Stephen Cope on Creative on Purpose Live!

at the speed of bytes. And it looks like we have successfully navigated our way live. Welcome to Creative on Purpose, a show about defining, developing, and delivering the difference only you can make in the second half of life so you can live your legacy. I'm Scott Perry, Encore Life Coach and author of Encore: The Art of Encore Living, also Chief Difference Maker at Creative on Purpose. It's time to play your game. Visit creativeonpurpose.com to get started now. Let's meet today's guest. I'm so excited to have Stephen Cope with us today. Stephen, please tell our viewers who you are, what you're up to these days, and where can people go to learn more about you and the difference that you make.

Sure. Hey Scott, and thanks for having me on. Uh, it's fun to meet you. I'm Steve Cope. I am the, um, currently the scholar emeritus at Kripalu Center, which is the, the largest yoga center in the, uh, probably the Western Hemisphere. I don't Scott Perry. I've been affiliated with Kripalu for about 33 years now, and I'm an author and a teacher. Um, I— the last couple of books I've written have been kind of contemporary commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Bhagavad Gita. Um, but I've kind of been all over the yoga world in terms of my writing. I have a book on the Yoga Sutra and a book on the relationship between Eastern and Western psychologies, um, and so forth. You can go to, uh, Amazon and find all that out.

Yes, in fact, we'll, uh, put up your website there right now, and you can, uh, check out Stephen's books. I— we're going to talk about a couple of them. The, the latest one I just finished listening to Stephen read to me in the audiobook called— it's called The Dharma of Difficult Times, or The Dharma in Difficult Times, um, which is a fantastic read. I recommend that you check that one out. One of the things that I'm always fascinated by, I gave you a little bit of my backstory with the Bhagavad Gita, being introduced to it in the 7th grade and just falling in love with the story and this exploration of dharma and what that all means. I'm really curious about what's your origin story? How did the Bhagavad Gita, you know, how did you collide with it and how did it become such an important component of the way that you think about life and connect, you know, connect through their teachings.

Yeah. So just briefly, I grew up in the Midwest in a fairly religious Protestant family, and I was lucky in that regard because there was a lot of respect for spirituality and spiritual traditions in my family, which I now I'm grateful for. Um, I lived with my family when I was younger in Europe, and that kind of broadened my scope of interest in Catholicism, Western, other Western religions. Um, I, uh, went to graduate school for psychoanalytic psychotherapy and practiced that for many years in Boston, but When I discovered Buddhism when I was in graduate school in Boston, I was completely blown away by the, the elegance and the concision and the just the beauty of, of Buddha's Dharma. I was at that time— Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the great crazy wisdom guru from Tibet, was still alive and kicking and teaching, and I got to study with him and some of his senior students in Boston. And my origin story is really, I was on fire with the Dharma when I first met it. You know, I was at that time in graduate school and the liveliness, the practicality of that whole path really appealed to me. So I dove in with both feet to Buddhism. And, and, and still there, really. I'm very involved in, in that practice. But along the way, I also discovered yoga. And yoga was really introduced to me as, um, a precursor to meditation. So you sit and you do postures so that you can deepen your meditation practice. I got fascinated by yoga then, and it's like amazing history and scriptures.. And when I took a year off from my sabbatical leave from my practice, my psychotherapy practice in Boston, I decided to go to this place called Kripalu. This was 33 years ago, which was, you know, in those days, all of this was much more marginal than it is today. And people were freaked out that I was leaving this very nice mainstream practice to go to this fairly marginal kind of hippie place. And I went to Kripalu and I found a community of really devout practitioners of yoga and Buddhism, and this was incredibly compelling to me. Um, so I stayed. I didn't go back to my psychotherapy practice. I basically dedicated the rest of my life to contemplative practice, and it's been— it's just been fantastic. It, um, It's taken me down the, the Buddhist pathway and the yogic pathway, and it's brought me full circle back into Western, um, religion because that's what it tends to do. You think of Thomas Merton, who toward the end of his life, um, circled from the West to the East, and I kind of circled from the East back to the West a little bit. So, um, I'm old enough to have been around several blocks Let's just say that.

