Ezra Klein: There's this book I love and I go back to and back to called Comfortable with Uncertainty. It's by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön who's also written really really really well-known beloved books like When Things Fall Apart and Welcoming the Unwelcome. But this particular book resonates with me in part because of the title. It has been a real revelation of my own life how uncomfortable I was with uncertainty. How many places I didn't go, how many things I didn't do, how many conversations I wouldn't have because I just couldn't control the way they would turn out. And just knowing that, just feeling uncertain, feeling a little afraid was enough for me to avoid the thing altogether. But you get older and you begin realizing how much there is that you can't avoid. You realize that discomfort is going to come for you whether you want it or not. I think it's easy to go pretty far with the illusion that you can control what is happening around you. That there is some set of decisions you can make or choices you can make. Find the people, the partner, the job, the success of the whatever. They'll keep you safe and then you keep getting older and you realize it's not going to happen. That things are going to keep falling apart and coming back together and then coming apart again. That there's no stable ground in the end to stand on. And so you have to have some real relationship with uncertainty, with discomfort, with pain, with suffering, with loss. And I've just found Pema’s books and work to be maybe better than anything else for trying to force at least me into some more truthful relationship with that which is not the illusion that I can make it not happen or that with enough meditation or wisdom or anything else I won't feel it, but actually the recognition that the path to growth and to wisdom is letting yourself feel it. Pema has a new book out, Another Kind of Freedom, which is on these themes and many others. And it created for me this wonderful and unexpected opportunity to interview somebody from whom I have learned so much. It's a really beautiful conversation. I found it really helpful. I hope you do too. Pema Chödrön, welcome to the show.

Pema Chödrön: Thank you.

Ezra Klein: It is such a pleasure to have you here. I want to begin with something you say in your book, Comfortable with Uncertainty, because that book is important to me. And you write there that the central question is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear, but how we relate to discomfort. Why?

Pema Chödrön: Well, I think if you're going to live in this age that we live in, discomfort is an ongoing thread for everybody through everything. And a big theme is how to get rid of it, how to not be feeling uncomfortable, not to be feeling uncertain, how to not feel insecure. And so the approach that Buddhism takes is that there's this expression about the only way out is through. So that's really the sort of the idea and one of the things that I've started saying is that to get your nervous system used to certain things. If you try to just go about trying to change the outer circumstances, which of course I applaud people that try, but this is more an approach of working with what the outer circumstances trigger in you and then the work becomes befriending or trying hard to find exactly the right word, but the idea is that you're not trying to get rid of, you're trying to become intimate with and this turns out to be completely accurate that if you approach things and kind of become familiar with what it feels like to feel insecure, let's just start with insecure. Is that okay? Mhm. If you become familiar with what it feels like to be insecure, not the story lines particularly around insecurity, but story lines are like triggers and what they trigger is something physical in your body. And so if you can contact that and actually in working with a lot of people it doesn't seem very hard to contact because it's kind of like if you say like what are you feeling in your solar plexus? People can go right there and then what do you say? What does it feel like? And there's some version of contracted and tight is what people usually say. So this sounds like doesn't sound all that spiritual or anything but actually if you can become comfortable or let's say what would the word be? It's not accepting exactly. It's more like willing to be there fully and completely with whatever it is you're feeling with kind of a unconditional I would say warmth is the word I would use. Unconditional warmth towards whatever you're feeling that seems to be the way not so much that you get rid of the feeling but that it all becomes very workable.

Ezra Klein: One word you use sometimes that really helped me is abiding. I we were talking before this began about how I sometimes have trouble with the verbs here surrendering and letting go and...

Pema Chödrön: Right. Right.

Ezra Klein: But for me discomfort, uncertainty, insecurity, they are very, it took time to see this, but they are very physical. They are a contraction in the solar plexus. And it took a long time to see how reflexively I ran from that and tried to make the feeling go away.

Pema Chödrön: Absolutely right. That is what people do. You can kind of count on it.

Ezra Klein: Really tell me about the the term befriending the warmth because there there's sort of two stages as I read you to to what you're saying here. One is the don't run from it. You are going to feel uncomfortable. You are going to have discomfort. That that is not an eradicable part of life. Right? But then there's this next move. You sometimes say smile at it, befriend it. I wouldn't say I've quite figured that one out. You know, and maybe I'll use an example like imagine somebody's in a fight with their partner. They're angry, they're hurt, they're rehearsing all the things they should have said or all the things they're going to say. Their chest is tight. They can't stop thinking about it, right? What what does it mean to befriend that feeling?

Pema Chödrön: Well, first of all, it means let's let's go through the sort of steps, you know? First of all, you have to want to. And then the question becomes just I think it's your question. Well, h how do I actually do that? So, the first thing would be some kind of pause through meditation. One of the things you learn to do uh it's kind of very basic to meditation is something that I call letting the story line go. If you meditate and you have an object of meditation that you keep coming back to, then you begin to experience all your thoughts, storylines as something that you can interrupt, something that you can come back from, that you don't have to keep following it and keep following it, keep following it. So, it's like you see yourself going down a rabbit hole and you decide, no way am I going to go down that rabbit hole. So, then what? So, how do I not go down the rabbit hole? And then you go to your body and you find where in your body the pain it's you're holding the grievance or the sense of revenge or the sense of uh regret that you didn't say the right thing. You don't really have to name it, but you ask you say go to what are you feeling like right now? What are you feeling? You don't not conceptually don't say you don't have to say mad or anything like that. What are you feeling? And then find that feeling in your body. So what you find is a contraction, some kind of tightness, a knot almost. And you can ask a person, well, where is it? Some people will say it's all over my body, but usually they'll say like it's in my solar plexus. It's in my throat, my stomach, wherever. It doesn't really matter. But once you're there, the attitude towards it is not that it's something um that needs to be eradicated, you know, oh, let's find it and then we'll throw it out or something like that. The attitude more is that you send I I like to use the word tenderness towards it. You send warmth towards it. People do this differently. People find their own way to do this. If you want to conceptualize it, you would say you send it unconditional love. You send it unconditional warmth, unconditional tenderness. It's like you're not going to give up on yourself.

