The way I think of confidence is just like an actual willingness to be in the forces of life and trust not necessarily that I'm going to get what I want because we also fail quite a lot.
I think trust is interesting.
It's just sort of a feeling of this is going to be okay.
I can work with this. It's that quality of like, here I am.
This may be hard, but I'm grounded.
And maybe that means grounded in groundlessness, but at the end of the day I have to trust myself.
So have ever felt a deep lack of confidence that just seeps into your relationships, your work, and even how you see yourself, maybe find yourself constantly seeking validation from others, or afraid to fully trust your own inner wisdom, or perhaps you bounce between the heights of self assurance and depths of self doubt, never really feeling truly grounded.
So easily not off your seat and into the spin of uncertainty.
Well, if so, you're not alone.
We are living through a unique moment in time where many are just questioning their core identity, their purpose, and grappling with pervasive groundlessness in nearly every domain of life.
The shaky foundations that we once relied on really, they seem to be crumbling all around us, in work, in love, in family, community, were being called to find a deeper wellspring of confidence from within.
On my guest today, Ethan Nickdern has spent years exploring the ancient wisdom that can help us cultivate unshakable confidence amidst life's uncertainties.
Ethan is a renowned Buddhist teacher who leads meditation classes and hosts the Road Home podcast.
In his book, Confidence Holding Your Seat through Life's Eight Worldly Winds.
He weighs a powerful tapestry of insights to really guide us home in our innate sense of self trust.
In our conversation, Ethan unwraps these things he calls the Eight Worldly Winds.
We dive into what those actually are, the contrasting experiences that we hope for and also fear in life, from pleasure and pain to fame and insignificance, and he shares how by taking really firmly our seat amidst these opposing forces, we can develop just profound self trust.
We'll discover practical strategies to harness the power of self-compassion and lineage and awareness in what Ethan calls Wind Horse to ride confidently through pretty much every situation.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
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We're having this conversation at a sort of an interesting moment in time where a lot of people are sort of like questioning who they are.
And their sense of confidence in themselves in the world around them in the relationships in a connection to something maybe more expansive and bigger than them.
And really trying to grapple with a sense of just pervasive groundlessness nearly every domain of life.
And it's interesting because this is a space where you have not just lived but you've been teaching in for a long time.
I'm wondering just broadly what are you seeing as you're having conversations with people with students out there in the world these days.
Yeah, the reason I wanted to write about confidence was because you know I've been teaching Buddhism and meditation and Buddhist psychology for a long time.
And I think the mindfulness movement really caught on in the last decade or so.
And I think when you look at people's initial interest in something like mindfulness.
It usually is something like stress reduction or working with a difficult emotion or just working with you know what we might call monkey mind, you know just really a difficult relationship with one's own thoughts and emotions.
But what I noticed and this really mirrors my own path is whenever I got one level below the surface with somebody about what they were interested in in studying or where the teachings or practices were coming alive for them.
And where they were stuck it had something to do with trusting ourselves to show up in some way to some aspect of life, you know it could be related to just trusting yourself to being able to make it through a meditation session which is not actually that easy kudos to everybody who does make it through a whole you know five or 10 or 20 minute meditation session.
And then you can be trusting yourself to have a difficult conversation with your boss where you know ask for a raise or advocate for yourself could be trusting yourself in a difficult very vulnerable conversation with your intimate partner or trusting yourself to like show up politically right now in a compassionate way that's saying hey we need to really figure
out human society together.
And I want to actually be part of that and it's difficult you know it's really hard to be part of it so I also realize that the teachings I inherited in a sense you could say that Buddhist thought is not so much about confidence at least not on the very surface level.
But when you really get into it it is about developing sort of a sense of trusting our own mind trusting herself and I wanted to harvest both some of the ancient themes and some of the modern themes because I think the union of ancient and modern is always where I find kind of the greatest wisdom and application.
I do agree we're in a time of immense groundlessness and people are definitely struggling with actually kind of showing up and wanting to show up I mean we're all doing it anyway you know maybe we're.
I mean I'm not hiding out for a minute watching our favorite streaming show or reading our fantasy novels but in general we are all really saying like how can I use my spiritual tools to actually show up to trust myself and you know I also think what was important for me about this in this moment as a man to.
I think we do live in this year of a lot of false confidence you know a lot of kind of alpha male confidence I've been reminded that actually the term con man is short for confidence man so you know that's really been on my mind in alive too because there is also this question of like in any of those situations sort of like how do I take my seat in my life as we say in meditation and then
really claim claim my spot it's an interesting thing you said about.
Jonathan about groundlessness because that's one half of it but I think about the example of going back to ancient master the historical Buddha when he achieved awakening he touched the ground he was like I'm completely grounded in being a human in my body at this moment and I can show up that's always interesting is dealing with trusting ourselves and working
with groundlessness and uncertainty at the same time.
You know I think that's usually where we harvest the greatest wisdom to and it's definitely that time on planet earth they think yeah it's early living in that gap and how do we now we get how do we dance with it and I love as you mentioned so much of the way that you brought yourself to sort of you know to the wisdom world is been as a bridge builder you know between sort of ancient
wisdom and modern life you know even down to you know one of your books the Dharma of the princess bride like one of the most adored movies that's been out there one of my favorite movies and then you sort of like deconstruct it in Buddhist thoughts let's talk about this in the context of of life what we learn from it when you talk about confidence also now trusting yourself
is a phrase that you kept repeating yeah when you use the word confidence what are you actually talking about yeah it's a term that I think that's not going to be a word of confidence.
