---
ai_generation_date: '2026-06-17'
ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview
audiodharma:
  talks:
  - date: '2022-06-06'
    mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/16400/20220606-Jim_Podolske-IMC-noble_friends_and_noble_conversations.mp3
    speakers:
    - speaker_name: Jim Podolske
      speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/118
    talk_start_time_seconds: 0
    title: Noble Friends and Noble Conversations
    url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/16400
    video_unavailable: false
location_city: Redwood City, CA
video_unavailable: false
youtube:
  id: 8EY4424DhuQ
  imprecise_upload_date: '2023-05-04'
  title: 'Noble Friends and Noble Conversations; Speaker: Jim Podolske'
  upload_date: null
  uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center
  uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EY4424DhuQ
---

# Noble Friends and Noble Conversations - [Jim Podolske](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/118)

*This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.*

## [Noble Friends and Noble Conversations](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/16400)

Well, good evening, everyone. Welcome.

Last week, Diana asked me if I would give a talk this evening, since both she and Gil are teaching a week-long retreat at IRC. It's been several years since I've given a talk, so I'm a little rusty, so hopefully you'll bear with me.

I thought tonight I would talk a little bit about what brought me to practice, what brought me to IMC, and also what keeps me practicing—what supports the continual practice.

I'll start with a little bit of history. I came to IMC in January of 1998, when we were meeting in Palo Alto. The reason I came was because there was an inescapable unsatisfactoriness in my life. I had good friends, I had a good job, good health, and yet there was something that just seemed off. I couldn't put my finger on it. I couldn't quite get any of the usual remedies for dissatisfaction or unhappiness that are offered by our culture to really work as well as I'd like it to.

A friend of mine had told me about Spirit Rock, a meditation center up in Marin County. I looked at their website, and one of their links was to this place in Palo Alto, Insight Meditation Center, which was only about ten minutes from where I lived. So I went there.

On the very first night, Gil was just finishing the last of a four-week series on the Four Noble Truths. I'll summarize those rather briefly. He was talking about how there's this thing called *dukkha*[^1], sometimes translated as suffering, stress, or dissatisfaction. One teacher translates it as a "bummer-ness"—the bummer-ness of life. So it can come in all sorts of forms and intensities, but basically this dissatisfaction, which I was feeling, and the teaching around that, calling it a noble truth, was that rather than trying to push it aside, or cover it over, or replace it with something else, the instruction was to really pay attention to it. That there was some value, something important about investigating this unsatisfactoriness, this *dukkha*, as he called it. So the First Noble Truth was both a description, but also an encouragement for action to really recognize it when it was operating. It required some action on my part, on the part of a meditator.

The Second Noble Truth was that there's a cause for this, and the cause is clinging. Trying to hold on. If it's a pleasant experience, trying to hold on to the pleasantness, hold on to something. Or if it's an unpleasant experience, trying to hold on to the absence of this experience. And of course, the problem with that is that the things that one often tries to cling to are un-clingable, if that's a word. They are things that you just can't cling to because they're going to change. They come about by conditions, and they disappear when conditions change. So it's not that we can make our experience just the way we want it, but it's how we're relating to this experience. Taking this attitude that we're going to try to hold on for dear life to something that can't be held onto. And the action associated with that is to release the clinging somehow, to release.

The Third Noble Truth has to do with experiencing the ending of *dukkha*, the ending of suffering. And that's something to be realized, and this might not even be like a once-and-you're-done experience; it might be that the clinging ends and the suffering ends for a second, for a minute, for an hour. However long, undoubtedly you'll start clinging again. But just recognizing that experience of at least temporarily being free of the *dukkha* is something to be experienced.

And then finally, the Fourth Noble Truth was that there's a path to be developed so that this recognition, this release, and this experience of freedom can come more often.

When I heard that talk, I knew this is the place for me to be. Gil was talking about exactly what I was experiencing, and offering a certain hope that through practice, through actions of my own, I could lead a life with less dissatisfaction, or maybe more satisfaction, more happiness. That was just transformational for me to hear that talk, and so I found him inspiring.

Now, at that point, I had heard about this mindfulness meditation, but I had really never learned how to do it or what it was. Over the previous six or seven years, I had learned transcendental meditation, so I did that the first night. And then fortunately, the very next Monday, there was an introductory course to mindfulness meditation. A 45-minute course, and it was taught by this woman, Margaret. She explained to us about paying attention to the very simple experiences of life: of the breath, of bodily sensations, of emotions, of thoughts. The thing that struck me was just her presence. She was kind, she was thoughtful. There was a serenity about her, and I remember after the end of the first class that I took with her thinking that if she's the product of this practice, this is what I want to be doing. I want the qualities that she's expressing. And even though I had taken the course, the next month I took it again just to have more of that same experience of being in her presence.

