Why Self Help Is Not Always Helpful with Susan Piver

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Every painful thing you feel is actually a masked form of wisdom. And the Enneagram says the same thing.

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Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy, the natural place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever wondered about why you are the way you are, well, you should listen to this podcast because it's with an extraordinary teacher, someone I've known since I'm 19 years old. Yes, a long time. Who is an incredible teacher of meditation and Buddhism. Susan Piver is the New York Times bestselling author of so many books, many of which I've read, including the award-winning How Not to Be Afraid of youf Own Life. That's a good one. The Wisdom of a Broken Heart. Oh, God, I've had that. And start here now, an open-hearted guide to the path and the practice of meditation. And of course, the Four Noble Truths of Love, Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships, and many, many other books, including the hard questions, which are ones you want to ask before you get married to someone. I use that book and it's very helpful. She's been a practicing Buddhist since 1993. She's graduated from a Buddhist seminary in 2004. She's an internationally acclaimed meditation teacher known for her ability to translate ancient practices into modern life. Her work has been featured on Oprah Show, the Today Show, CNN, and the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and lots more. And this is really cool. In 2013, she launched the Open Heart Project, the largest virtual mindfulness community in the world with 20,000 members. Her newest book, which we're going to talk about today, the Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Warriorship. If you've never heard of the Enneagram, hold on, put your seatbelt on. This is going to be an amazing conversation about the nature of personalities, how we see the world and how it influences everything about our lives and ways we can use that information to actually create a map for how to live better and love better. Welcome, Susan.

Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I'm so happy to be with you.

So this is really cool. I mean, I think we talked about this, but I majored in Buddhism in college and that was how I sort of got into healing was understanding Buddhism as a healing art, really as a way of healing the mind. And then of course I studied the Enneagram, which many of you probably haven't heard about, but this very archaic ancient system of personality typing that helps you see where your traits are and how your personality is and why it's like that and how it can manifest in really positive ways or often if you have not really kind of gotten your act together can show up in negative ways. And we're going to talk about how those two fields intersect, the Buddhist Enneagram. So let's start off, Susan, by talking about what is the Enneagram? Just give us a kind of high level view of this concept. I think most people understand what Buddhism is, but I'm sure many people don't even know what the Enneagram is. So what is the Enneagram? Where did it come from? Who invented it? Why does it matter? And why should we care?

Yeah, okay, no problem.

And the three senses or less. No, just kidding.

Oh, on it. Ennea, E-N-N-E-A, is the Greek prefix for nine. So Enneagram refers, as you're saying, to nine personalities, or you could also say nine ways of being that include your personality but extend beyond it. So you are more than your personality. You are way more than your causes and conditions. There's some essential quality that you have that can be named and mapped, and it's extraordinarily useful to do so. Where does it come from? Now that's a whole other story. And the honest answer, the TLDR is nobody really knows. Nobody knows.

Was some guy in a cave 4,000 years ago or something?

Some guy in a cave like 100 years ago. So here's the answer. I'll try to make it short. the first person known to teach the Enneagram is George Gurdjieff, a Greek Armenian mystic.

Yes, oh my God, you're kidding.

Right, meetings with remarkable men. In our youth, that was the thing to read. And he is the first person to teach it. And the meetings with remarkable men is actually kind of connected to this. But anyway, he didn't teach it as a system of personality. He taught it as a way of understanding natural cycles. Okay, mark that. Fast forward, like 40 years, some dude, I don't mean to be cavalier about it, but a Bolivian guy named Oscar Ichazo came up with the Enneagram, somehow channeled it, was taught it by hidden mystics. Nobody really knows. And he died like two years ago, so it would have been awesome to find out. Yep. He had a student, and this is coming to the end of my story, named Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist who benefited from Oscar Ichazo's teachings, particularly on the Enneagram. And then he became a professor at UC Berkeley and started teaching the Enneagram to his students. And he said, you can't write this down. We know how that turned out. This can only be orally transmitted because this is so powerful. has such capacity for use and misuse that you have to be trained in it by a person who actually understands it. Of course, that didn't happen. It turns out that, and Claudio added unbelievably important things to the Enneagram, things that without his additions, I don't think it would be as useful as it is by any means. So it turns out that he was also a Buddhist in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. like I am, like Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the whole Nyingma tradition, the ancient school of Tibetan Buddhism. So I'm like, oh, I gotta meet him and ask him where the Enneagram comes from. Because people say Sufism, people say caves in the Middle East. So I emailed him and said, can I come see you? I'm gonna be in Berkeley. I want to talk about Buddhism and the Enneagram. And he said, Okay.

Wow.

Yeah, then I bought a plane ticket Mark because I was not planning to be in you gotta do what you gotta do. So I went to his house. He was so thoughtful and charming and open to conversation. And I asked him, why do people think the Enneagram comes from Sufism? Because that was the first notion about origins. And he said, and he may have been BSing me, He said, oh, I told my students that in the 70s, so they would shut up. Oh! So they would stop asking me where it came from.

That's amazing.

It is amazing. So that's a few more details, but that's as far as I got.