I love that. Well, um, and we were chatting before we, we went live and, um, as you know, I, I grew up in Western Massachusetts and I'm familiar with, um, Kripalu and, uh, it's, it's a renowned center for, you know, spiritual, um, pursuit. And as you're unpacking your journey, one of the things that leaps up to me is, is something that I'm not probably very clear on. When you talk about, you know, there's— we have Buddhist practice, we have, you know, the yoga tradition. Can you give us a little of that backstory? Like, is— are they connected in any way? What's— or how are they different, you know? And how do they explore things differently?

Yeah, that's a really fascinating story. In fact, the yoga tradition goes back to at least the second millennium BCE, and By the time the Buddha came along in about 453, I think, we think now BCE, the yoga tradition was already an incredibly sophisticated tradition. So when the Buddha left home, took on the saffron robes and left home, he became a yogi and he went to study with the two greatest yogis in India. And he they were astonished because he mastered their practices and their material very, very quickly. This is kind of a bid for karma for previous lives. He, he arrived already fairly well cooked. So after he'd mastered what was there of the yoga tradition, he realized there's something missing. This is not the full path. This is not taking me to full freedom and enlightenment. And that's when he, he added an essential element to the yoga traditions, which is the whole insight, um, the whole insight aspect of meditation. So pretty much until the Buddha's time, the yoga tradition was focused on concentration, gathering attention, focusing attention, and all of the marvels that result from that in, in the mind. It also leads to quite a bit of bliss and rapture. This was, by the way, Freud's big criticism of yoga, that it leads to bliss and rapture and it doesn't necessarily lead to wisdom. So the Buddha realized that when the mind gets very focused and concentrated, inevitably it wants to begin to investigate itself. It wants to be can begin to look at its own functioning. And when that happens, real freedom, real freedom from the bondage of pattern can actually emerge. So in the mindfulness tradition, in the insight tradition, there are three major insights: the insight into anicca, anatta, and dukkha, which is impermanence, the insight that, wow, everything's arising and passing away. All the time. The insight into anatta, which is usually described as no self, but it really means that the self is, is profoundly contingent and co-created in its interactions with, with others. So anicca, anatta, and dukkha— the discovery that our ordinary state of consciousness is often filled with a ton of suffering. Subtle suffering, if you will, but the suffering as both the Buddhist and the yoga tradition saw as, um, greed, hatred, and delusion, the so-called three poisons. So the Buddha landed this entirely new aspect to the already evolved meditation tradition, and then the Buddhists went on to become much more successful as, um, intellectual, uh, uh, searchers, right, seekers. And the Buddhists had great universities, Naropa University. And so from that time on, the yoga tradition and the Buddhist tradition were in dialogue all the time, right? And so, um, they're, they're profoundly intertwined. So if you read the, the, the Yoga Sutra, which was written in about the 2nd century BCE, or of the Common Era rather. Um, it's the Eight Limb Path. The Buddhists had an Eight Limb Path, really. They're very similar. They always start with ethical practice, uh, they move on to concentration, and then they move on to insight, the wisdom practices. So I don't think it's well understood how profoundly interactive these, these traditions are.

Yeah, that's really, really fascinating. I appreciate the way you articulated that because in addition to having, um, been informed and inspired from a very young age by the Bhagavad Gita. I've also had Marcus Aurelius, one of the foremost sources that we have for Stoic philosophy. And one of the things that I'm hearing is that these enduring spiritual and philosophical traditions are evolving and blending other traditions in over time. And I mean, I find just in my study of Stoicism that there are Buddhism and Stoicism have a lot of points of intersection and kind of alignment. It's fascinating to just study that whole axial age and see the rich, that kind of everywhere all at once humanity suddenly was wrestling with life's big questions. I wanted to, um, when you spoke about your backstory and talked about leaving your psychotherapy practice and you kind of, you went all in full out. With, you know, this. And that's, that's one of the themes in one of, one of my favorite books of yours, which is The Great Work of Your Life. And so I'd love for you to talk just a little bit about what that experience was like, like really sloughing the skin of an entire life and, and dropping into something brand new.

