Stressed? Anxious? Depressed? Your inner voice can guide you through the darkest times. You just have to be able to hear it. Meditation Teacher Lodro Rinzler can help you find your inner self. We talk meditation techniques, the benefits of meditation and calming your mind. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Pieces of Playground Equipment.
Interview with Meditation Coach Lodro Rinzler
Nick VinZant 0:12
Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, finding your inner self, and the top five pieces of playground equipment.
Lodro Rinzler 0:25
That meditation is, in this essence, a way of becoming more familiar with who we truly are. Every time we do that we are rewiring the brain, we are retraining it that we don't have to chase after every anxiety producing thought that comes up in our life, we can make a different choice choice to be present to choice to be mindful choice to be in sentence kinder to ourselves.
Nick VinZant 0:46
I want to thank you so much for joining us, if you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, we really appreciate it really helps us out. So I have reached a point in my life, where I'm constantly trying to reflect. Problem is, I'm not really very good at it. Because every time I tried to do this, my mind just bounces all over the place. And it's been like that for a while. But I think that the pandemic and what we're all going through has just made it so much worse. I think so many more people are dealing with a lot of stress and anxiety, and there isn't time to just kind of relax, and think our first guest is an expert at dealing with that stress and anxiety, and really helping people find out who they really are. This is meditation teacher lodro rinzler. So I think a lot of people have heard about meditation, but what what am I actually supposed to be doing when I'm meditating.
Lodro Rinzler 1:55
So actually, we get a lot of meditation teacher trainings. And the funny thing is, I always have to give them the bad news, which is a large part of the work we do is like, re educating people around this word and what they should expect. Because most people have been sold a bill of goods, which is like you see the magazine cover, and you think, oh, if I meditate for a moment, I find everlasting peace and bliss. And it should feel just about as relaxing as massage when in fact, meditation is actually us, learning to know ourselves better. My favorite word for meditation in the Tibetan language is golm g o m. And that can be translated as familiarization or meditation. And it equates the two, that meditation is in this essence, a way of becoming more familiar with who we truly are. So there's the sense of, I mean, there's a million types of meditation out there. But since I come from the Buddhist tradition, you know, the types I talked about are often based in some form of mindfulness. So mindfulness of the breath, for example, we sit down, we meditate on feeling each in breath and out breath, when we get distracted, we come back, there's something very simple about that. And yet, when we sit down to do it, we often find that our mind is a little over the place. It's just ramping thoughts and sort of a bombardment of thoughts one after another after another, so that formerly after mentioned, bill of goods that we've been told, this should feel relaxing, this should feel good and only feel good. We feel like there must be something wrong with me, if I'm experiencing something other than that, when in fact, it's just about every human being out there, that when you sit down to meditate, whether it is meditation, on sound meditation on emotions, or meditation, breath or any number of things, it's actually this deeper experience of just getting to know how many thoughts we really have, and then starting to work with it over time, in the same way that we might learn a new language, we might train, learn a new musical instrument, the more we pick it up in little bits every day, the easier it becomes. And the easier part here, it was simple, but now it's easy to just sort of it's like the volume of the thoughts gets turned down, like the actual level of the volume. They become less alluring to us that we're more able to stay with our object of attention, such as the breath. And as a result, we feel more of a sense of peace.
Nick VinZant 4:20
I can't get this done in five minutes, right? Like, that's kind of how I feel. The normal approach now is like, I'll meditate but I got five minutes. And if I don't have everlasting peace after five minutes, probably not gonna do this again. Do you run into that?
Lodro Rinzler 4:35
Yeah, that's exactly it. It's like, we want amazon prime. for meditation. We don't want to wait the seven day day. 10 day shipping, we want it like tomorrow or it's not worth it. And same thing here. It's like the science. There's so much science these days around meditation. It's like every week there's some new study from some University saying if you meditate just a little bit every day after a period of some weeks, you start to see Increased gray matter in the hippocampus in the brain using more activity in the ACC the brain, which translates to were more productive, we're more efficient, we're more present, we sleep better boosts our immune system. We're a minute away from BuzzFeed releasing the 20 sexiest reasons we should be meditating, like, it's really getting up there. But the idea is like in that fine print, there's this marker of, well, you have to do it for a few weeks, you have to do it consistently for a few weeks, you can't just do it once or twice.
