Epicureanism and Zen Buddhism Part II

All right, so now we're going to have a brief lecture on some strategies from Ticknott-Tons how to walk. So we're mixing some Zen Buddhism here with Epicurianism to capitalize, to take advantage of, and to enjoy to the fullest extent what might be those natural and necessary pleasures. Right, so of course, we also have our lecture on how to eat. I think Ticknott-Tons books are great. I really recommend watching some of his lectures and reading these books. And I'm going to flip through the book. I want to share a few things with you, a few sections from this book. Before I get there though, quickly ask yourself, do you have a walking practice presently? When you're walking, what else are you usually doing? How do you feel about walking? Do you enjoy it? Do you not enjoy it? Do you not notice it? Things you think about. So here are some pieces of philosophical advice that I think are very much in line with Epicurian philosophy from Zen Buddhist Ticknott-Ton. So the first section I'm going to share with you all is called sleepwalking. We're in such a rush looking for happiness in one place and then another. We walk like sleepwalkers without any enjoyment of what we're actually doing. We are walking, but in our minds we're already doing something else. Planning, organizing, worrying. There is no more need to run. Every time we return our attention to our breath and our steps, it's as if we wake up. Every step brings us back to the here and the now. We can touch the earth and see the sky and notice all the wonders in between. Each step there is the possibility of mindfulness, concentration and insight. So I chose this because this is for me an antidote to living in New York, which I have my whole life. Right? We're always rushing. I've talked about this in lectures. I mentioned this in my classes and I think some of these ideas, this one specifically, are kind of antidotes to that. Is there a time to rush? Sure. But we shouldn't be doing it all the time. So I think the idea of sleepwalking is a really good one. I do this a lot. I'll be walking somewhere, I'm focusing, I'm getting there on time, I'm focusing on what I'm going to do and I get there. Those are our bad ideas, maybe when you arrive before you maybe walk through the door, I want to, you know, in my mind go over my intentions that could be positive. But let's not, as he's saying here, totally just sleepwalk all the time. Right? We want to bring awareness to the fact that we can walk if we're blessed to be able to walk. Right? We want to call awareness to the process of moving through space, not just to get somewhere else, but because the process in and of itself is enjoyable. Right? He's asking us to think about our breathing here a little bit. Right? He's asking us for each step to kind of bring us into the moment to see what's around us, right? To notice things around us on our walk, to concentrate on our walk and to not as he's saying here, just be kind of numb or asleep to the fact that in fact we are walking. Let's not take that for granted. And one of my early questions, you know, do you currently have a walking practice? And if your answer was yes, it's likely because you already find some joint in it. Right? It's literally just the simple idea of going out for a walk. Maybe you have and we're going to get to a section on this too. Maybe you have a place you like to go to that specifically, you know, it's relaxing or it's peaceful for you or it's beautiful and walking through it is helpful, right? And in a therapeutic kind of way, right? So those are all great things. This first reading asks yourself, do you sleep walk a lot? How can you sleep walk less? Let's go on to the next section. One second. Great. So this section, as I just said, or kind of alluded to, is called walking in beauty. You can walk mindfully on the busiest street. Sometimes though, it's helpful to practice in a park or some other beautiful quiet place. Let me jump in real quick. A busy street can also be beautiful, right? So I'm not, I'm adding that. I'm not saying he's not saying that. But for me personally, I'm usually walking on busy streets and I enjoy it. And I've learned to enjoy it more and more partially because of reading this book, right? So don't think that just because he's raising this way that a busy street inherently is a non-beautiful street. That's not the case, right? That being said, maybe a quiet place will facilitate a greater ability to focus on the moment less distractions. So there's some validity here too, of course, right? So walk slowly, but not so slowly that you draw too much attention to yourself. This is a kind of invisible practice. It's a very nature and your own serenity without making others uncomfortable or making a show of it. If you see something that you want to stop and appreciate, the sky, the hill, a tree or a bird, just stop and continue to breathe in and out mindfully. If we don't continue to breathe consciously, sooner or later our thinking will settle back in and the bird