Attachment Repair, Metta & Vipassana with George Haas | Reach Truth Podcast

[00:00:01]hi George thanks for joining me friend thanks for having me so I'd love to start by asking you the question I ask everyone which is just to share your life story or background in whatever way or whatever length you'd like anything that you'd like to share is fine but would love to hear from you about yourself I grew up in Chicago in an upper middle class family I had a kind of crap childhood I like to say to sum it up uh um and ended up coming out of that experience uh with a lot of mental illness I guess that's what we call it in our culture I was dissociative had dissociative identity disorder a lot of problems I was a daily Drinker and opiate user in elementary school had cirrhosis of the liver when I was 23 and nearly died from that and didn't manage to turn that around I've been sober for 44 years and have addressed most of the mental health issues that I had developing along the way it did of course take up all of the time energy and resources so a lot of the things that might have been conventional in terms of uh trajectory I I really wasn't able to do with the time that they came up and so I'm now in uh three quarters of the way through old age and uh actually pretty happy I'm a gay man and so my 20s was spent in New York during the AIDS period so there's a lot of loss there that really was the main impotence for my spiritual practices how to uh come to terms with the loss of so many people so that also had a profound effect in terms of my point of view what did the path to becoming sober look like for you you know I was uh my brother committed suicide when he was 22 and I was 23 and I really was completely incapable of integrating the loss and so I was just basically in a blackout for I don't know half a year or something but I had some health issues related to that namely my kidneys were bleeding and uh so I went to the doctor and he said that I had cirrhosis of the liver and if I didn't stop drinking I would die within six months or so I I couldn't stop drinking I did try to moderate it and after about a year just quite an accident it was running the Ceramics Lab at Hunter College in New York and one of my but would you like to come to an AAA meeting with me and so I went to uh Amsterdam which I think is still there on the upper uh east side and none and I've been actually so sober ever since the first meeting which is kind of unusual I did have a year leading up to that of trying to stop and recognizing that it was hopeless um and then you know along the way the other patterns of addiction sex addiction food uh deading the main ones not a gambler doesn't light up the dopamine receptors the way the others do no explanation for that but all the other ones I do have I know that um you know I've never been involved in a but uh from afar I've learned that if I understand correctly it's common to refer to yourself as like still an addict that you still have the problem and you're never completely sober um do you think of it that way um I think of addiction as an attachment to service and actually it's a it's a form of emotional regulation that you can repair the underlying cause of of addiction which is a an unwillingness to be involved in emotionally supportive relationships I think that what happens to people who develop addiction is an attachment uh disturbance usually disorganized people or dismissing people end up with addiction that if you repair that and are able to put around you a community of people that are supportive that you you run a much smaller risk of re-engaging substances on the other hand you do live in a body that grows in relationship to the environment so that it's conceivable that you would develop a sensitivity to certain substances and behaviors that would um make them potentially risky to engage in I think the phrase is once you're a pickle you can't be a cucumber anymore so you have to really recognize without minimizing the negative effects of that and respond appropriately and how did the spiritual path start to enter your life well I grew up in the 60s and so uh you know the Beatles went to India robbed off throat be here now uh and all of that had an influence I I you know left home and lived on the streets for a while and uh while I thought of it at the time as the great uh Adventure it was actually pretty awful and uh and those of us who were there were all needing things to manage uh you know the the level of addiction that we were in and also just this it's very stressful to live on the streets um so I took up various meditation practices uh when I was in high school the big Trend was TM and and I I was outraged that it was so expensive mainly because I I had no money and I grew upper middle class but my parents did not fund any uh any of the things that they didn't think uh would be a good reflection on the family TM was not one of them I did manage to convince a in Evans in Illinois where I grew up Northwestern University is there and I did manage to convince a college student to give me uh their Mantra which I practiced with quite a while wow but the concentration only stuff wasn't actually enough uh so um it wasn't really until uh everybody started dying of AIDs that it was so uh intense um showing up for the things that I got into a a practice that was really sort of centered on reading and mainly who I was reading was uh Trump a ribuchet and doing his practices um the um I left uh New York had moved to LA in 92.

[00:07:54]so that preliminary period of reading books and doing ramdas and stuff and doing a little bit of TM mostly on my own and sort of you know the invention of of uh spiritual practices followed by a self-guided introduction into the badriana when I landed in La I went uh and sat with ordinary Dharma which was a technan Han group and then I have a sensitivity to unkindness and so that the people that I'm willing to take on as the teacher have to be extraordinarily kind it's not a super high bar uh and uh it the community was Zen stick approach which I I really don't relate to very well uh and so I became uh there was another extended period of uh Darth Dharma orphan uh and then I found shinzen young and on that he was unfailingly kind and also I'm a slow learner and so he was patient and willing to repeat the instructions over and over again which I also needed um do you have any uh stories from that time when you were working with Shenzhen or early on what it was like to work with him at that time well he did say to me uh George the first time I saw you I thought you look like a drowned rat so you could uh how um [Laughter] I was uh uh very secretive uh very self-contained very protected very frightened and um my habit at the time was not to introduce myself to the teacher because I I thought that any self-respecting uh sociopath could put on a good show and so what I would do is spend six months or so just relating to the teaching students in the community and what I found uh in his world was that actually people were making progress from the practices that he was teaching um so that long ago of course was a before see here feel and um before that sort of structure of the five ways that he came up with and so it was a lot of the Gathering of the three main traditions of of practice uh parabolism of Adriana uh in the way he put it together he was all he was very kind but also uh the people that I met were very kind uh which was nice and uh so um we practiced a lot uh he was into duration sitting back then too and so we did a lot of intensive practice it was nice and uh if I'm not mistaken I I believe I've heard that you've done some training in Southeast Asia is that right yeah we we sit with or we have sat with uh new Indica Saida who is a metaphor and a teacher in the mahasi lineage um and so we I've had years of instruction and metagana practices I find in the attachment work that I do that uh being able to track mind States is really an important thing or understand the nature of you is really important and uh so uh mostly uh if you don't have have the capacity to do that which you would have learned in early childhood from your caregivers then you you need to learn it now and it's a great way of learning it also because the positive system and the negative system are different systems it's most people who have attachment disturbances have a deficit of the capacity for positive experiences and so a central focus on developing positivity is important that's actually one of the things about shinsen's work that is problematic for me is that it doesn't have much focus on positive it's more on the inside side see he would say you don't have to worry about all that stuff you just have to get enlightened but I I experience that doesn't change with enlightenment so um but um I understand what you're claiming about the positive and negative systems being different uh what is the sort of physiological basis for what you're