Creativity, Spirituality & the True Nature of Mind with Jane Hirshfield & Anouk Shambrook

Sandra Hannebohm: Welcome to the Lion’s Roar podcast, from the publishers of Lion’s Roar Magazine and Buddhadharma, The Practitioner’s Guide. I’m Sandra Hannebohm. Today is a little bit different. Lion’s Roar editor, Andrea Miller, is stepping in as co-host, First, to introduce a short reading from Buddhadharma’s Rod Meade Sperry. of an article by world-renowned meditation teacher Mingyur Rinpoche.

Then Andrea talks to Jane Hirshfield one-on-one about creativity in the liminal state. After that, she talks to Anouk Shambrook, an astrophysicist turned meditation teacher, about the intersections between science and spirituality.

Andrea Miller: Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a beloved Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher and best-selling author. On the cover of the November 2023 issue, You’ll find a photo of him smiling broadly. The cover says, How to Cultivate Calm and Clarity, Mingyur Rinpoche on Befriending Your Anxiety and Discovering Your Innate Well-Being.

There are three pieces in the issue that are focused on the teachings of Mingyur Rinpoche. The first is an in-depth interview that I did with Rinpoche in which he talks about his own experience of dealing with anxiety and how he overcame it. Following the interview, there is a beautiful teaching by him called Your Enlightened Nature. It is about how the essence of mind is empty, luminous awareness. And why recognizing our true nature is so transformative. Then finally, there’s a short practice by Mingyur Rinpoche, which guides us in experiencing the true nature of mind.

My colleague, Rod Meade Sperry, is now going to read that practice for us.

Rod Meade Sperry: According to the Buddha, the basic nature of mind can be directly experienced simply by allowing the mind to rest as it is. How do we accomplish this? Let’s try a brief exercise in resting the mind. This is not a meditation exercise.

In fact, it’s an exercise in non-meditation or open awareness, a very old Buddhist practice that takes the pressure off thinking you have to achieve a goal or experience some sort of special state. In non-meditation, we simply rest the mind without getting lost in our thoughts or emotions. That is all there is to it.

First, assume a comfortable position in which your spine is straight, your body relaxed, and your eyes gently open. Once your body is positioned comfortably, allow your mind to simply rest for three minutes or so. Let your mind go, as though you’ve just finished a long and difficult task. We’re not looking for a particular experience.

We are simply resting. We are aware that we are resting. That is the key, resting in the knowing quality of awareness itself. Just rest. When the three minutes are up, ask yourself, how was that experience? Don’t judge it. Don’t try to explain it. Just review what happened and how you felt. You might have experienced a brief taste of peace or openness.

That’s good. Or you might have been aware of a million different thoughts and feelings, that is also good. This is simple, but not easy. This is so familiar, so close, that it seems too simple to be meditation. This knowing quality of awareness is with us all the time. All we need to do is rest the mind to touch into it. Simply resting in this way is the experience of natural mind.

The only difference between non-meditation and the ordinary everyday process of thinking, feeling, and sensation is the application of the simple, open awareness that occurs when you allow your mind to rest simply as it is, without blocking anything, following thoughts, or becoming distracted by feelings or sensations.

Andrea Miller: Right now, I am here with a renowned American poet, Jane Hirshfield, who is profiled in the current issue of Lion’s Roar. Hirshfield is the author of 10 books of poetry, as well as a couple of books of essays. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets.

She’s also a long-time Zen practitioner, and for eight years, she lived at the San Francisco Zen Center and its affiliates, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and Green Gulch Farm.

So I want to offer a warm welcome to you, Jane, thank you for joining us today.

Jane Hirshfield: I’m glad to be here. Thank you.

Andrea Miller: Would you be able to start out by reading a poem from your recently released book, The Asking, New and Selected Poems? I was hoping you could read Entanglement.

Jane Hirshfield: Of course. and I’m going to give our listeners a tiny bit of help in just reminding them that the entanglement of the title is both the way the term is used in physics, which will become pretty clear, but also we can think of it as the entanglement of our lives, and we can think of it as Buddhist interconnection. All of them are part of this.

