Surviving the News: Buddhist Strategies for Staying Sane, Engaged, and Not Completely Furious | Pascal Auclair

Hey, hey everybody, welcome to the 10% happier podcast, I'm your host, Dan Harris. We're about a month out now from the midterms to the midterm elections here in the U.S. And a lot of us are feeling pretty stressed and anxious. So today we're going to talk about how to stay engaged without losing your mind. We're going to be talking about this with the great Buddhist meditation teacher, Pascal O'Claire, who is one of the teachers over on my meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. And what you're about to hear is me asking Pascal questions, but also feeding him some questions that we got from subscribers to the 10% with Dan Harris app, including a question about karma and whether the bad guys will ever get theirs. Pascal is very funny and he has a way of talking that just relaxes your nervous system. And speaking of relaxing your nervous system, we here at 10% happier are going to have your back through this election season. Sharon Salisberg, the great meditation teacher, will be appearing on the podcast closer to Election Day to talk about some great Buddhist coping strategies. And we'll be doing some live online events on Election Day and the day after the Election Day that are available to everyone, whether you're a subscriber or not, I'll guide a meditation on each of those days and then take your questions. We're doing all of this in the spirit of one of my favorite mantras, which is never worry alone. Just a little bit more about Pascal O'Claire before we jump in here. He's been immersed in the Buddhist scene since 1997 and he's been mentored by great Buddhist meditation teachers like Joseph Goldstein. He is the co-founder of True North Insight and one of its guiding teachers. And as mentioned, he is one of our key teachers over on my app, 10% with Dan Harris. All right, let's jump in and get started with Pascal O'Claire. Pascal O'Claire, you excited to talk about this very anxiety-provoking subject? Yeah, yeah. I am excited about this. It's very charged. I was reading some of the questions this afternoon. But somehow it was opening my heart very kind of wide. It was calling for compassion and care and listening and holding stuff together. It's good. We're together thinking about these things. Yeah, well, one of my favorite expressions and people will have heard me say this a million times before, but it literally is something that bears repeating. Never worry alone. We're in a crazy moment for the species and it's really advantageous to go through it with a song to use the Buddhist phrase for a community to do it, as I often say, in the Carpool Lane. So as you noted, we've received a bunch of questions in advance from members of our community that we're going to go through, but we also have a lot of people listening along with us live and popping into the chat with their own question. So I'll be bouncing back and forth between the pre-submitted questions and then the stuff that I'm seeing in the chat. So let's start with our first question and it comes from Karen. Here it is. I would like to hear about the dance around outrage, action, frustration, depression, shodden Freud. This administration is driving me crazy. I focus on hopeful things, but sometimes that's just those rare times he's stopped while the tsunami of criminality continues, breathing. Pascal, what say you to that? Well, I love that Karen ends with breathing because this is so kind of the instruction and teaching, you know, like this invitation to actually just come back here to this body, this breathing body, you know, and with this teaching, this is called the first foundation that's where our attention is invited to land back in the body to be here. Why I think partly is that when we come back to here, here now, you know, all these ideas, these news we're reading and coming back to here now, we can actually discover that maybe there's not an immediate threat here in the living room and this can help bring a little bit of space, a little bit of ground, a little bit of a breathing space. And so this to me is excellent practice, just breathing, just like, okay, there's all these ideas that are turning in my head, you know, and contracting my heart and here's a body breathing here and what's around here is space, maybe in this, wherever you are, room living room outside, just to bring this back. After this, I would say two ideas come to mind. One is the Buddha was not living in a different time than the time we're in. There was no democracy at the time of the Buddha, there was wars, there was all kinds of things happening and developed his practice, his wisdom, his compassion, his equanimity, his balance of mind, his amazing kind of honesty and non-denial and care in that kind of environment. So we're in a way, we're in the right environment to develop amazing qualities. And so sometimes we think this is in the way, I've heard this many time from many people, this is, maybe this is not in the way, this might be the way. This is excellent time to be alive in a way, not what we would wish for, but it's excellent to actually nurture values, like to clarify, what are my values, what am I going to live by? So this is one thing that comes to mind, the Buddha was living in this exact same kind of environment, probably even more precarious