Ep. 43 - Habits with Hugh Byrne

Once we do something often enough, it gets shifted to a different brain process. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. Welcome to episode 43 of Synchronicity. I guess today is Hugh Byrne. This is actually, this makes two Englishmen in a row. You know the song by staying Englishmen in New York? I don't. It's just a total tangent. There's no real relationship to anything to do with this episode. But I really like that song. I once saw a nature documentary where Pierce Brosnan narrated over that song with dolphins in the water. I think it might have been a planet Earth. Don't know. No, cause it's a corny reaver narrated dose.

Anyway, it was very cool. That's how you digress in the beginning part of an episode. Before I get to Hugh and on to the episode, I wanted to share some updates. Congratulations to Avery, who won this week's book giveaway, which was Rhombom's Ladder by Julie Salomon. Salomon. Salomon. We're going with Salomon. Congratulations Avery. If you want to join the book contest, I'm going on vacation next week. Going down to North Carolina Beach. So I'm not going to do the book giveaway, just because I'm not going to be able to send it out in time. So I'm going to start that up next week after that. So two weeks from now, today is, well, when you're listening to this, it'll be the 18th.

Yes, I believe. August 18th. Neither here nor there. So, uh, the Synchronicity Generosity Experiment has going awesomely. We have $720 in there right now, and as today's August 17th, the polls opened. And I've picked the two places that we can potentially send money to. The money, the recipients of this generosity experiment. This is where we're collectively raising funds, and we're going to send it to one of these two people. So I also have a third option up that if you want to recommend something, that maybe I didn't see, send it my way. Maybe we do it this time. Maybe we do it for another one. I don't know.

We'll see. Who knows? So here are the two causes. The first one is for helping Finn. Finn is a small child. I believe he's two to three years old, potentially. No, he might be 18 months. Anyway, he's going through some really tough medical issues, and his family could use some support in a lot of different ways. And again, you can find out more about both of these causes at synchpodcast.com/generosity. You can read more about Finn. It's, you know, I just had a baby boy, a first kid. I, you know, I've mentioned this ad nauseam, but I live there before the grace of God, right? I mean, this is something that is easy for me to relate to, and God forbid something like that happened to me, and I wish I would have the strength that these people seem to have.

So that seems like a pretty worthy cause. Okay, second option is the tonguey or tonguey. Don't know how to say it. Humane society in Louisiana. So they recently experienced a tremendous amount of flooding. Actually, as I'm recording this in Maryland, there's crazy thunderstorms outside. The weather has just been totally wack-a-do for the past couple of weeks. Hopefully not a harbinger of things to come, but who knows. But anyway, this was, the Humane Society was totally flooded. Like all Humane societies, they're no-kill shelters. They really look to place the animals in a home, but they're flooded.

It's a terrible situation. So I think they could benefit. And both of these, both of these causes are pretty close to hitting their goals. So the money that we would be sending, I think, will actually have a really positive impact. So that's pretty cool, too. So again, if you're interested in contributing to that, that's where I recommend you go syncpodcast.com/generosity. We're going to be doing these every quarter. I like the way this one has gone so far. I think I definitely learned a ton about what to do next time, maybe what not to do. So I'm looking forward to making these a better and better and more useful thing for everyone involved.

So stay tuned for that. And I really think everyone who's participated, I think it's super cool. And just by telling people about it, I think that's cool, too. Okay, let's get to Hugh a little bit. I'm continuing in the tradition. I'm not going to give too much away, but Hugh has written an excellent book on habits called "The Here and Now" habit, which is how mindfulness can help you break unhealthy habits once and for all. Sounds almost too good to be true, but if you actually read his book and Hugh's hat tip to Tar Brock, awesome, such a nice person. She let me know that I might want to be interviewing Hugh and he actually lives right down the street from me.

We did this one via Skype, but we found out we live really close together. And I'm so happy that Tar turned me on to Hugh because he is super cool, which is a common trend, a common trait, rather, amongst all my guests. And more importantly, I mean, the habit stuff is obviously incredibly useful. If you're like me, you probably have a ton of habits that are unhealthy, unwanted, that you'd like to drop, and also some habits you maybe would like to start, like maybe meditating, maybe exercising more, maybe eating a little bit more healthy, and he really provides an excellent kind of manual and guide for how to start habits, and provides a historical and neurological explanation for habit-building, and habit-forming, and how mindfulness and wisdom and compassion plays a role in that.

So that's kind of what this episode is about. Hugh also, truthfully, he's been a social activist for a large part of his life, and I like people who make the connection he says in the episode, like, you know, I'm a person who always found that going into the world is the way to figure this out. That's my particular path. That's what he said. And I also, I relate to that. I'm not someone who is probably going to ever go meditate in a cave or an ashram separated from the world. At least not anytime soon. Who knows? Never say never. But I relate to having to work in with the world to figure stuff out, and I think Hugh is pretty much latched on to that too.

Okay. We're easy, right? Keeping these intros relatively short. Rate and review, the podcast, blah, blah, blah. Probably just going to stop saying it. I know people are doing it, and I super actually really appreciate that. I don't want to be glib about that. If you can, write a review on iTunes, rate, stitcher, wherever. Cool. Not whatever. What else can you do? You can donate to synchronicity. Patrick. There's a guy Patrick out there. You know who you are. I'm not going to say your last name. Who consistently gives me a decent chunk of change every month. And I think that's so fucking cool. I know it's not.

It may be it's cool because someone's giving me money, but it's really more of like the token of appreciation and that something could impact or be a value to someone that they felt that was the appropriate amount to give. I think that's really cool. So if you do want to donate to synchronicity, the episode, the podcast, feel free to do that. That's okay. Holy crap. Okay. That was a huge thunder. I'm going to keep going as though nothing happened, even though it's very possible my wife comes down, comes down with my baby. So this is a real time podcast intro thing. I'm going to get right to the episode.

