He's already laughing. This is the 10% happier podcast, Dan Harris?
Okay, so today is the big day I've been in dharamsala for over a week and it is finally time for my sit down with his Holiness. The Dalai Lama, I have flown across the world for this one, our audience. So, the stakes feel pretty high. I will admit, I'm a little nervous. His Holiness can be a bit of a tough nut to crack on the one hand. It can sometimes fall back on his talking points instead of answering your questions. Directly on the other hand.
He's also been known to spontaneously feed people cake or tickle them so I have no idea what I'm going to get here. Good morning,
good morning, good morning, we're set up in a small wood paneled room. The Dalai Lama walks in slowly attended by large monks. Guiding him on either side because of his bum knee. I'm standing next to Richie Davidson we've already met the path-breaking scientist and longtime collaborator.
Operator of The Dalai Lama's. I've actually known for a long time that Richie and his Holiness were closed. But now I'm getting a sense of how close as he's getting settled into his seat. His Holiness, gives Richie a sort of compassionate head but a few minutes later, we settle in and it's on the interview gets rolling and it is remarkable.
Over the course of a single hour. We cover a ton of ground from a Frank discussion of whether his Holiness ever gets angry to comments about his own reincarnation that he's apparently never made in public before to a kind of Magical Mystery Tour of his own meditation practice, which left me both intrigued and Confused. The conversation is fascinating, funny rangy and unpredictable, I honestly didn't catch all of it.
In real time. So we're going to devote the next three episodes to unpacking the thing and we've recruited a superstar after. We got back stateside, I called up Ritchie to walk me through the choicest clips, from my conversation with his Holiness. As you will hear Rich, he's going to explain not only what the Dalai Lama is saying. But also how you can operationalize, his Holiness has wisdom into your real life right now. You can think of it like watching a movie with the
Actors, commentary, the later episodes in the series episodes four and five are going to get way weirder. But in today's episode, we're going to focus on the super practical stuff.
We'll cover some big questions. How do you deal with assholes? What does the Dalai Lama mean, when he talks about the very intriguing notion of wise selfishness and like, any good DVD extra, we're going to give you some incredible behind-the-scenes stories from Richie. Like the time he saw the Dalai Lama, get angry at him. In
fact, and his Holiness grabbed me by the arm, and he in a very angry way. He said don't use my just
Like that
we'll get started right after this.
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Hi Richie. Hey, Dan. Great to see
you likewise. All right, so let's Dive Right In Here. As, you know, because you were right there with me, when we sat down for that interview with his Holiness, the Dalai Lama, even before I asked the question, he launched into a whole riff about how warm heartedness, or altruism or compassion, is the ultimate source of happiness and her peace and inner strength. And it was an argument that was very familiar. You and I had both heard him say these words many many times during the
Passionate leaders Summit and it brought up a question for me about whether he has Holiness can really sustain this kind of warm-heartedness all the time. So I put it to him directly. Here's the clip. Do you ever lose your sense of warm-heartedness or your altruistic intent? Do you ever find yourself feeling angry or selfish? And
Almost done almost done here. His Holiness makes a reference to the one exception mosquitoes, except
getting nice sleep
mask. It will come otherwise and almost not. Come kidding aside. He does go on to say that he doesn't even get angry in the face of the decades-long conflict with China. The
Chinese digitally suppress us and destroyed within the culture but I feel more
sympathy.
No, anger more sense of concern, or how
bad, they are thinking very short-sighted and rumors said fish.
Okay. So Richie, have you ever seen his Holiness angry?
I've seen his Holiness. Angry on two occasions. And in both occasions, I clearly saw that his anger was in the service of an altruistic.
Like motivation. And I think it's best if I just talked about one of them because it was directed at me. So I feel like I have the privilege of revealing this. That's the story. I don't share very often, but since you've asked, I will share it. We used to have small meetings with his Holiness in the us, where we brought a very small group of scientists who are studying meditation together with him.