and challenging. After this, the other thing that comes to mind is the need to balance things, to expose oneself to beauty, we can easily forget all this when we're fascinated, especially by phones, screens these days. We can even, you know, we can, the mind, the attention can get all sucked in like a vortex. So it's very skillful, very skillful to be able to change object of attention. There is another war going on, Dan, there's a war and attention going on, there's a tension, sovereign tea. I think I might have heard about this on one of your podcasts, of your conversation. So I think to me, it's half of the practice is to actually be able to notice beauty, notice what is working, notice what brings joy. To me, it's not denial, it's skills. It would be denial if there was only this, but to actually be able to kind of titrate, go from one to the other. So that's skill. Also, I have to say I really liked when Karen writes the dance of outrage, action, frustration, depression, like the idea of dance to me ring almost a sense of creativity and playfulness, which are qualities that are really important here if we're going to survive what's what's happened. Just to reflect what you said there, one thing you said is that just doing this thing that we're already doing, but tuning into the breathing that's happening anyway can be really grounding in the face of the chaos of the news. You also talked about just the fact that we can achieve a degree of sovereignty over our attention and pay attention to the many beautiful things that are happening. The two things are always true. More than two things are always true. The algorithms are designed to keep us anxious and angry because that's what gets us coming back. It's sticky. It prays upon our evolutionary vulnerabilities, but it doesn't show you the whole picture. There are many other things that we can also focus on that don't alleviate or obviate the difficult things that are happening in the world, but can put them in perspective and I'm just looking at some of the things that people are saying in the chat here. Becky says nature really helps me shift focus from the negativity. Liz says I've been focusing on my garden and noticing the beauty. And again, this is not to be in a state of denial. It's to see more fully what the picture is. But then the other thing you said that I want to hear more about was about how the Buddha was alive in times like ours. Can you say a little bit more about the things the Buddha experienced during his life and how he handled them? Yeah, I wasn't there. And I'm not even in America, by the way, I mean, Canada. So it might be playing out in some ways. But we've lived enough to know there's so many things happening in a lifetime of a personal lifetime. So 2,600 years ago, there were conflict. Of course, there were, you know, I don't know the specifics, but we know there was wars and conflicts and, you know, like the views. There were so many views, kind of spiritual views. People would come to the Buddha and say, this is not how it is. It's like that. It's not like this. They might not have been the internet and the social media. But there was views flying around. People were debating and, you know, and of course, there was disease. There was uncertainty. There was the unwanted. That's what the beauty of the Dharma, to me, the spiritual practice is that it brings something that looks personal and specific, brings another vista. It says, look, what's happening there? Like what seems personal? Like you're facing the unwanted. It is personal, but there's also another view. It's not so personal. It was happening 2,500 years ago. It's happening to others. And so, to me, that's what we do. We take a phenomena that we perceive as personal. And then we say, does that ever happen in other circumstances, other time, other places? And so, yeah, we could think of the Buddha, but. Actually, I think I don't know many of the specifics. But I know people hated him. People were in conflict with him. Although he seemed to be a really nice guy, very wise. All kinds of things were happening. He had a bad foot. He had a bad back in the later years of his life. And you would think you could think like, oh, maybe if things were different, I could practice and develop unconditional freedom. No, this was exactly where the unconditional freedom was developed. This was the field. There was not another field. There's a great question that has just popped into the chat speaking of the Buddha. Pamela says, do Buddhists believe in karma? That's a comforting thought, no. And I don't know exactly what Pamela is pointing at, but I suspect maybe she is pointing at the fact that those of us who disagree with the current administration might feel like they'll get their just desserts via karma. But my understanding is that's not necessarily how it works. And I think the Buddha said that understanding karma is very hard to do. Yeah, and there's such a powerful teaching around karma. So also, I don't know exactly what is meant, but I know what my teachers, our teachers have taught us about karma. And it seems like the Buddha was, when he was talking about karma, he was talking about intentions, reactions, responses, like where the power lies is in my response. You know, I don't get to choose what is thrown at me exactly. What government is in power, what is in the news. I don't get to choose these