Tim Desmond: “The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook” @ Talks at Google (Transcript)

We’d never run out of those items either.

So there is a skill that is about training ourselves to notice, to be able to pay attention to what’s beautiful in life.

Now, if we focus all of our attention on everything — so most of us go through life believing that the only way it’s possible to be happy is when all of our conditions for suffering are gone. Right?

I can be happy when I fix this problem and when I’ve achieved that goal. And then at that point, once there’s no more reasons for me to suffer, then that’s when happiness is possible. But we also know that that’s never going to happen.

There will never be a moment in life that you won’t be able to find a reason to suffer, if you’re looking for it. And that’s why it’s so important for us to develop the skill to learn how to notice what’s already good, notice what’s already beautiful in our lives that’s available right in this moment.

And as we begin to do that, we also begin to recognize everything that isn’t wrong. Like, right now, if you had a toothache, if you had pain, like a dental pain, you’d be thinking, if only I didn’t have a toothache, I’d be so happy. And you don’t have a toothache right now, and so then the question is, is it possible for you to enjoy your non-toothache right in this moment?

Is it possible to train myself to be able to notice those things? And it’s not naive to look at life this way. I mean, if anything, it’s pretty irrational to be so focused on the never-ending stream of problems in life to the point that we become debilitated by it.

We can think of experiences of beauty and joy as kind of like the fuel that we need in order to be able to be present when something doesn’t go well. And if we don’t fill up that reservoir in ourselves, we won’t have the energy to be able to deal with life when we’re exposed to some real difficulty.

So coming back to my story. Coming back to that hospital room.

So there I am, with my wife and son, in a moment when it feels like everything is going wrong. And more than anything, what I want in that moment is to be able to be a resource for them, to be able to be there for them in a way that’s going to be helpful.

How can I do it?

So in that moment, I stop. I pause. I let go of whatever I’m trying to do in that moment. I let go of any desires, including the desire to feel any different or be any different than I am. And I come back just to the sensations in my body in that moment. And when I do, it is not pleasant.

What I find is an intense amount of tension, agitation, an intense amount of just kind of heaviness. And I give myself permission just to feel it, just to allow it to be there, just bringing kind of an open acceptance to exactly what I’m feeling in this moment.

And as I let go of struggling against what’s real for me, what I’m actually feeling, as I bring sort of acceptance and compassion to myself in that moment, it’s like I come into the present in a really different way. And I recognize this voice in me, this voice that’s just saying, no. This is not OK. I don’t accept this. I don’t accept that this is happening, and I pause, and I listen to myself with compassion. I don’t fight against myself. I don’t start arguing against myself, but I just listen.

And I recognize that that voice is suffering so much is that — what is so difficult in that moment what that voice is saying is I don’t want to lose my wife, that I’m really scared of losing her.

But as I come into the present a little more, I recognize that she’s here with me. She’s alive in this moment. That all of this suffering that’s coming up for me, all of this distress that’s coming up for me, is about the fear of losing something that I haven’t lost yet.

And I recognize, and I see this is a moment that she’s alive. This is a moment in which I’m here, with my wife and my son, and it’s not a moment to grieve. It’s a moment to celebrate.

When I give talks about mindfulness, there’s a story that I’ll sometimes tell. It’s about sort of listening to ourselves, listening to sort of what’s underneath whatever our behaviors are, and the story goes like this.

Imagine somebody is driving on a highway, and they get cut off, and they just go into a rage. And they roll down the window, and they’re screaming obscenities, and maybe like they throw a plastic water bottle at the other car.

If you could pause in that moment and ask that person, why are you doing that? They might say, because this jerk cut me off.

But if we look a little deeper, we might ask, OK, so why is that so upsetting to you? Well, because it was really unsafe and disrespectful.

OK, so the need that’s up for you right in this moment is safety and respect. You’d like to feel more safety and more respect. Right?