So that he could be updated on the latest research that was going on. And one year, it was decided that rather than have old folks, like, myself presented his Holiness. We would have young people who are postdocs and young graduate students, who are at the early stages of their career, and who really committed to this, kind of research present their work. And I was asked to moderate this and one of the young people
L was someone who was a former graduate student of mine, and she was a great student and has done some really important research on compassion. So, when it came time for me to introduce her, I said that this is my student, and she worked in my lab and went on about this, and his Holiness grabbed me by the arm, and he in a very angry way. He said don't use my
Just like that and it was a shock to my system in a wake-up call and then he started laughing.
And it was a deep deep teaching, which I will never forget and affected me in a cellular way and it lasted like a millisecond. But I clearly saw a flash of anger that was in the service of being compassionate to me and helping me understand my own self involvement in this
case.
That's an incredible story and we all need. I mean, just so you don't feel picked on here. We all need to be Jarred out of self-involvement. Some of us more than others. But let's just go back to anger for a second because most of us do get angry and not in a helpful way and quite frequently. So, should we feel badly about ourselves because of that? And what is your research show about how best to manage this anger?
Absolutely not. I don't think we should feel.
That about ourselves. The research shows that the practice of simple mindfulness and compassion meditation practices can be enormously helpful in, not so much changing our anger initially or suppressing, it or controlling it, but becoming aware of it. Sometimes people are really unaware that they're angry. And many of us, I think, have
It's that where someone raises her or his voice in a certain context and they're not really aware that they're doing it. And so mindfulness can really help a person be aware of it and having insight into. It can help us understand what the causes of the anger might be and help us change our relationship to the anger so that we're not completely fused with the anger, you know? We often use Expressions when we talk about our own emotions, we say,
I am angry or I'm sad or I'm depressed and we can ask ourselves really. Is it all of us that is feeling anger every cell in your body is angry. I mean, what does it actually mean to say, I am angry, what does that mean? And then we can really start to penetrate what this eye is that is angry and that helps to give us some distance from it and over time gradually step by
Step it begins to dissipate more
easily.
100% this shows up in the research and it shows up in my own and of one laboratory. Having meditated for a while now that you can surf your anger, instead of drowning in it and that applies to all sorts of difficult emotions. However, the sort of next level of difficulty is, when you're dealing with a truly difficult person or people, and I wanted to get some practicality on that from the Dalai Lama. So I asked him about a specifically sincere.
Reference the Chinese. So let's listen to that. You mentioned that you're able to feel compassionate for the Chinese, who invaded your country and put you into Exile. How can regular people who are not monks, feel compassion, for difficult people.
I think basically human nature warm-heartedness because we are social animal.
if we kept all modernist, then I think the should not happen first world war, Second World War
because has a genuine sense of Brotherhood Sisterhood.
And here, I always emphasis sense of Oneness of seven or eight billion human being, we are actually brother sisters.
We have to live together on this planet.
So I remember being a little frustrated with that answer because I was hoping to get some practical advice, maybe, even some meditation advice about how to deal with difficult people and I heard him sort of go back to his talking points about Oneness and Brotherhood and social animals, and 7 to 8 billion human beings. Why do you think the Dalai Lama is so repetitive? Is it possible that age is a contributor?
I think he's repetitive.
Because as he is nearing the later stages of his life, he's focusing on those things that he considers to be. Most important and really has less interest in things that are more peripheral to these really key issues and I've known him now for 40 years, I think and I've never seen him give at least in a public context for
Westerners practical, meditation instructions. You know, he teaches from the insights that he gets from his own practice and in the Tibetan tradition and it's the case that there are simple pointers that are given by a teacher and then you go off and practice. You don't get kind of handheld all the way, you gotta just do it and sort of Discover it. And so I think he's at
Thin part reflecting that as well when we were together. As part of that visited our Masala, I was with him for about three and a half weeks and saw him many times over the course of this period. And I would say that his Holiness is living mostly in a non conceptual World these days because he spends so much time by himself, not interacting with others. And then, when he is with others, he's really focusing on.
