💬 "Holding it Together When Things Fall Apart"
Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris
Host: Dan Harris
Guest: Pema Chödrön, Buddhist Teacher
Category: Society & Culture | 💬 Opinion
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[9:21] “[T]o the degree that you can be friendly to yourself, you will be friendly towards others. To the degree that you can make friends with yourself unconditionally, you'll be able to have an unconditional regard and openness to other people.”
[14:01] “[W]hen the outer circumstances are very difficult, it tends to bring out these strong, you might say, more negative qualities in all of us. And so if you've already spent some time befriending what previously you called negative qualities, then you feel more prepared.”
[15:58] “[T]he value of chaos […] or of crisis, which so many people have experienced throughout the centuries […] was if they had the realization that up to then they had been living on the facade, they had been living on the surface of life and not really realizing that, for instance, not taking impermanence as a fact of life. […] [Often people are] not valuing the fleeting quality of our life as something very precious that makes it more precious and instead [have] a lot of denial of death or resistance to change.”
[20:48] “I think when things are extreme, it often gets very clear that people either grow from it or their denial and that even the sense of fundamentalism gets stronger. The fear gets stronger. […] If I had to make a prediction, […] I would just say […] perhaps things will get more polarized that people will either become more fundamentalist or more open hearted and open minded.”
[25:05] “[Y]ou [can] condemn the act but not the person, and […] there's always a sense that the person is capable of changing and the person has goodness in their heart, as well as getting extremely carried away by aggression and hatred, et cetera, but condemning the action, but not the person.”
[28:57] “I remember reading an interview with Nelson Mandela where the interviewer asked him […] weren't you angry [being imprisoned]? And he said, yes, I was angry. But I realized that […] if I let that anger consume me, then I'm still their prisoner […]. And so I'm not going to let myself be consumed in that way because then nothing has shifted. I'm out of prison, but only in my body. But in my mind, I'm still completely caught.”
[34:36] “[P]eople feel [fear] in different ways. Sometimes it's in the throat, sometimes in the shoulders, […] sometimes in the stomach, often in the heart area. […] One actual method is then to breathe deeply […] into those places. So [by breathing in] you open and there's some sense of expansion and letting yourself feel the fear physically not think about the fear, but actually embody it, feel it. And then when you breathe out, there's also that sense of relaxation.[…] That's a very practical way of working with fear and in other words, not mentally trying to figure it out, but just go to your body, get in touch with what it feels like physically, and then breathe in and out of the places that are contracted and type and work with it that way.”
Rating: 🍎🍎🍎
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 50 min | 🗓️ 02/15/2021
✅ Time saved: 48 min