You Are Good. You Are Enough. My Interview with Lodro Rinzler

We explore why so many of us feel fundamentally flawed and how the Buddhist teaching of basic goodness offers a practical way back to ease. 

We share meditation-based tools for working with shame, self-doubt, and cultural messages of not-enoughness so we can act with more clarity and care. 

Buy Lodro Rinzler's Book: You Are Good. You Are Enough.
https://a.co/d/078HXYBb

Lodro's website: https://www.lodrorinzler.com/

• why Lodro writes You Are Good, You Are Enough amid divisiveness and rising self-doubt
• how to recognise basic goodness through ordinary moments rather than abstract belief
• the cocoon of self-stories and the shift from identity to present experience
• how acceptance supports commitment and more skillful action in the world
• subtle cultural messaging that reinforces not-enoughness and self-judgment
• why retreats and longer sits can reset perspective on distraction and presence
• choosing space over busy and aligning work with a clear intention
• four immeasurables practices including loving-kindness for self and others
• a practical “loving-kindness photo” for someone you struggle with
• navigating imposter syndrome for mindfulness teachers without chasing perfection
• healthy regret versus harmful shame and learning from mistakes
• a nuanced view on “evil” as distance from basic goodness rather than a fixed essence

Please check out Lodro Rinzler's website at https://www.lodrorinzler.com/ where you can find all those free guided meditations that we talked about, links to his past books, which I highly recommend.

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Mindfulness Exercises with Sean Fargo is a practical, grounded mindfulness podcast for people who want meditation to actually help in real life.

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• Mindfulness meditation for everyday life
• Trauma-sensitive and compassion-based practices
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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right. Welcome everyone. My name is Sean Fargo. Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises podcast. Today I have the honor of speaking with Lodro Rinsler, someone who I've been a fan of for, I'm guessing, about 15 years now, maybe more. I discovered Lodro in a bookstore. It might have been a spirit rock meditation center or a Bayagiri monastery, but he wrote a book that really caught my eye called The Buddha Walks Into a Bar. When I saw the title, I thought, oh, that seems a little different. And I opened it up and learned about Lodro and discovered that he is a very deep mindfulness practitioner and esteemed Buddhist teacher. Has done a really great job of making mindfulness applicable and relevant to daily life with a sense of reverence for the ancient teachings of the Buddha. Lodro is a Buddhist meditation teacher and author and speaker known for making meditation and these mindfulness exercises accessible to everyday life. He's a senior teacher. He's a co-founder of Mindful, that's MMDFL, which is a popular meditation studio in New York City. Lodro has taught meditation for over two decades, working with individuals, companies, and institutions to bring practical mindfulness into daily routines. In researching Lodro, I discovered that he founded the Buddhist House at Wesleyan University, which is where my wife went to college. And so I'm really curious to learn a little bit about that. After college, he was recruited to be the executive director of Boston's largest meditation center. He's led workshops at college campuses throughout the United States. He's launched Buddhist immersion and teacher training programs similar to what we do. I highly recommend his trainings. He lives in New York State, I believe, two hours north of New York City in Hudson Valley, and uh discovered the joy of farmers' markets. He's a proud papa of a three-year-old girl, I believe. And he's the author of a new book called You Are Good. You are enough. And I think just even reading the title of the book kind of sets me at ease. Makes me take a deep breath, relax the nervous system, and helps me to remember my inner goodness and enoughness. Sharon Salzberg said that Lodro Rinsler guides readers through the tender work of observing patterns of self-doubt, not to try and find a quick fix, but to reveal what was never broken. He's also the author of several other books, like Love Hurts and Take Back Your Mind, which blend traditional Buddhist teachings with relatable, often humorous insights about relationships, work, and personal growth. Lodro is especially known for his down-to-earth teaching style, emphasizing that meditation is not about perfection, but about showing up honestly and working with one's mind in the myths of real life. I believe I've seen a number of your articles as well in Elephant Journal. And every time I see a video with you teaching, there's an immediate sense of, dare I say, softness, which I really like. There's a sense of safety, kindness, friendliness, which I believe are born out of your deep practice and probably just your own nature. So Lodro, I'm very honored to speak with you today. Thank you so much for the work that you bring to the world. I am excited to speak with you today. Thank you for coming.

Why Write You Are Good Now

SPEAKER_02 4:31

Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure and an honor to be here.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

So, Lodro, with your new book, You Are Good. What led you to write this book now? Was there something that you were seeing in people or in yourself that felt especially important to address at this time?

SPEAKER_02 4:52

It's always funny because, particularly in traditional publishing, there's this long tale. So this is a book that I wrote before my daughter was even born. As you noted, she's almost three now. I don't think a lot has changed in these few years. I think the reasons may have intensified. Namely, two things really. A lot of divisiveness within society, people really finding new stamina to be really cruel to each other now that we have all these ways of commenting on Facebook posts or doing just like nasty things to people online. And just the level of divisiveness, I think it's really got going around at this point almost a decade ago, with some big political shifts, but then it got intense in the pandemic and people saying, No, you're not doing what I think you should be doing. And I think the various forms of forgive the term fundamentalism in people's rigidity of thinking is only intensified. And we're starting to approach this time where we're saying, well, anyone who doesn't agree with me is fundamentally wrong or bad. Whereas, of course, as you noted, I was raised within the Buddhist tradition that says, actually, we're fundamentally good. That's who we are. And to recognize that in each other, I think, is something that we really need to begin doing more of as individuals. And then the second reason is that sense that a lot of the people I work with in the last bazillion years have been teaching. I'm noticing an increasing trend in people starting to doubt their own goodness. People are giving in more and more to that little insidious voice in their own head saying, actually, you know, if Loder really knew me, he wouldn't say that about me. Whatever people's version of that may be. And some people, it is people, once they get to know me, they don't actually want to date me anymore. Or for some people, it's no one's going to want to hire me because they don't understand that sometimes I slack off. Sometimes it's this person wouldn't want to be friends with me if they knew what I was really like. Whatever our version of not enoughness is, we reify that into such a strong identity that ultimately we end up making our life very small. So the fundamental shift that this book, You Are Good, You Are Enough, is approaching is saying, what if we shifted the perspective from not enoughness to working with the techniques about how we settle into recognizing that our basic state is not messed up. Our basic state is good, it's whole, it's complete. If we shift our perspective from I'm basically broken to I'm not messed up at all, there's I'm not in need of fixing, I'm okay as I am, then we actually start to view our whole life and everyone we encounter through that lens. And that can be really transformative for us, and I'll go so far as to say for society.