Yeah. Okay. So without further ado, here he's a humor. Gotcha. Cool. And we're right in there. That's awesome. They're really close. You're my first local guest, even though we're not doing it in person. You're the first person from this area. So yeah. Thank you, by the way, for agreeing to do this. Tara told me, mentioned you, I think, I want to say like five months ago, we had our first kid, our son Eli in May. So things got a little hectic and crazy. And then I remembered, and I saw your name, I think on Facebook, and I was like, oh, I have to hit up you. And I'm so glad that she tuned me into you.

I got your book, the habits book, last night on my Kindle. And I've been Marty like halfway through it. Oh, cool. Yeah. Really excellent. I'm super excited to talk about it. But yes, just thank you so much for coming on. Yeah. It's going to be a conversation. Yeah. Very, very welcome. Nice to talk with you. And can you say a little bit about the podcast and show? Yeah. So the podcast is essentially, it was born out of a few different things. One is, I worked with a lot of mindfulness teachers, meditation teachers, spiritual quote unquote teachers, for the past five years professionally. That's been my job, digital strategy, web stuff.

So I've had access to really great minds and hearts like for a really long time, like you know what, this is probably something I can start. I also have a podcast network called MindPod Network, which had a lot of those teachers on it and still has Tara is still a part of it. And so I had a platform for it. So it's like, you know what, I'm going to basically start to have conversations with people I find interesting. People I think have valuable perspectives on life, meaning, death, all of these things that are important, I think, and not, you know, and so I, the selfish reason for starting it was that it's a way to propel kind of my creative momentum.

I have to put out one every week. It's like a habit, right? Yeah. It's been very fulfilling on all of the ways I'd hoped and many ways I hadn't. And really it's just just conversations. There's no real specific format. I just introduced, you'll hear at the end of the podcast, I asked three questions, quick fire, really easy to answer questions. But other than that, there's really no specific agenda, like really my main motivating factor is to speak to people I think can help other people, you know, that's basically it. Wonderful. Wonderful. And now I remember Tara had some very nice things to say about you.

And so that's good. So we have that connection. Yeah. She's great. I love Tara. Yeah. It's one of my, I lived in Manhattan for until June of last year and Tara was my brand new client just when I had moved here and so she became local. I had been working with her before, but then I was like, oh, we're finally local now. And I had the pleasure of going to see her speak and teach. Yeah. Yeah. So wonderful. Yeah. So that's the podcast in a nutshell. Right. So let's get started. Don't worry about anything I will answer. I will ask all the questions. I'll keep things, you know, relatively on track. We can digress into any area that we want to.

There's no real restrictions or rules. I would like to start though, like I mentioned, I got your book last night and already I'm halfway through it with habits, right? This is, you've written a book, I think you speak a little bit about it, but could you just tell me, you had some interesting explanations about what habits are. Can you, could you explain what habits are and kind of how they factor into our lives? Sure. You know, I, as I became more interested in this theme of habits and how they form and, you know, the role they play in our lives, I learned a lot of really kind of things that surprised me.

I mean, for example, that half of the things that we do, we do at the same time, same place, you know, their habitual. And what interested me probably more than anything was to see how once we do something often enough, it gets shifted to a different brain process. And this, for me, as a mindfulness practitioner and a mindfulness teacher, has kind of helped me really understand more deeply some of the things I've been working with for myself and for others for many years, just to see how, how deeply rooted, deeply ingrained habits can become, just by the fact of doing them often enough, you know, getting assigned to these faster acting brain processes, and, and then, and then they become really difficult to change, you know, I talk about in the book, you know, how, you know, they get assigned, these brain processes get assigned to these faster acting, you know, kind of parts of the brain, where it becomes more instinctual, it's more the fight off light mode, you know, one system, one as Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman talks about.

And so it helped me to see like, oh, that's why it's so hard when you're intentional and conscious and say, I really want to change this. Why is it so hard even then with good intentions to do it? And then understanding that like, oh, this is what's developed over millions of years of evolution, to help our ancestors survive and pass on their genes to us. That's why it's so hard. And then what that did for me was it kind of opened up compassion for me of like, Oh, I get it now, I get it much more fully for myself and for others that like, it's not like that we're lazy or we're stupid or we're screwing up, it's just like these, once they get formed, they get really kind of locked in.

So that's why the book really is about having to engage in a very intentional process with certain attitudes and focus of the mind to be able to kind of shift. It's not such an easy thing to just say, Oh, I want to change this. It's so true. I mean, I, I, I'm sure like everyone else who's going to be listening to this, I have habits that I'd like to break, I know that they're not particularly healthy. I also like the distinction you make in the book of not referring to habits as negative or bad, but relabeling them and categorizing them as either unhealthy or unwanted or not helpful. That's super, I thought that was a brilliant way of kind of getting to that.

But what you're describing is so true. I also, it's one, it's a cognitive dissonance, right? It's like, you know, you shouldn't be doing it. You know that it's not helpful, but then you can so easily fall into this trap of your like, well, that person isn't doing it. They don't seem to have a problem not doing that. And then also internally, because you bring up smoking and I, I began foolishly, I got all past all the peer pressure with smoking cigarettes until the age of 20, then I said, you know what? So smoking cigarettes is cool. I'm going to start smoking cigarettes. I smoked for about five years.