On the things that matter the most which are these points that he keeps coming back to.
What do you mean by non conceptual
for his Holiness compassion is not a concept? It is a lived experience so that when he sees you and when he sees me, he's actually seeing us as brothers. I mean, literally,
And it's not just a phrase, it's not just a way of speaking. It's a deeply embodied, perceptual stance toward the universe,
but that is the result of decades. And maybe if you believe in reincarnation lifetimes of practice, you know, you say he teaches from the insights and doesn't do a lot of hand-holding, but I think the rest of us at least in the west do, need some hand-holding. So I wonder if you could
Give us some and talk about what you've learned from your research and your practice about what we can do to develop compassion for difficult people.
Yeah, so I really appreciate that question and also believe it's a super important question and it's probably much easier for people to do that by starting with people who are not the most difficult people, people who are just sort of a little bit annoying if you
Will not the most problematic person in one's life and it's something that can be gradually approached step-by-step. So there are a few things that the research has shown. First, I'll speak about the research and then I'll speak about my own experience. One of the things that the research shows is that there are real behavioral consequences that are measurable when a person does this, and
And just to give you one example from our own research and this is research with very young children, who were taught, these kinds of practices starting in preschool. We had photographs of every kid in the class and we asked the kids to pick out their favorite friend in the class, you know, and they picked out from the photograph and we asked the kids to pick out their least favorite person in the class.
And then after they went through these practices, we gave them a bunch of stickers, which is a very important currency for a four-year-old. And we asked the kids to distribute the stickers in envelopes, according to how they wish to distribute them. And we had one envelope where there was a picture of themselves and another envelope that had a picture of their least favorite person in the class. And it turns out that kids
Actually distribute significantly more stickers to their least favorite friend in the class. After going through this Simple, Kindness training, where they are taught to reflect on the feelings of another person. Take the perspective of another person and to appreciate that. A kid may do something that may be annoying to you but they don't necessarily
I mean to hurt you by it, it's a byproduct of what they're doing. And so those kinds of lessons have these really important behavioral consequences in my own life. As a practitioner, you know, I do these kinds of practices as part of my daily practice and then when I know I'm going to have to be with a person who is difficult in one way or another, I specifically.
We bring them into my mind and my heart. I try to appreciate the fact that they don't mean to be difficult. It's just a product of their upbringing there, as they say in the Buddhist tradition, causes and conditions, but they have the same wish to be happy that I do, you know, I don't, I haven't measured it, but I have certainly over the long course of my career. I've become you know, much less.
Angry myself, much less, volatile, and much less perturbed by difficult people.
Yes, me too. And just to put a fine point on it there are these practices where you can train up your compassion muscle, you can find them on the healthy Minds app or the 10% happier app or many other meditation, apps, and research that Richie. And others have done shows that these practices have physiological psychological and even behavioral benefits that can really help you deal.
Deal with difficult people that does lead to the question of why, you know what's in it for me? Why do I need to be nice to these mean he's and I actually get to that in this next clip with the Dalai Lama where I asked him about one of my favorite of his Concepts. What is wise, selfishness tinging wall
compassionate way to other is best way to fulfill your own.
East.
Now for example, my own for a practice always think other
result, I get
benefit here, his Holiness, sticks his tongue out at me so although not motivated selfish but it actually happened that we had been other sincerely, then you get maximum benefit.
So is there science to back up this self-interested case he's making for not being a jerk?
Absolutely. I mean the clearest is a sort of prototype experiment that is part of a whole cottage industry of research. That has the following characteristic. You can bring a group of people into the laboratory, in the morning, assess their level of happiness, you then give them money real cash.
If you tell them, please go spend the money on yourself. Everyone has things they wanted to by themselves but they can't really justify it. Here's $100. Go buy yourself some gifts. The only requirement is that you cannot spend the money on anybody else. You just need to buy stuff for yourself, another group comes into the lab in the morning. Same thing they are given the hundred dollars and they say please go buy gifts for other people today.