referring to you mean from a neuroscience point of view yes do you know um I probably don't know enough to say I'm also not good at uh remembering names of things me neither um mainly uh the the way that I um understand this is through the the research of Alan Shore who was at UCLA Dan um Brown who was my teacher um I'm also talk about it in this way that the the intentional development of positivity is key to this uh particularly for people with adverse childhood experiences because they have such a heightened capacity for uh holding and processing negative experience um and then also depending since we do a lot of attachment work which attachment outcome you have depends on the consolation of the of that for instance preoccupied people have a difficulty with positivity because it is it wasn't a normal part of the experience of their childhoods uh problems with the where the the language of their childhood not positive experiences Delight is one of the the capacities of secure functioning relationships and insecure disorganized people don't tend to have much capacity for Delight whereas secure people it's the language of relationship and so if you don't have the capacity for that you can't really enter into the community of secure people because you don't have the basic skills so that's one of the areas that we focus on the intentional development of that well so self-hatred comes from uh an aversive response to the way that you create the experience of self and if the main way that you create the experience of self is through negative States each time the self activates you're filled with these negative states in the pattern that creates the experience of self and you because you can become aversive to that which is the core of self-hatred and so we need to pump up the capacity for positivity so that when the self-activity arises it's largely a positive experience so that you don't have the response of aversion to your own experience of self how did you start to get interested in the attachment work um uh Alan Shore was giving a lecture on in a disorganized attachment at the Neuropsychiatric Institute in UCLA and one of um my friends and a fellow Shin had uh worked there and she said oh you know this guy might be somebody for you and so I listened to a a c a bootleg CD which she clandestinely recorded for me of the lecture and in 10 minutes he described the the pattern of my life uh in a way that nobody had uh and I recognized it immediately which is that pattern of hiding out and feeling uh really bummed out and wounded and then gradually collecting yourself and then starting again and maybe even having a brilliant beginning but then the old patterns of of uh of relationship difficulties kicking in and then some fraught middles but almost no finishes and then the woundedness and the withdrawing and so that that pattern of starting and stopping which is the disorganized attachment pattern I was already sitting with shinsen at the time and so I had a pretty good ability to practice and one of the things about vipassana practices it's really good at developing mentalizing so I could watch all of these uh pieces arise but hadn't at that time yet had an order for them and then this this description of what that pattern was uh mapped on so well to what my ex my actual experience was that it was uh very Illuminating unfortunately at the time there was um it was largely something that was still in research and hadn't had in available to people that became my my own Journey really to try and discover how I could use meditation to uh um help move out of that disorganized uh place which was pretty resilient to yeah what did healing that attachment disturbance look like for you over the years well we I started with this uh mentalizing training which was organized around uh an understanding of um from a Buddhist perspective you might say we have the capacity to descend something we have an object that can be sensed when there's contact a consciousness of the sensing experience arises which is evaluated for processing speed and then compared to the perceptual database if there's an entry of the perceptual database which is close enough to the experience of the present moment then those meanings are assigned to it and it moves from Ultimate Reality into conceptual reality um in in addition to the unfolding of conceptual rally what also is included is the intention for the response to it and then how to respond to it and then if you really follow the mentalizing process or the way you take the action and see what the results are and then recreate in the next moment uh the new moment of conceptual reality but you have to be able to mentalize fast enough to notice that this is what's coming in this is my Earth my unconscious response to it in terms of urgency this is the meaning that I'm assigning it based on either what's in the database or what I'm imagining it to be and then creating this uh Tableau of conceptual reality around me which is actually not what's there but what I've made from what I take in that's there right and I don't even take in everything I just take in what my preferences are in the environment so we live in these conceptual realities which are very unique to our our conditioning and can you mentalize fast enough that is can you keep up with that process fast enough to know why you made it that way and is it accurate uh and if you can't mentalize that fast you live in these creations as if that's what were happening and so that's really what the mentalizing piece was in the positive meditation is extraordinarily useful in being able to pull that all apart watch all of the pieces flying around and then how you make the thing and then the other piece is um what patterns are you looking for you know I know that mostly in the teaching of meditation the patterns that are described are the patterns of the enlightened mind or the enlightened of you and that's what we're supposed to be looking for but often what happens to people is the obscurations that come from conditioning get in the way of being able to see that view uh even being able to mentalize that there is a view or that we've made conceptual reality it's not actually what's there um then there has to be some training in that right so one of the things that also is important I think for people in terms of practices it needs to be something that's helpful in the moment and so to be able to recognize the way that you create a conceptual reality through an attachment lens is extraordinarily helpful in the moment even if you haven't yet understood what the enlightened view is because it helps The Social Network that you put around you and it's very hard to actually pursue the deeper end of the path without enough support to do it because it can be so uh derailing and so teaching uh in a very practical way what a view or a mindset is how do you recognize it and how to track it faster and faster until you can get your mentalizing speed up until to the point that you know all of that in each moment as it's unfolding and it's not effortful how long did it take you to heal your own attachment wounding well the that process which I just described actually didn't work to heal attachment and it wasn't until I met Dan Brown and we incorporated the ideal parent figure protocol from his work uh into our system that we began to notice these shifts but I would say uh over the course of two and a half years I went from complexly disorganized to earned secure now why would you do that actually at 65.

[00:23:27]because it's so much easier to be secure than to be insecure and it's just so much easier that uh it's a no-brainer you know it's it's like uh Enlightenment it's a no-brainer but if you if you don't know what it is you don't know that it's a no-brainer yet right so attachment security is a no-brainer once you have it because it makes everything so much easier but if but if you don't know what that is then of course how do you know that what did the ideal parent figure that the mentalizing and other components of what you're already doing didn't have well the perceptual database mainly we always go back to our conditioned response to this thing which is I like to call those perceptual data debates and what ideal parent figure does is it layers in pristine purely secure responses to the conditions of the present moment so that when you go through that process of the capacity to descends the object and it sends the contact that creates the sensing experience the processing speed and then you have this undifferentiated unfixated sensing experience which is compared to the database there's a pristine secure response now in the database from the ideal parent figure work that you can use to create conceptual reality from that if you didn't do that work you'd be stuck with the array of entries that you already had or the capacity to imagine now one of the things that happens in childhood is the capacity to imagine is I