And then I just stopped. It was, it was, there was no habit breaking. There was no real arduous process for it. And I recognized I'm the type of person who made the connection for both systems of my brain saying, I don't want to do this, not important, not going to do it. Made all the little lists and things that reasons not to do it. And just stopped. But then I look at other aspects of my life. And this is why I'm really excited to talk to you. So a book we're coming out with from MindPod Network is something called basically practical mindfulness. And it's focused around a topic that we've done a lot of research on and found is really, really hard for a lot of people, which is the practice of meditation.

Yeah. A lot of people have a tremendous amount of trouble, myself included, either starting or maintaining and consistently meditating for whatever reasons. And I bumped up exactly what you're talking about. I, there's this intuitive level, this unconscious processes that it isn't an easy thing to stop. It isn't, I can't just decide, Oh, I want to start meditating. That's it. I just did it. There has to be some other supportive, deliberate, controlled aspect of what's going on. So could you talk a little bit about the two systems a little bit more and how one is kind of the intuitive and one is the controlled and how that kind of impacts our decision making or follow through with habits?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the, the, what Daniel Kahneman who wrote the kind of the best selling thinking fast and slow and it won the Nobel Peace, no, not Peace Prize Nobel Prize for economics. He distinguishes system one and system two and other people do as well. Walter Mitchell, who did the studies of kids and the marshmallow test. Right. Delayed gratification. Yeah. Exactly. He talks about the hot, the hot and the cool. The hot is that part, that brain process that really is a kind of survival oriented. It's kind of like, I've got to do this and it's the immediacy that really has played this really important role in the survival and the, of our, of our species, you know, to be able to, you know, when something dangerous is coming towards us, we don't have to deliberate if we did.

Yeah. We wouldn't be here. Yeah, so there's that kind of goes into action. And system two, so that goes back to lizards and way, way back, you know, way, way back in the evolution, you know, of our species and earlier times. And, and that's really fast acting that, you know, that's instinctual, it's immediate, it's automatic. The more developed part of the brain has developed in the last, you know, million years, the prefrontal cortex and all the, the kind of rational, thoughtful decision making, but it's a much slower process. So it's a, for me, it was a really important understanding to see that habits are, get assigned to that instinctual, fast acting, brain process, and intentions are much slower.

So, so when the, when they come into conflict, the research studies show that most often the habits went out, ergo, you know, New Year's resolution, you know, why are they so hard to keep? Well, because we think, Oh, I'm going to do this. And we think we give a lot of authority to our intentions and intentions are really important and I emphasize that in the book, but they're not enough, you know, they were, you might say, you know, they're necessary, but not sufficient conditions for habit change. We need them, but we need other things as well. We need the repetition. We need, you know, we need the, the, the awareness, the present moment awareness to be able to keep making the healthy choices until the healthy choices become more habitual.

It's what you're describing sounds like an analogy to use for a metaphor would be if you have a seed for a plant and you can look at that seed and say, Hey, I really, this is going to turn into a great tomato plant. I'm going to have amazing tomatoes, but as much as you look at and stare at it and wish and hope and have the intention of having a great, until you put it in the soil, water it, create the conditions, it's not going to grow and it's not going to create what you want. So that's, yeah, I love that. And I think it's so incredibly important. So I want to shift gears not too much. We're still in the same territory here.

So you mentioned four types, wanting distraction, resisting and doing. And I've studied various Buddhist psychology for psychologies for a long time. But what you said about doing really resonated with me, because I noticed it's something I can alleviate wanting, I can alleviate distracting. I am aware of a version, but doing is one I hadn't really focused on. And when I did some self reflection, I noticed like that's what I, what I fall into the trap of constantly having to do this or go to this and it feels sometimes even productive. And I've been doing a lot of self reflecting just in my life, especially with the new child, trying to, you know, I want to spend more time with my family.

I don't want to be so stressed out because of work and all of these things. And this doing really resonated with me. And it's different than what I think the goal of mindfulness is, which is just being or awareness. So could you talk a little bit about the types and how those kind of relate and factor into why maybe habits are started that we don't necessarily want or yeah. Yeah, I mean, the, you know, as you pointed out, and the first three bear a lot in common with the Buddhist kind of three, sometimes called the three poison, you know, greed, hatred and delusion. I mean, those are very strong ways of, yeah, but the, the, the, the greed is the, is that kind of urging of like the going out the wanting, I mean, it's hugely fundamental again to our evolution.

Right. You know, our ancestors had to go out and get the things to eat and drink and sex and all of that to survive and pass on genes. So that, that wanting is very, very deeply rooted in us. And you know, there's nothing wrong with the wanting. There's nothing wrong with desire, what, you know, in Buddhist understanding what's the problem with desire is when it becomes a kind of a, it gets locked in, it becomes craving. And the mind gets hooked into the wanting. It's very different to just, oh, I can't, I really want a nice meal now. I'm feeling hungry. I'm like, I'm kind of, that's a very healthy thing.

But then when the mind says, I can't survive without a drink or a drug or, you know, or this food or whatever. And it's that contraction that, that we're talking about, you know, it's what in Buddhism is termed the craving, you know, here I use a more kind of somewhat more neutral term of wanting, but it's that same energy of moving towards. And so many, you know, in most situations, I think it's begun with something that we wanted that was perhaps helpful to us, served a need, but it may be over time it no longer serves a need or it now, you know, it, it's being done in a way that's no longer helpful, you know, so that the wanting, you know, I think of it as really these energies, you know, these habitual energies and without awareness, the energy of wanting becomes unhealthy.