Skepticism About Inherent Goodness

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Well, that's a pretty big shift for a lot of people in the world right now who have this ingrained perception of themselves as being not good enough or fundamentally flawed or even bad. So I'm curious when people hear this, that we are all inherently good and enough, how might you address the skepticism that may come? Like, are there certain teachings or evidence that you can point to or practices that you can lead them through to kind of unpack levels of either shame or not enoughness?

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Yeah, it is interesting. I imagine you find this in your teaching as well, that it's just different levels of the same thing. So for some people, I can just say, hey, there's this thing you may not know, which is this term basic goodness, but you've probably already experienced little moments of it. Let me continue to highlight it for you. And sometimes that's all it takes. But I use the example in the book about how the word blue didn't exist in language until about 4,500 years ago, which is not that long ago in the grand scheme of it. But if you look at some of these ancient chet texts in Hebrew, Chinese, Greek, there's nothing there that says blue, which is crazy. But then it gradually made its way into our language. And now, when I look up at the sky, someone must have told me that's blue. I did this with my daughter once I learned about this that I said, you know, I'm just gonna take you outside real quick. You see that? That's blue. And now she knows blue is everywhere. The same thing can be said for basic goodness. Sometimes it's something we may have experienced, but we don't even have a name for it. But by putting a name on it, just pointing at the experience itself, that can be transformative. And it is as simple as now that I've recognized it once, I recognize it everywhere. Same thing as if someone pointed out blue. For us, that could be all it takes. But a lot of times, as you noted, there are a lot of layers of shame, mistakes, guilt that cover over that realization. So we might even, to give a specific example, be meditating, doing mindfulness of the breath practice. And there's a moment where we notice we're not spiraling in anxiety or fear, and we're just present. And we say, Oh, this feels basically good. Is this what they're talking about? And then we start second guessing it and then we go back. But that's it. It's a simple, very ordinary experience. It's not transcendental, it's not something you need to work toward. It is very ordinary and very common. But the more I notice it on the cushion, then when I, you know, I went for a run earlier, I got at home, I went and took a shower, and the warm water hit my back, and my shoulders dropped, and I was present for that experience. And I noticed, oh, this is basic goodness too. Before I got on the line, I hugged my daughter, she's a big hug. And they're 100% with her, basic goodness. So there's these moments, and we start to string these moments together to a continuity of basic goodness. It's very helpful we start recognize them on the meditation cushion itself. But to the shame and guilt of it all, it does take a lot of us letting go of the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves that are not helping in any way, shape, or form in order to remember that experience. Because those stories wrap us up. A common term that I use in this book is that of a cocoon. It's like we have these little threads of this story about myself, that story about myself, and they spiral around us to the point that we can't even interact with the world around us. We are cocooned off from it. Meditation is a really good tool for acknowledging those thoughts, cutting through, coming back. And like that is a way of slowly spreading open that cocoon and peering out at the world around us so that we actually are fully present with it in ourselves in a way that the experience of basic goodness becomes not a philosophy or dogma in any way, but our own genuine experience. It's our personal experience, and that's what I'm really hoping for for everyone.

The Cocoon Of Identity Stories

SPEAKER_01 11:18

That's a cocoon spiraling of stories, as you mentioned, can wrap around us pretty tightly sometimes. I'm wondering if you can speak to the fear that some of us have of even acknowledging those stories or that cocoon that's wrapped around us. And how do we approach that cocoon or those stories in order to be released from it?

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Similar to the color blue and basic goodness, I think it's one of those things that first we just need to acknowledge it. And then we start to see it for real. The cocoon might look like I use the example of anxiety a moment ago, it might be the distinction between I'm currently feeling anxiety and I'm an anxious person. This is who I am. And I'm guessing someone listening to this is like, yes, that is me. I am an anxious person. I've been anxious all my life. Now I don't want to come off as judgmental or too pushy, but I think it's worth examining those stories and saying, is that necessarily who I am all the time? No, of course not. There are moments where there's relaxation, there's moments where there's relief or release. So if that's not our 100% experience all the time, then we can start to let go of the story of I am this person, I'm an angry person, I'm an anxious person, I am an overwhelmed person, and start to notice that is part of what's happening. So that slight shift from this is who I am to this is one of the things happening right now is really powerful because it moves us from that place of this is a cocoon that's happening to me versus this is something that I am sort of reinforcing moment by moment. So the Buddha a bazillion years ago said, anger is not one thing. It is an experience that we then keep adding to. It is a moment by moment experience. I think that is a good example, actually, because if let's say I get angry about something, I could read the news and say, oh, that politician, they're a jerk or whatever, I could tell myself that story and then I can come back to what's happening. Or I could tell myself that story all day long. And every time I tell myself that story, I am extending that experience of anger. I'm intentionally reifying it. Sometimes it feels good to be self-righteous. Oh, I'm right in this person's wrong, right? And then what happens though is we exhaust ourselves. Like, why am I so tired at the end of my day? Why do I feel so emotionally exhausted? It's because I've been holding myself in a state of tension. So ultimately, long term, we realize this is not actually serving me. And it didn't help shift the needle in terms of what that politician's doing or any of it. So if I'm only hurting myself, another analogy that's commonly used from the time of the Buddha, it's like holding onto a hot coal, then it's only going to burn ourselves. With all of that in mind, we have to start noticing the things that we do in the comfort of our own mind that are not actually helpful. And it could be telling ourselves stories about how we're not good enough to ask that person out or ask for a promotion or whatever. It could be stories around anxiety and what if this happens, what if that happens? It could be something else entirely. But once we start to recognize those stories, then we say, well, now I realize I actually have a choice around how I spend my mental energy, whether I continue to perpetuate them or whether I actually just come back to the present moment. Again, this is where meditation comes so helpful because it creates these new neural pathways that allow us to do that more readily. So a little bit of meditation training goes a long way in the post-meditation experience of acknowledging stories that aren't serving us, coming back to the present moment. And again, as you said, starting to unweave that cuckoo.