Ezra Klein: What if you don't feel unconditional love towards them?

Pema Chödrön: If you don't feel unconditional love towards it, not a problem. Then you send then you send the warmth towards what does it feel like to not have unconditional love? I mean, what does that feel like? And then what would you say that would feel like to not have unconditional love?

Ezra Klein: Let me try to think through how it feels for me. I think the idea of how it would feel to have unconditional love is so for a feeling like that yes is so alien that even trying to describe it is hard because that the the water I swim in is wanting certain feelings to go away.

Pema Chödrön: Yeah. Right. And you're a typical human being.

Ezra Klein: I am a typical human being. And you know, one thing that I have gotten better at over time has been abiding in those feelings and then recognizing that they will change.

Pema Chödrön: Exactly.

Ezra Klein: And that they will change more profoundly if I let them sit there.

Pema Chödrön: That's right.

Ezra Klein: But I certainly have not found warmth for them. I've become maybe better at attending to them. Mhm. I think in some places you talk about sometimes noting feelings like that as a a bell to pay attention. And I've gotten a little bit better at that. Like I have a like a physical relationship to uncertainty, which when I feel it, I now feel that is something that I should look at as opposed to try to get rid of, right? But I have a lot more trouble when people say extend unconditional love.

Pema Chödrön: What about what about just a gesture like touching it with your hand?

Ezra Klein: That does help me. I do do that.

Pema Chödrön: You know, in other words, get away from concept and words alto together and just put your hand there. That can be very very powerful to just do that. And sometimes people they just express affection for themselves by, you know, maybe touching the top of their head or I don't I don't want to get too corny with this, but some sort of sense of being okay with yourself.

Ezra Klein: How do you help people learn to feel what they're feeling in their body? It has taken me many years of therapy and meditation to even realize that I often wasn't feeling what was happening in the body that I didn't have awareness of it. I was reacting to it. It was there.

Pema Chödrön: Right. Right.

Ezra Klein: I had a therapist once who was actually one of the people who really helped me work with this. What she realized about me was that the way I would talk about something and the way I would feel about it were very different. And she would start telling me when I was talking about something, she'd say, "Stop. Tell me the same thing, but have your hand on your stomach. Tell me the same thing, but have your hand on your heart." It was a very powerful practice because the feeling would start to come into what I was saying.

Pema Chödrön: Yes. Okay. So, you're saying that for you the the physical gesture is actually very very important in terms of...

Ezra Klein: It certainly helped me. Yeah.

Pema Chödrön: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I found this exactly the same thing. And that's where I've come to find out that if people just use gestures that it helps a lot to sort of soften up the situation, touching the heart or touching where the contraction is. Put your hand where that is and like like uh have a sense of that hand being friendly. And the heart seems to be the one that is the, you know, really gets to people. You know, you could be on the street and then someone for some reason they like something you just did or something, they'll just touch their hearts. And I I find it's such a sweet thing, you know, a way to communicate to people you don't know on the street.

Ezra Klein: Why do you think it's so hard to feel what we're feeling?

Pema Chödrön: A lot of times it's trauma related that people uh close down at a young age around something or other. And so uh it's like trying to uh open up a floodgate and maybe people are scared for one thing, you know, to open up that floodgate. And actually it's not such a great idea to open up a floodgate. it's more a good idea to sort of like uh put a little hole in it in a tiny hole so that the whole thing is a gradual opening.

Ezra Klein: So, so let's say you're there and you are feeling how you're feeling, you know, and maybe you don't like how you're feeling, but you're at least there with it. You have a line that I find very evocative. You said, "I once asked the Zen master Kobanchino Roshi how he related with fear. you said, 'I agree. I agree.'"

Pema Chödrön: Yeah. It was such a beautiful answer. You know, it was sort of shorthand for this whole thing that we're talking about. I I I stress the warmth and the friendliness because people seem to need that a lot. But the fundamental thing, if you're saying, "What are we actually trying to do here?" It's like agreeing rather than disagreeing, accepting rather than rejecting, staying with rather than running away. Uh what are some other ways we could say... breathing into... allowing... allowing is a good word. Yeah. Allowing rather than uh disapproving or criticizing. And the thing is uh what I like about this approach and what seems to be attractive to people is it doesn't matter where you are in the process you can make friends with that. So, so like for instance, it might very common for people who have low low self-esteem, which is many many many many people that they hear a meditation instruction and then it's just another thing to beat themselves up on because I could never do that. So then if I was had an opportunity to work closely with someone, I would just say, "Well, then let's just work with uh what happens in your body when you feel like you're a loser or you feel like you're can never get it right or uh let's go under the words of what is let's get at what it feels like physically to feel like I I'm always messing up or I'm inadequate or there's something fundamentally unlovable about me, you you know, so you so somehow um getting right to the kind of core of a lot of the dysfunction that they might be feeling. So getting back to the original thing is I think we all need a lot of help to start to agree with what's happening with us rather than feel that it's because it's uncomfortable that it has to be rejected. Everybody needs a lot of time and willingness and intention to uh be able to hold more discomfort, hold more pain really. You know.

Ezra Klein: It took me, it is still taking me a really long time to realize that what I'm trying to do when I meditate is not to change how I'm feeling. Right? I started meditating because I had and have a fair amount of anxiety and stress and I started really seriously when I was starting a company and I was trying to feel differently than I felt, right? And for years and years and years and years, I was there in a practice of trying to feel differently than I felt. And and I do think it is a very subtle and difficult shift and one I've only begun to recognize needs to be made, right, to to this place of agreement that you're that how you feel might change, but you're not trying to change it that you're trying to like be in a space of accepting how you feel.

