The Energizing Force of Compassion

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript is provided in its raw, unedited form and may contain errors. We have not proofread this transcript, so it may include typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this rough transcript as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.

 

Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. 

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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Cortland Dahl. Cortland is a scientist, Buddhist scholar and translator, and a meditation teacher under the guidance of the Tibetan meditation master Mingyur Rinpoche. Cortland Dahl cofounded Tergar International, a global network of meditation centers on six continents, and he currently serves as the executive director of Tergar International. 

Cortland is also actively involved in scientific research on meditation and human flourishing. He’s the chief contemplative officer at Healthy Minds Innovations, working with Dr. Richie Davidson and his team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to develop the Healthy Minds mobile app. Cortland is also the author of a new book. It’s called A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism: The Path of Awareness, Compassion, and Wisdom. Cortland, welcome.

 

Dr. Cortland Dahl: It’s an honor to be with you, Tami. Thank you so much for having me on.

 

TS: One of the things I learned in your new book, A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism, is that you often like to begin a new project or a meditation session, a practice period, with a declaration of a compassionate motivation, a rousing of a compassionate motivation. And I wonder, do you start a new project that way? Could we start a podcast that way?

 

CD: We absolutely can. In fact, I did it a few minutes before we popped on, so I’m happy to lead a little micro practice. I always actually like to start this tuning into the heart and forming a compassionate motivation with a little space of being. In fact, we’re at the new year and it’s interesting how in a new year we oftentimes think of all the stuff we want to do or not do, and one thing we oftentimes neglect is being, so maybe we could just start off this new year with a little space of being and then inject a little compassion into that. 

So to just begin this conversation with a few moments of meditative experience, let’s just take a moment, a few moments to simply be, to shift from doing to being. So all of you out there listening, you can just take a moment to let go and rest your mind. You don’t even need to meditate. Just give yourself permission and space to simply exist as you are for just a few moments. Just tune in to your inner experience. And from this space of being and effortless presence, see if you can tune in to all these subtle details of experience that we normally miss. Just notice what you’re hearing, what you’re feeling. No effort required, just noticing for a few moments.

And now let’s bring into this quality of being a little warmth, a little heart energy. One of the simplest ways you can do this is to think to yourself, I’m now going to engage in something. In this case we’re going to spend a little time in conversation. May whatever comes of this not only benefit my own life, but may this, may the benefit, ripple out and touch the lives of others. May it touch the lives of countless beings. May it send out ripples of happiness, of well-being, out into the world. So in whatever way resonates with you and inspires you, you can form an openhearted compassion motivation for being here tonight.

 

TS: Thank you, Cortland. Interestingly, just pointing out that we can tune in to the energy of our heart, it does seem to introduce this warmth immediately just by that shift of attention. I wonder if you could speak to that.

 

CD: Yeah, so much of the path of meditation when we come to it, we think it’s about improving. We think it’s all about self-improvement. It’s about fixing something, something we don’t like about ourselves. And I think a lot of what many of these traditions, the world’s wisdom traditions and meditative traditions, open up for us is just this inner universe of experience and it becomes less about self-improvement and more about self-discovery, and part of that is the heart space. We’re so up in our heads in the modern world and we’re filled, we’re bombarded, with information all the time, and this quality of being just allows us to drop into that wider space of experience. It’s like we’re just widening the aperture of our awareness so we can take more of that in and then we just start noticing a lot of that texture and a lot of that is just that we’re built for relationship more than anything else. Our DNA, our brains, our nervous systems, our biology, certainly our minds, we’re just wired to be social. We’re wired for connection with each other, so we’re just giving ourselves space for that to emerge and to play out an experience.

 

TS: Cortland, you’ve had such a remarkable life adventure that’s been so dharma filled, meeting great teachers and studying in Asia for over a decade. But from learning more about your life story, it sounds like earlier in your life as a teenager you really suffered with debilitating anxiety. That has been a huge catalyst for your life discovery process, and I wonder if you can share a bit about that.

 

CD: Yeah, I wish I could say I was some spiritual prodigy and meditating when I was eight years old or something like that, but it was just straight-up suffering. As you said, Tami, that got me started on this. I was wound really tight as a teenager. I had a lot of anxiety and in particular—it’s just one of the great ironies in my life that I do a fair amount of this kind of stuff now, because I never in a million years would’ve believed that to be true when I was younger of the anxiety that I had. One of the things that I was most afraid of was public speaking. I had a complete and genuine phobia, public speaking, so much so that I fainted onstage when I was a teenager.

And just to point out that I’m not exaggerating for dramatic effect. I literally fell face-first flat, kind of flat out on my face in front of my entire school when I was a teenager. So you can imagine my coolness factor, whatever it was before that, it took quite a nose dive on that particular day. So I was wound pretty tight, and I got to college and that the anxiety I had that just the restlessness just went up through the roof. And it got to the point where it became really debilitating, but in many ways that was such a blessing in my life because it got me looking. It got me searching for help and just a different way to live. I just knew this was not sustainable, the path that I was on. 

And as luck would have it, I stumbled upon the practice of meditation. I didn’t know anybody who meditated, but I was a bit of kind of an introvert by nature. So I started reading books, and it changed my life. It completely changed my life. It changed everything, not just gave me some tools to work with the anxiety, but completely changed the way I saw myself and saw the world in a very deep and profound way.

 

TS: Can you speak specifically and especially bring in, if you would, your experience as a neuroscientific researcher in terms of addressing anxiety, what works?