You know, it becomes a craving. It becomes maybe even an addiction or an obsession at a certain point. And similarly with the aversion, you know, which is the opposite side, again, we survived by moving away from what was threatening to us, you know, an animal that might kill us, you know, our ancestors, we want to get away from as quickly as we can, or we want to push it. We don't want to eat food that might be unhealthy, you know, poison. So again, it's a very, very natural tendency, but without awareness, you know, it can become anger can turn into hatred and resentment. And so it can become a very unhealthy habitual quality of mind to just like, Oh, I don't like this.

And we get locked into this pushing away of experience that we don't like, which to a certain extent, we do want to keep away things that are going to harm us. But every little bit of discomfort, if we keep pushing it away, we're going to, we're always going to be, you know, unsettled, unhappy, you know, I'm not present for our experience. So and then the third one, distraction is, I think is a very common one right now in our business. Yeah. There's so many things competing for our, our bent, your limited bandwidth that look at me, you know, flashing lights and, you know, you know, and, and our attention spans have become, you know, for many have become so limited, you know, I, Oh, yeah, this looks interesting, but then all the something more interesting over here.

So again, it's a very unhealthy place for the mind to get locked into it. It's great to be able to shift our awareness, but mostly we're not doing it in an aware way. Right. Right. We're, we're actually disconnected, you know, and so when we talk, we think about multitasking, you know, all the studies show we're not really doing any of those things well, you know, we're kind of like partly here, partly here, partly here, but we're never really present for any of them. That's right. Our interaction is a really is a big one for us, and I, you know, so I was very, you know, I was aware of those three very significant kind of tendencies or energies of the mind.

And the doing is one that, yes, it, when I just, I took some time and I reflected on it. And I saw in myself that energy that isn't easily fitted into it has some aspects of those other ones. But it really is something of its, of its own kind, that kind of moving towards the future and the busyness and the to do less and the worry and the anxiety that once again, again, when that gets set in motion in an unhealthy way, it becomes a kind of cycle that we get locked into. So to bring awareness to that by coming into the present moment and noticing, oh, I'm really moving into the future. My life is really kind of one thing to another to another.

And seeing the cost of that allows us to kind of to step back and say, okay, life is only lived moment to moment. The rest is a story in our heads, you know, I've got to get there. And it's often a very fear-based story that something is going to go wrong if I don't do all of this. So true. Something bad is going to happen to me. It's so true, and it's also the reactivity of all of those. It's once these, the rolling stone gets going, it gathers no moss. It's the forward momentum of all of those things that really, I think, is what makes some habits that are unwanted so difficult to discard or just kind of be like, okay, I can let you go now.

I also love that weaved into all of this is this compassionate aspect of being accepting of what's going on and not pushing it away, you know, a version, but accepting it and saying, okay, maybe this is and that's why you give the historical context of how these things evolve. It's not like there's something wrong with us. It's not like this is some flaw in human species. It's like we're dealing with the prefrontal cortex. We're dealing with this massively useful and helpful thing, but it's fairly recent. It's competing with talk about neural pathways. We're dealing with a brain stem that's been there since we were lizards, right?

There's a lot of time that we have to catch up, but we're in this amazing situation where we can start reflecting, turning the light inwards to see what's going on. That's where I love this other aspect, so mindfulness. I want to shift a little bit to you personally and talk about, because just reading your bio, so many things resonated with me. I love talking about all this stuff. What's great about habits is it is a practical thing, but what I love more is when we reflect and discuss and study and experience, but then take some action, some engagement. When I saw things like social activism coming up, that just, you know, piqued my interest.

I'd love to hear, how did you get into mindfulness, meditation? What was your particular path to this stuff? Yeah, that's a great question. In a way, I kind of say, and I look back on it, I think of it as, in a way, kind of serendipitous, but in a way, also maybe karmic, you know, there was maybe kind of all of these forces. And just how it was was this was almost exactly 30 years ago. I'd been, I was doing a lot of activist work at the time, all through the 80s. I was doing work around Central America and US policy, and I travel a lot to the region, and I do organizing here in the US, you know, back when Ronald Reagan was president.

And I was in this very doing mode. I was really in this kind of strong, strong doing mode. I was organizing, organizing, got to do it, got to win, got to, you know, got to change the policies. And I just happened to read a book. I was away for a few days over Thanksgiving, I think that my partners, mothers of a place. And I just happened to pick up a book and was reading it for a couple of days by Alan Watts, the way of Zen. Love it. And, you know, I kind of heard some things about Zen and Zen seemed kind of a little kind of sexy, you know, some things. I wasn't interested in Buddhism because it seemed really kind of passive to me at the time, you know.

But I read this book and it was kind of having this impact on me internally. I was kind of a lot of it was, I didn't wasn't sure it seemed a little esoteric, but I was it was kind of actually having an impact on me. And I just had this experience, it was just one of those simple but really powerful experiences where I was, I was in a place where I didn't know really where I was, I mean, I kind of knew where I was and I had to find my way back to where I'm staying. And I found myself in this really incredibly tight place, as though the whole world hung on whether it was this way or this way. And it's almost like, you know, a Zen Cohen, something broke open.

And there was this huge internal laugh, it was like coming out of the universe. And this message said, just walk, just walk. And it was like, it was this experience that was a profoundly powerful internal experience that led me to live in much more happily and freely and spaciously. Now it went on, didn't go on forever, it went off for a few months, after that, I was just living in a much more spacious place. And so obviously I made a connection, you know, something, you know, it wasn't as though I read the book and suddenly won't. But reading, there's something that was triggered in my mind that allowed a letting go to happen.

And this was a deeply experiential letting go, it wasn't a cognitive thing, it wasn't like, oh, I get it, I understand it. It was much more a kind of a deep letting go. And that was kind of what got me on the path. For the next few years, I was kind of looked as people often do on a spiritual path and like, well, what am I looking for and what is it? So I just began reading, I read, you know, the Eastern classics of Buddhism and Hinduism, Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada and, you know, all of these things and a lot of Zen stuff. And, you know, and that was really helpful, it was a very kind of fruitful phase.