The inspiration from Gil, and the clarity and the cognitive experience of hearing his dharma talk, and the following week having this experience of the presence that Margaret displayed, really let me know that I was where I wanted to be, or at least starting a path, starting a practice. In the coming months, about half the time Gil would have a guest speaker. Often people from Spirit Rock or from San Francisco Zen Center, some various monastics, and some people that came from I don't know where, but they were all inspiring.

One of the things that I also liked about IMC in those first weeks and months that I was there was that people just left you alone. It was fine to just come in, sit, listen to the talk, and then just walk out into the night, luxuriating in what I had just heard, reflecting on it, thinking about it, feeling what it felt like to have heard these teachings that I had never heard before. I didn't have to stop and chitchat, I didn't have to put on a social persona or explain why I was there. I didn't have to explain myself. I could just come and go, and people left me alone.

I really valued that for a number of months. I don't know exactly how long, and I really saw it as a solitary practice. Like, this is something that I'm doing for me. It's my happiness, my tranquility, my peace of mind. And in some ways, that's true. Nobody can meditate for you, nobody can listen to talks for you, nobody can have the insights that come from this practice. You can't job it out. It requires your own inspiration, motivation, determination. There's some part of it that really takes your commitment and your time and your energy to do the practice.

Over time, maybe within four to eight months roughly, although it's a little hard for me to remember back then, I noticed that I wanted to talk to people about the practice. I wanted to talk to someone. I found that my non-practicing friends, although they would be patient with me, they'd listen, they just couldn't figure out what I was talking about or why. Why would you pay attention to dissatisfaction? Why would you pay attention to suffering? It just didn't make sense to them. I knew enough that I couldn't really put this in words that maybe made sense.

For example, when I talked about doing *mettā*[^2], loving-kindness practice, where you wish well for someone even though they're not wishing well back for you. This sort of unilateral well-wishing for other people wasn't the usual transactional well-wishing that people were used to. They said, "Well, if the person doesn't wish you well back, I mean, how long is that going to last? You're going to give up pretty quickly." So that was just one example of the kind of thing that I was learning about that just didn't connect.

About the time that I was wanting to talk to other people, a couple of people that were also Monday night regulars started coming up to me and saying, "Well, how'd you like to have coffee? How about if we meet for a meal before the Monday night sit and let's talk about this." So I formed a few informal friendships that way and started to have a few discussions.

I also thought, "Well, if I want to talk about this, what I really need to do is talk with a master, the maestro, like Gil." So I went to him and I think I asked him if he would meet with me once a week to have a discussion. He wouldn't do that, but I could schedule interviews with him, and so for a time I met with him about once a month.

Those were useful for me, although I did find that, maybe not consciously or subconsciously, I really wanted to look good in his eyes. I wanted to be a good Buddhist. At some point, he related to me this story that when he was a young Zen practitioner at San Francisco Zen Center, one of his teachers told him that much of what he was going to learn about Buddhism he was going to learn from his peers. When he told me that, I sort of thought that it was a polite brush-off. I thought he was like, "Yeah, you know, talk to some of these other people." But I took him at his word, and I found that that actually was true. There was a way that having these discussions about the things that I didn't understand, I'm not sure that I believed, or had experienced, with other people really helped the practice. It wasn't just about learning facts or learning from somebody that had already experienced things, but it was the talking to other people about it. A questioning that really helped clarify things for me.

The next year, I did a 10-day retreat with Gil and two of his friends, John and Mary. On that retreat, I learned several things. Those teachers started to say more than once that we don't do this practice for ourselves alone. Now, I kind of thought that I was doing this for myself alone. It was fine with me if other people benefited from it, but that wasn't my motivation to support other people or to benefit them in some way. But on that retreat, I noticed what support I was getting from the other yogis. We weren't talking to each other, but just the fact that other people were showing up and sitting, session after session, was inspiring and helped me keep sitting even though it was periods of pain, to just sit for 45 minutes at a time.

One person in particular who was inspiring to me was a woman that was sitting the retreat who was, I think, eight months pregnant. From what I understand, at that point in pregnancy, you're probably uncomfortable all the time. The body's just... and yet she was just sitting there so still, with a serene look on her face. I just thought, "Wow." That was inspiring to me, and that she was doing it not only for herself but, I imagined, doing it also for this soon-to-be-born child. There was a way in which my heart opened by being around the other practitioners.