Nick VinZant 5:28
Can you do meditation without the spiritual slash religious aspect of it?
Lodro Rinzler 5:35
Yes, absolutely. So there's, I mean, you know, we always hear about these things within religions, like the Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and things like that, right? He was a person. He's a person who tried, actually a bunch of different types of meditation then settled into just being with the body breathing mindfulness of the body, and was able to wake up in a really big way, which is why we say, Well, here's a good example of what we could do with these simple practices. But the idea here is that that is not a religious experience, that is not a it's, you know, because his words were passed on. And we have this advice today, when we call it a religious tradition. But it's not a religion, per se, as we might normally think of some of them. But the spirit of it has never been do these things on this day, and then you are good. And do these, if you don't do these things, or you do these other things, then you're bad. The core of Buddhism in particular, and I know you're asking about meditation in general, but I'll come back to that. The core of Buddhism in general, in particular, is that there's, we are all inherently wakeful. We're all basically peaceful, basically good. As is. That's who we are. And if you I mean, have kids, if you have a nephew of God, child of some sort, you know, like any, any sort of kids in your life, you see them come into the world, and they aren't sitting around being like, Oh my gosh, what's wrong with me? Why am I like this? That's learned behavior. They come in from the sense of, Oh, I'm, I'm good, I'm whole and complete. And then they get picked on by society. And you know, all the other influences there have, and start to second guess that. So this is not even like a Buddhist teaching. It's like we see this in our in our life. This is just experience that we might have of Oh, yeah. You know, when I meditate, for example, I might have a moment to just resting with the breath, and I feel good and complete, and everything's okay. In that moment, I'm not mentally freaking out about my finances. I'm not freaking out about my friendship. But what it is, it's like, I'm just okay, I'm here and present. And that's not a religious thing. That's a human thing. And that's just something that we can discover for ourselves. I think, pretty much
Nick VinZant 7:42
any rational person. Here's what has been said, what you've been saying about meditation. Here's what they have read, right? I think that this is something that everybody would agree like, this is a good idea. I should do this. But we just don't like, I've done it before. That was fantastic. And I just don't do it. Why do you think that is? How can we change that?
Lodro Rinzler 8:05
I don't think do you exercise in some form?
Nick VinZant 8:09
I do. Yes. In the mornings?
Lodro Rinzler 8:10
Yeah. What do you do?
Nick VinZant 8:12
Running? Basically? Great.
Lodro Rinzler 8:14
So you put on the shoes, and you step out is super cold in that moment? And in that moment, you don't say I can't wait to do this. You say? No, I'm gonna do this. I know, it's gonna be uncomfortable as No, it's gonna take a minute for me to warm up. And I'm gonna be tired after that to stretch. But I'm doing it because you have your own Why? Right? Like, it may. Yeah, because I like the way it feels after because I want to lose weight. Because whatever it might be, it's always very personal. But same thing here. I think there's discomfort. And the payoff, if you will, is a little bit less obvious than some other things. Because we could measure Oh, I've been running for three months, and I lost this many pounds during that time. We it's harder for us to be like, oh, I've been meditating for three months, and I am 10% kinder than I used to be. Right? Like, it's just how would you measure? I'm a little bit more present with my family than I was before is, it's often something that we are sitting out with people and they noticed that we're acting differently to see what's going on. Because I don't know. Maybe it's because you've been meditating. It's sort of, it always gets mirrored back to us. It's so subtle.
Nick VinZant 9:23
I don't like refer back to my spreadsheet and say, Well, I'm 10% happier today than I was last week. You know, I guess you mean, right? It's not a quantum easily quantifiable metric.
Lodro Rinzler 9:35
Yeah, it would be a lot easier if it was, but it's the effects are huge. And they are I mean, I work with people for years at a time. And, you know, someone would come to me and say, Gosh, compared to when we started working together a year ago. I just feel like I'm handling this whole chaotic pandemic, family situation, work issue, whatever.
Nick VinZant 9:55
It is so much better than I would have if I hadn't been meditating. Do you think Though that is from the practice of meditation, or because we know ourselves more and become with our Okay, thoughts, like, Where do you think that peace kind of comes from?
