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Accepting the Mind (Discovering Ikigai)

[Host:] Our teacher this morning is Max Erdstein. Max, good morning. Thank you. And welcome back to IMC.

[Max:] Good morning. Just want to check the sound. How is that? You can hear? Okay. Let me know.

Introduction

It's nice for me to be back here, and it feels like a little bit of a homecoming. I haven't been here in a while. I've been a member of this community, a practitioner, since the late 90s. I can't believe it myself—something like 25 years or more. Every time I come here, I still remember the first time I came to IMC, when we were meeting at the Quaker Friends Meeting House in Palo Alto. I don't know if anyone remembers that.

There can be a kind of magic in being a beginner and doing something for the first time. I was just talking to someone here who is here for the first time—I don't know if there's anyone else here for the first time, or meditating for the first time. In Buddhism, "beginner's mind" is a wonderful thing. It's when we're totally open, something is new and fresh and full of possibility, and we kind of have an innocence or purity.

If you've done this a lot, or done anything a lot, it's kind of like, "Oh, I know what's going to happen, right?" I'm going to sit down. I mean, I feel it myself. I look at my cushion at home and I'm like, "Well, I know what's going to happen. I'm going to go sit down and breathe for a while and then get up, right?" I think it's a very natural, human thing to think we know something. We want a kind of certainty or predictability.

Part of the power and the beauty of a practice like this is we are opening to what's unknown and what's uncertain. Who knows what's going to happen? We don't know what our mind is going to serve up to us. So to sit down and to have this practice of moment-to-moment just being with this mind, this body, this heart—it's so simple. But I think it's also a beautiful thing, a deep thing, and I'm always surprised by the experience of sitting.

To this person who is new here today, I gave my very brief beginner's instruction, which is just two words: accept everything. Whatever happens, whatever comes in. We're not trying to create some particular experience, not even calm, not even peace, not even enlightenment. We're here to just accept this moment as it is. Moment to moment, things as they are, life as it is. In doing that, this kind of Dharma field develops. This Dharma field that little by little expands, and can hold what's here, can hold what arises in consciousness. So it's a great thing to be a beginner, and we envy you.

Western Psychology and Eastern Thought

One of the reasons it's nice to be back is that I started sitting with this group in the late 90s and then began teaching around 2013 or so. When COVID happened, I got the idea—or the little inspiration—that I wanted to expand my own understanding of Western psychology. So, I went to grad school to train in psychotherapy, and I just finished that. Now I feel a little more space and time to be here.

One of my interests is the intersection of Eastern thought, Buddhism, and Western psychology and psychoanalytic thinking. So just a warning, you might hear something about that! [Laughter]

The other way I feel like I'm back or I'm home is I was just in Asia for about six weeks, in Japan and then also a little bit in Thailand and Cambodia. So maybe I'll talk about that a little bit.

Accepting the Mind

One of the ways my own understanding of meditation has changed or evolved is this shift from trying to get something, or trying to use meditation. You know, meditation is powerful. It can be a great tool to get my mind the way I want it to be. "I want to have less of this, and more of that." And that's okay. But now I feel this kind of reverence for this attitude of acceptance, and not only accepting what arises, but seeing the contents of our mind as something valuable for us.

The things we think about, the patterns of thought, the images that come up in meditation, the memories, the concerns, the anxieties, the dreams, the hopes—these are kind of like our treasures in a way. Personally, I think it's a mistake to dismiss them, like, "Oh, that's just thinking, or that's just imagining or dreaming." This is so valuable. Freud—not such a popular guy these days—talked about dreams as the royal road to the unconscious. One way to think of what we dream about when we're sleeping is that it's just random static, right? It's just the detritus of our brain secretions. Maybe it's totally random. But maybe our dreams in some way reflect our inner life and our inner state, and maybe there's a place for looking at that and finding insight in that.

When we meditate, it's like letting ourselves be bored, letting ourselves be agitated, letting ourselves have this experience of the mind wandering.

The Value of Boredom

I was giving a talk at a vocational school in Cambodia where this nonprofit that I admire and support has all these different training programs and builds schools. One of the things I got a little bit surprised myself in saying is that it's so valuable to be bored. These days, I feel it myself when I have a moment when nothing's really going on, my hand just goes to where I keep my phone, and I take out my phone. There's probably something good there, something interesting.