Entanglement. A librarian in Calcutta and an entomologist in Prague sign their moon-faced illicit emails “ton entanglée.” No one can explain it. The strange charm between border collie and sheep, leaf, and wind, the two distant electrons. There is, too, the matter of a horse race.

Each person shouts for his own horse louder, confident in the rising din, past whip, past mud, the horse will hear his own name in his own quickened ear. Desire is different. Desire is the moment before the race is run. Has an electron never refused the invitation to change direction? Sent in no knowable envelope with no knowable ring? A story told often. After the lecture, the widow insisting the universe left rests on the back of a turtle. And what? The physicist asks, does the turtle rest on? Very clever, young man, she replies. Very clever, but it’s turtles all the way down. And so, a woman in Beijing buys for her love, who practices turtle geometry in Boston, a metal trinket from a night market street stall.

On the back of a turtle, at rest on its shell, a turtle. Inside that green-painted shell, another, still smaller. This continues for many turtles until, finally, too small to see or to lift up by its curious, preacherly head, a single, ungreen electron waits the width of a world for some weightless message sent into the din of existence for it alone. Murmur of all that is claspable, clabberable, clamberable against all that is not. You are there. I am here. I remember.

Andrea Miller: Thank you so much. That was a beautiful reading.

So, Jane, I am wondering what inspired you to write this poem. And also, sort of as a side question, where do all of your poems come from? What inspires you in a general sense?

Jane Hirshfield: Well, what inspires me is always specific, never general. I, something in life, my personal life, the outer world, something I’ve encountered, provokes a sense of I need to understand this better. I need to feel this through more thoroughly. There’s something incomplete in my understanding or in my emotional relationship to whatever it is, and for those things, I write poems.

It’s something that I often say is science, mathematics, and engineering exist for answerable questions. Poems exist for questions that have no answers but still require response. And so this poem, there are so many things behind it. The strange charm of entanglement in physics was always fascinating to me.

There’s a fair bit of science in my poems, increasingly over the years, but also, it did begin pretty much as it seems centered upon as a love poem. That woman in buying the turtle for her love who practiced turtle geometry in Boston. that one is me. and, and, the rest of them are invented, you know, I, I somehow came to be thinking about couples who live far apart and yet feel themselves to be entangled.

I feel that connection despite distance, despite separation, I will say I never, I wasn’t living in Beijing, I was just doing a poetry event there, but under that as well is this idea which everyone who has practiced has some relationship to of interdependent co arising of our connection. With all things, not only those we love.

And so all these other examples came into it. You know how, why do we think if we cheer our horse’s name, it will possibly make a difference to the horse down on the track who can hear only its own breathing and hoofbeats and those of the other horses around it? And yet, we do. And this is as unfathomably trusting as prayer, or Tonglen meditation, or any of the ways that we believe things, act as if things, or trust that things are connected in ways beyond knowing, beyond logic.

Andrea Miller: When you were writing this poem, did you think of it as having a Buddhist sensibility, or were you really mostly focused on the scientific aspect and just the more human aspect. And did you discover later that it had some Buddhist connection? How did that work?

Jane Hirshfield: When I’m writing, all I am doing is listening for the words. I am not thinking about anything external to the poem. I never know when I start writing a poem what it’s going to be about, or what its backgrounds are. My poems are, because I have been practicing Zen for fifty-plus years now, my poems are infused with what comes from practicing Zen for five decades and more, and yet I have never set out to write a Zen poem or a Buddhist poem because that’s not how poetry works for me. A poem includes your whole life, it includes your whole self, and it is a search for something you didn’t yet understand, or know, or include in everything that you brought to it at the moment that you started writing it. Does that make sense to you?