Lodro Rinzler 10:13
With this bombardment of thoughts? Most people don't realize that they walk around with this little inner narrator, I guess that this is constantly chattering the way I think like, okay, after this, I'm gonna go do that. And then after this thing, I got that meeting and what's going on with that person? Right, I need to talk to them about this. It's just constant, like chatter. And it's, we're listening to our own inner radio station there. And sometimes that radio station is actually quite cruel. Sometimes radio stations self aggressive. Why do you say that? You know, you shouldn't have prepared for that as a jerk. Why are you like this. And meditation, to some degree is like turning the dial down. And either not listening to it or not like, it sort of becomes background noise. And we're more present. Often in meditation, the I was talking to a friend of mine, who's a colleague, earlier, Susan Piver, she's written many books on meditation as well. And my favorite definition of meditation comes from her, which is substituting your discursive thinking for another object of your attention. So the conscious act of saying, I'm going to stop focusing my attention on that inner narrator, that radio and focus it on something else is radically shifting the way like it's just rerouting the out of the whole operating system. Here. I'm saying no, this is not what I'm doing right now I acknowledge the thought, I come back to the breath. Maybe that same thought comes up again, oh, no, I'm acknowledging it, I'm coming back to the breath. Every time we do that, we are rewiring the brain, we are retraining it that we don't have to chase after every anxiety producing thought that comes up in our life, we can make a different choice, a choice to be present to choice to be mindful a choice to be, in some sense, kinder to ourselves. And that's really good training for the rest of our lives. So that we can learn to be present. In every other waking hour, we can be present with our tea, we can be present with our spouse, we can be present with a good meal, and actually start to enjoy it more. How often do you generally recommend like somebody should do this, this often this wall, it sometimes varies. But I would say for many people, I would recommend something along the lines of like 10 minutes a day, and trying to make it a daily practice. Now, I also acknowledge that most people have like their nine to five or some version thereof, Monday to Friday. And then the weekends are a little different. And so it's sort of hard to get into real rhythm. Because there's sort of two cycles, there's the a cycle of like my work day schedule, and then my B cycle weekend cycle. So if a daily practice ended up becoming five days a week, for example, because we get thrown off here and there. I think that's the end of the world. But I do think starting at that 10 minute mark is really powerful. Because quite frankly, we all do have 10 minutes a day, I work with all sorts of people who are, you know, hold really rigorous jobs, people who have kids and their kids are sitting on their lap while they meditate, like, people make it work, which is it's beautiful to see. But 10 minutes, we all we all can do it somewhere in there. It's interesting, right? Like jump times, your brain gets so tired that I feel like I've been doing all this stuff all day. I don't have time to think anymore.
Right? Like, can you just meditate just sitting on the couch?
Unknown Speaker 13:30
You can I mean, I often think it's a great thing to sort of have an established corner or an established chair or something that says that's where I go to meditate something that magnetizes and says that's where I go to do the thing. Absolutely, I think that can be really helpful. And again, it doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be could be meditation cushion, we can mark the space with an incense burner, a candle an image of someone we admire a statue, any number of things. But suddenly it's like, oh, yeah, that's where I get to meditate. That can be really helpful in setting up a practice. But to answer the question more directly because I've been all over I there's like always the simple answer, then there's the inspiring, but yes, you could absolutely meditate on the couch and you know, I often do you know, like that's in a finished the morning coffee or tea and I say, Okay, I've got some time and I just sort of settle in and I, I just practice there. But I think it gets a little chaotic if for example, we do have kids and they're running around and they want to play with us or whatever version.
Nick VinZant 14:26
You mentioned, you've been teaching for a long time, what generally, what generally do you find holds people back?
