How to Feel Confident, No Matter What Comes Your Way | Ethan Nichtern

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Episode Transcript:

Ethan Nichtern: [00:00:00] The way I think of confidence is just like an actual willingness to be in the forces of life and trust. Not necessarily that I’m going to get what I want because we also fail quite a lot. I think trust is interesting. It’s just sort of a feeling of, this is going to be okay, I can work with this. It’s that quality of like, here I am. This may be hard, but I’m grounded. And maybe that means grounded in groundlessness, but at the end of the day, I have to trust myself.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:32] So have you ever felt a deep lack of confidence that just seeps into your relationships, your work, and even how you see yourself? Maybe you find yourself constantly seeking validation from others, or afraid to fully trust your own inner wisdom. Or perhaps you bounce between heights of self-assurance and depths of self-doubt, never really feeling truly grounded, so easily knocked off your seat and into the spin of uncertainty. Well, if so, you’re not alone. We’re are living through a unique moment in time where many are just questioning their core identity, their purpose and grappling with pervasive groundlessness in nearly every domain of life. The shaky foundations that we once relied on really, they seem to be crumbling all around us in work and love and family community. We’re being called to find a deeper wellspring of confidence from within. Well, my guest today, Ethan Nichtern, has spent years exploring the ancient wisdom that can help us cultivate unshakable confidence amidst life’s uncertainties. Ethan is a renowned Buddhist teacher who leads meditation classes and hosts the Road Home Podcast. In his book, Confidence Holding Your Seat Through Life’s eight Worldly Winds, he weaves a powerful tapestry of insights to really guide us home in our innate sense of self-trust. In our conversation, Ethan unwraps these things he calls the eight worldly winds. We dive into what those actually are the contrasting experiences that we hope for and also fear in life, from pleasure and pain to fame and insignificance. And he shares how by taking really firmly our seat amidst these opposing forces, we can develop just profound self-trust. You’ll discover practical strategies to harness the power of self-compassion and lineage and awareness, and what Ethan calls windhorse to ride confidently through pretty much every situation. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:37] We’re having this conversation at a sort of an interesting moment in time where a lot of people are sort of like questioning who they are and their sense of confidence in themselves, in the world around them, in their relationships, in a connection to something maybe more expansive and bigger than them and and really trying to grapple with a sense of just pervasive groundlessness in nearly every domain of life. And, you know, it’s interesting because this is a space where you have not just lived, but you’ve been teaching in for a long time. I’m wondering just broadly, what are you seeing as you’re having conversations with people, with students out there in the world these days?

Ethan Nichtern: [00:03:14] Yeah. The reason I wanted to write about confidence was because, you know, I’ve been teaching Buddhism and meditation and Buddhist psychology for a long time, and I think the mindfulness movement really caught on in the last decade or so. And I think when you look at people’s initial interest in something like mindfulness, it usually is something like stress reduction or working with a difficult emotion or just working with, you know, what we might call monkey mind, you know, just really a difficult relationship with one’s own thoughts and emotions. But what I noticed, and this really mirrors my own path is whenever I got one level below the surface with somebody about what they were interested in studying, or where the teachings or practices were coming alive for them, or where they were, where they were stuck. It had something to do with trusting ourselves to show up in some way to some aspect of life. You know, it could be related to just trusting yourself, to being able to make it through a meditation session, which is not actually that easy. Kudos to everybody who does make it through a whole, you know, 5 or 10 or 20 minute meditation session. It could be trusting yourself to have a difficult conversation with your boss where you, you know, ask for a raise or advocate for yourself.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:04:38] It could be trusting yourself in a difficult, very vulnerable conversation with your intimate partner, or trusting yourself to, like, show up politically right now in a compassionate way. That’s saying, hey, we need to really figure out human society together, and I want to actually be part of that. And it’s difficult. You know, it’s really hard to be part of it. So I also realized that the teachings I inherited, in a sense, you could say that Buddhist thought is not so much about confidence, at least not on the very surface level. But when you really get into it, it is about developing sort of a sense of trusting our own mind, trusting ourself. And I wanted to harvest both some of the ancient themes and some of the modern themes, because I think the union of ancient and modern is always where I find kind of the greatest wisdom and application. I do agree we’re in a time of immense groundlessness, and people are definitely struggling with actually kind of showing up and wanting to show up. I mean, we’re all doing it anyway, you know, maybe we’re hiding out for a minute watching our favorite streaming show or reading our fantasy novels, but in general, we are all really saying, like, how can I use my spiritual tools to actually show up to trust myself? And you know, I also think what was important for me about this in this moment as a man, too, I think we do live in this era of a lot of false confidence, you know, a lot of kind of alpha male confidence.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:06:10] I’ve been reminded that actually the term con man is short for confidence man. So, you know, that’s really been on my mind and alive too, because there is also this question of like in any of those situations, sort of like how do I take my seat in my life, as we say, in meditation and then really claim claim my spot? It’s an interesting thing you said about Jonathan, about Groundlessness, because that’s one half of it. But I think about the example of going back to ancient master, the historical Buddha. When he achieved awakening, he touched the ground. He was like, I’m completely grounded in being a human in my body at this moment and I can show up. That’s always interesting, is dealing with trusting ourselves and working with groundlessness and uncertainty at the same time is, you know, I think that’s usually where we harvest the greatest wisdom, too. And it’s it’s definitely that time on planet Earth, I think.

Jonathan Fields: [00:07:09] Yeah, it’s sort of like living in that gap. And how do we navigate it? How do we dance with it? And I love, as you mentioned, so much of the way that you brought yourself to sort of, you know, to the wisdom world has been as a bridge builder, you know, between sort of ancient wisdom and modern life, you know, even down to, you know, one of your books, The Dharma of the Princess Bride, like one of the most adored movies that’s been out there, one of my favorite movies. And then you sort of like, deconstruct it in Buddhist thought. And let’s talk about this in the context of of life. And what can we learn from it? Um, when you talk about confidence also now trusting yourself is a phrase that you kept repeating. Yeah. When you use the word confidence, what are you actually talking about?