Andrea Miller: Yes, yes, it makes, it makes total sense. It’s an interesting process. So how, how long does it take you to write, like, a poem like this? How long does it take you to write it? Do you write it over a period of years, or does…

Jane Hirshfield: Something in between often. So I will usually for, poems have different processes, just as everything else does. Some meals are whipped up quickly, and some take three days. This poem, I believe, was written probably the first draft in a single sitting of, maybe 45 minutes or an hour, but then I keep working on them and I keep refining them and I Keep trying to find in them their essential music, their essential images, and the way they step from stepping stone to stepping stone.

You know, sometimes I’ll change the order of something. Um, you know, the, the book that we’re reading from, The Asking, is a, is a new and selected, and this poem isn’t all that recent, and so, My, my recollection of the actual process is, is a little fuzzy on this one, but because it’s a longer poem, I’m sure more time went into it.

But I don’t think it’s one of the rare poems that took me six months to find an ending for. I think this poem found its basic shape rather quickly, and then, one works and reworks and thinks.

Andrea Miller: I was really intrigued by your line, that desire is different. Desire is the moment before the race is run. Can you, can you maybe talk a little bit about that line?

Jane Hirshfield: Yes, well, of course, you know, you’re opening an entire avenue of conversation that I have long cared about. You know, in Buddhism, desire is a word understood very differently in different traditions. And, I have thought about this a long time, since I began my relationship with formal practice in my 20s, when the questions of eros and desire and relationship are quite foreground in anybody’s life, or many people’s life, I shouldn’t say anybody’s.

And I’ve thought a lot over these decades about the relationship between eros and practice, and between the emotions and practice. I have always been a lay practitioner, and I think that might make a difference. But for me, what I was trying to figure out for a long time as one of my central questions in practice was, what is the relationship of these common, ordinary, lay life human emotions to practice.

And one of my models, I’m about to leap far afield for you, I think, one of my models has always been the Buddhist Japanese women poets of the Heian era. A thousand years ago, who wrote in their poems accounts of 31 syllables, five-line expressions of their lives, in which a complete life of eros and a sincere dedication to practice were both there at the same time.

It’s one of the only examples we have in world literature where love poems and spiritual poems, neither is a metaphor for the other. They are both equally present. And if I can, if it’s not too distracting, I’d love to give you one of those poems by one of those women. This is from The Ink Dark Moon. This poem was written a thousand years ago by the poet Izumi Shikibu, who, as the headnote says, wrote it when she was on retreat at a mountain temple in autumn.

And what she wrote was, although I try to hold the single thought of Buddha’s teaching in my heart, I cannot help but hear the many crickets voices calling as well. Now when I first co-translated that poem with Mariko Aratani, I thought she was talking about distraction in meditation. And then, as I remembered my own practice years at the monastery, first of all, in Soto Zen, in shikantaza meditation, you are supposed to hear the crickets.

You might become the crickets in a state of meditation in which the separation between self and other falls away. Now, in her poem, the crickets are also thoughts of her lovers down below the mountain when she’s not on retreat, because Izumi Shikibu’s life was like that. And when I finally understood the poem in a way that I felt complete, I thought, oh, this is such an interesting teaching, in that it is saying meditation is not about cutting yourself off from all the rest of human feeling.

It is supposed to include desire. It is supposed to include hearing the actual crickets. So that was a roundabout answer, but I hope it addressed why you were asking the question.

Andrea Miller: Yes, yes, indeed. There’s another line that I’m really intrigued by as well, it’s the line, it’s turtles all the way down. I just love that line. Can you maybe talk about what that one is?

Jane Hirshfield: Yeah. So this is a true story and it’s attributed to two or three or four different physicists or philosophers who are the speaker at this lecture. But it is something that actually happened and gets much retold. It appears at the very beginning of, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, for example. And, it’s turtles all the way down, is this…

First of all, everybody laughs whenever I give this poem at a reading, the audience. verse out laughing, but you know, it is a way of including, I think, charmingly and truly, our ultimate relationship with unknowing and the laughter is the laughter of I give up, I give up on logic, I give up on, I don’t have to justify, I just understand, no, the turtle rests on the turtle, rests on the turtle, rests on the turtle, it’s interdependence all the way down, it’s karma and accident all the way down. It’s connection all the way down. It’s living beings all the way down. Turtles have an enormous meaning in Chinese culture. The beginning of literacy is the cracks on the shell of a turtle being interpreted as oracles. And so, yeah, sometimes we just have to be comfortable with the fact that we can only imagine an answer, and the answer is infinite and unparaphrasable.

