may even be accelerated or induced by facing one’s mortality. But I wonder, are there patterns that you see emerging in the narratives you hear patients tell?

Anthony Back: Yes, to some degree. I think of a couple of things. You know, I’ve just been interviewing patients for this study that I’m doing of psilocybin-assisted therapy for a group, and so, for example, one of the people said to me, “I went to see a doctor about my cancer. The first thing the doctor said was, ‘You know, I can’t cure this illness.’” And she said, “I completely had a panic attack. I didn’t want to show it. But basically everything in my mind was going, was screaming, ‘Oh my God, what is happening?’” And from that day on, she started to have panic attacks. And what I think is one of the patterns there is this tremendous dislocation that people feel when they get the news of something like cancer or serious illness. All of a sudden, everything looks different, and that’s one of the big narratives.

Another narrative that I see a lot of is this narrative—this was really identified by a writer, Arthur Frank, who had a serious illness and did a lot of writing about the illness experience. He identified something called the quest narrative, meaning the quest for my former condition to be restored, for things to be exactly like they were, for me not to have to worry about this, and I see a great deal of that, especially in the cancer space.

And then finally there’s another one that is a narrative about “What am I becoming,” which I think of as a different kind of narrative that is a much more open-ended narrative that is really an inquiry about “What is my life about now given all these different things?” And that in a way, that’s one of the ones I try to encourage as a physician. ? I feel like that is a way into a kind of new adaptation and a new reinvention of the self. 

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s interesting, this idea of dislocation or all sorts of narratives that repeat themselves when people are at the end of their lives. A close friend of mine a few years back got his diagnosis and he said, and I don’t know where he got it from, that he felt like he had walked into a room that nobody else could enter. So that sense of separateness needs somehow or another connection. It is very interesting. But on a similar note, have you noticed any stories that you yourself have felt trapped in, either as an oncologist or as a palliative care doctor?

Anthony Back: Oh, yeah. I mean, how much time do you have, James?

James Shaheen: We have some time. I would rather talk about Woolf and Joyce, but here we are talking about death, which is related.

Anthony Back: Yeah. Well, of course, one of the stories is, “I’m an oncologist, I should be able to fix this, and if I’m not fixing it, it must be because I’m doing something wrong.” Like that’s one of my stories. Or if I were a better doctor, this person would understand themselves better and they would adapt better, and what is happening to them is their difficulty is my fault in some way. And there’s another one about feeling heroic. Something good happens and I feel like the hero, and I’m writing the story of myself as the doctor hero, with all the trappings that entail, that’s a very kind of comforting, also trapping story. But yeah, I have all those things going on.

James Shaheen: So you work as a palliative care doctor, and for our listeners who may not be familiar with palliative care, could you give us a brief introduction to the field?

Anthony Back: Sure. Palliative care is specialized medical care that is aimed at treating the ss symptoms, dealing with the stress, and improving coping for people who are living with a serious illness. And so palliative care can be given at any time, at any stage in a serious illness, and so it’s really meant to help people live well in this face of whatever their illness may be.

James Shaheen: So you’re an oncologist, but what drew you specifically to palliative care?

Anthony Back: I think it is because, you know, in my own personal experience, that was the part that I don’t think happened for my mother, and as a young oncologist, that was the part that I felt like nobody was really doing.

I remember in my training, I was following a really famous oncologist around on rounds, and we had been seeing a woman who, like my mother, had pre-leukemia, had an infection, ended up in the emergency room, was staying there because there was no bed in the hospital for her, and we were about to go see her the next day, and the attending said in the hallway, “Hey, what happened to Mrs. So-and-so?” And the fellow said, “Oh, she died.” And the attending said, “Well, she was an old trout,” and then he turned the corner and everybody followed him like a school of fish. And I was walking along going, “Holy shit, what just happened?”

Nobody said a word of it. Nobody acknowledged it. We didn’t go talk to the family, even though we had been the oncology team supposedly taking care of her in the hospital. And I thought, “What is this? What is happening here?” SoI think it was experiences like that that made me think there was more to be done there. 

James Shaheen: So a lot, though, has changed since then, and you’re a part of that change. Can you say something about that?

Anthony Back: Yeah, so I do think there has been this awareness that has turned into a set of medical practices and now a new specialty, a relatively new specialty, in medicine that is meant to make this issue visible and address it and bring the same kind of expertise to it that we bring to, you know, trying to stop the cancer or cure the cancer. And so that is the field of palliative care.

Sharon Salzberg: It was very evocative for me when you were talking about your family and your conditioning around death and loss and so on, because mine is very, very similar, which carried on through—my mother died when I was 9, and I was then living with my father’s parents, who felt the kindest thing of all was not to ever mention her again. And so this very strange kind of silence surrounded that, you know, and, and the eventuality of death. And it was also very interesting for me when James said that quote from his friend about entering a room that no one else could enter because in a way we all enter that room inevitably. And so there’s cultural conditioning, there’s family conditioning. I know that when I grew up, you wouldn’t say the word cancer like it was a normal word, you know, you had a whisper or, and so all of that makes honest communication about illness and really being there in a way for people who are struggling very difficult. Thinking that so much of palliative care actually seems linked to honest communication about illness and death, I’m curious about how your Buddhist practice might influence your ability to have these open conversations.

Anthony Back: So what my practice has really given me and what it’s really enabled me to do is work at a layer that is below just the words. Of course, there’s all this teaching about what words to use and what words help you come across as empathic. But what my practices taught me was that my, uh, stillness can make space for whatever that other person is experiencing and that my ability to be with it and not push it away myself or distract them or try to distract myself, that really creates a kind of field for that kind of deeper communication. And people pick up on that right away, I think. And I don’t think I would’ve learned that any other way, really.

You know, the priority in my world is not about stillness. It’s about doing, doing, doing and about efficiency, efficiency and faster, faster, faster. And it really took taking myself out of the hospital or the cancer center to learn to practice that kind of stillness inside and outside to be able to do that and to sit with people.

Sharon Salzberg: Because it’s really, I mean, it’s striking me that there’s layer upon layer of conditioning. There’s just the conditioning of a human being. When we’re confronted with suffering, it can be so tempting to look away or to try to avoid it at all costs. And then you have the kind of, I would assume, sort of professional obligation to make it all better, you know, in some way. And that’s another layer of conditioning, you know, as you described, like fix it, make it better, do it faster. And I’m wondering how you’ve seen this kind of avoidance or resistance to suffering itself play out in the medical field, and how do you train providers to be able to talk openly about suffering?

Anthony Back: Well, in the medical field and among the people I am training and among colleagues, I think the usual reaction to suffering is that we should be able to do something about this and we should be able to treat it. And if we can’t treat it now, we need to find some new treatments to treat it. And so we need to do more research and do more clinical trials and all that stuff. And there is something really good in all that, right? That is how medical practice improves. And yet if we don’t pause to be with that suffering and to witness it and to be present with it with that person, then something gets missed, and people really notice that.

It is a constant struggle honestly to make the time to be still in the midst of these busy practices. And because it’s not reinforced by the system, because it’s not reimbursed, for example, because it’s not really formally taught, you know, very often mindfulness gets this label of being just another little technique. And of course, what you learn after years of practice is that it is a way that you bring yourself into everything. It’s a way you are present in the moment. It’s not just some kind of thing you apply at the moment. Of course, it is good to apply it when you’re stressed out or when you’re freaking out or when you’re like, “Yikes.” But there is another layer of it that is the ground that you’re coming from.

Actually, what I have found in my own practice is that actually being that is much more important than talking about it. So I can do some things like I will have a moment of mindfulness on rounds or a moment for somebody who’s really had a tough time. Or even when I’m with a patient, I will say, “Wow. Let’s, can we take a moment just so I can take that in,” you know, and I make it about me so that they don’t have to feel like I’m asking them to do something. But in a way it’s what happens in between all those things that I think is the most powerful teaching of all. And then of course with the patients, there’s a whole, and families, there’s a whole different thing.

Sharon Salzberg: And I’m also thinking about colleagues in the sense that the first time I ever heard the term moral injury, it was from some hospice nurses who were talking about how they’d find themselves sometimes in a situation where the patient was ready to go and the clinicians were quite ready to not, you know, intervene excessively and let them go, but the family could not let them go. And so there was a kind of moral quandary there. Moral injury is a kind of soul wound where you have these divided loyalties in a way, you know, your own values and then the situation.

The next time I heard the term was really through Roshi Joan, who was exploring it extensively. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the courses you teach on being with dying at Upaya with Roshi Joan and the complexity of these kinds of situations.

Anthony Back: Yeah, well, let’s start with moral injury. Moral injury in the case of a clinician is when a clinician knows what they think would be best and has some experience to back it up and yet feels blocked or prevented from doing that by some other circumstance, you know, a system that won’t give them the time, a family member who can’t bear the thought of losing their loved one.

And when clinicians have a really strong sense of what the best course, the best pathway ff would be for someone, that being blocked can really feel like kind of a soul wound. It can feel like, “Wow, I am not doing the work I was meant to do, the work I’m equipped to do, the work that would be really facilitative for this person.”

Now, of course, there’s always a caveat in there about knowing what is best for another person, right? That’s a whole thing in and of itself. And yet there are times when you know you as a nurse or doctor or another clinician really perceive that suffering is being magnified or suffering is being amplified by the blockade of people or systems around somebody that are preventing something from happening. And one of those is really around how we meet the moment of death, right? And so those moral injuries, I mean, they’re things that clinicians really remember and that stick with them.

For example, I was working with an ICU nurse. She was an ICU nurse during the worst part of COVID. She was with a patient who was intubated from COVID in the ICU, still having difficulty breathing, struggling on his tube, trying to talk to her, you know, can’t talk because of this tube in there, and she was the only person in the room, ao she felt completely responsible for him. And then it turned out he was getting worse and worse, and she had to give him a medicine that would actually paralyze him so that his body would resist as little as possible to the breathing machine that puts air down into your lungs.

What happened was she realized as she was giving him the medicine that she was probably blocking the only way he had left to communicate with her. And so even though there was part of her that knew that she was doing the medically indicated thing to help him on the ventilator, there was part of her that felt like, “Oh my God, I am preventing him from communicating it all.” And it was a moment of real moral injury for her where she felt like “I am not doing the right thing for this person.”

And so in that case, the block was this imperative to save his life, keep him breathing. She wasn’t at all sure that he was what he really wanted or needed at that point in his illness. And so those moments, they stick with. 

In the course that I teach with Roshi Joan, “Being with Dying,” and then another one called “G.R.A.C.E.,” we actually invite and create space for clinicians to remember those moments, to go back to them, in a way to tell their stories about them, and create a setting in the retreat, where unlike regular life, people aren’t just going, “Oh, you did the best you can, move on. Oh, that probably would’ve happened anyway. Oh, there was nothing more you could have done,” because that experience of being deeply listened to and to learn yourself how to be with all those emotions that come up, that is actually an incredibly healing thing.

And that’s really maybe the most important thing that goes on at these retreats is that, you know, we teach a lot of mindfulness skills and a lot of other ways to think about that. These are clinicians, so we teach a lot of the neuroscience that supports what happens in, uh, many Buddhist practices. But really, the healing thing is being in this community of other practitioners who’ve all been there, who all have their own stories, who listen to each other’s stories and simply witness them. And so that’s a great deal of what happens there.

James Shaheen: Tony, I’m really glad you mentioned that sometimes protocol isn’t what’s called for, because maybe 30 years ago I was with someone who was in his last days and he was told, “Don’t have a glass of water. You may aspirate. “And so he asked for a glass of water and I said, “Well, they said you’re not supposed to have water.” He said, “James, I’m dying. I can have a glass of water,” and I gave him a glass of water, and he drank it with mixed results, but he was thirsty.

But yeah, you’ve talked about the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness you can feel in the face of a patient’s suffering. Has your Zen practice shifted your relationship to this powerlessness, and maybe more broadly, has it changed your understanding of what it means to provide care?

Anthony Back: So first, I would say that Zen practice has radically shifted my sense of what powerlessness means and what it is in the sense that I no longer expect to have that kind of power over that, like I really appreciate all the things that medical technology can do, and yet I don’t invoke them and use them with the same kind of expectation that I will be able to have power over another person’s body where there are things going on biologically that are so complicated that, you know, we’ll never be able to completely understand them. And so coming at it that way, which I think gives me a kind of humility about the situation, I think that changes how I expect everything to happen. And, you know, ex expectations are a huge issue, right, for all of us.