 

CD: Yeah, that’s a great question. In fact, I was just having a conversation today about that. I was at a retreat and was sitting over lunch with some psychologists and people who work at the frontlines of mental health. And we were just talking about this. A lot of the best treatments we have these days for depression and anxiety and other challenges like that are really not very good. A lot of them are not very effective, and when they are effective, it’s for a relatively small percentage of people. There’s many people who aren’t helped by what are considered the gold standard treatments. So that’s the bad news. The good news is that I think we’re starting to see more and more new treatments, new modalities, new approaches, psychedelics for one, contemplative meditative approaches. There’s just new things, there’s new innovation happening, and it’s quite exciting what’s happening in research these days.

One of the things that we’re finding in our research—you mentioned the Healthy Minds program and the Healthy Minds app—we’ve now done really rigorous scientific studies with thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people have used the app, and we have all this data, kind of quantities of data that typically you don’t have for this kind of research. And what it’s showing is that very small amounts of practice, of learning the kinds of stuff that we’re talking about, that you learn through everything that you do with Sounds True, in all of your courses and publications. I mean all these practices and principles that just put us in touch with our own minds and help us to explore what’s going on in our own minds and emotions, that actually it doesn’t take much. In fact, our research shows that you see after even a single week of people just doing four to five minutes a day, you start seeing these statistically significant improvements in things like depression, anxiety, and in positive things like feelings of connection versus loneliness and so on.

And then if you follow that through for a month, or even beyond that to three months, that these positive effects seem to last and they seem to endure and it really doesn’t take a lot. So there’s a lot we can say on what kinds of training work for what people under what circumstances, and these are the questions that we’re really researching. But the data these days is really, really hopeful. And I think it shows that even the busiest people, the most stressed-out people, can make use of these practices and they can start having a positive impact right away. So there’s lots—I could share a lot more about the research, but it’s very, very giving us a lot of hope and promise for the future.

 

TS: Just to get more specific, and especially because you were so involved in the creation of the Healthy Minds curriculum and the app design, you said four to five times a week, four to five minutes, doing what specifically?

 

CD: So in the Healthy Minds app, it’s based on this scientific framework that we created based on both contemplative traditions and research. And it highlights four key dimensions of well-being. We call them like the four pillars of a healthy mind. They are awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. And we liken these to skills. They’re not just things we have or we don’t have. We tend to think of if you feel connected to other people, it either just happens or it doesn’t happen, but actually they’re skills. They’re things that you can really practice. 

So in the Healthy Minds app, it’s a mixture of these short, kind of podcast-style lessons that are usually like 10 minutes or so. And then we have practices, and the practices—there was a lot of experimentation, because we actually wanted to do research. And so you can actually select different ways to practice. So you can do everything as a sitting meditation. You could sit down and choose a 5 minute or 10 minute. You can choose the length from 5 to 30 minutes, but you can also do what we call active practices. So the skill is exactly the same. It might be a mindfulness practices, it might be appreciation, but you could do it as a sitting meditation or you could do it when you’re commuting to work. In fact, that’s one of the ways I really love to do the practices. You could do it when you’re doing the laundry; you could do it when you’re walking your dog. You could do it when you’re out going for a jog or for a walk. And basically it’s just taking a simple skill, and there’s a whole repertoire of skills, and you just practice them one by one. 

So appreciation, just to give an example, it might be this very simple thing of noticing the positive. That’s basically what appreciation is. So if you’re listening to this right now, you can be practicing this. You can just notice I’m looking at you, Tami, and just thinking, wow, here’s this remarkable person who has touched so many lives. Think of all the books, all the courses, all the recordings. I mean, back in my own journey, I mean there’s so many books and recordings and cassette tapes back in the day. I mean, I have more memories. You’ve touched my life. You’ve touched so many lives. So again, it’s that little shift where you just consciously orient yourself to the positive and you just treat that like a skill. So you can practice it formally for a few minutes, but then you practice it throughout the day. You take that into your—when you’re at lunch or a dinner or at work with colleagues, whatever, and you just kind of treat that as something you just practice in short moments many times throughout your day.

 

TS: Well, first of all, the appreciation feels really good, so thank you.

 

CD: It feels good for me. It feels good for you. It’s a win-win. 

 

TS: Well, yeah, and I’m going to practice and appreciate you. And the thing that I’m going to appreciate in this moment is that right here at the beginning of our conversation, you’re addressing something that was important to me to ask you about, which is what about for those people who just aren’t drawn to meditation, sitting meditation? I found through my work communicating with the Sounds True audience, people raise their hands. They’re like, “Tami, I just don’t like to meditate.” And my response always is, “Don’t let that stop you. That’s fine.” I’m wondering what you have to say about that.

 

CD: Yeah, I mean, even as I said just a moment ago, anybody who’s listening or you, Tami, if you do what I just encouraged us all to do, notice something positive or take a different skill like mindfulness, take a breath, just take a breath. Notice what that feels like, you just meditated. I think what people don’t like oftentimes is sitting still, and there’s good reason for that. We live in an always-on culture right now, and we are simply not used to having time and space just to be. And I experienced this in my own life. I, as I said, I was very kind of high strung, well and pretty tight, high energy. I mean everybody in my family was shocked when I started meditating. I was like the last person anybody thought would ever learn to meditate. I was hyperactive, running around, really easily bored, restless.