Acceptance That Leads To Skillful Action

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Thank you. I've been exploring acceptance and commitment therapy lately as a paradigm of healing and growth. I really like that combination of acceptance and commitment. I think that a lot of your book speaks to the acceptance piece of accepting ourselves, accepting our experience with the sense of care and warmth and love. I think that so much of our Western culture gets wrapped up in, say, the commitment part of life, where we are committed to changing the world, helping others, providing for our families, growing internally, but often out of a sense of not accepting ourselves. I think your book is speaking largely to the acceptance part, which is so important. I imagine a lot of people being afraid of, say, reading your book and practicing the acceptance part, thinking that they need to then drop the commitment part or the change or action part, thinking that we have to do one or the other, that it's hard to do both. Can you speak to the importance of both and how you reconcile deepening, say, the acceptance part while also holding, say, intention to also grow and change?

SPEAKER_02 16:17

Accepting ourselves as we are essentially, and also how do we grow at the same time? Absolutely. It almost sounds like these things would be in conflict. Sometimes I get a question of like, hey, if we're present all of the time, how do we think about the future? Which is a similar question, perhaps not as nuanced as the one you just asked. For whatever reason, I always flash back to this moment on the television show Friends, where Chandler Bing asks some sort of question, and he says, Yeah, that's a problem that is about the same as me having diamond shoes being too tight and my wallet is too small for my 50s. And I think that's about right, which is like if we really accepted ourselves as we are, how would we ever grow as people? How would we commit to positive action? My experience of this, and this is something that I tested the medal of because all of my teachers kept saying, This is a thing, this is how this goes. I go, let me see, let me see. It's been my experience too, which is when we are actually 100% present, we learn how to be skillful. We learn how to meet the moment as it is and act in the most accordance with what is needed of us and the best way that we can grow. If we are not 100% present, we are not reading the situation clearly, and we are starting to act in ways that are perhaps going to cause harm to ourselves or others. So there is this sense of really trying to meet the present moment 100%, which is that sense of acceptance. Both self-acceptance, as you said, you know, actually accepting ourselves as we are, the quote-unquote good, bad, and ugly, but also meeting the moment as it is, this world we're in, and saying, I'm here for all of it, not trying to edit out some of our experience and say, Oh, I'm here for all of it, except for that beeping noise in the background or whatever it might be. Right. It's like I'm here for all of it, is the point. And then out of that, when I'm fully present, I say, Well, this is a great experience for me to be really patient with this person, or this is really a good experience for me to be very generous with this person, or this is a good experience for me to practice boundaries with this person, whatever it might be, that is the most appropriate thing. But if I'm not seeing the situation clearly, I'm not going to do it. So I think those go hand in hand, not to make it too chicken and egg, but I would say the more we accept ourselves as we are, the more we accept this moment and meet it for what it is, the more we see the change that needs to happen. So it's not just, again, I'll come back to sort of world events. Oh, the world's on fire and I accepted it, everything's great. That's not what I do. With a book like You're Good, You're Enough, you think it'd be Pollyanna. It is not. I pride myself in being a practical human being that actually really says, no, there's a lot of effing suffering out there. Let's look at that through this lens and see how that transforms our experience of what we experience, our personal suffering, our interpersonal suffering, the suffering of society. What we're really looking at here is this sense of when I look 100% at my own suffering, the suffering within my relationships, within the society around me, how can I show up most skillfully? I went through an obnoxious activism phase in my late teens, early twenties. I got arrested and did like these sort of big protest arrests. And it was basically me not knowing how to work with what I saw as injustice in the world and just yelling constantly at anyone that came across me. One particular big protest arrest really sort of shook me by the shoulders. I said, This isn't effective for me, which is not to negate anyone who's doing that. But for me personally, I was saying this isn't the best way for me to help. I still go to protest. I took my daughter to one not that long ago. But it was more of a peaceful situation than what I used to do in my late teens, early twenties. It wasn't coming from a place of, I'm angry and I need to yell at everyone. It was a different intention. So I think that there's something here of like when we slow down, we say, Well, how do I help? I happen to be a meditation teacher. I'm just trying to do as much good work as I can from that lens of offering tools I think bring peace to individuals. Something that TikNot Han has taught extensively about and is in a lot of his writings, is the fact that we could look at warfare, for example, as a massive topic out there. But then when we look at it as an internal topic, how do I create warfare in my own mind, in my own life? Then it becomes very personal. And then it becomes something that we can do something about. And from there, everything that we do is like a stone thrown in a pool of water. First, when we throw this stone, we see an initial splash, but we actually don't ever really see how far those ripples will go. We forget the truth of interdependence that the Buddha taught so extensively. It means that whatever goodness we're putting into the world has an effect on society overall. So I know I took this very large from acceptance and commitment, rather, but I do think that those two go hand in hand, and that the stepping stone of acceptance can lead to us committing to really positive activity that can have really deep impact. But a lot of it is us seeing things clearly as a result of that acceptance.

Culture That Sells Not Enoughness

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Yeah, beautiful. You brought up the image of you hugging your three-year-old daughter before we spoke, and you were very present with her. I just imagine you telling her and conveying to her that you are good, you are enough. And I think that's the kind of message that we all crave as kids and also as adults. As a dad myself, I certainly try to convey that to my six-year-old daughter as much as possible. As kids, if we are so fortunate to receive those messages explicitly or implicitly, life happens over the decades, and we come across many different kinds of messages in our culture, from our schooling, from our friends, from the internet now. Wondering if you can speak to some of those, say, unhelpful messages that we may come across in our culture. If there's any nuanced messages that you think we could bring more awareness to that may undermine our sense of goodness and enoughness. Television commercials and billboards are a more obvious form of messaging of not enoughness, not being good enough, like we need to buy the makeup or the widget at Walmart. Can you speak to some of the more nuanced, subtle messaging that we receive in our culture that helps reinforce this sense of not enoughness or not good enoughness?