But then I hadn't actually practiced meditation, but all of many of these books kind of kept talking about meditation, so I kind of began and, you know, for the first couple of years, you know, I do a little bit and I do a day long here and a little bit there. But it wasn't till I did a nine or ten day retreat up in Barry Massachusetts, up at the Insight Meditation Society, actually with a teacher who was very activist, because I wanted, I was kind of interested enough in Buddhism, but I wanted more of the activist thing and this was a teacher who was an activist as well as a spiritual teacher.

And so when I did the nine day retreat, something had, you know, there, like I really sunk into a sense of, oh, I get it now, this is what it's all about. And then, you know, I joke, I say after that first retreat, I said to myself, I remember saying to myself, if there's one thing in my life that I'm really glad I did, it's doing this retreat, it was had such an important effect on me. And so I did it the next year and had an equally kind of or even deeper effect. And then I said again, if there are two things in my life, I just began that process of you know, at least once or twice a year, I'd do a nine or ten day retreat.

And then over time, it just kind of, rather than being on the periphery of my life, it just became more and more central. And one of the things coming back to your question around the activism is, you know, at first it was like the activism was over here and the spiritual practice was over here. And they were like two tracks that only occasionally seemed to overlap that this was much more an inward journey and the other one was more engagement and outward journey. But over time and particularly in the last few years, maybe last 10 years or so, that's been a real quest for me of kind of consciously bringing them together.

And it's probably the most important theme for me in my spiritual practice is engagement in the world, is because this can't look, when we look around at the kind of the state of the world today, this can't be just about feeling good about ourselves or feeling more peaceful or meet feeling calm. Those are necessary and important things, but we have to come back into the world. We have to come bring it into the world. And one of the things I'm really excited about and very active on right now is kind of I'm writing about and I'm organizing groups around mindful politics, you know, we're hitting a deep vein here.

We got a lot of rich subjects. Yeah. I mean, it's like so many things are being triggered and activated by for many, many of us, you know, I mean, Trump is the central example of like the fears that come up, the reactivity, the judgment. And it's so easy to get sucked into a cycle where, you know, we're the good guys and they're the bad guys. So easy. So easy. But mindfulness is so essential. I think it's the most important value added if you like, we can bring to this process to the world right now is that politics engagement in that debate and discussion about how we live together in the world has to include in a very, very central way, how do we the qualities of awareness, of mindfulness, of compassion and how those become integrally part of engaging, you know, of this political process.

So this is a really big thing for me. And one of the things I'm involved in as well is a project to bring mindfulness to train humanitarian aid workers who are working with Syrian refugees and Iraqi refugees to train them in the skills of mindfulness and understanding some of these brain processes of stress and trauma. Because they're really right there on the front lines. How can they be supported and in turn support those hundreds of thousands, in fact, millions of people who are deeply, deeply suffering right now? Right. It's like, it's an analogous to like palliative care, right? I mean, there's, it's really, it's in a very noble and needed and awesome thing to do.

But the burnout rates, the things that you have to take on are just, I mean, it's understandable, but you need tools to be able to. So I want to, I want to talk about, there's a lot of stuff there. All awesome. I want to, let's start with the politics stuff. So I noticed like you, I've been aware of the us first them paradigm for a very long time. It's a necessary thing in a dual, in a dualistic universe, right? But the reactivity, again, the quickly putting yourself into a category and putting other people into another, even with Donald Trump is the easiest thing. For so many people who just look at Donald Trump and this is not disparaging him as a human being, even though the want might be there to do that, you know, he's reactive.

He makes things up. He doesn't tell the truth. He's just, you know, he calls people names. He doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on policy, you know, things that objective people who care about our politics and our government, you know, would be a little like, I don't know about this guy, it's so easy to just lump him in with all of his supporters, everyone we imagine in our mind who would be a Trump supporter and not realize the conditions. Why maybe Donald Trump is like that. Even Donald Trump, maybe deserving of our compassion is crazy as that it's going to be. It's such an interesting time in politics.

Also this other thing I've noticed just to stay on this topic is this political cycle is unlike any I can actually remember in my life, I'm 33. And what's so weird about it is any almost day to day, really week to week though, the news cycle can go from absolutely terrifying, abject terror to like, Oh my God, Donald Trump might have nuclear codes at his disposal to incredibly hilarious, like this is a joke. And it's like this weird oscillation between like, what is actually going on? Is this really reality at this point? It's like a manic up and down kind of we're at the mercy of just insanity, it seems that sometimes, but I think this mindfulness in politics is probably going to be a make or break thing for our current political system because many of us know, it seems very clear that the political system, I don't want to call it irrevocably broken, but it's definitely like it's not working so great right now for a lot of people.

That's why someone like Donald Trump who really is just playing on fears of xenophobia, racism, fear, all of these things can come and be a populist figure that people can rally behind because things are not great for a lot of people in this country. And it's easy to blame other people. So bringing that how, I mean, I'm just curious right off the bat, how, what are the inroads do you see towards making that a reality or starting to kind of bring the concept of mindfulness and spaciousness and non reactivity towards, because people are going to disagree forever. That's almost a necessary fact of the universe.

Not everyone is going to agree about everything. So how do we bring in this concept of awareness, compassion, wisdom to our political centers and try to enact change in a positive way that will benefit people? How do we do that? You know, as anything else with awareness, with mindfulness, we have to begin with our own reaction. Yes, yes. Because if we don't begin there, we're just going to bring it out into the world. Yes. You know, this wonderful quote from Albert Camus who says, you know, we all carry with us our crimes, our places of exile, our ravages, our task is not to impose it on the world, but to transform it in ourselves and others.