Lodro Rinzler 14:36
self doubt, is probably a good one. I mean, not a good one. But you know, it's a big one that many of us struggle with that there is some sense of disheartened meant once we get going like, as I mentioned before, something must be wrong with me if I still have thoughts. I thought I should be able to sit down, maybe even press something behind the ear and then all of a sudden like the mind shuts off like a computer shutting down. or something. And I should just be without thoughts. And because I'm sitting here and everyone else's looks so still, they must be completely absorbed in the breath. And I'm sitting here freaking out about it, because I'm not very good at it. And they get very disheartened very quickly. Or, they do it a few times because they actually listen to a conversation like ours, and they're like, Alright, I'll give it two weeks, I'll try it. And then two weeks roll around, and they're like, I'm still myself. Like, there's some sense of like deep self aggression for so many of us. And the sense of doubt that I'm talking about it's not like a, you know, a doubt like, Oh, I doubt I look like an orange. You know, it's a sense of this insidious. I mentioned the inner narrator before my friend, in a co author of one of my books, how to love yourself and sometimes other people. Megan Watterson. She has a great phrase in there, which is our inner bitch radio set little voice, it's like, oh, my god, you're a little jerk. Why are you like this? What? Why didn't you prepare better for both? Well, it's just that constant, like, Oh, you know, that self flagellation that so many people do, like really deep, painful voice that is constantly undermining us. That's the same voice that says, Oh, I can never meditate. Meditation does help us turn that voice down. Or not buy into that voice. So much, I should say. But we sort of have to do a little bit to get there. And so it's, you know, the thing that holds us back from a consistent practice is also the thing that we learned to work with once we started a practice, which is why it's actually really helpful to come full circle to work with a meditation teacher on a regular basis to have someone that you either connect with in classes or one on one or any number of things that might establish relationships that when these sorts of thoughts come up, or when we get disheartened. And say I want to leave the practice, I don't want to do it any more, that we could come back to some sense of support. And I feel like that's, it's not like we need to find, you know, the wise person on the top of the mountain, we just need to find someone who's a little bit ahead of us on the path and who's been doing it for a little bit longer. So that they they can be like, yeah, I've been there. I know exactly what that's like. And here's how I worked with it.
Nick VinZant 17:13
Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?
Lodro Rinzler 17:17
Sure.
Nick VinZant 17:18
What if I meditate, and I just find out that my life kind of sucks. And I don't want to meditate anymore? What should I do?
Lodro Rinzler 17:27
Yeah, it's a great question. So I mean, if you find out that your life sucks, then you probably want to make some changes in your life. So if we talk about becoming familiar with we go back to that phrase from however long ago, the sense of Okay, I'm getting familiar with what's going on with me. And natural discernment starts to arise out of our meditation, what aspects of my life Do I want to cultivate more of which ones might I want to cut out or, you know, at least cut down on? So if we're saying, Oh, my gosh, that friend, they're such a jerk. And we come back to the breath. Oh, he saw their friend, you know, what a jerk. And come back to the breath. At some point in my, you know, weeks of meditation, I might say, Hmm, maybe I don't want to spend as much time as I do with those people. It doesn't feel good to me. Right? It's like, even for the most dense of us, such as myself, we start to say, Oh, that's a choice I can make in my life, I can make a better choice. So we start to realize that some parts of our life are not so great, that we say, Okay, good. Now I have that information. Where do I want to direct my time and energy, and we can actually make, we can actually make good changes in our life. So I think that would be great. If you discovered, you know, here's some aspects of my life that I really don't like. And here's some ones I really do want to spend more time on. Turns out that I've got, you know, this group of friends that really inspire me, and I always feel like I have meaningful conversations with them. Maybe I spent more time with them can go both ways.
Nick VinZant 18:45
Ah, this person says, I tried to meditate, but I just fall asleep. Is that bad? Or is that okay?