like to call it pinched off or Limited when over and over again you can't get the thing that you want as a child you begin to limit your imagination in terms of being able to desire it in the first place the thing about those limitations to imagination is that they stay there when you become an adult and so if you grow up in a childhood that your needs are largely not met and you stop imagining your needs being met in childhood as an adult you don't imagine that your needs can be met and so you don't even try most of the time it's a it's a bitter sweet Awakening in the sense that once you realize of course that you can get your needs met in the present moment you look back at your history and see that actually you were the one who didn't take what was available to you not that it wasn't available and then that has a kind of bitterness to it some people that's the part that makes it hard for them to look that they see in the in the looking that they were the author of so much of the deprivation in their life [Music] how do you relate some of the more traditional moments of the Buddha Dharma that you teach like ferpasana and meta to uh the more contemporary psychotherapeutic methods like the ideal parent figure protocol well ideal parent figure is based on mahamudra meditation so it it is just I think of it as a facilitated uh guided meditation um I don't really think of it as that much different I think um that each generation in the teaching of the Dharma is obligated to language in their own way that's relevant to the community that that's being addressed and that uh sometimes the the traditional side of or the Restriction around traditional interpretation is not helpful and how do you see those pieces fitting together of like Brahma vihar's practice and vipassana and ideal parent figure like how do they fit together in your mind well um it's a three pillar approach that we we do for the attached to repair what is the ideal parent figure which is actually um with alternatives to the the conditioning experience and also a an opening might be a good way to say an opening up of the imagination particularly people who have adverse childhood conditions have a tendency to happen that restricted capacity around imagination and that if you can open up that it creates that are present yeah in each moment what opens up in front of you is all of the possibilities that you could choose in that moment all of them are there but if your Your Capacity to interpret the data that's coming in is really restricted you don't see most of them in fact you get into a rut where you see over and over again only the things that you have your limited imagination things that you can have so you choose over and over again from a very restricted uh selection um in order to see that well enough you need to be able to mentalize and mentalizing is really waking or having enough processing attention and speed to track all of these things from arising so that's a basic papasana frame seeing each thing that's coming up and understanding how you're interpreting each thing that's coming up how you you're knowing it so you know Nama Rupa the the uh this is the sensation this is what I made the sensation into this is the cessation this is how I made it into um on the positive side of things of course uh when you're talking about a metagina practice what you're talking about is holding views and so you have to understand what a view is and you have to be able to distinguish one View From Another and then you have to have agency and causing a particular view to arise and then you have to have the capacity to sustain The View that you've caused to arise the reason we teach a matter of apostana approach and not just a vipassent approach with some meta thrown in is that to understand views where view is the object of the meditation uh means that you need to explore that so that you have the capacity to use but positive to explore what a view is what one view is from another uh and then once you develop that level of clarity from the heart side developing the capacity to generate and hold views this is different than the developing an emotional state and holding an emotional state we're really talking about View and the reason why view is so important is because we need to understand the nature of Ultimate Reality and what we're experiencing and what we make it into in terms of conceptual reality and between Ultimate Reality and conceptual realities where the view goes and if you can't recognize the view you can't recognize the distortions in conceptual reality and then of course a lot a lot of people who do have adverse childhood conditionings are subject to these negative views that arise in the mind and they don't have agency to affect them and so teaching people what not only what views are and to recognize them but also teach agency in terms of generating and sustaining a view means that you can pull out of a lot of the negative States and into an intentional positive State whenever you want to and that you have great capacity to do it which then of course opens up the capacity not only of caring for yourself but caring for the people around you and so we would call that dry a dry meta the wet meta is the the intentional generation of emotional states but the main danger there is that you slip out at the experience of the present moment into thinking and then actually what you're engaged in is the process of thinking yourself into positive emotional states which also mute the experience of the present moment what is the view that you are trying to cultivate through mental practice The Meta viewer the loving kindness to you I uh it is uh ooh in the cassette I would say that it's always cool and so what it means by that is there's an absence of the heat of Desire there's an absence of the heat of anger but it's also an inclining view so it's it's directed um we don't there isn't a word in English that means meta and poly so we use these hyphenins to describe it I would say in the family lexicon my family likes to come curiosity is actually a closer word so a kind open-hearted friendly curiosity about the experience that you're having but pretty chill hypothetically if you had a new student that you were working with and you know like many of us had some kind of attachment difficulty is there sort of a sequence of these practices that you would take them through like emphasize this first and then this or how would you approach that pedagogically well we have it set up so we have level one level two level three we actually have six levels so but the first level is basically a psycho-education on attachment conditioning it's an introduction to metaposana practice uh and uh uh just a teaser for ideal parent figure and we do that typically over four day longs so it's 24 hours of instruction that we do over two months and then level two is an intensive uh class that goes over six months so it's two meetings a month of a class and uh if you have enough resources one of the things about our society of course is that everything is resource dependence and something is really subsidized um and then a meeting with a with a facilitator twice a month so we have weekly contact with the material and then we do a deep dive into the the psycho education psycho education around attachment and also what collaborative relationship systems work are supposed to work like one of the things about insecure disorganized attached people is they don't really understand the Dynamics of a secure functioning relationship because that isn't what they know how to do and so you have to learn this new system of how relationships are supposed to function to maintain a collaborative secure uh connection then we also do a deep dive into the uh metavipassana meditation and learn uh uh we we've designed some routines uh that take you through mentalizing and also emotional regulation which is a it's a matter of a positive approach so we uh understand that the main way that most adults regulate their emotion is through thinking and then are you generating positive thoughts or negative thoughts or beneficial thoughts or afflictive thoughts being able to evaluate uh the quality of those thoughts and then having agency in displacing the afflictive uh Thoughts with beneficial thoughts so you have to develop the capacity for a beneficial emotional regulation strategy before you can replace a an afflictive strategy important and then the third aspect is the introduction to the preliminary ideal parent figure protocol so like any meditation strategy you have to become proficient at doing the meditation and so there's instruction in how to to do that and we take you through the the first stage of the meditation then in level three it's a one-on-one facilitation where you do your individual ideal parent figure work um it also includes uh the development of mentalizing and also the furthering of the psycho-education around secure a relationship systems level