The Path of Awareness, Compassion & Wisdom w/ Sharon Salzberg & Cortland Dahl – Metta Hour Ep. 248

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Welcome to the Meta Hour podcast with Sharon Salzberg. I'm Lily Cushman, I produce this podcast and today we're coming to you with episode 248. Our first appearance today with scientist, Buddhist scholar, translator and meditation teacher Cortland Thal. Cortland is the co founder of Tergar International, which is a global network of meditation centers of Mingyur Rinpoche. Cortland is also involved at the center for Healthy Minds, which is a center for scientific research on meditation and human flourishing. And Cortland's here today talking about his new book, A Meditator's Guide to Buddhism, the Path of Awareness, Compassion and Wisdom. Today's interview is about the book, of course. Cortland shares his path, kind of how he came to spiritual practice. And as someone who spent a lot of time living in Tibet, Sharon and he talk a lot about the difference between Eastern and Western cultural conditioning and some of the ways that Tibetans kind of rest into being in everyday life that's quite different from Western culture. And as a translator, Cortland's a big word nerd, like Sharon is. I think we can use that word nerd now since it's been reclaimed. He shares about learning the Tibetan language. They talk about devotion, the word devotion and kind of how that's understood in Tibetan Buddhism. They also talk about the Dalai Lama's first visit to North America and visiting the Insight Meditation Society and then really dig into the contents of of Cortland's new book, why he wrote it, what's there, talking about how to take refuge, how much longer till we're enlightened and how we recreate ancient traditions like that of Mengy rinpoche in the 21st century. And he closes conversation with an open awareness guided meditation. Before we get into the conversation, for those of you in the U.S. we're right in the middle of election season with all its glory, all its chaos. And Sharon's put together some resources for you which are also I think really applicable for those outside the States who, or maybe just experiencing the non election related unprecedented times. And those resources include a bunch of different think pieces, podcast interviews, memes, all kinds of good stuff. And Sharon is also doing a three part series for election season which is the application of the Brahma Viharas, which are some of the core teachings in the Buddhist realm. It's like our innate qualities of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. And she's doing these three classes, applying those to everything election related, everything unprecedented times related. So I Hope you will join us. The first is September 25th, which is loving kindness and compassion. And then two weeks later, October 9th, equanimity and October 23rd, resilience and hope. And those are all offered sliding scale so everybody gets to join and they will be recorded as well. So if you can't attend live, you can sign up and get the recording afterwards and you can head over to sharonsalzberg.com to learn more. The other big announcement is that Sharon has a brand new online course starting on October 9th, kindness in a fractured world. This is a flexible seven day program that consists of seven 20 minute lessons all pre recorded and we hope you'll join us. It's offered on a sliding scale basis so that anyone can join regardless of finances and explores the immense power and nuance of kindness, how kindness can be the thread we weave through our lives for our own benefit and the benefit of all. So for information on the course, you can head over to Sharon Salsberg.com okay, so let's get to today's conversation. Cortland Dahl and Sharon Salzberg.

Hello Cortland, and welcome to the podcast.

It's an honor to be here with you. Thank you so much for having me on.

Oh, I'm so delighted for the chance to talk to you. And how are you and where are you? Are you in Madison?

I am in Madison, Wisconsin, where I live and my mind is probably somewhere in the Himalayas or over the Pacific. I just got back from a long trip to India and Nepal, but I am physically in Madison, Wisconsin, I can promise that much.

How long were you gone? That's a long time.

Yeah, yeah, it is a long time to be away from home.

So it's truly wonderful to have you here today. It's your first time recording, I think, on this podcast and it's in honor of the release of your new book, A Meditator's Guide to Buddhism, the Path of Awareness, Compassion and Wisdom, which has just come out this week in September of 2024. So really giant, congratulations to you.

Oh, thank you so much.

So you've been involved in the meditation community for many years as a scholar and translator of many books, as a co founder of Tergor International and a researcher at the center for Healthy Minds. So it's great to see you manifesting a little more as a teacher with this new book coming out.

Yeah, it's definitely a different side of my work, so I think it's great. Yeah, yeah, I definitely. It's exciting for me for sure.

So I wonder if we could Start with your story. What drew you to the spiritual path initially and how that path has unfolded for you?

Yeah, for me, like many, many listeners, and I know a little bit from your stories as well, Sharon. It was Dukkha, you know, it was suffering and some challenges I was having really when I left home and started my college studies. And I had always been kind of tightly wound, you know, a little, a little high energy, couldn't sit still, anxious kind of kid. And that kind of social awkwardness of my teenage years kind of grew into full blown social anxiety when I got to college. So this is now, you know, more than 30 years ago. And I was just kind of overwhelmed by the whole mess of being human as a 19 and you know, 18, 19 year old and making new friends, going out to parties, you know, the social scene, the pressure of school, all, all these things. I can't even imagine what it's like for kids these days because it's, it's just such a pressure cooker. But for me, that was a blessing in disguise because it, it really got me started on the path of meditation. So I, I started reading some books. I think your book Loving Kindness came out a couple a year or two after I started meditating and was one of the big influences in my life. But it was really just working with my mind, with my emotions. I had a full blown phobia of public speaking. In fact, it's the big irony of my life that, yeah, I mean, I used to get so anxious being in front of people that when I was in high school, I fainted on stage in a choir concert, like, literally unconscious. Fell off like the top row of the riser. And like, it was this whole drama. My mom like ran and jumped onto the stage. I mean, it was like it was a whole thing. Luckily, I was unconscious to see that part of it, but so I used to be really, I was like epically anxious. So it was no small thing. But you know, like many of us, that became my greatest teacher and my gateway into meditation and the Dharma and you know, it's been a huge part of my life ever since.