That's incredible. So it's sort of an ancient map of how we work. And Buddhism is also an ancient map of how the mind works. And so they kind of go together in a way. And I never really thought of them as going together, but Until I read your book, I was like, wait a minute, they actually kind of do. And just this little background. So Susan is an old friend and her brother David is my best friend in the world. We met on top of a mountain in Canada, in the Rockies, backpacking a week from anywhere. And we became best friends. We've been friends for 44 years. And he actually in college gave me the book, Meetings with Remarkable Men. by Gorji. So it's kind of funny. Yes. And then the books by Ozbenki, one of his students. So it was really, yeah, a very, very incredible intersection of the world. So, you know, one thing I kind of was struck by in your book is you talk about the problem with the self-help movement and the sort of idea of self-improvement and you kind of suggest that it might not be the best way to look at how we deal with ourselves in life. Can you explain that? Because, you know, I've certainly read plenty of self-help books. I've certainly written a lot of self-help books. So you, by the way, so maybe you don't see them that way. But what are you talking about?

What am I talking about? Great question. So this is a big, big one. This is a big one. Self-help starts from the perspective that there's something wrong with you and we should fix it. And the mind that created the problem is going to be the mind that solves the problem. And that can get us someplace, but only so far. Only so far. First of all, because it begins with a kind of self-aggression. Stop. Fix. Be different. Sometimes, sometimes very appropriately, Stop being an addict, stop being impatient, so forth. Both Buddhism and the Enneagram start from the polar opposite perspective, which is there is nothing wrong with you. You're just looking at it incorrectly.

And in Buddhism, it's perception that's wrong. Your perception is wrong.

Exactly. Any idea that you are broken, of course we all have things we need to fix about ourselves on the conventional plane. But in the wisdom world, in the beyond conventional mind, there's a kind of innate perfection that you're born with. It doesn't mean you're perfect, even though it's an innate perfection. It doesn't mean you don't have faults, obviously. But it means you're starting from a place of wholeness. And whatever you think is broken about you is a symptom of your confusion about your worthiness.

So we all in a sense have our own true Buddha nature, right? Which is, often covered over by our beliefs, our attitudes, our perceptions, our projections. Once a cloud of our minds.

100%. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but once long ago, someone, Sharon Salzberg, a great loving kindness Buddhist teacher, asked the Dalai Lama how she could help her students who suffered from low self-esteem. It was like 40 years ago or something. In her story, he's back and forth with this translator. What does this mean? Low self-esteem. The translator said, means you don't like yourself, something like that. It was shocked. And his answer was, how can you not like yourself if you possess Buddha nature? And that's the pith. You're awake. your way. Yeah.

Amazing. Amazing. That's just so beautiful. So, you know, a lot of us live with a sense of discomfort, some level of uneasiness, and we're not good enough that we have to work on improving ourselves. And you talk about how this impacts our relationships, our health, our creativity. So you're kind of inviting us to think differently about looking at helping our lives become better. We all want to improve our lives, improve ourselves, our relationships, our contribution to the world. But you kind of suggest that maybe there's a different way of looking at it that could be more helpful than this constant self-flagellation really to come to a place of not enough. Right?

100%. Yeah, it's-- and I obviously I suffer from all of this stuff myself. I'm not saying I'm exempt from it in any way, but Wait, wait, I.

Thought you were enlightened. That's why I invited you on the podcast. All right, we can stop right now.

Maybe right after we hang up, I'll be coming like that. Yeah, so working on yourself, cool. But that can only get us so far. And as you say, then we just start working harder and harder and harder. And even when you get somewhere we didn't want to be. Immediately that becomes devalued because you were able to do it. So harder, more, further. So, okay, again, you can work on yourself. That's great. It's important. But the things that we value most, and you just named many of them, love, creativity, wisdom, true insight, these things have one thing in common. they cannot be worked on. They can only be received. And so they arise, no matter how good your plan is, I'm going to get love or I'm going to be more insightful. It doesn't seem to work that way. What happens when you relax, a space opens up and you see what's already there. So relaxing is. Can be a better way of working on yourself than working more.

I mean, yeah. I think you bring up something I hadn't really thought about, which is this whole idea of self-aggression. I think Thoreau talked about non-violence, civil disobedience as a way of protesting. And that was taken up by Gandhi with his movement to free India and my Martin Luther King with the civil rights movement. And I met Bernice King, who was his daughter. And we're talking about the problem of obesity in the African-American community. And she had a very interesting comment. She said, no, non-violence also means non-violence to yourself. And I was like, wow, okay. And it sort of seems like that's what you're talking about. And the way that we kind of look at our lives often is with a little bit of meanness to ourselves. We're not nice. I mean, I often say to people, if you write down your inner dialogue and what you say about yourself every day and you don't filter it and you just have a raw rendition of all the stupid things you say to yourself about yourself or about your life or the beliefs you have, like, I'm this, I'm that, or I'm never gonna, or I can't, or this one, this and that. And if you just write that down, I mean, you would never say that to a friend. You wouldn't have any friends.

Right? Totally agree.

So how we, so you offer, so you have the sort of true Buddhist meditation and the Enneagram, you show there's a way around this self-aggression that has really amazing implications. So tell us more about that. And how do we think about the Enneagram and, and Buddhism and meditation as, as a different route around this self-aggression and violence to ourselves.

I will do my best, but my mind is exploding with connections as it seems to say. So if I'm starting to get a.

Little bit- oh, we have time.