Andrea Miller: I think turtles all the way down is my new motto in life. And I think it’s easy to feel like a separate, independently existing self, and I’m wondering what it is that helps you remember that you’re not a separate self, and that there is interbeing.

Jane Hirshfield: That is a wonderful question, and I think it is decades of the experience of practice awareness, whether on the meditation cushion or not on the meditation cushion, somehow my habit of mind shifted. Over those many, many years of moving from the smaller, ego driven, listening only to, the interior monologue of, of the day’s requirements, blows, distractions, wishes, hopes, all of those things too because I have felt what it is to step outside of that, and it always feels better.

I’m not saying I don’t fall into it all the time, of course I do, but I have just noticed over the years that by especially embracing a fundamental approach of questioning and listening, I begin to hear the world as not centered on me. I begin to hear the world as something so interesting that I would rather know, who are you?

Whether I’m asking that of a person, or of a tree, or of a mountain, or of a fish, who are you? What was your life? What is our relationship? This shift into an inquiring mind, to use the phrase from Vipassana, if you are asking a question, there’s somebody besides you in the room, and I have simply become a person who prefers to ask questions than to make declarations.

Andrea Miller: As a last question, with Entanglement, what is the idea or, or maybe felt sense or call to action that you’re hoping to leave readers with?

Jane Hirshfield: Call to action. What an interesting thing to be asking. There are many, many poems of mine, especially more recent ones, which have, been drawn more and more to the crisis of the biosphere and the crises of how we relate to one another, us human beings, and how we relate to… all other existence on this life, and they have become profoundly activist poems.

This one, I wrote it for personal reasons, and I believe that maybe if there is any, and I wrote it, I always write my poems to transform myself first. I’m not thinking about how will this affect somebody else. First, it must affect me, and if it then affects somebody else, perhaps that’s because I found something that I myself required first.

But I think perhaps the direction of request of this poem is simple intimacy. Intimacy with all things. to use, the 13th century Zen master Eihei Dogen’s formulation of it, enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And, you are there, I am here, I remember. For me, that is a statement of profound intimacy, and whatever else is being remembered, it is the simple, essential connection which matters the most.

And I think that is what is at the center of this poem, that as the scientists who, first worked out entanglement, showed us, if two electrons have ever met and ever been put into a similar situation, you can put them on opposite sides of the very planet, and if you change the direction of spin of one, the direction of spin of the other will change.

And so this remembering of connection, of how anything any of us do will affect the fate of everyone. This great shared fate which is now, to such a large extent, at a pivotal moment because our human hands can do so many things in and with other beings in this world. So perhaps that would be the answer to your question.

Intimacy. connection, and that nothing that a person does is without effect at distances you will not ever be able to fully imagine. And yet it is so.

Andrea Miller: Thank you so much, Jane. That leaves us with a lot to think about. It was a pleasure to talk with you.

Jane Hirshfield: Thank you for these wonderful questions, and thank you for Lion’s Roar and what it brings to us all.

Andrea Miller: I am here now with Dr. Anouk Amy Shambrook who is featured in the November issue. Dr. Shambrook’s passion is integrating science and spiritual inquiry. After earning a Ph.D. in astrophysics and being a NASA fellow, she completed seven years of Vajrayana and Dzogchen meditation retreats.

Now, she provides mindfulness executive coaching for individuals and institutions and teaches within BIPOC communities, transforming suffering into embodied lessons for awakening.

Thank you for joining us today, Anouk.