things. But if there is agency, this might be one place where there's some playroom. And that's karma to me. That's my understanding of karma is what do I do with what is happening? It's not so much, like the focus is not so much on what is happening. Because if it was like my happiness was depending on what's happening, I'm in trouble. I depend on something outside. And here, the whole teaching of the karma is on what is your response? Because what is your response? Now has an impact on now. It has an impact on your mind in the future. And it will have an impact in the past tense. When later you look at what was your response. And so to me, that's what I want to focus on. It's not so much in a way like fascinated and hooked on what's happening. But what is my response? How am I going to respond to this? What is possible here? So when I see people making wrong choices of how to treat others, I wanted to help nurture my values. Oh, I don't want to treat people like this. This is not what I want to see in my world. So what am I going to put out? It helps me become really clear. But what I want to put out, how I want to respond. And to me, this is the teaching on karma that I've learned about this. Pascal, take great care of your response. Because your response will have a great impact on your own mind and your relationships later. And when you'll die, you'll be at peace, maybe, because your response was a good response. This, I find karma to be such an interesting subject. Can I, Pascal, would you be OK if I just set a bunch of stuff from my level of understanding? And then you can, as somebody who's senior in the Dharma correct or expand? Yes, please. So Pamela did confirm that my interpretation of her question was correct. And you took the answer in a direction that I think is very constructive, which is, karma really is the law of cause and effect. This happens, and therefore that happens. And so that actually can be very empowering for us as individuals, because we do have a certain amount of agency in terms of how we respond to things. And I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said, when I do good, I feel good, when I do bad, I feel bad. And we can use that as a North Star. As it pertains to Donald Trump, who I think is the elephant in the room, a lot of people are wondering, is he, because he's done so many things that I think we all believe our corrupt and cruel, will he pay some sort of price for it? And the truth is, we don't know, but we can see in the laboratory of our own minds, what does it feel like when we're on time? And from that, you can imagine what's happening in his mind. But at the end of the day, there's only one mind you can take responsibility for in its yours. And so that's what we're here to do to train this mind and hope for the best, how am I doing? - Great, yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Maybe there's kind of a parenthesis I want to make because we're talking about these times, it's so hard, it's so hard, yeah, it crosses my mind. Like, do we think things were great in the past? Like, make America great again? That's, to me, that's like, is that what we believe here? Because I was reading last night, I was reading Tanasi Coats, his last book, The Message. And he's saying, there's some of us here in North America who are not in shock. We've seen that it was crooked the whole time that this whole nation was based on something crooked, you know, an exploitation. And it seems like for some of us, and maybe a bunch of white people, it's we don't understand what is going on, everything has fallen apart, but it was already pretty messy, maybe, I don't know. So anyway, I liked reading that last night. I was like, yeah, some people were already awake to the fact that it was pretty messy already. I don't know much about the history of the founding of Canada, but I have been doing a lot of reading recently about the history of the founding of this country as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And it's so interesting, like, to me, it's a teaching in the fact that nobody's all one thing. You know, when I was growing up, we lionized the founders as these great men, and they were just obviously given the sexism of the times, they were the men were the ones in power. And then there was this backlash where in recent years, we've really focused on the fact that they were total hypocrites who were talking about all men created equal and literally Thomas Jefferson wrote all men are created equal while being an enslaver. So massive hypocrisy. And I guess in doing some reading around the Revolutionary War and the founders, just really coming back to the center and seeing that there was a true spark of genius there among these men around creating a republic based on ideals that were truly high-minded. At the same time as they were, as I said before, complete hypocrites. George Washington fighting the Revolutionary War had an enslaved man with him at all times, shocking to think about. And yet had he not stepped down voluntarily at the end of his second term, like we may not have a country right now. So the human animal really does contain multitudes. And these founders and this country is an intertwining of the basest human instincts and the highest. Anyway, that's my current view of the situation. How does that go down with you? - Yeah, and so is Canada. So Canada, it