Pema Chödrön: So, uh I I believe you work with Will Cabinson. So one of the big things about why the stress reduction program that his father has uh John Kabits in uh one of the premises is you he says to people you just have to give up the idea that this is going to help you in any way. You have to give up the idea that there's like a goal here. We're just going to be mindful of what's happening for itself for its own. such a hard idea to give up, but he must have a lot of success doing it, right? Because it's in all the hospitals and everything. So, but that is a very important part of it is you're not trying to improve. And these are people with severe back pains mostly that no doctors could help. So, so all the exercises are for themselves alone and not to try to have get rid of the things. I'm sure it's very hard, but uh I think that let's just say it helps to be introduced to the idea and people sometimes get kind of fascinated by the idea that there's an alternative to well to it trying to get rid of it. Why? Because they've spent how many years they're alive trying to get rid of it and it hasn't helped. So let's try something different. Don't you think so?

Ezra Klein: What attracted you to this side of it? I mean something if you go through your book titles... Yeah. just that right I know it's like when things fall apart comfortable with uncertainty how we live is how we die um you know a different kind of freedom that you know one after another welcoming the unwelcome... welcoming the unwelcome.

Ezra Klein: There's been a real attraction in for you in this idea that it's going to hurt sometimes.

Pema Chödrön: Yeah and and that let's just let's let's be okay with it hurting sometimes like Trumpete Cham trumpet my teacher he always used to say lean into the sharp points and that was a that's a great phrase I think you know lean into the sharp points because it expresses what we're trying to say here about leaning in rather than pulling back you know so sometimes it's just really physical you sort of have the idea okay this is really hurting And so uh some people would say I so I lean into it. Uh other people would say I stop resisting. That's what for me that's what it is. I've learned that anything unpleasant I I can feel that I'm resisting. I don't want it to happen. And then I just go through this process which I've done so many times now that I can actually do it. But I go through this process of relaxing with it. you know, say not physically not resisting like unnoding the stomach.

Ezra Klein: Walk me through that process. I mean, I believe you have back pain.

Pema Chödrön: I do.

Ezra Klein: We were talking about back pain a minute ago, too. When you're in pain, what what do you do, right? Some some part of you must not want to feel the pain. What then happens in your mind body?

Pema Chödrön: I uh All right. So I I do, you know, I I stand up, I stretch, I do physical therapy, things like...

Ezra Klein: You're not just accepting it and letting the pain be there. You are trying to change it too.

Pema Chödrön: I'm I'm doing those smart things, you know, or what the doctors recommend and and those things are really helpful. I'm a big PT fan around physical pain, but the attitude is the main thing. So, I've given up the idea that uh maybe it's all going to go away and I'm lived more with the idea like this is what I'm going to be living with uh for the rest of my life. So, that's a whole different kind of more relaxed attitude about it. You don't you you do do the physical therapy and things like this but the attitude is um you might you know me we might say agreeing you might say making friends with but for me the what I catch what I catch is when I'm going like this when I resist I I don't want I don't want and I can feel that physically and then I lean in and I lean in. So what does lean in mean?

Pema Chödrön: Um, okay, I'll give an example. I don't know if it's going to answer your question, but Chimam Trumper once gave a talk and the topic of the talk was collaborating with reality. And he gave the example, this is what what he gave the example that I was very familiar with in living in Nova Scotia in the wintertime of walking in the winter when the snow and sleet is coming in your face and it's extremely unpleasant and and your whole body is as if you're in the dentist chair. You're just like tensing up. So leaning in means you physically stop resisting what's happening and you you more like relax with it. You sort of relax with it. It's like you the thing is that the contrast is so great between resisting and then relaxing that somehow it's not that hard to do because it's so so tangible this resisting thing because I can feel everything in me is like pushing away and that's like fruitless. I mean it's not going to it's not going to help at all. Whereas as when I sort of just let it be what it is, let's just that's another way to say it. Just let it be what it is and stop tensing against it, then it becomes totally fine.

Ezra Klein: I think about this when I walk home with my kids, you know, half the days of the week I do pickup. And I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old. And we live in New York and it rains. Like yesterday when we walk home in the rain, what happens is I'm sitting there trying to not get wet and they're like puddles and they're trying to jump in every puddle and if they have their rain boots on that's great and if they don't I'm like don't get your feet wet and you don't get your shoes wet. But I'm often tensed up against getting wet and I'm going to get wet one way or the other and they're playing in the rain. They're collaborating with reality. That's right. And I'm resisting reality. I don't want to get wet. And they're like, "There's so much water here. That's so fun." Uh see, it is a subtle shift and mentally, I think. And so for the kids, it's natural. And then somehow we lose it, right, as we get older, it seems like. But then you can kind of go back. You can you can begin to be more joyful about what's happening. I mean, I just had this experience with the sleet and everything and and I always used this image. So, I was I I began to it did feel like I was in a dance with the storm, you know, there was something very joyful about it. Funny. I think that's what it was. It became sort of funny, like I felt like I was in a New Yorker cartoon or something. And uh but it's but it's more like your kids with the the puddle that becomes enjoyable rather than a battle. So struggle is a helpful word. I think you find yourself struggling and and and basically you pause and uh you find your way to not struggle.

Ezra Klein: You have a line that I think is interesting where you say when we resist change it's called suffering. And I often find Buddhist teachers make this distinction between suffering and pain.