The term that I think we kind of know intuitively you know like when somebody when we think somebody has confidence there's a sense of strong presence there's a sense of bravery but if you look it up in the dictionary which I did the most common definition of confidence does include the word trust and firm trust sometimes like like somebody said the Latin root has to
do with faith right which is a sometimes more spiritually religiously loaded word than trust but they basically mean the same thing like there's some belief in one zone ability and the way I framed it in the book is it has to do with our ability specifically to work with hope and fear striking us like we want some things in life and you know I think a lot of times when people
study meditation they think we're supposed to stop wanting you know which I would say good luck with that yeah I have not come list and anywhere remotely close to yeah I really want to write a book for people who want actually some kind of you know maybe it's you want your screenplay to get a finish and adopted and picked up by somebody you want love very human right and then
you're afraid of certain things we're afraid of failure we're afraid of death we're afraid of being criticized you know we're afraid of pain it's very human and so when early Buddhism talked about these experiences of hope and fear just like kind of you know wins striking us and so the way I think of confidence is just like an actual willingness to be in the forces
of life and trust not necessarily that I'm going to get what I want because I do think a confident person in the true sense of the word we do really want to accomplish our purposes a little bit more frequently but we also fail quite a lot and you can get as enlightened as you want in business or art or politics or romance or relationship but you're still going to have death
right and like if we want to say some spiritual master like Buddha was greatly spiritually accomplished he got what he wanted in the end he was so confident but he also died and so I think that students can't be about like just winning the game of life because nobody really wins the game of life from the standpoint of like surviving you know and so working with how do
we trust ourselves to show up and pursue things in the face of all that is I think really really what I was looking at and you know I think trust is interesting it's just sort of a feeling of this is going to be OK I can work with this it's hard to define in words it's that quality of like here I am you know this may be hard but I'm grounded and maybe that means grounded in groundlessness
which is an interesting idea it is you know and I feel like so many people have this experience where they'll actually trust other people before they'll trust themselves yeah and I wonder part of that I'm so curious what you're taking is on this often wonder whether part of that and like I'm raising my hand here also right is that if we trust other people if we go seek
well like let me talk to this wise personal let me go get this we trust the data we trust the people we trust this and then we make a decision based on all of that external input and then we can say when we make the decision we say well I'm confident based on x y and z external things and I can point to those as the basis for this decision then if the decision doesn't work out
then we can point to something outside of ourselves and say well you know like I relied on on these people these indicators and clearly like they were off so it's not a personal hit because it wasn't my own self trust that betrayed me whereas if I just say let me go inside and say let me really feel into this like let me use my intuition let me use whatever intelligence
or rationality I can make a decision and then that decision doesn't work out so much bigger hit for most people so often wonder whether we sort of we outsourced confidence because there's something inside of us that subconsciously says that if we actually try and stand in a place and rely on our own self trust and to make a call and it turns out wrong and the stakes are high
that is going to hurt way more yeah it's a beautiful discussion you know I also think there's so much wisdom in Western psychology so if you start with why do we trust other people it's it's because we enter the world helpless you know and so from that standpoint from a psychodynamics standpoint we we start trusting our parents or our parental figures my daughter
is getting more and more self-sufficient she's she actually turned seven years old tomorrow but when I pick her up she needs to know I'm going to carry her right you and I don't get anybody to give a shoulder rides anymore I don't think right we have to carry ourselves all the time on our own two feet so there is something about like and I think a lot of things we study I
think it's really important you know to have teachers or mentors or experts that we're looking to right and interesting moment where in I talk about this later in the book when I talk about lineage that I do think there's kind of been a growing distrust for experts in some ways too because you can feel like exactly everything you said like okay it's on them like they
will carry me if they get it wrong it's not my fault but you can also feel like oh they don't the experts don't know what they're talking about right which is very similar to rebelling against your parents and I think that's actually pretty a pretty necessary phase in our psychological and spiritual development to be like no I'm going to figure this out you know and so I
think there's some balance of the two right because we are interconnected with each other so we do have to realize you know actually I'm not figuring anything out like even everything I'm saying comes from other people I'm just kind of synthesizing it and putting it into my own expression and at the same time you're grown adult life and you say whatever whatever
my parents and teachers and elders and family whatever they taught me right now it's just me here you know like nobody else can help me figure out what I'm going to say or how I'm going to show up to like this interview it's like okay I have to like internalize whatever those parental voices are whatever those mentors are and say I got this you know just like my daughter
you know most of the time is walking out of self yeah it is interesting though how much we do as you say kind of outsource our own power even as grown ups you know and I think then there is some sense of actually realizing okay I outsource my own power because I did need help learning how to do things and I might still need learning help but at the end of the day I have to trust
myself and I think that's especially important when we're looking at receiving back from others which is a whole chapter in the book working with how we receive praise how we receive criticism on whatever project we might be working on people are going to give me all sorts of ideas about how I'm doing and what I should do next but I actually have to take those ideas
and then synthesize them with what in Buddhism is sometimes called the principle or internal witness which is my own sense of knowing and I have to trust that at the end of the day right now that makes a lot of sense and the other thing that as you're describing it you know that's coming to my mind is that when we outsource self trust our confidence we kind of lose that magical
feeling of when something actually does work out the way we hope to work out then if it was something that we're like we really grappled with it and we we reasoned it out and we felt into it whatever you want to is your process and then we make a decision yeah this actually turned out like the way they did and I worked hard and like we have a level of ownership over that yeah
that really just feels amazing but if we outsource the decision making if we outsource it you know if we if we say well that was because I trusted the input of others and that's sort of like what led to it we feel less of a sense of ownership yeah and we lose like this magical moment of us standing in a place of agency you know that I think so many of us feel that we don't get
enough of these days yeah it's interesting because I think there's been a lot of talk in recent years really good talk and really necessary talk about accountability right accountability for one's actions accountability for how we show up but accountability has sort of like a negative twist to it right it doesn't need to but the way we often say that is like if you
mess up take responsibility yeah yeah the other side of accountability is actually empowerment like you know it's not I think the other thing that I think Buddhism names is that there's a problem with the world view of individualism right there's a problem with the idea that I did everything for example going back to the parents example my parents are the ones who introduced