Ethan Nichtern: [00:07:49] Yeah. It’s a term that I think we kind of know intuitively. You know, like when somebody when we think somebody has confidence, there’s a sense of strong presence, there’s a sense of bravery. But if you look it up in the dictionary, which I did, the most common definition of confidence does include the word trust and firm trust sometimes like like somebody said, the Latin root has to do with faith, right? Which is sometimes a more spiritually or religiously loaded word than trust. But they basically mean the same thing, like there’s some belief in one’s own ability. And the way I framed it in the book is it has to do with our ability specifically to work with hope and fear striking us like we want some things in life. And, you know, I think a lot of times when people study meditation, they think we’re supposed to stop wanting, you know, which I would say, good luck with that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:48] Yeah. I have not come close to anywhere remotely close to. Yeah. It’s like.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:08:52] And I really want to write a book for people who want actually some kind of, you know, maybe it’s, uh, you want your screenplay to get finished and adopted and picked up by somebody. You want love. It’s very human. Right? And then you’re afraid of certain things. We’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid of death. We’re afraid of being criticized. You know? We’re afraid of pain. It’s very human. And so when early Buddhism talked about these experiences of hope and fear, just like kind of, you know, winds striking us. And so the way I think of confidence is just like an actual willingness to be in the forces of life and trust, not necessarily that I’m going to get what I want, because I do think a confident person, in the true sense of the word, we do accomplish our purpose is a little bit more frequently, but we also fail quite a lot, and you can get as enlightened as you want in business or art or politics or romance or relationship, but you’re still going to have death. Right? And like if we want to say some spiritual master like Buddha was greatly spiritually accomplished. He got what he wanted. In the end, he was so confident, but he also died. So confidence can’t be about like just winning the game of life, because nobody really wins the game of life from the standpoint of like surviving it, you know? Yeah. Um, and so working with how do we trust ourselves to show up and pursue things in the face of all that is, I think, really, really what I was looking at. And, you know, I think trust is interesting. It’s just sort of a feeling of this is going to be okay, I can work with this. It’s hard to define in words. It’s that quality of like, here I am. You know, this may be hard, but I’m grounded. And maybe that means grounded in groundlessness, which is an interesting idea.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:54] It is, you know, and I feel like so many people have this experience where they’ll actually trust other people before they’ll trust themselves.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:11:01] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:02] And I wonder if part of that. I’m so curious what your take is on this. I often wonder whether part of that. And like, I’m raising my hand here also, right, is that if we trust other people or if we go seek, well, like, let me talk to this wise person or let me go get this. We trust the data. We trust the people, we trust this. And then we make a decision based on all of that external input. And then we can say when we make the decision, we say, well, I’m confident based on x, Y and z external things, and I can point to those as the basis for this decision. Then if the decision doesn’t work out, then we can point to something outside of ourselves and say, well, you know, like I relied on on these people, these indicators and clearly like they were off. So it’s not a personal hit because it wasn’t my own self-trust that betrayed me. Whereas if I just say, let me go inside and say, mm, let me really feel into this, like, let me use my intuition. Let me use whatever intelligence or rationality I can make a decision. And then that decision doesn’t work out. It’s a much bigger hit for most people. So I often wonder whether we sort of we outsource confidence because there’s something inside of us that subconsciously says that if we actually try and stand in a place and rely on our own self-trust and then make a call and it turns out wrong and the stakes are high, that is going to hurt way more.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:12:17] Yeah, it’s a beautiful discussion. You know, I also think there’s so much wisdom in Western psychology. So if you start with, why do we trust other people? It’s it’s because we enter the world helpless, you know. And so from that standpoint, from a psychodynamic standpoint, we we start trusting our parents or our parental figures. My daughter is getting more and more self-sufficient. She’s she actually turns seven years old tomorrow. But when I pick her up, she needs to know I’m going to carry her. Right? You and I don’t get anybody to give us shoulder rides anymore, I don’t think. Right. We have to carry ourselves all the time on our own two feet. So there is something about, like. And I think a lot of things we study, I think it’s really important, you know, to have teachers or mentors or experts that we’re looking to. Right. And it’s an interesting moment wherein I talk about this later in the book when I talk about lineage, that I do think there’s kind of been a growing distrust for experts in some ways, too, because you can feel like exactly everything you said, like, okay, it’s on them. Like they will carry me if they get it wrong. It’s not my fault. But you can also feel like, oh, they don’t. The experts don’t know what they’re talking about, right? Which is very similar to rebelling against your parents. And I think that’s actually pretty a pretty necessary phase in our psychological and spiritual development to be like, no, I’m going to figure this out, you know? And so I think there’s some balance of the two, right? Because we are interconnected with each other. So we do have to realize, you know, actually, I’m not figuring anything out.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:13:57] Like even everything I’m saying comes from other people. I’m just kind of synthesizing it and putting it into my own expression. And at the same time, your grown adult life and you say whatever, whatever. My parents and teachers and elders and family, whatever they taught me right now, it’s just me here, you know, like nobody else can help me figure out what I’m going to say or how I’m going to show up to, like, this interview. It’s like, okay, I have to like, internalize whatever those parental voices are, whatever those mentors are and say, I got this. You know, just like my daughter, you know, most of the time is walking herself. Self. Yeah, it is interesting though, how much we do, as you say, kind of outsource our own power even as grownups, you know. And I think then there is some sense of actually realizing, oh, okay, I outsource my own power because I did need help learning how to do things, and I might still need learning help, but at the end of the day, I have to trust myself. And I think that’s especially important when we’re looking at receiving feedback from others, which is a whole chapter in the book. Working with how we receive praise, how we receive criticism on whatever project we might be working on. People are going to give me all sorts of ideas about how I’m doing and what I should do next, but I actually have to take those ideas and then synthesize them with what in Buddhism is sometimes called the principle or internal witness, which is my own sense of knowing. And I have to trust that at the end of the day, right.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:34] Now, that makes a lot of sense. And the other thing that, you know, as you’re describing it. You know, that’s coming to my mind is that when we outsource self-trust or confidence, we kind of lose that magical feeling of when something actually does work out the way we hoped it worked out. Then if it was something that where we really grappled with it and we reasoned it out and we felt into it, whatever you want to say is your process, and then we make a decision. It’s like, yeah, this actually turned out the way that it did. And I worked hard. And like, we have a level of ownership over that. Yeah, that really just feels amazing. But if we outsource the decision making, if we outsource it, you know, if we if we say, well, that was because I trusted the input of others. And that’s sort of like what led to it. We feel less of a sense of ownership. Yeah. And we lose like this magical moment of us standing in a place of agency, you know that I think so many of us feel that we don’t get enough of these days.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:16:27] Yeah, it’s interesting because I think there’s been a lot of talk in recent years. Really good talk and really necessary talk about accountability, right? Accountability for one’s actions. Accountability for how we show up. But accountability has sort of like a negative twist to it, right? It doesn’t need to. But the way we often say that is like, if you mess up, take responsibility. Yeah. The other side of accountability is actually empowerment. Like, you know, it’s not I think the other thing that I think Buddhism names is that there’s a problem with the worldview of individualism. Right? There’s a problem with the idea that I did everything. For example, going back to the parents example, my parents are the ones who introduced me to quite a lot of the practices that I do. I mean, they didn’t force any of them on me, and I had other teachers, but I would not be a Buddhist probably without my parents. Right? So I can’t really take responsibility alone. Say I did all this. It’s like, oh yeah, no, I had privilege. I had a good environment. It was interdependent. But then at the same time, there’s like and and by the way, I worked really hard, right. And I showed up and I could do it again. Right? I can take responsibility. I love that sort of two sides of the coin of agency and accountability. The other way to think about agency, to use a more slightly loaded word is power. Like claiming our own power. You know, like I can do something. I might not be able to do everything, but I can influence situations, you know, by showing up.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:06] That makes a lot of sense. You know, it’s interesting. Um, I feel like so much of when you tee an idea up, it’s often, well, let’s actually look at the different aspects of this, you know. And so you introduced accountability and agency. But you mentioned this notion of worldly winds earlier and talked about these two. Hope and fear. I want to dive in because in the book you actually introduced the idea of eight worldly winds. So take me to what we’re actually talking about when we’re talking about worldly winds. And then maybe we’ll walk through them a little bit so we can get a better feel for them.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:18:38] Yeah. So the eight worldly winds that is talking about ancient versus modern, this is ancient wisdom, right? And it’s still applicable. It comes from the historical Buddha 2600 years ago. He talked about these eight experiences that if you’re a human in the world, you will face and they’re either called like my teacher and friend Sharon Salzberg sometimes refers to them as the vicissitudes, which feels like a very s.a.t word. So they’re sometimes called the worldly phenomenon. But I really like this metaphor of wind, which is the way I think Pema Chodron and others refer to them as winds, because there’s a sense of like a force striking you. And the analogy that I use early on in the book, which there’s always kind of a I don’t know if you’re like this when you’re expressing yourself or writing, there’s always kind of a visual analogy that comes to me at a certain point is like, oh yeah, that. So if you go buy a car wash or a mechanic or like a car dealership, there’s those, those noodle looking, really tall inflatable guys, sometimes they’re artificially blown by an air blower, but when the wind hits them, they wave. They look like they’re smiling, they’re laughing, they’re dancing. And then if the wind stops blowing or blows the other way, they droop over, like, looking, like, completely depressed and and crestfallen.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:20:01] So I was playing with that analogy of how these different experiences of life hit us. So the eight is really four pairs, right? And and four pairs on each side of the pair. There’s the experience that we hope for or that when it happens, when it hits us, it inflates us, it inflates us, it makes us temporarily feel great about our confidence. And on the other side is the the wind that deflates us, that knocks us over, that, you know, signals our defeat or our demise. So they go from sort of the most visceral to our embodied nervous system, which is we hope for pleasure, we fear pain, and then they get into our sort of our relational sense of self. We hope for praise. We fear criticism and blame if we’re trying to do bigger work in the world, you know, have a podcast or we’re trying to influence a group of people in some way. We hope for recognition and renown and fame. We fear insignificance, having no influence. It’s interesting in that pair fame and insignificance. Another classic translation says that the feared outcome is infamy, which I think we still fear.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:21:18] But I also think we live in this interesting era where if you’re infamous among a group of people, you can kind of turn that into a new kind of fame. The example I use for that is the rapper Eminem. Nobody ever talked about how controversial Eminem was more than Eminem, you know? So he’s sort of, you know, turning his infamy into fame. So I think what we really fear in that couplet is we just have no impact. Nobody knows our work. Nobody knows what we’re trying to do. Nobody remembers us, nobody writes us a holiday card, etc. and then the most generalized one, which has to do with our spiritual quest, it has to do with every aspect of life. Any project we could conceive is we hope for success and we fear failure or loss. So those are the eight worldly wins. But it’s really working with this dance when we show up, when we try to, you could say, take our seats in the world, in our life, just the same way we might take our seat in meditation. We really hope to be inflated with the positive winds and we really fear being knocked over with the negative winds.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:31] That makes so much sense. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. I want to walk through this in a little bit more detail. Starting out with pleasure and pain. You use this phrase licking honey from a razor blade, which is pretty visceral.