Yeah, obviously, and so what you’re doing, to seek greater safety and respect, is chasing somebody down the highway, sticking your head out the window and screaming at them.

In that moment, I felt as misguided as the person in my story, just sort of lost in grief about something that hadn’t happened. And actually, in a moment that I can celebrate. That’s what I mean by the practice of recognizing what’s already beautiful and being fed by it.

SKILL OF ACCEPTANCE AND COMPASSION

The second skill that I want to talk about today — I sort of alluded to in that story — is the skill of — the skill of being able to come home to your body with acceptance and compassion.

Whatever is taking us away, whatever is getting in the way of our ability to be fully present, our ability to be fully human in any situation, at least the most basic level, we can think of as distress. Right? And that on one of the most basic levels, we can think of distress as a physiological response that happens in the body.

In fact, from the perspective of Buddhist psychology, any emotion is made out of this physiological component and a tendency to think in a certain way. So for example, anger is considered to be made up of a physiological reaction combined with a tendency to think angry thoughts.

So this is a practice of coming home to that physiological response in the body and bringing acceptance and compassion. So at probably the most basic level, just being able to accept my own physiological response to a situation, we might consider the absolute floor of self-compassion of self-acceptance.

It is OK for my body to be doing what it’s doing right now, as opposed to it’s not OK for whatever my body is — whatever’s happening in my body right now. So we can consider that in some ways just the most basic level of self-acceptance or self-compassion.

But bringing compassion to the sensations in our body has another element. I’m going to flip through a couple of slides here.

So first, this is Annie. This is my wife after one of our many hospital visits. And then this is the person that I want to talk about now, Jaak Panksepp. Panksepp is probably one of — or was one of the most well-known affective neuroscientists in the world, actually coined the term affective neuroscience. He’s a neuroscientist who focuses on the study of emotion in the brain. This is a photo of him with some of his best friends, his lab rats.

So Panksepp, in the course of his research, he discovered what he calls basic emotional circuits in the brain. He was really particularly interested in coming to understand well-defined anatomical structures in the brain that all mammals share, that give rise to what he would call basic emotions.

And one of the seven basic emotional circuits that Panksepp discovered he calls the care circuit. It’s basically the brain circuit that all mammals share that regulates caretaking behaviors. If you’re feeling warmth and love, if it were possible to image your brain with enough detail, we would see that the care circuit in your brain is active. That it’s releasing oxytocin and natural opiates to give you that warm fuzzy feeling.

Panksepp discovered that the care circuit in your brain is one of the primary tools that we have for emotional regulation. That for any mammal experiencing distress, if you can activate the care circuit in your brain, he’ll say you can do so either naturally or using micro electrodes in animal studies. Just turning on the care circuit in your brain, that your experience of distress drops dramatically.

And so one thing that we’re learning how to do in this practice is we can consider compassion training at some level utilizing the care circuit in your brain to regulate distress. Getting in touch with a feeling of warmth and love, and allowing that to regulate distressing emotions.

And I’m going to tell a little story about utilizing this practice or process in kind of a high pressure environment.

I think it was October 13th or so, 2011. Mayor Bloomberg in New York City gave an eviction notice for all of the protesters at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park. What he said was that the protesters needed to evacuate the park, so the park can be power washed. Most of the demonstrators assumed that this was just kind of a way of clearing out the demonstrations.

And in fact, Saturday Night Live made a joke about anyone who spent much time in New York City doesn’t see a lot of evidence of public parks being power washed.

So that night hundreds of protesters rented industrial cleaning equipment and cleaned the park, and a call went out to resist the eviction. And so the next morning, before dawn, more people than ever were crowded into Zuccotti Park, shoulder to shoulder for the entire public park.

And I was asked with another organizer, Nicole Cardi, to facilitate the General Assembly the next morning. So I remember standing up on a low stone wall and looking out into this sea of humanity. We were entirely penned in by police in riot gear. There were helicopters overhead, and this enormous military-level police presence, and Nicole and I were tasked with doing something impossible.