So the other thing that has really shifted about what providing care means is that there’s a technical aspect to my care, the care that I provide, but then there is also this other more personal aspect, which is this person-to-person aspect, which I think of as more than even just emotional care. It is the care of being present. It’s the care of witnessing. It is the care of sharing space with another human being. And I think that’s a very different sense of care than I have had earlier in my career. You know, when I was a young physician, I was trained that care was all the nice things that you did or all the extra things that you did that were beyond the minimum. And really now I think of care as it is the way I bring myself to the room to meet this other person and the way I can stay there or try to stay there regardless of what is coming up for them and for me to use that time that we are together to invite everything into the room. Because the more that we can both be present with everything, the more I think the potential for kind of healing there really is, and it is healing for both of us, right. It is healing for that person, and it is healing for me, even though the emphasis is on them,

James Shaheen: Just really quickly, how do you make a decision, for instance, intubating a patient who might otherwise have communicated, although with difficulty, or the person who wants the glass of water, how do you make that decision?

Anthony Back: Oh yeah. Yeah, so for the person who needs to be intubated, so I’ll say that, you know, there are situations where medically, there are guidelines and research and all that stuff about measurements you make to decide when someone needs a new medical intervention, and then you do that in the context of what is this person’s goals? How much is this person willing to go through? Have they told me that they think this is going to be worth it? Are they on board with that? Because if they’re not on board with that, it doesn’t matter how technically adept I am. It won’t turn out well in the end.

And so those kinds of technological interventions I have to make always in the setting of do I know what they are really aiming for, and do I know in what way they’re willing to go through certain kinds of medical things to get there?

And then for the glass of water, it’s the same thing. You know, it’s like, what is all wrapped up in that glass of water for that person, and what is the danger really? Is the danger that he’s going to cough a little bit and we’re gonna have to reposition him and help him get over that, and is that going to be a real burden on him? I know enough now as a palliative care doctor and a person who’s been with dying people to know that one glass of water is not going to be the end of his life. He may cough, but you know what? He’s not going to die because someone gave him a glass of water. So if he wants a glass of water, you know, hand it to him. And if you have to, you can comment to, you know, go a little slowly with it so he doesn’t take a big gulp and, you know, really cough. And that I am balancing against the sense of someone near the end of their life having agency over their own body, having the feeling that I as someone right nearby will respect and honor what he needs and wants, right, and all that actually in that setting is as important or more important than just the mechanical aspects of aspiration or coughing, right, and that’s what you did for him.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it made the most sense.

Anthony Back: Yeah. And that was an honoring of him. You know, if he knows and everyone knows he’s near the end of his life and he asks for something, wow. We have to have a pretty good reason not to say that we won’t do something that we could easily do, right?

James Shaheen: Well, what you’re saying is that you listen to the patient. That’s not always the case, but it’s really refreshing to hear that. This was thirty years ago. But Sharon, I think, has a question. 

Sharaon Salzberg: So, uh, you’ve discussed how your practice influences your clinical work, but I’m also curious about the other direction. Has this day-to-day work in such complex moving situations as a palliative care doctor changed your relationship to Buddhist practice?

Anthony Back: Well, I will say that my experience as a doctor sitting with people who are dealing with a serious illness or dying, it has totally changed my worldview. I mean, I think I started out in this work as kind of a materialist, right? Like you have a body and it’s just stuff and you die and it’s over. And sitting with people actually has given me the sense that there’s something much, much different. Like being at with somebody at the moment of death and being really present for that, there is clearly something happening that is not really described by medical science that we don’t know, but it is a profound shift when someone’s spirit leaves the room, and that has really forced me to recognize that there is something else going on at the universe that I really was never trained about, and my Buddhist practice is what has allowed me to really perceive that.

I think if I had not learned to stay still long enough to feel inside myself, I don’t think I would’ve ever noticed that was happening. And I see it all the time actually at work. Everyone’s running around so much, and everybody’s worried about all these different things, and someone dies and they just don’t even notice what happened and they don’t feel it. And actually, I think those experiences over and over have really tuned me in to a level of my practice that I’m not sure I would have accessed just on my own, because being with people has really changed what it means for me to even be present in my own body.

And so what that does, I think, for me is it gives me a different point of reference for myself, but it has also given me a point of reference about how we are all really interconnected, right? Like, I’m interconnected to everything, and actually if I pay close enough attention and my mind is quiet, I can actually feel it like all the time, and that is a source of encouragement and a kind of joy and a kind of curiosity and a kind of awe really. Even in really busy moments. I can get a taste of that on a good day.

Sharon Salzberg: That’s beautiful.

Sharon Salzberg: One of the themes we’ve been exploring recently on the podcast is dealing with burnout, especially for those in helping professions. I know this has been an area of focus for you as well, and I’m wondering if you could walk us through how you understand burnout. We talked about moral injury, and just now in this last response, you touched upon taking in the joy and the awesomeness and the wonder of life as well. So, you know, that I think would have to be a part of dealing with conditions that could steadily produce burnout. So, to begin with, how do you understand burnout?

Anthony Back: Yeah, so the scientific definition that I use as burnout is a condition where people experience three things. They feel emotionally exhausted, right? Like “I just can’t bring myself to the situation anymore, it’s just too hard.” Then there’s the cynicism, which is “No matter what I do, this is going to turn out badly.” And then there’s the, uh, sense of low personal accomplishment, like “I am working really hard, and I’m really not making a difference in the world.”

Those three aspects are three different aspects of what can get measured in like a scientific question or as burnout, and I think what has happened and what I see is that there has been such a focus in medical practice on medicine as a series of procedures, right? It’s not about care actually. It’s about a series of procedures. And everything in the system is designed to set up the procedure, execute the procedure, bill the procedure. That’s really it. And then you go to the next procedure. And what that means for a clinician is that your work is really measured according to how many of those procedures you’ve done, how well they were executed, and whether they had the desired effect.

What that can lead to in a really difficult time, like in the COVID pandemic, is the sense that I just do these things over and over and over, and then if they stop working because something changes, like we don’t exactly know how COVID is going to act, or I am running into a lot of new situations, well, then what I know to do feels like it’s not working, and if I just keep doing it and keep doing it and it’s not working and not working and not working, then after a while I go, “Why should I bother? Why should I bother to put myself out there?” And you extend yourself less and you are less present because you think “I’m just going to, you know, close my eyes and get through the day.” And it constricts your whole field of vision. And what that does is that makes you less porous to all the complicatedness of it, but it also makes you less porous to the joy of it and the satisfaction of it. And so that’s how I see burnout now.

I mean, in a way, it’s a changing of your orientation to what’s around you so that your expectations become that nothing is going to work, and then what that turns into is because you are not then doing your work to the same degree, that that happens, like you are in fact achieving less, and that turns into a spiral. And it’s hard. It’s hard to experience and hard to get out of.

James Shaheen: So Tony, you’re currently conducting a study on psilocybin-assisted therapy for doctors and nurses who experienced burnout from the pandemic. Could you tell us a little bit about that study and how it came about?

Anthony Back: Yeah. Well, it came about from my direct experience in the pandemic of seeing people and talking to people who were really just blown away by their experience in the pandemic, and to the point where they felt like they were not functional. And I remember, you know, Roshi Joan did a, we did a retreat online for clinicians early in the pandemic because we thought, “Well, there seems to be a need here,” and they were like eight hundred people who signed up, and we were like, “Oh my gosh, there’s really something going on here.”

This is a different part of my life, but I have been looking at the potential for psychedelics to sort of reset how people see the world, how they hold their expectations, how they work with their own assumptions and their own habits and patterns. And, you know, one of the things is that psychedelics can disrupt our habits and patterns long enough for us to say, “Gee, is this really what I should be doing? Is there a new pattern that I could develop or a new habit that I could develop that is actually more adaptive for me in the current situation?”

And then there is this other ability of a well-guided psychedelic experience for people to enable themselves to experience some of the deep-seated feelings that they have been not allowing themselves to feel. You know, doctors and nurses, they’re so professionalized about what happens. It becomes hard to feel. After you’ve been preventing yourself from feeling everything for a long time, it becomes just hard to feel what’s really happening, and a well-guided psilocybin experience can do that. So I started this study as a way of investigating whether this is a way to work on the inner side of how people end up in burnout.

James Shaheen: You know, I’d like to read a quote from an article you were kind enough to write for Tricycle. You write, “What I am realizing as the study unfolds is that how we all recover from the pandemic—from the suffering, the burdens, the changed identities—starts with how we cultivate our own presence, as well as how we extend that presence to the people we are with.” You refer to a reciprocity of presence. Can you say something about that?

Anthony Back: Yes. You know, what I have begun to realize really sitting with doctors and nurses in this study, because sitting with people while they’re having their psilocybin experience is really like a meditation retreat. It’s like you are holding space for them. You are completely present with yourself, but you are also present with them. So it’s just a very interesting variation on what happens when you are in a long meditation retreat.

And what I came to realize is it wasn’t just me sitting there being open for them, and it wasn’t just about them doing their own thing. There are subtle ways in which we know each other is there, subtle ways in which we interact with each other. And they can be the small things that happen in the room—you know, somebody needs to go to the bathroom or they want a glass of water. And they can be deeper things like when somebody sat up with me and sat right across from me and said, “I can really feel you here.”

All those experiences, I think, allow people to feel their own presence and allow me to feel my own presence with them. And that kind of exchange is what I meant by a kind of reciprocity, and in fact, it’s always happening, and I’m just not always so aware of it, but in that setting, I have become really attuned to it.

James Shaheen: OK, we’re running short on time, so one last question. I was asked not long ago to speak to a group of humanities students at Berkeley. And People who were majoring in literature were asking, “What is this degree going to do for me?” And yet you’ve integrated your background in the humanities too into your medical practice. You know, back to Joyce and Woolf, I’m sorry, but how, how would you say the value of that education, what value did that bring to your work as a medicine oncologist?

Anthony Back: Well, you know what, I mean, there are a couple of things. One is it was about the value of paying close attention. For me, this was pre-mindfulness, right? It was about the value of paying attention to every sentence, to every comma, and that ability to focus like that I think has been incredibly fruitful for me, and it has led to all these avenues in life I would’ve never expected.

And then the other thing is that there are people who, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who had such a profound understanding of the mind and of human experience that even though they weren’t scientists and they didn’t know any the things that I talk about now in terms of scientific concepts, what they knew and rendered was a deep kind of understanding of the world that I think only happens in a kind of act of creative imagination like those novels represent.

There’s nothing like it, even in the scientific literature. And I go back to those kinds of writings again and again even now because they are so rich. And so I think of the humanities for me as really the ground of everything else I’ve done. And so I know that everyone feels really pressed to do something really practical, but it turns out that these fundamental abilities and capacities that we build, they’re what really sustain you in the long run.

James Shaheen: OK, so we have a nice way of closing. First of all, thank you, Tony, for joining us. It’s been wonderful. We typically close with a meditation led by Sharon, but I leave it to the two of you to decide which one of you will lead the meditation.

Anthony Back: Oh, beautiful. 

Sharon Salzberg: I actually had that thought as well. I thought, Tony, why don’t you lead us in the short meditation? Then I get to just sit, which is great.

Anthony Back: Sure. I would love that. Thank you. So first, if you allow your body to settle in the chair and just imagine that you are sinking deeply into the chair and the chair is completely supporting you, let your body soften and just take three breaths and on the in breath one, and on the breath, I’ll count three.

So, on the in-breath 1, and on the out-breath, 1, 2, 3. Again, in on 1, and out, 1, 2, 3. Notice the stillness, however much there is. Last one. On the in-breath, 1, and out, 1, 2, 3.

Now, as your breathing comes back to normal, whatever that is for you, just notice the tiny movements your body is making as you breathe and just allow them, and let yourself take in everything in this present moment and allow it to pass through you.

And for whatever brought you to this podcast, remember why you’re really here. Remember what you’d like to look forward to or what direction or what aspiration. Just hold that for a moment with your next out-breath. And on the next out-breath, please dedicate your practice to the well-being of all. And when you are ready, you can open your eyes. Thank you.