Less and less these days do we have this experience of simply being with ourselves in an uncomplicated way. I remember some years ago, maybe it was like 10 years ago, I happened to be in Tokyo with my Zen teacher, Mel Weitsman^[1] from the Berkeley Zen Center. We happened to be riding on the subway. When I first came to Japan, I was amazed because the subways are so quiet. I'm from New York City and there's a little more activity in a subway car—screaming and singing. It was so quiet in Japan.

When I first went to Japan, probably 2002 or 2003, it was before the iPhone and everyone was reading. They had these little books. The way the Japanese language works, you can say a lot in a few characters, so the books are really small, and everyone seemed to be reading these little books. What I thought was interesting was everyone had this kind of book cover on, so you couldn't see what the other person was reading. It's a little private thing.

In this memory of being with Mel about 10 years ago, people had iPhones, and it was like every single person was looking on their phone doing something, except for one person: Mel, my Zen teacher. He was kind of just sitting there, looking around, looking at people, looking out the window. So I felt like, "Well, I can't take out my phone!" [Laughter] I had to kind of be present. It wasn't like we were really talking that much, but it was such a wonderful teaching for me—to have this time with ourselves and not need to fill it up with something, even if it's productive or interesting.

Maybe one of the most valuable things about coming to a place like this and sitting down, opening into the silence and stillness, is just restoring some sense of balance. We're always out there. We're always engaged and immersed in the object of consciousness. We're thinking about something, to do something. We have some agenda, which is fine, which is good. But this is a chance to restore a little balance.

What I find for myself is it creates space. We usually don't notice—unless maybe you're a visual artist and attuned to composition—the empty space in a room, or the empty space on a page. But that's the source of possibility. That's the source of renewal. In meditation, we're sorting of training ourselves to let go of the fixation and the obsession with the objects and the stuff, and to maybe relax a little bit into the empty space. When I feel this kind of spaciousness, then sometimes there's room for different kinds of content to arise—different kinds of images, different kinds of dreams, different kinds of thoughts.

Creativity and inspiration, I think, are often connected to this discipline of being still and being open and being present, and accepting whatever shows up. Whatever shows up is Dharma. Whatever shows up, we use it. We meet it. In a way, it's a little bit like a dream state. We're in and out; we're not thinking about something in an intentional way, but things are coming and going, thoughts are coming and going.

Child's Dream and Following Inspiration

This nonprofit that was hosting me in Thailand and Cambodia is called Child's Dream Foundation. This organization was the dream or the inspiration of two men who were Swiss bankers about 20 years ago. They were doing banking in Asia, based in Singapore and Hong Kong, and got to know Southeast Asia and the Mekong Delta.

Thailand is a pretty developed country, but expanding a little bit from Thailand, there's Myanmar, which right now has a lot of conflict, and Cambodia and Laos. These countries are, I was a little bit surprised to learn, on about the same level on the human development index as the poorest countries in Africa. So there's a lot of poverty and a lot of need in these places.

These bankers—one was in his mid-20s and one was in his mid-30s—said, "Okay, we've had this experience of managing the wealth of billionaires, and that's nice. But for our own sense of balance, meaning, and purpose, we want to do something a little bit different." So they started this educational nonprofit, and the first donors were their former clients at the Swiss bank.

Part of the reason I know about this organization is that one of the things I do in the summers is bring university students, mostly from Japan, to Southeast Asia. It's a cross-cultural educational experience that comes out of a wonderful organization called Volunteers in Asia (VIA), the founder of which was at Stanford for many years. In the process of finding different places for us to visit in Thailand, I found this nonprofit.

The students are so inspired by what they're doing. In places like Cambodia, I think they've built like 300 schools. They also provide pathways for refugees from Myanmar. Not to go into the whole situation, but there's a civil war happening in Myanmar, so many people have walked out of the country and into Thailand because the border is open. But if you're in Thailand, you have no papers, you have nothing. Thailand doesn't really want you. You don't have a passport. It's a very vulnerable place to be. Imagine you're a young person. You can't go to Thai school. How do you go to school? This organization creates non-formal schools for these migrant populations and refugees.