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:22:46] Yeah, that comes from an eighth century very famous Indian Buddhist teacher who’s very well known, uh, named Shantideva, who wrote this text that especially popular in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition called The Way of the Bodhisattva, the way of the being who’s trying to awaken compassion. Right. And he said that pursuit of pleasure can be like licking honey from a razor blade. Right? What he was talking about was fixation on pleasure. When we know it’s impermanent, right? When we know we can’t make any pleasure last forever. And so the razor blade is kind of the truth of impermanence, the truth of death. I love that phrase because when I read it, I was like, you know, I’m from the 90s. So it did sound like it could be, you know, the 90s, when I feel like all the music was about very personal existential dilemmas, like Alanis Morissette. So I feel like that could be like a Nirvana lyric, you know? I just imagine them on MTV unplugged licking honey from a razor blade. So the idea is that pleasure feels good, pain feels bad. But there’s this false promise that if we have a pleasing sensation in our body and our sense realm, we can make it last. And if we do the right things, we might avoid pain, you know? And I think in that arena, I’m always a casual fan and invested student of the conversation between Buddhist thought and neuroscience is really interesting to me and sort of what they’ve discovered.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:24:25] I talk about one experiment, what they’ve discovered about how advanced mindfulness practice changes our relationship to pain, I think is, is super interesting. You know, the long and the short of it is we don’t brace against pain as much when it’s not happening. But for very advanced meditators, what they found is during a painful physical experience, the pain receptors light up more than people who’ve never practiced mindfulness. You actually feel the pain more completely if you’re being mindful. They didn’t do a pleasure experiment, which I also think they would find during the experience of a chocolate chip cookie. Right. You would actually taste it would be even more ecstatic for the mindful person than the non mindful person. You would taste it that much more. And it’s like when we actually are holding our seat, we actually are feeling our experience more right, but it’s less of a problem. I think that’s the thing about pleasure and pain. I talk about this. There’s there’s a mirage in pleasure. There’s this idea in hope or pleasure that this is going to save me.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:25:42] Right? Like when you really want a chocolate chip cookie, there’s some feeling of like, this cookie is my spiritual salvation, you know? And you’re never thinking about just tomorrow when you’re going to be craving the cookie again. Right. And I talk about the experience of being on a meditation retreat and having a really difficult itch on my nose from a fly buzzing or something like that, and just deciding that I was not going to scratch the itch, which is a very holding your seat kind of a thing to do. And I remember as a grown up person actually thinking the thought, if I don’t scratch my nose, I’m going to die, which is not true. It’s an irrational thought, but there is in pain or unpleasant circumstance. It’s not that we’re misunderstanding, that we’re in pain because we very much are. And if we’re in chronic pain, if there’s something we can do to reduce the pain, please always do the compassionate thing. But we think that this unpleasant experience is going to be the end of us, when really what happened with the itch is few minutes later, it was just completely gone. You know, just evaporated.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:52] It’s a really interesting distinction that you make also in that like if we take our seat and especially if it’s informed by a practice like mindfulness where like we’re sort of like we have an enhanced level of awareness where we’re going to notice, and we’re also probably going to experience sensory input more, more deeply, more intensely. It’s going to be there on both sides of the spectrum, right? But the other part of it, which you shared, you know, and people would be like, oh, sweet, more pleasure. Like, yay! But also like more pain, but at the same time, as you described, you experience that stimulus. But part of the experience of it isn’t just the neurons that are firing at the end at the point of stimulation, it’s what your brain does with it, you know? And that very same practice says, yes, I’m going to actually like notice all those firings. Yet the signals that I’m getting from it, I’m going to have like more of a say in how that lands in my mind, which is the other part of the experience. You know, I think oftentimes practices like mindfulness, like their experience says, oh, the benefit is, you know, you just, you know, you’re the screen on the screen door on the summer porch and everything like it touches you, but then it just blows through you. And it’s all about like the ability to just kind of be chill and in the center and let it go. But it’s not about it’s not often said like actually, it may also give you access to really heightened sensory experience. Yeah. Yeah. But you’re going to you’re going to handle it differently. Yeah. And that’s a huge like that’s the big qualifier there.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:28:19] Yeah, yeah. You know, that’s based on the way you framed it Jonathan. What I would say is being in the center, you know, which I’m calling holding your seat is not so chill. Yeah. Because there’s always a lot going on. Right. That’s actually what presence is. It’s it’s not the absence of activity. It’s actually you’re sitting in the center of this almost maelstrom, external and internal. You know, you have everything that’s happening in the outside world. You have your sense perceptions, you have your thoughts, you have your emotions. And even in moments of boredom, actually, even, you know, when you’re sitting some days when I have a break, especially in the summertime, I live here in in Brooklyn, I have a stoop, you know, which is the thing I’ve always wanted. That’s living the dream for me is just having a stoop.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:10] It’s a beautiful thing.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:29:13] And you just go and it’s a quiet street, you know, especially when I sometimes can take a break in the afternoon. But even if you say, oh, for Brooklyn, for New York, this is a very quiet moment. This is a very quiet street. There’s still so much going on. And even when I go to the country, which I do quite frequently, you say, oh, it’s so chill here. But then you open up and you go, oh, like there is a symphony of birds and chipmunks, and they’re all talking to each other like there’s so much happening when we pay attention and it’s never that chill. And I think when we go into the deeper, I think pleasure and pain is a really good foundational level. And that’s why mindfulness starts with the body and mindfulness starts with pleasure and pain, because the things we discover about our reaction to pleasure and pain, I think, are very applicable to when life gets real or when life gets more relational, you know. Pleasure and pain have so much to do with how we handle praise and criticism.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:21] Yeah. Which is the second pairing that you talk about, you know, praise and blame. And I think so many people feel like they’re living in a world where there’s a lot of opportunity for criticism. Yeah, it’s kind of coming at them from all angles here. And for a lot of people, I think it kind of shuts them down and makes them say, what’s the middle path here where, you know, like I keep my head down enough so that I don’t take any, any heat or any fire. I’m doing enough where I’m kind of getting by, and I feel like I’m a constructive human being. And they’re trying to thread this needle, which is really unthreatening. And even if they feel like they end up doing that for a window of time, then if you ask them, how are you doing? And they’re honest with you, oftentimes the answer is not good.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:31:02] Right, right, right. I think a lot of times that’s that’s sort of the sad thing is a lot of times people don’t really try to accomplish a lot in life because they’re afraid of how others will respond. And we’re afraid of criticism, so we don’t put ourselves out there. And there’s reasons not to. I mean, friends of mine asked me like, how do you handle social media? Like, that’s just it just sounds like people are coming for each other all the time on social media. And I think our technology is really interesting because because praise and criticism in the classic Buddhist teachings would fall in the category of speaking and listening, right, right speech. How we express ourselves, how we listen to others, kind of some basic guardrails for how that’s done with skill and with kindness. And again, there’s a lot of modern nonviolent communication I’m thinking of, you know, a lot of modern insight into how one works with that, but that’s really about like verbal communication and two people talking to each other. And now we have this devices where you’re just able to give and get feedback practically any time to practically or from practically anyone you want you know.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:21] Or don’t.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:32:22] Want or don’t want or.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:23] Don’t know and never will know. And that’s like a part of it.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:32:26] Yeah, yeah. So it’s interesting because like, you know, praise and criticism are hard enough practices to work with our sense of self-trust. If we know, like ten people just getting like a family together at Thanksgiving to say, like, okay, hey, we’re going to practice mindful speech. Let’s each say what we appreciate about each other. And then if there’s something maybe that somebody’s doing that’s bothering you, we could express that after we’ve, you know, validated a little bit, that would be near impossible for a lot of families, although a valiant effort. And some families, I think it happens. Well, and that’s quite a joy when you actually see that. But now you’re like, oh, okay. So you’re struggling with communication in like five relationships. Try 5000 strangers at once. You know, it’s not it’s not a fair arena in some ways. But the first insight that really works for me is, again, to go back to pleasure and pain. The more present you are, the more this is going to be true, that actually praise is going to feel good. And actually, a lot of times we don’t let ourselves feel that if somebody compliments you and says, oh, thank you so much for cooking me dinner, you go, oh no, no, no, it was nothing, right? Rather than just actually receiving the pleasure of like, oh wow, I did a good thing. And somebody’s expressing appreciation. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:49] People are so often so bad at actually receiving words of praise.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:33:53] Exactly. Because it’s like too much kindness or something. It makes us vulnerable and it puts us on the spot. It’s a wind. It hits us, you know, something’s actually happening in our system. And then also our our defensiveness in the name of criticism. I once heard. Your friend, our mutual friend Susan Piver, share great wisdom that I put in the book. What she was saying was, there was one friend who would just point out potential problems or potential things that could turn into obstacles. And she said, when I was early on in the creative process, I really needed like that creative energy to be flowing. So I would ask for this person’s feedback. But much later on in the process, when it had already gained all the momentum that it needed. So I think this is one thing is like if we’re trying to put ourselves out there knowing who we’re asking, and I think it’s important to have people in our corner who are inherently supportive. I think that’s really important for teachers, you know, or mentors or coaches, people who work with other people, because we are so biased to pay attention to negative information. That’s just part of our evolution as well, to really be able to when we’re sharing feedback with others to start from appreciation, and then to maybe know that it’s going to hurt.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:35:14] If you get criticized, it might be really important to be criticized to receive feedback. It is really important to receive constructive criticism if we want to show up to anything we’re trying to do, but knowing that that is the same experience as pain, I think is really important. That’s really been transformative for me. I talk about preparing for the ouch when you’re receiving feedback like, don’t post a thing on social media without being like, oh, somebody’s going to disagree with this. They might not know who I am, they might not be well trained in the tools of right speech or nonviolent communication. And it might hurt to be disagreed with, you know, just the same way an itch is unpleasant, the same way if somebody poked you with a needle, it would hurt. Like, that’s just part of how I receive information. So I think that’s really important is when people say, oh, I know how to get to the place where criticism doesn’t hurt. I’m like, I don’t I don’t think that’s what mindfulness is. You know, it’s actually familiarity with the process and familiarity with like, yeah, it hurts. But there’s also good information here.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:26] Sometimes it’s being able to parse that. You know, I remember a couple of years back Adam Grant was sharing that when he’s working on a book, you know, he’ll work on the manuscript and it’ll get to a certain point. And then he has a small group of people who he gets together, often his grad students or postdocs where and he calls them his challengers, and he’ll basically share a piece of the manuscript or the entire thing and say, like, have at it. Literally just.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:36:50] Like, oh my gosh.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:50] Tell me everything that you can figure out. Like, where did I mess up? What’s wrong? What’s the counterargument here? He wants to know it all, but he does it in a way that’s really interesting, which is really syncs up with what you’re talking about here, which is that he doesn’t actually post that online to your millions of followers and say have at it. You know, he has a very small number of people, maybe half a dozen people or something like this, who he trusts, who he knows are really smart, who know his work, who are really well versed in in his lineage and his science. And then he says, okay, like, you know, like the agreement here is that you’re not having at it because you’re trying to take me out or take me down. We’re doing this together because we’re trying to refine the ideas so that they are as accurate and as useful and as valid as possible. So when mass numbers of people interact with it, I can feel better that we’ve done our work. And maybe sure, like maybe that helps me feel like it’s more defensible to. And maybe we get less people disagreeing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:45] But of course, like you’re always going to have people that disagree when something goes to scale. But it’s an interesting example, I think, of what you’re describing there, and it ties in also with this sort of like this third couplet that you referenced earlier, which is the notion of influence and significance or what you describe. There’s a really interesting sort of like potential interpretation of infamy there, you know, because we all do want to see, feel like we’re doing something that makes a difference. You know, like that we have some influence that we have some level of say in our lives and maybe in other lives. And if we if it ties in with what you were just sharing, also, because if we can’t weather the winds of criticism, it’s going to be really hard to be able to take a seat behind an idea or an identity that allows us to feel a sense of mattering and significance. And then there’s that other fear of saying, like, what if I don’t matter? Which can be devastating, but maybe it’s also really freeing at the same time.