Interview with Kenley Neufeld of the Deer Park Buddhist Mindfulness Community. Kenley was ordained in 2005 by Thich Nhat Hanh as a lay-practitioner in the Order of Interbeing with the dharma name, True Recollection of Joy. Kenley received the Lamp of W…
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Trying to eliminate chaos in her life, and also in her mind, and connect to peace in a nutshell.
You mention a natural disaster, hurricane Hugo in your book, what is the role of that major (traumatic) event in your life?
Lisa says that it did transform her, and she was traumatized by that experience. She still finds herself shivering and having other symptoms when there is a storm. it can leave remnants. It still to this day has somewhat of an effect. She doesn’t necessarily think it changed the way she views things. She’s always known that there’s more to life than money, cars, etc. Just a knowing that there was more to life..
She wasn’t brought up that way, it was a painful upbringing. In part to escape that pain, she had to believe that there was something more to life.
What problem where you perhaps trying to solve with your meditation?
She didn’t approach it as a specific problem, like working on forgiveness, progress, or self-esteem. I wanted to solve the problem of chaos and unhappiness. Once I could connect to source into the present moment, that all of those other things would disappear. Going for the root than dealing with the limbs and for the branches.
I don’t look too much for the branches. She always knew that there was something even larger than that. That if she just addressed the root cause (her chaos and unhappiness), then the rest would just fall away by itself.
You mentioned you had to love yourself, imperfections and all. Did that chaos disconnect you from being connected.
Yes, some of that came from the Oprah show. She love Oprah like a mother. Back in the 90’s, Gary Zuchov was one of her favorite spiritual teachers. The world wasn’t ready for that at the time, she was crucified for it. But Lisa knew there was value for her in those interviews. She resonated with those interview. She played those over and over again, and learn more and more from it.
She said Gary was lighting the path for her, she decided to stick with it. Because this was the way she was going to “get it”. After this things became more clear to Lisa, that she had to love herself, imperfections and all. She is a great soul, that every place is a holy place, not just in the confines of a church. It can be anywhere.
Did those teachings turn you towards a meditation practice?
She turned towards running as a meditation practice, not sitting meditation. She could not resonate with that practice. She learned that meditation is anything that you can use that brings you into the present moment. Meditation is just a tool or a technique. There are many meditators sitting in cross legged positions who are not really meditating. They just look like they are.
So running is my form of meditation, my meditation practice.
Did you just discovered it?
Yes, she discovered it, she just knew it. That was her form of being able to connect with source, and the present moment. And to experience her mind and body the way that she wanted to. Her running is more directed inwardly from the kind of feeling that she wants to have, and those are the tools to help her get that.
So you didn’t have a teacher or way to know how to know to get out of your own way?
Yes, any time your minds are in the way, it prevents us from getting into the now, the present moment. Whether we’re focused on the past or the future. She did go to a class in meditation and she found that sitting meditation did not work for her. Sitting meditation does work for her in a sauna, because of the heat. Which helps her with her thoughts.
Tell me more about how the thoughts when running, prevent you from getting into the zone, or peak performance.
Yes, anytime we have thoughts, thoughts carry energy. Negative thoughts are heavy, and positive thoughts uplift us. If you carry a log of negative thoughts, they can actually make you stop (literally) where your body stops. Next thing you know, your legs feel like legs.
But changing all of that is literally only a thought away. Focus on what’s right and positive, and you can be restored.
Explains her experience with wind and trying to run, and she could barely move her legs. So she started to think she couldn’t do it., but then she stopped, and got her mind right. Then when she got back on her run on the trail, and it ended up being her fastest repetition out of the six, and it was into the wind. And all she changed was her mindset!
It’s the difference whether she goes out for a run or not, it all begins with the mind.
Expand how your beliefs are another layer that affect your thoughts?
Yes, there are different layers, thoughts are like particles in the air. We can’t always control what comes into our heads, but we can control what stays there. Part of what does stay there, is what resonates with the believes that we have underneath it. So you have all these thoughts that are floating around, and we pick the ones that resonate with the beliefs that we already have. And letting those go that we don’t.
If you have positive self-beliefs, then the chance are you’re going to pick the positive thoughts in this massive thought cloud. Whereas with negative believes, you pick the negative ones.
