[00:03:06] William Green: I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist, but for me personally, this practice of meeting difficult emotions with awareness, and warmth, and kindness has just been incredibly helpful. So, I really wanted to share it with you too. In this conversation, we’ll talk in detail about how to handshake our beautiful monsters.

[00:03:26] William Green: We’ll also discuss some other very practical techniques that can help you become happier, calmer, and more focused. For example, we’ll talk about a belly breathing technique that can restore your sense of wellbeing when you’re feeling a lot of restless, speedy, unsettled energy in your mind and body.

[00:03:45] William Green: Rinpoche will also share his instructions for two different types of simple meditation. You’ll also hear his wonderfully irreverent mantra which is, “Who cares? So what? Whatever happens, whatever doesn’t happen.” I try to remind myself of this mantra once in a while when I need to lighten up and take myself a bit less seriously.

[00:04:07] William Green: In any case, I’m really thrilled to be able to bring you this conversation with Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Daniel Goleman, who happened to be staying with each other in America for a few days before Rinpoche flew back to his home in Nepal. Our conversation may not make you richer in the strictly financial sense of the word, but I have high hopes that it’s going to make you wiser and happier.

[00:04:29] William Green: [00:04:30] Thanks so much for joining.

[00:04:35] Intro: You’re listening to the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast where your host, William Green, interviews the world’s greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life.

[00:04:55] William Green: Hi folks. It’s an honor to be here today with some very special guests. I’ve been joined here by Tsoknyi Rinpoche, who’s one of the greatest Buddhist teachers and meditation masters of our time, and we’re also joined by his close friend and my friend, Daniel Goleman, who’s been a guest on the podcast before.

[00:05:11] William Green: And Dan, as you know, is the author of Emotional Intelligence, which is an iconic book that sold more than 5 million copies. We are also lucky to be joined by Adam Kane, who often helps Rinpoche by translating from Tibetan into English. Rinpoche and Dan have just written a new book with help from Adam.

[00:05:28] William Green: And in the epilogue they write, “Our vision with this book is to help create healthy people in every sense, grounded, warmhearted, clear minded people who have the energy, a natural inclination to help others.” A simple slogan captures this vision: grounded body, open heart, clear mind. So, I’m sure all of us would love to feel better physically, emotionally, and mentally because it’ll no doubt help us in every area of our lives.

[00:05:54] William Green: So that’s really what we’re going to discuss today. Rinpoche, it’s wonderful to see you. Today is actually [00:06:00] my birthday, so speaking with you is my birthday present. So, thank you for joining us.

[00:06:05] Daniel Goleman: Happy birthday.

[00:06:06] William Green: Thank you very much. I wanted to start by asking you about your father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, because he was obviously a very extraordinary man.

[00:06:15] William Green: I’ve read a couple of his books and I wanted to ask you, who was he? What was he like, and why did he have this very profound influence on your life?

[00:06:24] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: He has a lineage of meditation lineage that he transmitted from his father, his uncle, and all his life. Of course, he studied Buddhism in the intellectual way, but mainly, I think he focus on meditation and transform himself.

[00:06:43] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And the love, the compassion is part of his nature. So, whenever I connect with him, seeing him, of course, he’s my father, but more like he’s my teacher. So, I think I got a lot of whether I’m aware of not. So, I got a lot of influence, the blessings from dead practice.

[00:07:03] William Green: And Dan, you also knew Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche very well.

[00:07:07] William Green: You wrote an introduction to a memoir that he wrote and described him in the introduction as among Tibetan Buddhism’s Greatest Masters of the 20^th century. I know that you spent many weeks with him and I know this is – I guess he passed away in about 1996, so this is a long time ago, but I wonder if you could give us a sense of what made him special, and also to give us more [00:07:30] of a sense of what Tsoknyi Rinpoche just said about the importance of their family. Because I think Tsoknyi is being a little bit modest about how eminent this lineage of great meditation teachers really is.

[00:07:41] Daniel Goleman: So, I think let’s start with the family because it’s extraordinary. Tulku Urgyen’s grandfather was a one amazing meditative visionary named Chokgyur Lingpa, who founded actually an entire lineage of practice. His daughter, who was the mom of Tulku Urgyen, I think –

[00:08:03] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Chokgyur Lingpa is the great grandfather.

[00:08:05] Daniel Goleman: Oh, great-grandfather. Oh, okay. At any rate, there’s a grandmother who is also an amazing meditation master. Mostly everyone in the family was,it was just part of growing up in that family, I think, and so teachings that, for other people, might take a lifetime to get.

[00:08:24] Daniel Goleman: I think maybe you got in childhood.

[00:08:27] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I got a childhood I think when I was in 14 years old, I was studying in India.

[00:08:32] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: So I come back. So, one morning he was giving mind teaching, which is quite high teaching. You know, you are like looking or finding your real true nature of this mind, not the, you know, mind has many aspects like thinking and like a lot of disturbs emotions.

[00:08:53] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yes, that is part of your mind, but there’s another mind, like a mirror, clear [00:09:00] and open with a space. So, introduce me the inner most space and I think I got it somehow. So slow. Of course. Take time. So, I think that space is very precious to me because I can perceive everything without pushing away, without blocking.

[00:09:20] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But I can sort of rest be with that inner openness and through that openness, innate nature, like, compassion, love, understanding, just come because a part of your own true nature, but without introduced the openness. And I think there’s so many things are blocked, and we cling on, and we don’t know what to do with that.

[00:09:47] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: So, we sort of suck into it. So that transmission I received when I was 14 years old, of course, so many ups and down in our life, but somehow that was, I call my inner refuge, one of the inner refuges.

[00:10:02] Daniel Goleman: So, what Rinpoche is describing really captures the essence of what it was like to be with, Tulku Urgyen. He was utterly peaceful, utterly present, utterly loving, and very empty behind it.

[00:10:15] Daniel Goleman: He didn’t want anything. He was just there for you,

[00:10:18] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Empty in the sense of free.

[00:10:20] Daniel Goleman: Exactly.

[00:10:21] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Not like hollow, empty. It’s very rich, empty. When you look at him, we know he’s there. He can talk to us [00:10:30] everything very beautifully. But if you look more into it, there’s an openness, freedom, sometimes very hard to relate, but we love to relate, but hard to relate because I cannot find some thick stuff that his personality is blocked by something.

[00:10:47] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: It’s just transparent, beautifully open, but ready to respond to. But who responding is through love, compassion, really like normal human being. I call something more normal than normal being.

[00:11:03] William Green: Yeah. It’s funny I was going to read a paragraph to you from this book that Dan wrote the introduction to, which is your father’s memoir, and it’s an amazing one paragraph summary of his life by your father.

[00:11:13] William Green: That’s the most unarrogant, like, like it’s the least prideful description of a life. He says, I was born in central Tibet he says,

[00:11:21] Daniel Goleman: I just want to say-

[00:11:22] William Green: Yeah?

[00:11:23] Daniel Goleman: He didn’t want a memoir, he wanted to talk about amazing beings he had met. He really never talked about himself.

[00:11:31] William Green: Yeah. And it really is about your ancestors. It’s not about him, it’s about his teachers and what he learned. So, here’s his summary of his entire life, which takes up four lines. He says, I was born in central Tibet, taken to Cam, then went back and forth between the two several times I fled the communists to Sikkim and finally moved to Nepal where I am now living as an old man. That’s my life in a nutshell. I haven’t accomplished any great deeds. Mostly it’s just one sad event after another. It’s very [00:12:00] humble. Yeah. It’s extraordinarily humble. Right. Given, you know, the fact that he presumably had an impact on many thousands of lives.

[00:12:07] Daniel Goleman: And in fact, you know, William, he traveled around the world, taught everywhere. People came from all over the world to study with him too. But he doesn’t mention that.

[00:12:17] William Green: And he was your teacher, Dan, right? Among other teachers, he taught you and your wife Tara.

[00:12:23] Daniel Goleman: Tara and I came because Rinpoche said, you really should come and meet my father. We met him 30 years ago, the first day he came to America.

[00:12:32] Daniel Goleman: Straight from JFK actually, right? Yeah. And we just felt very close. They’re a natural feeling. And one of the wonderful things that Rinpoche has done for Tara, and I is to connect us with amazing teachers, starting with his father. We were there to study with Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, another great master who you had come to study with also.