James Shaheen: OK, so I opened my eyes and I thank you, Tony. Thank you, Sharon. It was great to speak with you both.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you all.

Anthony Back: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Tony Back. To read Tony’s article on psilocybin-assisted therapy, visit tricycle.org. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. When Anne Klein first read that everyone, including her, was already a buddha, she was so shocked that she put down the book she was reading. Now, as a Dzogchen teacher, she continues to grapple with the relationship between our buddhahood and our humanity. In her new book, Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training for a Sunlit Sky, she takes up the question of what it actually means for each of us to be a buddha, as well as what happens to our humanity when we seek awakening. In today’s episode of Tricycle Talks, I sit down with Anne to discuss how she has come to understand buddhahood, the difference between wholeness and perfection, and why she believes that we are all backlit by completeness.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer and teacher Anne Klein. Hi, Anne. It’s great to be with you. Hi, James.

Anne C. Klein: Hi James. It’s great to be with you too.

James Shaheen: So Anne, we’re here to talk about your new book, Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training for a Sunlit Sky. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Anne C. Klein: Well, several things inspired me to write it. One was that in 2007, Adzom Paylo Rinpoche taught it, and it was my first acquaintance with this. It apparently is not taught that often. At least it hasn’t been in the West in my knowledge. So I really enjoyed it. It’s short, it’s clear, it gives you things to do that are rewarding. And I had an opportunity to discuss it with him. And I got to hear firsthand from the perspective of his being really a great Dzogchen master is what a tremendous foundation this is for one’s practice.

And then I reached back to kind of a koan that I’ve been just kind of chewing over since almost high school when I first heard this idea that you somehow were a buddha, which sounded insane and yet a very compelling statement. So a little bit in the book is occasional reflections on kind of my own process with looking at that statement and making sense out of it. And of course, it’s absolutely pivotal to Dzogchen, and, in fact, Adzom Rinpoche emphasizes it a lot. Even to a new student, he just sits them down and says, “Do you think you could be a buddha in this lifetime?” And it’s kind of a wake-up call, like, do I think that? And if I don’t, why not? And if I do, really? So these are things that were on my mind that I really wanted to bring forth in some way, and it felt like this was the way to do it.

Also, the theme of wholeness is something I’ve been reflecting on a good bit. I wrote a short story called “A Vow of Wholeness,” which, for me, really was a vow to really try to explore the wholeness that the traditions tell us is there. What does that mean to an ordinary human being? Because I’m clearly a human being, but there’s a buddha too that’s actually not separate in some way that I wanted to explore. I would say it’s been a continuing exploration. So for me, this book was a way to pull these things together and also to launch the House of Adzom series. It’s the first book that has a significant portion from Adzom Rinpoche, who is by all accounts really one of the great Dzogchen masters of this time in Tibet. So it just kind of came together.

James Shaheen: So we’ll get to Adzom Rinpoche and Jigme Lingpa and Longchenpa further on, but you write that Dzogchen understands all paths to move toward a natural state of wholeness like “rivers seeking their ocean or pained and promising humans like ourselves contending with something at once utterly foreign and also inseparably intimate with our human being.” Can you say more about this state of wholeness?

Anne C. Klein: So a state of wholeness is one of the great central symbols of Dzogchen, for example, the vast ocean. There are waves that are catastrophic, there are little ripples, there are changes in color, there is water crashing on the shore, but it’s all unquestionably ocean. The ocean is whole. I think that’s one of the reasons humans love to look at the ocean and the sky because somehow the sense of the usual sorts of “me,” “that” sort of dissolves just naturally, or I would say it softens. There’s still some kind of subject object sensibility there, maybe, but it softens. And there’s something about that that I think as a species we fall in love with. We love that vastness. And it’s a very intimate connection at that time, and it’s radically different experientially from looking at a computer or looking at cars or most of the things that we look at most of the time. So I feel like it’s actually a very deep yearning to have this. Some people might use other words. They might use the word beauty, for example, or heartfelt. And all of these sensibilities seem to be nourished in an experience of wholeness.

James Shaheen: In fact, you say that we are backlit by wholeness, and this is already accessible to each of us yet the book also describes a very highly structured path of practice. This may seem paradoxical: If we are already whole, then why do we need such structured and specific practice? And how do you understand the relationship between wholeness and the path of practice?

Anne C. Klein: It’s the central paradox of the path, not only in Dzogchen, but I think it’s particularly vivid in Dzogchen. You’re a Buddha. We’re told this from the beginning. You also don’t understand that. How can that be? How could that which is utterly perfect, the ground of everything, the real realm, the dharmadhatu? That is whole, and everything arises in it. Everything arises in your experience also. Your experience is in some sense the expanse in which everything arises. This is not an esoteric thing. You’re happy, you’re sad, but it’s all part of the domain of your experience. Or if you look at something, anything, this computer, my thermos, can you separate your knowing consciousness, the knower, from the thing you’re looking at? 

James Shaheen: I don’t think so.

Anne C. Klein: You’re shaking your head. Most of my students who never heard anything about Buddhism, I’ll bring this up very early sometimes, and they’re all like, “No, I don’t think so.” And that’s an extremely important recognition, because that’s where wholeness lies. And perhaps one of the reasons we love to look at the sky, the ocean, mountains, is that we get a sense of unfettered, unelaborated as they say, I like to say free of frills. The moment can be a portal to the wholeness that’s there. So this is some of the ways that I think of it.

So really, to come into wholeness is greatly advancing that process. Looking at the mind, in very particular ways, the mind can do anything, it is of infinite variety. And that’s kind of important to see. This kind of wholeness is the ultimate creative space. Everything arises in it, never leaves it. So practices like we have in the seven mind trainings, for example, will call on us to actually think about certain things like impermanence. It helps open our radar to flux and change and lightens up a little bit our projection on things and desire for things, especially “me,” “mine,” to be permanent, feel that they are permanent. And then it takes us through various kinds of permutations using vivid imagery, using the imagination, allowing things to rise in fullness of color and drama and emotion and then dissolve. It’s seeing that kind of process over and over and over again in daily practice that really opens up to the wholeness, the ground that is actually always there and never shaken, and nothing ever happens to it. But a lot of stuff happens in some sense, and we can’t ignore that. Maybe that’s the important thing to say: life is not just looking at the sky. The sky has clouds; the ocean has waves. Wholeness without arisings in it wouldn’t be wholeness; it would be some kind of exclusive zone. So it’s partly to really reckon with that experientially.

James Shaheen: One of the ways I looked at it was you have this wonderful description of yourself as a young woman, and you serendipitously stumbled into that state of wholeness or connection with it, and the way I look at it is yes, I think most people have an experience like that. And then we wonder, how does one cultivate a state of mind in which that is more likely to happen, in which that connection can be strengthened so we can come back to it more easily. That’s one of the ways I looked at it. Even as children sometimes we dip into that state. We don’t know what it is. But I understood the practice as recognizing that and connecting with that. Yet you say that wholeness and connection are central to our existence, but we rarely live as if they are. Can you say more about what you call our unwieldy sense of separateness? How does separateness cause our suffering, and why is it so easy to get stuck there—in other words, not find our way back or not even recognize that we’re already whole?

Anne C. Klein: Very simple question, of course. So this separateness operates on many levels, just the sense of hey, look over there, the birds are over there, right away, there’s there. And once there’s a there, there’s a here. So the dualism, the sense of separateness, the sense of two-ness gets more and more reinforced. There’s a you and a me; already the stage is set; there’s separateness. Of course, sometimes there’s connection also. One of the reasons I think that connection of many kinds is such a blessing is because it does soften our terrible sense of aloneness. So we don’t want to be alone, we don’t really want to be separate. In a way that makes us feel a stranger in the world in one sense or another, which happens a lot. It’s the cause of the greatest divisions in our society as these separations grow more powerful, and there’s tremendous suffering just because somebody looks a little different or thinks a little different, and suddenly, they’re your enemy, and you have to spend your whole life fighting.

But even more than that, in a way, what I’m thinking of is a separateness from one’s own experience. Just on a very simple level, most of us most of the time don’t really know how we feel and what we feel. We’re in our heads a lot. Being in the head keeps us active and lively. But without being also in the body, you really don’t know what you feel. You don’t feel things in your head. You know things in your head, and one of the things that I discovered, to my great surprise, but now I think it’s very common, is how frequently one confuses thinking with feeling. And that comes up a lot. Some people honestly don’t know the difference. So you’ll say, “How does that feel to you?” And they’ll say, “Well, it’s a nice day.” They’ll describe some kind of describable thing, but it doesn’t tell you or them anything about how one feels. So part of practice, it seems to me, is to really get in touch with what one is feeling. So mindfulness practice does that, practices where you feel you’re encountering a special being, which is very common in Mahayana, especially Tibetan style practices, traditional practices of cultivating equanimity, for example. “Oh, I’m equanimous,” most people will say. Well, watch yourself through the day. Or even the classic example of bringing to mind someone you really like. Notice what that feels like. Not get caught up in why you like them and so on, the story, but how does it feel? Is your body more or less relaxed? Is your breathing more or less deep? Or whatever it might be. Then think of somebody you really don’t like. How does that feel? One reason Dzogchen values certain of these practices is that they do bring us into closer contact with our own experience. And that’s essential because the experience, ultimately of our nature, is the most intimate experience there is. And we usually need practice to discover what we’re experiencing,

James Shaheen: We’re talking in part about relationships, how we relate to ourselves and to others, and at the same time, you say, while there’s this completeness, this wholeness, it’s not the same as sameness. It doesn’t erase the difference. So how does Dzogchen honor and celebrate the vast diversity and variety of human experience while also acknowledging completeness, wholeness, because you always hear people say something that has now become cliche, “we are all one” and so forth. And yet, there’s this infinite variety, not only to the many selves that we are but the many other things, the many other phenomena. You mentioned the clouds in the sky, the waves in the ocean. They’re there, and that’s where the tension often arises.

Anne C. Klein: Yeah, and we think that difference then is the last word, and it blinds us to the wholeness, and yet a great line from a Dzogchen text, “Because there are many, there is one.” Wholeness is not a dead expanse with nothing in it. Wholeness is the open space in which everything occurs, which is boundless, which is unlimited, and in which anything can occur without in any way leaving that state of state, place, unnameable, unthingable wholeness. And this is actually very central to Longchenpa’s approach, that nothing ever leaves this state. It’s like, well, again, the waves in the ocean. They never leave the ocean. The clouds never leave the sky. They arise there, they dissolve into it, they don’t disrupt it. And in some ways, the more clouds and lightning and thunder and rainbows and birds that you can see in the sky, the more you can appreciate its openness and its boundlessness. So it is often said that for a pretty developed practitioner, not so immediately, the more activated your mind can be, in a certain sense, the more you can see, “Yeah, but that wholeness is not getting disrupted.” So it’s very important to recognize that variety is like the blossoming of wholeness and creativity. One of the great Dzogchen tantras is called Kunjed Gyalpo, which is translated as the all-creating majesty, that which actually is the source of everything. And its greatness is there, its majesticness is there. The chen of Dzogchen, dzog meaning perfect or complete, chen literally just meaning great, means it’s great because there’s nothing outside of it. Nothing. Not your worst enemy, not your worst fears. It’s all a wave in the ocean.

James Shaheen: Right, in fact, you refer to Dzogchen’s radical inclusivity. So in that wholeness, there’s this inclusivity. So you say that in Dzogchen, there is no barrier between ordinary and awakened conditions, and humans and buddhas are simply different ways of arising from the general ground of being. Can you say more about this? What does it actually mean for there to be no barrier between ordinary and awakened?

Anne C. Klein: At different levels, it means different things. So at the very ground of everything, there is not yet any division into human/buddha. In other words, there’s something there that’s not really anything but nonetheless from which everything comes forth. Longchenpa says this in exquisite poetry over and over and over again. And that’s really kind of as deep as we can get into our nature or our existence. And then an ocean can divide, and at some point, something happens that’s part of the ocean’s process, the Earth has moved in a certain way or a dam has built up or something has happened, and the streams go in different directions, and one goes through the mountains, and one goes through valleys and they’re like completely different. But there’s still ocean actually. But one forgets. We forget. We are so entranced by the objects of our senses that we think they’re separate from our senses and not part of the sensory awareness arena that is associated with our senses. They’re arising right there. They’re not outside our ocean of experience ever.