four is after you've earned security if you have insecure attachment we focus mainly on the functioning of adult relationships and also on exploration so we talk about exploration as primary or secondary exploration primary exploration being the thing that you derive the meaningfulness of your life from and secondary exploration where you you gather the resources the so that you have the the ability to pursue a primary exploration the fifth level is for people that are already in committed relationships uh where uh we help them navigate moving from insecure attached Dynamics into secure functioning Dynamics and then the sixth level is advanced mentalizing what is the advanced mentalizing until well you know you have your basic mentalizing uh once we really think of all of that that I've just described as preliminary practices I know in the West we've leaped over preliminary practices for the most part and just want to get right on to the pursuit of um the deeper stuff um we're still formulating the sixth level but what we're talking about here are the uh uh insights that are necessary to begin to perceive the awakened View and then um the insights that are necessary so that you can sustain you can sustain the awakened view in in all aspects of your life I'm inferring from that that um and I could be wrong but I'm just inferring that you might see healing attachment wounds as a necessary prerequisite or useful prerequisite for a more traditional search of Enlightenment is that is that true uh only for people who need the repair right right [Laughter] not everybody does it's unfair but secure people their lives are much easier than insecure people and secure and insecurely attach people's lives are so much easier to disorganize people one of the things of course in in Western Dharma is that they don't come for meditation practice for the most part because they're they're doing all right it's you're at the at the low end the hardly functional people that come in looking for somehow they tend to be disorganized and then you have the people that super achieving people that really get everything that they want and they're still unhappy and they tend to be a sort of on the in the insecurely attacked the camp are there any dismissing people a lot of disorganized people are there any adaptations that you feel have been useful to you as a teacher for teaching people in the west like with uh I'm curious about the Brahma fihara's practice in particular like ways that have been useful to teach those practices to people in the West I mainly teach in uh indica's style because I want uh the for [Music] um you know being a Shenzhen teacher uh most people who go into uh conventional uh meditation communities never develop enough concentration to be able to do his techniques so you get uh reactions to the mother too heavy they're too technical they're too [Music] um thinking um but those are Mo my experience in teaching them is that that really comes from not being able to sustain a meditative state for very long because of lack of concentration so that what you have in a lot of the Lake Community is not meditators but contemplators who are thinking about spiritual things which I don't have a I don't have a problem with but um uh I think that's a fine thing but it isn't the same thing and uh you're not going to be able to move a disorganized or insecure attachment by thinking about it it's too resilient for that and so I need people to be able to hold High concentration States in order to do the work that we're describing uh and one of the things that happens in vipassana without the the heart practices first is that you can confront these very difficult experiences in a way that you wouldn't if you weren't in a meditative state and then that creates a lot of distress so we start with the intentional development of positivity uh and only when you have the capacity for uh holding a positive state do we venture into the to the the side where you might encounter things that are distressing so that you have this you this Reserve where you can rush back to I'm in this terrible negative state but I am confident that I can generate a positive state to counteract it and I can because I've done that practice then the the the the difficult states that you might encounter are much less frightening so you're actually uh better at getting at them but I remember uh you know when I was teaching it against the stream which was mainly of a possible oriented practice the first two or three days of the retreat for the teacher was handling crisis after crisis of people who were experiencing these distressing states but on a med of a passenger tree that almost never happens people do three or four days or two or three days side without the distress mostly what happens to people who get into that situation just vipassana stop meditating as a way of getting away from the just starting and stopping where it's on the med of a positive side you just flip to the medicine and you keep meditating wow what is what is um it look like to emphasize mind States when you teach the Bravo viharas how does that work practically well um so you know you make the intention to radiate the let's say loving kindness to whoever you've chosen to work with uh and then um you're aware that there's emotional states in the body but you're not attempting to affect them in particular some people are visual thinkers primarily and so if you don't hold something in visual space you can't concentrate very long so you make that discernment and then understand uh that a mind state or a view affects the way that conceptual reality looks so in the med of a person approach in the beginning what you're attempting to do is create a view or to understand what a view is which is the vipassana side of men of a possuma so we're exploring how do I know how do I touch into what I'm actually sensing and what have I made it into it's that back and forth and in a Qantas view of course there's not much Distortion if lust is present as the Buddha said using the metaphor of the mirror or the bowl of water if the bowl is dyed a bright color the color of lust then the reflection of the view is imbued with that color Distortion you'll you'll notice that this is a fairly easy one for people when you look at somebody and you find them highly erotically charged or very desirable do they look different uh does the world look different to you than when you're looking at somebody who's you're indifferent to and so then you begin to get them to discern what is that difference um have you ever broken up with somebody who can't even believe that you were involved with them and can you think back to the time when the the world was infused with bright colors they looked like a Christmas tree uh so that begins that uh exploration so that's the cognitive instruction to begin to piece it apart but then you're looking at the sensing experience of it [Music] um and you do that as you build up The View so first it's I don't know what a view is now this is not true for all people some people already know views they already can do this and it's it's uh something that we would learn in childhood the thing is of course secure people mostly can do this without any without much effort because they've always been able to do it caregivers say to you what's going on with you use your words I can't figure out what that means why did you do the thing that you did not because I'm going to punish you but because I'm curious about how you made the world and how you understood what was happening and can you describe that to me and can you tell that you're angry can you tell that you're sad can you tell that you're happy and how do you know that that's what's happening and if you had a caregiver that asked you all of those things all the way through your childhood you'll know when the mind is happy and the world is different when the mind is angry and the world looks different but if you didn't have that level of care and nobody was interested in what your states were and never asked you to communicate them you may not have understood that they vary and that are different and there's different ways of calling them so you have to learn that now it's a bummer but it isn't that you can't learn it it's that you haven't yet and so you learn it and so that's the investigation it's this movement back and forth once of course you're able to understand what a view is have agency to cause of you you don't need the vipassana side anymore and you can just rest in the middle met aside holding the view now in Asia when we were at the monastery in pinoleum um what you'd notice this is like say a 15-day meta retreat uh the first days everyone's becoming progressively more frustrated and angry so they're not floating around on meta they're stomping around in anger and then um depending on uh how people do you'll notice that all of a sudden it's like they explode in loving kindness uh sad dial calls that