We have time. Okay, good. Yeah, what Bertie's King said is everything. It is the pith of the pith. If we use self-aggression to quell self-aggression, it won't work. It's like being attached to non-attachment. Well, you're already in, you're already in Palo Alto. Something else has to happen. You can't beat yourself up to be less aggressive by saying, don't do that, stop. Oh, by policing your thoughts and having this hyper vigilance of, oh, that was aggressive. Uh-oh. Well, that's already, you're trapped. You're trapped. It's the same thing with compassion, the antithesis of I think aggression is compassion. And in the Buddhist view, as I'm sure you know, in loving kindness practice, for example, it starts in a particular way. It starts with you, then a loved one, then a stranger and so forth, then an enemy. But without that first part, without being able to express compassion toward yourself, genuinely, all the other dominoes do not fall. You cannot have aggression even for your loved one. I mean, compassion even for your loved ones. much less an enemy, it flowers from within, from planting the seed of softness toward yourself, which can only be planted with more softness. So if you experience gentleness, which doesn't mean toward yourself, which doesn't mean being nice, the practice of meditation is the practice of gentleness, not by being like, I'm cool, everything's cool. By seeing what arises, I'm angry, I'm happy, I'm bored, this is icky, I love it, and letting go, letting go, letting go. To come back, in this case, to the breath, which is the stand-in for life, it's not about being conscious of your breath. Then you experience the flow of being with your inner experience with a kind of sweetness rather than manipulation. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's kind of a paradox, right? because we can kind of get all the things we want by letting go and kind of releasing the drive that makes us often really miserable and unhappy. And I've actually figured this out in the last few years and it's taken me a long freaking time. Say more. I've been using it over 40 years ago. And I really began to understand that the more I just release, let go, and not try to force life and be alert to what's happening and then meet it where it is as it comes, that way more fun stuff happens, way more magic happens. I get exactly what I want and I get actually even things that I couldn't even imagine that I would ever get and it's easy without effort. And it's just a weird phenomena that as soon as I sort of stopped trying, everything started working out.

That's awesome. I'm happy for you because I love you. And I also have my own way of relating to that. The older I get, the more I feel like I'm not crafting my life. Everything I do to try to make things happen, five-year plans, for me that just never works. Ever, ever. Some people maybe, but so I don't feel like I'm crafting my life. I feel like I'm shepherding it. Like it wants to go somewhere. It wants to be something. It happens to include me, but it couldn't happen without me, but it's also not about me. Where does it want to go? What is my life trying to say to me right now? That's been more fruitful.

Yeah, it's such a powerful thing. And it's hard for people to really accept that because we think we have to force our life. We have to try. We have to work hard. We have to accomplish. We have to strive. And all the striving and hustling and pushing and whether it's around love or work or health or any aspect of our life, it often gets in the way of us actually just being free and meeting what is and having joy in our life and having happiness and having peace. All of a sudden, when you let go of having things needing to be a certain way, you get to actually witness what is, which is often way more amazing than what's so, much of the time we have the filter in front of us that doesn't let us see the magic and beauty of what actually is. And I actually, I don't choose you, but I went to a cabin in Vermont for a month last December. It just be, it was like a retreat. And I took all technology books. I had a few spiritual books that I read. Actually, one of them was the Gita, which is, which is about basically not being attached to the fruit of your work. So just sort of doing what you got to do, but. I was letting go, basically. And it was such a profound experience. At first, it was super uncomfortable. I resisted it. I was agitated, antsy, where's my phone? I want my text messages. Nobody loves me. I'm out of the world. And what was really quite amazing was after a little while, it all settled down and I would just sit and I would sit in the morning and drink my tea. I'd light the wood stove. I'd watch the mountain be the mountain. And every day the mountain was different. And then I would pick walk on myself and just be without stimulation, without, you know, constant like distraction. And I just got to realize what a beautiful thing it is to be alive and what an incredible gift it is to just be and how miraculous everything is and how beautiful everything is. And all I need to do is just be and didn't really need anything. And then when you, when you let go of that, that neediness in life, then all of a sudden everything is kind of gravy. You know, David said that to me. We're 19. We're sitting on the floor of his little apartment in Ithaca where he went to college. And he's like, Mark, once you have your food and your clothes and a place to sleep, then everything else is gravy. Okay. And that was really stuck with me.

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The challenge around this, and I mean you and I are lucky to be able to sort of do these practices and work on ourselves in this beautiful way. But for many people, and I have found this too, in looking back at my life and a lot of healing I've done over the last year, is things happen to us, traumas happen to us, Lil and we kind of disconnect in a way from our body and from our experience as a way to manage that. And we, whether we turn to drugs or sex or food or workaholism like I did, guilty as charged. Then, you know, we've got these emotional wounds that we've experienced and they're in our bodies, in our somatic systems and it's very hard for us to often break through and heal those things, which are automatic. They're hardwired and they're very difficult to undo. I noticed this for myself, but it really wasn't until I really started to deal with the physiology of those experiences and to look at what happened to me and deal with those traumas of my childhood that I was able to get more free. So how do we sort of learning to stop, and being your body, allow us to step out of these reactive patterns and engage with the things that matter to us, that we care about our values, you know? Because all of us, we don't want to be happy, we want to be at peace, we want to meet the world in a loving way. But there's so much always in the way, and then we kind of live in a world of fear and a disconnection. And I think, how do we break through that?

Well, that is the question.

You're going to give us the answer.