SPEAKER_02 22:44

Oh, yeah. I mean, hey, if you want a rant against capitalism, I've got 10. It is the water that we swim in. So I think it is very easy for many of us to say, I blame my parents. They raised me to believe that I'm wrong or bad. And maybe that is the case. And if so, I'm extremely sorry. But I think a lot of parents really do try their best to communicate some sense of, oh no, you're good. I feel very fortunate that it was sort of like a conscious guiding principle when I was growing up. I was raised Buddhist and my parents had been practicing before I was born. So it really was this sort of speaking in the water you swim in, like that was the experience. When something goes wrong for a kid, a kid might say, I'm bad. But basic goodness is I'm human and humans make mistakes. And that was the culture I was raised in, was the sense of like if something went wrong, it's that you're human in your learning as opposed to, you know, you're a bad kid or something. I do think that maybe I'm downplaying how often people might have heard that in their household. So I apologize for that experience for you, but it's often transcends that. It's schooling, it's the playground bully, it's the as you said, just the ubiquitous advertising. My wife has a story. She came home one day when we were living in New York City. This is long before we were married or had a kid. There was an ad that I never thought much about, but it was just sort of like tasteless. And it was a woman, two photos of her side by side, and one of them had her holding lemons up by her chest. And in the next photo, she had cantaloupes in her hands. And it was for breast augmentation surgery. There was this young girl, probably about your daughter's age, actually, with her father. And she said, Daddy, why is that woman sad in that photo and then she's happy in the other photo? And to his credit, this guy was like, Oh, yeah, okay. Well, maybe she doesn't like lemons. Lemons don't taste very good. Cantaloupes taste great. What sort of fruit do you like? And so I'm like, I was just, oh my gosh, that is drilling a particular message into the minds of young beings. I feel like it's everywhere. It is. It's the Subway ad, it's the playground bully, it's anything. I hate that this small insidious voice of not enoughness is starting to seep into my own child despite my best intentions. What if that kid doesn't want to play with me? It just breaks my heart when I see it. There's this sense of like, oof, maybe not everyone's gonna be friendly. That is the world we live in. To approach that world through that lens feels very monstrous to me. I just feel very passionate about this. It's really hard. So these messages, if we believe we're broken, we're gonna treat others as broken too. So it goes beyond just as individuals internalizing, it's also how we outly treat each other. You are not the worst thought about yourself, but many of us cling to it so tightly. I think if Sharon Salzberg frequently will refer to a previous guest on your show, I know, will frequently say that if we saw someone saying some of the things we say in our own head to our best friend, just some of the mean stuff, we would get right in their face and we go, You can't say that about my friend. How dare you? That is horrible. But we do it to ourselves all the time. So it is that voice that we're talking about today, that insidious voice, what is often referred to in Buddhist circles as the trap of doubt, not doubt like, oh, I doubt I look good in yellow, more of a deep-rooted doubt, a doubt in not enoughness, because we have heard so many of these stories through family, maybe our school, maybe our religious institution, any of the number of it, that just got under the skin just enough to make us doubt that we're basically good. So it is insidious, it is all over the place, and it is the water we swim in because capitalism needs us to actually believe that we are not okay. Because if we believe we're not okay, then we're gonna try and get something that'll fix us. I don't think I'm skinny enough. I'm going to go on all of the types of new medicine that they have to sort of do weight modulation and stuff like that. I apologize, I don't know much about that, but that's everywhere now too, right? If I don't feel good about my skin, I can get makeup and cover out my skin. So if we actually just felt okay about ourselves, going back to acceptance, if we accepted ourselves as we are, those industries would just fall into the ocean. They rely on us doubting that we're okay as we are to sell us things. But I think for anyone who's listening to this, they probably have tried some of those things and said that didn't work. I still am not feeling a sense of contentment or okay as I am. So maybe I need to look internally. And I think that's why I love doing these conversations, because if that's you listening to this right now, please check out the book, You Are Good, You Are Enough. It's meant for you. It's for people that actually understand that they can make different choices with their minds to actually focus on the goodness that's underlying all of these stories that are not serving us and to live their life through that lens.

Retreats And Reentering The World

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Yeah. And for those listening and watching, we'll have a link to you are good, you are enough in the show notes and the description below. When you talk about the water that we swim in, this insidious trap of doubt that can seem like it's all around us and it's hard for us to have perspective of because we're in it. And it just reminds me of these times, say, after a meditation retreat, where we effectively like sensitize ourselves to the water where we're able to see the water for what it is a little bit more clearly because we've settled our own mind and heart, and then we see these stories and the messages more clearly. So this is just a plug for just meditation in general.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

But also deep meditation is what you're referring to, which is so important. No shame to anyone who is doing 10 minutes a day. That's really wonderful. But I find that when people push themselves a little bit beyond that comfort level, either to do longer sits, 20, 30 minutes, or to do a half day or full-day retreat, or to go away for a week. They find that the equation of how much distraction they're allowing into their life versus how much time they're present just starts to shift slightly. And they say, oh, sort of like supercharging my practice. I'm feeling more connected to these qualities within myself that I want to cultivate.