and the tree will disappear. So this is also a great piece of advice, generally, right? Stop thinking and instead try to be attentive to the world around you. I also think that's a great piece of advice just to relax a little bit, right? When you're always caught up in your thoughts, a great way to maybe ground ourselves is to focus on the real experience we're having. Right? So if you're just sitting in your car and you're nervous thinking about what you have to do at work, focus on the steering wheel. Focus on how the sky looks. Focus on the temperature and the car. And start describing it with your thoughts. Right? So that walking practice can also, I think, help us with that in a nice way. And maybe he also suggests not going on a busy street because again, that might give us some distractions here. Next section, this is great. This is really tied in with this whole chapter quite nicely, right? So a kung fu notebook. The words kung fu mean daily diligent practice. You don't have to be doing martial arts to have a daily practice. Walking can be that practice. At the end of the day, you might like to review and write about the practice you've had during the day. And you noticed about walking, breathing, smiling, or speaking. It would be a pity if you spent the whole day without enjoying walking. You have feet. And if you don't make use of them, it's a loss and a waste. Someone is telling you now so that in the future, you cannot say no one told me that it was important to enjoy using my feet. So again, very much in line with our idea here of daily or frequent philosophical practices and really a very tangible suggestion for all of you, right? Maybe your practice could be a walking practice coupled with a journaling practice about the walking. Where you discuss what you, what let's say called for your attention during the walk that was both external or maybe even internal as well. A few more. I like this book a lot. I really do strongly suggest this book. One second, I'm turning the pages. All right. Creating a habit of mindful walking. Every time you need to go somewhere, even if it's a very short distance of three or five steps, you can apply mindful walking. Soon, it will become a habit. You will find that you are walking mindfully to pick up the phone or to make your tea. You may not realize it first while you don't feel rushed or while you are happier when you walk in the door. Cultivating a daily habit of walking meditation is free and doesn't take any more time in the walking you are already doing. So this is great advice also for our conversation, this chapter because one of the first things as I think I mentioned, I myself say and I've heard many students say when I ask them to adopt a new practice, of course, is I don't have time. So this is great. He's suggesting here, well, just change the way you're doing something that you're already doing. Right. And then for the paper, you could really reflect on that, I think pretty meaningfully. And I like the idea once again here of not rushing. Right. If you feel like you're someone who's constantly rushing, you're constantly rushed, you maybe want to pair this also with the mantra, right? Right. And that's the idea that the world can wait. And that's a good thing, right? Because what I find with people who are obsessed with rushing, typically they're pretty much always on time anyway. Right. So I'm not saying, be, you know, don't be punctual. That's a different conversation. But I'm saying if you're generally very punctual and yet you always feel rushed, maybe you have to work on some mindful walking and pair it with the mantra of everything is fine, right? Everything is calm. The idea of waiting is not a bad thing. So we're waiting to get to, again, to work or to the tea or to the phone. We'll get there on our own pace. And that's okay. This is also a great metaphor for life. We pressure ourselves. We feel like we have to achieve things right back to a piquarineism. We have to make sure our desires and our pleasures, our rational, our reasonable and our healthy. So to walk without even acknowledging or walking or to walk and constantly being a rush, right, we might have to remind ourselves, everything is going to be fine. Right. I don't have to rush constantly. Next one. This is very practical. The soul of your foot. You might like to focus your attention on the soul of your foot. Feel the contact between your foot and the ground. You are down there in your foot, not up here in your head. There's a feeling that you are touching the beautiful mother earth. So that's practical. I mean, literally becoming conscious of the contact, I think, is even a way to sort of alleviate some stress. Right. To try to notice that. To notice your feet once again is a very interesting concept, I think. Right. One of the things you would do when you were to adopt, you know, if you were to adopt new physical practice, you'd notice your body moving in different ways. Right. If it was rigorous, you'd notice that, you know, you were sore in ways that you