Anouk Shambrook: Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Andrea Miller: To start, I’m curious, what inspired you to go into physics or astrophysics?

Anouk Shambrook: So, as a kid, I was just super curious, and I’m really grateful to my parents, Maude and Kevin because I used to ask questions all the time, and they were just really patient and never discouraged me, and so, even though I love a lot of subjects, I felt like science was a natural fit for my inquiring mind.

And then in high school, I read the Tao of Physics. And up until then, I kind of feel like sciences in school were presented as though they were quote-unquote truth. But as a Black pansexual female, that same so-called objective science has been used to justify systems of oppression, like racism, slavery, sexism, and homophobia.

And time and time again, it’s purported to prove what we know are false ideas about women and Black people being inferior. And one of the recommendations in the book, The Tao of Physics, is to replace objective science with epistemic science, where the approach to decide what counts as knowledge adapts to the subject studied.

And I really feel like that resonates deeply with Buddhism, and I’d already witnessed how like the cultural background of scientists greatly influences what kind of questions they ask and their approach to answering those questions. And, you know, we’ve seen that, especially time and time again in the field of medical science in the U.S.

And now, it’s more culturally accepted, what physics has demonstrated, that the observer literally influences the experiment itself. But, as a teenager, you know, most sciences at the time acted as though the scientist and the observer were completely independent of each other and that, therefore, their findings were objective.

But again, the parallel in Buddhism is that everything is interdependent. So, uh, another thing that really inspired me to want to get into physics because of the book was this idea that what I would kind of reframe as there are different norms, you know, in physics, we call it laws, but on a subatomic level, compared to what we experience in our everyday life on a macroscopic level, and in the U.S. we’re so used to using Newton’s model, Isaac Newton, to describe reality. And, in my opinion, sometimes in the U.S., science can almost feel like a religion. And it has taken decades for the implications of quantum physics to finally begin to seep into our cultural understanding here. And, again, I’d say that the book’s ideas resonated with my lived experience because, you know, my mom’s family lived in Haiti. My dad’s family lived in Ireland. And when I would visit, they had such different cultural norms. And in Buddhism, we speak about how our cultural assumptions and lenses result in us perceiving reality differently.

And, like I’d say, Buddhism takes it an extra step of just saying that all of us are wearing some kind of lenses. And I really love the story by David Foster Wallace of the two young fish swimming along. And then, an older fish happens to pass in the other direction. And it’s like, good morning, how’s the water? And then they swim on. At some point, one of the young fish turns to the other and asks, What the hell is water?

And so often, we don’t know the water we’re swimming in, so I guess another thing that I loved about the book that inspired me is that it felt like physics took a more humble approach to understanding reality and understanding the actual water we’re swimming in and I guess I’ll add something else about, it turns out that, Prithya Kapra, he was the physicist who wrote the book, he later went to Germany to speak with Heisenberg, the physicist, and Heisenberg shared that he gave a lecture in India and said he started talking to people there and finding out that that culture subscribed to really similar ideas to what he was introducing through quantum physics. He just said that that actually like gave him more confidence to continue, and apparently, Niels Bohr had a similar experience when he went to China.

And I guess, so I became a physics major when I went to Columbia, and then the astrophysics came in because my senior year, I was applying to grad school, I was thinking I was going to study particle physics, and then my partner happened to introduce this book to me, Black Holes and Warped Space-time.

I had no idea about stars at the time, and I was stunned to learn, you know, that they’re born, they live, they die, and you could only explain them using quantum physics. I was stunned because Columbia was really heavy on the theory, and I didn’t realize that the stars literally embody these things that almost felt esoteric.

And so it really felt like a lot of what I’d been studying came to life. So even though I’d never taken an astronomy class in my life, I just started changing my applications, and I went on to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

Andrea Miller: What did you do for your thesis, and did it in any way relate to Buddhism?

Anouk Shambrook: Yeah, I think to me, I feel like everything relates to Buddhism. so the actual research was looking at the galaxies of stars and finding out how they are impacted by their environment.