Well, there, there are many other questions I want to ask you, but I, I do feel moved to say that I too had this tremendous phobia about public speaking. And in fact, the first retreat Joseph Goldstein and I taught together in this country was a 30 day retreat. And the format, the flow of the day when we do intensive retreats is people practice during the day. There's questions and answer sessions, there's teacher contact, but there's only one lecture at night in the hall. And Joseph had to give 30 talks because it was a month long retreat and I could not do it. And people were going up and yelling at him, saying, why won't you let her have a voice? Why won't you let her speak? And he'd say, I'd love a night off. Talk, talk to her, you know, but it was a long road to being okay actually doing it. And, you know, loving kindness actually played a big role in my finally being able to do it. But we'll get to that later. So I'm curious about your thoughts on Western cultural conditioning as compared to Eastern conditioning as it relates to practice and meditation. So, for example, many years ago I was at a conference with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, a small group of people in India, and I had the chance to ask His Holiness a question. So my question was, what is self hatred? What do you think about self hatred? And he didn't understand what I was talking about, basically, you know, and he said, is that some kind of nervous disorder? And all kinds of things. It was very interesting. So not to deify Tibetan or Asian culture by any means, but that sort of rock bottom sense of who you are and what you are capable of was very different, it seemed. So I'm wondering if you've noticed different challenges for Westerners on the path than other practitioners in the world.

That's a fascinating question. And you know, I've heard that story so many times. It's, yeah, it's such an interesting cultural moment. And yeah, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts and experiences on that very question. I mean, in many ways I have all these different job titles and different things I do and have done over the years. But I think at the end of the day, I'm really a translator. I feel like I'm just one of these people that straddles a few different worlds and is helping them make sense of one another. And, you know, I spent about eight years living in Tibetan refugee settlements in, mainly in Nepal, also a little bit in India, and was completely immersed in the Tibetan community. And that was such an eye opening experience on many, many, many levels. And there's many differences. I saw, you know, one of the things that you're pointing to is that there's such a radically different understanding of the mind, mental states and emotional states. And in some cases there's a tremendous amount of nuance that you have, for example, coming from the Buddhist tradition around the mind. And what happens when we meditate and we begin to explore and transform the mind through meditation. And there's just this incredibly rich and nuanced and subtle language. But there's also in some ways a much simpler language that lacks some of the nuance around what you might call more samsaric emotional states. I mean, things like what you just mentioned, we have so many kind of a way of talking about our emotional lives. I just talked about anxiety, for example, and we could talk about that with a nuance that I don't think the language is there in, for example, in the Tibetan culture. But as I said, there's nuance on other sides. So I think there's things to be gained from the discussion on both sides. But I think for me, the biggest thing, the biggest difference, and it's one that I really ran into head on right when I got there, is really around equality of being versus doing. And I have this visceral vivid memory of this place I lived, which is and was called Boda. I'm sure you've been there many times. Yeah. This huge Buddhist monument on the outskirts of Kathmandu where the Tibetan community, or part of the Tibetan community has gathered and they go out and they do this, what they call kora. They circumambulate this huge Buddhist monument. And it's a cultural thing that they do twice a day. In the beginning of the day and the end of the day. It's like the whole community comes out for this. And then they'll go and they'll just drink tea and they'll sit down and have a tea with a friend or family and oftentimes just sit there in silence. And when I got there, I had been meditating a decade and really into my practice, so it wasn't as though I was new to just sitting still, but there was this element of just of not doing anything, even meditating, of just existing, sometimes not even talking. And I just was like, why aren't you people doing something? Get up, there's work to be done. People come on, at least meditate or something. And it took a while for me to realize that this was a discomfort in myself around being, and that I had this doing, accomplishing, achieving impulse in my mind that was just sort of baked into my neural wiring or something. And I think it's become a huge part of my path to grapple with that and to see that we've just erased our entire culture of being in the modern world, not even the modern West. You know, all sorts of things that exist in different cultures, like tea drinking around the world is one example. But the arts in some cases. So different social kind of situations, long lunches, just different things that aren't about doing things and checking things off the to do list. So there's, there's a beauty in the Tibetan culture around being that I felt like I had missed in my own culture. That was one of the most stark contrasts, I would say. And as I said, it's been such a rich and deep part of my path to explore that it's beautiful.