would never even anticipate. Right. We started, let's say, a new workout regimen or maybe you started a new physical practice of some sort, right. So with this idea, we do the same thing spiritually. Right. What would happen if you instead of just walking aimlessly or let's say with too much of an aim, which for him would be aimless, right? Because you're missing what's in front of you. You really focused on your foot hitting the ground and felt that process in a more conscious manner. Guys, a very practical piece of advice on how to ground this practice. Right. Sometimes I notice this, like I'll notice this more if I'm going up a hill and I live in a pretty, you know, my area's got a lot of hills in it. So like I'll be walking up a hill and I'll notice my legs feeling different. Right. So how do we do that? Maybe more regularly. So we feel our body working. It's more of an embodied experience. And if you're someone, especially like myself who, you know, I'll get stressed out when I'm walking or when I'm driving, thinking about what I have to do that day. And again, rushing myself to things, try to focus on that a little bit. Simply having a more embodied walking experience from, from car to work or from train to apartment or what have you. And see what the results might be. It might be a really nice way to divert your desire from one type of pleasure to the desire for the pleasure you're currently having, which of course for Tick-N-A-Tom would be the ability to walk. And again, you know, for the, a pigerian's, if a life where we decrease suffering and increase pleasure is the goal, that might be a good fit. Two more. Okay. Walking in the city. Try to practice mindful walking in your daily life. When you go to the bus stop, make it into a walking meditation. Even if your surroundings are full of noise and agitation, you can still walk in rhythm with your own breathing. In the commotion of a big city, you can still walk with peace, happiness, and an inner smile. This is what it means to live fully in every moment of every day of your life. Good advice, right, for those of us who are living in the city. A little bit of encouragement here. Right, again, walking with your own breathing. And even establishing that, you know what? I'm going to, I'm able to maybe work on cultivating that sort of inner, that inner strength, right, that inner ability to not be agitated by my external surroundings. And I also think like growing up in the city too, like for me, this is interesting, like silence is worse for me than noise. The guy grew up as a kid walking under the sixth train a lot with my grandparents. And now we had like it when I was there for, you know, I was there for days on end. And we had a walking practice every day. As a family, my grandmother, my grandfather would always take me and my sister for a walk. And those are my fondest memories of my grandparents. And grandmother still goes for walks. Right, there's something maybe medicinal therapeutic and in the same neighborhood, right? So she's still walking under the sixth. Right, so I found, I think as a kid, because I was in a loving, you know, loving family's environment that, you know, at that time in those moments, the noise became a part of that positivity. Right, so I think even like the noise of a train for me is like kind of therapeutic. The noise of a train for me kind of like calms me down, whereas silence makes me nervous. So we can basically, what I'm trying to convey here is we can learn as he's saying to use the sounds and what some may consider to be unnecessary loud agitation, as our mode of finding rhythm in peace with our walking. Let's go to the last one. I want to share with all of you for today the last section from Ticknautons How to Walk. And this is great because a number of you have written about your families and your reflections which have been great. So far in those reflections, I think it's amazing to see how a number of you are already applying our philosophy to your, not only to your life, but to your family's lives, which is great. So I really encourage that. If you want to write about it, of course. And here we go, family practice. Go out for a slow walk with your children before going to sleep. Just 10 minutes is enough. If your children want to, you can hold hands as you walk. Your child will receive your concentration and stability and you will receive their innocence and freshness. Young people might like to practice a simple poem while they walk. They can say to themselves, "Yes, yes, yes, as they breathe in and thanks, thanks, thanks" when they breathe out. Cultivating an affirmation of the goodness and the practice and also, of course, cultivating gratitude for the practice. So again, I think this is pretty practical. We have some good suggestions here. I'm broader philosophical points about living in the moment, living in our bodies and appreciating that. Once again, appreciating that epicory and natural and necessary pleasure. And also some other practical, just about how to actually touch the