And if you kind of anthropomorphize stars a little bit, you would use language by saying that some of them lived in urban environments that are densely populated, and some lived in very sparsely populated areas, kind of like humans in the countryside.

And then there’s a population living in the equivalent of suburbia. And so, I used some radio telescopes in New Mexico to look at the cold gas from which stars form. And this gas is invisible in the optical spectrum. So even that is a parallel. I feel like so much of Buddhism speaks to the power of things that we may not be able to see with our human eyes.

Andrea Miller: I’m wondering what made you decide to move away from working as an astrophysicist. Because you seem very passionate about it.

Anouk Shambrook: Yeah, I love it. For me, it’s like art, it is just phenomenal. And as much as I love it to this day, and I love teaching it, uh, when I was getting my Ph.D. I became ill, and it was a wake-up call. Even though I’d studied, with Chapter Rinpoche, the importance of realizing impermanence and you might die any day, I was in my 20s, kind of feeling immortal.

And when I became ill, I was like, oh my God, what kind of life do I want to look back on when I die? And I really went into my heart, and I decided that after I finished my Ph.D. I would switch fields. And so you could say that I switched from studying the outer universe and, in, in 95, I had the great honor of living for a year at the Buddhist Center of Chakravarti Rinpoche, and, uh, I later had the teachers of Tsongkhapa Rinpoche and Lama Drimme.

And I would say that I experienced an embodiment of freedom and well-being as they were going about life. Thinking, talking, acting. And I was really drawn to that. And, in the teachings, they’re always establishing wanting to do our practice for the benefit of all sentient beings. And I feel like a lot of Buddhists in the United States, even if they have that as part of their practice, we’re not conscious of the many ways that we aren’t being inclusive in our everyday life off the cushion of many sentient beings.

And so, in particular, I really wanted to try and support the black community and communities of color. Primarily in the U.S., but given my parents being immigrants, definitely wanting to partner with people around the world. And I love the work of the MindLife Institute and the many neuroscientists, including Richie Davidson. So, the whole thing of brain plasticity is something that Buddhists have known about for centuries. And I feel like often science, modern Western science, can take a while to come around to quote-unquote rediscoveringh things that a lot of indigenous populations have known for centuries.

And I think it’s phenomenally powerful to realize that our brains are changing, whether it’s wittingly or unwittingly. So, I studied neuroscience, I learned the community resilience model at the Trauma Resource Institute. I learned voice dialogue, aware ego process, and Keegan and Leahy’s immunity to change. And really dove into offering trauma resilience as a foundation for racial equity work.

Andrea Miller: How are you using neuroscience in trauma resiliency work?

Anouk Shambrook: Mm hmm. Yes. Love that question. I highly recommend the book by Resmaa Menekum, My Grandmother’s Hands. It’s about healing racial trauma, and I’m just really grateful for the work of Kolk and Peter Levine and many others in establishing that trauma lives in the body, and until we begin to address it in the body, then a lot of our efforts to create sustaining systemic change so that we can create environments that are more inclusive, that offer people a greater sense of belonging that have less oppression, that in order to create that environment we have to pay attention to our body sensations and learn these really simple tools.

They call it regulating our nervous system and, imagine many of the listeners may be familiar with this, but just doing some really simple exercises for two or three minutes, a couple times a day can make a phenomenal difference to your sense of well-being. Over time, again, they’ve done studies at the Trauma Resource Institute and elsewhere about how these simple practices can really, like, change the brain.

And over time, we deepen our zone of resilience, which means that the things that used to kick us out of that zone and cause our amygdala or our survival brain to go into the fight, flight, freeze, appease, dissociate, that those triggers no longer activate us in the same way. So we might still feel, angry or worried or, kind of in the high zone direction or in the low zone direction of, maybe depressed or not motivated, we still might have these feelings, but if we can stay in our zone of resilience, then essentially, our survival brain hasn’t hijacked our thinking brain or our neocortex, and it hasn’t hijacked the limbic brain, that part of our brain that enables us to relate to other people socially. This is just, in general, a great tool for, stress management, but it’s particularly powerful if you want to shift an environment to becoming more inclusive because, John Powell at the Othering and Belonging Institute talks, extensively about what happens when we feel that sense of othering.