the metabomb you've got meta bombed and all of a sudden you understand this and you have agency and you can hold the view and then the world looks completely different and then you're operating in this this world that is you know profoundly beautiful how do you react to a situation that's profoundly beautiful and is that different from the way that you react to it if you're Furious uh that it's the way that it is or you're bored and indifferent to the way that it is and then you begin to understand ah view is really useful um Let's Help washing the dishes suddenly becomes beautiful because you can hold the view of it or it becomes sacred because you know what the sacred view is and you can hold that what are the sort of Milestones along the path to Healing attachment wounds and how do you know when you've reached secure attachment well we like to do things in an empirical way so we'd like you to do your adult attachment interview as you begin the work so we have a good assessment of what your uh attachment is and then every two years we repeat the adult attachment interview until we have evidence that you actually have earned security because that you know it's very subjective otherwise but um what you notice along the way is that you begin to respond to the experience of the present moment in a totally different way than you used to respond to it and it's automatic and unconscious uh one of the things that's uh Sublime about this approach to work is that the self-experience is the same you're thinking I'm the same person I always was except I'm choosing completely different things that I never would have picked before and I'm seeing that I can have this in a way that I never saw before I can ask for things I can inquire for things I'm interested in things that I I would would never half before but the self experience is largely unchanged so you also then have that deep Insight is oh yeah the self experience is the audience the the play is actually this being that I am that's just operating in the world and I'm I'm watching what I do rather than being the author of what I do and that's fascinating and the reason that that begins to happen is because you've stack the database and so there's different things that you can form reality from and different possibilities that you conform reality from and so it it changes now that may be too esoteric or too Lala to make sense of uh so I'll give you more concrete example I spent 12 years writing a book and it was terrible a terrible experience of unbearable anxiety and distress and starts and stops um and that had actually been what my experience of doing anything was like it was always like that [Music] um and then I would finally get to the end of something and then I would be too afraid to really even to mention it um but I I've written another book in two years yes so 10 years of horrible anxiety I don't have to do anymore so pretty awesome yeah I'd like to come back to hearing about that book project um I I wonder um could you describe how you see uh you know say someone has attained secure attachment and they're ready or they already have it they're the lucky ones uh what how do you approach teaching the more traditional Buddha Dharma and like the path to enlightenment I'm I would probably say all roads lead to dochin but I'm too old to be a dogean teacher to learn how to to be a doge and teacher at least in the tradition that I engage with you is which is Dan Brown's pointing out the great way so I teach a traditional teravada approach using mahasi's Manual of insight progress of insight working through those stages and how have you uh have there been any adjustments or adaptations you've made in framing that for a western audience um well I tend to like to offer the the traditional texts as they are without any change at all and then my commentary is irreverent and uh contemporary [Laughter] that works well you know I grew up in an environment where the rules weren't really followed uh and um and a lot of secrets were kept [Music] so from that perspective [Music] I don't I don't really have much in the way of uh an inherent response to rules um I know what they are I'd like to know them I was a bonsai artist for a long time and what I liked about bonsai was that there were a lot of rules really strict rules but the great masterpieces of bonsai violated them and in the way that they violated them that was what created the uniqueness and the mastery foreign I also noticed that a lot of people come because they're suffering and their suffering is great and some kind of lightness uh is helpful some kind of humor is helpful so it's I prefer the laughter side of things to the uh [Music] crushing piety side of things so and I might be mistaken again but I believe I've heard that when you lead Retreats there's often uh like social or speaking components to them is that right that is correct uh so um you know we grow up in the in the in the meditation World here which is largely informed by Thai Forest uh and there's that rigidity around silence um but it's terrible a terrible environment for attachment um most people require reassurance particularly when they're moving into a new environment uh they find the the silence uh and the lack of contact rejecting it activates their attachment system and the attachments one of the things you know about the attachment system is it activates and until you connect to somebody it just amps up the distress so one of the reasons why in the traditional vapassana Retreats there was so much distress in the first few days is because people's attachment systems were activated and nothing was settling them I think that if you go on enough for treats what you begin to learn is the rhythm of your attachment system so some people need contact every two and a half days some people need contact every day and a half some people may contact every three days uh uh and so that the teacher interview or uh grabbing the retreat manager whatever it is that gives you that enough of a connection but if you're going to come to a retreat and do attachment work it's better that the attachment system shuts off because it is linked to the exploration system and this is also something that might be true in a general or pass in a sense if the attachment system goes off the exploration system goes if the attachment system goes on the exploration system goes off how are we going to explore in meditation the things that you need to know if you're so activated attachment wise that you can't explore and so some balance is necessary now if you bet on a lot of Retreats you learn how to manage that in such a way that you're used to a culture of of Silence but for new meditators uh they don't have that and so you have people available designated people always that you can talk to but what I also find is that uh for instance in shinzhen's world I went on four Retreats of years for a decade I knew people by side but I didn't know anything else about them it's not really conducive for a household or Sangha to develop and to meet and find supportive meditators and so we have designated areas where you can talk and we have periods of uh talking um I think I had a fairly rigid view about it but I went on a couple of Dan Brown Retreats and there's no restriction on talking anywhere on the retreat at all and what I noticed in doing that was that it didn't affect my practice at all so that I was able to go into these meditative States I was able to explore very efficiently the meditation practices that I was looking to explore and at the same time I was able to relate the experiences I was having to somebody else who's doing the same thing and also to emotionally regulate and to regulate the attachment system and so that actually worked better when I brought it into my theravada community there was massive protest I saw that one coming so we have this compromise model which I keep trying to chip away at but there's so much resistance to it there's this Pride uh really in uh in silence what's the what is the Compromise that you tend to strike and if you had your way and could chip away at that what would you how would you structure it uh I would probably have no silence um at all uh uh but the way that we do it is um there's one designated Place uh which is in the the cafeteria where you can talk and so all of the rest of the retreat center is silent except for that and there's uh only one period a day where you can talk so dinner is usually I don't know it's 6 30 say let's say it may or may not be at 6 30 but let's say it's at 6 30. from 6 30 to 6 50 is silence so that you can eat your meal in silence and then a Bellows rum and then from 6 50 until 7 30 is a free-for-all but if you don't want to engage in it you can leave and it's nowhere else so it's contained you can't really hear it from anywhere else and so then then at 7 30 the bell rings and everybody's back in silence foreign no please you I restrict the size of my retreats