So we do as, as with, you know, any mindfulness practice, I think we begin with our own reactivity with our own emotions, with our own judgments and say, Oh, okay, yeah, I'm really triggered right now. I'm really putting him in a box. I'm really putting them in a box. I'm really creating another around them and creating a sense of separation where there is inevitably inevitably going to be suffering if there's a me and a you, you know, and that's kind of hard, hard, you know, hard definition of, you know, you're that, you're the other, you're less than, you're worse than, you're wrong or whatever, then there's going to be suffering.

To be able to see those, you know, as you were saying before, those to see those tendencies in the mind and to meet them with compassion, to meet them with, you know, just to see them as they're impermanent, they're changing, they're not solid, they're not truly who I am, they're, they're thoughts, they're maybe habitual beliefs that I can bring into awareness. And then if I do, then they don't have to inform the way I act in the world. I don't get scream at somebody or send some, some, you know, nasty message on email or social media. I can actually respond skillfully and wisely and kindly as much as I can.

So beginning there, also cultivating in ourselves compassion for ourselves, for our own reactivity, compassion, as you're saying, you know, for Trump himself, for the people who are supporting him. And as you were saying earlier, that there are causes and conditions for that, you know, it's not that he's just completely manipulating, he's a great manipulator, but it's not, he's not making that up out of whole cloth. He's doing it. He's so skillful at doing it because there are conditions. And he recognizes, in his very kind of a mictile-based way, he recognizes those conditions are there. And he knows how to manipulate them.

He is a great manipulator. And so, you know, there's something to kind of really recognize there. But to recognize that, that, that, you know, it's not that people are bad people, or even that they're stupid people, we might, they may be making choices that we disagree with, but to see how that could happen. To kind of set back from that, to take that larger view, and take an open-hearted view. So that transformation within ourselves, which really comes down in Buddhist terms to what the Buddha said, abandon what's unskillful and cultivate the good, abandon those patterns that are, you know, that are habitual, that get us into trouble, and cultivate those qualities that support connection, that support compassion, that support loving kindness.

So that's one step. And then, the next step, as I see it, and I don't mean this in a kind of a linear way, but there is a way in which we do need to begin with ourselves. But then, engaging with those who are also, see, I think, on some level, see the possibility of bringing awareness to this area. So, for example, here in our area, the last few months, and we'll be doing this up to the election and just after the election, we've organized these monthly mindful politics sessions. Oh, cool. And so, the invitation is to the people who are part of the meditation community and bringing friends and family and others to explore precisely these questions of, like, how can I engage more wisely and more skillfully and not be so reactive, not get caught up, so caught up in fear, not shut down because it just seems so overwhelming.

How do I do it in a wise way? So to have those conversations among people who have, you know, at least have the seeds of wanting to engage in that way. And then, I think it's a question of consciously incorporating that the inner process is with the outer as we engage in, you know, how do we bring this into different areas, into, you know, Congress or into, you know, engagement with our local city council? Right. How do we bring this? How do we make this, you know, I mean, it's not rocket science how to do community organizing. I mean, you know, there's, you know, many of us have done this for many years, but what's often missing from that community organizing, whether on a local level, on a national level, is bringing these skills into that process, not treating the person who's on the other side of the climate change debate as the bad person, the other, you know, that we'll never the twange or me finding ways of having conversations with people who disagree deeply with, with ourselves, with us, you know, that I think in this period, I don't think it's going to happen.

And I don't think it's going to change millions of votes, but it will change individuals. And I think it has to be, you know, in some way, it has to be person by person, yes, to talk to that family member in a respectful way, who's a Trump supporter, or who's, you know, who may be even, you know, saying, you know, bigoted things, you know, to, to kind of have those conversations. I don't think their best had on social media, because to a certain extent you can, yes. But if you're not seeing somebody, you're not, you know, you're mostly not engaging with them as a real human being. You're just seeing this kind of disembodied right.

That's right. I think it can be much more challenging. That's right. So I'm thinking more in terms of, you know, the person to person discussions. And, you know, with those where there is some level of affection or trust to be able to, to be able to at least begin that process of like, what do you care, what do you care about to understand where these views and opinions come from, those beliefs come from. Yeah. And I mean, you touched on a lot of awesome stuff there, not the least of which is the importance of obviously the spaciousness and awareness of what's going on internally, but then the extension into the community or the Sangha.

And the Sangha is the community, but it's also a spiritually minded community. And that doesn't mean we all have to be meditating and we all have to be believing the same thing, but bringing those qualities, compassion, wisdom to the table with whatever we're engaging with, that makes it a Sangha, that makes it a Satsang, that makes it a community that is really looking towards solutions and ways to make this place better. I think that's profoundly important. Also this, this lightness, this is something that I think is often so especially in politics. People take politics very seriously, I mean, no further than social media or a comment section on an article anywhere, a political article, people take it very seriously.

And I think partly that's because of how we have been taught in society to identify as certain members of a group or community and we hold that close and it's almost like us and if you're attacking that, you're attacking who I am, which is ironic because as you know as a meditator and a study of this stuff, that self that we like to believe is so solid and exist and is made up of all these things, when you actually begin to examine it, much like physical reality, doesn't really exist. So to latch onto it and present that and get done. So this concept of lightness is something that there's an Aldous Huxley quote, which I'm not going to butcher right now, it's a long way, but he thought it was lightly, lightly, go lightly.