James Shaheen: Again, we come back to the no separation between the knower and the known. It’s something I’ve talked to Ken McLeod about. And likewise, the sense of separation, negative sense of separation, in which we feel lonely and cast out and at odds with the world is not to be confused with variety or extraordinary diversity of experience. You write that only a wisp separates buddhas and humans, and it is this sensed separation from our birthright of wholeness that causes pain. So what does it mean for us to be just barely separated from buddhas? And why does this cause us so much pain?

Anne C. Klein: Oh, where to start. So this wisp is not even a wisp, really. It’s not really anything. But for us, there’s a collapsing of attention and a collapsing even of a sense of existence into the moment of this wave, this conversation, this piece of food, this is what there is. And somehow we forget about everything else that actually makes this possible. You know, even if we think of it in terms of dependent arising, which is famous throughout Buddhism, as we know, the food we eat connects us back to the beginning of time. We don’t think about that. We lose that openness. But you don’t have to lose it. I mean, it’s not easy not to lose it. But one can meet practitioners and just being around them, it’s quite clear that you’re never losing it. It’s all the play of clouds in the sky. It’s all the waves in the ocean. It’s all unfurling within one’s own intimate expanse, and intimate and vast are commingling. And that’s also very important: very intimate and it’s also infinitely vast, and we tend to get stuck in one or the other.

James Shaheen: You note that when you first read that everyone, including you, was already a Buddha, you were so shocked that you put down the book you were reading. What was so shocking to you then, and how have you come to understand that statement now?

Anne C. Klein: Well, really? I’m a Buddha? I mean, I can barely get through the day.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I have a hard time with that too.

Anne C. Klein: On the one hand, it seemed ridiculous. But I put the book down, I didn’t throw it away, because I guess on some inchoate level that maybe over the decades is getting a little less inchoate, it rang true. If I look back, there was something compelling about it. In one of my classes at Rice I did, it was a small class, and I did something that I’d never done before. We had been doing exercises together of various kinds. And I asked them to sit in pairs and say, one person to the other, “You’re perfect.” And right away, one student said, “I can’t possibly say that to anyone, and I don’t want them to say it to me, because I know that’s not true.” And she had her religious faith had taught her that and she was just not going. I said, Okay, you don’t have to believe it’s true. What you’re really just doing is giving this person an opportunity to feel whatever it is they feel. So then afterwards, I asked them, “Well, what happened?” And the two things that I remember, one, this is a Rice class, so undergraduates, and one student said, “How can I be perfect? I didn’t turn my last paper in on time.” And how to explain that that’s not the dimension making mistakes is not a violation of the kind of completeness or perfection. It’s being talked about here. And I think that’s hard to communicate. And then somebody else said, “What did you feel?” He said, “I found it very healing to be given this kind of positive reflection,” which from the perspective of really all the Buddhist traditions is also true. I think it’s very challenging to consider how close whatever you want to call it, but wholeness, pure awareness awakening might be. And I think it’s hard for at least two reasons. One is that it’s very, very poignant to feel this is so close, and yet I can’t get it. It’s just hard to believe.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, one of the things that I found helpful is that often I see Dzogchen translated as the Great Perfection, and to say completeness is easier for me. If someone says, “Are you perfect?,” I feel the same discomfort. If someone says, “Are you complete?,” I think, “Well, how could I not be?” Complete is much easier for me to understand. So a central question you raise is what actually happens to our humanity when we seek awakening. In particular, do we lose or amplify our humanness in the process? How do you understand our humanness and how it changes in the process of recognizing our buddhahood?

Anne C. Klein: I would say it becomes fuller and even more human. I’m remembering Barbara Walters. A long, long time ago, she interviewed the Dalai Lama, and she said something like, “I think he’s the most human person I’ve ever met.” When I think of my teachers, for example, they’re totally human. Why? Because they’re not defended against you. You know, they will look at you with complete acceptance in a certain way, which doesn’t mean that everything you’re doing is right in some other sense. You know, you come into their presence, and they’re all there for you. They will laugh with you, they will cry with you, they will hear you, they will be sensitive. They’re just interacting in a completely intimate way. You’re not a stranger. And that’s optimally human. I think the Sufis talk about being a real human being, and I think this is the kind of thing that is meant.

James Shaheen: I’m trying to remember, I think maybe it was in The Brothers Karamazov, where the saint is expected to remain preserved when he dies. But in fact, he stinks to high heaven, and in that we’re supposed to say he was intensely human, in other words, which was a really wonderful thing to read. But you ask, “Are we humans practicing to be buddhas? Are we buddhas masquerading as humans?”

Anne C. Klein: Yeah, it’s actually the latter. And to come to see that in one’s own experience from any angle a little bit is just very helpful. It’s OK. It’s terrible. But there is some okayness right there in everything. That’s hard. It’s hard to remain in touch with that short of full awakening. Anyway, I feel thinking about it this way and that way that it is just really true. And therefore it’s worth sitting and sitting and sitting through whatever you have to sit through, living through whatever you have to live through, with that in mind, that actually anything could finally open that wisp and dissolve it.

James Shaheen: One way this plays out is the relationship between what Dzogchen calls the ordinary mind and the wisdom mind. So first, what is the ordinary mind?

Anne C. Klein: The mind that laughs and cries and sees things as over there. It’s pretty much everything of our ordinary mind. Reactive, habitually programmed.

James Shaheen: Maybe the clouds and the waves that don’t know they’re part of the ocean.

Anne C. Klein: Yeah, probably. That’s good.

James Shaheen: So in Dzogchen teachings, it’s said that if we can’t relax, then we will always be in ordinary thought. This may seem paradoxical given the rigor of some of the practices associated with the mind trainings. So what role does relaxation play in awakening and helping us to access the wisdom mind? Because relaxing is no mean feat.

Anne C. Klein: Indeed, relaxing plays a huge role. And we see that in what I’m calling the pith practices of Jigme Lingpa all these different words for relaxing, being at ease, being settled, not being pulled or tethered in any direction. It’s extremely important. And anticipating sometimes when we do really, really, really vigorous exercise, you go skiing for the whole day, and then you’re in a hot tub, there’s a way in which, finally, we’re just finished, we just can’t do anymore. And there’s relaxation. So maybe that addresses the seeming paradox.

Thought is actually effort in the way that Dzogchen is talking about it. After going through a series of practices and getting used to various aspects of ease and relaxation and wholeness and so on and you’re ready to maybe sit in that state of wholeness, there will be thoughts. That’s kind of an efforting. If we watch ourselves very carefully, which is partly what those five pith practices are about, we notice, which usually we don’t, compared to being in total ease for the ordinary mind, there’s something a little bit effortful when thought arises. If your body is very quiet, you might feel it somewhere in your body. Your shoulder just tenses a little or your mouth just does something. We wouldn’t consider effort normally, but it’s something that has a quality of constriction, a quality of construction, which ease does not have, which wholeness does not have. So the ocean isn’t tense about all the waves, you know, which way are they going to go and who’s going to reach shore first. There’s really nothing but the waves and the fluid and the movement, and it doesn’t contradict things happening, but there can be much arising even in that state of openness, but we don’t clutch onto it.

James Shaheen: It’s interesting just about relaxation. My discovery when I was much younger, there were a lot of people to be taken care of who were ill, and that would mean many sleepless nights. And there would come a point when there was no option but to relax because of the exhaustion. And sometimes I look at the practice as a way to relax without having to be up ten days in a row. And so it’s very interesting. I love the way you talk about relaxation. But we’ve mentioned a few names that our listeners may need a little bit of help with. You structure the book around Longchenpa’s sevenfold mind trading and Jigme Lingpa’s commentaries on the trainings. So first, could you give us a brief introduction to these two teachers? Who were they, and how did you first come to their writings and teachings?

Anne C. Klein: So Longchen, whose name means vast expanse, Longchenpa lived in the 1300s, and he is to this day regarded as the unparalleled architect and conveyor of the richness of the Dzogchen traditions. He compiled Dzogchen materials going back to at least the way Tibetans unveil the story to the eighth century. Certainly scholars would say it’s from the 10th or 11th century. You already have traditions known as heart essence, Dzogchen traditions. Longchenpa then writes a big text called the Nyingthig Yabshi, the Fourfold Heart Essence. And he brings together all of these earlier teachings, and he writes his own commentaries on them, and then he writes the Seven Treasures, among his most famous writings. Interestingly enough, he talks about the seven trainings—if you only read a few texts, he says in some place, make sure this is one of them, because this has everything in it.

So Longchenpa, his poetry, his philosophy, there’s kind of nothing like it. That’s how Tibetans regard the tradition. And I think that hasn’t paled in Dzogchen’s coming to the West. So Longchenpa is the great one, and there are many myths about his origins. He has a story that takes him back to the earliest beginnings of Buddhism in Tibet. Longchenpa, at the end of his life, he spent some of his life in Bhutan, he came to Samye Chimpu, a very important place where Guru Rinpoche gathered his first twenty-five disciples. Yeshe Tsogyal visited there. Everybody who was anybody visited there, practiced there.

Jigme Lingpa also practiced there. And in one of his retreats, he has a vision of Longchenpa. He sees the wisdom body of Longchenpa. And he receives the full empowerment, permission to teach and really the full mind of Longchenpa. And after that, he begins to teach. From the perspective of the lineage and tradition there, even though they’re separated by a few centuries, Jigme Lingpa absorbs all that Longchenpa represents and is, and he comes forth with his own revelation called the Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse, the Longchen Nyingthig, the Heart Essence of Longchenpa, who is the whole of Dzogchen up to that time. And when I first visited Samye Chimpu on a pilgrimage, and I happened to meet someone who said, “You know, a great lama has just come here, and you could go see him,” and that’s when we met Adzom Rinpoche, who was then identified by his cousin who read a litany of his previous incarnations, one of which was Jigme Lingpa. but that was a very heart-stirring moment. He became my teacher from that time, that formed a tremendous connection, which fortunately continues.

James Shaheen: We can go into them in more depth, but briefly, what are the seven mind trainings? And what do they aim to cultivate in a practitioner because the seven mind trainings of Longchenpa are really later what Jigme Lingpa and Adzom Rinpoche are sort of building on, is that right?

Anne C. Klein: Yes, that’s right. And it goes back even further than that. The seven categories come from an ancient tantra, which actually lists these. At the last minute, Wisdom asked me to ask Rinpoche if he would write something praising the book, and he sent a poem about the book and the seven trainings, and I would like to read two verses.

“When you mind-train to discern mind and its nature,
all untoward thoughts hanging on to self
are finally free in their own ground. I have no doubt.
Naturally seeing reality is astounding. I’m amazed.

Practicing just this way, dissolve your ideas
into their ground, the frill-free Sheer Form (dharmakaya).
Let the uncontrived, incalculable way things are,
wholly free of contrivance, be a rich, serene stillness.”

So I would say that that describes what they do. These seven trainings begin with training in impermanence. Mind training is a very important genre from India, and this mind training is therefore part of that genre. And yet, it has some unusual features, especially in the way that Jigme Lingpa unfolds it. All Longchenpa says really is to learn to recognize that whatever you see, there’s outer, inner, and secret impermanence. There’s changes in weather, changes in leaves. The flux of your thoughts as a kind of subtle impermanence. And Jigme Lingpa creates these vignettes, especially in the first three, and to my knowledge, and I’ve asked around other people who have read more widely in lojong mind training than I have, this is unusual. He creates a vignette where you imagine that you find yourself somewhere, you have no idea where you are, you have no idea how you got there, you’re alone, the wind is blowing. It’s kind of horrific. It’s existential aloneness writ large. And these people come by and they say, “Hey, we’re going to go look for a jewel, you want to come with us?” And he says, “Yeah, OK.” And they go, and of course, it’s a harrowing journey. The waves of this ocean, which represent samsara, are frightful. And finally, they’re just in a little rickety boat. The oars break. He’s terrified. “Oh, my God, I’m going to die. I’m never going to see my family again,” this horrific fear. The boat breaks. He’s really on the edge of death.