We’re supposed to facilitate a consensus meeting with tens of thousands of people in imminent physical danger. And I remember looking out into this group of people and seeing the terror that was in so many of their faces, that threatened to overcome our hope and turn this gathering into chaos.

And in that moment, all that I wanted to do was to be a resource to ground the energy. I wanted to be — I wanted to project calm and serenity and connection, but I was just as freaked out as anybody else. Possibly more so, because I’m supposed to be facilitating this, co-facilitating it.

So in that moment, I remember looking out into this crowd of people, and again, just stopping and coming back to my body. And again becoming aware of just the shakiness, the agitation, the pressure, just as physical sensation in my body.

And in that moment, what I said to myself was, whatever you feel right now is OK. It can be as strong as it wants to be. I sort of spoke to the fear in me, and said, it’s OK for you to be here. You can be as strong as you want to be, and as I did, the sensation got a lot worse.

But I didn’t worry, because I’ve had enough experience with this practice that I know that happens sometimes. So I told myself — so I kind of spoke to the fear in me saying, you can be as strong as you want to be, and it did, got really intense. And I basically just said, you can be as afraid as you want to be. This fear can be as strong as you want to be, and you’re still loved. You’re still OK. I can be here for you.

That moment is what we might call equanimity with compassion. For a lot of us, when we think of compassion, we think of compassion without equanimity. The idea that I care so much about your well-being that to see you suffering kills me. And that it’s hard for me to be around, or it’s hard for me to help. It sort of burns me out to care of this much. You can consider that compassion without equanimity.

And then on the other hand, sometimes we can have equanimity without compassion. What that might consider equanimity without compassion is kind of like, oh yeah, things like this happen every day. You read the news, and you’re like, yeah, things like that happen every day, not surprised, and you’re not moved at all to want to help. It doesn’t really stir you. We consider that sort of equanimity without compassion.

But the image for what I want to talk about here, that I feel like is maybe the most important component of developing our capacity to stay human, is equanimity with compassion. And the archetype of equanimity with compassion is the way that we hold a crying baby.

My teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, when he talks about mindfulness practice, he says, what you’re learning how to do is to be present with yourself and especially present with your suffering. In the way that you would hold a crying baby, with that kind of openness and warmth and care.

And he’s not talking about the way that we might actually hold a crying baby, when it’s 3:00 O’clock in the morning, and you’re just totally burned out. What he means is that there is a way to hold a crying baby that that baby experiences as deeply comforting. And it’s not you’re holding the baby, and you’re just like, God, will you shut up. OK, I’m holding you, see, holding you, now stop.

It’s a way that I think that we can all relate to, that you’re holding this baby with the attitude of, it’s OK if you cry, and it’s OK if you stop. Whatever you’re feeling is fine with me, and I’m here for you, whatever you need.

It’s not the kind of equanimity — so sometimes we get confused when we think about our adult relationships, because we feel like to have compassion for somebody means that we don’t really accept their suffering. We have to fix them.

Or we might feel like having equanimity is like, well, you’re going through something hard, so I’m just going to — so that’s fine with me, that you’re going through something hard.

But there is a compassion with equanimity in which I can be — whatever you’re going through doesn’t bother me, like I recognize that’s part of life. And yet, I’m here for you, if there’s anything that I can do, I will.

And so in this meeting, I’m trying to relate to my own suffering in this way. I’m feeling this fear as borderline terror in me, and saying, you can be as afraid as you want to be. I’m here for you, whatever you need. And as I do, it gets worse for a few minutes. Maybe not even a minute, and then it starts to relax, and I start to get this sense of whatever feeling comes up is OK. It doesn’t threaten my value as a person, that love and compassion are available whatever is coming up with me, regardless.