ground. And I think the final suggestion is great. Taking your family out for a walk, maybe establishing your own individual practice as he says as well. And not rushing anymore. Right? We're going to get there anyway. Hopefully. Now, already as he said, we're already walking. We already have walking routines, but we don't have to pair walking with a sense of stress. We can work to say, "Let everything wait. I will get there because I'm walking, but I don't want to forget that I'm walking. I'm leaving this important pleasure, this daily thing I'm doing perhaps. I'm leaving it unaddressed. I'm leaving it ignored. I'm missing out on something." And why not, again, focus on something that could bring us pleasure with some of these suggestions, maybe. All right. So another practice from the Epicureans. We're sticking with Pierre Hadot's "What is Ancient Philosophy?" And here's a brief section that inspires a practice. The pleasure of knowledge. In the exercise of wisdom or philosophy, pleasure goes hand in hand with knowledge, for we do not obtain enjoyment after we learn, but learn and enjoy simultaneously. So the suggested practice here connects nicely to one of the lists of spiritual practices provided by Pierre Hadot and another work of his philosophy as a way of life. And that's research. I kind of see a parallel here. I'm making this connection to myself. But I think making time on a frequent basis, if not a daily basis, to just learn, to learn something for the sake of learning it can be really pleasurable. Right. And again, for the Epicureans, we want to capitalize on what is natural and what is necessary. It is natural for us to learn things. And I think for life, let's say, to be as meaningful as it could be, and for us to feel like we're flourishing to the best of our ability, for us to pursue you, pneumonia to the best of our ability, learning is also necessary. So setting time aside each day to learn, to study, and this doesn't have to even necessarily be in the traditional sense. I don't necessarily mean or necessarily want you to imagine yourself even sitting and reading. Right. That could be it, of course, but it could be listening to an audiobook. It could be going on the internet, watching some informational videos, watching some TED talks. It could be going out and learning a new physical discipline, maybe a martial art, maybe yoga, whatever. Right. We need, I think, to be learning. As people, we crave that. And I think it's, again, natural and necessary that we answer that call to learn. And I think learning also is a very important part of pretty much everything we do in life from work to love. And if we train ourselves on how to learn, we learn how we learn, we learn how to learn better, that'll serve us in everything in life. So maybe that's a practice, right? Each day set aside 15 minutes to spend learning about a specific topic. Read about it. Listen about it. Watch something about it. Take notes on it. Use an notebook for this. See how you tend to grapple with the information, how you tend to retain the information. And/or choose, let's say, a more, well, let's say choose another type of practice, right? Or learning practice that might not involve reading, writing, or listening as much. And go out, for example, maybe it's yoga, maybe it's a martial art, right? Practice it twice a week, three times a week, what have you? Start something new. Take five minutes after to write about it. How you felt? Why you did it that day? Maybe take time before to write about your intentions. Why you're going to do it? How you want to do this practice? And it's all different types of learning, right? If you go to yoga class, you're going to learn some new yoga moves. You go to martial arts class, you're going to learn some new techniques, right? Maybe it's grappling, maybe it's striking, whatever. You're going to learn new things. There's different types of learning. We all learn in different ways. I think the Epic Reigns are kind of, again, really asking us to consider this idea of like, what we could really do on a daily basis, right? We can make time to learn. For me, I actually live by this. I know I feel better when I even just take ten minutes a day to listen to an audiobook. I obviously do a lot of reading and writing for my work as a professor and for my work as a student. But even that, right? And that's a lot of learning and that's a great thing. And that, I think, for me, is not enough and it also doesn't feel. It doesn't feel like I'm expressing my autonomy sometimes, right? Because sometimes, like I'm sure I'll have you, I mean, hopefully not right now, but it's difficult to go to class, right? Sometimes you don't necessarily want to go to class. And I get that. That happens to everybody, right? Even if you love your job, sometimes you just don't want to go to work. So those are places where we learn, right? But ultimately, I think having a practice and a frequent philosophical relationship with the idea that I can autonomously, independently choose what I'm learning, that