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 will say a small asterisk, if you have significant mental health challenges or trauma, it might be good to do it under the supervision of a mental health professional. But other than that, it really is universally accessible. It doesn't matter what your religious beliefs are or if, like me, you're an agnostic. This is simple secular exercise for your brain.
Well, a couple things to say about that. One is there are many voices. I mean, one of the theories of modern psychological theories is called the modular model of mind. We have these modes. I kind of think about it like, you remember Magic 8-Balls? Yeah, of course. You shake one up. Yeah, I still love that. And the tiles compete for the top space, and it'll send you a message or whatever.
So we have a bunch of tiles in our head and they're all competing for that little for the steering wheel. Right. And so I've got a jealous mode, an angry mode, a fearful mode, a self-critical mode. And I think often the self-critical mode is the one with a steering wheel. But you have a wise mode, a generous mode, a compassionate mode, and they're often just not getting that much airtime.
And there are ways through meditation, through therapy, being in nature, exercise that can bring the healthier tiles to the surface. And so that's just one thing to say. And then the other thing to say is that. Yeah, it's true that self-criticism, we're scared that if we let it go that we'll be on the couch eating ice cream until the end of time. And that's just not what's going to happen.
Back to Tibetan Buddhism, and I'm not an expert in it, but they have this expression that I have a couple of colleagues who are sitting on a couch over here who heard me say this a million times, but I really love this. There's the Tibetan word for enlightenment. as far as I understand it, roughly translates into a clearing away and a bringing forth. You clear away the noise.
All of our demons, our unhelpful demons, what can come out is what is already there in all of us, which is the good stuff. You know, you might use the loaded word love. And I think of love as like sort of an overarching term that encompasses things like generosity, compassion, kindness, patience, ethics. And that is in us.
Of course it's in us because back to evolution as a social species, we needed all that stuff in order to cooperate and collaborate and become the apex predator on the planet. And
when you turn the volume down on the you know shittier aspects of our nature the good stuff will come out and it's it's it has an edge it has the edge that you want it it does want to create beautiful and important things in the world it does want to take care of you too as well as it wants to take care of everybody it it does um it does want to stand up to injustice
It does want to be tough, but not motivated by hatred. Instead, by the good stuff, which is like giving a shit, caring. Anyway, that's all my experience of how this goes. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm not perfect at it by any stretch. I mean, I made a reference to Liz and Tony who are sitting in the room with us. Like, give them the mic. They'll tell you, you know, 90% still a moron. Absolutely.
Sure. I mean, there's this great – I know you know who he is, but there's this great Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. I love Thich Nhat Hanh. He has this expression about like holding your anger like a baby. I don't love that because I'm such an anti-sentimentalist and I – I find it like somewhat annoying, even though he's completely right. He's a genius or was a genius. He passed recently.
There's something to that. First of all, the anger is trying to tell you something. In my case, it's like some infantile, usually desire to protect myself. And often it's sometimes anger has been described as a secondary emotion. So it's an emotion that's covering up for another emotion. And in my case, it's usually fear. So I'm a guy and we don't like to admit fear.
And often if I look closely, if I hold the anger like a crying child, If I get over myself and do the thing that the wise person has mentioned that we should probably do, I actually see, oh, yeah, I'm scared of something here. And that's really helpful because then I can respond wisely to the thing that's making me angry slash scared rather than reacting blindly.
There's a difference between healthy anger and destructive anger. Again, this is not my insight. This is the way in psychological circles they talk about it. that can get you off the couch to do something about a problem. And it's clarifying it. Healthy anger can help us see clearly where somebody's full of shit.
Although there's a reason why we talk about anger as seeing red, because it can also be, you know, blind with blind rage. And so that's the destructive anger, which where that's an anger fueled by hatred, fueled by bias, bigotry. And it can get us into endless conflict. And that's what you want to avoid. That's what I've failed to avoid for too many times in my own life.
And that's still screw that up, you know, regularly. But it's nothing can happen. until you identify the problem. You talked about this earlier, you know, like one of the things that meditation does for you is it helps you be aware of stuff so that you can work with it. And so, yeah, this is one of my big things that I have to work with.
defensiveness or dismissiveness. If I am dismissing something out of hand, it's usually something I should listen to. And if I'm getting defensive, it's because there's something I know I should hear that I'm unwilling to hear at that moment. And I almost never catch it. I almost never catch it in the moment. I almost never catch it in the moment.
But it's usually when I feel embarrassed the next day. You know, it's like it's just I keep coming back to this. You know, I'm so pissed that this person said this thing. It's like, ah, shit, they're probably right. And so I actually got an email the other day from I won't say her name because she didn't give me permission, but from a great meditation teacher who was talking to me about something.
And I didn't recall her getting defensive, but she recalled herself getting defensive about something, because I was pushing her on something. And she wrote me an email the next day. She was like, I woke up thinking about how I was defensive, and that means that there's something I really need to listen to there, so I'm going to go in that direction you push me.
And that's usually how I get past the double bluff.
It feels good to point at the other person. They're such a schmuck or whatever. But like, of course, you're seeing it so clearly and you hate it so much because it's in you.
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