me to quite a lot of the practices that I do I mean it didn't force any of them on me and I had other teachers but I would not be a Buddhist probably without my parents right so I can't really take responsibility alone say I did all this it's like oh yeah no I had privilege I had a good environment it was interdependent but then at the same time there's like and and by the way
I worked really hard right and I showed up and I could do it again right I can take responsibility I love that sort of two sides of the coin of agency and accountability the other way to think about agency to use a more slightly loaded word is power like claiming our own power you know like I can do something I might not be able to do everything but I can influence situations
you know by showing up that makes a lot of sense you know it's interesting I feel like so much of when you teen idea it's often well let's actually look at the different aspects of this you know and so you introduced you know accountability and agency but you mentioned this notion of worldly wins earlier and and talked about these two hope and fear I want to dive in because in the book
you actually introduced the idea of eight worldly wins so take me to what we're actually talking about when we're talking about worldly wins and then maybe we'll walk through them a little bit so we can get a better feel for them yeah so the eight worldly wins that is talking about ancient verse modern this is ancient wisdom right and it's still applicable it comes
from the historical Buddha 2600 years ago he talked about these eight experiences that if you're a human in the world you will face and they're either called like my teacher and friend Sharon Salzburg sometimes refers to them as the vicissitudes which feels like a very SAT word so there's sometimes called the worldly phenomenon but I really like this metaphor of wind
which is the way I think Pemachodron and others refer to them as wins because there's a sense of like a force striking you and the analogy that I use early on in the book which there's always kind of a I don't know if you're like this when you're expressing yourself or writing there's always kind of a visual analogy that comes to me at a certain point is like oh yeah that so if you
go by a car wash or mechanic or like a car dealership there's those those noodle looking really tall inflatable guys sometimes are artificially blown by an air blower but when the wind hits them they wave they look like they're smiling they're laughing they're dancing and then if the wind stops blowing or blows the other way they droop over like looking like completely
depressed and and press falling so I was playing with that analogy of how these different experiences of life hit us so the eight is really four pairs right and and four pairs on each side of the pair there's the experience that we hope for or that when it happens when it hits us it inflates us it elates us it makes us temporarily feel great about our confidence and on the other
side is the the wind that deflates us that knocks us over that you know signals are defeat or demise so they go from sort of the most visceral to our embodied nervous system which is we hope for pleasure we fear pain and then they get into our sort of our relational sense of self we hope for praise we fear criticism and blame if we're trying to do bigger work in the world
you know have a podcast or we're trying to influence a group of people in some way we hope for recognition and renown and fame we fear insignificance having no influence it's interesting in that pair fame and insignificance another classic translation says that the feared outcome is infamy which I think we still fear but I also think we live in this interesting
era where if you're infamous among a group of people you can kind of turn that into a new kind of fame the example I use for that is the rapper M&M nobody ever talked about how controversial M&M was more than M&M you know so he's sort of you know turning his infamy into fame so I think what we really fear in that couple it is we just have no impact nobody knows our work nobody
knows what we're trying to do nobody remembers us nobody writes us a holiday card etc.
And then the most generalized one which has to do with our spiritual quest it has to do with every aspect of life any project we could conceive is we hope for success and we fear failure or loss so those are the eight worldly wins but it's really working with this dance when we show up when we try to you could say take our seats in the world in our life just the same way we might take
our seat meditation we really hope to be inflated with the positive wins and we really fear being knocked over with the negative ones that makes so much sense and we'll be right back after word from our sponsors good life project is sponsored by cozy so you know that moment when you're trying to squeeze a new couch through a narrow doorway I wonder if you just made a huge
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more travel in the fall and my quince clothes have been with me the whole time they make these flown it breeze performance cheese they're just so light and comfy I pretty much live in them I have them in all different colors and they're lit in button downs have become go to travel essentials to it's just incredible how quince consistently delivers luxury quality
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licking honey from a razor blade which is pretty visceral that that comes from an eight century very famous Indian Buddhist teacher who's who's very well known name Shanti Dava who wrote this text that especially popular in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition called the way of the bodhisattva the way of the being who's trying to awaken compassion right pursuit of pleasure
can be like licking honey from a razor blade right what he was talking about was fixation on pleasure when we know it's impermanent right when we know we can't make any pleasure last forever and so the razor blade is kind of the truth of impermanence the truth of death I love that phrase because when I read it I was like you know I'm from the 90s so it did sound like it could be
you know the 90s when I feel like all the music was about very personal existential dilemmas like a lot is more set so I feel like that could be like a Nirvana lyric you know I just imagine them on MTV unplugged licking honey from a razor blade so the idea is that pleasure feels good pain feels bad but there's this false promise that if we have a pleasing sensation in our
body in our sense realm we can make it last and if we do the right things we might avoid pain you know and I think in that arena I'm always a casual fan and invested student of the conversation between bodhisattva and neuroscience is really interesting to me and sort of what they've discovered I talk about one experiment what they've discovered about how advanced
mindfulness practice changes our relationship to pain I think is is super interesting you know the long in the short of it is we don't brace against pain as much when it's not happening but for very advanced meditators what they found is during a painful physical experience the pain receptors light up more than people who've practiced mindfulness you actually
feel the pain more completely if you're being mindful they didn't do a pleasure experiment which I also think they would find during the experience of a chocolate chip cookie right you would actually taste it would be even more ecstatic for the mindful person than the non mindful person you you would taste it that much more it's like when we actually are holding
our seat we actually are feeling our experience more right but it's less of a problem I think that's the thing about pleasure and pain I talk about this there's there's a mirage in pleasure there's this idea in hope or pleasure that this is going to save me right like when you really want to chocolate chip cookie there's some feeling of like this cookie is my spiritual
salvation you know and you're never thinking about just tomorrow when you're going to be craving the cookie again right and I talk about the experience of being on a meditation retreat having a really difficult itch on my nose from a fly buzzing or something like that and just deciding that I was not going to scratch the itch which is a very holding your seat kind of a thing
to do and I remember as a grown up person actually thinking the thought if I don't scratch my nose I'm going to die which is not true it's an irrational thought but there is in pain or unpleasant circumstance it's not that we're misunderstanding that we're in pain because we very much are and if we're in chronic pain if there's something we can do to reduce the pain please
always do the compassionate thing but we think that this unpleasant experience is going to be the end of us when really what happened with the itch is a few minutes later it was just completely gone you know just evaporated.