And Resmaa’s work points to the need, based in neuroscience, for us to begin to engage really simple body practices, you know, whether it, and I will say that it’s, it’s a little bit more than just the standard Vipassana, pay attention to your breath. That’s a great foundation, but there are things like literally humming and rocking for 30 seconds where you’re vibrating the vagus nerve and beginning to send the message.

It’s, it’s that whole thing of the mind-body connection. It’s a two-way connection, two-way street. Often, in the West, we can be so overly influenced by Descartes. I think, therefore I am and think that thinking is the primary thing, but, Daniel Goleman has spoken about the importance of emotions and I feel like the more emerging thing is the importance of body sensations to support our wellbeing. So when you shift the body, it sends the message to the brain. That, oh, I’m actually not being attacked right now, even though this uncomfortable topic came up, or even though I might have said something and then realized that maybe I shouldn’t have said that, and if we want to create change, we have to start working with some of our unconscious habits in order to make that change.

And I’ll just add one more thing, the aware ego process or internal family systems, parts work, or Keegan and Leahy’s immunity to change. Those models can help us experientially become aware of some of our unconscious parts that might feel threatened by making a change that another part of us wants to make.

And I feel like this work is very much inline with and, for me, rooted in my Buddhist practice and my Buddhist North Star embodied collective liberation. But in practice, Buddhist communities, often we aren’t really implementing this in our everyday life. And, and so becoming aware of, for example, if I sit down and meditate, with this parts work, it will say, oh, there’s a part of you sitting down to meditate. And then there’s another part of you that isn’t sitting down to meditate. And until we begin to become conscious of all the different parts of us, then when we’re out in everyday life, the part that wasn’t sitting and meditating can often grab the so-called steering wheel of our psychological car and, so in Buddhism, often we might wonder, wait a minute, here I am spending this time trying to train my mind, which actually ends up changing the physical brain. And then, when your physical brain changes, it changes how your mind can work.

So again, there’s this two-way street. here I am meditating, but then I get on the freeway, and someone cuts me off, and bam! I act in a way that afterward, I’m thinking, oh no! There are just many different instances where our actions are out of alignment with our core values.

And if instead of judging that, if we can take a more neutral approach and say, huh, how can I shift that? Then I feel like this embodiment work is a key aspect that is missing because we don’t move automatically from new intellectual awareness to new action. There’s a whole process of beginning to learn experientially and through our body how to act differently and to become conscious of the unconscious parts that might feel threatened, even just feel threatened by change because there’s a part of us that really likes the familiar, even if it knows that the familiar is unhealthy. So yeah, I definitely feel that a lot of is aligned with Buddhism and I’m excited for more people to become curious about that misalignment between our, like our heart’s desire of liberation, embodied collective liberation and our actions. And over time, you have more and more compassion for our path there because it is a path. It’s a practice. We call it practice for a reason.

Andrea Miller: Well, thank you so much for all the work you’re doing. And it’s really so needed. And thank you for speaking with us today.

Anouk Shambrook: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.

Sandra Hannebohm: Thanks for listening.

Mission-driven, non-profit, and community-supported, Lion’s Roar offers Buddhist teachings, news, and perspectives so that the understanding and practice of Buddhism flourish in today’s world and its timeless wisdom is accessible to all. We do this by providing as many entry points as possible through print and digital publications, our website, video, social media, online courses, practice retreats, and more. We try to bring dharma to people right where they are, knowing the difference it can make in their lives. You can help us spread the dharma by leaving ratings and reviews. Or go to Lionsroar.com to subscribe and get unlimited access to online articles, new magazine issues, and several collections, plus perks and exclusives from Lion’s Roar Magazine and Buddhadharma, The Practitioner’s Guide.