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:38:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I talk about, again, having a seven year old, I harvest a lot of wisdom from Pixar movies. I don’t work for them, but but just, you know, had my mind slightly blown or just had a lot of appreciation for seeing the second inside Out movie. But in the with I was really picking up on a theme from the Disney movie Coco, where it has to do with the Mexican holiday Dia de Los Muertos and the land of the dead. The way this is set up, as happens on Dia de Los Muertos, you put on your altar ofrendas or offering to your dead ancestors as a way to remember them. And the way the movie sets this up is as long as somebody keeps remembering you on their altar, your spirit lives on in the land of the dead. But when you really die in this framework, is when nobody remembers you well enough to make an offering on your altar. And so I call that the second death. Right. And that’s sort of it could come before or after our physical death, but it’s when nobody remembers us. I think it’s really important, especially for those of us who are trying to do work that has impact. You know, I’m thinking of the song Fame. I want to live forever, right? Nobody does that. And I think what we try to do is say, but could I do something that has impact forever? And the answer is no, you actually can’t. It might have impact for a long time, you know, like great people of the ancient world. But probably people are going to misremember you. I mean, there’s so much conflict over who the Buddha actually was. I make the joke that most of the time, Jesus is just a totally different ethnicity than he actually was in his life, so he’s not being remembered very accurately in a lot of ways, and nobody’s going to remember us.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:40:36] And so what does it mean to have impact? Acknowledging that in a cosmic sense, there is a sense of letting go of our identity, because a lot of times we do approach, you know, what we could call these days, having a platform as like, yeah, but I really want people to know me and my work. In a sense, that’s the more outward or more social facing level of seeking praise is there has a lot of wisdom, right? If you feel like, oh, I can offer something, I want to be a benefit, I want to help, and I want to live a good life as well. The idea of offering that broadly is very important. It doesn’t have to be super broad, but beyond just one on one interactions, right? We all want that. We all want to have some level of impact. I think for some people, this coupling of wins of fame and insignificance feels or influence, as I called it, feels a little less relevant. But I think in some ways, whenever you’re trying to show up in the world, you want to have impact. You want to be recognized by your family. At least you want to be recognized by your friends. Nobody goes to a school reunion being like, oh, what have you been working on for the last 20 years? Nothing. I’m pretty invisible. Nobody wants to feel that way, I joke about coming back from a meditation retreat with all these insights and hoping everybody really missed you. And instead people are like, oh wait, you were gone for a week, you know? Right.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:09] But on the other hand, it’s like on the one hand, yes to all of that. And on the other hand, there is a certain spaciousness to not being missed. There’s a certain freedom to that as well. It’s terrifying and at the same time freeing. Literally, I was just talking to, as you mentioned, our dear mutual friend Susan Pifer yesterday and some version of the phrase, I want my work to be seen, not me, came out of my mouth. Yeah. And I’ve been kind of sitting with that and also in part asking myself, is that true? Because I’m not 100% sure it is. I’m an introvert. I’m a sensitive person, so I love being at home by myself. I love solitude, and I love creating things. You know? I love the fact that I could create something and that that thing would go out into the world, and that would be the thing of influence or significance or impact that would matter. And I’ve always felt like I don’t necessarily need to be the one associated with it. I just want to know it’s out there. I’m questioning that more and kind of saying, like, is that really true? Or is it just that I value my solitude so much that I’m afraid that if I was a part of the thing that was appreciated, or was out there in the world, that I would lose this other thing that I hold dear. And it’s an interesting thing that I’ve just been sitting with.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:43:22] Yeah, I talk about that in confidence, too, sort of my personal path. And for me, the interesting crux of this was since I was in sixth grade, I wanted to be a writer. Part of that was I just loved words and, you know, that mode of expression. And I resonated with it. I always have, but the other part was I was like, oh, famous writers are really cool because you’re still completely anonymous. Everybody could have read your work if you’re a best selling writer, but nobody really knows what you look like unless they really know who you are. And I was like, anonymous fame. That sounds like perfect to me, you know? And then I ended up becoming a teacher who also writes. And there’s again, there’s this sense of like, okay, but now my identity is like, oh, he’s the wisdom holder. And there is that complexity of like, you know, I’m sure when somebody comes up to you, Jonathan, and says, oh, I really appreciate your work. It’s had a really positive impact, right? There’s this complexity of ego and egolessness where there’s sort of like, oh, I’m so happy the work has been helpful. And then there’s a part of you that’s like, yeah, I did that. We flicker in and out of that, and I think it’s very natural to flicker in and out of that, but then we can get fixated on like, I need my name on the building, you know, who’s getting top billing, you know? Et cetera. It was interesting. I had I went on the, the book tour that’s been going on for confidence, spoke when I was in Portland, Oregon, at Powell’s, which is, from a writer’s standpoint, one of my.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:00] Favorite bookstores in the world. Yeah. It’s amazing.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:45:02] Yeah, it’s maybe from a writer’s from a, like, bookstore indie bookstore aficionado standpoint, maybe the most famous bookstore in the world. I mean, we can argue we can argue about that, but it’s one of the only places where when you have an event, they put your name on a marquee on the marquee, right? Yeah. Which, yeah, for a writer, it’s like, I’m not a I’m not a stand up comedian. Like. And then you’re like, whoa, my name is on the marquee. And of course, I’m a Buddhist teacher. But you snap a picture of that, you know? All right, I did that. And at the same time it’s like. And then they’re going to take that down and there’s going to be a new set of people trying to have influence and impact. And so I think if we can inhabit that dance of saying, I really want to be a benefit, and there’s a part of me that like actually seeks the recognition of that, but I’m going to be wary when that becomes a fixation. Right. Just the same way, I would be wary if pleasure was a fixation or people. Pleasing or praise was a fixation. If I start to notice that needing recognition is a fixation, I’m going to work with that, and I’m going to try to embrace the other side of the coin, which is the experience of aloneness. Right? Because at the end of the day, we’re always alone with ourselves. That’s the basic premise of mindfulness is it’s you, your body, your heart, your mind that’s your actual co-pilot through all of this life. And if we can’t actually inhabit our aloneness, I think when we try to have impact with others, it is going to have an addictive quality to it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:36] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. This final pairing in the worldly winds, this notion of success and failure that you referenced earlier because, you know, let’s say we do go out there, our work does go out there and make a difference in some way, shape or form. We have this and you write about this. You know so much of the way that we measure whether we’ve succeeded or failed at what we’re trying to do is not in terms of tuning in and just sort of like listening to ourselves, but it is looking around us and saying, where am I relative to like this person, that person, that person and the other person? And like, that is our measure of success. And it’s just a losing game. I mean, especially, you know, like I’m in Boulder, Colorado, but I spent 30 years in New York City. Two, You’re in Brooklyn. There is no way to live in a New York area. And then ever feel like for the history of your life that you can’t find a thousand other people who, by whatever measure you’re judging externally, are like eons ahead of you? It’s it’s a disastrous way to live and to sort of like, measure success. And yet we do it so often.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:47:43] It’s interesting. I really like to watch basketball. So I hope the Knicks are the best. So I think sports is a good arena where you try to figure out like, who’s better than the other on this given day or this given tournament or this given season. And I think it’s nice that we have certain areas of life where that that holds. But there’s a lot of uses of in Buddhist terms is called comparative mind. My level of okayness is judged relative to the perception of other people’s success or happiness. Right? So it’s interesting like sometimes, you know, I’ve never written a best seller, for example, but I do get to keep writing people enough. It’s fine for me. But, you know, somebody tells you in the process of writing a new book, I think you have a best seller in you and you’re like, okay, that’s wonderful, because that’s praise, right? But when you really parse, like, what does best selling mean? Is it do you mean you want all the other people who are writing books to not sell? Well, it means better than it doesn’t mean great job. Lots of people connected with your work. It means you did better than the other people you know. One of the things I noticed people say in New York a lot, oh, I have the best doctor. I have the best dentist. And it’s like, okay, what about I have a good doctor, I have a great dentist or something like that. Like best literally means what do you mean by that? Like, everybody else has a shitty doctor, like, wouldn’t you want other people to have good doctors too? And then we transpose that onto our children.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:49:17] I’m very aware of this as a as a parent and father. Like, and it’s it’s weird being a, like a kid in a kind of progressive liberal space because the messages are weird right now. It’s everybody’s included. We value everyone. And which is a completely egalitarian message, which I love to death and resonate with. Everyone’s included. But oh, by the way, only about 5% of you are going to get into the college you really want to go to and feel important there. And it’s like, well, those are weird, conflicting messages. And how do we start to actually hone? I’m succeeding or failing based on kind of my own metric of happiness and success. Because, as you said, comparative mind is it’s literally endless, like you not just in New York, in, you know, samsara in all the realms. Once you start saying that person has something and I do not have it, and until I have what they have, I am not okay. It’s a recipe for unhappiness, dissatisfaction. And it’s also probably a recipe for putting on blinders and getting very obsessive and not really thinking of ones showing up or ones work in a way that’s helpful to others. It’s much better as a writer to think I would like my work to be of benefit, you know, and I would like enough people to read it so that it is of benefit and keeps me doing it, you know. And if it sells better than everyone else’s, then honestly, I’m going to recommend people read other people’s writing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:52] It’s such an interesting frame too. I remember a number of years back reading some research on envy, and the researchers teased out this interesting distinction. They said basically, we identified two different types of envy. Benign envy and malicious envy. And they said that both envy. You look at somebody else and you’re like, ooh, I wish I had what they have, or I wish I could do what they could do. But one of them is accompanied by a sort of schadenfreude, like, like, how can we take them? Like, I hope they fail. The other one is like, what an inspiration. Like, maybe if I really work really hard, if I sort of, like, really pour myself into this thing, I’m inspired by this. Like, they show what’s possible to me. They’re just going to make me work that much harder and devote myself harder and and give that bigger because I see what’s possible. And it was eye opening for me because I think it helped me more intentionally flip that switch on a regular basis. So now as a writer, and I think there was a time where I pick up a book and I was like, oh, this is just like stunning, you know, like, this is terrible. Um, and now I’ll read a sentence from a writer who I really admire and I’m like, maybe in ten years I’ll be able to write a sentence like that, and I’m totally down for that journey. Like, how cool would it be? And I think there’s a certain amount of we can flip that switch. Like, I think there’s a way to actually have comparative mind, but in that benign, inspirational way that draws us towards and celebrates something and is inspired by it, rather than, I have to figure out a way to best that or take them down. I’m curious what your take is on that.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:52:22] Yeah, I wasn’t aware of the distinction between malicious and benign envy, but it totally syncs up with my thoughts on envy. And I think the most important part for me of of Buddhist wisdom is the idea that within every emotion, Motion, especially strong emotions that we experience and especially within emotions that are difficult to admit. We’re experiencing things like anger or envy, you know? And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it in the chapter in success and failure is like, oh, Buddhists don’t experience envy. And it’s like, so I just went ahead and told the story of like the day I succeeded the most I’ll ever succeed as a writer and still felt, you know, envy of another writer on that day, you know, so Buddhist teachers do experience envy because we’re human. And if a if a person ever says they don’t experience human emotion, I’m not sure why that would be a good teacher for other humans. You know, benign envy really speaks to the wisdom of envy, which is if we can see how somebody else’s is path is succeeding, we could maybe say, okay, what is it in here that I long for? And sometimes it’s easier to see it when somebody has a mode of success, that’s not your wheelhouse, right?