With pulling out something at the root. If you don’t just go after the thoughts, but go after the underlying believes, then all the other thoughts, you don’t have to fight with the problematic thoughts. Once you think your’e worthy, lovable, you don’t have to work at confidence, self esteem, and peripheral things.
What would you say with those who struggle with the self-limiting beliefs?
Replace and address and replace the beliefs with more positive ones, and do the inner work to change the beliefs to more positive ones. Stay in the present moment, which allows those beliefs to transform. Staying in the present moment helps, there is no past and no future, there just is. And our beliefs come from the past.
How do you define success with athletes?
A lot of time we think success should look a certain way, influenced by our parents, teacher, etc which dictate how we define success. Success is defined by how content you are, how much at peace you are, or how whole you are. And not necessarily by what time you got on your run, those too of course are successes. But let’s not miss all the other successes in addition to those.
Yes, the sport won’t always be there. It will transform. You do find that with athletes, they lose themselves in sport, and when the sport is taken away, they don’t know who they are anymore. Any time we’re identified with a role. It isn’t just with athletes. You see it with other professions, so identified with their job, or mothers with children who leave, etc. Anything you become identified with.
At some point you became connected to something much larger than the limits of your skin?
Yeah on some level she has always known. When things become hard, than that is the place she goes to, that I’m more than this body, more than this personality.
So there’s also a physical experience?
Yes, I know it. This is what I know for sure, my experience has been.
This changes your stories and way you view the world too?
Yes, it does. I’m here with a personality and stuff that i need to work through. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been in that space multiple times. and it does change everything. You don’t take things so personally. There is more love, compassion, passion, no fear of death. This is what if feels like, when I’m in that space, fully conscious, fully awake, and fully in the present moment.
I too am a work in progress. There are things that happen that take me out of that. When I’m out of that I do take things personally. Then my life does become stressful and chaotic.
What do you do in those cases?
Then I have to make a decision, “so what are you going to do with it Lisa”? Are you going to wallow in the craziness, or meditate, or do some gratitude journaling to get you back there. What role am I going to be in?
So very conscious decision making?
Yes, very conscious, because I’m experience both. So for me it is which wolf am I going to feed? The one of happiness, joy and contentment and peace? Or the one of greed, and anger, and frustration?
Sometimes I don’t feed the right one..
And then you reap it right as I’m sitting there trying to decide, because it is no fun, it’s suffering!
How do you look at flow?
Lisa looks at it as being in the zone, or being present or connected with source, different ways of saying the same thing. Like saying God or the universe.
Is that the same as being in the super conscious mind, and the other two states of conscious you mention in your book?
Yes, the superconscious mind is like being in flow, being in the zone, being fully present.
Whereas conscious mind, you can still be conscious, but still not be fully present, you don’t necessarily notice everything around you, so many thoughts still floating around etc.
You call that the inner dweller, the 80 thousand thoughts that are clouding one’s mind, like a veil between you and reality.
Yes, the difference between living in black and white world, and living in color. It’s amazing when you’re in the present moment. How the wold comes alive, how much connection there is, love compassion, awe, magic and beauty. You stop looking at just people, and you can see through them, you can see the souls of who they are. And relate to that, it’s really amazing.
Do you have suggestions for those who seek a particular state of flow, and then when they can’t run, they may not get that state?
Yes, that is part two of her book, where she talks about the practices where you get into the meditative technique in order to run. It goes through deep breaths, scanning the body, visualizations, transitioning the body, mindset things like setting your intention.
The way to make it lasting is by doing the first part of the book, make it part of your life. So that by the time of your run, you’re already in that state. The only true way to truly be in that state is to experience it. You don’t want your book, you don’t want to rely on it for ever. You have to experience it. Everything in the book are pointers, ultimately you have to experience it.
The book takes you so far, to the gate, the rest is up to you.
If you then still struggle, you have to go back and and find out what is going on.
Lisa can only speak from personal experience. Chaos and drama are not comfortable, we say we want peace, and presence, and joy. In a weird way sometimes we don’t chose the right thing. Because the familiar is actually comfortable, even when it’s not good.
Sometimes the familiar is better than the unknown, even though the familiar is not good. Why people don’t change, she mentions in her second half of the book.
Why do we sabotage ourselves? Sometimes I make a conscious choice not to have peace, why do I do that. Because feeling like crap feels familiar. And there is some comfort in the familiar even though it does not feel good.