That's the way to approach the world. Yes, there are serious things that happen, but if you approach it with a lightness, it could be better for you and everyone else. And this is something that I was having a talk with a friend who's very politically minded and I think we were talking during the RNC and the RNC was a relatively scary event for a lot of people. I mean, just the rhetoric and the ways that they were speaking about the country, Giuliani in particular. I mean, if that's the world that was actually going on, I've been missing it. Like, I know there's a lot of messed up things, but Jesus, that is what he was talking about.

So I was talking and he's like, my friend was like, I am so, I don't, I have to turn this off. I'm getting so angry. And I was like, here's the deal. You're on the right path because you're noticing you're getting angry. You're noticing that this is creating some reaction. That's step one. That's the, that's awareness. That's amazing. Now, maybe try to make it a game, try to see if you can find a way to not be angry about it. And he was like, no, I can't do it. I can't do it. And then I, I threw a third little component in, I was like, if people have had experience with psychedelics, it's like, imagine you took some mushrooms or LSD, do you think you would care to the same extent right now that you do about what's going on?

He's like, oh, now you finally open a crack where maybe I get that I don't actually have to be like this. And I was like, it's a lot of different perspective shifting, but that lightness, which I think is the psychedelic influence I'm referring to, is such an important thing because if you can, it's hard to maintain throughout life, almost impossible. I've not been able to do it for the duration of my life, probably much more than a few minutes at a time, but if you can do it, it loosens some of the grip of what these kind of reactions and reactivity holds over us. So I, I think that's essentially what you're referring to too.

When you're talking about, you know, how to engage with other people. When you're compassionately asking someone, well, why do you believe that? Part of the reasons, because ultimately people are pretty similar. They want to be loved and they want to love. And that's pretty much for every single person, even a sociopath somewhere in there that's going on. So it's, it's yeah, I love that you, you reemphasize the importance of starting with yourself because if you don't, there's a rhombos parable he gives, oh, he says, have you ever gone to a peace rally and noticed how many angry people are who are yelling, piece, piece, piece.

It's like, that's maybe not the best way to get peace just enough. Right. Right. So, yeah, I absolutely love that. I also, I wanted to talk a little bit about, because you wrote about this, at least it was in your bio and your about. And it's very poignant right now is the issue of racial injustice, but in this country, it is such a systemic and just written on the history of this country. And it is obviously now that we have access to real time events of police brutality, knowing that there's a different playing field for people of color than in this country. And I'm having a lot of conversations with my friends about this, who are people of color.

And how, what do you think, I look at the issue of racial injustice, and I try constantly as much as possible when a story pops up on my radar, where a friend is bringing something up, or I see something that isn't right, to say, well, what am I taking for granted? I'm a white man who's 33 year old. I don't have to worry about anything truthfully from police unless I'm doing something overtly illegal. I'm pretty much guarded against this. I have friends who if they're driving their car, and maybe they didn't signal in a lane, they could end up in jail that night, you know, or worse. How do we begin as people, regardless of race, to start looking through the lens of mindfulness?

How do we start looking at this issue of racial injustice in this country? Yeah, it's a great question. And actually, the final chapter of my book, I address, I bring this, I address this, because what I see, you know, when I talk about habits in the rest of the book, I'm pretty much talking about choices that we're consciously making at some stage at state, you know, some phase in the development, we're actually saying, I'm going to do this, I'm choosing to do this, I'm choosing to smoke this cigarette, or to take this drug, or to eat another bowl of ice cream or whatever. And so we can see some kind of a sequence.

Now in the areas where there are areas where it's like what becomes habitual doesn't come so much from our own choices, but it's almost like it comes like the air we breathe, or like fish swimming in water that aren't aware that they were in the water, because that's just the environment they're in, we are swimming in this, you know, you could see it as we're swimming as people from dominant groups, particularly white people, particularly males, particularly straight, you know, the dominant group. The way the world is presented is through the lens of that group. So if you're a member of that group and you're born into it, it's like, why would you need to even look outside of that?

I mean, because you're swimming in the sea, I mean, I gave some examples in the book. So it's kind of a little bit more extreme. Like, if you were brought up as a white person in apartheid South Africa, you know, under racial segregation, separation, or even, you know, a white person in the South in Jim Proshines, you know, unless you were part of some active opposition, a minority, which would be kind of a fairly rare thing, you would grow up with certain views of racial superiority of how the order of society is, how it's natural, it's probably in your religion saying, well, this is how, you know, God meant it to be, there'd be some kind of rationalizations.