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:43] There’s no sense of competition. You know, like, or winner take all type of thing going on there.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:53:48] Yeah. I went to see when I was in Chicago, like show at the Museum of Contemporary Art by a painter who’s a Brooklyn painter, Nicole Eisenman, who I think is just amazing. And because I’m a huge fan of painting, but I just it was never the thing I was trying to do. So you can move through this show and just be like, wow. And there’s not even a like, I wish I could do that. It’s just like, oh, this is so amazing that a person could do that. You know, it’s like watching somebody like LeBron James play, play basketball or something like that. You’re just like, I’m just going to watch the art and enjoy it. But sometimes somebody does have something you want and you could say, okay, what is it that I actually long to do on my own path? And maybe I could just take that information that, you know, benign or that actually wisdom envy, we could almost call it and say, okay, how do I actually let this lead me towards my longing a little bit? You know, one other unrelated to what you’re saying, point I want to make about success and failure, because I really do think our relationship to pleasure and pain is so important to understand the other of the eight worldly winds. So one of the thinkers that I read in writing the chapter on pleasure and pain was Doctor Anna Lemke, who wrote a book called Dopamine Nation, and she’s an addiction expert, and she talks. There’s some good podcasts with her. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with her work, but she talks about how pleasure and pain are co-located in the brain, and she talks about sort of like a seesaw, right? That that wants to stay in balance.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:55:29] And if you try to do too much, say, on your smartphone or too much sugar or too much whatever the addictive tendency that you have is to try to push the dopamine side of the seesaw so that it’s going down. It balances out on the other side. You get less, less pleasure with each hit, and she calls them the gremlins load up on the other side. But I love that idea of pleasure and pain, wanting to stay in some sort of balance for a healthy brain and a healthy nervous system. Meaning we want to have some relationship to both of them. Some appreciation to both of them. I think the exact same thing is true for success and failure, and I think this is really important. Like when I am talking to students or people on the path about confidence and they say, I really want to succeed at X, you know, you’d be a jerk if you said, well, I hope you fail because that’ll teach you a spiritual lesson. Like that’s never the thing to say. It’s like, I do hope, but it’s not always going to happen. And what I really hope for is that when you experience either success or failure, you learn something. You learn something about what it means to be human. And I do think that leads to more success, maybe in general, but I think more importantly, it leads to an actual insight into being human, which is really what we’re looking for 100%.