seems like a beautiful kind of, that's what I learned. That's called a beautiful project, beautiful vision. But it's very messy when you, when you talk to indigenous folks, like it's horrible, everything that happened. And so this is samsara. If I put it in even a bigger, the samsara is this realm that we are born in, where there's exploitation and disease and death and oppression and uncertainty and all this. And so that's why I had this very large contact. So there's things, particular things happening with this government in the USA right now, but still it's in the context of samsara. And that's something that you can't actually totally fix. You cannot think you're gonna fix it, but you can respond appropriately. That's the whole idea of wisdom is that how do you respond, respond appropriately, respond wisely, respond creatively? So what do you do when there's stuff happening that's so wisdom to me is a capacity to see what are the powers, what are the abilities, the skill, what is possible with this system at the amount of energy, et cetera, and to act from there. And that's, you know, I lead retreats. That's mainly what I do. So I invite people to come, be silenced and feel their body, feel their intelligence. And then in order to go back to the world and respond, not to fix the world, we're not gonna be able to fix the world, we don't have that power, but we can respond appropriately, say, no here, create new forms over there, take care of our inner life, and here plenty of opportunities these days. - You've led us nicely to the next question with your last answer there. This one's from Teresa. I have a question from Pascal and Dan about our personal reactions to the news and about their role as teachers and public figures speaking about Buddhism. I worry that we use meditation to be aware of pain without acting for the material changes that are for the benefit of all beings. What's the connection between meditation and acting to help and protect? How do we and you guard against becoming passive observers on the cushion that don't use our power and influence to make change? - Yeah, so that's a little bit what I was saying. saying to me meditation, mindfulness is there to actually read the situation better. Like I want to dive under my preconceived ideas and go and really listen well to the environment. Listen well to the body, the intuition, the guts, the listen well to the ethical nature of things that I can feel at the skin level in the guts. And to intuition in order to be in relationship to respond, to engage with the world. Sometimes there's this idea that Buddhists would only sit on cushion and receive the world with equanimity and maybe compassion. But that's not my understanding. My understanding is that we're developing kind of honesty, of courage, of patience, of non-denial, so that we can engage in a wise way, except what is to be accepted because don't have the power to change it and creatively respond to what's happening. And for me personally, the ways I respond are different ways, teaching a meditation and retreat to me is a kind of a political thing to do, to actually help people gain their power back, their attention back, their power back, their creativity back, is something I do. But I also will write to my newspaper sometimes when I don't agree with the way something is presented and I'll write to officials and I'll go to how do you call it, the demo, demonstrations, walks, you know, and gatherings around stuff. I'm constantly educating myself so I'm not somebody who stays away from news, I'll probably do a good hour and a half of news reading every day. I want to know what is happening. Last night I finished the book, the message from Tanasi Quote. Very educative for me, very good reading. It felt very dark make to actually listen to an intelligent voice that has a lot to say about the world and what's happening. And another thing that I do personally, maybe because of my sensitivity and background and stuff, is I spend a lot of time with arts. I go to art exhibits, I go to theater, I love to, as you said, in the beginning, gather with other people and look at creative response to what is happening. I've seen an amazing exhibit lately, exhibits and these are response to what is happening in the political realm and with the environment and it gives me hope, it informs me, the sense of community helps me cutarsis, helps me move through the difficult times, gives me hope and power. That all sounds great. What do I do? Pretty much everything you do. Let me answer that after I read a question that is very much linked to part of what you just said there, Pascal, and this one comes from Bruce. What is the latest recommendation for how much news watching is too little and how much is too much? So what do I do and then what would I recommend in this regard? I do consume the news. I don't watch any real television news, which is weird since I worked in the industry for 30 years. I listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of newsletters. Check the times once in a while. But I'm not compulsive or obsessive about it personally and oddly even though I was in the news business for a long time, I was never really a news junkie. I was an experienced junkie so I loved being a reporter who could fly to all of these incredible date lines and cover amazing things and meet incredible people. That was really