So I want to continue on a little bit in this discussion of you as a translator, in effect. And one of the things I find myself doing, I realize as I look back over my writing and things I've chosen to write about, is I seem to have a kind of determination to try to redeem or reclaim certain words that I feel have gotten overlays of conditioning that are distorting in some way. So love is one, kindness is one, faith is certainly one. I wrote a book called Faith and you know, many friends were saying, students were saying, why, you know, it's such a negative quality. It means being silenced. It means not being able to ask questions. And of course it didn't mean that at all to me or within the context of Buddhism. So it's really been powerful for me looking back and saying, oh, that is really part of what has moved me all these years. So I'm wondering, have, you know, there have been words that you feel that you really want to reclaim or redeem?

Oh, wow, that's another rich question. And you named some of the words that would be on that list for me. Oh, there's many. You know, one that springs to mind that I think was sparked by your mention of faith, because faith for sure is. It's such a huge one in Buddhism, but as you know and you've written about, has such a radically different meaning than I think, kind of the knee jerk reaction most of us have to that word these days. A related one that is such a fraught term in English, but is so rich in the Buddhist tradition, specifically in the Tibetan tradition, is devotion. And even the etymology of devotion in Tibetan, you have this word, mugu, which is actually a contraction of two verbs. And what those two verbs mean is incredibly beautiful. It means it's an emotional state that is a combination of inspiration and respect. Those are the two words, merpa. In the mugu, merpa is to be inspired or to be intensely interested in something. And the kupa is like to be respect, to have a sense of kind of awe or reverence, deep respect for something. And that was really helpful to me to learn because when I hear, like many people, I hear this word devotion, and I immediately think of toxic guru, all the worst side of the kind of the guru controversies and all the nasty stuff that's happened over the years. But if you think about it from just a relational point of view, when you meet somebody who you deeply respect and who you look up to and who inspires you to be a better person or who inspires you in some way, and that kind of inner frame of mind, that inner emotional state that just opens us up to learning, to taking something new into new perspectives, to shifting our view of things, it's actually such a beautiful and important state. But I feel like the word devotion just like we can't get past just all the, as you said, all the baggage we have around that word. So that one just came to mind as, as one of many words I, I could. I'm a total word guy. If you crack open my head, it's like words will come spilling out. So I could go on and on about this, but that's one that, that's one that comes to mind that I think is just so beautiful in the tradition. But it's almost like a no go zone, you know, just because of our baggage.

It's beautiful. So I've tried several times to learn Pali, the Pali language and language of the early texts, and never really too successfully but at all. But I found it really fascinating. For one thing, Pali doesn't exist as a kind of conversational language. You don't ever learn to say, let's go get lunch or go to the movies. It's all like in the text and from the text. And I'm wondering how your process in learning Tibetan and if it changed the way you thought about the world in some way.

Yeah, you know, I think it did. So I started learning Tibetan over here, more in an academic kind of learning the grammar, learning some basics. But then I went and I lived there and was completely immersed. And I tend to be a fanatic about whatever I do. And this was no exception. I think I was kind of famous in the area I was living in at one point because I literally was walking around with flashcards for like three months. And all I was doing like the way it was probably the least. It was like learning a language through brute force rather than intelligence. I picked up a book and it's a really well known book in the Buddhist tradition, in the Tibetan tradition called the Jewel Ornament of Liberation. It's been translated by Kampopa So I had the Tibetan version of that and I bought that book and I started on the first page and I literally just started memorizing every word. And I would write, like, the context, I'd write the sentence the word was in. And I just did that until I didn't have any words I didn't know anymore. And that, like. So it was probably very inefficient, but it was quite an interesting process in doing that. And lots of things came from that. And since, I mean, more than anything else, it's just. It's opened the world, the door to the world of Tibetan literature, which is vast and immense. There are just amazing texts that have never been translated and probably won't be anytime soon. But great authors, like, my favorite author is a great figure named Longchampa, who's one of the great masters of the non dual awareness tradition that I know, you know, well, Sharon Zogchen. And, you know, he just. Volumes and volumes and volumes of this incredibly detailed roadmaps to exploring and transforming the mind. Just like nothing that exists, you know, in the Western world. So I think just being open to that, and I think that I've, you know, I've translated different kinds of literature, but the, the stuff I really love is, are, are those roadmaps in Tibetan, these texts called cheek, which means instruction manuals. It's the, the practical ones. Like, okay, you sit down and you look at your mind and what, what do you do? What. What happens? What, like, what's the path forward? That's the stuff that I love. And I could just geek out on that stuff forever. Access to that. I think that it, it just opened my mind to the possibility of just such a deep, rich inner life that we all can develop through these practices.