After that retreat, I found myself making friends with some of the other yogis on that retreat. Andrea Fella was on that retreat, Jen Lemas, and some other people who are now teachers. So I did start to get that sense of, "Oh yeah, maybe there is something that is going on beyond this particular body, this particular heart and mind."

And then less than a year later, the following spring, I did a 14-day retreat with Gil. Because so many people had canceled, it turned out it was just Gil and twelve yogis at this little zendo, Jikoji, up on Skyline. There was such an intimacy to it. It rained the first twelve of the fourteen days. It was cold. We just had a couple little wood stoves to keep us warm, in which one person, this guy Peter, would just between every sitting put more wood in the fire. He kept us warm, he took care of us. The water system broke, so we had no running water. We had to bathe in the pond and carry water from the creek for dishwashing. The local fire department brought in drinking water for us each day. But there was something about that particular retreat that made me feel so close to these other 11 people—well, 12, including Gil.

It's a retreat I'll never forget. It was the antithesis of some of these golden palace-type retreat centers where it's warm and comfortable and the lights go on and off on their own. This was really pretty primitive. But because there were so few people, Gil would give us interviews every single day.

At the end of that retreat, I was invited by a couple that was on it to join what they call a *Kalyāṇa-mitta*[^3] group. Sometimes it's translated as "spiritual friends" or "beautiful friends." People that wanted to talk about the dharma and about their experiences and create a sense of community. I didn't know what this was, but since they invited me, I thought, "Well, at least go a couple of times and see what's up with it."

We would always start, we'd always sit together for 45 minutes, we'd have a meal together, so there was that sense of community from sharing a meal. Then we did this thing called a listening circle where we'd set a timer and each person had something like four to six minutes to say whatever it was they wanted to say. Everyone else just listened. There were no questions or comments or advice or clarifications. One person just said whatever it was that wanted to be said, including nothing at all, and everyone else was just as present as they could be, just listened.

At first, I would sort of plan, "Well, what am I going to say? I need to rehearse what I'm going to say." But over time, I came to trust that what wanted to be heard from me would emerge. I didn't need to plan it. I didn't need to somehow have some agenda. As we trusted each other and the listening deepened, I learned to trust myself. I learned to trust that what wanted to be seen would emerge.

I also learned that four or five minutes can go by pretty fast, and so it was important to really, in some ways, get to the point. To not waste time on things that weren't so important, but really kind of, what's really going on? Some deep honesty. So that was very helpful for me, particularly talking about what was working for me in practice, and also what wasn't, where I was stuck.

That group lasted about two years roughly, and then the couple moved away. Then I was invited into another group, and that group I still meet with. We've been meeting now for about twenty years.

Over time, there were some neighborhood groups that I was in. There's one that I'm in right now in Mountain View. Each group has a somewhat different structure, a way of doing things, but the commonality is that willingness to listen to each other and trust that we can talk about what's going on in practice for us.

One of the things I like to say is it's a great place to talk about how you fail as a Buddhist. You know, there's a lot of times when you like to think of yourself as this swell, well-practiced Buddhist person, and there's a value in that. But there's also value in talking about what things aren't working, what have you done that you regretted. That's really been a way to grow in a way that I don't think I could do just on my own if I was just sitting at home meditating and listening to talks and reading books.

For a while, I was in a group that was supporting somebody that was dying, somebody that had cancer. We thought it was only going to last a few weeks, and he ended up lasting a couple of years.

I started another group thinking about peers. Since I'm a senior-age male, I started a group of other senior-age males, so we could talk about what it's like to have a body that's breaking down, that's starting to fail. And what do we still aspire to? What keeps us practicing? How to become not resigned to, but in accord with our mortality? So those are some of the things that came out of that group.

I was also in this social group called the Dharma Friends where we would go and see movies or go for hikes. There's a book group that started back in the '90s that's still meeting here once a month.

I'm telling you all of this because my belief is that there's a real value in connecting with others in this practice. There's a saying that I've heard a number of times about how one of the Buddha's disciples had one time told somebody that noble friends and noble conversations are half of the holy life. And the Buddha corrected him and he said, "No, it's not half of the holy life. It's all of the holy life." Our responding to support or in community with others is integral to this process of becoming free. I don't really know if it's possible to become free on your own.

I'd like to encourage people—well, first of all, I want to say I know the value of solitude, and that was really important to me, being able to practice without being involved in a social interaction that was unwelcome. And I'd also like to encourage people that feel like they're at a point where they want to be able to connect with other people to look for ways to connect. I know it's been difficult over the last couple of years with the pandemic. At one point, we used to have like 60 or 80 people in this room on a Monday night, now we've got a handful. But there are virtual ways of meeting. Sunday mornings, there's a Zoom after the Sunday talk. People are starting to meet out in the parking lot outside of IMC on Sunday mornings. There's a lot of small group discussion that goes on through the Happy Hour groups, Monday through Friday. There's the way of meeting people through either day-long classes or there are some even eight-to-twelve-month classes that are being offered now by IMC and other places.