Wait for it, wait for it. Yeah, well, first of all, trauma, that's very, very, very important thing to note. Trauma in my work as a Buddhist teacher, that's a different category. And often people say, well, sit with it, bring it to the cushion, meditate. No, no, not trauma. No, that's your limbic system or I mean, obviously you know way more about this than me, but you can't say to an animal, just meditate on it. And when our animal brain is activated, It's akin to doing that. Just stop. No, it doesn't work that way. So trauma needs professional care. It needs a lot of support, a lot of love. It's a different category. But the wounds, let's say separating for our conversation traumas and wounds, that's different. So the first thing that is really useful is to stop, give up the idea of changing it through willpower and techniques. And that means dropping self-aggression. So in the Buddhist view, there are three ways to work with very painful emotions, including depression, rage, fear, all the things. And they're all good, but they're not all good all the time. So the first one, and the one we mostly hear in spiritual circles, is pacify it. Let go. Just try not to feel it or, you know, anger obviously is bad for you, so pacify it. It's afflictive. Pacify afflictive emotions.

It doesn't seem to work very good.

No. Maybe, yeah, occasionally, you know, it's not, if you could do it, it would be great. So it's good advice. The second, so if you have your childhood wound, You can't just say stop, stop feeling reactive to that wound. The second way is connected to the Mahayana traditions, which says the pain, the sorrow, the suffering, the fear that you feel, okay, yeah, it's afflictive, but if you find a way to meet it, it becomes a bridge of compassion between you and others. Because, and you know this, I know you, you know this, I see you do it all the time. you meet someone who's suffering with something you have also experienced. And because you didn't brush it away, you have endless compassion for them. So it's the heart opening way of relating with painful feelings. And then the third way is most germane for this conversation is Afflictive. Okay. Bridge of Confession. Okay, whatever. Make room for it. Make room for it. Expand to include it. so make friends with it. Experience gentleness toward your sorrows, your fears, which means relax with them just like we were talking about. When you relax with your anger, which doesn't mean you stop feeling angry, it means you feel it. So usually that's in your body. Your shoulders go like this or your body temperature feels hotter. If you find that feeling and then separate it from the storyline, This is the great advice of the wonderful Pema Chödrön, feel the feeling and drop the story. It's because of this, or I have to do that, or this wouldn't have happened, or whatever it is, let go and just head towards the feeling and sit with it like you would a parent and a child. Just to extend some kind of friendship toward it. Then according to this third view, The view of, can't say Ripche in fact, something starts to metabolize that is beyond your psychology and your willpower. Something starts to move. But when we just stop keep trying to box it out or use it, I'm going to learn something from this. That metabolization process doesn't help. Finally, you see that every painful thing you feel is actually a masked form of wisdom. And the Enneagram says the same thing. So anger, for example, the most afflictive probably of the afflictive emotions, causes the most damage. In this view, if you take the story away from anger, you did this, I did that, and you feel it, it's like this unbelievably potent form of wakefulness. Can't be angry and sleepy.

You can't, yeah.

So it's a kind of fierce clarity. And so anger and mirror-like wisdom as it's called are the same thing. But when we start mucking with this, this is, you don't get this.

Yeah, well it's amazing. So, so you basically talked a lot about kind of a Buddhist framework for thinking about how we how we meet our emotions, how we meet our lives, how we are kind to ourselves, how we recognize we're perfect already, and we just have to realize that the things that are in our way are just our mental constructs and our beliefs and our frameworks and our perceptions that kind of generate all these negative emotions and feelings. And there's an ancient Buddhist path to working with that. But you wrote this book called the Buddhist Enneagram, which somehow brings in the Enneagram into the conversation. So what do they have to do with each other? And what are the ways in which we can use the Enneagram? What are the types to help us understand ourselves and how does that complement this sort of ancient Buddhist technology? And I say Buddhist technology because I think a lot of people think of Buddhism as a religion. But it's actually, you know, we've explored outer technology. We've sent people to outer space. We've built supercomputers. We can do all these amazing things with technology. And the West has really been expert at that. But in the East, especially in Tibet, they went on the inside. They really explored inner technology and they are so advanced in understanding how to look at the nature of our mind and the nature of suffering, the nature of how we relate to our world and how to free ourselves. So it's really powerful. So they're really incredible forms of healing. It's not really a religion. So tell us how do we bring the Enneagram into this conversation around Buddhism? why should we and how does it relate and how do we use it to free ourselves?

Well, first, what you said is absolutely beautiful and I agree and we're so lucky in our lifetime to have been exposed to these extraordinary teachings. In the Buddhist path and then it will relate to the Enneagram in a second, there's tremendous emphasis on compassion and tremendous emphasis on wakefulness, on fierce presence. So yay, those things are great for me. And I've been studying both Buddhism and the Enneagram for 30 years side by side. Nothing has helped me more to actually discover what is meant by compassion and to remain present than the Enneagram. It is my most potent skillful means or upaya in Sanskrit. It is how do you do all these things? that sounds so great and are. Well, the Enneagram is like a roadmap for how to do these things. And also the Enneagram, as like Buddhism, as we just discussed, posits that what you think is worst about you is the gateway to what you think is best about you. So it's value free in the sense that don't do this, only do that. It's in the mud of your difficulty is the lotus of your brilliance. Let's look at that.

So tell us about the Enneagram then. What are the nine types? What do they mean? How do we know what we are? How do we figure out which type we are and how to use that to help us?