That's wonderful. So let's talk about your new book, A Meditator's Guide to Buddhism. Since I've been teaching for so many years now, I see kind of a nuance in your title that I found quite striking because Buddhism, the Buddhist teaching, encompasses such a large scope as a religion, philosophical tradition, psychological tradition. Within the teachings of the Buddha are many different lineages and schools that go back thousands of years. And you're approaching all of this through the lens of what might be useful for meditators to know about the Buddhist teachings. So tell me how that came about.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great description, and that's really exactly how it came about. You know, I. A woman named Casey Kemp, who at the time was an editor at Shambhala, called me up One day and we had a conversation and she had this idea of an introductory book to Buddhism and we were talking about that. And I, as I just mentioned a moment ago, my interest is really practical. I really, both personally and in helping and support other people in their own journeys and their own practice. I'm very pragmatic. You know, I'm not, you know, I'm not super philosophical. I'm. I'm very hands on, like, all right, we've got real world issues that we're all struggling with. And, and how can these ideas and these practices and these teachings help us all just be human in this whole mess of life we're all trying to get through? And so I didn't want to write another Dharma book. There's already so many amazing Dharma books. And when I started talking to Casey, it became clear to me that actually there is kind of a gap, in fact, in the work I've done with the Targar community. I've done a lot of curriculum, kind of designing courses and Buddhist studies and meditation courses. And there were places where we didn't have a good textbook, actually where there wasn't a really good book we didn't want to an academic book. These are courses for meditators, for people who are really sitting down in the cushion and exploring their minds. So it felt to me like there was a spot and perhaps a need for something that just would give a bird's eye view of the Buddhist tradition. And as you might guess, it's coming very much from the point of view of the Tibetan tradition, which I try to make clear in the book. But really for meditators, for people who are people who have jobs and families and really want the more practical side, want things that they really can take into their lives and apply to their direct experience. So that was my, my primary motivation was. Was kind of imagining somebody who's, you know, maybe they downloaded Headspace and had been meditating for six months and they're like, hey, I've heard all this stuff comes from Buddhism. What's Buddhism all about? And can just, you know, give them the lay of the land. But again, from a very experiential and hopefully practical point of view.

Well, clearly there are so many people who, with great sincerity and endeavor these days, are practicing some form of meditation, either without context, such as the Buddhist teachings, or a different context, other traditions. And it speaks to the popularity of meditation these days. But for me, I really celebrate your book and the effort that you're making. And it's in some ways, sometimes for Me, it comes back even to the meaning of a word like mindfulness, you know, and one of my bugaboos is how, you know, mindfulness very beautifully is often talked about these days in the popular way as something that helps us inhabit our lives, live more fully, really appreciate that cup of tea, because we're finally tasting it. And not always multitasking, but classically within the Buddhist tradition, certainly within the Cherevan tradition, mindfulness. I mean, that's nice, and that could be even wonderful. But the fundamental purpose of mindfulness is not inhabiting our lives, it's understanding our lives, insight or wisdom. And it's kind of strange to see how that cannot be at all the context in which people are necessarily practicing. And so I think it's wonderful that you really thought about people who do have a practice and how that can deepen and expand.

Yeah, that's so true. And mindfulness is one of those words. I mean, we could easily talk for hours just about that. But it's true. I mean, you mentioned the understanding in the Theravada tradition. Very much that same understanding in the Tibetan tradition. In fact, the word for mindfulness in Tibetan is trempa, which is the exact same word that you use to say, I remember. So if you say, I miss my mom, you would say, I'm a Trengidu. I'm remembering my mom. And it captures that. Yes, it is this being fully in the present, but it has this sense of bringing yourself back to the rich world of the principles and the views that are informing how you see the world in a more intentional way. And even going back to one of the questions you asked earlier about Tibetan culture and the differences that I experienced in going to live there. But certainly one of the big ones with the Tibetan world is this idea of Buddha nature and this view of our fundamental nature being whole and pure and good. And so part of what mindfulness from that point of view is, it's not just bringing yourself back to the present, but bringing yourself back to this way of seeing the world and seeing yourself. That could be radically different than certainly what a lot of us are being programmed to think about ourselves in the world, in the current cultural moment we're living through. So, yeah, I think there is a lot, hopefully, to be gained for somebody who might have just begun meditating, and they want to broaden that perspective and see this rich tapestry of practices and ideas that is sort of the backdrop out of which many of these practices that are being brought into the world are coming from. And I think that's another piece of just also that mindfulness, if you think about that as a practice. And it's kind of weird for me even to say that, because historically, as I'm sure you know, in the Theravada tradition, there's no mindfulness practice. Like, it's not as mindfulness is a form of meditation. Mindfulness is sort of a quality of mind that is really there in any form of meditation, but there's literally hundreds or thousands of forms of meditation, and we're just getting this tiny, tiny slice of the pie. So it's a great way to start. Incredibly powerful. But there's such a wide world of different practices and principles to explore, so hopefully that'll. That'll be something people will take away from. The book is just hopefully a bit of a roadmap to make sense of what all those practices and ideas look like.