It's a really interesting distinction that you make also in that like if we take our seat and especially if it's informed by practice like mindfulness where like we're sort of like we have an enhanced level of awareness where we're going to notice and we're also probably going to experience sensory input more more deeply more intensity is going to be on both sides
of the spectrum right but the other part of it which you shared you know get and people be like oh sweet more pleasure like yay but also like more pain but at the same time as you described you experience that stimulus but part of the experience of it isn't just the neurons that are firing at the end of the point of stimulation it's what your brain does with it you know and that very
same practices yes I'm going to actually like notice all those firings yet the signals that I'm getting from it I'm going to have like more of a say.
In how that lands in my mind which is the other part of the experience you I think oftentimes practices like mindfulness that their experiences over the benefit is you you just know you're the screen on the screen door on the summer porch and everything you like it touches you but then it just blows through you and it's all about like the ability to just kind of be chill
and in the center and let it go but it's not about it's not often said like no actually you also give you access to really heightened sensory experience yeah yeah but you're going to you're going to handle it differently yeah and that's a huge like that's the big qualifier there yeah yeah you know that's based on the way you framed it Jonathan what I would say is being
in the center you know which I'm calling holding your seat is not so chill because there's always a lot going on right that's actually what presence is it's it's not the absence of activity it's actually you're sitting in the center of this almost maelstrom external internal you know you have everything that's happening in the outside world you have your sense
perceptions you have your thoughts you have your emotions and even in moments of boredom actually even you know when you're sitting some days when I have a break especially in the summertime I live here in in Brooklyn have a stoop you know which is the thing I've always wanted that's living the dream for me is just stoop the beautiful day and you just go and it's a quiet
street you know especially when I sometimes can take a break in the afternoon but even if you say oh for Brooklyn for New York this is a very quiet moment this is a very quiet street there's still so much going on and even when I go to the country which I do quite frequently say oh it's so chill here but then you open up and you go oh like there is a symphony of birds and chipmunks
and they're all talking to each other like it there's so much happening when we pay attention and it's never that chill when I think when we go into the deeper I think pleasure and pain is a really good foundational level and that's why mindfulness starts with the body and mindfulness starts with pleasure and pain because the things we discover about our reaction to
pleasure and pain I think are very applicable to when life gets real or when life gets more relational you know pleasure and pain have so much to do with how we handle praise and criticism yeah which is the second pairing that you talk about you know praise and blame and I think so many people feel like they're living in a world where there's a lot of opportunity for criticism
it's kind of coming at them from all angles here and for a lot of people I think it kind of shuts them down and makes them say what's the middle path here where you know like I keep my head down enough so that I don't take any heat or any fire I'm doing enough where you know I'm kind of getting by and I feel like I'm a constructive human being and the trying to thread this needle
which is really unthreadable and even if they feel like they end up doing that for a window of time then if you ask them how are you doing and they're honest with you oftentimes answers not good right right right I think a lot of times that's that's sort of the sad thing is a lot of times people don't really try to accomplish a lot in life because they're afraid of how others
will respond and we're afraid of criticism so we don't put ourselves out there and there's reasons not to I mean friends of mine ask me like how do you handle social media like that's just it just sounds like people are coming for each other all the time on social media and I think our technology is really interesting because because praising criticism in the classic
Buddhist teachings would fall in the category of speaking and listening right right speech how we express ourselves how we listen to others kind of some basic guard rails for how that's done with skill and with kindness and again there's a lot of modern nonviolent communication I'm thinking of you know a lot of modern insight into how one works with that but that's
really about like verbi and verbal communication and two people talking to each other and now we have this devices where you're just able to give and get feedback practically any time to practically or from practically anyone you want you know or don't want or don't want or don't know I never will know and that's like a part of it yeah yeah interesting because like
you know praising criticism are hard enough practices to work with our sense of self trust if we know like 10 people just getting like a family together at Thanksgiving to say like okay hey we're going to practice mindful speech let's each say what we appreciate about each other and then if there's something maybe that somebody's doing that's bothering you we could express
that after we've you know validated a little bit that would be near impossible for a lot of people in the world and we're impossible for a lot of families although a valiant effort in some families I think it happens well and we that's quite a joy when you actually see that but now you're like okay so you're struggling with communication in like five relationships
try 5,000 strangers at once you know it's not it's not a fair arena in some ways but the first insight that really works for me is again to go back to pleasure and pain and then you know what I think is really important to you is that you're present you are the more this is going to be true that actually praises going to feel good and actually a lot of times we don't let ourselves
feel that if somebody compliments you and says oh thank you so much for cooking me dinner you go oh no I was nothing right rather than just actually receiving the pleasure of like oh wow I did a good thing and somebody's expressing appreciation so often so bad it actually receiving words of praise exactly because it's like too much kindness or something it makes us
vulnerable and it puts us on the spot it's a win did hits us you know something is actually happening in our system and then also the our our defensiveness in the name of criticism I once heard your friend our mutual friend Susan Piver share great wisdom that I put in the book what she was saying was there was one friend who would just point out potential problems or potential
things that could turn into obstacles and she said when I was early on in the creative process I really needed like that creative energy to be flowing so I would ask for this person's feedback but much later on in the process when it had already gained all the momentum that it needed so I think this is one thing is like if we're trying to put ourselves out there knowing