You can create a new familiar with being in presence. Why am I afraid? Maybe if I leave the familiar, I lose my friends, or it ties me to my family, my upbringing. If I leave the comfort zone, the familiarity. There’s a lot of layers to this as to why people don’t change.
Yes, maybe small steps for some?
Yes, there are different ways to progress through their lives. Some folks have one really bad night, and that’s the end of the ego attachment, one devastating breakup, their lives just completely crumbling down.
Interview with Lisa Hamilton of the “Conscious Runner”.
“Running is my form of meditation, my meditation practice.” Lisa Hamilton
What brought you to a meditation practice?
Trying to eliminate chaos in her life, and also in her mind, and connect to…
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This is a summary (not a full transcript) of the interview
What brought you to a meditation practice?
His relationship started “non-spectacular”, he was “chasing a lady!” That’s how it started. He liked this woman, and she invited him to a Buddhist meditation class. He couldn’t say no, so he went. It was Geshe Michael Roach, from the Tibetan Gelugpa tradition. He’s a very polarizing person. He became his first teacher, put the seeds of meditation into his brain. Learning about karma, mindfulness. and emptiness. He had already grasped these concepts before from his own experience, but didn’t have a framework for understanding.
Meditation can lead them to the best version of yourself. He liked the promises of what meditation leads up to. His parents were going through a divorce, and he had broken up with his girlfriend, so that further encouraged him. His fiancee calls him an “experience junkie”, so he gave it a try about 8 years ago. It took some time to make it part of his daily life. But it radically changed his way of seeing his reality. But also has a new view of Buddhism.
How did meditation help you with sad events?
It helped him accept sadness, it’s ok what is going on right now. So it is not so strong of an emotion later. He can now accept it. Through the practice of meditation and off the cushion through mindfulness and in living. He could now better identify what he was feeling and how it made him react to the world.
When his parents divorced, it hurt him very much. He felt physical pain in his chest, he’d never felt physical pain from sadness before. He could better understand it, and now allow that pain to become part of everything else. He did notice how this pain from broken relationships in his family affected how he started seeing others. He noticed he was objectifying women and rejecting love, but it was coming so much from his own relationships, but from seeing the broken relationships in his life like his parents. And by objectifying, he was protecting himself through this objectification.
Through meditation he was able to realize how he was putting on that barrier, and he was able to break it down. After that he started seeing clinging to possessions, and other afflictions in himself. So he could now find the problems in his life, and observe, and re-frame, and then it was not a problem anymore, but an opportunity.
Were there any particular practices that you found particularly helpful with particular struggles?
He read this book by Lama Christie (see link below), about a death meditation. About through visualizations, you try to simulate what it means what it is like to die and see how your possession and loved ones are left behind. It plays with the idea of uncertainty in the time of death. That was a wake up thing. He always liked to think death was far away, so you don’t pay attention. We like to think it won’t happen to us, we don’t pay much attention to our own death.
He started doing this death meditation over and over again. And he could now start to appreciate the shortness of human life, and appreciate the moment, so precious. And the fact that he was experiencing was mind-blowing. It is his choice whether to love or objectify a woman, cheat or not, etc. It’s all based on the choices you make now. That sitting down and self-analysis about mortality, really triggered a deeper practice. He needed to understand now more of our own reality, and how his mind creates his own reality, through that death meditation.
Was there more of a sense of what the consequences are of your actions?
Yeah, as small and insignificant as our actions are, there are consequences. He can recall things he did when he was a teenager, and now sees how those things created consequences. Very interesting once you learn about karma or the things you put into the world, the causes and effects.
And it then makes you more conscious about what direction you. want to take with your life right?
Yes, completely, that is also where mindfulness comes in. Because you may get cut off in traffic, or you have a fight with someone with work. That is where the practice takes shape in real life, not so much in sitting down. If you’re not mindful in your daily life, you’re bound to make mistakes, terrible mistakes even.
We tend to do something, there’s this urge, and then ohh, shouldn’t have done. The moment you have an impulse, this urge, not surrender to it right away. You take a second with mindfulness, you have that moment to think about it before you do it.
Regret is delayed illumination…
Yeah, we go through life without realizing. Sometimes we think we can get away with it. But when we know we didn’t. We’re constantly judging ourselves.
Do you have more self compassion through practice?
At first more for others, then more recently for myself. He took longer to develop compassion for himself. For such an individualistic society, in the west, we don’t really teach to love ourselves. Sure indulgence our selves, yes, but respect and love ourselves, not so much.