what I was in it for. But I really tried to balance my anxiety around the state of the world with being with my friends and family and being outside and meditating and doing work that I feel is useful for the world. We come back to this phrase so often in this group, action absorbs anxiety. Just being useful, I hope that I've built this second career of mine around being useful in some way and that is a great salve for the helplessness and hopelessness that I can sometimes feel about the state of the world. In terms of news consumption, I think that's a very individual thing and this is where mindfulness can help. You want to be aware of what your nervous system can handle. I'm pretty sturdy, I can, well, I'm not very sturdy in many ways honestly but as it pertains to the news I'm pretty sturdy and I can handle spending an hour a day in it. But if it's freaking you out and you're finding that you're just getting obsessive and just being sucked into the vortex, I think the fact that you have this mindfulness practice and you can notice, oh this is not sitting well with me, there is no reason why you need to know everything that's happening. I saw somebody note this in the comments, our mutual friend, Seven A. Salassi, the amazing meditation teacher has a policy of no news before noon and she will often argue she's not former president Barack Obama. She does not yet a presidential daily brief, nobody cares what she knows about the latest global news event. She goes a couple of days without reading the news, there are no consequences. So yes, on the one hand we should all be engaged since informed citizens but if it's stopping you from sleeping, ruining your relationships, frazzling and fraying your nervous system I would listen to that and titrate accordingly. What do you say to this one Pascal? Yeah, that mindfulness is the big help for me to be able to assess what is enough and something that became very clear to me a couple of years ago I think was watching short videos and getting, there's a bunch of words, expressions for this like doom scrolling and sucked in and I realized that that's very personal but videos didn't add anything for me. So I decided not to look at moving images. So I'll read articles, I don't want to see moving images for me, they add fascination and I get kind of hooked and stuck and it doesn't make me more intelligent in any way. So I'll read, so that's a personal choice. And sometimes I think I'm also good at, I'm able to take in a lot in a way but I'll feel in my body at some point it's like, oops, I'm getting a little dizzy here or it's playing on my mind state or I can feel it in the body and then I have to really take really good, good care, good care of this. Yeah, so for everyone to see what is the right form, what is the right time, all these things are really they do count. And to me I sit also, I have to say done as a practice, it's really a practice to me. I read the news on my phone, so when I do it, I had to get really intentional and really conscious about, oh Pascal, you're lifting your hand, you're about to look at news. Do you know what you're engaging with? So I want to do this very consciously so that I'm holding the phone, I know I'm opening the app where I read some of the stuff I read and I want to go in with good qualities. I don't want to go in with reactivity in patience, fear. I want to be to go in with honesty, with curiosity, with care. I care about what's happening for us. This is why I go read. What policies are we putting in place? Are we responding? What effects that is have on people? I want to understand the world I'm in. So I want to go in with curiosity, with care, with patience, with love really. And so it's my responsibility how I show up when I read news. Now I come out, I read what I read. It's really my responsibility. That's a really interesting reframing around reading the news as an act of love, love for yourself because you want to stay engaged, love for your community in the world because you care about what's happening. I think if that's the frame as opposed to I'm going to stare, I'm going to rubber neck at a car crash. It just changes the complexion of the experience. Speaking of news consumption, there is a great question here from B. That's the name showing up in the chat here. B says, "Curious about how much of the news you listen to is from opposing views and/or not speaking to your own POV. I find we're in an echo chamber with self-selected news, which further entrenches this sense of the other. B, yes, a million percent, yes, I do not, as a practice, I try not to use the word should. So everybody should make their, there I did, I said should there. Everybody can make their own decisions on who they want to consume from. But for myself, I have made the decision to consume from people with whom I disagree. Thoughtfully. I listen to Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson or Groyper's or folks who are on the super, super far right. I don't watch Fox News. But I do listen to center right thinkers. Specifically, I listen to the editors of the National Review. There's a podcast called The Editors. I read Andrew Sullivan on Substack. I listen to the commentary podcast and there are a few others. I listen to Ben Shapiro sometimes. I really disagree with a lot of what these folks are saying. So that can be provocative for my news, for my nervous