Jonathan Fields: [00:56:54] It just helps us live a little bit with a little bit more ease. You know, the words come to mind where she’s sort of like, you look at each of those situations and you’re like, this too shall pass. Yeah, sure. Like the highest high. Awesome. And it’s going to go away. And the lowest low. Oh, and it’s going to go away. You know, um, let’s certainly say yes to all of them. Accept that as reality and then know also that they’re impermanent. You know, it kind of wraps us around to what you describe as the four powers of confidence. And I want to move through these a little bit more quickly. You know, so you list out compassion, lineage, awareness, windhorse as, as almost like this is your toolbox. This is what you get to access when you sit in the seat, when you actually know when you have this confidence with you. You brought up lineage earlier in our conversation. Compassion is something where I feel like there’s been a lot of conversation around it, and I think we’re all getting more attuned to the fact that this is really important for us for a lot of different reasons. Awareness is one of those. Those four as well. This notion of being able to observe and take in what’s going on around you, not necessarily with a sense of judging it, but just like knowing like this is actually this is my reality. This is my subjective reality, but this is what I’m experiencing. Lineage and Windhorse I think are really interesting. I’d love to go into each one of those just a little bit more, because I think those are the two where people are going to be like, I don’t really get what this is about, so talk to me about these a bit more.

Ethan Nichtern: [00:58:23] Well, Lindsey,, obviously, you know, a lot of this is coming from things inherited from Buddhist teachings and trainings and the notion of lineage related to confidence. It has to do with that, that sort of interwoven nature between taking your own seat and saying, I can do this and kind of owning your own agency and power on the one hand, but also realizing you’re not the first human in history to experience hope and fear. You’re not the first human to try to do something. In my case, I’m not the inventor of any of these teachings. You’re standing on the shoulders of mentors, teachers, family, ancestors, and I think a lot of times we have a very especially in modern life, you know, a very tenuous nature relationship with our past. You know, if you go through kind of, again, that psychodynamic sort of, you know, intergenerational trauma approach, you’re like, well, this person in my family was a screw up, and that person was a screw up, and that person before them was a screw up. And I think studying Tibetan Buddhism, it’s so crucial to acknowledge being part of a lineage. Right. And not necessarily being the same as the other members of the lineage. But there’s an idea of actually being part of something larger than oneself. And, you know, there’s a certain aspect of that that’s humbling, right? To say, I didn’t invent all this, but there’s also an aspect that’s empowering, which is to say you can actually call on the support and the wisdom from your ancestors, right? From not just to look at one family line as a series of screw ups, but to say like, oh, let me study like who my parents were, who my grandparents were, who my great grandparents were, and maybe even imagine them coming with me.