Pema Chödrön: Right. And I'd love you to talk a bit about that. Pain is you put your finger on the burner and there's pain you pull away that's that and there's many many examples like I have back pain you know or whatever it is so that's pain that's like uh direct experience then there's suffering which is all the story lines that we lay on top of it and I call that unnecessary suffering actually but suffering in this case is uh optional because it's based on the story lines you're telling yourself about like I talk to people say people are curious we talk about back pain you know spiritual spiritual discussions about back pain but one of the things is um just uh people are curious about uh how to be be with the experience without all the story lines because they're saying to themselves things like uh this is going to get worse and I'm going to be disabled or I'm not going to be able to do my work because of this or all sorts of disaster scenarios which are causing them so much suffering that that's optional that part.

Ezra Klein: I take this as a very important part of I mean Buddhism generally but but your your teaching in particular working with this layer of resistance to what's happening and and I I struggle with this a tremendous amount and it's something I'm trying to work on where I'm in a situation that exists. It's not a situation at this point I can change. I have, you know, created the schedule. I'm going to the thing I'm, you know, I have back pain, too. I'm feeling the back pain. Or there's something in the future that I'm worried about happening, but it may not happen. I was just doing a governor's forum in California, and I was worried on the flight out that I was losing my voice. I didn't end up losing my voice, but I worried about it a lot. And there's this like layer of experience that for me is resisting. Trying to make it different than it is when I can't. And on the one hand, I think I become more attentive to how much suffering comes out of that. But I'm curious again in a very sort of physical or tactical way how you drop that layer because for me the impulse to try to solve every problem or to treat even every moment like a problem to solve or to perfect is very deep and reflexive. Right.

Pema Chödrön: Now would you say though is it possible to keep it going if you don't keep feeding it with story line? Is it dependent on story line?

Ezra Klein: You when you say to keep feeding it, it to me I the I uh am not feeding it. The story line feeds itself. It takes an enormous amount of mental energy for me to not have worried thoughts feed themselves. I don't want to be thinking about this. I'm not trying to do it. That's worried thoughts do feed themselves. Absolutely. And um part of the book the uh another kind of freedom which is that commentary on Trumpish's book there is this part which may had a big effect on me where he talks about there's nothing wrong with in this case it was negativity but let's just say nothing wrong with back pain or nothing wrong with worrying about the future. Nothing wrong. And but the problem is what he called negative negativity. That's on top of worrying then there's judgment about worrying and it gets very it goes way down the rabbit hole right so coming it's almost like I think in your case like on the airplane it would be almost like meditating getting back to meditation where you I don't know what you do when you meditate exactly but do you have an object of meditation often? Uh, no. I tend to do noting. I sort of continuously speak either aloud or or mentally what I'm aware of at that moment and from which sense. So, I'm aware of looking at you. I'm aware of hearing the sound as you sort of affirm what I'm saying. Yes. Right. I'm aware of feeling my fingers touch each other right now and just sort of letting everything come into awareness but doing nothing about it.

Pema Chödrön: But doing nothing about it. Right. Okay. So let me just propose um I think I could work with noting too in in terms of this but just in terms of more familiar ground for me. So if you what you did was uh say okay I'm going to uh gently note or aware of my breath going out and coming in. And uh my intention here is to just as much as possible stay fully present with the breath going out and the breath coming in. Nothing forced just natural breathing. Okay. So then what happens is you the worry thought is like a magnet. It's a very seductive like the sirens you know calling you. It keeps pulling you off. So fine that's what happens. So then we just keep coming back to uh being present with the breath going in and breath going out and then it pulls you away again. But you're training in noting that you're going off and then coming back. You're training in noting that you're going off and coming back. So you interrupt it. I guess you could say you just get the hang of what it feels like to not continue with the story line. And then you might find but by the time you land in San Francisco or wherever you're going that uh that uh there's been a shift in your anxiety level, a shift in your uh obsessive thinking part, you know, and that you're more ready to just go in without hope and fear into the situation. You're in a different place with the whole thing because you've stayed so present with what's going on.

Ezra Klein: I I become very interested in and this is just my own experience with myself but the difference between energy of doing something and energy of just allowing something to be there. And to me a lot of the exhaustion from worrying, right? He's actually trying to think about like, well, what can I do about it? You know, do I need to be uh you know, sucking on a throat lozenge? You know, when I go there, should I see a doctor? and the the kind of trying to actually solve it versus and this is true in a lot of areas of my life versus just it's there like the thoughts are there I might lose my voice and that I mean of course there are things in life that we want to change you do physical therapy for your back I work in politics I'm trying to affectuate change not just allow things to be the way they are right and on the other hand the you can for me at least how much I've trained the energy of trying to change things and solve problems and act and optimize. It's made me realize like how untrained for me and unfamiliar actually the energy of just letting things be.

Pema Chödrön: I'm sure I'm sure it's very unfamiliar. But uh are you attracted to it?

Ezra Klein: Yeah, I wouldn't be having this conversation if I weren't attracted to it.

Pema Chödrön: Uh and so do you find that you can do it sometimes? just be so is the thing I'm starting to try to learn how to do. It's been a big shift in my own meditation practice.

Pema Chödrön: So I do think you know you I think probably anxiety comes up a lot like I was anxious about coming over here. So uh what about it made you anxious? Oh coming here unknown.

Ezra Klein: It's so unknown. You weren't comfortable with the uncertainty.

Pema Chödrön: Actually I didn't have a story line particularly. Uh-huh. My daughter asked me, "Well, what are you afraid of?" And I said, "I I actually don't know. I'm just I just having butterflies." But I wasn't having a problem with having butterflies. I think that's what I'm trying to get at. It was just a automatic response. Um, nothing wrong with it. wasn't escalating into a big storyline or I'm going to be a big flop or uh you know he'll ask me and I won't be able to talk or you know it didn't go any of those places and so it just was I think you know we have these just old habitual responses to things butterflies no big deal butterflies is what I'm thinking in this case so in terms of the worry that's no big deal either but somehow it escalates and escal escalates and escalates and that's when the real unnecessary suffering gets strong, right? And affects you physically and uh so just coming back to it what it feels like in my solar plexus or whatever uh with a feeling of sense of humor, warmth, uh no big deal, something um more along those lines. You're interrupting the tendency to escalate. So, you're actually kind of practicing non-resistance.