And so it’s very natural. I think for a lot of people when you try to sit down, all you feel is discomfort. You experience distraction; you experience the boredom. That’s just the residue of doing, of just this compulsive doing and an absence of being. We as a culture have erased the cultural rituals that virtually all cultures have around being, and we’ve replaced it. The closest we get to being is binge watching our favorite TV show or something like that. So it’s normal that people feel that kind of discomfort when they just sit. The beauty is that meditation doesn’t have to be just sitting in discomfort for half an hour. You can meditate while you’re going for a walk. You can meditate, as I said, while you’re doing the laundry. 

What inspired me with the Healthy Minds app, when Richie Davidson and I were first kind of just hatching the idea of this, and we had the idea of this active practices, not just formal sitting meditation. Actually the inspiration for me was when my son was born. And I was living in Asia at the time. I was doing months of retreat every year. I was a really hardcore meditator at the time, and then suddenly I have this little being in my life and everything about my spiritual path just went out the window. And I suddenly had to figure out, now what is meditation when I can’t sit down? I might not get five minutes just to sit quietly, but I have all this time with this little beautiful creature on my shoulder or lying down. One of my rituals was I laid down with him every time he went down for a nap. I laid down with him for three years. I did that literally every time. I mean, it was one of the most precious things in my life. Why can’t that be meditation? That can be my practice. And so I was thinking about that as just one example. I mean, people have many different versions of that, but why not make the things you already do the vehicle for this inner journey? It doesn’t have to be some departure from your life. It could be your life, but just living it in a meditative way. And now we’ve been researching that, and it shows that actually it seems to be just as effective in promoting well-being and human flourishing as the formal sitting practices are. So we’re really researching this to see how does it help people? How does it help people? But that was the impetus for it.

 

TS: I want to talk more about that in terms of braiding in this compassionate wish and inspiration into the activities we do in our daily life, because that’s one of the things I got from your book A Meditator’s Guide, and it was really moving to me. And it’s moving to me to hear you talk about lying down and napping with your son. You say, “I often suggest to fellow householder yogis, people like you who are practicing in the midst of your daily life, that the most essential thing for daily life is just to make a habit of linking all the steps we go through in our everyday routine with compassion. Compassion can become the energizing force that motivates you and inspires you.” So you’ve given us a couple of examples already, appreciating people, but there are more. So take me through a day and give me as many examples as you can think of where you bring in this compassionate motivation into the activities you do.

 

CD: Yeah, I’m so happy you’re asking about this. This is very traditional. I mean, this is all over the Tibetan tradition, which I’ve been very steeped in and been, I would say, by far the most transformative part of the journey for me is this. And it wasn’t the natural part. I can’t say I was Mr. Empathy as a kid or anything. I mean, it was something I learned. So one of the keys to this is what in Buddhist terms you call “the view,” which is to say your perspective. And in this case, it’s this simple idea that actually compassion is innate. It’s actually already here. It’s kind of just there beneath the surface, and we’re just learning to bring it into focus. We’re learning to just kind of bring it up to the surface of conscious experience. 

So take a simple example to answer your question. You get up in the morning. You stumble into the bathroom and begin your morning routine. Maybe you brush your teeth or whatever. Normally we do this completely—it’s autopilot. We do it every day. We don’t even think about it. You can use these little moments without even stopping what you’re doing. You can use that as a moment to bring this compassionate, innate, compassionate impulse into focus. 

So it could start by just reflecting on, why am I brushing my teeth? Why do we even want to do that? And you probably could go through two or three different little layers. It might be like, well, I want to be healthy, or I don’t want my teeth to look gnarly, or whatever the motivation might be. If you keep going a little bit deeper, well, why do I want that? Why do I want that? Almost always you’ll end up at something rooted in love and compassion. I want to be healthy because I want to be there for the people who I really care about. I want to be there. I want to be healthy so I can do the things that are meaningful to me in life and so that I can do the things that nourish me and that hopefully nourish the people around me. And then you can spread that out, that little act a brushing my teeth now becomes an act of love. It becomes an act of compassion. And then you can take it even further and think there are people all over the world doing this and countless other things, similarly motivated by this underlying innate movement of care and compassion. And so suddenly what you’re seeing is this seemingly mundane thing you’re doing, like brushing your teeth now is part of this current of love and kindness and care in the world, and it becomes meaningful, it becomes nourishing, it becomes rewarding.

So you could do that. You go down to your kitchen and again, the same thing all over again. And it might be as simple as may, whatever I’m doing right now, may it be a benefit. I’m making toast. Even if it’s for yourself, may this nourish my body so I can be of service to others. May I clean my kitchen so my family has a nice clean home that they can enjoy. I mean, you can just go on and on. It’s just a little, it’s not changing the things you do, it’s changing your perspective on the life you already lead. And again, it only takes an instant to do that, but then everything, your whole world is transformed just by shifting your perspective.

 

TS: I really love it, Cortland. And I’ll just say briefly, after reading A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism and hearing you talk about this, you use the example in the book of doing the dishes as a gift to the other people in your household. And I usually do the dishes in our house, and most of the time I do it, I just like the kitchen to be clean. And I think to myself, well, at least I get to put that in my column with my—it’s in my column. That’s good. That’s some good. But today, when I did the dishes, I said, “I am doing this as a gift to my partner, and this is an offering of my heart and love.” And it changed actually this thing and made it—I wasn’t quite as kind of bitchy about doing the dishes. Instead I was generous doing the same amount of dishes. What a thing.