And there’s something that’s just profoundly comforting for a human being to have that experience, and that’s really what we’re training ourselves to be able to do in the practice of self-compassion.

And as I started to settle, I looked out in this crowd, and it was just so obvious to me that there is nowhere on earth that I’d rather be. I’m surrounded with tens of thousands of people who are risking their comfort and their safety to try to make the world a little better, in whatever way that they think might make the world better.

But that they’re putting their bodies on the line for something that they believe in, and seeing that insight, I just fell in love with everybody, every single person in that crowd. And I think that they could feel it, and the energy relaxed.

And about 20 minutes into that general assembly, we got word that Bloomberg and Brookfield Properties, that manages the park, had rescinded their evacuation notice. And so there’s a huge celebration, and marching and dancing and everything like that. It ended up being this really wonderful day.

So that’s the second skill that I want to talk about, that ability to relate to ourselves, to our suffering, with openness, with compassion. To relate to those experiences primarily as sensations in the body that we can bring openness and compassion.

And then the third skill that I want to talk about — I’m going to turn these slides back on. There’s the one of the General Assembly meetings at Occupy Wall Street.

OK, so sometimes holding our suffering feels like this. Sometimes, our fear, our grief, our anger, we can recognize it and we can kind of hold it, and that’s kind of the image. When you’re thinking about mindfulness, this is the image that I’d like for you to have in your mind.

However, sometimes we try to come home to our suffering, and it looks a little more like this. And so there’s this question of how do I find compassion for that? How can I find it in myself to have love and compassion for this part of me?

And it’s particularly problematic when we’re being self-destructive, when we experience ourselves as being self-destructive. Those are the parts of us that are often the hardest to relate to with compassion.

So in my first book, in “Self-Compassion in Psychotherapy,” there’s a client that I — sort of a case study that I write up, that I’m going to share a little bit about, to talk about this problem.

His name, as the case study, his name was Chris, and he came to therapy. He said that he had been depressed with intense self-criticism for a long time, and that I was the fifth therapist that he had seen in two years. No one had helped. So I was already really excited.

And so I said, OK well, tell me about what you want to work on. And he said, so I’ve got this intense amount of self-criticism, and whatever I do doesn’t seem to help and he talks about whenever he had a success. He felt like an imposter, like he was just moments away from being kind of found out and that just going through life, whenever he made a mistake, he was incredibly critical of himself.

And so we started off, and I said, well, maybe we can try a couple of practices and see if we can find something that might help you. Would you be willing to try a practice? We can try a few things and see what might help, and he said, well, what do you want to do?

So I described him a mindfulness of the body practice, and he’s like, nah, I’ve read all about mindfulness. It doesn’t help me.

I said, OK.

So then I described another self-compassion practice about like the voices or thoughts in his head. And he’s like, no, that sounds really similar to something another therapist did. I don’t want to do that either.

We spent pretty much a full hour-long session going through just about any orientation that I could think of for working on depression and self-criticism. And every single one he had either tried, and it didn’t work, or it just couldn’t possibly work for him. And so the term that kept popping up in my mind was a term by the Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan called competing commitment.

And what Kegan means by a competing commitment is that it’s possible for someone to genuinely want to stop being depressed. And yet for another part of them to be afraid of letting go of their depression, or whatever that symptom is, competing commitments. And that’s kind of what was coming up in me.

It seems like everything I’m doing, Chris was finding some way to kind of not go along with it. I was kind of getting that sense, so we end up trying a practice looking into that.

But I want to talk a little bit about competing commitments first, because it’s I feel like one of the most important areas for really understanding self-compassion. Because what it means ultimately is relating to every part of myself, even the self-destructive ones, with understanding and compassion.

Now usually, when we think about somebody who’s like really self-critical or self-sabotaging or just incapable of taking a complement, it seems like they’re just being self-destructive, or that there’s something sort of dysfunction about their way of relating.

But I want to talk about that and question that a little bit in terms of finding a way to develop compassion for those parts of ourselves.