[00:12:54] Daniel Goleman: And then later Tsoknyi Rinpoche took us to China, and we met with one of his amazing teachers. Ani Rinpoche. So I would say those are the three remarkable teachers in this tradition that we were fortunate enough to meet. All thanks to you, and of course we, Tara and I studied with, it’s an amazing family. Rinpoche has three brothers who are also Tulkus or recognized incarnate Lamas.

[00:13:21] Daniel Goleman: Mingyur Rinpoche was remarkable. Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, an amazing teacher. Chokling Rinpoche passed away, but [00:13:30] he was amazing. So we were fortunate to study with the whole family, but I think each of them benefited from being the child of Tulku Urgyen in the same way.

[00:13:40] William Green: And just to clarify, for people who don’t understand the terminology, Rinpoche means precious one, right? Which is an honorific for an important teacher. Tulku. How would you define Tulku?

[00:13:53] Daniel Goleman: Well, you need to jump into the kind of Tibetan belief system a little and assume there’s such a thing as reincarnation. And if you make that assumption, people who are highly evolved, who have done a lot of inner work can come back to help other people that’s what a Tulku is.

[00:14:12] William Green: So it’s a reincarnated Lama, a great teacher who’s reincarnated basically to come back another time and help us.

[00:14:19] Daniel Goleman: Yeah. And who’s often identified in childhood and raised in a particular way so that they can fulfill that mission. And some say, oh, you know, maybe they made a mistake. I mean, people are who are called Tulkus sometimes are very humble about it.

[00:14:35] Daniel Goleman: And people Tulku are venerated in the Tibetan context. Yes.

[00:14:41] William Green: So Rinpoche. when you were I think about eight years old, you were in this little village in Nepal where your family was living in the mountains in a remote village in Nepal. And you overheard, I think your mother and your grandfather saying a letter has arrived.

[00:14:59] William Green: And I think it [00:15:00] was news from his Holiness the 16th Karmapa, who was head of one of the four principle orders of Tibetan Buddhism saying that you were a reincarnated Lama and that you needed to hop into action and come study. Can you tell us what happened there? Because it’s a kind of extraordinary story. I mean, it must have turned your life upside down.

[00:15:20] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: One evening I heard the conversation between my mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, about this news. So I have some sense because I have two older brothers, but also Tulku. I didn’t know I’m a tulku or not at that time. So I got the news. So I was little bit upset, you know, I have to leave the village at the same time.

[00:15:44] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: A little bit exciting that my other two brothers are also doing that. But then, you know, a little bit confused, so don’t know what to do. And then some point we went to Kathmandu and then my father was staying in Kathmandu at that time. So then he talked to us. Yeah, come up. He has a come-up letter that I was, you know, this and this, and that.

[00:16:08] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But then you know, it’s because I was child young, so forgot for a while. So then age of 12, the real thing happened. Then say, now you must go to India to study the under the in British. Then I go little, get upset, like, [00:16:30] and I don’t know anything about I don’t know anything about India. I never saw train. They say you have to go by train.

[00:16:39] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: The train is look like 40, 50 houses a joint together and moving on the wheel doesn’t get in my head. So I was thinking, I’m thinking how all of that. Then one day I went, someone, my father asked someone to help. So I arrive at Tashiding, India. So I eventually, I met Rinpoche. So I stayed there and study about 12 years.

[00:17:02] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: When I was really up and down, my emotional went up down. Then, you know, so many things happened because I call Tulku imprint. I was developing Tulku imprints is everyone Expect you as your previous life. So I was confused. Which one is mine? The second Sony is mine, or this one is mine. So I got a little confused at the beginning. Lot of confusion.

[00:17:28] William Green: This is because you were reincarnation of two different Tsoknyi Rinpoche, right? There was the first one who’d been born in the 19th century who was a great figure. And then a second one-

[00:17:38] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I don’t worry about second. First, I’m worried about me and the right one, so which is me, the boy, young boy coming from Village is the me or the great Lama who was born in Tibet.

[00:17:51] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: It was me that is the me. So there’s, two me going on, someone says not me because of their met previous son. I [00:18:00] respect me. So there’s lot, you know, it’s called Tulku schemas, which I learned from Tara about schemas, his wife and Daniel Goldman’s wife. So later then I went back to Nepal, then I got more teaching from my father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, and then later [inaudible] so I sorted out, out that.

[00:18:23] William Green: So you must have had a great sense of pressure, enormous sense of pressure.

[00:18:28] Daniel Goleman: You have to imagine the village Rinpoche grew up in, was a six day walk to the next town. It was really isolated. So you have to, it was like going up in a medieval area. Yeah, definitely. And then all of a sudden, he’s in this more modern situation with a lot of pressure.

[00:18:45] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Study you have to do well because you are either Tsoknyi you know, so name of the Tsoknyi is coming from my predecessors.

[00:18:53] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: So it was a great master. He has so many students, he did very well. You should behave this way; you should sit still. You cannot look this and that like the old men’s character is putting on the young child and this young child don’t know how to hold that lot of emotional problem. But the good news is I met a great teacher so I can call, I’m right now 75, 80% transform.

[00:19:22] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But the some imprint I now call beautiful monsters are still with me, but [00:19:30] I’m okay with that now.

[00:19:32] William Green: We’ll talk a lot more about this idea of beautiful monsters, which is a, it’s, can you explain the term now though, just so that people understand, but we’ll come back in great detail to this idea of beautiful monsters. What are they?

[00:19:44] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Because I was gone through that stuff, that training, that expectation I lost to myself between the previous Rinpoche and my person. So there’s a lot of things there. But then later, because of practice, because of meditation, because of awareness, kindness to myself, my two natures, which is introduced by to, so I found at, and wow, those difficult things are great, but it is kind of a monster. But there is a beauty in it.

[00:20:18] William Green: So these beautiful monsters really are, to use the word you used before, schema from Dan’s wife, Tara like these childhood patterns that we, like, wounded love or the lack of respect that we got, or a sense that we were unworthy or fear that we are not good enough. These psychological wounds from childhood, or is that right?

[00:20:38] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: The healthy one I will not call is beautiful monster. The little bit goes straight, it blocks our normal feeling and perceptions, and we identified that is me and mine. So there’s a way you can look into it. I call the practice of handshake and then to differentiate, oh, [00:21:00] this is a healthy fear, and this is a test distorted fear built in you.

[00:21:05] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Now it looks like a monster, but actually it’s not a monster. You can learn so many things from that fear and you’ll understand yourself much better and you’ll understand others feeling others emotion. Wow, there’s so many things you can learn. It became a learning ground. Then the beauty.

[00:21:26] William Green: So how did you deal with this in your own case?

[00:21:29] William Green: If we take this as an example of how to deal with these difficult patterns that we’ve adopted from early life, what did you do to deal with your own fear That you weren’t good enough or that you weren’t worthy of this lineage, or that you weren’t good enough to be your father’s success or any, I mean, it just must have been so much pressure.

[00:21:46] William Green: How did you greet and handshake your own fears and overcome them?

[00:21:51] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I smile. I feel that blockages, I feel that feeling and I’m say hi to it. I stay with them or with it and keep smiling. Feel that beautiful monster. Stay with it or stay nearby and not indulging, not suppressing, not running away from it. I’m there.

[00:22:17] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I’m there with you but doing nothing. No giving any commentary. No beautiful lectures. Just listen and be there. I call [00:22:30] fully being, just fully be with that. And then time to time, this is not me. My left-over imprint activated. Okay. And to kind to the beautiful monster. I know it’s not me. This conviction is important from your cognitive mind.

[00:22:54] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yes, it is a leftover star. It is not me. It can open up. When it opens up. There’s a lot of beautiful things we can learn. We can be transformed. Wow. But it is painful right now. So I have a mantra of it is real, but not true. The feeling of pain is real, but it is carrying wrong message. So eventually you should talk to each other.

[00:23:25] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: The cognitive mind, the feeling world need to talk to each other, but at the first they need to come together. No conversation, just smiling little bit and listen. And one day the beautiful monster starts to open up. I like to know more why you so calm? You’re always telling me something. Do this. Don’t do this.

[00:23:48] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: You, this is good, this is bad. I like, I don’t like, but this time you’re quite relaxed. You are there for me, but you are not scaling me. You’re not surprising [00:24:00] me. What is that? What happening then? The beginning of opening from the feeling Well, stats. Sorry, it’s too long.

