Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, one of the most venerable spiritual cliches is the notion of being present. It may be a cliche and therefore slightly annoying, but it is also an incredibly important concept and skill. Being awake and alive to your life during this limited period of time when you're here on this planet.
So today we're going to talk about what being present actually means, and then crucially, how to actually do it. My guest is a meditation teacher and self-described mystic named Rosa Lewis. Rosa and I talk about why sadness and grief, which of course nobody likes, can actually enable presence. The difference between feeling sadness and getting lost in self-pity.
Why the so-called dark night of the soul is a very normal stage in spiritual practice. Why, and this is counterintuitive, but why visualizing death can help you process the bad things that have happened to you. Why saying no can be a spiritual practice and much more. Before we dive in, I just want to say that if you want to meditate with me, I have two live in-person events coming up.
On May 17th, I'll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. I'll do a guided meditation. And then I'll talk about how the practice can help you in this chaotic world. And then I'll take your questions.
Chapter 2: What does it mean to be present in our lives?
It's going to be great. You should come May 17th, 92nd Street Y. Then in October, I'll be doing my annual meditation party retreat with my friends, Seben A. Selassie and Jeff Warren. It's a weekend thing at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's really fun. We teach a bunch of different styles of meditation. There's also time for Q&A.
and socializing and pickleball if you're into that kind of thing, your meditation practice really can be improved by doing it in the carpool lane. So come hang with us. I'll put links to both of those events in the show notes. And we will get started with Rosa Lewis right after this.
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Chapter 3: How can sadness and grief enhance our ability to be present?
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Thanks. Yeah, really nice to be here.
Okay, so, so many questions for you, but the first one is you describe yourself as not only a meditation teacher, but also a mystic. And so I'd just be curious of what does that mean actually?
Yeah, I guess one of the most important parts of it is that there's a deeper aspect of reality than just the sort of logical linear time, rational material. world that is sort of focused on by a lot of humanity as the main aspect of experience and then there are these sort of deeper more subtle realms of
experience that are present in time isn't always linear there's like different ways in which causality can happen and there's a connection to something bigger than just us so you could call that a kind of a divinity or a mystery or a buddha nature or something that has intelligence and a rhyme and a reason that isn't this sort of like just logical linear rational material that we're in
And I would say that being a mystic is kind of communing with those parts of experience, being connected to them, being open to them, that being more the sort of baseline of reality and experience sort of like arising from there as its main source.
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Chapter 4: What is the 'dark night of the soul' and why is it important?
So in the subtitle of your book, you use the word presence, like being present. It's called Unlocking the Depths of Being, Wholehearted Presence for a Mystical Reality. I'm narrowing in on the word presence because I think that's something that everybody gets being awake and aware right now, right here in the present moment.
If I understand correctly, and I hope you will correct me if I don't, that really is for many of us the gateway into what you're describing in terms of a deeper level of reality or mysticism.
Yes. For me, it starts there because otherwise it's just, you're actually just adding ideas and concepts and going off into somewhere else.
Chapter 5: How can visualizing death help us process our experiences?
It's actually, yeah, you go through the door of presence. Wholehearted is in there as well because it's about wholeness and feeling and embodiment and like showing up and being in the moment, committing to presence and committing to the full spectrum of what that can mean.
And then as you practice and through meditation and other things, other aspects of experience, which I'm sure we'll talk about, what it means to be in the present moment can start to get broader and more expansive.
So whether or not a listener understands exactly what you, Rosa, are pointing at when you talk about a deeper level of reality, aka the mystical, whether we get that or not, It's important to know, like, the only way to get it is through waking up right now. The only way to get to that state is by being awake and aware right now.
Yeah, it happens by paying attention to your immediate experience in the present moment and being here with what is in your body, your heart, in your direct experience.
Chapter 6: Why is saying 'no' considered a spiritual practice?
So we're going to get to the how of all of this. And your book really lays out these like seven aspects of our present moment experience that we can kind of unlock and investigate. But before we do that, I'm just curious, like, how did you get where you are now? Like, well, how does one become a mystic? I think the wise ass in me that will never go away would say, you know, like, just how
dozens of ayahuasca trips. So what's on your CV in order to get to call yourself a mystic?
There are some psychedelics sprinkled in there. I think that psychedelics open things up, but it's more meditation and shadow work focused, actually. It's interesting because now when I look back on when I was a child and a young adult, there were a lot of elements of mystical experience there, but I was in a very rational paradigm.
And so I was sort of like discounting that and seeing through that lens. But my sort of experience of when I first started experiencing these things is, well, there was a few things that happened at once. One was I got a bad concussion and that just sort of like, it's kind of like opened my mind a little bit to what was going on.
And then I sort of was listening to a few kind of like more spiritual things, Alan Wattsy type stuff and having sort of like energetic responses to that, which I didn't really have a bucket to put that in.