to to uh um um where I can do interviews with everybody on the retreat either on a daily or every other day basis so they don't get that we don't we don't do the big uh retreats mainly because people are are doing their attachment work and you know attachment work is really interpersonal if there were 150 people on The Retreat there would be no way that you could do that you couldn't really attend to the people in the way that um they they would meet it so we don't um so it's it's actually fairly easy to manage the on off of the talking it was not too many hooks yeah are there any like recommended topics for discussion during those times or specific practices or you said it's a free-for-all so you can talk about whatever what I'm really hoping for is that people will risk forming relationships one of the other things about attachment work is that disorganized people are highly socially isolated so that they can have all of the theory of what it is that they're supposed to be practicing with other people but they don't have anybody else to practice with uh hear what you're bringing together is a group of people that all have similar focuses uh have a framework that they can engage it's refereed so that they have a higher level of safety that they would than they would have in a general setting and they can try out uh and see who they like and who they don't like and it's not a it's not a 15 minutes at the end of The Retreat it's uh it's 40 minutes uh every day of the retreat so that you can and because the Retreats are small you can engage everybody one time or another you can engage people that you do like multiple times and then actually form some kind of bond that would translate into contact outside of the retreat environment that's beautiful and I appreciate that you're experimenting with different forms and structures I think uh that makes a lot of sense that a lot of the difficulties people would run into in the early days of retreat would be attachment related and that you know some talking in one structure another would be really helpful for mitigating that and uh just kind of avoiding that whole class of problems if possible it seems like right yeah and the men of a positive approach where people have done two or three days of meta there's almost no none of that and particularly when they have the we don't we don't have any restriction in talking the the Arrival Day so that you can so that it isn't so frightening one of the things about disorganized people is that they're frightened of other people uh and uh you know they they have a term for positive Romance well you know you can also have a vipassana enemy that is equally invented right foreign I know for me like often just I would get really uh anxious and agitated and like have some uh I don't even remember what they were but just some reason to be emotionally distressed or something and it was typically less about other people and more just you know something I was worrying about or fixated on and uh would really typically struggle that's your self-generated emotion which is regulating yes um um I'd be curious to ask about and this is just a very broad question about what was your relationship with Dan Brown like um he was my mentor he was my facilitator and we were friends [Music] um he was uh I I guess the easiest way is he he really got me without me having to explain myself which was lovely and he uh he was a very very direct [Music] one of the things like people uh we understood uh where we each other were uh and what we were and we're not willing to do and then he uh coming from the Psychotherapy side of things was very intrigued by The Meditation side of attachment repair and he was actually willing to take a risk and investigate that and support us integrating the ideal parent figure into our framework which uh was really an extraordinary Act of generosity as far as I I can understand it and then he was also very protective which was nice um what you may or may not be aware of is that the the traditional meditation side of things is is not interested in the psychological approach things and by and large the psychological Community is not interested in the meditation cited and when you somehow find the two sides putting you in the middle between that it can get into an unpleasant pressure situation so that he was one of the few people that had straddled that but the way that he did that was that the psychological side was completely separate from the meditation side and I think that uh one of the things that he said was that he thinks that in the west the way that the the Garment is going to form is that they're going to be well integrated and that this is the next step and that was one of the reasons why he was interested in supporting it um so that was uh he was also really fun I he liked to laugh he liked to talk two things I'd like to do [Music] yeah it was a great a great friendship which ended too too quickly for me yes I'm sorry I'm sorry to hear that he passed yeah who was the mentorship relationship like what did you learn from him uh in that relationship well um he he basically taught me how to facilitate the ideal parent figure work and so uh I would discuss with him the the experiences that I was having facilitating it for people and he would give me direction on what to do he also was my ideal parent for your facilitator and so that we would have a session where he would facilitate it and then he would explain to me the choices that he had made during the facilitation in response to what I was doing so that I would be able to have the insight into what to do in the interpretation of people's uh narratives what you're doing as an ipf facilitator is you're listening to the description of the visualization that people are doing and uh interpreting the attachment ramifications of that and that directing them toward secure functioning so um that was very useful to have him describe his reaction to my visualization how he interpreted it and then how to respond to that more broadly speaking is there anything that you wish you had known earlier in your career as a meditation teacher that you know you could pass on to other folks in the future [Music] um I think it's a good idea to have a teacher and I think it's a good idea to have a teacher who has a mentor orientation rather than as a teacher student orientation um I think it's important to have uh fellow Dharma Travelers so that you have the support that you need I don't think that you need to restrict yourself only to uh people pursuing the Dharma but it's useful to have a few foreign it is worthwhile to set up your life in such a way that you can dedicate enough of it to the practice that you make the progress that you need in order to see the value of doing it because it is very time energy and resource intensive and if you don't put enough energy into it enough time into it you don't make enough progress to see that very well [Music] I think also that it's useful to have a teacher that engenders a sense of safety is extraordinarily kind and you don't have to transliterate hmm that they actually what you mean by that but can you say what you mean by that that they speak your language that you don't have to translate everything that they say into your language you know we all have our we all have our set of definitions and we go through the world using them what we might not understand is that every our definitions are not Universal in any regard they're just ours and everybody has their own set and everybody's operating by the meanings that they understand so you could all be using the same words and all defining them differently in subtle ways and not actually communicating at all that's what I think it's the origin of most friction is that you're using your definitions they're using the other person is using uh their definitions and you haven't reconciled the definitions to understand what the other person is actually saying and so if you could find a teacher that uses definitions that are close enough to yours that you don't have to translate everything it's faster hmm and um I'm curious you mentioned that uh Dan said that he thought that the Western Dharma would unite Psychotherapy and meditation and I wonder if you have any thoughts about what kind of Buddhism not necessarily psychotherapy but uh the inside a psychological insight you know uh one of the things about Insight Meditation is you you probably know from your experience is that there's lots of insights that come up there's the Insight in how to do the dishes there's the inside in how to make the food there's the insight into how to do your taxes there's the insight into the path to enlightenment one of the things about traditional uh meditation is it's largely oriented around monastic life and when you get into Asia of course it's male monastic life really that it's oriented around uh we lose sight of the cultural framework of that um [Music] we don't Society where