[00:24:09] William Green: No, it’s perfect. And it’s such an important subject.

[00:24:12] William Green: And this subject actually Rinpoche has, it’s had an immense impact on my own life. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been studying this idea of handshake practice a lot. And as you know, I came on a one-week retreat with you very recently in New York State. And I asked you a question about this because I was saying one of the things that was shocking to me was as I was trying to be silent, which it turns out I’m almost incapable of this will surprise you.

[00:24:36] William Green: A lot of emotions came up from my teenage years where I felt like this sadness and a kind of yeah, just like a sort of disappointment and a memory of that loneliness. And I asked you how to deal with it. And you said to me, well, you know, stay with it. Be with it. Feel the emotions in your body without trying to judge them or change them, kind of resting with it.

[00:24:56] William Green: But you also said to me, smile at it. That was incredibly helpful to me because I feel like I take all of this stuff much too seriously. Yes, you seem more lighthearted and more accepting when these painful things come up. You’re happy to sit with them in a gentler way.

[00:25:12] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Really? Yes. I just, I feel, as you say, and I just stay with that and not hoping that it will go away, but it goes away.

[00:25:23] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: So whenever you have a hope, oh, I am doing handshake practice. Oh, through the handshake method. Handshake practice [00:25:30] method, my beautiful monster will transform. Oh yeah. This is a great method. I think you have to handshake that feeling, that thought. This is your original, beautiful monster. Then the handshake comes, wow, handshake is so nice.

[00:25:44] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Wonderful technique, wonderful method. I’m going to apply to my beautiful monster. And this is become monster again. That thought, that feeling. One, to transform, transform by this method. So again, drop the first one. Just say hello to the second thought, second feeling, and relax with that.

[00:26:05] Daniel Goleman: Just relax. And then there’s a space.

[00:26:10] William Green: I think in the west, a lot of us,

[00:26:12] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: if you relax here, then always like this. So we have to relax together.

[00:26:18] William Green: Yeah. Always clashing if we’re,

[00:26:21] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: yeah, so, and relax. But at the beginning, your mind hand can be relaxed, but in a beautiful monster might bang you a little bit. Then you go back.

[00:26:34] William Green: So Dan describes it in the book, I think as radical non-resistance. So in a sense, Dan, can you talk about this because you also know a great deal about the science of this. I mean, you have a PhD in psychology from Harvard, and you’re also married to someone who’s an expert both in mindfulness and in a lot of the, these ideas of how to deal with patterns from our childhood.

[00:26:54] William Green: Can you add your own perspective on what’s going on here? By not suppressing this stuff when it comes up, but [00:27:00] actually greeting it, welcoming it hand, shaking it warmly and not necessarily applying an antidote to it.

[00:27:07] Daniel Goleman: From a Western scientific perspective, I was quite surprised when I looked at the literature to see, for example, there’s very good research at Stanford University on how people can just simply be with and accept without judging, without trying to fix it.

[00:27:24] Daniel Goleman: As was saying, without avoiding it, just feeling the feelings and accepting the feelings turns out to be very powerful. There’s good brain research on this now that shows that if you can have this kind of accepting attitude, it dissipates as Rinpoche was saying. And this was a lab study, had nothing to do with your approach, but it’s absolutely convergent data. Absolutely, yes.

[00:27:52] William Green: It’s interesting. There’s also, there’s a book that I separately started to read multiple times a couple of years ago by a former psychiatrist called David Hawkins, who I think became kind of an enlightened mystic. He passed away a few years ago and he talked about a letting go technique that’s very similar, a mechanism where he said, the thing that keeps the energy behind these emotions, these difficult thought patterns or emotions going, is actually the resistance to them.

[00:28:21] William Green: And so he said, when you stop resisting and you just let it be, and you just abide with it, whether you’re meditating or just in regular life because everything is [00:28:30] impermanent, as we know from Buddhist philosophy, things change and the intensity kind of dissipates. Does that resonate? Is that a fair description of what’s going on?

[00:28:39] Daniel Goleman: Oh yeah. I think that many different traditions have come to the same. Different avenues. So I didn’t know David Hawkins, but it makes total sense, both from a scientific point of view, being with, without resisting, without attaching, just accepting. That’s the, that’s what the science is telling us. But it’s also what your tradition is telling us, right?

[00:29:02] Daniel Goleman: It’s what he’s saying too. I think it’s all the same thing.

[00:29:07] William Green: It’s very profound to me because I think actually life changing, because we grew up in the West, we weren’t really taught how to deal with our emotions. Right? And when negative stuff came up, like if you felt inadequate or you felt embarrassed or ashamed or not good enough, you couldn’t really deal with it.

[00:29:24] William Green: So you would deal with it maybe by judging somebody else or by hating yourself or by working harder or by beating yourself. And so there were all of these techniques that I think actually worked in my life. They made me more successful in many ways, but they don’t make you happy. And so I feel like we weren’t taught a good technology, if it makes sense.

[00:29:45] Daniel Goleman: We were talking today about developing a program for schools, for kids to help them with this kind of inner growth so that they won’t go down the usual path, which is what you’re describing. I mean, our society rewards us for [00:30:00] doing well, not for being kind or for being calm or clear. We have to find that later in life, you know, as you’re discovering.

[00:30:09] Daniel Goleman: But if we could help kids get that from the beginning, I think that would be a great gift.

[00:30:15] William Green: There’s an extraordinary line, Rinpoche, from your Fully Being course, which I’ve listened to over the last couple of years, and I’ll include this in the show notes, along with references to your books, links to your books.

[00:30:26] William Green: There’s an extraordinary line where you say, one day, all of our beautiful monsters will trust us and be our friends. And you also say, rest in the kind home of non-judging. And I thought that was just really interesting, this idea of non-judging, not judging ourselves. Can you talk about that attitude of non-judgment, non-self-judgment?

[00:30:47] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yes. If we do the handshake properly, then that is non-judging because there’s no way to judge It is with almost like a oneness with the beautiful monster. So there’s no space there like a, so it opened by itself. So you just be there, not like a separate at the beginning, maybe you stay in, thereby the mind, ego fixation.

[00:31:10] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Stop staying thereby, and smile. Listen slowly, just stay together. Once you stay together, the non-judging is natural. And then of course you can apply sometime. You can, oh, this is known, trust the capable or innate [00:31:30] nature of the beautiful monster. As you say, impermanent, it changes it not your inherent, you know, thing.

[00:31:38] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: It’s just came about and then there’s a right cause and condition and it will open up. So mainly you trust the beautiful monster and the beautiful monster, eventually, trust, and then that’s it. The openness happens.

[00:31:55] William Green: So there’s a sense that you’re saying to the beautiful monster you can stay here as long as you want.

[00:32:00] William Green: I don’t need to get rid of my fear, my sense of inadequacy, my sadness, my jealousy, my anger. It’s like, it’s part of being human. It’s, I can see you there and I’m okay hanging out with you. Is that an okay summary of that attitude?

[00:32:14] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Some kind of attitude like that? Yeah, but it changed. The secret is a change, but you cannot expect too much at the beginning.

[00:32:22] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Wow. If I practice handshake, everything will be okay, but it is, it will be. This beauty will come out of that.

[00:32:31] William Green: You have a whole chapter on this subject of beautiful monsters in the book, which I really encourage people to read. And it describes the four steps for handshake practice, where you’re meeting the beautiful monster, this upsetting emotion or pattern, and you’re being with it, feeling it, listening to it, and waiting, staying with it, and then I guess communicating with it and using the mantra that Rinpoche said, which is it’s real, but not true.

[00:32:53] William Green: This feeling is real. The pain may be real, but the narratives not true. So I really encourage people to look at this. It’s very [00:33:00] helpful. But you do mention in the book that sometimes the emotions that we are sitting with are actually kind of too intense and we have to back off, particularly if it’s something that’s been traumatic.

[00:33:11] William Green: Really traumatic. Can you talk a bit about this idea of what to do when the emotions that come up are too intense? When you are doing handshake practice, how do you deal with it? Cause obviously you don’t want to retraumatize yourself. If something really catastrophic has happened in your life, how do you deal with it?

[00:33:28] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: If it’s too intense, of course. So you have to come back to some of your wellbeing areas, maybe on the breath first, or just rest in the sensation of the body. Maybe not to go close to the feeling, the inner feeling world, not too close to the beautiful monster. Or maybe you have some place in your being is safe, relax, open place, and go there and nurture that and keep nurturing there.