So to go back to our slides for a second, when you see a moth fly into a flame — that moth’s about to kill himself. Why do they do that? Well, when we look at a moth just like a bee line for a flame and die, we generally don’t assume that moth just hated himself. Right?

We come up with some other story for why the moth did that. In general, we might believe that maybe they use light to navigate, and they get confused by artificial lights. That’s a really common idea that people will talk about why that happens, even though it’s factually untrue. Entomologists say that moths don’t use light to navigate.

We don’t actually know why they do this, but we tend to come up with some sort of explanation that there is a life-serving purpose that gets confused. Whenever we see an animal acting in ways that might be considered self-destructive, that there must be some sort of life-serving purpose that’s just out of context a little bit.

And we do that because evolution doesn’t really make sense unless you assume that life is motivated by avoiding suffering and trying to meet needs, trying to thrive. Otherwise, when you’re talking about evolution, it’s hard to say what’s driving — how to explain any of these behaviors in terms of evolution.

But we don’t necessarily do that with our own behaviors. We don’t give ourselves the benefit of the doubt in the same way that we might with a moth.

Now, trying to understand what gets confused — if we want to assume that whatever self-destructive behavior — we might engage in self-sabotaging behavior — that Chris, his depth of self-criticism and his whatever ways that he’s kind of avoiding therapy. If we’re trying to assume that that is motivated by some sort of life-serving purpose that gets confused, we need to understand a little bit about why it could be confused.

And actually, there is a new kind of subfield of neuroscience that’s teaching us a lot about this. Computational Neuroscience. For a long time, neuroscientists, from the beginning of neuroscience, they were only really able to learn about the brain through injuries. Right? Somebody gets — an animal or a person — an animal gets a lesion or a person gets a brain injury, and we see how it affects them.

And for a long time, up until more recent brain imaging, that’s the only way we’re able to really learn about how the brain works.

Starting with when we invented functional imaging, we were then able to learn a lot more about the brain, being able to kind of look at it in live subjects. But still, it’s like if I could just take a scan of what my computer is doing, like as the electricity is moving around, you can’t really learn that much about how my computer works just by kind of looking at a scan.

The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning have gotten to the point now that they’re making novel contributions to the field of neuroscience. And one of the main ways that they’re able to do that is by taking theories that are put forward by neuroscientists and biologists, biologically-grounded theories, and they’re able to formalize those theories and test them computationally. Like, does this actually behave — in what ways does it, and in what ways does it not behave like an actual brain?

Probably one of the most dominant ideas in computational neuroscience right now is that the brain’s core functioning is to build models, to build models of the world. To take the chaos of our sensory data, and to look for patterns, and to use those patterns to construct models of how the world works.

But what that means is that all of our actions are being mediated through these models that we have of how to avoid suffering and find happiness. And all of our models are constructed out of our past experience.

And so kind of recognizing that a worldview that sees human beings want to avoid suffering and find happiness, but we just generally don’t know how. Because we are filtering those impulses through imperfect modeling of the world. And that in some ways, recognizing that a human being is someone who — it’s actually very similar to the idea in Buddhist psychology, that ultimately what we want is to avoid suffering and find happiness, but we don’t know how.

Coming back to Chris, so what we did, he came back the next session. I said, you know, I’d like to try to — can we go through some sort of practice today?

He said, OK, I’ll try something.

And what I did was I asked him to picture himself in a moment that he was feeling really depressed. He talked about earlier that week he had stayed home and overeaten, played a lot of video games. And his girlfriend asked him to come out to a dinner party, and he was isolating. He turned her down, and he was just overeating and playing video games and feeling terrible about himself.

And I asked him to picture himself back there, and just sit with that for a moment, let himself get in touch with, bring up those feelings. And from the perspective of recognizing that whatever part of him is active right now is — it has a life-serving purpose that we don’t yet understand.