The only constraint is, you can't spend a penny on yourself, just go buy stuff for others and they come back at the end of the day and their level of happiness, is assessed. And, of course, all the listeners. I'm sure can guess which group by far is happier at the end of the day by far, it's not like a minor statistical result. It's a whopping affect. People are happier when they're benefiting others, it's very clear.
So, what is the line here though, between helping people sincerely and helping people because, you know, it's good for you and how do we know whether we're on the right side of this selfish unselfish
line? Yeah, that's a great question. And I would say that at the beginning, it doesn't matter. So that if you do something for someone else, out of his selfish motive, that's okay, you're still benefiting them. You know, there's a very famous psychologist by the name of
Gordon allport and he had this concept called functional autonomy. And what this concept means is that you can engage in a behavior initially for one motive and then it changes over time. And we see this all the time. Often people do something because their friends are doing it, but then it takes on a life of its own and they begin to do it more out of their own intrinsic motivation.
This is a case where I firmly believe that if a person started to do this, for selfish reasons that gradually over time, this would change because this is really part of our nature. You know here the Dalai Lama I think is onto something. And again scientific research shows that humans are born to be kind. They're born to be altruistic and the data here are
Really clear. So that if you show, for example, a six month, old infant a puppet interaction, where the puppets are altruistic to one another and warm-hearted compared to selfish and you ask which of these interactions to six month old babies prefer to look at
They clearly show a preference for the altruistic encounter. And again it's not like 55% of the infants prefer the altruism and 45% prefer selfish 100% 100% of six month old infants prefer the altruistic so there's no question intellectually. I buy all of this, but I'm going to be a little self revelatory here. And admit that these discussions of compassion often for me, produced a kind of
Esther syndrome because maybe a perverse impact of my mindfulness practice is more keenly aware of my own selfish Tendencies and I sometimes fear that they may not be up rudaba
Help me Uncle Richie.
Well first, let me say that I deeply, appreciate and admire, your honesty, and your awareness. And having awareness of what's happening in your mind is really a necessary condition for any form of change. And so, that's wonderful. And that should be celebrated, and I think that your experience then is super common. I think most of us including me
Me have those experiences at times. And, you know, I think that it really is a commentary on the culture, in which we live cross-cultural research, shows that, for example, people who are raised in East Asian cultures don't have the same kind of individualistic tendency that we do. And so it seems quite clear that these are culturally acquired characteristics so it does take a lot.
Uproot in a deep way these kinds of propensities that we have learned over time and that's why we need to do these
practices.
I just want to add here in the name of clarity that the Dalai Lama does argue that you do need to be a little bit selfish in the traditional sense. Listen to that.
Truism
does not remain to you completely forget your own interest. No.
So we do need to look out for our own interests which makes me feel a little bit better about my own ambition, I guess. And yet compassion, you know, focusing on other people has so many benefits including physical benefits. In fact during our interview when the Dalai Lama mentioned these physical benefits, I gave him a compliment on how those benefits have manifested.
Stood for him. So let's listen to that. You look good. Hmm. I said you look good because well yes
my physical. Now in storage old
age here, his Holiness takes off his robe. Not all of it. Just to kind of the top part and shows off his bod to the amusement of everybody in the room.
I didn't feel anger really destroyer of your health more compassionate mind really helpful your physical health. It brings in a peace, peace of mind and very bad for our health. Peace of mind, compassion really help to keep healthy body.
And nice smile. And here once again, he's six out of time. Okay. I'm not sure their dental benefits to compassion but in terms of the rest of our physiology Richie, what is the research say about? Developing our capacity for kindness compassion and altruism,
there is a growing body of serious. Scientific evidence on the biological consequences of training compassion and there.