You're actually reminding me of a story that I hadn't thought of for many years. And more recently, it's come back to me and I have been repeating it. But in 1979, we heard that His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, was coming to Amherst, Massachusetts, which is about 45 minutes or so away from Barry, where the Insight Meditation Society is. We heard that he was coming for a visit. And so we were very young and very brash, and so we wrote a letter to the private office and said, wouldn't he like to visit us, too? And then we got a letter back saying, yes, he would. So it was like, oh, my God, he's coming. So there are lots of stories about that day, but it includes the fact that we had a retreat that was happening anyway that had been going on for about two weeks. And the Dalai Lama went into the meditation hall and gave a talk and asked for questions afterwards. So the first question was, this young man raised his hand and he said, I've been meditating for two weeks, and I've decided I can't do it. I have no capacity, I have no ability. It's just not going to work for me. And the Dalai Lama, I think this was his first visit to North America, and he looked kind of surprised, and he said, you're just wrong. And then after the whole thing was over, all these people came up to me to complain about the Dalai Lama and say, that's bad pedagogy to tell someone they're wrong. You should never tell someone they're wrong. But you know who got a lot out of it was the young man.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, so it was sort of like there's a different worldview. Let's consider that, you know, maybe you do have capacity. Maybe everyone has a capacity.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to hear where that guy is now.

Yeah. Really?

I don't know. That's a great story.

Yeah, it was some years ago.

Wow.

So these days, you know, there are so many books in English. When I started practicing and, you know, probably used well, there weren't so many. Although by the time you were reading my book, there were more. But it's really kind of interesting how important it is to focus on the practical and the real life manifestation and yet broaden the context. So you begin your book with the Four Noble Truths, which is the cornerstone of the Buddhist teaching. And that certainly had a huge impact on my own life. The Four Noble Truths, which you can describe for us, especially that First Noble Truth about the suffering that is in life. And I like, I know the word dukkha has many meanings, not just terrible pain as suffering, but I'm so used to that translation, I do say suffering, you know. So for me, when I first heard really these Four Noble Truths, it was an Asian philosophy class. And it was riveting because for me, it was not a depressing message. It was a massive message of inclusion. Like, you know, as you said, and like, for so many people, I'd had a very traumatic childhood. And unlike for many people, my family system was one where you never spoke about it. And so I always felt different and strange and other. And. And then here was the Buddha saying right out loud, in a way, you belong. This is part of everyone's life to some degree or another. And so I'm wondering if you can describe the Four Noble Truths briefly for us and also remember when you first heard them.

Yeah, I had a very similar experience. You know, the. So just simply put, in case anybody listening isn't familiar with them, this is really the. The first and most foundational teaching that the Buddha gave. And he just outlined really kind of the facts of human existence and the possibilities of human existence, which is the fact that we suffer, that that suffering has causes, that it's possible to bring an end to that suffering, and there's a path to do so. So I had a very similar reaction to what you had. It was. It was such a breath of fresh air to me, of feeling like, okay, this is not my personal failing. Like, I, like, I somehow just didn't get the, you know, the Handbook for Life and screwed up, and I'm suffering because of this. I mean, As I mentioned, I was. I was having a rough time and I was. And I really didn't know how to work with. With my mind. And what I saw happening when I was having all this anxiety in my first few years of college is I could see that I was starting to go down this path that I knew was unhealthy and I was isolating myself. Basically what I was doing is the social stuff was hard for me and so I was just choosing to not do it. I was just kind of checking out and I knew, like, okay, this isn't good. Like, this is not going in the right direction. It, like was a short term fix for the challenges that I was facing, but I just knew that this was not going to lead any place good. And when I encountered the Four Noble Truths and these basic Buddhist teachings, it just radically shifted my perspective. And I think the first thing was just what I mentioned. It was saying, like, this is not your fault. This is just the human mind left to its own devices can do this thing. We just get caught in these loops and it's different for everybody. It's not anxiety. You know, maybe you have a short fuse or maybe you get depressed or sad or down on yourself. I mean, we all have something, right? Just the feeling that it wasn't personal, like you said. It was this feeling of like, okay, we're kind of in this together, rather than I'm in my own corner suffering silently. So that was a huge thing. And then it was also couched in this very positive view of there's another way. Like there's a way to explore this, to understand this, and through that, to tap into a part of yourself that you're maybe not seeing and experiencing right now. That was so deeply inspiring to me. And I think for me, as much as the ideas of the Four Noble Shrews, it was also hearing stories about people from these traditions who would actually practice. Because I think that I lived in books as a kid and a lot of my moments of inspiration were stories like I remember reading, like the Bishop in Les Miserables for those who've read that book. Or I love Dostoevsky and there's always like these saintly characters in Dostoevsky's works that really inspired me. But it was also kind of disheartening because there was nowhere to go. There was no path to be like the Bishop or to be like Alyosha and the Brothers Karamazov, it was just like they were just like that. And there was no way for me to kind of move towards that. But suddenly when I started hearing about great meditators and learning about people from this tradition, it was like, oh, these aren't people who are just born like this. They actually did something. There was a path, they practiced something, they trained, they learned. And suddenly it just. It opened up my entire life. In fact, I would say that within six months of kind of starting to meditate, I knew that I had found the thing that would define my life. And it really has. And it was. I think it was that. But it was rooted in these four Noble Truths and the reality and the promise that you find in these teachings.