who we're asking and I think it's important to have people in our corner who are inherently supportive I think that's really important for teachers you know our mentors or coaches people who work with other people because we are so biased to pay attention to negative information that's just part of our evolution as well to really be able to when we're sharing feedback
with others to start from appreciation and then to maybe know that it's going to hurt if you get criticized it might be really important to be criticized to receive feedback it is really important to receive constructive criticism if we want to show up to edge anything we're trying to do but knowing that that is the same experience as pain I think is really important
that's really been transformative for me I talk about preparing for the out when you're receiving feedback like don't post a thing on social media without being like oh somebody's going to disagree with this they might not know who I am they might not be well trained in the tools of right speech or not violent communication and it might hurt to be disagreed with you
know just the same way and itch is unpleasant the same way if somebody poked you with a needle it would hurt like that's just part of how I receive information so I think that's really important is when people say oh I know how to get to the place where criticism doesn't hurt I'm like I don't I don't think that's what mindfulness is you know and it's actually familiarity
with the process and familiarity with like yeah it hurts but there's also good information here sometimes it's being able to parse that you know I remember a couple years back and I'm grand was sharing that when he's working on a book you know he'll work on the manuscript and get to a certain point and then he has a small group of people who he gets together often his grad
students or postdocs where and he calls him his challengers and will basically share a piece of the manuscript word and be entire thing and say like have at it literally just oh my gosh tell me everything that you can figure out like where did I mess up what's wrong what's the counter argument here he wants to know it all but he doesn't weigh this is really interesting
which is really syncs up with what you're talking about here which is that he doesn't actually post that online you know he millions of followers and say have at it you he's a very small number of people maybe half dozen people are something like this who he trusts who he knows are really smart who know his work who are really well versed in in his lineage in his science
and then he says okay like you like the agreement here is that you're not having at it because you're trying to take me out or take me down we're doing this together because we're trying to refine the ideas so that they are as accurate and as useful and as valid as possible so when mass numbers of people interact with it I can feel better that we've done our work and maybe
sure like maybe that helps me feel like it's more dependable too and maybe we get less people disagreeing but of course like you're always going to have people disagreeing when something goes to scale but it's an interesting example I think of what you're describing there and it ties in also with this sort of like this third couplet that you referenced earlier which is the notion of influence
in significance or what you described there's a really interesting sort of like potential interpretation of infamy there you know because we all do want to see it feel like we're doing something that makes a difference you know like that we have some influence that we have some level of say in our lives and maybe in other lives and if we if it ties in with what you're
just sharing also because if we can't weather the winds of criticism it's going to be really hard to be able to take a seat behind an idea or an identity that allows us to feel a sense of mattering and significance and then there's that other fear saying like what if I don't matter which can be devastating but maybe it's also really freeing at the same time yeah yeah yeah
I talk about again having a seven year old I harvest a lot of wisdom from Pixar movies I don't work for them but but just you know had my mind slightly blown or just had a lot of appreciation for seeing the second inside out movie but in the with really I was really picking up on a theme from the Disney movie Coco where it has to do with the Mexican holiday dear de los muertos
and the land of the dead the way this is set up as happens on dear de los muertos you put on your altar off renders are offering to your dead ancestors as a way to remember them and the way the movie sets this up is as long as somebody keeps remembering you on their altar your spirit lives on in the land of the dead but when you really die in this framework is when nobody remembers
you well enough to make an offering on your altar and so I call that the second death right and that sort of it could come before or after our physical death but it's when nobody remembers us I think it's really important especially for those of us who are trying to do work that has impact you know I'm thinking of the song fame I want to live forever right nobody does that and I
think what we try to do is say but could I do something that has impact forever and the answer is no you're actually kids it might have impact for a long time you know like great people of the ancient world but probably people are going to misremember you I mean there's so much conflict over who the actually was I make the joke that most of the time Jesus is just a totally
different ethnicity than he actually was in his life so he's not being remembered very accurately in a lot of ways and nobody's going to remember us and so what does it mean to have impact acknowledging that in a cosmic sense there is a sense of letting go of our identity because a lot of times we do approach you know what we could call these days having a platform as like
yeah but I really want people to know me and my work in a sense that's the more outward or more social facing level of seeking praise is there has a lot of wisdom right if you feel like oh I can offer something I want to be a benefit I want to help and I want to live a good life as well the idea of offering that broadly is very important it doesn't have to be super broad but beyond
just one on one interactions right we all want that we all want to have some level of impact I think for some people this coupling of winds of fame and insignificance feels or influence as I called it feels a little less relevant but I think in some ways whenever you're trying to show up in the world you want to have impact you want to be recognized by your family at least
want to be recognized by your friends nobody goes to a school reunion being like oh what have you been working on for the last 20 years nothing I'm pretty invisible nobody wants to feel that way I joke about coming back from a meditation retreat with all these insights and hoping everybody really missed you and instead people are like oh wait you were gone for a week
you know right on the other hand it's like on the one hand yes to all of that and the other hand but there is a certain spaciousness to not being missed there's a certain freedom to that as well it's terrifying and at the same time freeing literally was just talking to as you mentioned our dear mutual friends season pi for yesterday and some version of the phrase I want
my work to be seen not me came out of my mouth yeah and I've been kind of sitting with that and also in part asking myself is that true because I'm not 100% sure it is I'm an introvert and sensitive person so I love being at home by myself I love solitude and I love creating things you know I love the fact that I could create something and that that thing would go out into the world