When I bring the university students to meet with the founders, part of it is to learn about what they're doing and the need there, but part of it is also to give these founders a chance to talk about their own life journey. When you're a young person, especially in a country like Japan, and I think here too, there's a lot of pressure to follow a traditional path. To have an example of these guys who followed that voice—I don't know if that thought came up while they were meditating, we could say it did for purposes of this talk—but at some point they had this thought, right? And instead of just ignoring it, they followed that thread.

When I was with one of the founders for a couple of weeks, traveling around and visiting different sites and projects, I was amazed at the passion and energy that he had. It was a great reminder for me that when we're fully engaged in something that we believe in, that we're passionate about, that we enjoy, it creates its own energy.

One of the things they do is the Burma Children's Medical Fund. The medical system in Burma has pretty much collapsed, especially with the war, and Thailand has a pretty much first-world healthcare system. This program brings out children who are sick with three specific congenital conditions. They bring them out of Burma and into Thailand and arrange for them to get this life-saving surgery. The recovery takes months, so they support them in a safe house in Chiang Mai to recover, and then eventually they can go back to their country. How amazing is this?

It's completely vetted. They know that these conditions can be basically cured with the surgery, and they have relationships with the surgeons and the hospitals in Thailand. I said, "How do you even get these children who have no papers and are not in the country legally from the border all the way to Chiang Mai or Bangkok where they can have the surgery?" There are a lot of military checkpoints. They said, "They know us. The military sees it's through Child's Dream and they're doing this medical thing." Volunteers drive them through, and it takes the goodwill of so many people. We visited the safe house where the children go before and after surgery. The woman who runs it is a nurse who has been doing it for 25 years.

For me, it was a wonderful reminder that to have a full, complete, balanced practice, it's not just about what's happening on the cushion. It's not just about what's happening in our own internal experience. That's beautiful and important, but then it's like, how do we express what we see and what we feel? How do we let ourselves follow that thread of inspiration?

Discovering Ikigai

It will look different for each of us. One of the concepts these nonprofit founders talk about with our college students is ikigai^[2]. In the traditional Japanese sense, ikigai has this meaning of your deep purpose in life. To find your ikigai is a beautiful thing.

The way they talk about ikigai is they show a Venn diagram of the overlap of four things:

1. What do I love doing?
2. What am I good at?
3. What does the world need?
4. What will I get paid for? How can I support myself?

It's a great model, and the students really like that. But I think in order to know what our purpose is, in order to find our ikigai, we need these moments of stopping, being still, and listening to ourselves in a deep way.

Even though there can be a temptation to use meditation as a strategy to create a mind state or an experience—and if you can get calm, if you can get peaceful, great, go for it! But when that doesn't work, if your mind is anything like my mind and doesn't really listen to you that much, then I would say this is when our real practice begins. It's about letting go of that habit to control and to fix, and opening up to what's here and what's being offered. Finding the Dharma in that, finding the beauty and goodness, and following that thread.

It might even be, "Oh, I should call so-and-so," or "Oh, I should answer that email." Honor that voice. Just like those two Swiss guys who had an idea, and now it's this amazing organization doing so much good in a part of the world that really needs it. But again, it's going to look different for everybody.

What are your gifts? What do you have to offer the world that you are good at, and that you enjoy? Because it turns out when we enjoy something, we're more likely to do it, and we're going to do it more. And the more we do it, the better we're going to be at it.

I feel like this practice is a portal into a deeper understanding and meeting of ourselves. This is a great thing for us, and it can be a great thing for the world. I think maybe I'll stop here and see if anyone has a comment or question.

Q&A

Question: Thank you for your lecture. Actually, that helped me because I struggle with the monkey mind. I've heard in other practices this idea of gently bringing the mind back, but you talked about acceptance even before that. I'm not sure what to do because I bring it back for a few seconds, and then off it goes again. I like the idea of acceptance—that seems to make sense from a Buddhist perspective. But how should we practice? I guess is the basic question.

Max Erdstein: Yeah, thank you. It's a great question. Suzuki Roshi^[3], a Japanese Zen teacher, said something like, "If it's not paradoxical, it's not true." [Laughter]

So yes, we are coming back to this moment, and there are some wonderful supports in meditation for that. One is just the awareness of the body. Sensations of the body are happening in the moment. That's why posture is often emphasized, because to maintain an upright posture, we have to have some degree of awareness or presence. Sensations of breathing are another kind of body sensation, or opening to sounds in the room. These are touchstones in the present moment.