[00:34:00] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And then time to time, say hi to the trauma and then smile, and then come back to your breath, you. I’m sure even the traumatized people have something in their being. There’s some wellbeing and like ascure feeling. So go there and I, that I call is base camp.

[00:34:23] William Green: So it’s like you’re going back to the base camp and then you go back to climb Mount Everest and deal with the difficult stuff. [00:34:30] [00:34:30] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yes. And you can do a little bit of walking meditation even. I like this, just feel, when you do.

[00:34:38] William Green: Rubbing your hands together for people who are listening-

[00:34:41] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Very like this.

[00:34:46] William Green: For people who just listening, Rinpoche is, rubbing his arms gently with his hands. So he is kind of soothing himself, I would say.

[00:34:54] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Then just awareness land there. You land with that feeling and relax and then maybe through that door you can connect with a beautiful monster. And then time to time, if you can change the cognitive belief or so cognitive belief.

[00:35:14] Daniel Goleman: Like you’re, what you’re thinking about. In other words,

[00:35:18] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Thinking, start to change. Be kind to thinking, oh, I know thinking is thing will think this way, but just aware of that. Relax with that. Then slowly you’ll feel, I call TBA tea up there, there’s a bag there. So that T bag could be a trauma or trauma plus something else. So you can handshake maybe with a retina of trauma, not the main dramatic feeling.

[00:35:48] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: So one opener, second opener, and less reinforce, less reaction. Then although we have intense trauma, [00:36:00] but there’s always openness around that. So we are trying to find that openness. And that openness will embrace or hold the traumatic experience.

[00:36:13] William Green: So it’s again, an attitude of gentleness and warmth rather than fighting.

[00:36:18] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: No. Not fighting at all. They fight. Some I call a trauma. Might beat you a little bit, is just take it. Okay. Okay. And then too much. Then you go away a little bit and then come back again. Stay nearby and stay nearby. Maybe. Good place. Maybe good memory, maybe calm place yes. Find some relaxation in the body.

[00:36:49] Daniel Goleman: And interesting that this is, parallels a therapeutic approach to trauma because in, when you work with a therapist with trauma, you’re doing the same sort of establishing a trusting alliance. You feel safe. And sometimes in this approach they talk about dosing yourself, which is really, I think, a different way of thinking about being near or approaching you.

[00:37:14] Daniel Goleman: Take it only as much as you can and not too much, because your question was really what do you do when it’s too much?

[00:37:22] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Always take little risk, go in every time. Little bit coming in, little bit coming closer, little bit coming closer, [00:37:30] but gently, of course, very gentle, very kind.

[00:37:34] William Green: You said something striking to me during that retreat where you said, you know, your beautiful monsters can’t hurt you.

[00:37:40] William Green: Now they’re, you know, you don’t need to be afraid of them. And it was kind of reassuring to be like, okay, I, you know, this stuff feels intense. All these memories of childhood and youth and, but yeah, it was, I think so much of the time we build this very strong defense against anything that’s painful, may, maybe, particularly for men, if you are like an ambitious man, you’re like, I’ve got to be strong and tough and pretend that I’m not vulnerable.

[00:38:03] William Green: And so in a way it was a real relief to hear, well, actually you can be a little gentler with it. A little more amused by it all. So thank you.

[00:38:13] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: You’re allowed to fail. You’re allowed to, you know, cry. You cry, but not judging. It’s just an offering.

[00:38:20] Daniel Goleman: And you can laugh too.

[00:38:22] William Green: I’m going to try not to cry during our interview. I’m going to wait till afterwards. So Rinpoche, I wanted to turn to another challenging subject that I know you’ve thought about a great deal, which is the whole issue of stress and what you call speediness and obviously you’ve traveled around the world a great deal for more than 30 years now, teaching in the US and the UK and Denmark and Taiwan and Hong Kong and many other places.

[00:38:50] William Green: And I’m wondering first what you’ve observed in countries like the US about this kind of, this challenge of stress and busyness and what you call speediness. Can you talk about [00:39:00] culturally, what’s going on here and also how it’s manifesting in our bodies? And then we can talk a bit about what to do about it.

[00:39:07] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I think the culture really encouraged, do everything fast from childhood. Doesn’t give any time to wander or like always need to do something in the fast mode. Otherwise you might not accomplish. So that constant message from environment goes into our, I call our system, our subtle body, the gross body and the cognitive mind.

[00:39:34] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But in Britain, there’s a feeling world I call the subtle body. And that, you know, I went into the system and then you move that again. And I’m going with that. When you are young, it’s quite okay. But the one day that become out of control, out of balance, your mind want to be a little relaxed. Your physical also wants to be relaxed.

[00:39:57] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But this movement in the energy world, I wonder, I want to go, I want to do this, I want to book, so I call this unbalanced or speed limit. So it’s always like, I call, like car is in the like neutral. Neutral and the full. X later. Paka is going nowhere. Just speeding. If you need to go to airport after four days, but your speediness is [00:40:30] went to airport many times before you really arrive there and everything about a rush or back.

[00:40:37] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I need to back, I’m going talking to the friend, all this like Lumi. I call that a BC that actually is the cause of stress. I found it. If you are aware of that and then you can keep the right balance with some technique or meditation practice, then the healthy speed is moving in your energetic body.

[00:41:03] William Green: So let’s talk about how to do this in some detail, Rinpoche, because the book offers some very specific ideas for how to bring down this energy when it’s.

[00:41:15] William Green: One of them though, there’s a breath control method. You talk about belly breathing. Can you just give a basic description of how you can use belly breathing? Where you, I guess you either lie on the floor or you sit on a chair and what do you do? You’re focused around your naval. How do you do this?

[00:41:34] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: When you are in the speedy mode, so everything goes up into your neck, head, the speediness like this, so by the hell of breath and the mindful awareness, slowly breathing, bring down and you do a belly breathing, deep breathing.

[00:41:55] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: End of the breathing in. Stop. Little bit.

[00:41:59] William Green: So your belly [00:42:00] is like a balloon, right? And it’s expanding out as you breathe in and then you hold the breath. Yes. For like eight seconds. Something like that.

[00:42:09] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: No. Yeah. At second, five, second, four second. Whatever’s comfortable. Comfortable, yeah. Little bit. Hold it.

[00:42:17] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And then there you go. And breathe in. And one day that become very natural. You will know when you are really in that speed. Everything went going up.

[00:42:28] Daniel Goleman: And William, it turns out that the scientific studies of these methods show it works. It really shifts you from the sympathetic nervous system mode, which is the stressed speediness to a parasympathetic, which is rest and recovery.

[00:42:44] Daniel Goleman: And it happens physiologically. It’s a very powerful method, it turns out. And so in Tibet, that was discovered spontaneously. From India. From India. And you know, you find the same methods in yoga, for example. And now the scientific studies are saying, you know what? This really works

[00:43:04] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And you not breathing too much up here.

[00:43:07] William Green: Yeah, not so much in the Rinpoche and more down in the belly.

[00:43:11] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: More like belly is doing like this, expanding when you breathe in and then whole little bit there. And then one day you do less and less and then, you know, okay, my speedy energy is down there. I’m freer, my neck is free, my eye is [00:43:30] cooler.

[00:43:32] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And my perception is more like a kind of life. And then you hold that while you are working, while you are in the, doing your business and you know you can do that.

[00:43:47] William Green: And in the scientific part of your new book, Dan, explains that this has a whole array of positive benefits. I think one of them is that you’re triggered less by troubling events, but one, one of them is that you recover better, I think when you’re in this kind of relaxed state that you’re more resilient.

[00:44:04] William Green: Is that right Dan?

[00:44:06] Daniel Goleman: Yeah, the technical definition and for example in laboratory science of resilience is how quickly you recover from the peak of upset to getting back to calm and clear. And it turns out the more you do these methods the quicker your recovery. So that’s one of the strong effects we found when you looked at all of the literature on meditation and on breathing and so on is that the, there’s a dose response.

[00:44:33] Daniel Goleman: The more you do it, the less triggered you are, the less intensely you’re triggered, and the more quickly you recover when you are.

[00:44:41] William Green: So let’s talk more specifically about meditation, because obviously we’ve talked about a couple of the techniques that you’d describe in the book, this breathing technique and the handshake practice.