and that would be the thing of the moments or significance or impact that would matter and I've always felt like I don't necessarily need to be the one associated with it I just want to know it's out there I'm questioning that more and kind of saying like is that really true or is it just that I value my solitude so much that I'm afraid that if I was a part of the thing that was appreciated
or was out there in the world that I would lose this other thing that I hold dear and it's an interesting thing that I've just been sitting with yeah I talk about that in confidence to sort of my personal path and for me the interesting crux of this was since I was in sixth grade I wanted to be a writer part of that was I just loved words and you know that mode of expression and I
I resonated with it I always have but the other part was I was like oh famous writers are really cool because you're still completely anonymous everybody could have read your work if you're best selling writer but nobody really knows what you look like and lastly really know who you are and I was like anonymous fame that sounds like perfect to me you know and then I
end up becoming a teacher who also writes and there's again there's this sense of like okay but now my identity is like oh he's the wisdom holder and there is that complexity of like you know I'm sure when somebody comes up to you Jonathan and says oh I really appreciate your work it's had a really positive impact right there's this complexity of ego and egolessness
where there's sort of like oh I'm so happy the work has been helpful and and then there's a part of you that's like yeah I did that we flicker in and out of that I think it's very natural to flicker in and out of that but then we can get fixated on like I need my name on the building you know who's getting top billing you know et cetera it was interesting I had went on the the book
tour that's been going on for confidence spoke when I was in Portland Oregon at Powell's which is from a writer's stamp on one of my favorite bookstores in the world yeah it's maybe from a writer's from a like bookstore indie bookstore a Fishing Auto standpoint maybe the most famous bookstore in the world I mean we can argue we can argue about that but it's one of the only
places where when you have an event they put your name on a mark on the market which yeah for a writer it's like I'm not I'm not a standup comedian like and then you're like whoa my name's on the Indian of course I'm a Buddhist teacher but you snap a picture of that you know all right I did that and at the same time it's like and then they're going to take that down and there's
going to be a new set of people trying to have influence and impact and so I think if we can inhabit that dance of saying I really want to be a benefit and there's a part of me that like actually seeks the recognition of that but I'm going to be wary when that becomes a fixation right just the same way I would be wary if pleasure was a fixation or people pleasing or praise was a fixation if I
start to notice that needing recognition is a fixation I'm going to work with that and I'm going to try to embrace the other side of the coin which is the experience of loneliness right because at the end of the day we're always alone with ourselves that's the basic premise of mindfulness is it's you your body your heart your mind that's your actual copilot through
all of this life and if we can't actually inhabit our loneliness I think when we try to have impact with others it is going to have an addictive quality to it and we'll be right back after word from our sponsors good my project is sponsored by aqua 2 so I'm such a long term fan of aqua 2 you know I've always been passionate about wellness but it wasn't until I really started
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and failure that you referenced earlier because you know and let's say we do go out there or work does go out there and make a difference in some way shape or form we have this and you write about this you know so much of the way that we measured whether we've succeeded or failed that like what we're trying to do is not in terms of tuning in and just sort of like listening
to ourselves but it is looking around us and saying where am I relative to like this person that person that person the other person and like that is our measure of success and it's just a losing game and especially you know like I'm building Colorado but I spent 30 years in New York City to your Brooklyn there is no way to live in in a New York area and then ever feel like
for the history of your life that you can't find a thousand other people who by whatever measured your judging externally are you know like eons ahead of you it's it's a disaster so we deliver to sort of like measure success and yet we do it so often it's interesting I really like to watch basketball so I hope the nicks are the best so I think sports is a good arena where you
try to figure out like who's better than the other on this given day or this given tournament or this given season and I think it's nice that we have certain areas of life where that that holds but there's a lot of uses of what in Buddhist terms is called comparative mine my level of OKness is judged relative to the perception of other people's success or happiness right
so it's interesting like sometimes you know I've never written a best seller for example but I do get to keep writing people enough it's fine for me but you know somebody tells you in the process of writing a new book I think you have a best seller in you and you're like OK that's wonderful because that's praise right but when you really parse like what is best selling
mean is it do you mean you want all the other people who are writing books to not sell well it means better than it doesn't mean great job lots of people connected with your work it means you did better than the other people you know one of the things I notice people say in New York a lot oh I have the best doctor I have the best dentist is like OK what about I have a good doctor I
have a great dentist or something like that like best literally means what do you mean by that like everybody else has a shitty doctor like wouldn't you want other people to have good doctors too and then we transpose that on to our children I'm very aware of this as a as a parent and father like and it's it's weird being like a kid in a kind of liberal space because the messages
are weird right now it's everybody's included we value everyone and which is a completely egalitarian message which I love to death and resonate with everyone's included but oh by the way only about 5% of you are going to get into the college you really want to go to and feel important there and it's like well those are weird conflicting messages and how do we start
to actually hone I'm succeeding or failing based on kind of my own metric of happiness and success because as you said comparative mind is it's literally endless like you not just in New York in you know some Sara in all the realms once you start saying that person has something and I do not have it and until I have what they have I am not okay it's a recipe for on happiness
dissatisfaction and it's also probably a recipe for putting on blinders and getting very obsessive and not really thinking of ones showing up or ones work in a way that's helpful to others it's much better as a writer to think I would like my work to be a benefit you know and I would like enough people to read it so that it is a benefit and keeps me doing you know and if it