 

CD: Yeah, everything becomes a gift then. And that’s another piece of this in giving that gift, I mean, the attitude of generosity puts us in touch with a part of ourselves. It’s like an inner richness that can never be exhausted. It’s like the more you give, the more you feel like, oh, I have so much to give, rather than when we’re always thinking about our needs. Exactly. The dishes are a great example like, oh, OK, is my partner doing their share? And suddenly you’re in this calculation. It’s now in the spirit of generosity. It just creates a totally different space, and then you feel enriched rather than impoverished. So the gift, we’re the biggest recipients in a way of the gift, even though that’s not our intention in doing it.

 

TS: Now, we hear so much about the research, if you look into it from how it’s changing our brain when we practice something like a mindfulness meditation practice. But I haven’t heard as much, at least about the research that says, when we do these kinds of acts of generosity and focus on compassion practice, how does that change our wiring? And I’m curious what is behind that.

 

CD: Yeah, yeah. It’s fascinating. There hasn’t been as much work, but there’s some. In fact, one of the reasons we published this scientific framework, and there was another paper that I and some of my colleagues wrote where we were really attempting to create a roadmap for scientists to understand the broad range of meditative practices. For a long time, I was very focused on mindfulness, which is beautiful and really powerful, but it’s just one of hundreds if not thousands of kinds of meditation. And we wanted just to broaden open the lens a little bit wider. And it turns out with the research that’s been done that these practices, not surprisingly perhaps for meditators, have completely different effects on the body, the mind, and the brain. So if you take something like compassion practices, what you’ll find is that they activate completely different networks in the brain than mindfulness practices.

And even within the realm of social emotions, empathy and compassion even are very different networks in the brain. So for example, say we’re talking here and something happens. I suddenly see you get you—something happens to your neck, or I can see you’re in pain, and I observe that. What will happen in me, assuming I have an empathetic response, is that the pain network in my brain will activate. Your pain network will obviously be activated. You’re experiencing physical pain, but I simply by observing you will also be almost simulating that experience in my own mind, and it’ll be activating a similar network. So if it’s pain, I’ll be activating a lot of those same brain regions that will be active in you. Well, that of course is a depleting experience. And so you hear terms “compassion fatigue” in the world of healthcare, for example. Actually what’s going on is it’s empathy fatigue. Because empathy, especially in relation to suffering, whether it’s physical or emotional suffering, it tends to be experienced as a difficult emotion, as a depleting experience. Compassion, however, activates a completely different set of brain regions, what we call the “care network,” and it has some overlap with another network that we call the “reward network.” This is actually the reward, the network of pleasure. If you eat a bite of chocolate or something that elicits an experience of pleasure, actually it’s some of those same brain regions. So we experience compassion as an uplifting emotion. It feels positive. It feels nourishing. It activates networks of the brain that are kind of the active—it’s not just a passive, fluffy state of mind. It’s a highly engaged state of mind, meaning we’re ready and willing to help if the situation calls for it. So the research shows that we can literally train ourselves to activate these networks in the brain.

And even if we have a moment of empathy, for example, we’re feeling a little depleted and we feel that kind of we’re vibrating at the same frequency, but we’re feeling a little overwhelmed by it, we can actually train ourselves to shift into compassion. Or what scientists call “empathic distress” we can shift to empathic concern. So these again, are just skills. We just need to learn them and then we can practice them in simple ways throughout our day, and it just rewires our whole nervous system and the way our brains are functioning even. So again, it’s really, really amazing how this works.

 

TS: Just to make that very real for people, let’s say someone is experiencing empathic distress. Maybe it’s for someone in their family. And they’re like, I’m feeling—how would they shift that into empathic concern or an actual engagement with the compassion part of themselves?

 

CD: Yeah, fantastic question. So again, let’s take this conversation right now and imagine that one of us suddenly had a moment of physical pain. And often what happens is you and I are talking and we’ve got some connection, we’re having a dialogue here, and we’re in this sort of relational space. We’re social creatures by nature. So we do this quite naturally with one another. And then you have, say you have that painful moment, and I observe that if it’s a strong one. I mean, if it’s something minor, this probably wouldn’t happen. But say you have a strong, it’s clear you’re having a really strong reaction. Oftentimes what’s going to happen if I empathize with you is that I have a kind of mirror or almost simulate a similar reaction. I feel that ouch. I feel whatever that emotional impact is. If it’s strong, then actually the relational field gets lost and I contract into my own reaction. Rather than being able to be there and comfort you, I’m suddenly having to take care of myself, having my own reaction. I suddenly have to take care of myself. And suddenly that relational—it’s almost like the relationship gets severed and I’m now in my own space. You’re in your own space. 

So part of as a practice, if you think about is what’s the skill here? What do you actually do? The first thing is just to notice that it’s not that you’re trying to stop the reaction—it’s the most natural thing to have that—but it’s to reestablish that caring relational space. So in this case, it might be simply bringing my attention back to you. And a simple way to do this in this—is in many meditative traditions, this is all over the place in Buddhist meditation, is you can simply bring online a thought process where I not only recognize that you are in pain or suffering, and I simply wish that you’d be free of that. I can simply even repeat a phrase in my mind, oh, Tami is suffering. May she be OK, may she be safe, may she be whatever. It’s just bringing online a caring response. It’s shifting back into the relationship, kind of moving out of the contracted space and then injecting into that field of connection, kind of a caring, like the warmth of care. And again, you can do that by repeating a phrase. You can do the practice of tonglen; many people might’ve heard about. It’s this where you use the breath. You imagine you’re sending out, when you breathe out, you could imagine you’re just sending out warm, healing light, energy. When you breathe in, you breathe in like you’re taking on the suffering of the other person. It’s completely against the logic of the ego. Normally we want to breathe in the stuff we want, and we want to get rid of the stuff we don’t want. This is almost the opposite, right? You’re like, no, I can hold it. You’re suffering. I got this, I want it. So it just takes you back into that caring space again. There’s many different ways to do it. This is in the Healthy Minds program. There’s a whole series of trainings on different techniques to do it, but they just take a moment. They just need practice. They’re just little inner movements that you get used to and then you can apply them very easily in relationships.