[00:44:51] William Green: But the book is called Why We Meditate, and it’s clearly a central part of what we are discussing. There are a couple of different techniques that you discuss [00:45:00] in the book for how to settle the mind and cool us down through meditation when we’re feeling scattered and unfocused and confused. Can you Rinpoche give us some very simple instructions for how to settle the mind by meditating first on an object of support, whether it’s the, I guess the most common one is the breath.

[00:45:19] William Green: Can you explain how we would do that?

[00:45:22] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yeah. I think before that I will do a dropping meditation, like a neat gesture attitude in the mind and breath, three things come together. You drop like attitude. Okay, what are, whatever happens, happen, whatever doesn’t happen, happen, doesn’t matter. I’m going to let it go.

[00:45:43] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And at the same time, your hand just drops like that and the breath out.

[00:45:51] William Green: So for people who are listening to this rather than watching, it’s essentially that your kind of, you’re dropping your hands onto your lap and you’re exhaling. So it’s like, ah. And so you’re dropping the attitude in your mind and you’re, so you, so you’re bringing yourself more out of your thinking mind grim, Rinpoche more into your body, is that what’s happening?

[00:46:08] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Well, thinking mind, body, everything. Like, you know, thinking mind is up there thinking all different kind of things. You know, busy cannot see the actual relaxation. So you have to say a little bit to know, to the thinking mind and the drop thinking mind and aware of the body and just stay there for a while.

[00:46:28] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And then you have still [00:46:30] the annoying mind, you have still the awareness is still there. Clarity is still there, but not chatting.

[00:46:37] William Green: Drop, you haven’t looked inside my mind obviously. When I’m in this state, I mean, what do we do here? When your mind is racing and you’re like, okay, I want to relax, and so you say, I’m going to do this dropping, I’m going to start calming down.

[00:46:50] William Green: So you sit there on your cushion or on your floor or on your sofa or on your chair, and you kind of, you drop your hands down to your lap and you exhale and you kind of let go and you try to feel your body and then your mind starts racing and you start to say, but wait, I’ve got this deadline and I can’t believe my wife just said this, and really she wants me to pick up the kid.

[00:47:09] William Green: Like, what do you do? Then when your mind starts racing?

[00:47:12] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Then you see it is really necessary that I need to pick up my children. Then don’t worry, forget about meditation. Go and pick up. But it might not be that. It might be some other stuff.

[00:47:26] Daniel Goleman: Then, you know, I think there’s some powerful mantras that Rinpoche has that you can use with the dropping, which help you with a thought racing.

[00:47:35] Daniel Goleman: One of them is who cares? Whatever happens. If you can tell yourself that as you drop, that means you can let go of whatever preoccupation is capturing your mind.

[00:47:50] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I’m not saying four-hour drop, I’m saying at that moment.

[00:47:54] Daniel Goleman: So it breaks the cycle for you.

[00:47:56] William Green: I think we kind of like the handshake practice where there’s [00:48:00] a very gentle approach when you do the dropping approach, which also is described very well in this book and in the fully being program online, as Dan was saying, there’s this mantra, so what, who cares?

[00:48:09] William Green: It’s no big deal. And I feel like for someone like me who takes everything too seriously, including myself, it’s and all my responsibilities just trying to learn, which aren’t really such major responsibilities anyway, but I act like the world is going to end if I don’t do them.

[00:48:25] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Sorry, don’t go all the way about linking your life.

[00:48:29] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: There’s a responsible, of course, you have to take responsibility. But the, you have to have some space moment that you cannot hold cup forever. No. Well, what happened? Your hand is attached with a cup. Can you hug? Your wife cannot. So drop the cup for a while now, hand is free. And stay with that freedom for a while.

[00:48:50] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Then you can, your French open. Then you can hug Denny. Otherwise I’m holding all the books, everything that carry me. I’m carrying that all the time that I cannot really do well. I cannot make friend with him. I have to draw or put down something. I cannot, is the mind, because it’s no solid things holding, but solid things.

[00:49:13] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Hold, hold. Then you can put it down. But this is like a psychological, subtle board stops hanging there. So you little bit like courage. Courage drop. It’s okay. Doesn’t matter. Whatever happened, whatever doesn’t happen. So, okay, whatever. Doesn’t matter. [00:49:30] Okay, now it matters. Now my health care comes, my healthy responsible come, I’m little bit open.

[00:49:37] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And so what shall we do? What can I do for you to solve the conflict problems? So the wisdom come out of openness, wisdom not come out this like a speediness.

[00:49:50] William Green: Speediness, yeah. And clenching. I feel like I’m always clenching, you know? It’s like I, I’m fighting the world and fighting my responsibilities. It’s always like, you know, and so I think what I like about your approach is it gives me permission to be a little bit softer and more humorous about it.

[00:50:07] William Green: Yeah.

[00:50:07] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Be child, little bit child heart for a while, then come out you rest, proper rest. If you are holding on that, you are not resting. When you don’t rest properly, you are not experiencing openness. And there’s no openness. The inner booty not coming.

[00:50:27] William Green: So, okay, let’s say we’ve done the dropping.

[00:50:30] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: One thing is, okay, you can drop, but something you cannot drop even you want to drop.

[00:50:37] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: That is the lit one. Strong imprint. You cannot drop like that. So there you need handshake. Where are you? I’m coming. That you want to drop, cannot drop that. But many things can drop. Many two things cannot drop. So there you need to come handshake.

[00:50:59] William Green: So if [00:51:00] you’re dropping and you have a sense that you’re still a little overwhelmed and anxious and you’re like, I’m never going to be good enough.

[00:51:05] William Green: I can never handle all of this. You look at that and your handshake that.

[00:51:09] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Let me shake that. That’s it. Yes. And be relaxed with that.

[00:51:14] Daniel Goleman: Oh, I cannot drop, I cannot drop that. And feeling and handshake that.

[00:51:21] William Green: So just being with it gently and being like, oh, hi. Okay, yeah. I see that old emotion coming up. Welcome, welcome to the party.

[00:51:28] William Green: So it’s a little bit, so acknowledging the stuff that comes up, that’s just your familiar patterns.

[00:51:35] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But not only from your cognitive mind. Oh yeah, I know it’s coming. You are welcome. Not like that. You feel it. There’s some ethnicity from the feeling wall is connected.

[00:51:47] William Green: I’m amazed at how much tension I feel in my forehead, you know?

[00:51:50] William Green: I like to look at it and I’m like, really? It’s like I’m trying to crunch all of these problems by frowning enough. You know, it’s interesting when you see how you’re dealing with this stuff in your body when you become more aware of it. So I’m trying to stop fighting the whole time fighting myself.

[00:52:07] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Welcome. This my end relaxes.

[00:52:11] William Green: You have to sit in my study reminding me of this, Rinpoche. If you could dial in on FaceTime, that would be very helpful. So to go back to the next step then. So we’ve done the dropping, so we are dropping our hands onto our laps. We’re relaxing. We’re saying who cares? So what, whatever happens, whatever doesn’t happen.

[00:52:28] William Green: It’s all fine. And then [00:52:30] we want to start meditating for a few minutes. Just to get a, to focus a little on some object of support. Can you discuss this technique a little, which is a very fundamental technique that runs through all meditation traditions.

[00:52:44] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I think it’s called ka biting meditation. You choose one gentle object in this case can be your own breath.

[00:52:55] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: So just aware of your breath, you know, breathing out, just aware, breathing in. Just aware. So keep doing that. The test. Yeah, this is called. Shamata with object.

[00:53:13] William Green: Yeah. Or with support, right? The support of your breath. Something to focus on. Yes. And Shamata is a term for like resting or calm abiding. What?

[00:53:23] William Green: What does it mean?

[00:53:25] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Adam?

[00:53:26] William Green: Adam, what’s the meaning of Shamata?

[00:53:29] Adam Kane: Shamata, yeah. It means sort of an abiding in calmness, abiding in peacefulness. So the Tibetan word, she, me remaining in a calm state.

[00:53:42] William Green: All right. That’s beautiful. You’ve earned your keep. Thank you. That’s great. And then there’s another technique, Rinpoche, which is sha without an object, right Where you are abiding, but in a kind of open way without focusing on the breath, which sounds a bit like meditating without a safety net.

[00:53:58] William Green: How do we do that and why [00:54:00] do we want to do that?