Just at that moment, Guru Rinpoche, who, of course, is the constellation—when I talk about this in general, I say to just imagine an orb of light. And Guru Rinpoche says, “You’ve really been a fool. You thought that life was about getting some kind of jewel, something you would call the jewel. You’ve risked your life for nothing. And you’ve never thought of impermanence. And here you are, you’re on the cusp of death, and you are just desperate and desperate.” And then somehow something cracks and light comes forth from Guru Rinpoche. You melt into light, your mind becomes one with Rinpoche, you have realized your completeness, your wholeness just like that, and you’re free. You’re free from samsara.

So this kind of vignette is, to my knowledge, not part of mind training. One of the things that if we look at it closely, as I describe, it really takes you through all nine vehicles from the beginning of the path to the end. The ancient ones famously divided the entire corpus of the teaching into nine vehicles, but we can reduce that to sutra, tantra, and Dzogchen. The worry in thinking about impermanence is sutra. The encounter with a deity and melting into a deity is tantra,  very simple creation and completion phases, dissolving into space. Then Jigme Lingpa says, “Now let all of this go, you’ve been through all that, and give up all thoughts of the past, present, and future. Relax, be open, and just be aware of movement and stillness.”

And that potentially, over time, really opens to Dzogchen’s understanding. There’s movement and there’s stillness. Maybe they aren’t contradictions. Maybe they don’t disrupt a wholeness of which they are, of course, a part. And yet, there is movement and stillness, and wholeness remains. It’s all there. Jigme Lingpa says that to move through all nine vehicles in one sitting is a great practice, which I think is another way of saying buddhahood is not so far away. And I think in Zen they also have statements like that.

James Shaheen: You’ve just told a story, and you have talked in the book about imagination, and many of the trainings rely on imaginative practices, and as you write, “Is it possible to attain something we have not imagined?” So can you say something about the role of imagination in these practices? How do the mind trainings ask us to imagine possibilities beyond our habitual range of experience?

Anne C. Klein: Well, they do ask us to do that, and the very fact that you can somehow imagine it maybe shows the infinite scope of the mind. Imagining isn’t the same as being. There’s a movement. I call it a movement from seeing to being. Imagination can expand the horizon that we live in. Imagination is a natural human expression of creativity. Little children imagine. We imagine all the time. We imagine in ways we don’t know that we’re imagining. We imagine that we’re real. We imagine that we’re permanent. But that is not what is meant here. It’s important to distinguish between daydreaming and what we could think of as a trained imagination. I’m training myself to think about impermanence. I’m training myself to feel that, hey, this isn’t flesh, this isn’t light. Now that may be easy, or it may take time, or it may be both. It may be easy, and it may get even more powerful over time. We have a mind. We have imagination. And meditation is a full-being process. It’s not just in the head, although it may stay there for a long time. But it’s really not. It’s a full-body process. A lot of imagination has to do with reimagining, reexperiencing one’s body to imagine it as light. I mean, there are many practices where buddhas melt into you and you melt into buddhas and then into space and over and over again, and I think this is a way of helping one to imagine and feel into this no-boundaryness between being ordinary and being human. They flow into each other. That is, over and again, there are infinite practices that one way or another ask us to imagine that, and I think that that has the potential even neurologically to shift how we experience things over time.

James Shaheen: In addition to the focus on imagination, some of the later mind trainings focus on the body. Can you say something more about bodily practices of the later mind trainings? How do they facilitate deeper meditative experiences like bliss, clarity, and nonconceptuality?

Anne C. Klein: Thank you for asking that. This is so important. This is the seventh mind training, so it’s a kind of culmination. And really, it is a tantric practice. It is the basis of what are called the channeling wind practices, which are really part of the very esoteric corpus of Tibetan practice. How do they help us? They help us go deeper into the body. The ordinary mind lives more or less on the surface of the body. This practice invites us to go right into the center, to the heart center, to the central channel, which is the most sacred secret sanctum of the body. It is said to be suffused with wisdom, only wisdom actually permeates the entire body. That means our body is a resource for accessing wisdom, because the wisdom there is most accessible through the heart. And the heart is the center of the vertical rise of the central channel, which in ordinary life, I mean, nobody ever told me to pay attention to my central channel. But we do think about the spine and sitting straight, which in a way is very much related. I would just say it’s a way to get more deeply into the body, which will yield a more subtle type of experience. I can feel my hand moving, but to go deep inside whatever movement might be, there is stillness or maybe there’s space there. And we find places to rest in the body. In Zen, Zen calls it the dantian. Tibetans call it the mdo, where the three main channels meet deep in the navel. So this is part of tantric physiology, and it’s really the deepest place to settle in the body. So when we’re learning to relax, we settle into the deep belly, and that also primes us to be more quiet than usual. And that quiet allows more clarity, which allows us finally to rest in a state of bliss, as you mentioned, and clarity. Bliss is naturally part of our physiology, and it’s understood to just naturally emerge when the conditions are right. And posture is one way for the conditions to be right, and that’s why posture is very important. All of the traditions emphasize sitting straight, at the very least, because that allows a flow of energies through the body, and ultimately the mind is always moving through energy. So the way the energy moves in the body very much affects the mind. When the energy is more subtle, the mind is more subtle. So we go into the body and find subtlety there and wisdom.

James Shaheen: You mentioned nonconceptuality, and in that embodiment, that very deep embodiment, it seems to be where knower and known disappear.

Anne C. Klein: Exactly. Exactly, it’s so important. The more esoteric you get in the Buddhist tradition, the more important the body becomes. These practices that are intimated here in the seventh training are really a portal and maybe more than a portal to the kinds of practices that certain Tibetan practitioners will develop enormous expertise over the years, and really, they just move differently.

James Shaheen: I was really interested in the question of agency and surrender as opposed to submission. It is interesting that we’ve talked a few times about serendipitously dropping into a state. It can happen to anyone. And then of course, there’s the surrender to these trainings in order to deepen and cultivate our inclination toward that state. Can you say something about surrender and how that differs from submission?

Anne C. Klein: Maybe the surrender is what allows the tremendous flow, which makes agency really creative, expressive of our fullness, whereas submission is a state of constriction. You’re submitting to someone else. Surrender is like letting go of everything that obscures authentic agency, and that serendipitous falling into a state is really important, and very poignant is that I do believe people fall into it all the time. For example, in psychotherapy, one might fall into it. But the therapist, a Western-trained therapist, won’t know to point that out, and it’s usually so fleeting and makes so little sense in the context in which you are occupying your life at that time. You don’t get paid more for having such an experience. It doesn’t go on your CV. In a sense, it has no meaning in public life until someone who really has it emerges and you realize this is the most meaningful thing. What’s so important is for somebody to point it out. Or even maybe if you read about it in a book, when you notice it, you know, “Oh, hey, let me hang here for a minute.” Hang there for a minute literally is very significant. Usually, we just bounce off and say, “Oh, that was weird,” but just stay there a little bit, because that will imprint it for you, and then it will be something of a resource. It’s a really important point.

James Shaheen: Sometimes we find ourselves without even realizing it so willfully trying to make something happen and we’re so utterly defeated that surrender comes as a very sweet experience. I lost, and I can relax. I get to relax now. OK, well, Anne, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, please be sure to pick up a copy of Being Human and a Buddha Too, available now. Thanks so much, Anne.

Anne C. Klein: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Anne Klein. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello and welcome to Life As It Is. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. These days, with catastrophe after catastrophe, it can be easy to turn to despair and to believe that there is nothing we can do. But writer Rebecca Solnit is determined to change that narrative. Over the course of her career, Solnit has published twenty-five books on feminism, popular power, social change and insurrection, and hope and catastrophe. Her most recent project, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, brings together climate scientists and activists from around the world to address the social, political, and spiritual dimensions of our current crisis. Together, they envision a path forward. In today’s episode of Life As It Is, my co-host Sharon Salzberg and I sit down with Rebecca to discuss the power of hope in times of catastrophe, the dangers of hyperindividualism, and why she believes beauty is an essential piece of activist work.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer Rebecca Solnit and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Rebecca. Hi, Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Rebecca Solnit: Likewise. Thank you.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi.

James Shaheen: So Rebecca, you’ve published twenty-five books on topics as broad as feminism, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, and hope and catastrophe. So today, we’re here to talk about a book of essays you’ve edited called Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, which is part of a larger project to change the narrative around climate change. To start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to work with others to write it?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, in 2020, I met the wonderful young climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, who’s based in Fiji, and we realized we had a really shared vision that a lot of the climate despair, grief, anxiety, angst could be not washed away but really helped a lot by good frameworks and good facts, and that you really needed both because it’s not only the facts of the situation but how you understand big things, the nature of change, what human beings really need, what abundance could consist of, where power lies, that we’re really impacting how people imagine where we are and what we can do. So Thelma and I started a project that was initially just a website a little over a year ago and weren’t quite sure what we were going to do next. At a dinner party for a climate activist, I announced the Not Too Late project, and everyone else just kind of looked at me and said, “Rebecca, this needs to be a book.” So I scampered back home, Thelma and my wonderful publishers at Haymarket got on board immediately, and Thelma and I started reaching out. We knew we couldn’t do this alone, and we needed voices from different experiences within the climate movement from people on the front lines, people who are scientists, people who are organizers, people who understand the politics particularly well, and that really only a diversity of voices, only a chorus could really address the breadth and depth of what’s going on.

James Shaheen: Well, I have to say, I think the chorus has been successful so far. In writing about climate emergency, you say that emergency comes from the word emerge, or to exit or leave behind. So what can we learn from this understanding of emergency as a leaving behind the familiar?

Rebecca Solnit: I love etymologies in general, and I found the etymology of emergency so compelling because you look at it, and it literally means to emerge from something, to exit the way that things have been and enter into something new, which is always a scary time. Things can go wrong; they can get much worse; sometimes they can get better. And it’s a real moment of decision. It reminds me of the term crisis, which in medical terms means the point at which the patient either begins to recover or heads towards death, and both are possible. Emergencies often get us out of being stuck, and although we tend to fear them, they’re not always bad.

James Shaheen: Well, you write that our present moment is an exodus into the unknown, and our task is to make a home in this space of uncertainty and possibility. Can you say more about how we can take refuge in the unknown?

Rebecca Solnit: I’ve been talking about the fact that the future is dark, the future is unknowable, and running into the Western and I think particularly American wild enthusiasm for certainty, whether or not it’s based on truth and accuracy or not. People seem to really dislike uncertainty, or a lot of people. One of the things I love about Buddhism is I think it really encourages to engage with codependent arising, which means that innumerable forces are at work and exactly how they’ll dance together remains to be seen. I think of both optimism and pessimism as well as despair as forms of certainty about the future. “We know what’s going to happen” is their assumption. Pessimists assume it’s terrible but let themselves off the hook from doing anything because they speak as though the future has already been decided. Optimists take the opposite position but with the same kind of certainty that everything will be fine, nothing is required. I think part of it is that uncertainty is unnerving because certainty is predictability. Security means no emergence, no emergency. But also because it demands a lot of us. If we are actually creating the future in the present, the future does not yet exist, then we have tremendous responsibility to actually get in there and engage and create it. So I really wanted to look at all the things around that: that anxiety about the avoidance of recognizing the truth of uncertainty, which I think is also about recognizing another thing Buddhism has to teach us, which is change is constant. I think people often don’t have much memory of the past, the historical past, so they think of the present as a kind of eternity that’s somehow being shattered, rather than that the world was radically different twenty and fifty, let alone a hundred years ago. So of course, it’s going to be different in the next ten and twenty and fifty years, but how it will be different is something we’re deciding now. And that’s so true for climate. This is the decade of decision.

Sharon Salzberg: Throughout your career, you’ve written about the power of hope in times of catastrophe. You say that hope is not a lottery ticket but an ax you break down doors with in an emergency. So how does hope function as an ax? And how can we harness hope as a powerful organizing tool?

Rebecca Solnit: One of the quotes when I began writing about hope twenty years ago I loved is that you can’t have hope without action, but you can’t have action without hope. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about hope. One is that it’s optimism, which is certainty about the future, whereas hope is just about possibility. Another is that hope is a feeling and that if you don’t feel good, you can’t be hopeful. And we know people in the worst situations in the world dared to hope not because everything looked good or felt good but because there’s something worth doing. So hope is an ax to break doors down with for me is about first of all recognizing that it’s active, not passive. Hope is where you begin, but you don’t just sit there on the couch feeling hopeful, but that you actually need to take it and act on it. I love the anti-prison activist Mariame Kaba’s definition that hope is a discipline, meaning that it’s a real commitment to who you want to be, how you want to be in the world, that you’re going to try without being confident or certain about outcome.

