Leaving New York To Rebuild A Daily Meditation Practice

Busy can start to feel like a personality, especially when you’re doing meaningful work and getting rewarded for it. Sean Fargo sits down with Buddhist meditation teacher and author Lodro Rinzler to unpack what happened when external success still left him exhausted, stretched thin, and craving something he couldn’t schedule: space. 

We talk about the real-life shift from New York City to the Hudson Valley, and why changing your environment can be a powerful mindfulness practice all by itself. Lodro shares how he and his wife clarified a single intention for his work, what it looks like to protect relationships while still serving others, and why doubling down on daily meditation and longer retreats can be the most practical form of self-care. If you’ve been searching for mindfulness for burnout, a sustainable meditation routine, or a way to stop feeling “always on,” you’ll hear a grounded path forward. 

Then we move into heart practices drawn from Tibetan Buddhism that are widely shared across traditions: the four immeasurables of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Lodro explains how loving-kindness for yourself includes the parts you like, the parts you regret, and the parts you’d rather ignore, and he offers an unexpectedly simple “loving-kindness photo” exercise for working with people you find difficult. We also point you to free guided meditations on Lodro’s website so you can practice immediately. 

If this conversation helps, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s running on empty, and leave a review with the heart practice you want to try first.

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ABOUT THE SHOW

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

Hosted by Sean Fargo — a former Buddhist monk, mindfulness teacher, and founder of MindfulnessExercises.com — the show explores how mindfulness can support mental health, emotional regulation, trauma sensitivity, chronic pain, leadership, creativity, and meaningful work.

Each episode offers a mix o...

Transcript

Meet Lodro Rinzler

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. Today I have the honor of speaking with Lodro Rinsler. 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. Lodro,

Why He Left New York

SPEAKER_00 0:48

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_01 1:13

It was

Burnout Behind The Accolades

SPEAKER_01 1:14

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 a 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 I said, 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

Choosing Space And Relationships

SPEAKER_01 3:14

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, Zachelin 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 reevaluating a lot of life things. And I took all these eight and 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 tried 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 love for myself that has shifted, which is really important.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

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_01 5:32

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.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

It just feels like you've helped like fertilize the ground from which everything is growing, and I really resonate with that. You

A Path For Self-Care Practice

SPEAKER_00 5:55

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.

The Four Immeasurables Explained

SPEAKER_01 6:35

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. We 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 Lodruinsler.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 that. And I talk about compassion practices. And in addition to all of this, there's not just the formal meditation. There's, I want

The Loving-Kindness Photo Practice

SPEAKER_01 8:13

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 and 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 like, 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_00 9:54

Thank you.

Free Meditations And Closing

SPEAKER_00 9:55

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 that out. But someone's keeping track of these things for me.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

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

SPEAKER_00 10:12

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.