Choosing Space Over Constant Busy

SPEAKER_01 28:44

Absolutely. Yeah, even just a few days can dramatically shift our perspective. And sometimes it can feel jolting to then re-enter our society or watch the news feeds and kind of get a sense for what we were swimming in before. I remember after my time as a monastic going to my parents' house and they had the news on. And between the news itself and the commercials in between, it was huge shock to the system to see, oh wow, this is the water that many people are swimming in and my heart just opened to them. So I do highly recommend people to take retreats, schedule retreats. And Lodra, just on a personal level, you moved from New York City to the Hudson Valley. I'm wondering if that shift in location to maybe a little bit more of a rural setting was intentional and what that did for your meditation practice. Just kind of hoping for you to speak to that move a little bit and how that impacted you and your mind.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

It was a really interesting moment in time. I'll be very transparent here. I spent a lot of my 30s just building, building things that I thought were gonna be very helpful. I mean, it was intentionally trying to help people, but it was really a lot of activity and no rest whatsoever. I would feel guilty once a year. My now wife and I would go away for a week or something, and I would still be like plugged into all of the work stuff that had to happen. Right before we left, I was running a network of meditation studios in New York called Mindful, and they were doing really well. And we hit this point where all of the sort of press and accolades you would ever want for something that you're building happened. I think growing up, I had some aspiration because my parents read the New York Times that I would someday get my name in there, and there I was, six months and six mentions, some of them very short, some of them full articles above the fold and all of that for the work that we were doing at Mindful, for my book, all sorts of stuff. And I thought, my God, like this is it. I'm really doing the thing. And I realized it didn't always translate into like people coming in and actually getting serious about meditation practice, which is what I was trying to do. So I thought, wow, I could do all of the things that I and get it all quote unquote right. And if people aren't practicing in the real way, then like, what's the point? I'm not out here for accolades. So finest is certainly wasn't making money during any of that, but it really was one of those situations where it's okay, I'm burning my body out. My relationship was really taking a hit during that time. She's always like, listen, this is your business, is your priority right now. I know it. And I say, well, I don't want it to be that way. And so when we got married, we got married upstate, and there was just this moment of, you know what, this is a priority, or if not the priority, alongside the work that I'm trying to do to help people. I can't just burn myself out in the hoax that doing more, creating more businesses will ultimately make some sort of magical marker that is made up in my head of like this is enough people meditating, or something like that. So I say, what if I just slow down and double down and triple down on my own practice? That's during the time when I started studying more closely with my teacher, Zach Keelan Grimpache, and doing longer treats with him and doing, gosh, I'm like seven years into this intensive program with him that I've been doing, and that really puts a heavy emphasis on a lot of consistent daily practice. And I just realized I needed space. I needed actual space to really walk the walk. I can't just keep being busy. I mean, that's the thing. You run into someone in New York City, you say, How are you doing? They say busy, as if that's their emotional state. And that was me. And I didn't want that anymore. I wanted space. I wanted time to actually really appreciate the relationships I had with my wife, our dogs, my family, at this point, my daughter. But my mother also lives down the road from us. Part of why we moved up here is that she is 20, 25 minutes away and is getting quite old, if I'm being honest. Like I don't know how much time she has at this point. And I wanted to be here for her during these times. So it just feels like by simply moving upstate, I was making a very conscious choice to move from the mind state of busy to a mind state of space and actual care for myself and for my relationships, which is not to negate the work that I'm doing. The intention is the same. A million years ago, actually back when my wife and I first got together, we did sort of a retreat together where we're practicing and we were sort of re-evaluating a lot of life things. And I took all these eight in a half by 11 pieces of paper. I started putting them up on the wall. Here's all the 10,000 things I was doing. Some of them were writing for this sort of magazine, and some of it was my own writing, and some of it was teaching meditation here, some of it was doing something else there. And I said, okay, the common theme with most of this is I try to make meditation really accessible to people in modern language. And I said, anything that's not in line with that intention has to go. Ever since then, I've sort of held this intention. I know meditation helps people, I want to help people. This is how I like to do it. So I feel like the intention has remained the same ever since. And it's just the skillful means and the level of care that I allow for myself that has shifted, which is really important.

SPEAKER_01 33:57

Thank you for sharing that. And I admire the criteria that you formed for yourself and your wife, and that you actually made that shift. And kudos to your wife for doing that with you.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

She's still here. It's great. And we're doing very well. It also created the ground by which I am able to be actively involved with my daughter in a way that I think it's very rare for parents to be in today's world. I feel very fortunate in that regard.

Heart Practices From Tibetan Buddhism

SPEAKER_01 34:26

It just feels like you've helped like fertilize the ground from which everything is growing, and I really resonate with that. You talked about self-care and you've mentioned the Buddha and your seven years of intensive practice with the Rinpoche with your teacher. I come from a Theravada background, and I admittedly don't know that much about Tibetan Buddhism. I was introduced to Buddhism in Tibet, but I'm I haven't really followed it very closely. I know there's different schools, but I'm wondering if there's any particular style of Tibetan practice that you might recommend for people to cultivate a sense of care, self-care, or care for others.

SPEAKER_02 35:16

I'm happy to. So one of the common similarities in a lot of schools of Buddhism is the four immeasurables as taught by the Buddha. Immeasurable because they are sort of limitless in their scope. And it is that sense of loving-kindness, which is obviously something we see a lot of in Theravada traditions, but also in Tibetan Buddhism and elsewhere. Compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. And one of the early practices I introduce in you are good, you are enough, is loving-kindness for ourselves. Again, that sense of acceptance that we were talking about earlier. From a Buddhist perspective, we could look at, look at we have parts of ourselves that we like, parts that we don't like, the parts that we actively ignore, and we have them all. That's normal. A part of ourselves that we might like might be the part that excels at our job or goes out of its way to help others or is particularly talented at a given musical instrument or a skill. Maybe we don't like the part that's overly sarcastic or cutting or says the wrong thing after a few drinks or gossips about other people. You don't feel good about that. And then those parts that we actively ignore is maybe that part that instinctively reaches for a phone whenever there's a lull or that bites our nails when anxiety kicks in. So this idea that if we're going to aim to love ourselves, we can't just love those positive parts. We have to be there and embrace the whole shebang. So I offer loving kindness for yourself meditation. It's actually available for free if people go to loadruinsler.com/slash you are good. And then you can just have access to this loving-kindness meditation because it is a sense of offering these aspirations, as you said, may I feel happy, may I feel healthy, may I feel safe, may I feel peaceful to all aspects of ourself. And then later on, I talk about loving-kindness for others, and there's a practice there for them. And I talk about compassion practices. And in addition to all of this, there's not just the formal meditation, there's, I want to say 15 or more on the spot practices. So one that I think is a little maybe controversial is called the loving-kindness photo. The loving-kindness photo is for people we actually really have a hard time with. So I'm going all the way from myself to someone I don't like, right? So I'm jumping to the deep end of the pool. The idea is that you take a photo of that person that you have a hard time with, you put it somewhere that you will regularly see. Maybe a bookshelf, maybe it's in your wallet. And then when you are going about your day to day and you see that photo, the practice is to stop and to the best of your ability, make an aspiration for their well-being. May you feel happy, may you feel healthy. Exact same sort of things I was just saying, but something that feels genuine, not forced. And then as we do that, we're sort of like learning to, from the comfort of our own home, wish this person well, to open our heart to them. There's a story that I'm fond of sharing, which is I asked a meditation student to do this a while back. She married someone who has a kid, and the ex-wife is actually a very difficult person for her to deal with. But she has to see this person regularly as a result of their situation. And she did this practice for a couple of weeks, and she got back to me. She said, Here's the thing. I saw her at soccer practice the other day, and she was bowled over because I was actually just really friendly. It could be nice, but I was actually friendly. She was, oh, she really engaged with me. She opened up in turn, which is not to say that there's never going to be conflict with them, but that she approached the relationship from this new lens, invited that person to meet her there, and it happened, if only for a day. So I think that there's real power to these heart-opening practices of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity, and they each have different chapters in the book as well.