system and sometimes I do not opt for it. So I don't do it. But I do find it soothing actually because if you are as the Buddha warned against, if you are attached to your views as the Buddha repeatedly warned against, then the word can seem like it's governed by illegible actors. But if you actually take the time to understand the way other people see the world, you can disagree. from a position of accuracy and non-ignorance. And so I find for me that is very helpful. What about you, Pasco? - Yeah, I think it's somewhat similar to you because like I don't want people who's kind of, it seems like their intention is to stir a lot of emotions. And so I want to hear different arguments, different ways of thinking. And again, to me by reading, it gives me more access to this. I want to hear different points of view, but I want to be careful about the source. And actually when I say points of view, for me it's a little bit more left than me and more right than me and like on every, both directions. And yeah, so the source and the intention of the writer, I think is important to me. So I try to understand it a little bit. What is this person doing? Are they trying to just get clicks? 'Cause I don't want that. I want somebody who's thinking about stuff and reflecting. And it helps me understand better my own point of view. And again, maybe I'm going back to something we said earlier, but it's so important to me. Like meditating for me is developing certain qualities of curiosity and calm. I think of the seven factors of awakening if some people are interested in that. News reading requires for me the same qualities has meditation, like it's the same qualities. I want to be very curious, very open, very attentive, very quantumous, balanced in my heart. And yet, to me they're the same practice. - We're out of time because I need to run because I'm having dinner with a friend tonight, which is part of how I take care of myself. But I do want to very quickly address one comment that came in from Debbie Henley. Debbie asks how I can best support her husband, who's the general manager of public radio station in the New York City metro area, and the producer of their network's national news. He's hyper-vigilant every day, would only sleep about four hours a night if I didn't hound him about the importance of sleep. He gets pretty close to panic sometimes, especially when also responsible for fundraising in this environment of no federal funding for public radio, any advice about how I can best support him. I just want to quickly say thank you to your husband for doing this work. I think journalists are, look, journalists are flawed. I know this from the inside because I'm flawed and I was a journalist for 30 years. We have all sorts of biases and we make all sorts of mistakes, but there's no democracy without journalism. And so I'm just grateful to journalists on all sides of the spectrum who do this work. But what I would say to your husband, again, I'm not a fan of the word should, but I would say this to anybody who is running themselves ragged in service of their job or in service of the world or in service of anything, there is a misconception that to take care of yourself is somehow selfish and self-indulgent, but you can't help the people you care about if you're a mess. Or let's, let me revise that and make it slightly more provisional. It's hard or harder to help the people you say you care about if you're a total mess as the cliche goes, it's, you can't pour from an empty cup. So your wife is, in my opinion, correct to encourage you to sleep. And if you get enough sleep and do a little bit of meditation and take a little bit of time for yourself, you're going to be even better at your job. And we need you to be good at your job because that's what a functioning democracy requires. So thank you again for your work. Speaking of thank you, it's Pascal. I love having you as part of this community. You're the best. Thank you for your time. - Thank you, thank you, Dan. I'm really happy to, every time we have a conversation and with people today. And I'm not so good with the chat on the side of a Zoom, but I said it was so much action. I hope I can read it at least after in some form, but that's beyond my capacity to take in. - Now that's my job to take it in. Your job is to drop wisdom bombs, which you did very successful. So thank you again, Pascal. And thanks to everybody for joining us for this as we do every week. And as I say at the close, and I mean this sincerely, I love you guys. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I really appreciate it. And if you enjoy listening to the show, if you get anything out of it, please do me a solid. Leave a rating or a review. I know every podcast host asks for this, but it really makes a difference. It helps boost the visibility of the show. We view the show as a mission to help people become nodes of sanity and an insane world. And so by taking a minute and giving the show a rating or a review, you're really helping us out and helping us achieve our mission. Thank you again. And now on to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Borissa Schneidermann, DJ Kashmir, David Hart and Hayden Brum. Post production is handled by the great folks over at Greenhorn Creative and Nick Thorburn of the great Indy Rock Band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening, deuces.