Yeah. So the Enneagram, nine types around a circle. And a good place to start in figuring out what are these numbers, how do I find myself, is to note that they're basically divided into three groups of three by what is called center of intelligence. And we all possess all three of these forms of intelligence, but one of them is predominant. Eight, nine, and one are called the intuitive triad, the people that go through the world on gut instinct. I don't know how I knew it. I just knew it. When things don't go their way, when you're like, let's go, this is right, and things don't go their way, they get angry. Yeah. We've all known all of these people and we are these people. Two, three, and four are the emotional triad. The people that go through the world, not feeling like, oh, my feelings are so important, although of course they are, but needing to know how one feels about something to know what it is. If you present this philosophy to me, it's going to be, and I, this is my Triad. So I'm saying me, it will be flat until I discover what I feel about it. Then it will come to life. Whether I like it or not. And when things don't go your way and this is your Triad, your emotions go out of whack and you become depressed or hysterical or graspy. This is all very broad, but, and then five, six and seven are the mental Triad. People who need to know what it, how the history, the research, the patterns, the, I'll see you smiling.

It's me.

I know. And thank God, because you brought you, your ability to do that has brought enormous gifts to planet Earth. So it just doesn't have any meaning. Like when sometimes I think, oh, I'm watching the weather report or listening to the weather report and the guys or the woman is saying, this front is coming. I'm like, I don't care why it's going to be this weather. I just want to know what, what what the weather will be. So that's a terrible example of in the mental triad, the why it's going to be this way means is valuable and gives it dimension. And then when things don't go their way, the thinking speeds up. What if I do this? What if that happens? I better have another plan. And so that's called anxiety. So that's one way to start finding yourself is which center of intelligence is mine?

Yeah, but there are also like quizzes, right? That help you identify what type you are or no? Like questions? You don't like those?

No, I don't like those. Could you tell by my face?

No, we didn't clearly like them.

Yeah, there is no good test for the Enneagram and that's disappointing because it would be so great if it was like Myers-Briggs or it was your birthday like astrology and you know some tests like Myers-Briggs or the Colby's They're good tests. They'll give you an accurate answer. There is no such test for the Enneagram. However, there are many tests. I suggest first think about your center of intelligence, then take all the tests, all the free tests, all the paid tests, whatever you feel like doing. Take all the free tests. Let's start there and start to see, I think I'm on the emotional triad and four and five come up a lot. Well, four's on the emotional triad, five's on mental. So let me start with four. So these are the tests don't give answers, but they do give data points for you to begin your investigation. That is an inward exploration. So it's kind of hard to find out, but if you think, oh, I took the test, and I'm a two, maybe. Yeah. Keep going, though.

Keep going. Well, I think I'm a seven, which is like an adventurer, but that's sort of a different way of looking at it through your lens. the things that I've typically read about it are quite, like they're not so different, but they are a little bit different than the way you present this view with the framework of Buddhism. So can you share a little bit about how that works? Because you're really coming at it from quite a different perspective.

Yes, thank you. So let's say you're a seven. We're going with that. So, and I could see that. I could see that for sure. But there's also, if I may say, as someone who really loves you, there's a heart quality in you that is not often in the seven or it takes a while to uncover. So I, that's just something to think about.

We're not always always one fully. We can be a blend, right?

No, incorrect. You are always one.

Oh, you're always one.

Yeah, you're always one. And that can make people upset, like, I don't want to be in a box. But you know what? You're already in a box. You put made a box already. So let's, and the Enneagram is, the numbers are connected by lines so you can travel the Enneagram. But your origin point is always what it is. 7 or 4. Yeah. It's like you were born in, where were you born?

Where?

Yeah.

Barcelona.

Oh, I didn't know that. Interesting. Okay, so you're never not gonna have been born in Barcelona. You can go anywhere you want, but you're always gonna have been born there. So each type has what's called a passion, which is bad in the Enneagram, not the passion is bad, but that's how it's used here. And a virtue. That's the spectrum, like anger to discriminating wisdom or mirror-like wisdom. Gluttony is the passion of seven.

Yeah, too much.

This is good. Let's have a lot more. Yeah. Whatever it is.

41 flavors of ice cream, right?

I need 32. Let's go find that 32nd one.

You mean like 20 books in 20 years? Is that what you mean?

14 New York Times best sellers, maybe. I mean, it's amazing that you've done this, by the way, Mark. It's incredibly inspiring. So yeah, gluttony. And then you already described this arc, by the way, in your journey to the cabin in Vermont. soberity, which doesn't mean never having fun. It means holding things in perspective and not being driven reflexively by the need for more. So if you don't have gluttony, like if you never have dark, you never know what light is. If you don't have gluttony, you don't actually know what sobriety is. So they're on a spectrum. and the journey for sevens is to travel from gluttony to sobriety. And in my book, I introduced a Buddhist teaching for each of those journeys. How do you let go of gluttony to or not let go? How do you see the sobriety within gluttony?

How do you make it all about me? How do I fix that?

Shall we?

Okay.

Well, sevens.

Use me as an example.

Shall we? Okay. Sevens are able to convey magic. And by magic, I don't mean wizard hats and that kind of thing, but to show a different point of view, to help people move from point A to point B when they've been stuck at point A for a million years through some word, some gesture, some idea, even if you never, they can make magic. Yeah. And they bring joy. Sevens can remind us that there's always a way to be joyful. even under the most dire circumstances, not by ignoring things. But anyway, so in the Tibetan Buddhist world, there are a lot of teachings on magic. How is magic? It's called auspicious coincidence or tendril. Tashi tendril. Yeah. What are the teachings on magic? So sevens have a particular gift for these teachings on Tashi tendril or magic. And so do all the numbers. There's a For my type, the journey is from longing to equanimity. So there's endless teachings in the Buddhist world on equanimity that can help me and other fours understand how to make that journey. So it is for each number.