SPEAKER_01 38:35

Thank you. And I just confirmed that at lodorinsler.com there are these free audio guided meditations, many of which are heart-based. So people can check out the code. Someone's keeping track of these things for me. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 38:50

I recorded them all. It's just been a little while since I did it.

Imposter Syndrome For Mindfulness Teachers

SPEAKER_01 38:53

Sure. Yeah. There's a Bodhichita meditation, loving kindness meditation for yourself, full loving kindness, emotions, etc. So thank you for sharing those freely. And I'll put a link to those in the show notes. Lodru, a lot of people in our community, and I think in your community too, are helpers, wellness professionals, people who are therapists, counselors, coaches, yoga teachers who practice mindfulness and self-care, but they also share these practices with others. And a common theme that I hear from people is one of self-doubt as a guide, as a teacher. A sense of not being good enough to share these practices, not being perfect, not being enlightened enough, not practicing mindfulness perfectly 100% of the time. On the flip side, of course, we don't want to share these practices with others without having significant practice, without having walked our talk or covering the actual terrain ourselves. I'm curious how you might talk to people who want to help others be mindful, practice meditation, and they're plagued by imposter syndrome or self-doubt. How do you navigate that for people?

Healthy Shame Without Self Hate

SPEAKER_02 40:29

It's a really important question. And I only have my unique take. And if you ask a bunch of different meditation teachers, they will probably have their own. But from my perspective, I do think that there's this dance that we play. One part being who am I to be offering this life-changing practice to others? And frankly, when I lead meditation teacher trainings, I've been doing it for about a decade now. I always actually listen for that because I want those people who understand that this is such a powerful practice that they really want to cherish it and they're not going to be flippant about it. But I also want to build them up so that they understand that through their own practice, they have a lot to offer from their lived experience. Not because my program is so great, but because they're doing a lot of practice and they are learning more and more about it from their own perspective and are able to articulate that to others. That's what I think is really important. So it sounds almost a masochistic for me to be like, I look for the people that opt up. I look for people who value these teachings and are a little nervous because they value these teachings, as opposed to people who are a little glib about it, you know. Oh, who cares? It's not a big deal. Like you just say, oh, sit in this posture, follow the breath. I steer away from some of that particular energy when I'm talking to people and as individuals and whether they might join my teacher training program. And I keep this very small. I keep it like a dozen people at a time because for me, it's an experience I want to karmically take these people on and always be there for them. And I meet with them every month, both as a group and then they meet with me individually one-on-one. And I think it's just one of those things where for me, in order to feel good about it, that's like that's an important part that they go through an actual formal teacher training. They have a lot of time to experience teaching labs where they are practicing, refining their own authentic voice, not echoing me by any stretch of the imagination, but really finding how they can articulate their lived experience of practice and getting feedback from others, getting feedback from me and all of that. So that's just my particular way of doing it. But I don't think that other people's ways of doing it are bad. It's important that people do some program, some form of I am stretching in my understanding of this practice, learning from that, and then able to articulate from my own lived experience of the practice how I would talk about it in my own voice. But there's never going to be a time that we just stop doubting ourselves. I think if we did, then we'd already be enlightened. If we completely eliminated the trap of doubt, we would be enlightened already. We get to this point, whatever training program we go through, that we come at the other end, and there is a little bit of like, oh gosh, it's nice that these people believe in me, but who am I anyway? It's not going to go away. I am fond of a story. I interviewed recently, this comic book legend in my mind, Joe Kelly. Joe Kelly has written a bazillion comics. I think it's like 500 or something ridiculous, a very large number of comic books over time. And he currently writes Spider-Man, which is obviously this massive intellectual property that they handed to him and he sort of has one of the more important tools in the toolbox to play with. I asked him, so how do you deal with it? This little voice, do you still experience that? He goes, absolutely. Every month when this comic book hits the stance, I think, is anyone gonna want to read this? Are people gonna think I'm doing a horrible job with this important thing that they love? Are they gonna be mean to me on the internet? Like, what are they gonna do? So how do you deal with it? And he goes, Well, even though the voice continues to come up, I get to choose whether how much I listen to it. I'm paraphrasing that conversation because I don't remember the exact phrasing, but that was the message in my mind. The way I translate that is the doubt's going to come along for the ride, but I don't get to let it drive. I'm not going to do that. It doesn't get to drive. So whenever I release a new book to follow Joe Kelly's example, I Go, oh, is anyone gonna care? Is anyone gonna read this? And then, you know, you sort of acknowledge that voice and you say, That's not the reality of my situation. For me, it's like if one person reads this and says this is helpful, it was worth all the effort. And that's happened. You know, here we are just really early on in its publication history, and it's happened a couple times already. So great, I did the job. It's done. Everything on top of this is gravy. So I do think that it's really easy for us, whatever ambitious thing that we're doing, we're going to doubt ourselves. Parenthood, my God. I have no idea what my kid's gonna hold against me at some point. It's gonna be something. There's no avoiding that, but I'm really trying hard. It's not like I'm gonna go hide from my kid because I don't want to mess this job of being a father up. It's quite the opposite. I sort of have to lean all the way in and set that trap of doubt aside long enough to be there 100% with her. Same thing with getting the writing done, same thing with teaching meditation. It's not that we're not going to have doubt. It's saying I can set aside that voice long enough to do the thing I want to do. I only adhere to one piece of writing advice personally. It comes from Raymond Chandler, the detective novelist, where he said that his process in writing was to throw up onto the typewriter every morning and to clean it up every afternoon. I loved that because it was the sense of like getting out of your own way long enough to get a bunch of stuff on the page. And then it's not like, oh, everything is brilliant that you write. You go back, you clean it up, that's fine. But that first step of getting out of our own way is really hard for a lot of people. I'm sure that there are people listening to this who are looking to launch that big business venture or looking to start teaching meditation or looking to do something else. The voice has to be set aside just a little bit so that we actually go out and do the thing that's we know is going to be helpful and impactful. That's also, again, to keep reiterating the point we come back to, that's how meditation helps. It helps us put down that voice just a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