Are some really exciting findings so probably the most health relevant finding is that this kind of training seems to decrease inflammation and molecules that promote inflammation in the body. So there are these molecules that are called, pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are molecules that play an important role in many chronic illnesses. Where inflammation is a significant accomplishment,
He meant these illnesses are very they can be cardiovascular illnesses, arthritic illnesses. Asthma just a whole variety of different chronic illnesses where inflammation plays a role and compassion meditation seems to decrease inflammation which will have very broad impact on a whole category of chronic illnesses. That really exact a toll.
In our society. And so, you know, I think it's important for listeners to appreciate that compassion is not going to cure any illnesses, we're not saying that. But what compassion will do is it will change the symptom profile of illnesses. It will decrease the severity of illnesses and it will generally lead to Better Health. When you look at Large Scale, heh
D me, a logical research that kind of research, clearly shows that happier. People are healthier physically healthier. It doesn't mean though that this applies to everyone, there are certainly people who are happy and who have chronic illnesses. There are also people who are unhappy and who may be physically healthy, but this is kind of the law of averages. If you look at large populations, you see.
See this General Trend and it invites the possibility that cultivating compassion and other qualities. That are important for our well-being will actually have a beneficial effect on our physical health.
Before we wrap up this episode one last clip and this is a comment, a very short one from the Dalai Lama that I know struck you when we were in the room. So I want to play it to you. And then here on the backside, why it's struck you
as if time will my debt, I betcha Tate on altruism
So he said this many times throughout the course of the interview but when you and I were chit-chatting right afterwards, you really singled that out as something that struck you, why,
you know, when a person is facing his or her death, there are innumerable things that they could be focusing on and to be focusing on altruism is kind of remarkable. And what it says to me is that even in the last moment of his life, he
he is committed to focus on the welfare of others and it just is inspiring to me to see the depth of his
commitment.
Agreed. And now you mentioned the d word death. We're going to talk about life after death and claims of reincarnation and rebirth in tomorrow's episode in the meantime, Richie, thank you very much and we'll see you back here tomorrow. Wonderful. Thank you, Dan.
In the Dalai Lama's view, there's actually a very deep connection between compassion and reincarnation. So how does this work? Exactly and so as I said that is where we're heading in tomorrow's installment of The Dalai Lama's guide to happiness. We're going to dig into the mechanics of reincarnation with the Dalai Lama himself and here some revealing comments which he apparently has never made in public before about the deity's who he believes will play a crucial role in
in his own rebirth. And of course, I will ask Richie whether there's any evidence for this and how those of us with Western Scientific World Views, should process it all, what's the right intellectual stance when somebody. So clearly brilliant like the Dalai Lama believes in something that you are not really sure
about. And so, when I hear all of this, I, you know, I have spent years cultivating, what I call respectful, not knowing
And humility and just sort of throw out my arms.
So that's coming up tomorrow. Before I let you go though, I do want to say that, if you are interested in starting to train your mind, to give a shit about yourself and other people. Again, that's probably not the Dalai Lama's favorite verbiage. But nonetheless, we hear a 10% happier are launching a free meditation challenge called The Dalai, Lama's guide to happiness. It will kick off over on the
percent happier app on January 9th, but you can join right now. Here's how it works. Every day for 10 days, you'll get a short video featuring The Dalai Lama, Richie and roshi Joan followed by a guided meditation to help you pound all of the lessons from that video and from this podcast into your neurons. So go check it out.
10% happier is produced by DJ Kashmir, Gabrielle Zuckerman Justine Davey and Lauren Smith are supervising producer is Marissa, Schneiderman Kami. Regular who I have to say, has been the driving force behind this series and is amazing. Thank you, Kimmy. Kimmy is, are managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Point. Audio services are provided by ultraviolet, audio with scoring mixing and sound design by the great Matt, Boynton, and we had additional engineering by Peter Bonaventure, Nick thorburn.
Composed our theme check out his excellent band islands and are a lot of other folks. I want to thank from The Wider tph universe and Beyond. They include Liz Levin. Jade Weston Gemma, VAR, D, Connor, Donahue. I also want to thank Richie Davidson and the whole team at healthy Minds Innovations. As collaborators on this course you can find out more about them in our show notes.