Honestly, it was incredibly exciting because I had, I had studied theology and Western religion. I'd studied psychoanalysis, which is very profound, by the way, which I still believe in profoundly. But never had I found a tradition that was so totally practical and that actually yields fruit from the very beginning. So in, in the West, we tend to be so up in our head. And when I was studying theology, it's, it's these infinitesimal discernments, distinctions, how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin. And, you know, the, the contemplative traditions like to say these practices bear fruit from the very beginning. So I sat down for the first time at Chögyam Trungpa's studio in Boston. It was called Dharma Datu. I went in and I asked, what the heck are you guys doing? Because I saw every afternoon they were sitting there. And he said, just sit down, just sit down for the hour. And I sat, and it was the beginning of just a remarkable experience of transformation for me. It took a while to learn the technique. Not that long, but I, I began to get concentrated mind and focused mind fairly quickly. And I think that was because I'm a pianist, I'm a classically trained pianist, and so I'd already— I already had a lot of concentration skills. And the whole first phase of training is gathering and focusing the mind. And when that happens, these remarkable states arise in mind, and you begin to feel the bliss and the rapture and the expansion. And I'd also been through psychoanalysis, so that also brings some skills, some attentional skills that are very similar to meditation.

Really, really amazing. Yeah. Your latest book is called The Dharma in Difficult Times, and your previous book, again, one of my favorites, The Great Work of Your Life, is an exploration of dharma. And, you know, it's what I find is when I'm sharing my appreciation and all the insight and inspiration I've derived from the Bhagavad Gita, dharma is a difficult word to explain, define. I would love— I think you have a beautiful way of articulating what dharma is. I'd love for you to just kind of unpack, you know, what dharma is and why why does it matter to us? Right.

So, um, dharma is one of those tightly packed Sanskrit words. It, it, you often hear it meaning truth, path, law. In the context of the Bhagavad Gita, it always means sacred duty, right? Say true calling, sacred duty. And the idea was that each one of us is born with an indwelling notion of our sacred duty, of what this life is about, of what we're put here on earth in this incarnation to learn. Um, you can see how that notion of dharma— the root of dharma is, is the Sanskrit root dhr, which means to hold together, right? So the idea here in the Bhagavad Gita, about which I've written a lot, is Um, if everybody does his or her own dharma, own calling, then the whole thing is held together. The whole universe, the whole, uh, human enterprise is, is kind of held together. And it was— it's anchored by this great ancient yogic tale of, of Indra and Indra's Web. And the tale that goes back to pre-Vedic times was that Indra, one of the great gods of, of the pre-Vedic times, lived on Mount Meru. And it was said that he had cast a vast net over the entire universe, and that at the warp and woof strand, the vertex of each warp and woof strand was a gem. And that gem is an individual soul, and it's that soul's job to hold together that part of the web. It's my job to hold together my idiosyncratic little part of the web. And if I'm doing that, the whole thing holds together. If I'm not doing it, it starts falling apart from my corner of the world. So I love this because it makes a connection between your idiosyncratic, your particular calling, your gifts and your skills and your calling and the universal, the well-being of the whole, uh, the whole world, right? And I love that. And I write a lot about Thoreau, for example, who also believed that, like, the more you can be yourself, crazy as it is, right? And the older we get, the crazier we allow ourselves to be. The more you're fulfilling your idiosyncratic dharma, and that is what connects you with the universal. Right. So Thoreau famously said, you know, I have traveled extensively in Concord. He didn't leave Concord, his little village, that much. But within that space, he found the whole world. Why? Because he delved deeply into his own genius, and that opened him out into the whole world. The whole world was in Concord. I've traveled extensively and conquered, right? Isn't that wonderful?

But it really is. And it reminds me that, you know, this is one of the shared ideas between the Bhagavad Gita and Stoic philosophy, because they both talk about, you know, this idea that all is— we're all one. It's— we're a completely integrated system. But what I love about what you articulated is this sacred duty to to identify, define, develop, and deliver our, our sacred gift. I call it in the work that I do, the difference only you can make. And it's very, very, one of the things that really resonated with me. I can't remember what it was probably in multiple books, but, you know, there's, in some ways it feels like what we're talking about is purpose. And we, you know, purpose is a squishy word, and it's also maybe an overused word. And, you know, Simon Sinek famously tells us that our why, our, you know, raison d'être, is kind of fully formed by the age of, you know, 20, 21. But that idea never really fully resonated with me. And when I was reading your books, it was like this idea that dharma is not this one fixed thing, that it's something that evolves over time. I'd love for you to speak a little bit about that.