[00:54:01] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yeah. I think we have to connect with the clear clarity of the mind. The weirdness, the special, unique quality of the mind is the clarity. Knowing clarity is not like when you are asleep or you lost consciousness or just awake daytime, just away, and find that work.

[00:54:28] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Openness and aware, that clarity, and then again, relax with that. So find that openness, clarity, aware of that, and relax again and again. And then thought comes sometimes thoughts, emotion comes, it will go by itself. Sometime the thoughts, emotion will disturb your clarity. Then you might need a little bit of handshake with that emotion, that beautiful monster and of handshake, the intensity in the beautiful monster start to open up.

[00:55:05] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Then naturally come back into that clarity, that openness.

[00:55:10] William Green: So it’s like that again and again. So people are always complaining that their minds go crazy when they’re meditating and too many thoughts come up. But it seems to me what you’re saying is that this type of meditation, it’s okay if thoughts come up, you just don’t want to indulge them or chase after them. Is that fair to say You’re just watching them? [00:55:30] [00:55:30] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Correct. You cannot stop thoughts.

[00:55:33] Daniel Goleman: But a lot of people have the false idea that meditation is supposed to be about emptying your mind and not having thoughts, which is a hopeless endeavor actually, because the mind generates thoughts continually. So the question is, can you change your relationship to those thoughts?

[00:55:48] Daniel Goleman: That’s what you’re doing.

[00:55:50] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: We’re not thinking about thought, but the thoughts can pop up. You know, when you meditate, you, you might feel some itchy or you meditate the breeze, wind. Touch to your body, this out of your control. This is the beauty of life all happening. And then some like thought popups or some emotion pop up, but you are not where you are resting.

[00:56:16] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Where you are landing is the clear openness. And within that clear openness, hot can come, anything can come welcome, but not indulging, not joining. So you have to know your platform first. The platform is the clarity. Aware of the clarity.

[00:56:36] William Green: So you’re not chasing after the thought. If you’re suddenly thinking, oh my God, I’ve got this deadline and I can’t believe this guy gave me this unreasonable deadline.

[00:56:43] William Green: You’re not chasing after it. You’re just like, oh, okay. Yep. Like how do you relate to this stuff so that you are not going off into a death spiral?

[00:56:52] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: This always there’s a fact or is your delusion. So its fact, and you have to follow, don’t meditate, [00:57:00] write your book, whatever. Make, you know, finish whatever you need to do.

[00:57:06] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But many is not like that. It’s not a fact. It’s just that distort it. So, by distorting it, you think is a real and true. But actually you still have a lot of time. And then if you be relaxed, calm, I think whatever your deadline, you will do much better.

[00:57:23] Daniel Goleman: I think this is true, we know this from psychology, that if you add to the idea, I have to finish this book, for example, very common to catastrophize.

[00:57:33] Daniel Goleman: What if I don’t, if I don’t, then I won’t get the money. If I don’t get the money, then I’ll lose my house. I’ll lose my house, I’ll be homeless. You know, you can go down a stream like that in a second. And what Rinpoche is saying is you don’t have to do that. Can’t, you’re aware of that.

[00:57:51] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And then you’ll be with that, and you talk to no. It’s okay. It’s You will, we will get some wisdom out of that.

[00:57:58] Daniel Goleman: It feels real, but it’s not true. That’s really important.

[00:58:02] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: It is real and true. Then you follow, of course, forget about your session. Forget about mindfulness. Forget about handshake practice. It is real and true that the tiger is in your house, is a real and true.

[00:58:17] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Then you must do something but there’s no tiger. Or you feel like there’s tiger in your house and then cognitively, you know, there’s no tiger. But the imprint says, yes, there’s a tiger. [00:58:30] So this imprint is a fall. So you have to be kind to it because one time the person has some, you know, bad experience with tiger, but not in this house.

[00:58:41] William Green: And Daniel, there are also tremendous benefits here. Not only in terms of calmness and the like, right? But in terms of this kind of training of the mind, there’s a lot of science showing the benefits for focus, right? That there is a great benefit in terms of productivity, presumably.

[00:58:57] Daniel Goleman: It’s really a very strong finding now for many different studies that if you do this very simple practice, for example, of meditating on the breath, which is a kind of universal form that people call it mindfulness.

[00:59:10] Daniel Goleman: They call it many different things that the more you do it, more calm you get. And I talked about how you’re less triggered or triggered less often, less intensely and recover more quickly. The other benefit is for attention, for focus. This is direct training in how to pay attention to what matters right now.

[00:59:32] Daniel Goleman: And that is a way to enhance productivity, to enhance your effectiveness no matter what you’re doing. And that’s another very important benefit from the beginning, I think, of meditation.

[00:59:45] William Green: Rinpoche. One trait that I have that I know many people in the west share is this sense of It’s related to that speediness and busyness, this sense of never being productive enough, never being good enough, never being satisfied, always [01:00:00] feeling like we are failing.

[01:00:01] William Green: And I, I often feel like it, it’s what drives me to be more successful and more productive than I would be otherwise. But it definitely doesn’t make me happy. It makes me suffer from plenty of stress and anxiety that a lot of which is self-induced. And there was someone on your retreat who asked an extraordinary question where she was, she said, look, I always feel like I’m failing.

[01:00:22] William Green: And everyone else would say that I’m actually really successful, but I don’t feel like it. And she said, I can’t even really enjoy my marriage or my kids or anything, because I always, I’m beating myself up. And I wondered if you could talk a bit about this subject because I feel like part of what’s happening for people like me or like her, is that we feel like we succeed because we’re anxious, because we’re pushing ourselves very hard.

[01:00:45] William Green: And there’s a fear, I think that if we let go. And we don’t beat ourselves up the whole time, then we are going to fail. And how do you think through this issue in a healthy way?

[01:00:58] Daniel Goleman: This is actually one of the beautiful monsters you’re describing. It’s the sense of, sometimes it’s called the imposter phenomena.

[01:01:05] Daniel Goleman: No matter how successful you are, you feel you didn’t really deserve it. You don’t really have the ability; you’ll be found out one day. This is the fear that goes with this is the not true part. The feelings are real, and they drive us. But this is a very self-defeating way to motivate yourself.

[01:01:26] Daniel Goleman: Because what you’re doing is creating anxiety and stress for yourself [01:01:30] over and above whatever the world is giving you. So I think the secret, or the key here is to cut through that in the way that is describing, to say, okay, I have these feelings, I have these thoughts. But just to be with that. And not to fight it, not to let it drive you because William, I think the standard model of success in our society is actually quite neurotic.

[01:01:57] Daniel Goleman: It’s that if we don’t keep up, if we don’t drive ourselves, we’ll somehow fail and fall behind. And so we get all of the self-judgment, self-criticism, this sense of I got to do it. The tension that goes with that river is saying, do it, but drop the tension. Do it.

[01:02:17] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But the find be with essence, love the whole thing.

[01:02:22] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Here is the essence. Love is missing. The basic okayness, basic wellbeing, the inner home is missing. And this driving for success is a good, I’m not saying it’s a bad, it’s good, but you have to have a help of the basic wellbeing and together that you can be very successful. At the same time, the basic being is happy and there’s two kinds of happy.

[01:02:51] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Happy without reason, happy with the reason. So if you put all your happiness with the reason, but [01:03:00] all the reasonable, all the reasons are not really reasonable. They’re thinking, no, sorry, they’re changing, moving.

[01:03:07] William Green: Yeah, impermanent like everything else. They don’t last.

[01:03:11] Daniel Goleman: But it’s important that he’s pointed to something else, which is an ongoing sense of okayness.

[01:03:18] Daniel Goleman: Because if you have that and you operate from that, it’s a very different mode. You can be highly effective, but without driving yourself crazy, what’s the tension, without the stress?

[01:03:31] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Well, you still will do same job and result even maybe better, but you are happy.

[01:03:38] William Green: You had a very interesting answer to that lady who asked you the question on the retreat where you said to her, something along the lines of, you are externally successful, but I want you to be internally successful too.

[01:03:52] William Green: And I really did a double take when you said that because I feel like often that’s where I’m failing, that it’s like I can feel like, yeah, I’m externally successful, but I never actually can really relish it because I’m so busy beating myself up. And so how do you tap into that sense of what you call essence love this like in practical terms, because it’s a very vague idea, right?