A quote that Thelma and I both go back to a lot is Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovakian activist who helped topple the regime but in ways that were so unforeseeable until it happened. And so he’s a great beacon of hope, and he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” And I’ll just say one more thing, which is, I think also people think if you don’t always win, then your hope was ill-founded, but it’s always a gamble. You know, you’re breaking down that door with an ax, but whether you’re going to get everyone out of the theater on fire or the flooding basement remains to be seen, but you might as well try.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I think one of the things you also serve in your work is redeeming words, which is a very powerful thing when they’ve changed meaning. I think about love in that way, for example, you know, where it’s kind of gotten degraded so that we see it as sentimentality or losing energy rather than gaining energy and so on, being able to kind of turn that around and say, “Hey, wait a minute.” So you actually liken hope to love and the sense of taking risks and being vulnerable to the possibility of grief and loss. So can you say more about that?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, hope, I think, is a kind of vulnerability, and you don’t hope if you don’t care, so it’s a form of care. Cynicism is a way of saying it’s not worth caring because it’s all going to hell anyway, there’s nothing we can do, we never win, etc. It’s a form of giving up beforehand. And it’s often seen as very sophisticated. When I wrote my book twenty years ago, Hope in the Dark, I was really struck by who was hopeful, which was often people on the frontlines of the Zapatistas, farmworkers facing modern-day slavery, poverty, and exploitation, and who was cynical and despairing, which was often really comfortable people who saw it as a form of solidarity with people they imagined as being desperate and therefore hopeless. And there I think they were wrong about the hope, if not the desperation. But they also I think were ultimately taking care of themselves rather than the world. Cynicism doesn’t require anything of you. It’s a posture. Hope does put you on the spot. If you hope we can win, then why the hell aren’t you doing anything to win? If you hope that this life can be saved, you better get out there and save it. You know, I think hope is inextricable from action, whereas cynicism is really kind of almost inextricable from passivity or making decisions that may benefit yourself but not the greater whole. I think it comes partly out of a sense of powerlessness, partly out of a sense of separateness.

I think so much encourages people to believe they can’t win, so all you can win is a really good posture for yourself in the world and how you present yourself. But I think that’s wrong. I think there’s so much more you can win, and the historical record shows that, which is why now think of hope, which is about the future, as very connected to memory about the past. If you remember how different the world was, how many times small groups, civil society, nonviolent direct action, concerted campaigns, dedicated individuals change the world, you know that the world can be changed by these means because it has been changed, and you know that the world is changing all the time, and the fossil fuel companies, Wall Street, capitalism are all very willing to change it for the worse. We should be at least as willing to change it for the better.

James Shaheen: Rebecca, you also quote AOC, who says that hope is not something you have but something you create with your actions and manifest in the world. So can you say more about the process of creating and manifesting hope through action?

Rebecca Solnit: Well, she’s referring to a bunch of things that are in that wonderful passage from a talk she gave. I think one thing is that she herself was pretty hopeless. Standing Rock made her hopeful, which I find incredibly exciting, because I know a lot of people would say the action at Standing Rock tried to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline; they didn’t stop it, therefore they lost. But so many things happened at Standing Rock. It was maybe the biggest gathering of Native people in North American history. It gave a lot of young Native people a sense of hope and worth and agency they didn’t have before, which I’ve heard directly from people on Standing Rock. It educated a lot of the settler colonial world about Native land rights, a commitment to protecting the natural world, and it convinced AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to give her her full and proper name, to go home and run for office. And in one of the great upset victories of recent years, she beat an incredibly powerful and successful-long term Democratic Congressman to take office and then become a great force for climate in Congress. To back up a little bit. I think AOC is saying her own version of hope without action is just wishful thinking, or kind of toxic positivity, you could almost call it. Action without hope, I’m not sure really knows what to do or why it’s doing it. And people also think hope is this very big, fancy thing that most of us don’t have, and it’s like you stand at the bus stop, because you hope the bus will come, you flip the light switch because you hope the light’s going to go on, you go down to the coffee shop because you hope they’re open, and they’re going to make you a cup of coffee. We have little acts of hope all the time. You call your mom because you’re hoping she’s gonna pick up the phone and act like your mom if you were lucky enough to have a good mom and she’s still on Earth. And it’s really kind of about cause-and-effect relations and our ability to participate in them and influence them. It’s not exotic. It’s not extreme. But it can be harnessed to big political goals, big goals for a better world, for some cessation of suffering. And I think it’s a good way to live because there’s also often this rhetoric that all these things that are noble are somehow eating your broccoli, and nothing against broccoli, but as I often say about activism, sometimes it’s drinking your champagne, and I have met the most wonderful people and seen the most extraordinary things by being in the activist world. It’s been an education. It’s given me great friendships, it’s greatly enriched my life. And I think I feel a lot better about climate change, because I’m actively engaged. I don’t do it just to take care of myself, but it is a certain kind of well-being I think is a fringe benefit of living this way. 

James Shaheen: One thing that did come out of Standing Rock is precisely the sort of narrative that supports us and encourages us and invites us to engage. So I don’t even think about whether or not the pipeline was built, I think about the amazing kind of galvanizing force that movement brought to the public. But you draw from the work of the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, who argued that hope is a belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable. Can you walk us through this statement? How does hope emerge from possibility? And how can it free us from the sense of doom and gloom inevitability in despair?

Rebecca Solnit: One thing I find among the many excuses people have for inaction is that sense of what’s going to happen. If they don’t say that the future has already been written or is already preordained, they’ll talk about plausibility. The big guys usually win. And that’s often true. It’s not always true that the likely thing is what happens and it can happen in the worst way, too. One of the things I found terrifying just before the 2016 election is that Hillary Clinton was given, I think, an 87% chance of winning. A lot of people walked around like that was 100% chance. And as I’ve been saying, ever since, guess what, she had an 87% chance of winning, but guess what, we live in the 13% chance about 13% of the time. And so I think possibility rather than probability is partly about knowing it’s worth trying even if it doesn’t seem like what is likely to happen but also that you can make things happen. For a while, I was leading climate chants at protests that were like, “Don’t ask what will happen, be what happens.” We see people make things happen all the time, the civil rights movement made voting rights happen. And you know, we’re not in racial paradise yet. But it changed a lot of things.  We know that this stuff matters. We know that this stuff makes things change. And what I love about the greatest activists is that they don’t say, “Does this look likely? Does this look possible? Does this look easy?” They just say “This is the right thing to do.”

There’s a wonderful book by Adam Hochschild called Bury the Chains about a dozen Quaker men in London in the 1770s who decided to abolish slavery in the British Empire. And it was such a radical thing to decide. And it was so implausible. Only one of them lived the next 50 years it took to see slavery abolished in the British Empire. But they were one of the forces that did that, and it was implausible when they started out. Women voting was really implausible when that idea was introduced into the conversation in the 1840s, which is why it took 80 years. So many things take a while, five years, ten years, twenty years. We had about a decade-long campaign to stop the KXL pipeline, and there were people telling us we were going to lose all the way until we won, and 10 years isn’t even that long compared to a lot of other struggles. But it took a while. And so all that I think is equipment for doing what needs to be done without just passively guessing what’s likely to happen, and really settling for it, settling for destruction, settling for suffering, settling for abuse, settling for any quality is something we don’t have to do. Settling for it is a form, as my friend Roshi Joan Halifax would say, of moral injury.

James Shaheen: Right, you also talk about the dangers of settling for despair, and you write that despair is a luxury. So what do you mean by this?

Rebecca Solnit: I did write a piece about despair as a luxury. Because if the threat is imminent, you’re usually not despairing. If you can get the kids into the lifeboat, you’re gonna get the kids into the lifeboat, not say, “Oh, it probably won’t work to get the kids into the lifeboat, I’ll just watch them drown.” And so I often find that despair is people who weren’t on the frontlines aren’t facing these things, essentially giving up on behalf of other people and excusing themselves from action. What I’m calling action, I think, is part of being connected to the greater whole. I also think that that’s a good way to live. The opposite is to feel powerless and disconnected. And I know why people feel both ways. And I feel that a huge amount in our society works really hard at making you feel those ways. A good citizen is a bad consumer. A good consumer is often a bad citizen. Everything tells us we’re consumers, and almost nothing tells us that we’re citizens, not just consumers, that we have agency, we have a role to play, we have power, maybe not alone, but we have immense power together.

Sharon Salzberg: I once was writing a book on faith, which is a lot about the way you describe hope, you know, I just use the word faith. My freelance editor said to me, “What’s the opposite of faith? Isn’t it doubt?” And I said, well, no, in the Buddhist tradition, the right kind of doubt is really helpful to faith because you need to question and wonder and find out for yourself and then your faith deepens. So she said, “Well, what’s the opposite of faith?” And I said despair. And I meant it in the sense of disconnection the way you’re using disconnect. But it sounds like you’re saying within despair, we can still have a sense of possibility and that the despair is the heartbreak in a way over what is and yet we can also see what could be.

Rebecca Solnit: One thing I ended up saying pretty regularly is that I totally respect and acknowledge despair as an emotion. I can feel it myself about things in my personal life, things in the world. But to recognize despair as an emotion, we have to add it’s really important not to confuse it for an analysis. And anybody who’s ever been depressed knows that feeling that nothing will ever get better, nothing will ever change, and we can usually throw in nobody loves me, and it’s not worth it.

Sharon Salzberg: And I’m the only one who’s ever felt this.

Rebecca Solnit: Oh, god, yeah. You know, I often think of the fact that depression, back to etymologies, also means a hollow in the ground. It’s as though you fall into this hollow where you can’t see out, you can’t see the bigger world around you. Your horizon is just the sort of crumbly dirt edges of this hole that you might have dug yourself and you might be able to dig or climb your way out of. So despair as an emotion, absolutely, and there’s every reason for people to feel it at times. We’re in a really tough era and between the new authoritarianism and the kind of white supremacists, misogynist, transphobic homophobic backlash, the physical state of the Earth as climate impacts are all around us. There’s a lot to feel despair about. But despair as an emotion doesn’t have to be despair as an analysis. I also say base your feelings on facts, and that’s what the whole Not Too Late project was about is that people literally, without consulting with the best sources, with the scientists, with activists, the people who are really doing the hard work to understand the situation deeply. People would think it’s too late. We don’t know what to do. We don’t have the solutions. Nobody cares. Nobody’s doing anything.

So base your feelings on facts, recognize despair as an emotion, but don’t turn it into an analysis because that usually means that you’re fiddling with facts, or sort of cherry picking misinformation to feed the despair. And that’s the feedback loop people get into is that they seek out stuff that feeds the despair that renders them passive, that keeps him disengaged. And so it’s partly about picking good sources of who to believe, who to follow, who to connect to, I think, and partly about how you live in relationship to an emergency or a crisis. And that’s a choice we get to make. I think there’s a lot of spiritual equipment in Buddhism and other practices. There’s a lot of practical equipment in understanding how activism works and understanding climate science. We have four or five really top climate scientists in the Not Too Late anthology, because we really wanted to hear from them directly about why they’re hopeful and what they believe can be done, just like we have people on South Pacific islands facing going underwater, facing typhoons facing tremendous loss, speaking about their commitments.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, it’s also possible to encounter a narrative that grief and sadness are almost a kind of failure, and what you’re suggesting seems to be that sadness is a totally appropriate response to crisis and can serve as a doorway to action. So it’s really interesting how sadness and grief might mobilize us toward action.

Rebecca Solnit: I’ve come to think of emotions as deep and shallow rather than happy and sad. Part of consumer culture tells us that what we really want is to feel happy. And I think people imagine that as what I like to call the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche of nothing ever makes you feel terrible, nothing seems difficult, nothing feels tragic. We’re mortal beings on earth. Death happens, loss happens, change happens. Of course, we’re going to face things that will make us feel sad. And I think much worse than sadness is that fear of sadness, that you may feel sad, and then you feel like you’re not supposed to feel this way and it’s wrong and you have to do something to abolish it or find some way to numb out or learn to not care. And so I think this is pretty far from climate, but different relationships to the emotions can be really helpful, that it’s OK to be sad. Of course, all of us are sad some of the time, and it’s not a failure, just like mortality is not a failure. Sadness also is not defeat, and it doesn’t have to break you.