 

TS: I’m curious if you can take us behind the curtain for a moment. And what I mean by that is as I was learning about you, I learned about how you are a translator of Tibetan texts. But then I thought to myself, actually, he’s a translator of the tradition into a contemporary format via an app and via a language and a practice style that fits for our contemporary world. That’s a huge act of translation. So the behind-the-curtain is to understand when you and the team at Healthy Minds Innovation looked at, how are we going to create this app with these four different categories, what was the process that you went through?

 

CD: Yeah. Well, you’re a very astute observer because it’s true. Oftentimes, as I said to you before we went live, whenever people ask me what I do, I never know what to say because I have five different job titles for three different organizations, and it’s hopelessly complicated. I confuse myself with my own professional identity, but actually what I often say is that, at heart, I’m a translator. That’s very exactly what you just said, because I’m just one of these people that is standing between worlds and helping them make sense of one another and hopefully helping wisdom flow between these worlds. And how that played out with the Healthy Minds program, it was a very long conversation, in particular with Richie Davidson, who, who’s a really brilliant scientist, one of my dear friends and mentors, and we had this shared aspiration to just want to put some of these other practices on the map scientifically to, as I said earlier, just widen the scientific agenda to include things like compassion and some of the wisdom practices that you find in these traditions.

That was the easy part, forming that intention, the how of it was not at all easy, and actually a lot of the key insights came from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, actually. We had a series of conversations with him where he gave us some really amazing advice, actually, about how to actually do this. So one of the key pieces was how we would marry science and these meditative traditions in a way that was not doing injustice to either of them, hopefully bringing the best of some of these traditions together, but in a way that would actually work for people that wouldn’t feel overly religious to people who had no interest in that, but wouldn’t feel like overly theoretical to people who really needed practical tools in their lives. And there was one particular meeting—he actually had visited Madison. 

In fact, there was this whole funny episode, which maybe I can share, where I found myself in the very odd position of having to give a public presentation to the Dalai Lama about meditation. I was teaching the Dalai Lama, as though the Dalai Lama needs somebody to tell him about the ins and outs of meditation, but somehow I found myself in that position. 

But in any case, it was on the same visit that we spent some time with him, and we asked him, we said, “We really want to take some of these important ideas from the world’s wisdom traditions, but present them in a way that anybody could benefit from them regardless of whether they’re atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, whatever. But we’re kind of a little befuddled as to how to actually do that.” And so we asked him about, there’s all these Buddhist ideas like emptiness and no self, and we’re like, “Should we try to put this in everyday language? What do you think? How should we actually do that?” And right away he almost cut us off and was like, “No, no, no, no. That’s Buddhist business.” He said something like that. “All that stuff’s Buddhist business. Don’t worry about that.” He said what you need to do is take the meditative approach and use the insights of science. Basically take the contemplative, experiential meditative approach that we find in Tibetan Buddhism, for example, but bring that together with some of the insights that you have that you’re gaining from science. So people can translate some of these insights that are there in the scientific tradition, but translate that into experience, not just theory as normal as you get. 

And that was it for us. That was the light bulb went off and we’re like, ah. And that’s basically what the Healthy Minds app is. Everything that we’ve done basically came out of that conversation. So it’s really bringing together interesting insights from research, but in a way that people can actually experience, how would you actually practice that? So it’s taking all these meditative techniques, but in sort of the language that we understand, because for better or worse, we’re kind of, science is sort of the religion of the modern world in many ways. So that’s basically how we did it. 

And then it was just a lot of dialogue, and we worked with some of the most brilliant designers, people who just know how to make stuff really, really well. I learned so much from working with these people. 

And a lot of that was just trying things with people, seeing how it landed. And it could be little things like in a guided meditation, for example, seeing that people really don’t seem to, when you depersonalize language, there’s this meditative habit when you do a guided meditation where you say “the breath, the body” instead of “your breath, your body.” And there’s kind of philosophical reasons for that. But when we talk to people, they’re like, “Well, that feels cold. It doesn’t feel warm and personal.” And we’re like, oh, OK. Even though that might make sense, theoretically, it’s not landing with people well. So that’s just one example. So a lot of it was just trial and error and really just trying to hear from people who tried these things and to see what actually would work for them. And now we’ve done all these tons of research. We published a bunch of papers, but a lot of that has just been through the grinder of trial and error.

 

TS: One of the things I’m curious about has to do with personal motivation because one of the things I’ve seen is that, at this point, people have listened to gosh knows how many podcasts and have read gosh knows how many books, and probably have gosh knows how many apps on their phone, and they kind of have a lot of knowledge about little things they could do. And yet sometimes we do these things and often we don’t. What’s the motivation to do it? 