I mean, this is a great misconception about dharma. I have one calling in this life. The truth is that as you do the practices that yoga and Buddhism and others, even Marcus Aurelius, prescribe, you begin to become more and more attuned to the inner voice. You begin to hear and feel in your body what's right for you and what's wrong for you, right? I talk a lot about Gandhi in, in my new book, and one of the things Gandhi said is, the only tyrant I allow in my life is the still small voice within. He became so attuned to the directions of that inner knowing, of that awakened, already awakened mind, that he had to do what it said. He knew that that's, that was his calling. So As we age, this gets more and more refined, and very often we come to the end of one outward manifestation of it and drop down into a whole new manifestation of it that, that takes us deeper because we're more and more attuned. And I, I talk about the, the, some of the great Jewish rabbis who, in, in my new book, who who talk about the fruit of a life lived in contemplative practice and how at the end they begin to see the whole world lit up from within. Lit up from within. In other words, the spirit— they begin to see the spirit everywhere. And Teilhard de Chardin, the great Jewish or Jesuit paleontologist, said the same thing, right? And he was practicing contemplative practice through prayer and his own Western religion. He was Catholic, but the Catholic hierarchy didn't love him.

Yeah, really, really fascinating. You, you referenced Thoreau, also one of my heroes, um, along with Emerson. Growing up where I grew up, um, the Transcendentalists are everywhere. And, uh, one of the— I was actually revisiting a chapter in The Great Work of Your Life about Thoreau, because I was thinking a lot about, you know, one of the things that I see with my clients that hangs them up is this idea of hearing and heeding your life's true calling, your sacred duty feels like a very grandiose and in some ways frightening thing. And then if, if it does not turn out to be a very grand and grandiose thing, it can fuel feelings of, I think you call it devalue, but just thinking broadly of like, just, you know, we're toggling between, it's got to be big and bold. But if it's not, then does that mean that I lack significance? And your exploration of those, that toggling back and forth and weaving in and out of that, you know, One of the things that I would love to have you share with listeners is, you know, if they have been— if their life has been speaking to them because it wants to speak through them, if that small voice of aspiration is starting to become something they can't ignore, and they hear this conversation, this idea of dharma, what What are, what do you, what would you share as like the smallest possible micro steps that they could take to start to embrace the idea that they have a unique gift, a unique calling that they are meant to not just explore, but share with others, uh, right now?

So you've, you've rightly pointed to this really central fact that I call this the romance of dharma. The notion that in order to find our dharma, we have to leave our job selling insurance and move to Paris and paint, right? Probably not. Okay, maybe, but probably not. It's more likely that you've already bumbled your way somewhere into the field of your dharma. You're already moderately close to it, I suspect, in most cases. So for most of us, the real problem is aiming and naming. And that involves getting clear, and it involves saying no to everything that is not your dharma. Like, the very first thing that I get students to do is simply to find out what they know is not their dharma, they're already doing, and to peel it away, right? Just peel that away. It's, it's like, you know, a great fire hose that has all these little tributary hoses coming off it. And as you seal them up, the energy of that main hose gets very powerful, you know. And these, we experience these as little deaths, okay? Decision, the root of the word decide is to kill, right? We kill off these little parts. But so much of the, the delight of dharma is the experience of being unified. Around your calling, right? And if you read the chapter on Susan B. Anthony, you see how she— her whole life is a story of a woman who gradually, step by step, unifies herself around her dharma, which was women's suffrage. And it's like a kaleidoscope coming into focus, and slowly she gets more and more effective in the world. But it requires her to peel away a ton of stuff until she gets to Robert Frost, the same, right? He didn't write his first really successful book till he was 38. He had to peel away so much to get to that farm in Derry, New Hampshire. So that's where I start. You talk about starting small, that chapter on Thoreau, the title is Think of the Small as Large. Which is what he did. He thought of the small village of Concord as the whole world. Yeah, this is the whole world. Every little move I make matters, right? Remember in the second book on dharma, I quote him as saying, no matter how small the beginning, a piece of work well done is done forever. So if you bring yourself fully to any, any little task ask. It's done forever. What does that mean? It means it connects somehow with the universal.

Yeah, really. So what I'm hearing is, I, I just, I absolutely love this insight. It's, it's my, my sons are now— one, one is in his early 30s, one is in his late 20s. And, you know, as they've been finding their way in the world, I, I would keep reminding them that a lot of finding finding your way in the world and what you're meant to do is to first do a lot of things that you'd never want to do again. And so you, you've just articulated this kind of via negativa approach of we're going to figure out what dharma is by first figuring out all the things that it isn't. Yeah, for, for you, I think that's absolutely brilliant.