Ezra Klein: We've talked so much about the relationship to discomfort. Mhm. What about the relationship to comfort?

Pema Chödrön: I love it. Well, here here's this is a really important question. So, let's talk about comfort as comfort zone. That's the expression that people use. Are you familiar with that expression? So everybody needs some time with the comfort zone because your nervous system needs it. Swimming in the ocean, all these things that the things that soothe you need you need some soothing listening to music that you love and all these things. But there's no growth in the comfort zone. growth happens where it's more uncomfortable and we call it challenge because it's uh we've come up against our edge a little bit there. And so you you want your edge to expand. In other words, if today your edge is the the sidewalk, then by this time next year, you want to be able to walk five blocks or something like that.

Ezra Klein: Somebody once said to me that the amount of growth you are capable of is a direct correlate of the amount of discomfort you're willing to tolerate.

Pema Chödrön: Oh, that's right on. That person was very wise and said that to you. That's absolutely absolutely true. So, I guess what we're talking about then is to the degree that we can feel discomfort to that degree we can grow. And grow means uh let the natural change in evolution happen rather than get frozen in views and opinions that keep you stuck in the same way for your whole life. Really?

Ezra Klein: Meditation has been coming in and out of this conversation. And what is the purpose for you of meditation? What are you trying to practice?

Pema Chödrön: There uh there's could be a lot of answers to that question. I think of it as um a a way to get to know yourself deeply, intimately, um fearlessly um uh with an attitude of of friendliness. So a person who say meditates goes on a meditation retreat let's say where you do more hours and then what it inevitably things start floating up like maybe they think this is all about getting calm and blissful but then when they go on the meditation retreat a lot of painful memories uh regrets uh um flashbacks all all kinds of stuff comes up. For instance, I once raised my hand with Chimam Triumper and I said, "Remember, you're always talking about making friends with yourself, but I've been meditating now for a couple of years and I think I'm getting a lot of ammunition and proof, but that I I am pretty messed up person." And then he said, "Okay, so move closer to the feeling of me messed up." That's what he that was his answer. One of my teachers is called Sonia Rimpiche and he has this expression being okay with not being okay which I think I like that a lot because it's very pathy. It's kind of a fearless thing to see your habits to see your emotional reactivity to see maybe selfishness pride um rage about things that you thought had worked through and all this kind of stuff. So the to me making friends with yourself is making friends with all of that all of that unresolved and stuff like this. So meditation it provides a u a forum or something like this for you to be able to see yourself very clearly and then the instruction is to make friends or you know to to to agree with what you're seeing to not reject what you're seeing.

Ezra Klein: What about for someone whose experience with meditation, which I think is very common, is not that they get these fireworks of self insight, right? But they just realize they can't take 10 breaths without their mind burning away from them.

Pema Chödrön: Yeah. That's true. That's okay. Yes. Absolutely. I was kind of jumping ahead, I guess, a little bit in terms of what I was saying. One of the things Trump says in myth of freedom is he has a whole chapter called boredom. And the chapter is about what a wonderful thing boredom is. Why is it a wonderful thing? He says because it doesn't feed the ego at all. There's nothing about it that feeds the ego. And so he was really encouraging people that if you start getting bored that is an excellent sign that your meditation is progressing and that uh uh sit okay sit through the hot boredom until it becomes cool boredom. And so hot boredom is what we're familiar with, which is like um you want to jumpiness. You you want to get out of there. You want to boredom has this quality of just wanting to bolt, you know. And cool boredom is you just you sit there with the feeling of boredom. No problem. And uh I would hear these teachings on cool boredom and honestly I had not a clue what they were talking about. So I went to Mexico where my parents had uh uh retired. My father had died. My mother liked to sit inside with all the windows shades closed in Mexico. We're outside of her door and the windows was like blazing with color and action and everything's happening and I'm young, you know. And so I go there to be with her and everything in me wants to be outside there. So for the first two days I was so bored and restless and then I realized I came all this way to be with with my mother. At some point I just gave up the struggle and I was just there with my mother. And then it was so remarkable because I began to feel like I was sitting in a on a stage and every once in a while the door would open and someone would a friend would come in or something. They'd have this conversation and then the door would close and then we were in this like nothing happening zone and I just sat there with her and then she'd start talking and then that's what was happening and the whole thing became kind of fascinating.

Ezra Klein: Feels very similar to what you were saying earlier about the the suffering was coming from resistance.

Pema Chödrön: That's right. The suffering was coming from the resistance. And so I learned I said, "Oh, this is cool boredom. I'm just here with it and it's and and there's no resistance."

Ezra Klein: I actually think time is a very interesting dimension. Yeah. Of all of this that you know when you talk about being I mean everybody feels uncomfortable sometimes but really in a way what we're talking about here what you're talking about is being willing to feel like that for longer without acting. You have a line where you say the opposite of patience is aggression. The desire to jump and move to push against our lives to try to fill up space. Um, you talk about refraining as a method of becoming a dharmic person and and in some ways I don't understand any of this as never acting but as taking a longer space before acting.

Pema Chödrön: Before acting. Yeah, absolutely.

Ezra Klein: And that's been a very important and transformative distinction insight for me. And I'm I'd be curious to just hear more from you on on this dimension of of time and action along the lines of what I was just saying. It would mean that you um a lot you're very patient.

Ezra Klein: Well, just tell me about how you understand patience.