Lodro Rinzler 18:53
I always joke that there is an ancient Buddhist remedy for anyone who finds himself consistently falling asleep in meditation. And it's really easy. And that remedy is to get more sleep. kicking a dead horse here, but like, if that's what you discover, and meditation, that's what you learn about yourself. Yeah, that's good information for you to have because probably you are exhausted, and you don't, you're probably not taking great care of the body. And maybe you do need to get more sleep, or maybe you need to prioritize rest and other ways as well. Like, actually, you know, taking long walks and not always being on screens, or whatever it is for you that might feel more relaxing. So that when we do go to bed, we have deep sleep, and finding that's actually a really big issue for many people in the pandemic. They're having trouble asleep. They're finding like, Oh, you know, I'm staring at this screen all day and I'm staring at that screen all night and then they get into bed. And there's all these worries, I never actually take any time to talk to anyone about them. And I've just stayed up and I feel wired and you know, I've been exhausted during the day and I Up all night. And I think if that is the case for this person or anyone out there, I think we really do need to do some deep body relaxation. And we always start meditation classes with, at least to me, work that I do with actually getting into the body and getting to know the body. When we get in bed, that's time that we might want to sleep. When we meditate, there's actually time that we're trying to be wakeful. That's the time that we might move into a sense of relaxation, where we are present and relaxed. The goal is to be relaxed and open and wakeful, to be present to what's currently going on so that we can become more present to what's going on in the rest of our life. But here, we find that we're like toppling over. In addition to getting more sleep, there are some things I would recommend one would be to do some simple stretching so that we get into the body early, even before we do the short body scan. Another would be to drink some water or some, you know, some green tea, something that isn't like going to like wire us but something that does wake up in the body a little bit, there are certain things that we can do. And even in the posture itself, like sometimes we find that people like slouched over a lot. And this, you know, that's actually not helpful in terms of rousing the energy in the body. So even lifting up through the top of the head, and elongating the spine can bring about some sense of energy, keeping the shoulders slightly back, keeping the palms down on the thighs. These actually make us feel a little bit more uplifted, even though we're also feeling relax. So that's sort of the less snarky answer. But I do suspect for anyone who consistently as far as the meditation, that they might need to look at their sleep cycle and whether they are getting the rest of the need, particularly as I mentioned, in this pandemic,
Nick VinZant 21:45
there are many different kinds of motivation or motivation, meditation, I mean, is one kind superior to the other, in your opinion.
Lodro Rinzler 21:53
It's a great question. And I'm going to be diplomatic. I mean, obviously, I've got a preference, but I come from a Buddhist tradition. So I'm gonna be like everyone should be doing mindfulness, mindfulness of the breath is a great place to start. Part of that is because it is so easy, so simple, the technique, right, we take an uplifted and relaxed posture, we connect to the body breathing, when we get distracted, we come back to the breath, you Those are the three steps, you just learned them. Congratulations, you can go meditate, which is a little bit different than some other traditions where we might need to go through a weekend retreat to receive a mantra, which is, you know, a particular phrase that we would repeat, where we need to create a particular situation that were listened to pleasant sound, or we, you know, focus on emotions and emotions are often very ephemeral and very difficult to focus on for somebody who's brand new to it until it's self worth. So I have a preference, but at the same time, it's a little bit like asking me is asking you a guitar player. what's what's the best musical instrument? The guitar player is probably gonna say guitar, same thing.
Nick VinZant 22:52
What inspired you to write the write your new book, take back your mind?
Lodro Rinzler 22:56
Yeah, so the new book, take back your mind Buddhist advice for anxious times? And it's, I mean, the short answer is anxious times. It's like the last part of the title. Right? Right, that we live in these ridiculous anxious times. Now, I grew up with anxiety, even though I started meditating when I was six, but like this was, you know, there was a lot of issues that came up from my life, different forms of anxiety that arose deep losses in my life that really pulled the rug out from under me. And even though I was a meditation meditator, and even a meditation teacher, I realized that I needed to also work with my mind, in all the post meditation hours to actually start to, like rewire around anxiety rewire around my response to the ways that I would hold myself back. And the more I started doing that work, the more I started noticing how many other people around me were also struggling in the same way. And this is a lot of what we work with in meditation, which is getting comfortable with not knowing, and uncertainty and discomfort. And like, for the first not the first time, but for maybe the first time in my life. It's not personal anxiety of like, oh, here's what I'm going through, or even interpersonal, like, you and your friend are having an issue. It's a societal anxiety. Like there's, even though we live in different places, the idea of when I say lockdown someone, you know, living in Australia, understand what I mean. And we're at a time where I just feel like anxiety is reaching all time high and yet, no one's talking about it. It's like this. He wouldn't be like, well, the second pandemic is blank, but it is like it's something that so many of us are suffering from.
Nick VinZant 24:37
Final question. What is the best advice you've ever given somebody? What is the best advice you've ever received?