Ethan Nichtern: [01:00:25] Visualize them coming with me when I’m doing a hard thing and asking for their blessings. And in the Buddhist tradition, the idea of actually imagining the great beings of the past in our spiritual heritage, in whatever work we’re doing in the world, hopefully we have lineage figures that we really look to as like, you know, if I had a shrine or an altar, I would put these these people up on it and you can actually harvest that and say, okay, like when I am going to do something hard, I’m actually going to visualize and imagine. And there’s meditations, especially in Tantric Buddhism, where you really work with this in depth. Imagine them kind of coming forth and blessing me and holding me, you know, in the conclusion chapter, I talk about the one hard thing that I did during writing the book, which again, you know, it’s interesting when we talk about the things we don’t have confidence in, all of us have things that if other people looked at them, we’d be like, oh my God, that’s amazing. I can’t believe you do that. And you’re like, well, it’s pretty, you know, it’s just a thing I do. And then there’s other things that people would be like, yeah, that’s no big deal. And you’d be like, yeah, that was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life, you know? So for whatever reason, which makes sense because I grew up in New York City, I didn’t get my driver’s license until later in life.

Ethan Nichtern: [01:01:48] And, you know, part of it was I just didn’t have enough support when I took the test as a teenager. And then I kind of like, you know, freaked out and blocked it out. And I was like, If I’m going to write a book about confidence, I’m going to have to do a hard thing during this, getting friends to help me borrow their cars, practice driving, taking the road test in New York City where actually supposedly people, the average person takes it more than three times before they pass, you know? And you know, I did all that a year and a half ago. But one of the things I imagined was my grandmother, who is in the dedication of the book not wasn’t a Buddhist, but was a very powerful woman and very bold and very confident. But another thing about my Grandma Claire is she got her driver’s license later in life. So to actually imagine Grandma Claire and, you know, use tools like love and kindness, meditation like the Windhorse practice. And to actually imagine her like being there as a lineage figure in support really helped do it, you know? And I was also willing to fail. If I failed the test, I’d say I’d take it again. And, you know, a year and a half ago, I, I took the test. And, you know, I’d been driving a lot ever since. And I can definitely say on the roads of America, I am I am not the worst driver on the road.