Pema Chödrön: Well, first let's start with impatience because like might as well start where we are, right? Uh I experience as restless and uh like I was saying about boredom. Uh wanting to get out of there, wanting to move to to just get off the hot seat sort of. And then patience would be sitting still with that restless energy. That's how I would think of patience. Sitting still with the restlessness of the energy. Just sitting there with it, you know, like in my mother's living room that uh that's how I experience patience. So again, it's uh growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Patience is part of it would be a necessary uh tool, I guess you could call it.

Ezra Klein: Do you think that that as a general capacity has as weakened and and I'm thinking of something you wrote that that I think about a lot. You wrote refraining is very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. It's a quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It's a practice of not immediately filling up space just because there's a gap. And we didn't used to have the ability to fill the space of every gap. Yeah. You know, you were sitting in traffic and there wasn't a lot to do. you were in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at and now we have the world of distraction at our fingertips. We have, you know, AirPods in our ears. Just the daily necessity of sitting with boredom even has dissolved.

Pema Chödrön: That's so true.

Ezra Klein: And I think it changes us.

Pema Chödrön: It's so true. And not for the better, I would say. you know, uh, less in touch with the richness of the world. So, um, you were discussing with me earlier about going on the subway without without your earpods, you know, and just sitting there and how rich an experience it was of just being there, the sights and sounds and what what was happening, the drama and the just the whole experience as being very rich. And uh sometimes with students very often these days I'll really encourage them to uh one day a week or one morning a week or take an opport time when they just go offline and uh and go to the grocery store offline ride on the subway offline all your activities but be there fully for what's happening because you're not uh engrossed in a movie or or on a podcast or anything.

Ezra Klein: Let's not let's not get crazy here.

Pema Chödrön: And put you out of business, Ezra. Uh so, uh but you know how it is. You you go on the subway or anywhere and everybody is somewhere else. And uh so I encourage them to be present without their device. But, you know, I'm trying to be realistic and just say, "Do it this short period of time, every Wednesday or every Wednesday morning or something like that." And uh yeah, it's like my granddaughter when she was still in college and her teacher said, "No, no devices in the room." And I said, "Couldn't you just turn the sound off?" She said, "No, because it vibrates." So then, you know, so they had to leave them outside.

Ezra Klein: My attention is different if I can feel my phone in my pocket.

Pema Chödrön: Yep. So when we do when I do conversations, my phone is here. It's not in my pocket right now. It's on the floor near me, right? Because my attention to you would be different if it were in my pocket. Of course, even knowing that the sound is off, even know I'm not going to chug.

Pema Chödrön: Right. Exactly. That's what she said. And then she said, "I never realized how I was training myself to be distracted." that was her vocabulary in and because it was so so different being in class without it even with just in her pocket as you say. So yeah, I I think everybody can do themselves a big favor by spending some time offline and seeing what that's like for them. And you know, you could say, well, that's when you get into being bored. But you could say Pal maybe that's when you get into being alive more alive because there's I mean the subway is such a great example of of fascinating really totally fascinating to just be there because of the people if nothing else there's so much happening from when you get on to when you get off there is so much I mean sometimes things you wish weren't happening but nevertheless but...

Ezra Klein: To to just expand that we were uh earlier off the microphone about uh one thing I've been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on the subway and just be aware of what's happening around me. And it's interesting because a lot of the times I don't really love what's happening around me. It's a rich experience but it's a boom box. It's you know somebody uh like trying to grab my attention with music I don't really want to be listening to. It's the screeching of the brakes. But there's just a lot going on and dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the right music or podcast or thing on my Kindle to distract myself in the right way and try to maintain a kind of like a hermetic comfort. It's easier to stop. That that's been my big lesson from it. It's not so much that I love every moment on the subway, but I didn't quite notice how much energy I was expending trying to block it all out.

Pema Chödrön: Do you feel more relaxed?

Ezra Klein: I do. Yeah. I pick up my kids and I'm more present with them. Because I just spent the last 35 minutes practicing being present. As opposed to practicing finding somewhere my mind would rather be.

Pema Chödrön: So it's interesting because I would call that a form of meditation. Uh that just you're just present. It's just it's interesting because we didn't used to have all these devices. You know, I I grew up before television even. So uh but now that we have the devices it's very helpful actually to feel the contrast you know somehow it it it's richer.

Ezra Klein: You have a lovely line I think it's the a line somebody told you that meditation is not a vacation from irritation.

Pema Chödrön: That's right that's right the first thing I was when I first time time I ever went for meditation instruction that's what the woman said to me and then I later I saw that it was from myth of freedom that Trump chim tr said that she was she plagiarized but anyway it made a big impression on me because that's that's right meditation not a vacation from irritation it's just another way of saying the same kind of thing you know but I I have to say even though I was introduced to this view or this attitude from the day one took me a lot of years to really uh somehow have it penetrate and get to me that the path of non-resistance. It was in there. The seed was in there, but it wasn't that I immediately uh uh was open to everything that was happen.

Ezra Klein: Narrate that progress for for a minute because I mean somebody listening to this here here you are. You're a you know a famed nun. Um and the idea of moving from I've never meditated to whatever you must be experiencing seems very intimidating. like what what how would you describe the stages your experience of meditation or your relationship to it have gone through?