is really a fulfilling thing to consider, right? And that's again, for me, that's been a source of fulfillment. I like having side learning projects. And I usually kind of. It ebbs and flows. So maybe some months I'm listening to audiobooks on finance, trying to learn about money. Other months I might focus even more again in my work as a student. I'm always reading philosophy. I often will even throw in an audiobook about philosophy. That's a little bit different than what I'm studying. And it's really something I've noticed with myself that I usually do in the morning, even if it's once again, just for 10 or 15 minutes. To hear something that's. To hear something that's educating me and helping me grow in a direction that I'm choosing is, I think, really pleasurable. So maybe try to establish a new learning practice. Once again, it can really take many different forms. And I do think, as the Epicureans are suggesting, the acquisition of that knowledge is a pathway to pleasure. So maybe adopting a new practice or even reflecting on one you presently have might be of interest and might be really useful. Okay. So here we have another exercise. This is coming directly from "What is ancient philosophy by Pierre Hadot?" I'm going to read a little bit here and then we're going to try to work out how he might turn this into a daily or frequent exercise. So he tells us, this is for, of course, the Epicureans still, finally, the pleasure of becoming aware of what is wonderful about existence. First of all, we must know how to master our thought in order to represent mainly pleasurable things to ourselves, to resuscitate the memory of pleasures of the past and to enjoy the pleasures of the present. We must recognize how intense and gratifying such immediate pleasures are and deliberately choose relaxation and serenity. We should live in profound gratitude toward nature and life, which constantly offers pleasure and joy if only we know how to find them. So this, I think, is a great idea for a self-riding exercise, especially if you're someone who grapples with what you may characterize as a lot of negative thoughts. So we have to carve out time, especially if we would say that we deal with that, to do this. And I think writing, as I hope I've made clear, is a better way to do something like this at times. When we're bombarded with negative thoughts, it's hard to think about thoughts. It's hard to control thoughts. It's easier, in my opinion, at least, especially once we start and we get a little practice to discipline our actions and really sort of be disciplined with ourselves to write, to use time for writing to present these pleasurable things to ourselves. So when we write, of course, we're getting out of our heads, we're taking action, and we could also see what we write. We can read what we write, we can meditate on what we write. And I think this also is a great piece of, let's say, encouragement to have photos in your space that remind you of the good things. That's a great way, I think, to practice this, in a large extent, right? Or in a way. So to recognize and to represent pleasurable things from our past might be a photo. It might be sitting down once a week and writing about the great things that happened that week. But we can't necessarily, I think, rely on our thinking. We can train ourselves to get good at that, to get better at that, 1 million percent. But I think especially, again, if you feel like yourself from a lot of negative thoughts, a good self-writing practice where we're disciplined and we're focused and we're working to, as he's saying here, to represent the pleasures of the past, to represent and to enjoy the pleasures of the present. We might have to do some self-writing there. Right? And/or, I think, once again, putting some photos, our additional photos into our spaces that we can then use those as, let's say, a visual aid in our meditation on the pleasures of the past. Right? We could even think to ourselves, what percentage of your thinking we've talked about this about the past is negative. Well, this is a great way to also create a healthy relationship to our past. And of course, that's an imagination exercise. We're having to reimagine. We have to use our memories productively, constructively, truthfully, and usefully to lead more pleasant lives. Right? So again, maybe it's sitting down for 10 minutes, putting some music on and trying to confront something pleasurable in our minds. Right? Again, maybe it's a memory. I would even also say, why not represent positive potential futures? Right? Why not spend a few minutes, I think, any other day in self-writing, helping or encouraging yourself, sorry, once again? I'll get that in one second, I'll finish this up. Why not spend some time writing about your future and presenting a pleasurable, pleasant image of your future to yourself? Right? So let's try to strive for representing mainly pleasurable things in our thinking. And if that's very difficult, especially if that's very difficult, let's use some self-writing.