So another theme you touch on in the book is taking refuge in the three Jewels. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. So in the book, I talk about this idea of refuge very much from the Tibetan point of view. And it really goes back to the idea of Buddha nature. And there's this idea. I mean, refuge, again, is one of these words that is sort of foreign. You know, we don't normally talk about taking refuge. It's not like a normal phrase we would say. But the general idea is that we are. We're always looking for something, right? We're always looking for safety, for comfort, for contentment, for peace of mind, whatever it is. But we're. There's just this almost like chronic sense of just looking around the corner for something that's going to bring us closer to whatever that is for. For us. And the idea of refuge is just getting us to think about that a little bit more critically, like what really is going to lead us home in that sense. And from the Buddhist point of view, of course, you have this sense of, on an outer level, the Buddha as the teacher, the Dharma as the path, and the Sangha as the support and the companions and the community. And equally, if not more important is this idea in the Tibetan tradition that you find of the ultimate or the true refuge, which is our own Buddha nature. So another way to look at it is that having these stories of awakened beings like the Buddha and Deepa Ma in the Theravada tradition, as somebody who's deeply inspired me, it's like they reflect back to us, our own Buddha nature. They reflect back to us, our own potential as humans, going back to that. That sense of being inspired and that. That sense of openness and respect that we can feel and it opens us up to that might be possible for us. So for me, that idea of refuge is so foundational, because in some respect, it's what the practice of Buddhism is All about. We're just surrounding ourselves and immersing ourselves in all of these things that are just leading us back to qualities of our own hearts and minds that it's just hard to see and hard to stay in touch with. That's really all that refuge is about. It's how we can do that in a more intentional, conscious way.

This also opens the door to a whole consideration about patience and about timing and having realistic expectations about what it looks like to engage in practice, pushing against the social conditioning. We may well have instant gratification. And, you know, I often get a question like, how long is it going to take, you know, before I am transformed into a being of pure white light, bliss, absolute. So what would your answer be?

It takes a moment, and it takes a lifetime. You know, I think a moment of practice can be transformative. And that practice needs to be continued. We need to nurture those sparks of inspiration, those little shifts that can happen. In fact, another little episode from my life that is one that always has kind of informed how I see this. And I think this particular question is the first time I saw the movie Schindler's List. And it's one of the most vivid memories I have in my life is walking out of the movie theater and walking through the parking lot. I remember I was in Chelard park movie theater outside Minneapolis, Minnesota. Way more detailed than anybody needs. But I remember this so vividly. I was. I don't know, I must have been like, 19 or 20 or something at the time. And that movie just devastated me. I was both inspired by Oskar Schindler. And there's just this moment at the end where he kind of breaks down crying. Even though he had saved so many from the Holocaust and the horrors of that period of human history, he was feeling like he hadn't done enough. And so it inspired me, this person who had devoted themselves so selflessly and at such great risk to helping others. And of course, the movie itself, just what humans can do and have done to each other was profoundly moving to me. And I remember walking out and having this feeling that my life was never going to be the same. That I had just. It was really the power of compassion. I was awakened to that for the first time. And it really just landed in my being in a different way. And I felt like, wow, this. I want my life to be about this, too. I want to make a change and to make this the center of my life. And it felt in that moment like my life would never be the same. I don't remember what happened the next day or the next week. But I'm pretty sure I was hanging out with my buddies and I was doing the same thing that I always did. And the sad thing about that moment is it faded. And actually I did feel the same. You know, like my, I kind of shifted back to my normal state of being. And pretty soon that was just a nice memory. And what that taught me, when I look back on that years later, was that those sparks of inspiration need to be nurtured. And it can happen a moment. I mean, you literally can hear one word or read one line or sit down and have one breath where you just feel your breath fully. That can shift in a shift to your experience in a really profound way. But again, then that needs to be tended to. It needs to be nurtured. And that takes a lifetime. I don't think that's something that ever ends. And what these traditions give us is they, they kind of give us the, the roadmap, the almost like the scaffolding for. How do you, how do you nurture, sustain, continue to explore those moments of inspiration so they aren't just these fleeting moments that do fade away and then you're just left with a nice memory. So I don't think until you just asked that I never really thought about that. But I think it's true that it really is. It can take a moment and it does also take a lifetime.

You also really have some Minneapolis karma, which we'll talk about in a few minutes.

I do, I do. I'm a Midwestern. I've moved away multiple times, but I can't escape it. I'm a Midwestern boy.

So before we get to that in minder, MJ Another question I hear very often from students is how can I access the peace or the calm or the mindfulness that I can informal practice in the rest of my life? And I'm curious how you might respond to that.