The skill or craft of meditation is a little bit like learning to ride a bike. At first, you think, "Should I steer, or should I deal with the pedals?" Well, yes, you've got to do it all, basically. At first, you're really wobbly. "I just have to pedal and get some momentum, but then, oh god, I have to steer!" But at a certain point, your body knows how to do it. There's a certain muscle memory.

But as we're starting off, I think cultivating that fundamental attitude of acceptance is the most important thing. When we're trying to do something, we're a little bit in conflict with ourselves. "I want to be here. I want to be present, but my mind is thinking about yesterday or tomorrow." It creates this division. In meditation, the point is to have this wholeness, this unity.

This fundamental disposition of acceptance lets all our agendas—even our good agendas, like "I want to be present"—quiet down a little bit. And then it turns out when things are quiet, we're here. Where else could we be? The present moment is not something we need to work really hard to generate or fabricate. It's all there is. When we stop fighting with ourselves, that's all there is.

I don't know if anyone grew up in New York City—or maybe there are other places like this—where you turn on the tap and the water is good water, but it's really cloudy. It's almost white. And you think, "How can I get this water to be clear?" No amount of technique, stirring it, or doing something to it is going to help. The only thing that works is to just leave it alone, accept it, let it be still. Once it's still, all of that settles, and then it's perfectly clear.

I think of it a little bit like that. Being with the body is great, being with the breath is great. Having some intention of that is very helpful.

Question: This idea of "meditating on something." Is that a real thing, or is that just a colloquialism? People say they're going to "meditate on something"—like the breath. Is that a thing?

Max Erdstein: It depends what you mean by that. Traditionally people would say meditate on the breath. You might say "look at a candle flame." You can meditate on anything. All it means is you have this intention of what you are aware of.

What I'm saying is that's good, but despite whatever our intention is, we're going to have lots of other things that happen. It's not a mistake that those other things happen. That's valuable too—maybe even more valuable than the candle flame or the breath.

It's easy, especially if you've gotten enamored with meditation, to use meditation as a way of avoiding things. "I don't want to feel that feeling. I don't want to think about that." If you've gotten good at meditating on the breath, you can just block things out. That might be useful at certain times, but basically, we want to be open and let things in. We want to have the ability to be aware of whatever shows up, not just this one narrow thing.

Question: Hey, Max. When you were talking about ikigai, I see some college students focus mostly on the second and the fourth circles—what am I good at, and what can I make money at. How would you talk to young people who are trying to pick majors, to help them balance those four things out a little more, to also consider what they enjoy and what will help people?

Max Erdstein: It makes sense for someone who is young and at the start of their professional life to be thinking about how they can support themselves. I think that's a good thing. But if that were the only thing in the picture, it leaves out a lot. It rests on this assumption that "Once I make this amount of money, then I'll be happy." So there's this encouragement to bring in, "What do I enjoy? What do I love doing?"

Teasing apart what we enjoy and what we're good at can be a little tricky. Often we enjoy what we're good at, though not always. Some people have said that "follow your passion" is the worst career advice. [Laughter] I'm never going to play in the NBA. I'm never going to be an opera singer. I love opera and I can listen to it, but a little bit of reality is needed.

But I think it's about finding ways in. It might be meditation, or it might be something like the summer program we do. The Japanese students have a roommate from Myanmar. They are from very different circumstances, and they learn so much in this connection. The Japanese students learn about Southeast Asia, but maybe even more crucially, they learn about themselves.

It's good for all of us to get out of our comfort zone, to travel, to meet different kinds of people. Little by little, we start to see more of ourselves, and then the picture comes into focus.

The other thing I say to the students is that what you do over your long life is probably going to change. I started out studying humanities in college, then I was in the tech world, then doing Buddhism and meditation, and now psychotherapy. Not to feel like you're going to be locked into one thing forever.

It's a great question. Maybe I'll just use this to give a little plug for my Sunday night group here, which is for people in their 20s and 30s. Often these kinds of questions are very alive there. So, thank you.

Host: Okay. Thank you very much, and take care.