sells better than everyone else is then honestly I'm going to recommend people read other people's writing it's such an interesting frame to remember a number of years back reading some research on envy and the researchers tease out this interesting distinction this I basically were identified two different types of envy benign envy and malicious envy and they
said the both envy you look at somebody else like who I wish I had what they have or wish I could do what they could do but one of them is accompanied by sort of shadow Freud like like how can we take that like I hope they fail the other one is like one inspiration like maybe if I really work really hard if I sort of like really pour myself into this thing I'm inspired by this like
they show what's possible to me they're just going to make me work that much harder and devote myself harder and and and give that bigger because I see what's possible and it was eye opening for me because I think it helped me more intentionally flip that switch on a regular basis so now is a writer and I think there was a time where I pick up a book and I was like this is just
like stunning you know like this is terrible and I'll read a sentence from a writer who I really admire and like maybe in 10 years I'll be able to write a sentence like that and I'm totally down for that journey you know like how cool would it be and I think there's a certain amount of we can flip that switch like I think there's a way to actually have comparative mind but in that be
nine inspirational way that draws us towards and celebrate something and is inspired by it rather than I have to figure out a way to best that or take them down I'm curious what your take is on that yeah I wasn't aware of the distinction between malicious and benign envy but it totally syncs up with my thoughts on envy and I think the most important part for me of Buddhist
wisdom is the idea that within every emotion especially strong emotions that we experience and especially within emotions that are difficult to admit we're experiencing things like anger or envy you know and that's one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it in the chapter in success and failures like oh Buddhist don't experience envy and it's like so I just went
ahead and told the story of like the day I succeeded the most I'll ever succeed as a writer and still felt you know envy of another writer on that day you know so Buddhist teachers do experience envy because we're human and if a if a person ever says they don't experience human emotion I'm not sure why that would be a good teacher for other humans you know benign envy really
speaks to the wisdom of envy which is if we can see how somebody else's is path is succeeding we could maybe say okay what is it in here that I long for and sometimes it's easier to see it when somebody has a motive success that's not your wheelhouse but there's no sense of competition you know like or winner take all type of thing going on there yeah I went to see when I was in Chicago
like show at the Museum of Contemporary Art by a painter who's a Brooklyn painter Nicole Eisenman who I think is just amazing and because I'm a huge fan of painting but I've I just it was never the thing I was trying to do so you can move through this show and just be like wow and there's not even a like I wish I could do that it's just like oh this is so amazing that a person could do
that you know it's like watching somebody like LeBron James play play basketball or something like that you're just like I'm just going to watch the art and enjoy it but sometimes somebody does have something you want and you could say okay what is it that I actually long to do on my own path and maybe I could just take that information that you know benign or that actually
wisdom envy we could almost call it and say okay how do I actually let this lead me towards my longing a little bit you know one other unrelated to what you're saying point I want to make about success and failure because I really do think our relationship to pleasure and pain is so important to understand the other of the eight-worldly wins so one of the thinkers that I
read in writing the chapter on pleasure and pain was Dr.
Anna Lemke who wrote a book called Dopamine Nation and she's an addiction expert and she talks there's some good podcasts with her I'm not sure if you're familiar with her work but she talks about how pleasure and pain are co-located in the brain and she talks about sort of like a seesaw right that that wants to stay in balance and if you try to do too much say on your smartphone
or too much sugar or too much it did whatever the addictive tendency that you have is to try to push the dopamine side of the seesaw so that it's going down it balances out on the other side you get less less pleasure with each hit and she calls them the gremlins load up on the other side but I love that idea of pleasure and pain wanting to stay in some sort of balance for a healthy
brain and a healthy nervous system meaning we want to have some relationship to both of them some appreciation both of them I think the exact same thing is true for success and failure and I think this is really important like when I am talking to students or people on the path about confidence and they say I really want to succeed at X you know you'd be a jerk if you said
well I hope you fail because that'll teach you a spiritual lesson like that's never the thing to say it's like I do hope but it's not always going to happen and what I really hope for is that when you experience either success or failure you learn something you learn something about what it means to be human and I do think that leads to more success maybe in general but I
think more importantly it leads to an actual insight into being human which is really what we're looking for 100% it just helps us live a little bit with a little bit more ease you know the entire box works come to mind where she's sort of like you look at each of those situations and you're like this too shall pass yeah sure like the highest high awesome and it's going
to go away and the lowest low oh and it's going to go away you know let's sort of like say yes to all of them except it is reality and then know also that they're impermanent you know it kind of wraps us around to what you describe is the four powers of confidence and when we get through this a little bit more quickly you know so you list out compassion lineage awareness wind
horse as is almost like this is your toolbox this is what you get to access when you sit in the seat when you actually know when you have this confidence with you you brought up lineage earlier in a conversation compassion is something where I feel like you know there's been a lot of conversation around that and I think we're all getting more attuned to the fact that this is really
important for us for a lot of different reasons awareness is one of those those for as well this notion of being able to observe and take in what's going on around you not necessarily with the sense of judging it but just like knowing like this is actually this is my reality this is my subjective reality but this is what I'm experiencing lineage and wind horse I think
are really interesting I let they go into each one of those just a little bit more because I think those are the two people are going to be like I don't really get what this is about so talk to me about these a bit more well linear obviously you know a lot of this is coming from things inherited from Buddhist teachings and trainings and the notion of lineage related to confidence