Amazing. The sobriety part sounds kind of boring.

But.

It'S not really boring. What do you mean by that?

I, what I mean by that is what you discovered in the cabin in Vermont when you let go of your text messages and it was caused anxiety because it would freeze you, of course. Yeah. And you were like, you fought through it and then you read some books and then something relaxed and you saw the beauty of what is without having to add anything to it or make it into something. That's what is meant by sobriety. So you could also say presence.

You know, maybe it's taking me 60 years to get sober.

Hey, you're there. Amazing.

Well, it totally changed my life in.

Terms of- But how would you explain the beauty of sobriety in this sense of looking at it?

Well, I think for my whole life, I have struggled with that sense of let me, you know, like just wanting to be everywhere, do everything, make everything happen, you know, tell the world everything I want to tell them. I mean, just to overdo and overwork and it took a toll on me. It really did took a physical toll, took an emotional toll and it led to a lot of wake of destruction in my life that I now can see. And the shift has really been one of profound relaxation where I don't have to do anything, be anywhere, go anywhere, and yet I get to go to where do everything and have everything. So it's like a weird paradox where I'm just like, I'm just gonna see what shows up and I'm just gonna meet it and I'm not gonna try to make anything happen that's frictional and just let go. And since I've done that, I've been way more effective, way more productive in a way more impactful in my personal life, in work, in every way. And it's such a weird paradox because like the less I do, the more it happens. sort of like the Tao Te Ching, not doing by non-doing. I don't know how to explain that exactly, but it's that idea of wu wei, which is doing by non-doing. And that's sort of the feeling that I've got. And I think that's, for me, what sobriety has become, which was I need to stop trying to figure things out. And it's really been powerful. I don't know if everybody's, what everybody needs is certainly what I needed. And really helped me.

If that's what sobriety is, that is really not boring.

I know it's definitely not boring.

That is seriously not boring.

Not boring. Not boring. But I get it. It's like a whole shift. And I think that's a really interesting way to look at my own life and my own personality and my own automatic tendencies. And I think the Enneagram, the way you use the Enneagram, and obviously we talked about me because you know, we only like to talk about ourselves. I wanted to hear your perspective, which was actually very helpful. But for all of the types, for all of us in the book, the Buddhist Enneagram, there's a map for how we begin to think about ourselves, our lives, our innate traits that aren't necessarily bad or good, but that we can use to learn to take us from suffering to joy and happiness. That's really what it's about.

That is 100% what it's about. Advaita practitioners, you know, non-dual practitioners say the Enneagram is who you are not. It's who you think you are, but it's not true. So it's very important to find your type and it can take time, so people should be patient. Start with the centers of intelligence, take all the tests, and then, and if this sounds too complicated and wonky, just ex-nay me. There is something in the Enneagram that's extremely important in addition to this centers of intelligence that really helps more than anything to discover your type. And that is what are called the subtypes or instinctual drives. So we all have all three of these drives, just like we have all of the intelligences. And the first instinctual drive, and I'll keep this short, I promise, although it's endlessly fascinating to me, is the drive for self-preservation. Yeah. We're wired. It's just threatening. I don't want to be too cold. I don't want anyone to kill me. I hope I have enough money to live.

Just these sorts of things.

And second drive is social, which I want to connect. I want to be part of a tribe. I want to connect with a family or be part of something bigger than myself. Whether it's a neighborhood or a political party or an environmental movement, I want to find my place. Very important. We're wired for that. And the third drive is the sexual drive, which doesn't just mean I want to have sex with everyone all the time. It means it's I want to connect. I want to connect with one person, whether it's romantic or friendship or creative connection. And we all have all of those. So just to start, which one is predominant? That will help you find your type. And I'll explain what I mean by that in a second. If you're a self-preservation subtype person, which I am, I'm a self-preservation four. If I'm going to a professional gathering, let's say, I've never been to, the first things I and other self-preservation people will think about is, will there be food I can eat? Or what if it's too cold? What if there's too much gluten and dairy?

What if there's too much gluten and.

Dairy, and I'm lactose intolerant and have celiac, or don't, but I just don't want to eat those things. By the way, I've been keto for like two years. It's been life-changing.

Amazing.

It's been amazing. What am I gonna sleep on? How do I get out? If I don't like it, how do I get out? Those are self-preservation concerns. Those are the first things I think about. Social concerns, going to the same gathering, not the same thoughts. How will this room be arranged? Will people be able to see me? Will I be called upon to say anything? How do I feel? about being associated with this group? Does it make me proud or not? People go out to eat, will they invite me? So those are different concerns. And then the sexual subtype people will think, will there be someone there who I can connect with and share this with, who will get me and who I can like make snarky comments to or happy comments, someone I can go through this with. So I never would have thought I was a four. But I knew I was self-preservation. That was easy. And then when I read about self-preservation for as opposed to social for or sexual for, it was like ding, ding, ding. All the bells rang.

All of them.

Every single one.