So your whole horizon, your whole, what's visible to you is coming through, not your even conscious choices, it's just like, it's like it's coming to you with your mother's milk, you know, it's the sea that you swim in. So it takes some real, some level of awareness, some kind of conscious practice to choose to look outside, or maybe something fortunate happens. You have a friend of color, or some friends who say, oh yeah, you've never been stopped by the police, we get stopped, you know, once a month by the police, you know, we, and given a hard time, it's like something that opens your mind and opens your eyes, and that's part of the awareness that is sometimes not clear enough to people who are practicing mindfulness even, that mindfulness can seem to be just about, well, what am I aware of in my body, and what am I aware of in my thoughts, and what am I aware of in my emotions, what am I aware of in my kind of immediate environment, but what am I not aware of, we're not necessarily asking that, what am I not seeing, what am I not seeing as a straight white man, you know, in this culture that is, you know, has had 400 years of racial injustice that's been passed on from generations to generation, yes, it's changed, and yes, it's got better in many ways, but the weight of that history is still continuing, you know, and you and I both know, and anyone listening probably knows that, you know, that the legacy of that is so much with us, and as you said, you know, it's only, the only thing that's changed in these last few years is cell phones, and videos of what's going on is not as though this is suddenly happening, because suddenly we have iPhones and androids or whatever, it's like this has been the reality for many people, but it's, you know, when somebody claims that in a court, who does the judge tend to believe, do they believe the police officers who are saying no, no, that's not what happened or, you know, and but when there is a video, yes, you see it. So there's more awareness, there's a growing awareness, but there's a need for consciously stepping outside of our, you know, a bubble, you know, and that's part of the practice of mindfulness, which I do talk about in the book, and it's, I think it's an even more challenging area, because it's not on our radar screen, even in the way that some of our regular, you know, more day to day unhealthy habits. Well, at least we see that we're doing it. We can't deny we're smoking smoking, you know, we might kind of push it out of our minds, but that's what we're doing it. We know. Yeah, we don't necessarily know that we're being racial, racially unconscious or insensitive. If that's just the way all our friends are acting, you know, unless we bring awareness to it. So there needs to be a conscious process of inquiring and really with others as well, so that we're learning from each other. And we're in dialogue, you know, both among people from our own group, but also across, you know, across the, you know, the racial divide and other divides that are so prevalent in our culture. I mean, you spoke, you write about it a little bit in the early part of the book, I believe, where you talk about absorbing habits and beliefs unconsciously from society. And that is the fish in the water thing. And that happens in so much. I mean, I'm a big Jungian. I'm a big Carl Jung fan. I have, I put I all respects to Freud. I'm a Jungian, but the unconscious pretty much guides the majority of our lives. Even for us who are aware of mindfulness, our meditation practitioners, we just are limited conception of reality is filtered. It is a very small sliver of what is actually outdoor out there. We have to take in a lot of information and parse it and filter it into something where we're not just like aimlessly like freaking out and having no idea what's going on. I see this very clearly with my three month old, just the amount of information that is going into his brain and how he's just, you know, and he's now beginning these three months now, he's beginning to get a sense of the world and himself. And it's interesting to see. But we're still doing that at all points throughout the day. I you hear a sound at any given time when you're talking to someone, there's hundreds and thousands and millions of other sounds and sights that you have to basically filter out. And with the filtering out, we also filter in these beliefs. And I think this exactly like you're like you were saying, we now have, I think collectively more awareness of what's going on and to bring back our friend Donald Trump to some of us when we see him make a comment where basically suggesting that someone assassinate Hillary Clinton or at least Supreme Court judges. And then he says he's just being sarcastic. We can see that this is a ridiculous thing to say. It's not compassionate.

It's not nice. But his supporters see the exact same thing and say, Oh, well, he's just speaking his mind. So what you're advocating and I think is incredibly important is when we are aware of something that is getting flash in front of our face, don't just react, but say what what is this? Am I taking something for granted as my perspective warped or shifted in a particular way because of conditions that I grew up and people I've surrounded myself with. What I love about all this you is that it really does start with each person and I agree with you. I think if these things are going to change, it's not like some policy is going to be enacted.

And I think affirmative action in some ways is very good thing. I think it helps break down some of the barriers, but I don't think a policy like that solves racism. It doesn't is not going to do that. It is going to be on a human to human and group to group level. And that to me is basically my guiding philosophy in life. Whenever I am angry, whenever I see something out in the world of refugee crisis, racial injustices, my first reaction, and I have some tools to engage with the world, but my first reaction is got to fix this first in myself, have to start here, knowing that the goal is to be of service to others to help people. But if you don't start with yourself, you're running the risk of bringing other things to the situation that maybe wouldn't be that helpful. Okay, so we're coming. I have two parts of this that we're going to do. I have three questions and then I'm going to ask for a practical tip from you. So my three questions I just started this. And I think I'm going to replace the word favorite with something you love. What is an animal that you love? A heron. Oh, cool. Cool. I love it. Okay. What is a color that you love?

A kind of a light blue. Love it. Me too. What is a number that you love? Seven. That we've had two answers so far. That's been the same number. That's so interesting. Okay. And then we're going to leave it on this. And Hugh, I'd love to continue this conversation on a later episode and just in general. So my last question to you is, what is a practical tip that you can offer listeners that has helped you in your life? I think for me it's something we've talked about in the last hour. It's being kind and compassionate to my own responses to my own reactivity, giving enough space to just see that, you know, that it's a human process. It's not a bad me that I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I'm making an unhealthy choice, but I have to begin by just by with that kindness, with the acceptance that this is true and meet it with kindness. And then as you've been saying, you know, then I can engage with like, what do I do about this? How do I bring this into the world? What is my response?

So I think for me, you know, the ground of all that we're talking about is kindness. Kindness to self-kindness to others. And I think that that, you know, ultimately, that that's what matters most in the world is kindness. You and the Dalai Lama agree. Yeah, I think he's still that from you. I'll let him know. Hugh, thank you so much for coming on. Really, this has been such a fantastic hour. I thank you. Deep bows and respect. Yeah, I'd love to stay in touch with you. And I'd love to be back on some other time. Of course, I'll, I'll, I will email you after this and we'll stay in touch. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, take care. Bye-bye.

Well, well, well, people who listen past the music, you always get treated to one of my little music tidbits there at the end. Thank you for listening. As always, debating whether to go on a little hiatus next week. And by hiatus, I mean, I have a guest who I have recorded. But I might just do a quick little mini episode, you know, going on vacation. Everyone should take a vacation. Important to do. So I may just release like a little bonus episode, who knows something cool, something I got, whatever, if not, then just regard this and there'll be a regular episode next week. So I will see you next week either way. But who knows what will be in store. Seriously, thank you for listening though. Rate and review, donate, blah, blah, blah. Thank you. Bye-bye.

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