I asked him to finish the sentence “I refuse to let go of my depression, because if I did –” and he immediately said, “they get away with it.”

I said, who gets away with it, and he goes, my fucking parents.

And we talked a little bit more, and he explained that he’d grown up in a household where it was a household where his parents would be screaming at him and demeaning him. And then the phone would ring, and they’d be like, oh hi! Oh yeah, everything’s wonderful here. How are you?

And for Chris, that facade of needing to put forth everything is fine here was actually more painful than the emotional abuse that he experienced from his parents. And that there was a part of him that felt like the only way for me to have any hope of my parents admitting the reality of what our relationship has been is just to stay depressed, to keep undermining my life.

Because as soon as I start really succeeding, as soon as I really let go of this stuff, they’re just going to take credit for all of it, and that was intolerable. And as soon as I could recognize how this undermining himself was an attempt — had a life serving purpose, then we could integrate it, and we could find compassion for that part of himself that just is terrified of letting his parents win.

And eventually, he was able to kind of consciously give up. Give up hope on the possibility that they were going to respond to him the way that he wanted them to, and in doing that, he no longer felt compelled to undermine himself anymore.

Coming back to the workbook — let’s see. There you go, yep.

Coming back to the workbook, the Self-Compassion Skills workbook is organized as kind of a flow chart of different practices. In my first book, “Self-Compassion in Psychotherapy,” Richie Davidson wrote the foreword, and he describes research that shows about 30 minutes a day, for two weeks, of compassion training is enough to create measurable changes in both brain physiology and behavior.

And so this workbook is set up with that assumption in mind, that taking 30 minutes a day, for two weeks, to train yourself in the component skills of self-compassion. But recognizing that we’re different, and we have different strengths, and we have different obstacles. There’s a flow chart that, depending on what’s coming up for you, it points you to whatever practice is going to be most appropriate for you in that moment.

So you start every training session at the beginning, and move from one practice to the next, depending on what comes up for you.

So we’re at a good place, I think, to open up for questions, thoughts, and comments. So I think Van has a mic there.

MICHAEL VAN RIPER: Yeah, I’m going to– maybe Brandy, you’ll be my mic runner?

AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Swarup. I’m part of gPause team. I teach meditations and yoga. Look like I’m a taking a personal session and asking you a question, but it’s kind of like, so I teach meditation, right?

TIM DESMOND: Sure.

AUDIENCE: I’m learning mediation from the day. I’m going to school, because my schools are teaching meditation. But now, still even after practicing meditation from so long, right, still there is a little anger in me.

TIM DESMOND: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Right? There’s still little because people point this out. You are practicing this long.

TIM DESMOND: Sure, sure.

AUDIENCE: Why the hell do you have anger? But now the problem — now, you know? Even discussion is coming to me, myself. Right? The point is right. I’m practicing meditation for so long, why there’s still this anger. Now, I want to share the situation as well.

TIM DESMOND: Sure.

AUDIENCE: That is causing the anger. So I belong to a very poor family. Somehow I managed to reach Google today, and I want to give back to the society, right? So I was helping an orphanage to fund. Not just me, I collected a bunch of friends who were like me, somehow least successful in their life, and we were supporting an orphanage.

But since we are busy with our life, and we were not ready to really go and check what the hell is happening, we just give money to support. But one day I realized that the orphanage we all were funding, they were giving drugs to the kids, and they were abducting kids from other places to just make the orphanage big. Right?

So all of a sudden, this gave me an anger. I know I myself — I teach meditation.

TIM DESMOND: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: And I do know well, should I just enjoy the fact that, OK, stuff happen. Now, look in the future, and don’t do the mistake. Or I just keep this small anger in myself to help me motivate to fight against it.

TIM DESMOND: Yeah, yeah.

AUDIENCE: So my question is, should I let go and enjoy my life, or should I keep this anger and fight against it?