I was still in a very rational frame, but just these sort of like big, overwhelming, emotional, energetic kind of responses where I would hear something and it would be like a sort of transmission quality where I would kind of suddenly be in a very different experience. And then, you know, sort of like synchronicities were showing up and things like that. And then I did a...
group shadow work therapy retreat. And essentially it's like a very embodied therapeutic modality that is about opening these different archetypes and letting these modes and ways of being flow through you more fully. And my process was around opening up the lava archetype, so deeper level of feeling. And when that happened, It really, really transformed how I experienced the world for one.
I was like, I'm allowed to feel these things I'm normally just repressing with more of letting that repression out. Yeah, just more archetypal, imaginal, energetic, emotional things started to sort of come into reality.
And then the more shadow work I did and the more I later started meditation, the more meditation I did, the more sort of these altered states and different parts of experience started coming in.
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Chapter 7: How does one reconnect with their natural sensitivity?
It's like, that's a kind of prerequisite for opening to anything mystical. There's a kind of like openhearted, like willingness to be moved by life and the feeling that that is beautiful There's not a kind of control where I'm only orienting towards good stuff.
In Buddhist terms, it's like, you know, the craving and aversion of just trying to make things different, trying to get to the good stuff, avoid the bad stuff. And when people can sort of get a bit of a flavor of sacred sadness or just opening to their grief more and like feeling safe in that and like, ah, it's actually, this can be beautiful.
This can be, it's still sad and it's meaningful and it's, then that just opens up a doorway for something positive. Yeah, a kind of presence with less of that craving and aversion happening.
That actually makes complete sense to me that there's something about allowing in the sadness that most of us spend a lot of time medicating away, either through actual medication or through scrolling or gambling or shopping or...
whatever, binging on Netflix, not against any of those things, but if taken too far, you're actually just closing yourself off from like a really important part of life and doing the hard thing of letting it in. I think you're saying is a foundational aspect of, you know, living a more vibrant life.
Yeah. Yeah. couple of things that help people with it is i think in the book i say open my heart requires an equal measure of beauty and heartbreak or something like that and i think art can be a way to do this in a way that's safer so i recommend one of the exercises is listening to sad music and having a cry or also watching a sad film can do it just something where there's like
That feeling of like the beauty of it is still present as well. It can be a way for people to sort of like ease in if they want to sort of dip their toes in the water a bit more with it.
I'm a big fan of using aesthetics, beauty, art to feel more. That is, I think, pretty readily accessible. If we were to go one click deeper into the less accessible, what else would you recommend in this zone?
I guess there's like that moment of just when you're having a cry. There's a sort of moment of like, if I open to this, I'm just going to get so overwhelmed by like the depths of this sadness. It's kind of like you really let go and you're just... It's sort of like a fear of destruction from it. And it's almost like you do just let yourself be completely destroyed by it.
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Chapter 8: What does 'falling in love with experience' mean in this context?
So for you, the term sensitivity is kind of... And I just want to make sure I understand this, because I think it's interesting, especially when you invoke how we were as kids. There's some kind of factory setting for us of how we experience the world, how open our aperture is, maybe. It can get papered over. It can get paved over by the events of our subsequent life.
But by sensitivity, I think you're... pushing us to like get back in touch with this original stance.
Yeah. And it has a strong sort of like, it connects to the quality of innocence as well of just this sort of original natural kind of been there since you were a kid. Just how you receive the world before it gets gunked up with a bunch of stuff.
Again, I find this very intriguing. I kind of like the childhood version of myself better than I like the current version of myself. So what very practically can we do to get back in touch with that?
Yeah, so there's a exercise in the book and it starts with just building some safety in the different aspects of yourself. So one thing that pulls us out of that kind of sensitivity is that it's just not safe for the naturalness to sort of be itself. There's a sense of like having to put on a posture or a mask or a defense and they get stacked up as we go through life.
So it's sort of like getting into a safe space
place you know like a place where you're meditating and you know nothing's going to come get you or you don't have to be a certain way and then sort of letting that infuse and then spending some time the question yeah what's what's the way of being that's been there since a kid is a good way there's a few more questions as well in the book but like just sitting with that and trying to feel into are there specific aspects of experience that i
feel or focus on or sense and then that's the sort of individual thing and then also we do on retreats i've sort of worked with this quite a lot where again it's the allowing thing often people are like for some reason have learned that they're not allowed to see what they can see and actually if you start saying to people i would just describe what you're seeing sit in partners and just describe what you're seeing in their emotions or describe what you imagine they're
in a world might be like, or you can actually see a lot more than you think you can see. There's like a lot more sensitivity there, but we've sort of learned not to include it because it's not polite or for many reasons, I guess. But so you can also do it in sort of pairs or small groups and explore it.
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