Amazing. Amazing. So how does this all help us get free from all the stories and negative emotions we have? 'Cause, you know, we talked about it earlier, but our inner dialogue is our worst enemy, right? these automatic negative thoughts or aunts. My friend Daniel even calls them, you know, he says, don't believe every stupid thought you have. And for me, one of the most powerful things I've ever done was including that one. Yeah, right. Including that one. And one of the most powerful things I ever did was just write down my inner dialogue every day for months and months and months and unfiltered. And I shared it with, with a friend who was a coach, and it was, it was so helpful. because I knew she wasn't going to judge me and I was able to be completely honest and free. Things that I wouldn't even admit that I thought myself, right? But when you put them down, you're like, oh, wow, I'm actually feeling that. I'm actually thinking that. And it sort of helped me kind of release it. But that was my process. How do you kind of get rid of the things that block you from love, block you from meeting your life fully from actually the joy and happiness or your to Buddhist nature as you talk about it. Because all those negative thoughts and stories, they create this sort of armor around us. And I think a lot of us walk around like, you know, the knights of yore with this steel armor that prevents us from actually protects us, but it also prevents us from actually experiencing life fully.

Fully, totally. All right, with there with you on all that. And I have sort of two answers. The first is you can't Just take the armor off because it will just go right back. It just goes right back. And if you take a sword to it, if you hate it, if you stomp on it, you're just recreating the negative self-talk. You're a terrible person because you think you're a terrible person. And you're mean to yourself about being mean to yourself. That just will not work. Aggression never quells aggression. ever. You don't have to be a Buddhist to know that or anything else. So the first step is always the same thing. Make friends with it. Just what you did. You wrote it down. You didn't say, I was writing down what I wish I thought. No, you wrote down what you did think. And that in the Buddhist tradition is called shining the light of awareness on what is. and that's the first step. So the great Zen teacher and poet, I love this thing. He said, attention is the most basic form of love. Through it, we bless and are blessed. So there's no love without attention. So you first place your attention on the thing, and that's love. And then it starts. The edges start to soften. It could take a minute, it could take a year. Could usually it softens and hardens, softens and hardens, but. that initiates a process. So that Buddhism and meditation really, really helps with that. And the Enneagram helps because it helps you reframe what you may think is awful about you as something that is maybe not awful, maybe great, or just your wiring. So from myself, for example, I'll give you a short example. I always was very hard on myself for not being a good friend. No, because I'm not. I mean, I love my friends. I have a lot of love in my heart, but I've never been the kind of person to hang out or let's chat, let's go somewhere together. It's terrible. I just, so I've lost friends. They think I don't care about them because I don't connect in that way. And then when I realized, oh, I'm a four, all of my emotional energies going in and all these various other things about a four, I saw I was never going to be that kind of friend. But if you're being born or dying, call me.

Yeah.

I will be your best friend. And that's my gift for friendship. And it may be great, it may be horrible, but it just is. So I was able to let myself off the hook for this decades of diatribe against myself and just go, okay, this is how I this is how I extend friendship and that's how it is.

That's amazing. Wow. So you talk about a kind of meditation in the book that is an ancient Tibetan practice called Tummo meditation that helps us deal with all this pain that we feel and how we meet it and how it can actually hold the key to healing. because it's, you know, especially today, you know, I think when we're all living in our villages back 100, 200 years ago, I mean, we kind of knew what was happening with our neighbors, but we didn't, we didn't know instantly about all the horror and trauma of everything around the world. Maybe it was going on, but we just, we weren't flooded every day with negative news cycles and with just all the things that we have to deal with from, you know, political strife to religious conflict to the diet wars.

Those are some serious wars.

Yeah, I'm in the middle of those.

I can imagine.

That's why I wrote the Pegan diet. Like, hey guys, let's just kind of go off and talk about what we know. And so there's this beautiful meditation, called Tonglen meditation, helps us kind of meet the challenges and transmute them. So can you tell us about that? How do we do it? What is it? Where did it come from? I'd love to learn more about it and have our listeners learn a bit more about it too.

Thank you for asking. Tonglen means the practice of sending and taking or giving and receiving. And first, I just want to say mostly to myself, you don't have to stick your face in the world's troubles 24/7. you've got to be wise and prudent. You can't ignore and you can't bathe in it. There's some balance for each of us in how much we open to the suffering so that we can preserve some sense of strength. And some people don't have the privilege of making that balance. But if you do, even for a minute, be kind to yourself. So I find this often. there's so many terrible examples, but when you encounter someone who's suffering, let's say, could be a nation, could be a friend, could be whoever, and you're like overwhelmed with the pain of their pain. The practice of sending and taking, Tong Len says, do the opposite of what you're normally counseled to do, which is breathe in relief and peace and breathe out stress and anxiety. This says, do the opposite. for that being or that country or that situation. But first you must start with yourself. So say you have a friend who just discovered they had a serious illness. So you start with yourself. Maybe you have or haven't had a serious illness, but you've had illness. And you breathe in the suffering of having an illness as a texture, not as a story. Sticky or claustrophobic. Whatever you associate with bad, you breathe that in and then you breathe out relief from that suffering to yourself in the form of opposing textures, light and bright and airy and spacious. And then you turn to your friend, you breathe in their suffering. You take it and you breathe out to them relief from that suffering in the form of textures. and then you let go of that after a minute or five minutes or however long you can do it, and you just sit with breath meditation, exercise practice, because you have to close it with something spacious. And there's a sense of, I can transmute Sorrows by sharing them. And I believe, I never read this, but my experience, and I believe that, that the intention to hold others' suffering with them is the filter that actually creates non-suffering for yourself and others. So sometimes you worry, well, I'm going to take in this suffering, what am I going to do with it? But it's automatically liberated through the gesture of kindness, I believe.

Isn't that my compassion is really Susan? I mean, I think the idea of compassion is different than empathy. Empathy is where you feel the other person's emotions and in some way feel sort of identified with it. And compassion is where you feel the suffering of others and feel a different emotion, a different sense, which is love. I would call love maybe something else, but it's a way where it's not become it doesn't become a poison for you. so it's totally really a meditation or a compassion.