TIM DESMOND: Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

I’m glad you feel angry about that. Some people talk about the goal of meditation is like to no longer have negative emotions or even to stop your thinking, as though like being brain dead is like a better situation than being alive.

So for me, any type of meditation, the goal of that meditation comes down to what is your goal about the person that you want to be in the world. And actually, it’s not so much like how can I be a good meditator and just embody whatever goals are part of that. You find a lot more success in discovering who do I want to be? What’s important to me? What are the qualities that I want to develop in myself, and then I want to train myself in those qualities, and I want to know why. Why do I want to be this way and not that way? Right?

So like in what way do I want — how would I like to react in a moment like that? And I’m 100% not going to prescribe some sort of a right way to react, but I can say that it is the inevitable human response when you’re in touch with suffering that it brings up suffering in you.

In Buddhist psychology, the saying is that the nature of mind is dual and permeable. If you’re really happy, being around you is going to make me happy, and if you’re really suffering, being around you is going to bring up suffering in me. The question is, what do I do with the suffering that comes up in me? Am I dominated by it?

Suffering, I would say, is a good servant and a terrible master, because suffering is a necessary component of compassion. There would be no compassion, if we couldn’t suffer. So I recognize the suffering in me, and then I want to relate to that suffering with love in myself. I want to be able to accept that in me, and I want to be able to recognize that the entire spectrum of human experience is welcome in me.

I want to make friends with my anger. I don’t want to somehow decide that I shouldn’t be angry. And that the more that I’m able to make friends with my anger, the more that I’m able to listen to it and act with wisdom.

Thank you.

MICHAEL VAN RIPER: So we’re actually almost at time. Well, we can take another question. I just want to be respectful if people have to go somewhere at one. I also don’t know if our live stream will cut out that one, or if we can keep it going for a little bit.

But I had one question from the Dory, and then we can go for a few minutes past, because we have the room beyond one. This person had two questions. What can we do every day to stop being negative and bringing ourselves down? That’s the first question, and also, after I speak with someone, or I’m afraid to approach someone, I get very angry and have regrets for not being confident and beat myself up. How can I deal with those feelings? We have limited time, so you can choose which of those two you —

TIM DESMOND: I’ll use the second one. It’s a little more practical. It’s more like specific. I want to approach somebody and insecurity arises in me. So the real question is, how can I be kind to the insecurity in me? How can I recognize — instead of identifying with it, instead of saying like, this insecurity is me, and it’s bad, I can recognize that insecurity is something that every human being experiences. And probably, it’s a transmission that I’ve received from whatever experiences or my parents, my ancestors.

And the question is, how can I relate to that insecurity with compassion? So after I want to approach somebody and then don’t and feel bad about it, then I want to stop and recognize that there is insecurity in me. And I want to ask myself, is it possible for me to relate to this insecurity with compassion?

Now, the insecurity in me, if it seems like a beautiful crying baby that just feels anxious, then I can hold it like that. If it seems like a little monster, then I need to look a little deeper and try to understand how does that insecurity have some sort of a life-serving purpose? How is it trying to keep me safe? How is it trying to steer me away from suffering and toward happiness?

And if I can see that as the basis, then it becomes easier to relate to with compassion. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you. Really don’t have a whole lot of words to describe how I feel right now, other than this feeling of coming home. Just everything that you’ve talked about, there’s just this resonance of home. So thank you for that.

TIM DESMOND: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, my question though is when you were talking about the first tool, about seeing what’s already beautiful, so I do a lot of that. And it’s something that I do daily, and it’s come naturally to me.

But something — I am a fixer, and I love to solution things, and I have this commitment to my life that if I’m going to complain about something, I better have a solution.

TIM DESMOND: Sure.

AUDIENCE: Or else, don’t complain about it. And I have an 11-year-old boy, and there’s a lot of litter in San Jose. It’s absolutely filthy, and my eye is constantly seeing it. And it comes — my mind says, well, this is because I want a solution it, and that’s a beautiful thing.