In my own inner chewing on this, I came up with four sources of motivation, but I’m curious what you and the tradition has to say. Then what can further our motivation? The first is you talked about how your own anxiety was a catalyst in your journey, and I thought, well, the first thing that motivates people is pain. They want to get out of pain. The second thing that motivates people is they discover the pleasure of some of these new behaviors. Like, wow, this is really rewarding. I feel better. So we have pleasure and pain that motivates people. The other, and I thought, I wonder how many people really are motivated by this, is where we started our conversation together, which is actually wanting to be of service to other people and knowing that if we do do these practices repeatedly, we will be of more service to other people. Does that motivate some people a little? And then the last idea I had was that sometimes you meet a model, you could say a teacher or you read a great story, and something in you is just like, gosh, I want to be like that. I want to be like that. I’m so inspired by that. So those were the four things I thought of. And I wonder if you have more to add to that, and then what can you say to help us accelerate our motivation, if you will?

 

CD: That’s beautiful. Yeah, I think that’s lovely. And I think the way I would see it is that it’s not as though necessarily we graduate from one of those to another. Actually, we have all of those, and I think it’s almost like we’re sort of slowly expanding the scope, but it’s not as though we finished first grade and now we’re in second grade. For example, compassion. For me, it was definitely not the driving motivation, as you said, as you just pointed out. It was suffering, right? I was looking for something. I would say it was a mixture of the suffering and curiosity, but it was about me, right? I wanted it for my life. I was not thinking, how can I benefit others? But at a certain point, it really did become about that, but it wasn’t as though I was subtracted at that point. I didn’t care about myself anymore. And I was now just all about, it was more like, yes, of course I still want to be happy. I want meaning in my life, and now I see that it’s this bigger thing too. I really see that the world needs this, and it’s helped me so much, and maybe my life could in part be a bridge so other people could benefit from this as well. And then it becomes a positive loop because that also is not only beneficial to others, but it is also nourishing to oneself. So compassion is—as I mentioned earlier, the research shows this as well—it’s tremendously nourishing. It’s tremendously energizing and uplifting, so it becomes this positive feedback loop. So we’re kind of gradually expanding that.

I think all of those, to me definitely ring true. I would say another one I feel a little hidden, but can be there very, very early on. But oftentimes unconsciously, it was definitely unconscious for me, but it was very much there is that we, in addition to being social creatures by nature, we are always on the hunt for meaning and purpose, even if we’re not thinking about it in those terms. So at the beginning, my anxiety, for example, was the demon. It was a thing I wanted to get rid of. And at a certain point I started to see that actually all the things I’m looking for are not in the absence of this inner demon. They’re actually found within it and around it. It’s actually that became my gateway. And suddenly working with the anxiety and working with this painful stuff in my life, it suddenly became meaningful. It allowed me to open the doors to my own inner experience and just start exploring this whole inner universe. And I think it was that, again, I wasn’t thinking about this at the time, but things that had been painful, inner demons in my life, became meaningful and rewarding. Not easy. There were still—pain is always pain, but it became meaningful pain. It became transformative pain. And I think that’s another piece of this too, is that the motivation—kind of like a subterranean motivation oftentimes is we are just looking for meaning. Our lives can feel so devoid of meaning at times. Everything seems mundane. Why are we doing all this stuff? And again, we think we need to live some different fantasy life. But what this is showing is, no, even just a shift in perspective, even forget about mundane stuff. Even the painful stuff actually can be deeply meaningful. You don’t have to look farther than Nelson Mandela or Malala, the great heroes of our world. And it’s almost always adversity and pain and their perspective on that stuff that led them to be who they are. So we can see that in our own lives too. 

So anyways, there’s all sorts of layers of motivation, but I think as you’re doing kind of bringing that up to consciousness so we can be more aware of it, and when you’re aware of it, then you can start nurturing those things. You’re more conscious of it. You can kind of strengthen that as a conscious experience. So yeah, I love all four of those points.

 

TS: And now the fifth one, I have some sense that there’s more to life than this. There’s more meaning that’s available to me. But if I heard you correctly, what you’re saying is becoming aware of what motivates us automatically increases the motivation. Is that what you said? Just that awareness like, oh, this is my—because I mean, look, you’re in the transformation business. You designed the Healthy Minds app. I’ve been focusing on human transformation now for four decades, and I’m still trying to understand, what could I do to help motivate people more? What could I do?

 

CD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do think the meaning. I think being aware of these things has a power in and of itself. In the Tergar community, this thing that we did at the beginning of our conversation where you just reflect on, why am I even doing this? In many ways that is as important, if not more important than all the other elements of the practice. I think, in fact, if you were to ask the Dalai Lama like, “Hey, what’s the most important part of all these teachings that are there in your tradition?” I doubt he would say mindfulness. I doubt he would say being more focused. He certainly would not start talking about altered states of consciousness. I think he would say it’s compassion. I think he would say it’s compassion. Just try to do good in the world. That one thing. It doesn’t have to be some esoteric, mystical thing. We all want some blissful, tranced out, whatever. That might happen, it might not, but compassion is the real marker. It’s, at the end of the day, it’s wisdom and compassion. 

So I think the beauty of making it conscious is just that you can then nurture those experiences. They become more nourishing when we’re aware of them and conscious of them. It becomes like an active force in our life versus something that’s kind of behind the scenes that it’s sort of there, but it’s almost like we don’t benefit as much from it because it’s not conscious. So that’s just to make that itself part of the practice, make that the motivation. The practice itself actually is the motivation.