Pema Chödrön: That's a difficult question to answer because I've never actually given it a lot of thought. But let me just go back to remembering the first time I was taught to meditate. Well, yeah, sure. I I could hardly stay with the breath for two seconds, you know. But then that was like what uh I was saying earlier. It was just a revelation to see how I had no idea that my mind was like that. And instead of being discouraged by that because of what my teacher at the time was telling me and so forth, I was told just expect that that that actually meditation is not about getting rid of thoughts. There's always going to be thoughts, but you don't have to follow them for an hour and a half, you know. Uh, and um, so, so I would say in the beginning, uh, my very wild mind and, um, and when I say beginning, I don't just mean, you know, what first month or something. I guess for a couple of years, maybe maybe five years. I I don't know how long. But but of course, I kept at it and I did some long meditation practices. We we had these month-long meditation practices and I did that kind of thing and um uh then what started to happen more was a very important thing was I um Trump remembers used to talk about something he called the gap. You could call it a stillness. You could call it a openness uh freshness. And again, I I didn't really know what in the world he was talking about, but he said, you know, it could be possible that at the end of every breath, there's a gap before you breathe back in again. And he heaven sometimes gave a meditation like just natural breathing out and then pause like create a gap and then come back in. So he called that the gap and it had supposedly very profound and but I didn't didn't have a clue really what he was talking about. And then I was in a meditation retreat uh um and we had a big fan that was going all the time. And so the hum of the fan became just background new noise that was always there. So I was sitting there meditating doing my practice and the fan is going and all of a sudden It went off for just a second. I said, "That's a gap. That's what he's talking about." So then I understood what he meant by gap. He meant there's all this noise and then suddenly there's silence. It's sort of like being in a use the image of being in a sack or something like that and it's dark and then there's this little slit and you suddenly realize oh there's there's a whole big space out there. It's it's sort of like that. Someone used this example that they were in a room with this teacher in Nepal and had his window was covered with uh black plastic and he said um that's like uh all think of that as just all the discursive thoughts. this black plastic. It's just covering over and then you just make a pin prick in it and then the light comes through and that's like oh there's there's there's a background here to this whole thing.

Ezra Klein: So he said that you could at the end of every breath you could pause and there would you could experience that gap the gap of well in the tense of the fan it was just the sound was going and then it stopped. So you could say in terms of chatter it would be chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter. But you're not trying to prefer the gap. You're just trying to discover that behind all of in say if if the discursive thoughts and emotions and everything are foreground, there's also a background to the whole thing. and that that that you could connect with at any moment.

Ezra Klein: So, I have a question about this, like a pretty I I think a question I really struggle with when I read his books, when I read your books. I feel like there's like a shifting back and forth a little bit between this instruction of there is no good, there is no bad. It is not better to have mental chatter. It is not better to have spacious mental quiet. It is not better to see the light coming through the pinhole in the black uh plastic over the chatter of the mind. It is not better to be looking at the the black plastic. There's this non-dualism. Everything is totally fine and in some ways the same because it's all the ground of experience and also and maybe it is better. So why do we even talk about gap then? Um because it's there I guess. I guess because it's there. But I think I'm asking at the underlying thing that that is there I feel like sometimes there is a conversation about better and worse or that nothing is better and nothing is worse and then sometimes something seems to be being described that is better.

Pema Chödrön: Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. And uh uh well that's where sense of humor comes in and and an ability to like uh be okay with paradox and ambiguity and things not always being so neat and tidy like that. Because if you know the basic thing that struggle and uh and uh polarization dualism you know pitting one thing against another trying to get better which comes from the place of feeling that you're not good enough to begin with you know that as long as you have the idea that we're moving in the direction of... you're okay just the way you are and that that's a Suzuki Roshi joke. Suzuki Roshi was a Zen master in San Francisco, started the San Francisco Zen Center and he had this expression. He looked out at the audience of his students and he said, "You are all perfect just as you are and you can use a little work." and it is sort of like that, you know.

Ezra Klein: And how do you understand what he meant?

Pema Chödrön: I understand that fundamentally we have Buddha nature. I guess you that would be the uh kind of uh traditional way to say it. But you could say fundamentally uh everybody comes from a a uh has this potential for uh a awakening from the sleep of confusion. Let's call it that. You know, kind of glamorous language. But um everybody has that potential and uh you look out and you see you see a room full of Buddhas. You know, you see a room full of people that are awake but just don't realize it. something like that. And so you begin to say, "Okay, I'm one of them." You know, uh, and uh, I want to recognize more my true nature, I guess you could say. But the thing is, if you want to recognize the true nature by getting rid of the confus, getting rid of the ego, let's say, it doesn't work. The only way to actually have the confusion lesson is to become familiar intimate with yourself just as you are which is a lot of confusion and and wildmindedness and boredom and the all those things you know and so if you have a view that there's nothing problematic with any of that then you can understand that my fundamental nature is uh one of is basic goodness. Uh but uh I'm not recognizing that and so the work is kind of uncovering what's already here. Something like that.

Ezra Klein: Earlier in the conversation you were talking about unconditional love. And what you were saying there as I was trying to absorb it made me think of it that the thing that came to mind is how I feel as a parent. I don't want my children to be any different than they are. I love them just the way they are. And also I want them to grow and there are ways that they can grow but it doesn't have any it doesn't come from a desire to change them. Like I really do. Like I really love them as they are and I want them to grow and you know learn how to do more math and you know all the things you do as a person and put on their own pants. Um tie their own shoes. But so they're both there. It was funny. It was the only it was the only experience I could come to that that had both of those in my head.

Pema Chödrön: Yeah. Yeah. So it's a good one. You could think of yourself that way, you know, just think of yourself that way. Does that make sense?

Ezra Klein: Yeah, that would be nice.

Pema Chödrön: Yeah, you could. You used to be that little, you know. And uh but you don't have to think of yourself necessarily as a little kid, but you could think of yourself as fine just as you are. And yet at the same time uh let's just say not wanting to harm people with my speech, not wanting to harm people with my actions, not wanting to be so critical minded about everything. So it is paradoxical but the basic view is that there's nothing wrong here.

Ezra Klein: How do you think about the relationship between abiding and acting. We've talked about abiding in difficult emotions and right and I think that a question that comes up for people and that's come up for me is you know you think about if your partner treats you badly and you think okay I you know I'm having these difficult emotions I'm going to sit here and I'm not going to be reactive and I'm going to you know work with the texture of them and and drop the story line and touch the energy of the emotion. Yeah. And yet your your therapist would say, "Well, maybe the story here is important. Maybe, you know, this person is not treating you well. Maybe you're allowing it because you don't love yourself enough. But there is something about the dropping of story lines that can become or at least I fear it can become also a way to accept situations that shouldn't be accepted. the responsibility for change. I hear you.