Just this afternoon, I was in the Dharma Mentor training program where we meet once a month and split off into small groups to talk. I think Gil and Diana are offering some courses on Ethics as Enlightenment and two others that they rotate through. So I can't give you an exhaustive list of how you might make the kind of connections to support practice through dialogue, but if you start looking around, you'll find ways.

So I appreciate your tuning in tonight to this talk, and I'll be available for questions or comments for the next couple of minutes, either from those of you who are here at IMC in person, or Nancy will monitor the chat on YouTube if you want to offer a question that way.

Thank you.

## Q&A

**Nancy:** Jim, this is Nancy. Can you say more about the groups that you are part of? Are those ones the neighborhood groups that you can sign up through the website, or did you create a group on your own?

**Jim Podolske:** Yeah, that's a good question. This was, I think the first group was maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and about every three years IMC would put out a call. If people were interested in joining a group, they could send in their contact information and their zip code, and they would be matched with other people. Usually, those groups started out with a kind of fixed agenda, you know, readings and things like that, and then might over time deepen. I don't know whether they're doing that right now, but if you're interested, I'm sure that if you send an email to the main IMC email site, they could let you know what's available. Some of the groups... the first group that I was in lasted for maybe four years and then disbanded. Another one that was an existing group that was already ongoing invited me to join them, and that one I imagine going for some time. So I think if you contact IMC, they could let you know what groups are available.

I know that there are links on the IMC website for individual practice discussion with a teacher, and then group practice discussions. I believe that you need to email to get hooked up with a neighborhood sangha that meets regularly, I think that's right. And the Sati Center also is teaching a number of classes that Gil and a number of other teachers have small groups.

**Nancy:** Great, thank you.

**Jim Podolske:** Thank you, Nancy. One other program that IMC has is this Eightfold Path program. I think the Eightfold Path is a nine-month series, and that has small group interactions every month for each of the elements. If you want, you can sign up to get a mentor so you can have somebody to talk to once a month that can offer encouragement and sound you out that way. The current cycle I think is just coming to an end right now, but it usually starts again in the fall, maybe September.

**Nancy:** Jim, one other thing is that there is a new beginner meditation program that's starting in August that will be meeting in person at IMC.

**Jim Podolske:** Okay, it's supposed to be on the calendar already. So there's also an introductory meditation course, an in-person course that's starting in August, so that's another way to make connection.

Do you see anything on the...

**Audience Member:** Thank you very much. I appreciate what you had to share. Definitely identify with that dissatisfaction and bummer-ness, so I guess I'm in the right place too. It's about finding your own path and I'm trying to figure out how to do that. All of these suggestions of lots of different ways to start down a path is a little overwhelming but also very helpful, so thank you on that.

I hear a lot from people that practice about, you know, letting go. I imagine that's letting go of the suffering. I don't know what that means when people say, "Oh, the first step is letting go." Okay, I get the concept of clinging, but if I'm already just kind of softening, then what does it mean to let go?

**Jim Podolske:** Yeah, well that's an excellent question. I mean, I'd start with just saying that that's like, "What does it mean to let go?" I'm trying to remember, one of the monastics said something like 80 percent of the time they're sitting in meditation knowing they need to let go and can't. So I don't think that it's strictly something that the ego or the intellect can do. I think to a certain extent it's seeing the suffering and seeing what is it that we're just not... if you can see the connection between what you're clinging to and the suffering, then the clinging may dissolve on its own. But I believe you can't make it happen, and you definitely can't make it happen on your time schedule. It's kind of like sitting with it until...

**Audience Member:** So don't just knock three times and turn around.

**Jim Podolske:** [Laughter] Yeah. Okay.

**Audience Member:** Yeah, so thank you.

**Jim Podolske:** Okay. Well, it's one minute to nine, so thank you all for your attention, and if this has been helpful then stay with it, and if it's not helpful just let it go. Thank you.

---
[^1]: **Dukkha:** A Pali word often translated as "suffering," "stress," or "unsatisfactoriness."
[^2]: **Mettā:** A Pali word often translated as "loving-kindness" or "benevolence."
[^3]: **Kalyāṇa-mitta:** A Pali term for "spiritual friend" or "noble friend," referring to a companion or teacher on the Buddhist path.