One thing I hear a lot is a version of human nature in which we’re tremendously fragile and we cannot deal with despair, grief, loss, difficulty, or we should not be expected to. One of the things I love about Roshi Joan Halifax, I think she comes from another generation, but she also comes from decades of deep Buddhist practice. And her whole take on human nature is that we’re actually really tough, we’re resilient. We can survive a lot. And so I also think part of what we need to do to address the climate crisis is to look at the deeper stories we’ve been told: that life is supposed to be easy, that we’re very fragile creatures, that we can’t adapt. Another story I find really important for addressing this as so many people believe another false narrative, which is that we currently live in an age of abundance and climate requires terrible renunciation of us. I think there’s a way to reframe that where we live in an era of austerity when it comes to social connection, to joy, to friendship, to free time, to hope about the future, to living in a healthy world where the air is breathable, the food is good for you and not contaminated, the ocean is thriving.

For the sake of fossil fuel, in particular, we’ve renounced so much. We’ve renounced clean air, we’ve renounced the future, we’ve renounced kids not having asthma in so many parts of the world. Because of fossil fuel emissions, about 8 million people a year die of respiratory problems related just to the particulate matter, not even to some of the other aspects. So what if we don’t live in an era of abundance, but doing what the climate requires of us, leaving the age of fossil fuels behind, could bring us to an era where the water is clean, the air is clean, the natural world is thriving, and we can feel more joy than anxiety when we look at it, where food is good for you, where people have more time for friendship, for joy, for time in the natural world, for creativity, or meditation, or cooking or painting or whatever gives us pleasure. And so how we tell the stories are so crucial, and not only the stories about the natural world, but deep down, the stories about human nature. What do we really want? What makes us thrive? What is the nature of our connections to each other? All these things, I think, are part of what we need to address. And so the climate crisis, as Thelma likes to say, is partly an imagination crisis, lack of an ability to imagine that maybe the world could get better, maybe this is not as good as it gets. So changing the story is not all you need to do to change the world. But you can’t change the world without changing the story about who matters, what matters, who we can be.

James Shaheen: You mentioned renunciation, and in Buddhism, it’s letting go of what harms us and allows us to cultivate greater freedom and joy, and it seems to me that that’s what you’re saying.

Rebecca Solnit: Absolutely. I think it was a Buddhist practitioner who said renunciation is great when you’re giving up something that makes you miserable. But of course, the dominant culture in the Western world is Christianity, where renunciation is the kind of monastic austerity or giving things up for Lent. It’s about a form of self-denial where you’re giving up things you actually want or that you think are fun or that might even be good for you. I think the Buddha’s take on renunciation is a lot more encouraging. But I think around climate, people imagine that we’re supposed to renounce things. And you often hear people when you ask them what they’re doing about climate change, talking about recycling, or I don’t fly anymore, or I’m vegan, about thinking that all we have in our own hands is renunciation of one kind or another. But in fact, there’s so much more we have in our hands. We have so much more agency and power. And I think the renunciation we need has to be collective. First of all, we have to give up fossil fuels. We have to find other ways to power the systems. And one of the things very few people grasp and it took me a long time to really understand is that in the 21st century, we’ve had the most astonishing energy revolution. In the year 2000, we could not really have left fossil fuel behind. Thanks to the incredible improvements, we can give up fossil fuel, and it’s not a renunciation any more than drinking poison, giving that up should feel like renunciation. You know, we’re giving up something incredibly destructive, or we can give it up.

And so reframing is such an important part of the work and it’s why the climate crisis is an imagination crisis. Why old stories have gotten us into this and new stories, which are sometimes the oldest stories of all indigenous stories, Buddha stories of non separation, non duality, of the fact that we in nature were never separate, are really important equipment. And it’s exciting to see that they are more and more present in the culture at large.

James Shaheen: Well, you mentioned reframing, and you also reframe what it means to measure our wealth, if you don’t mind, I’ll read from the book: “What if we measured our wealth in other ways, as confidence in the future, as the clarity of the air and its breathability, as pride in one’s community and country, as integrity in our material and moral lives, as having seen the summer’s shooting stars or throwing moon-viewing parties or watching the migratory birds arrive, as friendship and the sense of safety that means help is there when needed, as honor and dignity and a meaningful life?” And I’d also just like to add, there’s a difficulty about writing about spirituality in a culture that is to a significant degree hostile to it. There isn’t a lot of room sometimes to affirm spiritual life. So can you say something about that?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, I think a lot of people imagined spirituality as the kind of religion that either they think depends on theocratic beliefs that are not scientifically verifiable. The kind of dogmatic atheists think religion isn’t about going and hanging out with all the people you know at church and hearing the good word or singing with the chorus, listening to the music, smelling the incense, they think it’s just about believing things that aren’t true. So I think that there’s suspicion on that level. But I also think one of the radical and exciting and beautiful things that’s happened in the last maybe fifty years, particularly the last thirty, is that Buddhist ideas and indigenous worldviews have come to play a larger and larger role in the Western world. It’s really common on part of the left to talk as though we’re starting from scratch, the good things don’t exist yet, we need to bring them in. But they’re already here. I was so moved when Thich Nhat Hanh died to see how many people who didn’t consider themselves Buddhist had one way or another been touched by his life, his words, his writing, his example. And it was just a reminder for me that these other sets of values, I think, are increasingly prevalent in the culture already. They have real meaning for people. And I think indigenous ideas that we’re not separate from nature, that we have deep responsibility for it, that relationship to it is an important part of our spiritual, emotional, psychic, and cultural lives, as well as physical dependence.

These ideas are circulating. To me, it’s like the seeds have been planted, we just need to water them and help them propagate and spread. And so I would add science to indigenous and Buddhist worldviews as more and more telling us in beautiful and terrifying ways that everything is connected to everything else. Climate itself is a kind of dharma teacher come to tell us, damn it, everything is connected to everything else. Because all that burning of coal, oil and gas is thickening the carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, which is an insulating blanket, which makes it hotter, which is why there’s unbearable heat right now in China, Mexico, and Texas, why there’s unprecedented forest fires in Canada and smoke as we speak, making the air perilous in Michigan and a lot of the Midwest, and that will probably return to the East Coast as it did earlier this month.

So the ideas are there. I think just supporting them, helping people understand the basis for them, promoting them, talking about them, supporting them is part of the climate job. And people usually also think climate work is just shutting down fossil fuel extraction or putting up wind turbines. But it’s also about changing our imaginations, about giving us the equipment to be the people we need to be to live in the world we need for the best possible scenario. It’s a cultural crisis. And I think the creative work, which is also the theological work, is not just the practical stuff, not just fossil fuel and energy and energy policy and economics. It’s what kind of human beings do we need to be to be people who make choices based on the well-being of the whole rather than individual profit and benefit. And that’s something Native American culture has been very strong on is this sense that you don’t make decisions in isolation, because you don’t imagine yourself as an isolated individual, you imagine yourself as woven into a beautiful tapestry or network or Indra’s net of the whole.

Sharon Salzberg: So some of that sounds like self-awareness, some intuition, because we need some means of discerning that this is just a loop, this is bringing me down, this is leaving me feeling hopeless, or this is leading me to seek community, this is leading me to seek clarity and more information, and I want to do something to help somebody even if it feels like there could never be enough.

Rebecca Solnit: Enough is such an interesting thing. Thelma talks about enough and how we become people who feel like we have enough. But I also think enough in terms of how much is enough to do. And there’s often a sense that if you can’t save everything, you can’t save anything. One of the most profound things I’ve seen in recent decades was the day after Hurricane Katrina put 80% of New Orleans underwater, there was bumper-to-bumper boat traffic of people trying to get into New Orleans, that is people towing boat trailers. And those people stand for me for the greatness of human nature, engaging in an emergency, nobody thought they could put their fishing boat in and rescue all of the tens of thousands of people who had been stranded, mostly because they’re too poor to evacuate. But these people went in there anyway. And they did rescue tens of thousands of people. Nobody rescued everybody, but a lot of them rescued somebody.

I think for me, that’s been the great metaphor or allegory for the world: Get your boat in the water. You’re not going to rescue everybody. It’s not your job to do it all by yourself. And rescuing somebody is deeply meaningful even if you can’t rescue everybody. With the climate crisis, we’re not going to return the world to the ecological state it was in fifty or a hundred years ago. But the best case scenario is infinitely better than the worst case scenario for their survival of hundreds of millions of people and their ability to stay in their ancestral places rather than to become climate refugees for species for the overall condition of the planet for people now living and people yet to be born over the next thousands and thousands of years and all living things. It is so worth doing. And of course, enough is such a strange criterion. But if you rescued thirty-seven people in the flooded city of New Orleans, was that enough? It was certainly something.

James Shaheen: You know, as you and Sharon have both said, there are some stories that move us toward a more positive outcome. And then there are stories that move us toward despair. And probably one of the more pernicious stories in the climate crisis. And in Western culture, perhaps, is the notion of the autonomous individual actor. Can you say more about the dangers of an overvaluation of individualism and how it can prevent us from acting in community?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, as I said, when you ask people what they’re doing about climate, mostly they’ll tell you about individual acts of virtue, usually renunciation, like, “I recycle, I don’t eat meat, I bicycle,” although I definitely count bicycling as a pleasure too. It’s rare that somebody says, “I vote, I work on getting out the vote for climate positive candidates, I support this legislation, I campaign for my high school to put solar over the parking lot.” So we’ve really been encouraged and the fossil fuel industry played a direct role in it when it came to climate footprints to think of what we have to contribute as our individual virtue, which is mostly passive. It’s mostly not doing things. It’s that we imagine ourselves as individuals, we imagine ourselves as consumers who can maybe consume less or consume differently. And I really want us to see ourselves as citizens, by which I don’t mean you hold nationality and a passport in a country, but you see yourself as a member of civil society—to see that together, we have so much more power to decide who wins elections, which decides what kind of legislation will pass, to create pressure to pass important legislation to maybe get out there and physically blockade the fossil fuel project or pipeline or something like that, to educate, to encourage each other.

There’s so much we can do not through the renunciation that’s about giving things up but by actively laying hands on our own power and possibility. And there are times when individuals have tremendous power but only because somehow they connect other people. Greta Thunberg got out there all alone at age 15 with her cardboard sign for her climate strike, but only because she was the right person in the right place at the right time did her action resonate. That made it something that was internationally impactful that caused climate strikes and youth actions to go on on every continent on Earth except Antarctica. So also seeing ourselves as members of communities, and that’s where our strength lies to build a movement. So the isolated individual I think makes us both sad and weak—sad because it feeds loneliness. It feeds a sense that we don’t need to care about anything else and nothing cares about us. And weak I think because our power lies in our connections. It’s not autonomous, because we were never autonomous. So I think getting over the idea of individuality is that I don’t get to have my own dreams and wild imagination and course through life, but I do that in relationship to other people and with respect for all the other beings that I impact and they impact me. One other thing I’ll throw out is the kind of sad framing we constantly get around climate as responsibility, which is like, “Oh, I have to take care of this other thing.” To me, it always sounds like chores and the ways that we tell kids that doing stuff is chores, which makes it kind of moral virtue and also kind of a drag, not nearly as fun as playing. What I love about Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass and her public speaking and other work is that her constant framework is reciprocity. We want to do stuff for the Earth because the Earth does everything for us, that food, water, and air are all produced as something we benefit from depend upon. We’re giving back because so much has been given to us. We can give in a spirit of gratitude while feeling rich, rather than like, oh god, we have to do our chores or we can’t do this; we have to do that. I think the spirit of it is really important too.

James Shaheen: You seem to be describing alternatives to hyperindividualism. And I like that you quote Bill McKibben, who says that the most significant thing we can do for the climate is to stop being an individual and join something. So it’s almost like a renunciation of the notion of a separate self. We’re back at renunciation again in a way that we renounce something that is harmful to us.