 

TS: Now, I want to track back for a moment to your anxiety, and I’m going to go out a little bit on a limb here. I’m someone who has dealt with anxiety in various ways my whole life. And I remember at one point when a Buddhist psychotherapist, Bruce Tift—I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work, lived and practiced in Boulder for many years—and in a recording that we made called Already Free, he shared anxiety is groundlessness from the ego’s point of view.

And I remember writing that down and really focusing on it and thinking to myself, God, I wonder if there’s some—this is where I’m now going out on a limb. I haven’t gone out there yet, but now I’m going out there—if there’s some connection between the anxiety that as a person I’ve felt a lot and this kind of shaky openness, sense of possibility, I feel so much groundlessness. There’s a positive openness, but then it can get interpreted as anxiety if I’m looking at it from a certain perspective of self-protection. And I wonder how you relate to this.

 

CD: Yeah, I think that’s very true. One of the principles of the approach that in this strand of teachings from the Tibetan tradition and also very much woven into the Healthy Minds app is this view that, as I said earlier, the things we’re looking for in life, whether it’s just being at home in the world, not being anxious, feeling content, whatever, being happy or more spiritual sense, awakening, enlightenment, wisdom, compassion, whatever fancy terms we want to put on it, that these things are actually found within whatever present moment of experience we’re having, especially the painful ones and the challenges in our lives. We tend to think that pain and discomfort equal suffering. And so therefore, since that’s kind of our unconscious, that little formula’s almost unconsciously driving our behavior, we think, oh, we need to get rid of the pain and discomfort. And so a lot of our effort is to get rid of the bad stuff and to get the good stuff. And then we think if we do that right, eventually we’ll be happy or content or whatever. All the good stuff will happen. And this is just a totally different paradigm. It’s saying, no, it’s actually not. Pain and discomfort do not equal suffering. It’s oftentimes the resistance. It’s all the layers of stuff that surround the pain and discomfort, but often there’s tremendous wisdom within all of these emotions. 

I know you’ve explored the idea of the Buddha families in the Tibetan tradition, this idea that there’s sort of this wisdom energy within even what otherwise might feel like toxic emotion. So a great question to pose. We’re talking about anxiety right now, but you could swap out anything, whatever. You’ve got a short temper, you get depressed, you have a lot of grief, whatever it might be, rather than thinking, how can I get rid of this thing, open up and explore that, and where is the beauty in that?

And it might feel almost antithetical, like, no, there’s nothing good about anxiety. Why would you want to do that? But actually, if you take—as you’re saying right now, anxiety oftentimes is operating in this space of uncertainty. Human beings, in fact, not only beings, animals in general, hate uncertainty. There’s horrible animal studies in my mind, highly unethical. But one of the things that it showed is that if you induce uncertainty in lab rats, for example, they basically will get depressed. Uncertainty is one of the quickest roots just to create anxiety and depression in any animal, not just us as humans. So we just have a fundamental, we just don’t process that well, and this is how we respond. But instead of trying to get rid of that, I think the first thing is seeing anxiety and depression actually are completely predictable natural responses to this insane world that we live in currently. Our biology just simply is not built to cope with the amount and kind of information we’re dealing with. So the first thing is just, it’s normal. It feels like a personal failing if you get anxious, right? There’s something wrong with me. Nothing’s wrong with us. Something’s wrong with the world, perhaps. But then you can start saying, OK, am I stuck with this? And the answer I would say is no. 

So as you’re saying, when you kind of open up to it and you can see, actually, this is kind of a beautiful response to that, and there’s tremendous care actually in anxiety. It’s simply our system trying to adjust to uncertainty. And so within that, you can almost just open up into that energy, and it’s oftentimes when we contract into the emotion is where the pain is, but if we can kind of expand and allow the emotion to be there, not trying to change it or get rid of it, but we can sort of expand the scope of our experience, and then you can feel your way back into that unique energy of that. There’s sort of like the anxious vibration in the body-mind that comes with anxiety, and there’s the loop of thoughts that’s playing. You can start seeing, actually, there’s a lot of beauty and richness in that, and it’s simply the contraction that’s painful about it. When you can expand, actually, you can unlock all sorts of good things from within that that don’t call you to experience anything other than what you’re actually experiencing in that moment. And again, you can say the same thing for anger, for grief or whatever. It’s just, how do we just sort of open up and just hold space for that? And then, yeah, again, so many really, really beautiful, amazing things can happen from that.

 

TS: Can you give me another example, Cortland, perhaps from your own life, perhaps from something in the last couple years, of something that first appeared like this is an unwanted X, Y, Z, but you were able to find the beauty in the experience?

 

CD: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can think of a lot of examples, but one that really comes to mind was my father passed away about two and a half years ago, and I was quite close to him. He had a big role in my life, and we had a very complicated relationship. I think a lot of parents and kids. I had tremendous love and affection for him, and he could be a royal pain in the ass. I’m sure I was a royal pain in the ass to him at various points in my life as well. And it was really interesting. He passed away unexpectedly. It was right at the end of COVID, and he wasn’t sick. He went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up. And it was very interesting how that played out. You never know how you’re going to respond to these kinds of things until they happen when you lose somebody really close to you.