There is judgement in this culture about failing too. We are not allowed to fail in this culture as much.
Initially there’s more of self serving in a way initially because of cause and effect where you make sure it doesn’t come back at you. But regardless that still makes the world a better place.
Lately he has been doing Tonglen (Tibetan) practice, “giving and taking” with his future self.
Has your sense of who you think you are changed?
Yes, completely. When he was younger, he thought his identity was a film maker, and had to get a message out, self serving though. He didn’t care initially what he was making if it mattered to others. But now after practicing Buddhism, it does not define him anymore.
But with the Buddhist practice, and getting more wisdom, but now his film making career doesn’t define him so much anymore. Film making is now something he does, that doesn’t mean he is that. Now he feels more like a human being, a future father, future husband. He’s in a different framework.
Now the stories he tells through video, he wants to inspire with them, more oriented to what people the world needs. Inspire people to be the best version of themselves.
So what is the film you’re working on right now?
Yes, it’s called, The Perfection of Giving”, a documentary film shot between Kathmandu and NYC. See link below for more info. 108 lives project, from his teacher. The idea was to replicate the project in many other places. Javier wanted to offer his help. Initially just 5 minute pieces to document this giving to the 108 resource poor people, But as he was helping the organization to become bigger. As he started helping, their attitude started changing.
Just a couple hours a day thinking about the needs of those 108 other people. Was making them happy, brutally happy. Ah, there is something here, maybe altruism is not so much about helping others, but helping ourselves, to find ourselves. Not so much about building schools, but helping ourselves. They help people paint schools, teach kids English, etc. And then all the volunteers go back to their own lives. Sure there is an exchange, their lives don’t change much, but the volunteers experience as human beings completely changed! So that is what the story is about.
It’s a very personal film. It doesn’t come from his personal view, but that is not what he hopes it comes across as. Let’s see how it plays out. He’ll put it online after screening it at festivals. And he hopes it will help some people do some crazy non-self interesting things.
You mention non-self, what are you talking about for those who don’t know?
Yes, the blurry line between me and you. It’s the illusion from our own duality of mind. When you put yourself in a very generous position, “playing the Bodhisattva”, those boundaries just blur. When you see somebody laugh, you cannot help but laugh, or if you see someone in pain, you feel their pain.
Is that why you called it, “The Perfection of Giving”?
Yes, it’s exactly about that. In Tibetan Buddhism, the first perfection is about giving, dana. Blurring that space between our body and minds and access to the oneness. Certainly the experience we lived in the movie, was at least a little taste of what that means, that oneness, that blurring between giving and receiving.
So the self and other dissolves in that giving?
Giving is a full circle. There’s someone on the other end of the giving. For that person to be taking, it immediately becomes an interdependent arising. There can not be giving without receiving, not a giver without a receiver. Two sides of the same coin.
When is the film ready?
It’s done already for private screenings. It will be out to the public, depends on how the festival goes. It will be available in September 2015 for watching online (see below for links).
So you are a teacher of meditation?
He guides meditation offerings at the 3 Jewels Meditation Center. He’s now a junior teacher there. He’s also studying under a Shambala tradition. Mostly teaches mindfulness meditation and giving and taking meditation (Tonglen). Easy meditations for beginning meditators. One is based on breath, and the other on visualizations. He does a little bit of both.
Currently also doing an immersive meditation teacher training for a year, at a place called the interdependent project in New York City. They explore together with other teachers, and several lineages, to built more skills together with other teacher. Under several lineages of the Buddhist tradition.
Is there any meditation for really busy lives with distracted people like in New York?
If you are just starting out, recommend anybody to just breath, focus on your breath. Don’t beat yourself up. Your mind is going to wander somewhere else, just bring it back to your breath. Even if you do it “badly”, you can do it, to gain benefits from meditation. It’s better to learn how to breath first.
Interview with Javier Perez-Karam
Javier Perez-Karam grew up in Venezuela, and relocated to New York in 2002 to pursue a film-making career. In the process he discovered Meditation and Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy, and as he started incorporating the p…
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Interview with “The One You Feed” Podcast host Eric Zimmer
Eric Zimmer is host and founder of the, “One You Feed” podcast, “. He has also worked with start-ups, doing Management and Software Development, is CEO, Tipping Point Renewable Energy, and all…
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