Jonathan Fields: [01:03:11] It is. It’s it’s funny. It’s such a New York City thing.

Ethan Nichtern: [01:03:14] It is a New York City.

Jonathan Fields: [01:03:15] Raising a kid in New York also. It’s just like there’s no reason. So. Right. Let’s circle back to that final thing, Windhorse, which you just referenced also which like my understanding is it’s it’s been explained to me as sort of like life force. Yeah. You know, maybe, you know, people might use the word prana or whatever your word for it is. Yeah. Is that sort of like, similar to what we’re talking about here?

Ethan Nichtern: [01:03:37] Yeah, yeah. So again, going on the theme of wind. So coming from a combination of Tibetan or Tantric Buddhism along with Tibetan indigenous wisdom that was sort of housed in, in the Shambhala tradition of, of Tibetan Buddhism. There’s this theme and it’s a set of meditation practices and usually a set of meditation practices that is done relatively quickly. So there’s short meditation practices, like they can take 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 minutes, and you can do them before showing up to do a hard thing. But the idea is wind has multiple meanings in classic Buddhism here, it’s exactly as you said. It’s kind of like prana or sort of like life force. But it’s not just your life force. It also is kind of the the force of the moment, which often takes an emotional like if you’re about to have a difficult conversation with a friend, let’s say the wind of the moment might be whatever the emotion is, it might be sadness, it might be resentment or anger. And you sort of acknowledge in winters the wind of the moment. You don’t try to fight it. But then the notion of horse is kind of harnessing and riding the energy of the moment, taking your seat and expanding outward with confidence and then going into whatever the situation is. So it’s very much about seeing that the life force or the prana of the moment, the wind, is actually in the human difficulty of the moment. So it’s actually the energy that says, oh, I don’t want to do this, or this is going to be really hard. Or what if democracy collapses and whatever it is, right? That you go, oh, okay, that’s it. That fear or that hope or that emotion is the moment I’m going. To be present with that, I’m going to ground with that, acknowledge that, and then open my heart to. And through that and then do what needs to be done, you know. So it’s a kind of a preparatory. Meditation usually for showing up in difficult moments.

Jonathan Fields: [01:05:48] Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. So. The book is filled with such a like a deeper conversation about all four of these powers as. Well, and also strategies, practices to say, how do I actually do this? How do I harness it. So I definitely encourage folks to dive in. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Ethan Nichtern: [01:06:10] Hmm. Yeah. To live a good life, I would say try to come back to the present moment as much as you can and acknowledge that you’re human. I think that’s the most important thing for me. And there’s no way to get around that. And there’s no need to get around being human. It’s actually a really good working basis for a good life.

Speaker3: [01:06:33] Mm. Thank you.

[01:06:36] Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Henry Shukman about the way to original Love. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it. Maybe on social or by text or by email. Even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.