[01:04:14] William Green: Essence love, which you define as this sort of sense of being just basic okayness for no reason. How do you, when you’re dissatisfied with yourself and you are used to beating yourself up and thinking, wait, I’m falling behind. I should do more. How do you tap into that state of essence [01:04:30] love of basic okayness, independent of your circumstances?

[01:04:34] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I think a little bit training through mindful awareness. And you have to drop all this worry for why. It’s not like a forever removing from you just take your backpack and then two to yourself what is down there, and then you might meet some beautiful monsters through handshake. Practice it. Open up.

[01:04:57] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: When it opens up naturally you feel okay. Huh? I’m okay. Why you okay? No reason. I’m just feel good. I feel okay. And we have to nurture that time to time. Reconnect with that, nurture that Then that purified the hollow insight in deep down there’s a hollow, many people have the hollow and then there’s no hollower, there’s some rich richness and that is love.

[01:05:32] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Ready to love to other, some kind of, I call basic spark shining. I’m okay with the busy or, but I’m okay without that also. Okay. So I call the dance between these two, two. One is social eye, one is like basic, healthy, mere eye.

[01:05:55] William Green: And the mere eye is just, this is such a complicated subject. I’m hesitant to [01:06:00] go into it, but can you give us a sense of what you call them? What would you like to say about this Daniel?

[01:06:07] Daniel Goleman: Very interesting. So her has a model of several different eyes. One is the needy real fight eye. It’s the one that worries, it’s the one that says I’m a, I have a deadline. If I don’t get it, it’s something terrible. It’s that state of mind. And then there’s what he calls the me I, which is very different.

[01:06:27] Daniel Goleman: M e r e. Basic. Yeah. M e r e. Mere I. Where you’re sufficient unto yourself. You have this basic okayness is says there’s a social eye. That’s your role. You do a podcast, you’re a journalist, you write, and you use that effectively to help other people. But that’s, that is not who you are.

[01:06:50] Daniel Goleman: You put it on, and you take it off.

[01:06:53] Daniel Goleman: You know when you’re William at home, you’re someone

[01:06:55] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: else then William at work. Exactly. So you are loving, open, normal, good sensing. But then, oh, my social eye comes in. Okay. Use social eyes in the form of compassion way.

[01:07:12] William Green: And you mentioned something in the book, Daniel, I think you write about the Dalai Lama, who both of you are friends with. There’s a beautiful example of someone who ha, who’s brilliant at using his social eye. Like he operates brilliantly in public.

[01:07:25] Daniel Goleman: Yes. And what’s remarkable about him is he’s so [01:07:30] flexible with it. Depending on the context, depending on who he’s with, depending on what people expect of him, he brings out a different social eye and he does it very seamlessly.

[01:07:41] William Green: Well, you were saying there was a study by Paul Eckman, I think, where he looked at the Dalai Lama’s face and he would mirror the expression of the other person in this amazing way. And then the other person would go, and his face would go flat again, and then the next person would come and his face would mirror their face.

[01:07:59] William Green: Paul

[01:07:59] Daniel Goleman: Eckman was a world expert on the facial expression of emotion, and when he met the dial on, he said, I’d never seen a face like that. First of all, he freely expresses the entire range of human emotion. And then second of all, he reflects whatever the person he’s with at that moment is feeling. But then he drops it and he said, Eckman said, most people don’t, can’t drop it.

[01:08:25] Daniel Goleman: It stays with him. But he’s so adaptable and agile. This is the way he manifests the social self so that he’s ready for the next person and the next person and the next person.

[01:08:39] William Green: So Rinpoche. When I try to sum up a lot of your teachings and see the link between your teachings of handshake practice dropping, trying to avoid reifying, our own ego, our reified eye, and making, you know, believing too much in who we are and how great we are, or how solid we are, or how permanent we are, a lot of your practices seem to [01:09:00] be kind of a letting go and a lightning up and then saying, if I drop all of these worries and all of these fears and all of these childhood patterns, then what’s underneath it is actually a much simpler and kinder and less fearful and more loving person.

[01:09:16] William Green: Is that fair to say that’s what we’re discovering?

[01:09:20] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yes. I think you know my boat more than I do. I

[01:09:26] William Green: just read it last, last night. So it’s fresher to me than it is to you. Yes. But it’s a very nice view of human nature that underneath all of the nonsense and all of the worry, you know, you talk about dropping the backpack of neuros, you know, like dropping a lot of this nonsense and underneath discovering, actually for the most part people are pretty good and pretty loving.

[01:09:48] William Green: And pretty kind. And I find that myself, that like, when I behave worst, it’s usually because I’m stressed out. So when you think of your father, for example, or you think of the Dalai Lama or you think of your other great teachers, is this what they’re representing in a sense, this freedom where they’ve got rid of so much of this stuff that they’re able to operate in a clear and simple way?

[01:10:11] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yes. Clear and simple. And they’re there with the loving and caring, but without baggage, without rfi, without need. I need that. I need that Without this frozen mind, frozen subtle body. [01:10:30] It’s very open. But radiance ready to connect with you through love and compassion and under very ready to respond but not reacting.

[01:10:43] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: It’s our problem is we react everything, whether we need or no need to react. But when you found that simplicity, openness with the essence love, you are like, you know, like little bit like, you know, big tree, but leaves. Everything moves, but there’s some groundedness and very open emotionally do block and loving emotion, caring emotion, all there.

[01:11:14] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And the mind is not, you know, repeating after same problem again. So to work fresh, open, and they’re like that.

[01:11:23] William Green: You also write about in your book, carefree Dignity, which I was rereading last night. You write about being with your father in the last few months of his life and how he behaved. And you said he always held others to be more important than himself, even when he could hardly take one step on his own.

[01:11:39] William Green: And there’s a lovely description of how someone would come to visit him, and he would get his helpers to sort of hold him up by the window so he could wave goodbye to people even when he could barely walk. So it seems like compassion is a very big part of this, that when we’re not so frightened and so anxious, a lot of compassion comes out.

[01:11:58] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: The original compassion [01:12:00] come out because with the compassion is not always a blessing. Compassion is dealing with suffering. Loving kindness is connecting with the happiness of other and yours. But the compassion is really trying to eliminate a suffering. So when you engage compassionate wear, there’s a lot of stuff comes to you.

[01:12:24] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Oh, like too much sadness. Oh, I cannot help the whole world. What should I do? I just help one person. It’s not good enough. I want to do, there’s so much baggage come and you, but you are not helping one person. You’re not helping the larger wall also because you think there’s so much to you. You become frozen.

[01:12:47] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But these yes, they know how to let you go. The frozen, there’s good,

[01:12:52] Daniel Goleman: Science about this too, by the way. It turns out that compassion means tuning into the suffering and pain of someone else. And what very often happens, for example, in nursing, there’s a lot of burnouts, compassion fatigue, because people get a kind of contagion from the person in pain.

[01:13:11] Daniel Goleman: They take it on, they don’t know what to do with it. So they handle it by tuning out. And in the helping professions, this becomes a kind of cynicism. The alternative is what Rinpoche is talking about with his father and people like that who are able to bring love. You know, when you have little [01:13:30] kid who’s having a meltdown, you love the kid, and so you’re willing to stay with them in a loving way during the tantrum, because you know they’ll recover, and you love them.

[01:13:41] Daniel Goleman: And it’s a very similar situation. If, and this is what the science shows, if you can bring compassion and love and not just try to handle your own pain, but really care about the other person and be with them in a loving way, changes everything.

[01:13:59] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I think we believe there’s some liberation, freedom, liberation within yourself, then that naturally brings compassion. And then that compassion is, we call fearless compassion.

[01:14:13] Daniel Goleman: I think the fear is I’m going to be overwhelmed by the other person Suffering. Fearless compassion is, I don’t care. I love them, I’m here for them.

[01:14:25] William Green: You used the phrase a minute ago, Daniel, when you talked about tuning in rather than tuning out. And I feel like with a lot of, there’s a great line from the Wordsworth where he talks about the world is too much with us and we are sort of overwhelmed the whole time.

[01:14:40] William Green: And I find myself sometimes in the evening just being like, God, let just sit here and watch something dumb on Netflix or something. And it’s tuning out and yeah, likewise when things are, you know, when you feel that sense of hollowness Rinpoche that you talked about before, you know, it’s like, okay, let me just eat the 23rd piece of toast or whatever, you know, to try to fill the [01:15:00] hollowness.