Pema Chödrön: Well, one I I I frequently get uh women in abusive relationships and I always say get out of there as fast as you can. You know, like they like like one woman tell stood up and she was saying uh that she has she described it as an abusive relationship with her husband who for many years and she said so I try to work with it by just you know going to the feelings and all of this and that. So what you're saying there I said uh forget about all of that just get out of the relationship. you you need to get out of the relationship and get some distance from it and that's the that is the most compassionate thing you could do for your husband and also for yourself. So I said you know this is not the time to sit there and you know contact what it feels like in the body. this is time to get just get out, take take the kids and go and just start exploring how you could do that, how you practically could do that, you know, go to your mother's or whatever.

Ezra Klein: So how then do you discern when you should be acting when you should be taking the story line seriously versus when you should be abiding, feeling, touching the energy without the story line.

Pema Chödrön: Yeah, that's a really good question. And uh uh this comes up a lot with um uh protesting injustice in various forms. And uh so that conversation I've had with a lot of people uh and I always say you know I say what they already know but then we have a discussion about it and that is that you're not effective if you're caught in uh strong emotions and you're being carried away by the energy of anger or something like this that you just can't be effective. First of all you're not able to communicate. Someone's only going to hear your anger. they're not going to hear your words and it's there's no possibility of change. So I I first of all I say try to experiment with ways that actually start to communicate to the heart of the people that you're trying to influence for change. Try it when you're angry. Try it when you're not angry. Like find out for yourself, you know, that's the only way it really lands in the body. So I'm encouraging the people to continue with what they're doing but not not when they're caught up in in their clacious that's a Tibetan word for strong destructive emotions and then in that process they might go to the body feel what they're feeling get in got in touch as a way of uh being able to then walk through the door and have the conversation that doesn't come from that place and is actually curious to hear what they have to say and is actually open to hearing what they have to say and isn't uh controlled by fear.

Ezra Klein: It's interesting when you say isn't controlled by fear. One of the things I've experienced with some of your work and and some of this is that there were a lot of actions I was not willing to take because I was afraid of feeling the discomfort the uncertainty associated with them right and it was only when I became less afraid of feeling that right that I could take those actions right. Getting more um comfortable being uncomfortable has opened up a wider range of space in which I can act.

Pema Chödrön: You know, I think a really good way to go about this is uh think like um okay, where do I want to be in one year time or how about five years? You know, like do I want to be stuck in exactly the same way, you know, on this day 2027 or on this day in 2027? Well, I feel that like, okay, I'm I'm able to sit with discomfort a little bit more than before. In other words, it's like it's a growth process and and I think you're actually changing the DNA and some kind of way like it's really fundamental what's what's being changed.

Ezra Klein: Let me as we come to a close here, ask you about a very lovely line in one of your teachers books. He writes, "One's whole practice should be based on the relationship between you and nowness."

Pema Chödrön: Oh, I love that. Yeah. nowness is a word I really love. And another place he says like let the thread of nowness run through your whole life.

Ezra Klein: But but I would just be curious on on hearing your reflection because this can all feel so abstract, but just what does it mean to have a relationship with now?

Pema Chödrön: Oh, well, it means that you Okay, basically that you're present instead of drawn off and uh and that being present itself can tune you into a bigger perspective on your life. It's like that I was talking about foreground and background. It's like uh an example might be the difference between being all caught up in your thoughts and going to the window and looking at the sky and uh you know it's like the astronauts experiences. They're all out there and they're having these amazing spiritual experiences just because they're seeing the earth from the perspective of vast space. And then you get back down on earth and right away all that your habitual patterns and things click in. You're already stuck in in in fighting, you know, struggle and so forth. So in a way I I guess what it means with nowness is that you begin to have more that big perspective that puts everything in in perspective and um and then you just go about your life but all the time you know at at the same time uh you're a little dot the earth is a little dot and you are t nothing in the you know really tiny tiny in the face of this vast universe that just expands forever and does not have an end.

Ezra Klein: If you do this practice in a committed way, if what is promising is not an end to pain. If what it's promising is not that you'll always feel radiant joy or equinimity, what is it promising?

Pema Chödrön: Contentment. Um being okay with how things unfold even if even if it's disturbing. In other words, okay with how things unfold doesn't mean that you wouldn't act, but it does mean that you aren't struggling against what's happening. H contentment so deep because there's you're not struggling against the unfolding of your life. You're more like letting it unfold and then doing things to uh fine-tune it or uncover uh your your uh the openness and and vastness of your mind and and not not be all caught up in the smallalness of petty u grievances and criticisms and uh likes and dislikes and um So somehow then all of that likes and dislikes and everything just have a lot of room to exist and uh so there is a sense of less and less separation between you and your experience and that is a very has a lot of contentment in it. I would say I can say definitely that I uh am deeply contented with my life and I do feel it comes from not from the outer circumstances but from uh the meditation practice and working with my mind and knowing that mind has so much power to uh make you suffer or to help you stay awake and alive to your life.

Ezra Klein: I think that's a lovely place to end. Then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Pema Chödrön: I recommend Shambala, the sacred path of the warrior by Choim Trish, and I recommend Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Suzuki Roshi, and I recommend this book um called Enlightened Vagabond by uh Matthew Ricard. He collected stories about this 19th century eccentric Buddhist master but very eccentric and the stories are totally delightful and very you it's like every story has a moral so to speak but funny very very funny and and the man was a fabulous character so I love those stories and uh Matthew Ricard collected them over many many many many years hearing them from his teachers and things. So those are the three books that I recommend.

Ezra Klein: Pema Chödrön, thank you very much.