Tara Brach

I mean, if you're anxious or irritated or over cynical or whatever, or if you're warmhearted and open, it affects me, you know?

And so we truly get 10% happier.

If we do, it's because we're 10% more awake to the truth of our belonging.

No exceptions, right?

You know, we're 10% more caring because we know our belonging.

By the way, I have to tell you that I plan to say that.

Wanted to bring in that 10% thing, you know?

Do what I can, Dan.

Well, first, maybe just to say from an evolutionary perspective that our default and our huge, huge patterning is to perceive ourself as separate.

And even if we have some conceptual understanding of interdependence, I can say for myself, I've had many, many moments through meditation or through psychedelics or through nature of having the separateness fall away.

And really those deep ahas, and I know many people have had them, that we're all part of each other and love is what it is.

And daily, daily, there's a shrinking back into that trance of this bubble of self who's concerned with protecting and defending the self and furthering the self and succeeding and failing and so on.

So it's no surprise that interdependence is just conceptual.

I mean, we're in this super individualistic society, and it impacts all domains of life, including spiritual life.

I mean, I remember an issue of Tricycle where it had a cartoon with Buddhist personals, and it said, tall, dark, handsome Buddhist looking for himself.

And, you know, you could just see it all that it's Buddhism has been translated in an individualistic way.

And practitioners get drawn to practices or life hacks that bring our personal ease or well-being, sleep, inner freedom.

But it reifies a self that's on a path looking for its own healing and freedom.

And that is not a mistake.

It's part of our evolutionary makeup that we have a primitive part of our nervous systems designed to perceive a separate self and do whatever we can to protect ourselves.