Yes, yes it is. And compassion here is like you say, different than empathy. It's not, oh that's too bad, I feel sad for you. It's you feel the other person's pain as your own pain. It's like a child. When you're a kid, there's no division. It's not like, oh I feel sad for you. You feel the pain in your own body. And so yeah, it's pain, but it's also, somebody once told me this, Cannot take credit for it. So brilliant. Compassion is the willingness to hold love and pain in your heart together. And isn't that what it feels like.

Love and pain together? It's true. It's true. I think that's an interesting way of thinking about it. So how do we become more compassionate? I mean, the world's pretty crazy. There's a lot to be angry about. I mean, climate change, all the strife politically, a food system makes me pretty angry from time to time. I'm like, wait a minute, guys. I mean, I just spent a week in Washington, D.C. and working with, you know, bipartisan senators and congressmen in the White House, USDA about trying to bring science into policy and common sense and, you know, and, and, and it was, it sort of made me angry in, in many ways because I felt that you know, there was such a block to doing the things that were right. I mean, someone said, well, you know, we can't necessarily put kid friendly labeling on because the manufacturers are going to push back on that. I'm like, well, wait a minute. Who are we working for? The kids or the food companies? Like, I just, you know, it really was disheartening. And I think there's so much to be, you know, but so how do we sort of, how do we bring more compassion into it? And I, and I actually did understand she was doing her job, and she trying to represent the sort of constituencies she came from. And the, you know, it's complicated politics, but I just, it was really, I had to sort of bring up plenty of compassion.

I bet that is, it's like, where are your priorities? Where are the priorities here? Yeah, it's a crazy world. I think we can sum it up by saying it's a crazy world at best and a violent world at worst. So I don't know, Mark. I don't know. I mean, I can tell you what I try to do, which is practice meditation, which introduces a noticed space in my mind so that when I'm angry, everything solidifies into one point and there's no space and there's no sense of humor and there's no possibility. In meditation, I'm not trying to say, yeah, everything's cool. but you just introduced space to your inner environment. So I think a meditation or meditative practice is important. And I know you emphasize mindset tremendously for, I imagine, the same reasons. And then, and this may sound cheesy, but I always have something to be grateful for, even if in the worst moments of my life where I have been totally broke and destitute and sick and injured and hospitalized and all the things.

Yeah, you have.

I have, yeah. There's still something, I got, you took care of me or the sun is very, very beautiful today or it's just some, I know it sounds, maybe it sounds cheesy, but if we can direct our minds not aggressively, because then we've already defeated the whole exercise, but truly, you can be reminded that it's not all one thing.

And.

If you can hold your pains, not just as things that may defeat you and rob your energy, which they certainly can, but as things that open you to the truth of other people's suffering, then you're in the Bodhisattva realm. Then you're on the path. and the path, I once asked a teacher why the more I practice, the more I cry.

Oh, God. Yeah.

I don't think that Dalai Lama is running into his bedroom and throwing himself on his bed sobbing, although maybe he is, I don't know. And you just become more vulnerable with the spiritual practices, not less. That's why it's very important to be careful with trauma, because it amplifies inner states.

You.

What he said was, some of the world's greatest practitioners have cried a lot. That made me think, oh, crying and heartbreak and sorrow and hopelessness. These are part of the practice. These are part of the journey. We open to meet them rather than try first to get rid of them. We open. That's very hard, but very profound.

Well, you know, the openness is key and I think that's why I love your open heart project, which is such a beautiful way of thinking about how to live. I was reminded of a story. I was at Cleveland Clinic and I was having dinner at this restaurant with my colleague and I had my Cleveland Clinic phone on the table and it was a restaurant that was focused on hiring ex-convicts and it was a kind of a five-star, fancy French restaurant. And, you know, they would grind the hamburger at your table and they would do all the fancy stuff. And they were basically teaching ex-cons how to get back in the workforce and be part of life. This guy comes on the table and he's like, Hey, I'm like, yeah, he says, you, work for Cleveland Clinic? I'm like, yeah, I do. He says, Are you a heart surgeon? And I stopped for a minute and I thought, I'm like, obviously not a heart surgeon. I said, yeah, I'm a heart surgeon.

I open hearts.

Oh, Mark.

That's awesome.

And I was like, you know, that's what it's about. 'Cause a lot of us walk around with armor and closed hearts and it protects us, but it also denies us so much of what's beautiful in life. And your book, the Buddhist Enneagram and all your other books and work are so much about helping us live life with an open heart. And I just wanna thank you for your work, Susan, thank you for what you're doing. Everybody needs to get a copy of the Buddhist Enneagram. It's out now, Nine Paths to Warriorship. A beautiful way of thinking about your life, going through it not as a victim, but as a warrior. And check out Open Heart Project, an online community that explores how to live a mindful life. And check it all out. She's the work. She's just awesome. Not just because she's my friend for 40 years plus a lot of years. I think we look pretty good, don't we?

For like now, all we are. It's amazing how old we are and not old.

Exactly.

Really old.

Well, thank you, Susan. Thanks for being there all these years and you're the best. And thank you for listening everybody. If you love this podcast, share it with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. Have you figured out how to work through your challenges? How has Buddhism or the Enneagram helped you? And subscribe wherever you get your podcast and I'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Dr. Hyman, thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I wanna tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

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