Ashlyn Harris
speaker
188 appearances
15 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Ashlyn Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think it's absolutely complementary. You know, as you know, in meditation, you are one of the benefits is that you're more self-aware. You're more aware of all of these wild thoughts careening through your head. And so it's easier to wake up. Now, I mean, I get lost in meditation. you know, homicidal fantasies and, you know, unspeakable fantasy, other kinds of fantasies. That's just the mind.
But I'm more likely now to have some self-awareness. I mean, another word for that is mindfulness, to be able to see what's happening between my ears, behind my eyes, without necessarily being caught up in it. And so the sooner I can wake up to the fact that I'm in the middle of a jag of self-judgment, Then I can bring in these other tools.
Oh, yeah, you know what I need to do right now is have a talk between the sane part of myself and the insane part of myself. And as you said before, the inner critic comes to the ball masquerading as wisdom. But it's not wisdom. It is your ancient fears. And it is the dysfunction of the larger culture. So you might be telling yourself you need to look better. Well, that's not your voice.
That is as to invoke another amazing person, Sonia Renee. What am I? Sonia Renee Taylor, I believe, is her name. I'm embarrassed and I'm forgetting her last name, but she's a great writer. And she said something to the effect of when I see self-criticism, I realize it's not my voice. It's the voice of the system. And so you're telling yourself you don't look good? Well, by whose standards?
It's the culture's standards. And I have two modes that I'm least proud of. One is greedy, and the other is angry. And over time, I've learned to actually have some affection for these modes because it's just the organism trying to protect itself. It's just my ancient fear-based patterns
doing their best usually you know like they're it's a five-year-old's version of doing their best to protect this body but i don't need to listen to them in fact the radical disarmament is to actually make friends with them to kind of high-five those demons instead of trying to slay them and for me that's been really useful and and just to get it back to your question combining these i would say modern psychological tools with ancient contemplative tools has really been helpful
Another fascinating question is, what is me? Close your eyes and look inside. Can you find some core nugget of J? Spend some time with that question. That'll pop you out of ruminating about lots of other unhealthy things.
I think you I think I think you come more out of the Hindu tradition. Yes. And I come a little bit more out of the Buddhist tradition, even though I don't look like it. But, you know, that's that's where I've spent the last 15 years of my life really doing a lot of study. And one of the things they say in Tibetan Buddhism is that. the not finding is the finding. Because there's nothing to find.
Yes, I mean, on the level of consensual, conventional reality, I'm Dan, and that camera's taking a picture of me, and yes, that is true. But on the deepest possible level, if I look for some core nugget of Dan, there's nothing to find. And that not finding is...
is the answer and if can you stay with that ambiguity there is something healing about that so how how do you take that out of the esoteric clouds into your actual life one little linguistic trick you can you kind of teed me up for this before because you you use the phrase i am like i am so and so what if you just and again this is i want to give credit to the person who came up with this it's joseph goldstein is a great meditation teacher but he often
advises his students to say, instead of I am fill in the blank, there is fill in the blank. There is hunger right now. There is anger in my mind right now. There is sadness in my mind right now. There's no you to find. The adding of the you on top of it is just adding insult to injury, right? That's extra. But it's true that hunger or anger or sadness can be here right now.
But if you can take the I am out of it and to the there is, well, then it's workable, right? You can do something with it. You can let it pass. You can observe it. You can try to work with it. But if you add in a whole story about how I, Jay, or I, Dan, I mean, curably fill in the blank, well, that's a much bigger problem.
Well, can I turn it around?
Like my last retreat was six to nine months ago. I've got one coming up. So I'm like further and further away from sanity. But you are much fresher. Like you've just come out of a retreat. How do you balance that?
Well, it does. I think you're aware through your own practice that there's more than just the J you see in the mirror.
And yet you live in a busy world and you're actually, like me, you're kind of building a business around the small version of yourself, like the physical corporeal version of yourself that presents here and now, smaller than the sort of vast, infinite, mysterious, we don't know what that is somehow, it lives in your mind. And the way that you balance it, I heard, is
just engage in the messy business of trying to remember to the best of your ability.
Exactly. I mean, I think the biggest problem In my experience, the biggest problem in whatever, again, like I don't know what to call this, personal growth, spiritual development, whatever it is, the biggest challenge is forgetting. Because you hear a great podcast, you see a great Instagram post, you read a great book, you go to a great retreat.
But then everything about modern life pulls you back into the I'm going to get satisfaction from the next thing. Oh, no, no. The next thing I'm going to keep scrolling. I'm going to get that next sip of a latte. I'm going to get the next promotion. And again, I'm not saying these are bad things, but they won't do it for you.
There's a reason why you keep wanting more, because the way the human animal is designed is that natural selection didn't want us to be satisfied, because then we'd stop having babies, and that wouldn't be good for the species. So you need to wake. This is an urgent mission.
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