And you know what, here's a sidebar to that, Scott. There are some things you have to do in order that you never have to do them again. Those things happen, and you may get halfway through it and know this is not quite right, but you might have to do it in order that you never have to do it again.

Well, that, that's— I appreciate you sharing that because I remember I, I wrote a piece, um, a couple of years ago, um, about, uh, the Greeks' perception of time, Kronos and Kairos, and Uh, you referenced this in, in your latest book, and it was one of the things that you articulated that, that I, that I have found true for me is we get kind of lulled into this false sense of, um, security by Kronos. Time is just passing, and yesterday looks a lot like today, and tomorrow will probably look very much the same. But these moments of Kairos, these moments, you know, when time kind of expands and when we find significance, sometimes it requires crisis. And a lot of us have lived through a crisis very recently that reminds us that actually tomorrow is not looking like today is not a given. Um, and that those moments of crisis, and you articulated this, I think, at the last book, it's, and for people that are in midlife, which is a lot of my audience, you know, we talk a lot about midlife crisis. Well, that's enough. You know, however your crisis has unfolded, it's an opportunity to, to be broken or to decide to become broken open to the possibility, to the epiphanies that are available in that moment of, of Kairos. I don't know if you have anything to, to share, but that was really a such a great teaching in, in your last book.

Oh, totally. Look, most great spiritual writing, you'll notice that protagonist begins in meltdown, in brokenness, right? So at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is on the floor of the chariot, and he says— it's— this chapter is usually called the Depression of Arjuna. He says, I'm out, I can't do this, I'm depressed. So, you know, if you go through great spiritual writing, that moment when you're broken down and you're broken open and you're incredibly available to teaching and to learning. That is a kairos moment when the whole thing opens up. And I found that there's also— it brings some energy for jettisoning things that haven't been working. The Buddhists call this samvega, which means with vehemence. That there are spiritual crises that bring up a huge amount of energy for transformation, for like, okay, I'm willing now. I don't know why this popped into my mind, but there's a great movie scene where this carjacker gets into a car with a guy who's suicidal, right? And have you seen this movie? And I think it's Samuel Jackson, I'm not sure. But anyway, the guy who's suicidal says to the carjacker, Dude, you just got into the wrong car because I don't care. And not that I'm proposing, you know, suggesting suicide, but he's willing, he's willing to throw it all up right now. And when we're in extremis, we're willing to throw off some of the bonds. And it's, it's very exciting time.

Yeah, well, crisis does tend to sharpen the focus, I have found. I want to be respectful of your time. And I know you have another commitment to get to, but We always end the episode with just one final lesson, insight, takeaway that viewers and listeners can apply in their lives. I would like to set the table and have you share one of my favorite quotes that you, I think, open the great work of your life with. It's from the Gnostic Gospel of Saint Thomas. Would you mind sharing that quote with us?

It's a fabulous quote from Thomas's Gospel. It says, um, if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. And then there's a corollary: if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you. And this— the Bhagavad Gita takes that notion and expands it by saying this: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you and it will save the whole world. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you and it will destroy the whole world. I love that, which makes every day sacred. You know, Emerson, at the beginning of one of his books, his quote is, I think it's, uh, only the days are gods. What does that mean? It means that today is the opportunity to bring everything you've got to that which is calling you. I don't care if it's building a stone wall or saving 1,000 people in wherever.

I love it. Now is the time. The time is now. Thanks so much everyone for tuning in. Stephen and I really appreciate your time and attention. We hope today's broadcast motivates you to take Take a Bolder Step into Possibility. To keep go-go going with defining, developing, and delivering the difference only you can make, you can visit creativeonpurpose.com. Please also check out Stephen's site and his books. His latest book is phenomenal. And if you get the audiobook, he will whisper it to you right in your ear. It's one of the most compelling audiobooks I've ever tuned into. And if you're watching on social media or YouTube, please, if something resonated with you, or you have a question, leave a comment. If you're listening on a podcast, please leave a 5-star review and a couple of lines about what you enjoyed about this show. And now we'd like to invite you to take the insight and inspiration from today's show and play your game all in and full out. Stephen Cope, thank you so much for giving us the benefit of your wisdom and time today.

Thank you, Scott Perry. My pleasure. Lovely to meet you.