I love that question. And I think this, this is a. Opens up into a much larger challenge for us. I think recreating these traditions in the 21st century and the way I look at it is that the traditions that have come down to us are largely coming down through two streams. There's a stream that you might call kind of like the scholarly tradition. And these are books and practices and traditions that were largely by people who were full time scholars in these meditative traditions. And there's another one that is like the yogic tradition that, you know, like in the Tibetan tradition, people like Milarepa, you know, full Time meditators who are just, you know, they're living in caves or in retreat, and they're just meditating full time. And for a lot of my life as a practitioner, I feel like I was judging myself primarily against, like, the Milarepa. You know, like, anything short of living in a cave in the Himalayas for my entire life was. I kind of really wasn't quite there yet. Like, I hadn't quite, you know, I wasn't practicing as hard as I should be or something. And I realized that actually, rather than being a failed yogi or a failed scholar of these traditions, what we need to do is. Is really reinvent the. The modern yogi, yogini model. Like, who has a job and a family. And there. There are parts of the tradition, as, you know, like, again, Deepa Ma is one who I think embodies this, but there's not that many that you find really kind of held up in the tradition as role models. But I feel like we need to kind of reinvent what that looks like in the modern world. And to me, what that calls for is to take all of the wisdom we have around the deep meditative training and the teachings that we can study. And we have now access to, which is really quite remarkable relative to 20, 30 years ago. We really do have access to so many teachings now. But the thing we haven't figured out is what in the Tibetan tradition, we call application. So you have this framework of view, meditation and application as kind of describing what we do on the path. The view is like, you could say is the more the study side. How do you shift your perspective through taking in and digesting ideas? Meditation, of course, we all know, but the application part is kind of an afterthought. Sort of like, expected that, like, oh, yeah, we'll just know how to do that. But, you know, what is, you know, this path of awareness, compassion, and wisdom. When you're on your fourth zoom meeting of the day or you're picking up your phone for the 72nd time that day, when you're. We really need to reinvent the dharma for these small moments of our lives. And so I'm kind of answering a question with a question, but I think that is the challenge for us. We need to find ways for every moment we pick up our phone, every moment we sit down for a meal with our family, every moment that we walk into a meeting at work. What is practice in that moment? And just to find simple ways to make that a moment of connection with other people, to make that a moment of Appreciation of noticing the best in others or of just simply being fully present. So I think this is very attainable. What we do know from the science, and this is a whole other side of my work that we haven't talked about much, is that actually the science shows that pretty profound benefits from these practices can happen with very small what in scientific terms we call dosage that really it actually doesn't take much, but as we talked about, it does need to be sustained. Like if you just do it for a week and then stop, it's going to fade. But it really doesn't take a lot for people to begin to practice and to bring it into their lives.

Well, speaking about Minneapolis, can you tell us something about Tergar where you serve as Ed and also on the board and what offerings are happening? And also Mindra Rinpoche.

Yeah. So Mingyi Rinpoche, who you know well and you know, is a great, wonderful teacher who I've studied with and worked closely with for many, many years. He's the guiding teacher of the Tergar community. You know, his story is quite remarkable because he. He started, you know, he was born basically into a family of lamas, almost like Interroyalty of Tibet. You know, his father was a great, great meditation master named Tolka Urgin Rinpoche. And he was born into this family. But he had crippling panic attacks as a kid. And his early journey was very much defined, like many of ours is, by how he was basically learning to work with this very difficult emotional experience. But the path he took was unlike what most of us experience in that by the time he was 20, he had done almost 10 years of dedicated retreat practice. So his childhood was basically in intensive meditation training. And he has also been very involved in a lot of the scientific research on meditation, actually here in Madison, where I live now with Dr. Richard Davidson. So he's had this kind of remarkable life. And Tergar is the community that he guides around the world, which is very much based, I think, in a lot of the things that we just talked about. So lots of interesting things with Terrgar these days, but a lot of what is happening in the world of the Targar community is really trying to provide support for that day in, day out process of exploring the heart and mind through meditation. So actually my book is part of that. One of the reasons why I wrote the book is it's for a course that we're launching that has the same title as the book, which is basically the course that is the introductory course to give the lay of the land of what Buddhism is all about from the perspective of this particular lineage. So that's just one example. But there's a whole kind of step by step path of meditation that Rinpoche teaches, starting with awareness, compassion and wisdom, and then going into these practices that we call nature of mind practices or non dual awareness practices, which are kind of the heart of Rinpoche's tradition and which I would say for me too, have been my great passion in life, have been studying and practice, practicing nature of mind teachings. So it's been a great joy to help build a whole community that's, that's really centered on exploring the nature of mind and pure awareness and how to experience that in everyday life.

And let's take a little journey to Madison to the center for Healthy Minds, and maybe you could just say a little bit about what the center is and what the current research is about there.