religious life is actually a path to success uh in the way that it is in a lot of Arab country assaria Asian countries um so um the psychological insights that can come up in practice can be useful in a householder context which most of us are that makes the environment of the household more conducive to supporting the the enlightenment practice which may not be necessarily the applicable in an Asian Monastery in the same way although if you've ever spend much time in Asian monasteries you might hope it trickles in there too [Laughter] alluding to um that so for instance uh you know it also is when you when you study across lineages um abuse you begin to see that the type of insight that arises arises based on the practice that you're doing and if you practice in a different way different insights arise and so in the in the Tibetan way of practicing what you have is this expanse of awareness where everything happens within that and then teravata side you have this self no self uh conundrum Judd Brewer and Dan did a fmri study on Advanced practitioners and um Tibetan and theravada traditions and they found that the meditation practices activate different parts of the brain and so you have different experiences different sensitivities that come from that there isn't one uh experience of Enlightenment there's the experience of Enlightenment which is tied to the specific practice that you're doing so where is that expansiveness that comes from the Tibetan practices isn't really the same as the no self-experience in caravada practice foreign hierarchical structures where Detachment is one of the primary focuses which is true of the the teravata world is well it's conducive to different types of attachment functioning mainly dismissing people so dismissing people are better able to climb up into the hierarchies of uh patriarchal systems because they don't attach to anybody and so that the recommendation that you know the non-attachment would choose to two different definitions of the word obviously non-attachment means that you don't fixate so attached is the fixated or conceptual to non-attached is the unfixated but in a in a hierarchy that is largely uh affected by people with a dismissing attachment the view is that uh that kind of human supportive relationship is not useful not because it's not useful but because it's not useful to people who are dismissing and so that there's that gets lost and so if there was some recognition of uh how these kinds of structures are formed and how they relate to the conditioning of the people who come into them for instance in Myanmar they don't have an orphanage system because they have the monasteries and that if you can't take care of your child you can give them to the monastery mainly the males but uh so that it wasn't unusual for instance at the monastery we were staying for children to be dropped off because the families couldn't care for them and then they would be in the monastery from Early Childhood until they were 15 and needed to make a decision about a longer commitment they get their preliminary schooling and whatnot but it's a it's a atmosphere that would create a dismissing attachment in adults so the societal system feeds uh culture in the monastery which is informed by all of these things but not addressed in any way so that's where it could be useful I think and um sort of zooming out again do you think that they're how to put this are there any guesses that you have about what kind of Buddhism might be needed in the West in the coming years um well so late stage capitalism climate change we're not really doing anything to mitigate climate change so that we could reasonably expect the results of that to unfold [Laughter] that means that the the trickle of climate refugees that we have now is going to be a torrent if the tropics do become uninhabitable that's four billion people that are going to have to move north or south um are we obviously on the right in the U.S they're building walls to keep out the climate refugees I mean it's this it is merely the stupidest thing you could think of right uh I built a 30-foot wall that will keep them out oh my God he's got a 31 foot ladder how will we wreck how will we uh address that now the you know the United States geographically the way that it's located we have oceans between us and most of those people where it's going to be easy for us to exclude them without noticing it particularly they're they're going to come north but the majority of them are going to go south because of the geography we're already you know we don't build the wall across Texas we're building a wall between Guatemala and Mexico which is much shorter and and has fewer prying eyes [Music] we live in an incredibly unequal Society what is it actually that we we value so I think in in terms of the Buddhist path of course what we ask in the beginning is that you take an ethical stand and does that ethical stand include the four billion people that will be refugees from the world that we've mismanaged [Music] and I think it I think that it should include those people and do I think I think resources should be distributed so that each person has the capacity to explore and Find meaning in their life and that each life uh has that capacity that a person can find a way of being in the world that provides them with meaning and that that's actually uh where the focus of our distribution of resources should be centered but that's not what we do I don't know exactly uh the path between what we do and what I think is a good idea but I do think that we need to advocate for those things so the Buddhism would be one that opens compassion and just in a an amazing capacity for compassion because the amount of suffering that's coming is is going to be unbelievable um particularly you know in places like the US where we're so privileged uh we're so privileged we don't even have the concept of how a privilege that is in comparison to other places and uh [Music] so rather than the you know the hundreds of thousands of refugees that are coming what are we going to do with tens of Millions that's what I think our practice is going to need to be able to hold that experience it makes me want to ask I think um we've talked a lot about meta in particular uh loving kindness but is there anything that you've found in teaching compassion as one of the Brahma viharas that would be useful to mention well you know the emotional regulation there's a few things about compassion practice one so it's an empathetic practice in order for you to have an uh compassionately empathetic response to people we have to be able to feel your emotions so when you look at the different attachment strategies uh they have different relationships to emotion and so what we do is open up and explore the capacity of our own emotions and then develop skills for regulating our own emotions which will then allow for the Attunement which is another part of compassion you have to be able to attune to somebody so put your attention on them hold that attention allow them to put their attention on you what you'll notice is depending on the intimacy of that connection you have an emotional response to that if you can't regulate your emotional response to that connection you can't hold the Attunement if you can't hold the Attunement you can be in an empathetic compassionate response so you build those skills up the Attunement skill the emotional regulation skills emotional Clarity skill uh hold the space for somebody else's suffering they typically don't have to resolve people's problems what you have to do is help them re-regulate the cognitive mind which can solve the problems is adversely related to the emotional side if the emotions are just regulated can't think you could help somebody regulate then they could think again and so you don't have to solve the problems we have a tendency to want to solve the problem and not attend to the emotional difficulty because we can't regulate the experience of that but we can shut that down and go cognitive so it's kind of the reverse of that holding space for them to express the emotional chaos of their suffering and you creating a container large enough that you can hold the experience of without having to get away from it and bringing your capacity to emotionally regulate to the empathetic experience so that you keep sending back to them a version of their emotional say that's more regulated until it has a regulating effect on them and they settle into a emotions they settle into a what oh we always use Dan Siegel's thing the window of Tolerance people can tolerate a certain level of intensity of their emotions and once it exceeds that then they have an emotional event that needs to be regulated which we usually use thinking for if you have skillful thought processes to regulate your emotion you you have a much more Dynamic experience of things and if you have afflictive strategies to regulate your auction for instance