TIM DESMOND: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Well, a couple of weeks ago, my son said to me, mom, stop looking at the trash and look at everything else that’s beautiful. It’s not the only thing that’s around. And I loved that he said that to me. He’s a beautiful mirror. And I said, yes, you’re right, but if I don’t look at the trash, then who’s going to fix it?

TIM DESMOND: Yeah, so it’s a balance. Right?

AUDIENCE: Right.

TIM DESMOND: It’s not only look at the trash or pretend the trash isn’t there. Right?

We want to be like — the question is like, who I want to be in the world? I want to be somebody who acts to make my community better, but who isn’t debilitated by the amount of work that’s in front of me. Right?

So what I want to do is it’s — and that’s when we talk about being present, what it means in this situation is coming back to you in this moment. Do I need to be looking more at the litter, or more at everything else? It’s not about always. It’s right now, do I move myself a little left or a little right in order to be in the place that I want to be right now?

And so it’s this constant question of re-orienting and finding a balance that’s going to help me be the person I want to be.

AUDIENCE: That was perfect. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. It’s great talk. I did enjoy it. I wanted to ask about one thing.

So definitely the 30 minute training every day something that might — I can definitely see it having benefits. But most of us in our work, we are engineers. We are writing code or dealing with maybe all kind of stuff at work or at home. I also saw this kind of probably there’s an answer already to it, but I would like to see some sort of tools that can help me in the moment rather than doing a training 30 minutes in the morning. Would that — I think, I did see a third thing which was the deck. I don’t know.

Maybe that’s the answer to the question or maybe something else.

TIM DESMOND: You know, what I would say is, for me, what it comes down to ultimately is getting clear about who do I want to be in the world? What are the qualities that I want to develop in me? And so let’s say what I want to develop is just sort of greater peace, contentment, happiness, whatever it is, compassion.

And there are four basic categories of personal practice. A formal daily practice is just one of them. So first category we can think of as a formal daily practice, and the reason that I orient the workbook around the formal daily practice is that most of the research comes from explicit practice for an explicit amount of time.

The second category, sort of a broad category of practice, we might consider an informal moment-to-moment practice, which is about recognizing. So it might be finding one activity that I do every day, stepping into the shower, turning on my car, whatever it is. And asking myself, can I create a poem or a reminder that will help me to get into the frame of mind that I would like to be in, in this moment?

When my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, first became a Buddhist monk in Vietnam, the first element of his training he was given a book of poems, and he was told to memorize. And there was a poem for waking up, for putting on your robes, putting on your shoes, for washing your face. And he was supposed to recite these poems as he went through his day, and that was like the first stage of monastic training.

The poem — he’s translated these poems in a book called “Present Moment, Wonderful Moment.” Kind of an example, the poem for waking up is, waking up this morning I smile. 24 brand new hours to be alive. I vow to look at living beings with the eyes of compassion. So you say that. So there is moment-to-moment practice.

Then, there is intensive retreats. If you want to learn, let’s say, like a foreign language, what do they say is the best way to do that? Immersion, right?

So we can think of a retreat as kind of like immersion in the training of mindfulness and compassion. Similar to immersion in language, you take up a lot more a lot quicker with that sort of a practice.

And the fourth category is a supportive community, having people around you that share your enthusiasm, or that can at least feed that purpose in you. And so some people really feel like their daily formal practice is where they shine. It’s what feels most important.

Other people aren’t able to do the daily formal practice, but they try to go on an intensive retreat once or twice a year. Other people, it’s really the informal practice that they put their energy into. So finding something, trying out something from those different categories, can be really helpful.

But just like learning a new language, just like learning to play an instrument, what it comes down to is deliberate practice in whatever form that’s going to take if you want something to create real change in your life.

MICHAEL VAN RIPER: We’re going to have to wrap it up, but I want to thank Tim.

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