Yeah. So the center for Healthy Minds, my time is pretty evenly divided between Targar on the one hand, and the work I do with Dr. Richard Davidson, who we all call Richie and who you also know very well, Sharon, and the work that we do at the center for Healthy Minds, really, I mean, it might sound like this is a totally different world, but actually it's, it's very much rooted in this same understanding of the potential we all have to better understand what is causing the suffering in our own lives and in the world. The possibility of using practices like meditation to better understand that and hopefully to help alleviate some of that suffering. So at the center, this has really been where a lot of the pioneering work on meditation has been done. There's many, many great centers and labs around the world that are also doing work now. But Richie's work, I think, you know, if you really had to locate it, one place was as much as anywhere, kind of where the, the, the really important research on meditation began in many ways. So we're doing a lot of work these days as well. We created an app, actually, this came out of my PhD dissertation. We created an app called the Healthy Minds Program and made it freely available online. And we originally did this for research, thinking this would just be a research tool. And it now has almost a million downloads and is somehow ended up on all these lists in the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, in Vogue of all places. So I have no idea how that happened, but it somehow has gotten a lot of traction. And so we, we have just millions and millions of data points of people who are learning these different practices. And we've done some really Rigorous scientific studies, what in scientific terms are called randomized controlled trials, RCTs. And the data is just so inspiring. We did for example, a study here in Madison with 700 school employees during the pandemic. And then subsequent we did with an even bigger group in Louisville of school teachers and school employees. Basically what that showed is that in a single month of doing just 4, 5 minutes of practice a day, we saw improvements on literally every single thing we measured, including depression, anxiety, levels of stress. And the improvements were on the level of 20 to 30% in a month just from doing a few minutes a day. Again, that likely needs to be maintained. We did follow ups at three months later and those benefits are still there. My guess is if we were to look a year later, two years later, three years later, whether or not those last will depend on whether or not people keep practicing. But the fact that you can practice for a few minutes and see those real changes on real hard nosed scientific measures has just been deeply inspiring to us. And actually I talked about a month, but actually you see those differences after a week. They're more pronounced after a month. But actually you see significant improvements after just a week of practice, which is kind of amazing. So we have all sorts of research going on now. We're looking at the microbiome and epigenetic markers and all sorts of geeky scientific stuff, just trying to understand how these practices work, how they can benefit people, and especially how we can tailor them. That's kind of the, that's the, the holy grail for us is how we can make more personalized paths for people, you know, to find a way that's going to make them hopefully uniquely relevant and beneficial to different kinds of people in different contexts.

That's so wonderful. I'll have to have you back just to talk about the science someday.

Yeah, lots, lots to talk about for sure.

So I'm hoping that before we finish, if you can lead us in a practice of some kind.

I would love to. I would absolutely love to. So I was thinking, I started off earlier. You had asked this question about culture and it brought me back to my time in, in Tibetan communities and I talked about being. So I thought I could, I could do a little bit of a practice that is very much the practice of being, which is something that, that we refer to as open awareness and resting in open awareness. So I'll just cut a short practice to help give a little bit of taste of this side of the tradition. So we'll start with the body and the breath and we'll use that as an entry point into simply resting in awareness. So you can go ahead and bring awareness into your body. Notice any sensations in your body. And here not with any impulse to change what you find, but just getting curious, bringing a sense of warmth and gentleness into your own body and noticing what you find. For a few moments, You can keep your eyes gently open or close them, whatever feels more natural. And now bring awareness to the movement of your breath. And here the key is to simply notice what the breath feels like. There's no need for any intense focus or mental effort, just the very lightest touch of awareness. Just noticing that breathing is happening. What does that feel like in this moment? It. Here we're simply allowing meditation to happen. Your body already knows how to breathe. Your mind is already aware. We're just allowing these two to flow together so there's almost no effort needed. Can just simply be with your breath as it moves in and out of your body. It. Notice too how when you exhale, there's a very subtle sense of releasing and relaxing that happens in the mind and the body every time you breathe out. It's not something you need to make happen. Rather, simply notice how your body and mind naturally relax a little bit and release a little bit every time you breathe out. You might also notice how there's a short gap at the end of each exhalation, a short pause before you breathe in. So as your body and mind relax as you breathe out, allow yourself just to relax into that space between your breaths and just rest there for a moment before you breathe in it. In this space between your breaths, there is space to simply be. There's nothing you need to do, nothing to hold on to, no special state of mind you need to be experiencing. It's just a simple, ordinary moment of being, just resting in the moment as it is. So again, continue to breathe, relax with each exhalation and just allow yourself to be in that space between your breaths. It. And now you can gradually let go of the orientation even to your breath, but still just resting in that that space of being. Nothing more than simply being with your own awareness as it is. So you can again just gradually orient more to this quality of being, letting go of the focus on your breath and just resting in awareness. Rest in your open, effortless awareness.

It.

And in this space of awareness, you can feel whatever you're feeling. You don't have to stop your mind from thinking. You can allow your mind and experience to be as it is. There's no need to change anything. Or do anything. Anything. Just be. You can slowly open your eyes if they've been closed, Take in the world around you, perhaps bring a little bit of warmth and appreciation to the little details you might normally miss. And hopefully you can bring a little bit of this quality of being into whatever comes next in your day. So that's it for now.

So thank you so much for that practice and the conversation. And again, a big congratulations on the new book A Meditator's Guide to Buddhism, which is now available in paperback and ebook formats wherever books are sold.

Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you having me on foreign.

Hey folks, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like to learn more about Cortland's work and his new book, which is out this week, if you're listening to the podcast right away, Meditator's Guide to Buddhism, you can visit his website at Cortlanddollo. That's C-O-R-T L-A-N- dash dash a H L.com and for all things Sharon, including election resources, all kinds of online courses and free guided meditations, you can head over to Sharon Salzberg.com this has been the Meta Hour podcast brought to you by the Be Here Now Network. May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, and may you live with ease.