Rebecca Solnit: Can I just reframe what Bill said, because I think what he said is such a perfect summary. The first time I heard him say it, he was exhausted because he worked so hard for decades for climate. We were sitting on the floor of an activist event in Paris while the Paris climate treaty was being negotiated, and somebody came up and asked him a question he’s heard a thousand times before and said, “What’s the most effective thing I can do as an individual?” He looked at them and said, “Stop being an individual. Find something to join. Join an organization, a movement, a campaign. Find a community.” And again, I think this feels like the refrain of the conversation. That’s where you find your power. But I think it’s also really helpful personally. You also assuage loneliness and being alone. You assuage your powerlessness. You get to hang out with people who maybe already have some good experience of making change and can help you learn about it. And I find that there are a lot of fantastic people with great strength, commitment, idealism, and generosity, and being around them is so good. There’s a wonderful anecdote where Ananda asks the Buddha, “The sangha, good community is half the spiritual life, isn’t it?” And the Buddha replies, “It’s the whole thing.” And I think that you could interpret that very narrowly as just getting your Buddhist sangha. But I think looking for people living a bodhisattva vow or a life of commitment in another way including climate activism is another way to pursue that.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, sometimes the notion of community can seem a little daunting. I think one of the great things you’ve said is getting to know our neighbors is one of the most powerful things we can do.

Rebecca Solnit: We live in terrible isolation. I think the pandemic made it worse. I think there’s a deep yearning for community. And even the Surgeon General of the United States right now, he’s an extraordinary man, talks about loneliness as the other epidemic in the United States. And it has a real impact on people’s physical and mental well-being. I think it lies behind a lot of the mass shooting, suicides, addictions, and other really tragic things around us. And so seeing community as a health thing for the planet, for human beings, for society, I think is important. And it’s also a kind of garden that needs feeding and watering and being taken care of.

I fear that we need to start over again, because so many of the organizations, whether it’s churches, recreational groups, square dancing, bowling, unions, etc. that people used to belong to aren’t part of people’s lives now. So we have to look at joining things, as Bill said, as something for our own benefit as well and figure out where that lies. And I think again, about what constitutes abundance. We’re in an economy that makes so many people work so hard. They don’t have as much time for friendship, for community, let alone for volunteering and activism as they might. In a world where people feel pretty secure, they don’t feel like they have to work frantically, they don’t work sixty hours a week, they have time for their family, their kids, their garden, their neighborhood, they’re participating in public life, participating in festivals and connecting to the natural world. And so time is something we can imagine poverty or abundance of too. We often think of abundance in material terms. But as I said before, I want to turn that around to look at all the nonmaterial things that we can be rich in, and being rich and time is such a good foundation for all the rest of it. In an economy with more security and more quality, we’re much more likely to have those things than we are in a radical inequality and precariousness that so many people experience in the United States right now.

I would just say there’s an indigenous worldview that tells us we’re not separate. There’s a Buddhist worldview. And science more and more, natural science, biological science, is describing a world of interconnectedness, a world not driven by the competition that Social Darwinists wanted us to believe in. But by cooperation, mutuality, symbiosis, we now recognize the majority of cells in our own body do not have human DNA. They’re all the microbes that keep our guts working and everything else, that even what you call yourself is actually a big community of many species lurching around. There’s so many forms of beautiful interdependence of relationships between species, the plants that require the insects and birds and bats to pollinate them, the insects, birds and bats that in turn require the flowers to feed upon all the natural systems. And of course, climate science is also understanding the feedback loops of everything being connected. So I feel more and more that it’s coming into focus on spiritual, imaginative, and also scientific levels. We’re recognizing a world in which we have never been individuals, that the individual is sometimes a useful way to describe ourselves or others, and sometimes it’s not a useful way, it’s a harmful way, because it’s obliterating the nonseparation, the nonduality of all being. And Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, was a real milestone for that, to understand the natural world is so deeply interconnected, that whatever we do affects so many other things, that we can’t really treat anything as separate, we have to understand how it affects the whole. And so that’s a scientific fact, that’s also a moral imperative, that I think is also a beautiful vision of a world in which we don’t have to feel that existential loneliness, of separateness and we don’t have to imagine human beings is separate from the rest of the web of life, or Indra’s net, or however you want to describe it.

Sharon Salzberg: You say that above all, Not Too Late is a love story, which I loved, and though we can be told that beauty and pleasure and joy aren’t necessary, they are in fact vital to our survival. Can you say more about how love and pleasure can guide us in these difficult times?

Rebecca Solnit: Yeah, I did an event last fall with the wonderful writer Julian Aguon, who’s a queer Indigenous poet from the island of Guam, colonized still by the US, also a climate lawyer with the Blue Ocean Law firm, a leader in an incredible victory in the United Nations recently. But so I did this event for his wonderful book, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, where I was his interlocutor. I’d never met him. I didn’t really know what he’d be like. Before the event, he murmured in my ear, “Be sure we talk about beauty, joy, and abundance,” and I was just in love. It was so great, because so often we are taught to frame these things in terms of austerity. And I think the left has been very austere. We’ve treated beauty and joy as superfluous, self-indulgent, unnecessary, bourgeois.

I wrote a book called Orwell’s Roses recently, and I was very amused that a left-wing woman wrote in scolding him that flowers are bourgeois. Flowers have existed for tens of millions of years before human beings did. Most of what we eat is either a flowering plant or something that depends on flowering plants directly. So it’s such a funny thing to say. But I think beauty also comes from meaning, from moral beauty, the opposite of moral injury and moral ugliness. I think joy comes from a meaningful life, from deep connection. I think beauty, joy, and abundance can also be imagined in these ways that are quite banal and superficial. Beauty becomes “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the prettiest of them all?” Joy becomes just the kind of disconnected lightheartedness that’s not paying attention to the state of the world. Abundance becomes greed or materialism. But there are other versions that I think are spiritual or ethical or engaged. I think, first of all, if you’re utterly miserable, you’re usually a terrible activist, and you’re often dragging down other activists around you, and that kind of self-denial often creates miserable activists.

Second of all, I think you can lose sight of what we’re fighting for. We want a world of beauty, joy, and abundance, and there’s no reason why we can’t enjoy as much as possible of those things along the way. I think there’s a real danger, and I’ve seen it in a lot of hardcore left-wing activists, of actually forgetting what the goal is or imagining that the goal is some kind of justice without knowing that justice is beautiful and joyful, that justice should be a kind of abundance, that security, not the security of weapons and militarism, but the security of knowing that you’re not going to starve or be homeless or go without healthcare, that you’re not imperiled by guns and violence. I think there’s beauty and joy in the security of feeling the interconnectedness that’s almost the opposite of violence. I think understanding how everything’s connected is beautiful. And there’s a kind of intellectual beauty and understanding and learning and things like that.

So I think we have to understand those things more deeply. And I think they are connected to love, that love is itself often a kind of beauty, joy, and abundance and something that comes from within us. And again, I think capitalism is so often teaching us to ask, “Well, how do we get love?” like it’s a commodity we want to stockpile. We want lots of people to love us or people to fall madly in love with us. But giving love is also a kind of abundance. How do we feel that we have abundant hearts that can afford to love, that have a lot of love to give, that we’re rich in love and generosity in that way? How do we imagine love as also a pleasure and a joy to give as well as receive and that there’s a reciprocity there, that it’s circulating? It shouldn’t only be coming in, it shouldn’t only be going out, but the more it circulates, the more it circulates. Because I think also capitalism has taught us to imagine everything in terms of material objects. If I take away some of your toys, I have more toys because you have fewer toys. But if I take away some of your well-being, I don’t have more well-being. If I take away your joy, your sense of abundance, your sense of your own value, it’s like cutting you off at the knees may make you shorter, but it doesn’t actually make me taller. So I think it’s also understanding the economy of the immaterial, which is a generosity economy, a gift economy, an economy in which the more you give, the more you get, because it’s weaving it all together. It’s helping it all circulate.

James Shaheen: So you mentioned your recent book, Orwell’s Roses. So how did you learn about George Orwell’s love of gardening?

Rebecca Solnit: There’s a bunch of pieces of that. I went into the roses. The people who live in the cottage he moved into in 1936 at the time were quite confident he planted them. They’re a little more uncertain about that now, but it made me look harder first at the essay that had got me there about planting roses and fruit trees and then into his journals and letters. I found in Orwell that nothing had led me to expect. It was a lot more joyful, sensual, engaged with the natural world than that kind of angsty, austere, grim, antifascist Orwell we’re usually given. And so I spent a few years delving deep into his work. First, I think Orwell understood that in order to spend a lot of his life facing the most difficult, scary, and unpleasant things, he needed to come back and renew himself, and he took such joy and pleasure in gardening. In a 1940 questionnaire, he said, “Aside from writing, the most important thing in my life is gardening, particularly vegetable gardening.”

But I think he also understood we can live in a world of swirling and confusing information, and that grounding yourself in something tangible and specific, hands on with the physical material natural world helps you keep your own capacity to perceive, judge, trust yourself, because all through 1984, that’s what he shows his protagonist Winston Smith doing. There’s a beautiful passage where Winston says almost like a little mantra, “Water is wet, stones are hard, objects dropped fall towards the center of the earth” because he lives in a world that’s trying so hard to disorient you, make you distrust your own capacity to perceive, remember, and judge. So how do you revolt against Big Brother? There’s another line in the book that says, “The final instruction of the authorities was not to trust the evidence of your eyes and ears,” and something I’ve learned is you can invert something to understand what is the opposite? Trusting your eyes and ears makes you a rebel, makes you a person who thinks for herself or himself, makes you a person who can be independent from Big Brother telling you what to think.

Winston revolts very ineffectually and basically gets swept up in a trap when he tries to join a conspiracy against the regime, but he revolts pretty effectively by having a love affair, going to the country, listening to birdsong, cherishing memories and objects, trying to ascertain the truth, trusting his own judgment, really setting himself up not as an individual in terms of separateness in the way we’re talking about it for our climate purposes but separate from a manipulative and corrosive regime. So I think Orwell understood that this also kept his mind equipped, that not only was there pleasure and joy and abundance in the gardening and all the time he spent in the natural world but that it was also keeping his mind kind of supple, independent, capable of sorting through the information not completely swept away. And something that’s been really interesting to me as a writer is what are the things we need to do that a lot of people might say are frivolous, decadent, self-indulgent, superfluous, and people on the left say those things all the time if you’re doing anything fun and leisurely. What are these things we need to do that don’t look important, don’t look productive, but that allow us to then go do the most important and productive things we need to do.

There’s a wonderful essay by Lawrence Weschler called “Vermeer in Bosnia,” where he’s sitting in the war crimes tribunal for the Bosnian war crimes in The Hague, and he asked the judge afterwards how he can bear to sit and listen day after day to these stories of absolute atrocity. The judge thinks for a moment, and then his face brightens he says, “Oh, after work, I go to the museum and look at the Vermeers.” And I know lots of people would say looking at Vermeers is frivolous or superfluous or unnecessary or a thousand things like that. But essentially, looking at the Vermeers, if it helps a judge prosecute war crimes and therefore maintain justice on Earth, then 400-year-old paintings and the enjoyment of them is part of justice work, and we can’t discount anything, whether it’s baking cookies or birdwatching or surfing or any pleasure, if it helps people do the really important work they need to do, and that’s something I really felt I got from him.

James Shaheen: You know, sadly, we’re out of time. But Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a great pleasure.

Rebecca Solnit: Thank you for letting me circulate some ideas, and wonderful to be with you.

Sharon Salzberg: It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful.

James Shaheen: You too, and for our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, available now. We’d like to close these podcasts with a short guided meditation, so I’ll hand this over to Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you so much. I would like us just to sit, eyes open or closed, however you feel most at ease. Just feel natural in what you’re doing. Take some breaths, which as we’ve heard is one of the great markers of interconnection, like it or not. Feel what’s coursing through your body, different emotions, different resolves perhaps. Pay some attention to those stories. “I can’t fix it. I can’t do enough.” If you feel yourself just getting swept up and lost or disconnected in some way, take a breath. Come back. We have a refuge. We have a home base. It’s already happening. Just feel the breath. So thank you.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca Solnit: Thank you both. And Sharon, if you’re ever coming out for Spirit Rock or anything, I would love to meet you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Rebecca Solnit. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!