Thank you. Yeah, I agree with everything you just shared. And I think it's really helpful for our listeners to hear when you talk about this trap of doubt. Makes me remember the teachings of some of my teachers on Hiri and Otapa. Are you familiar with Hiri and Otapa? I don't believe I am. Okay. Wasn't sure if it was a Tibetan thing or a Theravada thing, but they're translated as the protectors of the world. I think in certain Japanese, I think, monasteries and maybe certain Chinese chump monasteries. There's protectors at Buddhist monasteries with swords and grimacing faces, these warriors. And one is named Hiri, H-I-R-I, and the other is named Otapa, O-T-T-A-P-P-A. Very Buddhist D characters. But Hiri is translated as a sense of shame. Yeah, like moral shame, right?

SPEAKER_02 46:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

And then Otapa is often translated as a fear of wrongdoing. So one is like a sense of shame for what's already been done. The other is a fear of doing wrong in the future. And when I first learned about this, it felt confusing because oh, well, aren't we supposed to say not have this sense of shame or fear? And it felt paradoxical. And I wasn't quite sure how to hold that. And Rajan uh Passano and Amro and other, say, Theravadan masters will talk about them in glowing terms, that these are protectors of the world, that we need a healthy sense of quote unquote shame, or a healthy sense of fear of wrongdoing. And so I'm just wondering if you happen to have a way of holding that alongside these teachings on the trap of doubt, and how we can have a healthy sense of shame and fear of wrongdoing without it paralyzing us, getting in the way, or creating a sense of heaviness in our mind.

SPEAKER_02 48:01

Thank you for that question. I appreciate it. I do write a fair amount on shame, guilt, mistakes, all of these sorts of things in this book, which is a lot of my own learning and a lot of the teachings that I am very fortunate to receive. And there's one particular quote from Pema Children I always think about, which is the sense that negative shame is accompanied by guilt and self-denigration. She says, it is pointless and it doesn't help us even slightly. But she talks about positive shame, which is really interesting, which is when we have recognized we're either harming ourselves or anyone else and we feel sorry that we have done so. And that allows us to grow wiser from our mistakes. She says, eventually it dawns on us that we can regret causing harm without becoming weighed down by negative shame. Just seeing the hurt and heartbreak clearly motivates us to move on. By acknowledging what we did cleanly and compassionately, we go forward. So when we talk about shame and guilt, I myself have found it really helpful to face these feelings directly. And the phrase that I offer in the book that's helped me is to just say, I too am human. And it reminds me that I'm this fallible learning human being is that acknowledgement that we can learn and grow from our mistakes, that we can move further toward wakefulness, doing less harm to ourselves and others over time. So I too am human. 12, 14 years ago, I was serving on the Board of an Aid Organization for Unhoused Youth. And I led this meditation for a group of teenagers. And this participant came up to me after and he said that his grandmother had given him a phrase that he'd never forgotten, that he shared with me, that I'm going to share with you all. He said, 100 different mistakes are progressive. 100 of the same mistake is regressive. I love that. 100 different mistakes are progressive. 100 of the same mistake is regressive. Meaning we make a mistake, we learn from it, letting it change us for the better. That's progress on the path of becoming more fully human on waking up. That growth puts us in touch with our basic goodness. If we repeat a mistake without learning, it's regressive and we'll keep getting stuck in our same pain. And I think that distinction is really important.

SPEAKER_01 50:00

Beautiful. I just watched a video of Kobe Bryant basically saying the same thing about how he approaches basketball and how he never fails if he learns from his past mistakes. Very different context. But I love that.

SPEAKER_02 50:13

Same idea. It is across the board because if we linger in the past, beating ourselves up over and over again about this thing and not learning from it, that just keeps us locked in pain. We're not actually even available to help those in front of us in different ways. But if we can learn, if we can change, if we can grow. I think that's an interesting thing in today's world because it's very easy for us to solidify. No, this is who this person is and they're bad and they're wrong, as opposed to what we're talking about in basic goodness is like everyone's basically good. And sometimes they act out of confusion. I have, you have, this is how people operate. So it's having some awareness about that.

Do We Really Believe In Evil

SPEAKER_01 50:45

Yeah. Personally, I just got back from Peru, was hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and I was hiking with some friends, but also some people I had never met who happened to be from the United States. And I got into a conversation with this one older lady who was asking me about the presence of evil in this world. And she said, What do I do with these judgments I have of the evil in this world? I gave a very off-the-cuff response in which I said, Well, I don't know for a fact that there's such a thing as quote-unquote evil. Personally, I think that there's love and goodness in the world that's embedded in the fabric of our universe. And my sense is that the things that we may deem as being evil may in fact just be unwholesome actions or energy derived from a root of, say, confusion or fear or what the Buddha might call like delusion. And she wasn't convinced of that. Quite frankly, neither was I. I don't pretend to know whether evil exists in the world, but that was kind of my hunch. And she said, Well, on an individual level, I can see how people like Hitler were confused, they were deluded. I may be able to find compassion for them. But from a larger energetic level, from a larger collective level, it seems like there is such a thing as evil. And I don't know how to deal with that. So I'm just curious if you have any take on this and how you might advise us to relate to this potential of evil in the world.