And it was very interesting because I could see sort of the contraction that can happen, of course, the most understandable thing in the world. And of course, you have a lot of training as a meditator, just how you can work with that, and especially with this approach of not like, oh, I don’t want to feel the grief. I don’t want to get overwhelmed by it. A lot of this, the training I’ve had has been exactly what we just talked about, which is let it all be there and where’s the beauty in this? And what I noticed was there, of course, was just this atmosphere of sadness, right? He wasn’t there anymore, and there were so many moments from the first day, even now I just feel like I want to call him, or I want to, this just sort of impulse and like, oh, and then you remember, oh, I can’t call him.

And so there’s just this sadness, just the loss, just the sadness of the loss. But I think what the opening created space for was that I felt so much gratitude. Actually my dominant experience when he passed away, strangely—and I never would’ve guessed this, actually—it was gratitude. It was like all the complications and the squabbles and things over the years, it’s like all of that—it’s not like I erased it. That’s just part of our history. But I just thought of all the things he brought into my life, all the ways he supported me, all the things. It just created this space for gratitude, but within the space of sadness. I was still sad. It was something about that, seeing the contraction and just allowing the opening to happen, letting the sadness move through without needing, just letting it do what it needed to do. But it just created the room for other things to be happening as well. And it was quite profound, profoundly healing in a way, the way that played out in that moment. So that just came to mind as one example.

 

TS: A final question for you. In A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism, you talk about the power of pith instructions, these short, on-the-spot meditative insights that we can draw on to help us in situations and how it’s valuable to have a few in your back pocket, so to speak, that you can pull out when you need them. Share with us a pith instruction that you rely on.

 

CD: Yeah, I mean, the first thing that came to mind that’s a—many times, I would say not only every day, probably every hour, many times—is the simplest thing, which is just look at your mind. Look at your mind just right now, every moment, not needing to do anything, not to fix it, not to improve it, not to change it. It’s really just this. I think what that instruction invites to me is just an attitude of curiosity and having just kind of a curious, a love affair filled with curiosity with your own mind. And that’s something that came early on in my practice. And it’s not a theoretical thing. It’s just taking a quick weather check like, OK, what’s going on right now? And curiosity has—short circuits the hardening. Like, I got this, right, got it figured out. Or all the layers of interpretations that we bring to every experience, it has a way of short-circuiting expectations, or at least just brings, it makes them conscious versus unconscious assumptions and expectations that may or may not be true. So that’s one. I think just getting curious and just that phrase “look at your mind.” 

Another one related to that that has been profoundly helpful in a very different way is this thing actually that came from Ramana Maharishi, the great sage in India in the 20th century. And I actually don’t know, I haven’t been a student in that tradition, and I can’t even say I’ve read that widely. I’ve been listening to some of his teachings here and there, but I read something that he, in early in life, he just sat down outside this temple nearby where he lived and just kind of sitting outside and he just was asking, who am I? And that was it. It was just that question, who am I? And just relentlessly asked himself that question. And I’ve really taken that—I can’t say I’ve done it anywhere nearly as relentlessly as he probably did. But I find that question opens so many interesting doors, and it’s never like, what happens? What I tend to do is just ask that. And then it’s kind of the look at your mind thing. OK, it’s just opening some space in my own inner experience. And then what emerges, who actually am I right now? I’m having this conversation. Who is this guy Cort who’s doing all what? I mean, it just short-circuits the rigidity of the identity. So that’s another one that it’s more about the question than the answer and related, I think, still to that attitude of curiosity. 

And then the other one is one we’ve talked about for the whole hour, which is really just always coming back to compassion. Just refresh that driving force. Just nourish that. Just treat it like a small little seedling that you’re just protecting from the harsh elements and just never let it perish. And that’s one that I think has been a huge, huge thread throughout my life.

 

TS: And I’d love to end on that note. I would like to call our conversation “The Energizing Force of Compassion.” And with that in mind, give us a little energizing completion here to this hour that we’ve spent together.

 

CD: Yeah. Well, we could even do another short micro practice. But just to say the fact that, Tami, you’ve initiated this conversation, that people have taken time to listen to this. I mean, it’s so easy to underestimate the good in the world we’re doing just by taking time. There are so many things we could have been doing with this hour of our lives. We could have been—the world has a million different distractions. We have perfected the art of distraction in the 21st century. Nevertheless, we’re all doing this right now. We’ve taken the time to do this right now. This is incredible. This is compassion. This is us all collectively nurturing this little seedling together. We’re actually doing this right now. This is not only for ourselves. Hopefully, this is useful to us and to everybody who’s listening, but whatever conversation you have next, whatever you do next in your day, or just going to sleep, the sleep that you have and whatever you do tomorrow, these little things shape our lives.

So one of the things I like to do is almost not getting caught up in the theory of it, but just almost viewing ourselves like we’re all these little stars, these little suns, and we’re just kind of feeling that warmth of compassion within ourselves and just allowing it, not even needing to make it radiate out, but just noticing that warmth and allowing it just to radiate out in our lives, and just carry that into whatever you do next. Whether that’s just you on your own or you see somebody or you send somebody a text. Just infusing all of that with that warmth of compassion and just feeling almost like you are that star and you’re just radiating it in all directions. Wherever, whatever happens to enter your little orbit, you’re just kind of radiating that out. It doesn’t have to be some grand exercise, and I can promise you there’ll be nothing more rewarding in your life than just putting that at the center.

 

TS: I’ve been speaking with Cortland Dahl, author of A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism and the chief contemplative officer who helped with the design and creation of the Healthy Minds app. Cortland, I have really loved talking with you. Thank you.

 

CD: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s been an honor.

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