it has to do with that sort of interwoven nature between taking your own seat and saying I can do this and kind of owning your own agency and power on the one hand but also realizing you're not the first human in history to experience hope and fear you're not the first human to try to do something in my case I'm not the inventor of any of these teachings you're standing
on the sort of shoulders of mentors teachers family ancestors and I think a lot of times we have a very especially a modern life you know a very tenuous nature relationship with our past you know if you go through kind of a again that psychodynamic sort of you know intergenerational trauma approach you're like well this person in my family was a screw up and that person was a screw
up and that person before them was a screw up and I think studying Buddhism it's so crucial to acknowledge being part of a lineage right and not necessarily being the same as the other members of the lineage but there's an idea of actually being part of something larger than oneself and you know there's a certain aspect of that that's humbling right to say I didn't
invent all this but there's also an aspect that's empowering which is to say you can actually call on the support and the wisdom from your ancestors right from not just to look at one's family line as a series of screw ups but to say like oh let me study like who my parents were who my grandparents were who my great grandparents were and maybe even imagine them coming
with me visualize them coming with me when I'm doing a hard thing and asking for their blessings and in the Buddhist tradition the idea of actually imagining the great beings of the past in our spiritual heritage in whatever work we're doing in the world hopefully we have lineage figures that we really look to as like you know if I had a shrine or an altar I would put
these these people up on it and you can actually harvest that and say okay like when I am going to do something hard I'm actually going to visualize and imagine and there's meditations especially in Tontric Buddhism where you really work with this in depth imagine them kind of coming forth and blessing me and holding me you know in the conclusion chapter I talk about the one
hard thing that I did during writing the book which again you know it's interesting when we talk about the things we don't have confidence in all of us have things that if other people looked at them we'd be like oh my god that's amazing I can't believe you do that and you're like well it's pretty you know it's just a thing I do and then there's other things that people
would be like yeah that's no big deal and you'd be like yeah that was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life you know so for whatever reason which makes sense because I grew up in New York City I didn't get my driver's license to later in life and you know part of it was I just didn't have enough support when I took the test as a teenager and then I kind of like you know
freaked out and blocked it out and I was like if I'm going to write a book about confidence I'm going to have to do a hard thing during this getting friends to help me borrow their cars practice driving taking the road test in New York City where actually supposedly people the average person takes it more than three times before they pass you know and you know I did all
that a year and a half ago but one of the things I imagine was my grandmother who is in the dedication of the book not wasn't a Buddhist but was a very powerful woman and very bold and very confident but another thing about my grandma Claire is she got her driver's license later in life so to actually imagine grandma Claire and you know use tools like loving kindness meditation like
the wind horse practice and actually imagine her like being there as a lineage figure in support really helped do it you know and I was also willing to fail if I failed the test I'd say I'd take it again and you know year and a half ago I I took the test and you know I've been driving a lot ever since and I can definitely say on the roads of America I am I am not the worst driver
on the road it's it's fun it's such a New York City thing it is a new reason a kid in New York also it's just like there's no reason right let's circle back to the final thing wind horse which you just referenced also which like my understanding is it's it's been explained to me as sort of like life force yeah you know maybe you know people might use the word prana or whatever
your word for it is yeah is that sort of similar to what we're talking about here yeah yeah so again going on the theme of wind so coming from a combination of Tibetan or Tantric Buddhism along with Tibetan indigenous wisdom that was sort of housed in in the Shambhala tradition of Tibetan Buddhism there's this theme and it's a set of meditation practices and usually
a set of meditation practices that is done relatively quickly so there's short meditation practices like they can take one or two or three or four minutes and you can do them before showing up to do a hard thing but the idea is wind has multiple meanings in classic Buddhism here it's exactly as you said it's kind of like prana or sort of like life force but it's not just
your life force it also is kind of the the force of the moment which often takes an emotional like if you're about to have a difficult conversation with a friend let's say the wind of the moment might be whatever the emotion is it might be sadness it might be resentment or anger and you sort of acknowledge in wind horse the wind of the moment you don't try to fight it but then
the notion of horse is kind of harnessing and riding the energy of the moment taking your seat and expanding outward with confidence and then going into whatever the situation is so it's very much about seeing that the life force or the prana of the moment the wind is actually in the human difficulty of the moment so it's actually the energy that says oh I don't want
to do this or this is going to be really hard or what if democracy collapses and whatever it is right that you go oh okay that's it that fear or that hope or that emotion is the moment I'm going to be present with that I'm going to ground with that acknowledge that and then open my heart to and through that and then do what needs to be done you know so it's a kind of a preparatory
meditation usually for showing up in difficult moments yeah no that makes a lot of sense so the book is filled with such a like a deeper conversation about all four of these powers as well and also strategies practices to say how do I actually do this how do I harness it so definitely encourage folks to dive in feels like good place for us to come full circle as well so in this container
of good life project if I offer up the phrase to live a good life what comes up hmm yeah to live a good life I would say try to come back to the present moment as much as you can and acknowledge that you're human I think that's the most important thing for me and there's no way to get around that there's no need to get around being human it's actually a really good working basis for a good
life. hmm thank you. hey before you leave if you love this episode safe but you'll also love the conversation we had with Henry Schochman about the way to original love and find a link to that episode in the show notes.
this episode of good life project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me Jonathan Fields editing helped by Alejandro Ramirez Christopher Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on this episode and of course if you haven't already done so please go ahead and follow good life project in your favorite listening
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