SPEAKER_02 52:51

I don't think evil is a thing. People might just turn this off right now upon hearing that. Hear me out though. Brene Brown has this phrase that she has used, which is it's hard to hate people up close. And I think when we say, oh, that is evil, it's not actually someone we know. It's not our neighbor is evil. Our neighbor, we could say, oh, you know, they're loud or they're mean or whatever. But we don't give up on their humanity. They seem very human. We see them walk their dog and care for their dog. You say, oh, they love their dog. I love my dog. I understand that. So it's I don't think we we're walking around saying our neighbor is evil. It's people we read about in the news. It's people that we never meet. And then because we've heard stories and probably only negative stories, and this is what I was getting to earlier in terms of our divisiveness, when you asked why did I write this book? It's that sense of like we're just increasingly in our bubbles and then alienating each other. Anyone who's not in our bubble, we say, Oh, those people on that side of the aisle are crazy, dumb, wrong, stupid, whatever. Anyone who doesn't agree with me is just wrong or bad. I don't think society is going to move in a lot of good ways if we hold tightly to that notion and say, well, that person's evil. That party is evil, whatever it might be. I think what you said is actually really brilliant. It's those people are pretty confused. They're pretty distant from what we would call our basic goodness. People don't often create harm and do what we might consider evil things because they feel great and everything's going their way. They do it because they feel threatened in some way where they don't feel good about themselves. So this age-old question, and there's a whole chapter about what about that world-threatening politician? Everyone, the moment you talk about basic goodness, everyone goes, Well, what about that person? And not trigger anyone, but the question that I received for a bazillion years now is what about Hitler? Clearly that person, and that was the gold standard. And then around 2015, people began to ask, what about Trump? And by 2022, what about Putin? And it seems in the past decade or so we're more readily open to there's going to be certain individuals who are irredeemable, devoid of basic goodness. For the record, if you love Trump, for example, you might say this about Biden. It's just that more often than not, these are the questions I got. So I'm reiterating it as I received it. And the short answer is really hard because it is this sense of, like, yes, even Hitler. Like, and I need to pause before going on to a longer answer. Clearly, Hitler did atrocious things. Crimes against humanity. Not saying he's a good person or someone worth admiring. I'm saying the opposite. He's someone who's so distanced from his basic goodness that he was able to convince himself to do horrible things and that those horrible things were right when clearly they were not. That's what we're talking about. But at the same time, I don't think Hitler emerged from the womb hating all of these people. He learned that type of thinking over time, and that distanced him from any semblance of basic goodness. And then the consequences are catastrophic. I'm of Jewish descent. I have branches of my family tree clipped as a result of this. So it's hard, I think, to ask people to contemplate that evil being. Again, often it is someone that they don't know, an authoritarian ruler, a politician, and say, what if they possess basic goodness? It's a difficult topic for me. I get that. But as I mentioned earlier, like our neighbor, they have people they love or dogs they love who love them back and they experience moments of genuine open-heartedness. There's this old quote from the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogan Trunk Rampoche, where he said, everybody loves something, even if it's just tortillas. Which, by the way, my daughter loves tortillas. I get it. They're delicious. But this is like this fundamental truth. Like everyone has the ability to soften and connect to the world around them, even if it's just in a very small way. So I think that is evident that everyone, absolutely everyone, possesses basic goodness. Everyone is capable of love and compassion, and that there aren't exceptions to this rule. There aren't just people who are off that map of and they're evil. I just think that they're very distanced from how they are connected to their basic goodness.

Final Reframe And Where To Learn More

SPEAKER_01 56:32

I love this metaphor or this truth that someone like Hitler was so distanced from their own humanity that it's hard to hate people up close. And it just echoes this encouragement that you're sharing to meditate and to become closer, more intimate with our own humanity, and that the closer we become to ourselves, largely via meditation and mindfulness, we uncover that goodness, that love, that beauty of ourselves and our humanity, and that the more distance we are from our own humanity, easier it is to forget our own beauty and to arrive at these doubts and self-judgments and then project those outwards. So this is an invitation for everyone listening to befriend ourselves, to sit and rediscover ourselves through meditation and mindfulness. Lodro Rinsler, thank you so much for this lovely conversation, for the humor, for the warmth, and for these really deep insights that you're sharing on our goodness and enoughness. Is there anything else that you'd like to share for our listeners? Any other messages that you'd like to convey today?

SPEAKER_02 58:08

Yeah, I guess the one thing that's coming to mind right now is just the fact that, well, there's a lot of like meditations and things you can do as part of daily life. What we're talking about today is often just a shift in our point of view. And the view of you are good and you are enough. I think if we remember that about each other, the world would look very different. And it's not about self-improvement, it's about self-recognition, it's recognizing that you're already whole, complete, and good as is. That's who you've always been and coming back to that in a lived experience. That's the important thing. And that's why I'm doing this work. So I hope people do get a chance to check out You Are Good, You Are Enough. And I hope that you can check out some of those guided meditations that we talked about as well. And I just want to again thank you so much for having me on and for doing the important work that you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 58:50

Yeah, it's an honor. And we will have the link to Lodro's book, You Are Good, You Are Enough, in the show notes. Please check out Lodro Rinsler's website at LodroRinsler.com where you can find all those free guided meditations that we talked about, links to his past books, which I highly recommend. He has classes, trainings, a community, lots of resources. He's been a figure in the mindfulness and Buddhist community for quite a while. And Loder, I can't thank you enough for the work that you're doing in the world. And thanks again for joining me today.