[01:15:00] William Green: And it sounds like what you are advocating in general is instead of tuning out, kind of tuning in and being aware of your emotions, being with your emotions. Not hiding but becoming more aware of what’s going on and what you’re feeling. Is it, is that fair to say?

[01:15:16] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yes. And then you regulate yourself how much you can do, how much you cannot do.

[01:15:22] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And you know, maybe you have a capacity to do lot, maybe you know, smaller, but you’re doing without guilt, and you don’t have a, you know, like a big capacity. Then learn more, study more, practice more. Then you can do a bigger, it’s not become discouraged, it’s become a courage that, oh, my capacity is just like a 10, so I think I will improve 20, you know, just, you know, then I, one day I can do 80%. Do you know what I’m saying?

[01:16:00] William Green: Yeah. So when you have that sense of internal freedom, you are a little bit more available to help and you’re not beating yourself up so much. You’re not suffering so much from guilt and shame.

[01:16:11] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Then you cannot help because you’re all of that. Yeah, you can. So yeah, at the end then you have a good thought, but you cannot do anything.

[01:16:22] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: And one day you are afraid of compassion. Please don’t talk about compassion. Cannot take it because you have a compassion and [01:16:30] because of compassion, you don’t know what to do. It makes you frozen. That is not right way. You have to elaborate those stuff.

[01:16:39] William Green: You seem very free. When I watched you in action over the last week in Garrison, New York on this retreat, you seem very joyful, very peaceful, very calm.

[01:16:50] William Green: You’re helping a lot of people, but you don’t, there’s no atmosphere of you trying to impress people. It’s like you seem very free and humorous. Do you feel like you’ve managed to free yourself after all these years?

[01:17:03] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: I know a little bit of dance. Can you say more dance between the, I don’t know, this, the relative and the actual what it is.

[01:17:13] William Green: So the relative world is kind of the practical world that we live in. And then there’s this ultimate world that you live in. It’s hard because it gets into esoteric Buddhist terminology, right?

[01:17:25] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Yeah. I mean, you cannot really hold in and you are just a simple human being.

[01:17:31] William Green: So in a way, a lot of this is about becoming simpler.

[01:17:35] William Green: So that we are being in the present moment rather than worrying so much.

[01:17:40] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: No worry. Sufficient worry, not over worry.

[01:17:44] William Green: I’m good at sufficient worry.

[01:17:47] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Everything is sufficient worry. But actually we are over worry. That’s why you need meditation to look at is this. A really sufficient worry is this is a distorted base on sufficient worry.

[01:17:59] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: 10 [01:18:00] person is sufficient worry, but I’m worried about 50%. So these 40 people is giving me suffering. That person is diluting me. So what should I handshake with the 40% and keep the 10 person and 10 person is quite healthy? I call healthy fear, healthy attachment, healthy jealousy, healthy anger. Not really anger, but healthy something.

[01:18:26] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: But when you out balance, and you build in the distorted one and bringing into the reality, and you are wearing that from that lens, you are perceiving everything through that then is, it gives suffering to you. It keeps suffering to your family. It gives suffering to the world because it’s misunderstanding, miscalculated.

[01:18:52] William Green: And in practical terms, so that we can give our listeners something to kind of, tangible and pragmatic to guide them. They’re going to use, hopefully they, you know, if they read your book, they can play with these techniques like handshake practice that we’ve discussed in detail. They can use dropping; they can use different types of breathing to calm. In terms of the meditation, which seems very central people, a lot of people, some of our listeners are already key in meditators.

[01:19:17] William Green: Some of them have dropped meditating. Some of them are a bit frightened of it. What’s a practical, reasonable approach to meditation? Should they be thinking of 10 minutes a day, five minutes a day, 20? What would you guide [01:19:30] people to do who are thinking, yeah, I want to be calmer and less neurotic and happier and more focused.

[01:19:35] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Start with the 10 minutes and then here and there throughout of the day, aware of it, and just sit down, sit little bit or aware of your thought and feeling. Just one minute here, two minutes there. And sometime if you have an opportunity, just there’s so many time that you don’t do anything and just sit and reflect and be kind to yourself.

[01:20:02] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Number one is kind to your thoughts and emotions. Now I’m here. I’m with you. I’m relaxing. It’s okay. And keep doing that. The result, the beautiful thing will come.

[01:20:20] William Green: Dan do you have any last piece of advice on top of that? Be happy without reason. Happy without reason. That’s good. I also love, there’s a beautiful line that, that I wrote down from our retreat, Rinpoche, where about this idea of kindness, where you said, be kind to yourself, be kind to your beautiful monsters, be kind to your children, be kind to your parents, be kind to everyone.

[01:20:43] William Green: Like that seemed to me. There’s a sort of generosity of spirit, not only to other people, but to ourselves, which I think is very hard for us in the west.

[01:20:51] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Kind in the form of non-judging.

[01:20:54] Daniel Goleman: So you’re saying non-judging is kindness?

[01:20:57] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Kindness, yeah. Kindness comes with many forms. One [01:21:00] of the measure is non-judgment.

[01:21:03] William Green: It’s hard because I think that brings up the fear for people like me, that if we don’t judge ourselves and beat ourselves up, maybe we’ll be too lazy and we won’t get anything done. You know? I’ll be so busy being calm and that I’ll just sit there eating toast.

[01:21:18] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: That is brilliant too. Other way too. Too much other side. You want to balance? Balance.

[01:21:26] William Green: Any final piece of advice that you’d like to leave us with? This has been incredibly helpful. Thank you.

[01:21:32] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Daniel?

[01:21:33] Daniel Goleman: Oh, final advice. Yes. You know the very best meditation is the one you’ll do. That’s my advice.

[01:21:40] William Green: And Rinpoche, any last piece of advice from you that you’d like to leave us with?

[01:21:45] Tsoknyi Rinpoche: Don’t lose your inner humor. Connect with humor.

[01:21:49] William Green: I like that. Thank you so much. Well, Rinpoche, thank you so much for joining us here and as you can see, your teachings have helped me a great deal in my own life. I’m a work in progress. I’m not there yet, but I’m happy that we have the opportunity here to share them with a broader audience.

[01:22:03] William Green: And Daniel, thank you so much for joining us as well. You’re the first repeat guest on the podcast, so thank you. And Adam, thank you so much for your help translating from Tibetan. It’s a pretty awesome skill you’ve got. I’m full of admiration for it, so thank you all so much.

[01:22:18] Tsoknyi Rinpoche:  It’s such a pleasure.

[01:22:19] Daniel Goleman: Thank you.

[01:22:20] Adam Kane: Thank you.

[01:22:21] William Green: Thank you. Take care. Lovely to see you all.

[01:22:23] William Green: All right, folks. Thanks so much for joining us for this conversation. As I’m sure you could tell, this was just a [01:22:30] total pleasure for me. I have tremendous admiration for Daniel Goleman, who I regard as a friend and mentor, and Tsoknyi Rinpoche is one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever encountered.

[01:22:40] William Green: So to have them together in one conversation was just really special. I hope you enjoyed it too, and that you’ll benefit from the insights and practices they shared with us. If you’d like to learn more from them, I definitely encourage you to read their new book, which is titled “Why We Meditate”. I don’t think the title really does full justice to the breadth and richness of the book because it’s actually about much more than meditation.

[01:23:04] William Green: For one thing, there’s a terrific chapter entitled “Beautiful Monsters”, which is all about Rinpoche’s approach of meeting our emotional challenges with kind awareness and applying his method of handshake practice. I’ve found this approach pretty transformative in my own life, and I hope it helps you too. I’m also a huge fan of Rinpoche’s online meditation course, which is called “Fully Being”. I’ve included links to this and various other resources in the show notes for this episode.

[01:23:34] William Green: Rinpoche lives in Nepal, so it’s a fantastic gift to be able to learn from him online. He’s a really remarkable teacher, and I personally hope to study with him for many years or decades to come. I’ll be back again very soon with some more great guests, including a terrific investor named John Spears, who spent almost half a century generating superb long-term returns at an iconic investment firm called Tweedy Browne.

[01:23:59] William Green: In the [01:24:00] meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter @WilliamGreen72, and please do let me know how you are liking the podcast. I’m always really glad to hear from you. Until next time, stay well and in the spirit of today’s episode, be happy.

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