Lodro Rinzler 24:44
Gosh, what an interesting question. I don't give him really good advice. You know, for all of my, it's, I don't mean to be self deprecating here. But for all of my years of teaching meditation, all I do is essentially share what I've learned. from teachers who were generous and taught me, so it's not like I came up with any of it. You know, whatever I share with people, it's something that actually comes from centuries and centuries of people who knew I learned, I learned with someone who currently is alive and to learn with someone, and they learn with someone, and they learn with someone all the way back for 1000s of years. So I feel like a lot of the advice I give, I'll just say maybe more recently around the book of in xiety, is to realize that we could actually make a choice around anxiety and working with our mind that we don't have to live in an HST. There's an analogy, an analogy in Buddhism, that you're in the woods, and out of nowhere, an arrow comes and hits you in the arm. And the thing we ought to do probably is to take that arrow out and tend to our healing. And yet many of us in that moment, when we feel wounded when we feel like oh, there's pain or stress or anxiety and stress in our life, we say, Ah, you know what, this is so typical, like, this is such a thing that would happen to me on a day like today, no one else gets hit in the arm by arrows. It's just me, like, this is no such a thing. I bet this was a you know, who showed me a bit it was that person who I don't like this is so typical them. And we just keep telling ourselves story upon story upon story. And that is holding us in that state of pain. And that is known as the secondary. So this is the two arrow analogy, first arrow, there's pain that comes up. As part of life, there are stressful situations that happen to all of us. The second arrow is the stories that we then read to ourselves to reify, that state of pain, to hold ourselves in that state of stress. And so I suppose the quote unquote, best advice I might be able to give around this particular book is we don't have to do the secondary, that we don't have to hold ourselves in that state of, well, what if this happens? What if that happens, we can actually retrain the mind to do something else to actually become more present. So that's the advice. And then the best advice that I have ever received? It's such a good question. I wish I could give a more thoughtful answer and give you the actual best advice. But the answer that comes to my mind, the first one that pops up, good advice that I have received was, my last book was on the topic of heartbreak. It was called Love Hurts Buddha's advice for the heartbroken. And I get more emails about that book than any other book, maybe not surprisingly, because that's another thing where people really feel like, no one knows my pain. No one's ever been through this before. And then they pick up a book like that. And they're like, Oh, this person, sort of highlighting all the things that happened when I have a broken heart. So it's very sweet actually, to be in touch with with readers about these books. I enjoyed that tremendously. But the, in that there was there's a lot of stories, my own heartbreak, and the learning and unlearning that I had to do, particularly in my 20s. And there is a moment where everything really fell apart for me that I had lost my job, my best friend died, and my fiance had broken up with me. And I called a friend, friend who coincidentally just had a baby yesterday. And I said to him, Brett, I need you to tell me that I'm going to love again, because I actually don't believe that's gonna happen. I think this was it. And he said, Listen, I know that you will love again, because that's in your nature. That's who you are. And I don't know if it will be a long term romantic situation that turns into marriage, I don't know if it will be other situations where people come and go in your life, I don't know if it will be lots of friends and family. But I know that you will lead a life marked by love. And that was so meaningful to me at that moment, in that deep, like state of despair. And when people reach out, there's literally, there's a chapter in the book where I tell the story and say, if you feel this way, send me your phone number. And I'll tell you the same thing. So I find myself calling people a couple times a week. This book came out five years ago, it's still a couple times a week, except for the people internationally who I have to I'm like, I'm sorry, but I'm just gonna email you back. That's okay. But I deliver the same message which is, you know, even these devastating heartbreaking emotions that we go through are impermanent, they're subject to impermanence, just like everything else, and that, ultimately, we do heal and the pain paid to some degree. And we do love again, that's not a low draft. And that's a human thing we all do. So that was beautiful advice I received and I'm happy now to be passing on to others.
Nick VinZant 29:41
I want to thank lodro so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him. We have a link to him on our social media accounts, or Profoundly Pointless on Instagram and Twitter. And we have also included his information in the episode description. Okay, now let's go ahead and bring in a man who's great at fun himself but in a completely different way. JOHN jaw? What does internal you think of you?