catastrophizing people to typically regulate fear by creating more intense fear it's sort of escalating rather than settling fascinating fascinating it's a really incredible description of compassion you've just given I really appreciate that um so shifting here slightly uh you know you mentioned your book project earlier could you tell me about what the book is that you've been working on yes it's called punch outs or Taja panati and Paulie that's the subtitle ment is a word that means to reflect back on conceptual reality and what it really means is that you're looking for markers in the way that you've formed uh reality to see whether it matches well or not the um data that's coming in so for instance uh if uh that which brings about understanding in relationship to the essential nature of any truth Earth fire hardness heat and so on is the tajapanati so let's say uh you formed the experience of a cup when you touch the cup does the cup feel hard because one of the qualities of a cup is that it's hard if it's a hard Cup right what is the color what is the shape all of those things that you check to make sure that you've set it up right and it is the data that's coming in has been represented appropriately the Buddha used the metaphor of the farmer going into the Hut at dusk do you remember this one no I don't remember it he go he opens the door of the Hut he sees his snake in the corner he draws his machete and he chops it up and then he lights the candle and realizes that he's chopped up his rope that he saw the coil and his mind made it into a snake and then he instantly responded by killing the snake even though actually it was a coil of rope so that that habit I think of it as a kind of rocking back and forth you have conceptual reality and you explore what's there and then you rock back into the sensing data to see whether or not you've made the right thing from it so you move from this this is what's going on because this is how I've made it to this is what I think is going on what do you think is going on one of the things that's great about having these fellow Dharma Travelers is you can say that this is what I'm experiencing this is what I think is happening what do you think is happening and there's that openness and that intimacy that can come from the sharing of perspective which and then allows you to focus on different facets of the Jewel and sea in the contrast more clearly so what I thought uh was that uh if there was a way to create that experience and someone they would be able to track it easier and so I started to do a series of photographs that I was hoping would elicit the experience of questioning conceptual reality based on the data so let's see if I can find a representation of this so you know what I mean so in this spread can you see that okay uh sort of yeah uh can you lift it up a little bit like [Music] all right yes you would not be able to tell what I mean by that can you see that yes what do you see I see it I'm what I'm hoping you'll see is that that it's a hit it's a hillside and that it's a rounded Hillside which you can tell by the shape that the trees are forming but if you look in the background you see that the hills don't align at all and actually if you look closely it's all the same picture slightly off so you're looking at four pictures of the same thing but the mind can create from that a view of a rolling Hillside all right that's the touch of cannot and then here's another one can you see what looks like a rolling hill in the background yes exactly pretty much the same picture the same four views that you've just seen But actually if you look at them the second and fourth picture are almost identical and the second and fourth pictures are slightly to the right of the first and third pictures so it is largely one view but then the mind is able to create a rolling landscape from is that making sense yeah so that you then have the experience of being able to see not only the rolling landscape that you've made but also that you've made it out of these these little punch outs uh and that actually you begin to understand the conceptual reality is not what's there it's actually these punch outs of your preferences of what's there that are then created into reality and so that Insight is really fundamental to understanding the nature of experience and also opening up the possibility that you don't have to own it so much um I made this this version of reality and you've made a version of reality that's yours tell me about your version of reality and I'll tell you about my version of reality and then we'll have an insight into the nature of each other's conditioning and insight into the nature of each other is suffering which will open the capacity for compassion in each of our experiences so that's the subject of the book well uh are are all of the pages in the book like series of four images like that or there are other ways that you pull that off um well no there's all sorts of different things um here's one that's two pages [Music] it's a little there's a white stripe and the yellow one that didn't show up so well on the camera whoops this one I think is a picture of what the visual field looks like when you're in dissolution wow yeah I can see it um at least that's what it looks like to me yeah if there was a for instance a single image that are in Ukrainian colors but this was before that so I mean you create a fence in a hill and a sky and a cloud um okay anyway as photography been something in your life for a long time or was it this is your first project with photography no this is my third book actually so um the um I've been yeah an artist most of my life I like photography [Music] anyway I'm looking for a particular picture um I like uh the realism of it um it has foreign can you see that one so it looks like a vast landscape but then Los Angeles is repeated twice so it's the same photo flipped yeah so you have a sense of this broad sky and this mountain range and this endless sky and then when you look down at the bottom you have the evidence that it's actually two pictures that are like very close to the same picture which is the the how do you get people to see that the mind can create this big experience but it might not be representative of um one of the things about photography that we're used to in our culture is that it it creates these extraordinary Frozen moments so you set the shutter to really fast and it Clips out this 125th or 250th of a second and it freezes it and so what we find in that experience is that we can see things that we would not have been able to see in life because they move so quickly and so it gives a heightening to the experience of looking at them that other forms don't really do in the same way but there's also the other end of the spectrum where if you use a long exposure it compresses multiple experiences into one which is actually closer I think to the way that we experience things we don't you know it's the who to say experience anything we directly we experience everything as a reflection of the mind and so the the more um our habit of understanding that is the the more uh enjoyment one can have uh in in what you create of the world and the less attachment you have to it oh I've created this it's a bummer get rid of it let's do it again I remember I was on retreat uh and the first is solution experience was really frightening and I actually did not have much help with it uh but uh after you know many many of them I was on a retreat and I had complete dissolution between my feet and my head with no no connection at all uh but I had solid feet in a solid head and I was walking around and it was like my feet were dragging a balloon head behind them and it was absolutely hilarious and light and enjoyable um so you know it's I think it's a it's a one of the passports out of suffering in a way is to really understand that we make we make everything up and there's a lot of flexibility in how we can make it up um and we don't have to be committed to the way that we make it up in each moment we can remake it [Music] well we've covered quite a bit of territory is there anything else that you'd like to say more about or talk more about not really I mean if you're if the attachment work is interesting to you you can check out my website and we have stuff coming up we're gonna we do we have a level two starting next week uh we we have um we're opening up classes for Central European Time in the fall so that if you want to do it at an ungodly hour for me but a good hour for you if you live in Europe that's how we know you're a bodhisattva um track next June uh which if you want to come to you can um anyway it's all it's all up there on the website wonderful yes we'll definitely link to your website and yeah I just really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me George it was really lovely to learn about your life and your teaching so thank you great thanks for having me