Tami Simon: This Program Is Brought to You by SoundsTrue.com. at SoundsTrue.com, You Can Find Hundreds of Downloadable Audio Learning Programs Plus books, music, videos, and Online Courses and events. at SoundsTrue.com, We Think of Ourselve

But our sense of worth should transcend all that. I'm a human being on planet Earth. I'm a peaceful warrior in training, as are you and all of your listeners. We should base our worth on that.

Why? Why is it important to have a strong sense of self-worth? Because if we don't, we tend to self-sabotage. We don't feel deserving. We get uncomfortable if something good happens, or we get in our own way. That's why it's the first of those 12 areas. And I do describe some of what I've shared with you now on our program.

TS: When you talk about being flawed—that we're all flawed, we're all human—I relate to that. And yet the subtitle of the series is a Practical Path to Courage, Compassion, and Personal Mastery. This is one of the things I wanted to ask you about—this idea of personal mastery. How do we understand that we're flawed human beings but there's a path to something like personal mastery?

DM: Wow, I love your questions. First of all, the term "master" is very tricky. In the East, they call someone "Master this," "Master that." It's an honorific like mister or Roshi, or anything like that. Mastering implies arriving at a destination, but I'd like to redefine that for the sake of the conversation.

And I'll do it this way: To be a master potter or a master sculptor or artist or gymnast or poet, I believe we step onto the path of mastery even near the beginning of our journey. Even when our skills aren't very high, we're on the path of mastery as soon as we make one fundamental recognition: "What I'm doing," whatever that may be, "is a direct reflection of my life."

In other words, how I do anything is how I do everything. If I practice gymnastics and I'm barely learning a few fundamental cartwheels but I recognize, "You know, learning gymnastics is a lot like life. It's a metaphor. It's a reflection of my life. I'm on the path of mastery."

Many people have become professional athletes—and I'm presuming this, but I believe—without ever stepping under the path of mastery because they haven't connected up their skill level—they haven't broadened it into the arena of daily life [and] how they're growing as people. I've seen many athletes—I've never seen a dumb athlete. I've seen academically disinclined athletes who don't have skills or even high IQs, but anybody who's skillful moving their nervous system and their body has a smart body and the nervous system is connected to the brain. Many athletes have learnt spiritual laws—universal laws about process, balance, presence—but they don't know what they know because they're so busy focused on external rewards—medals, scores, winning, losing, records. And they haven't noticed all they're learning about life.

This is the idea of mastery—recognizing, connecting what up what we do with the larger purpose and process of our life.

[Loud siren begins in the background.]

DM: By the way, I'm coming to you from Brooklyn, New York. I don't know if you can hear the ambient sound. I don't charge extra for that—the sirens in the background.

TS: Very good. Thank you, Dan. If I understand you correctly, you're defining personal mastery as being engaged moment to moment in whatever is happening in your life in a certain kind of way?

DM: I wrote a book titled Body-Mind Mastery and the subtitle is Training for Sport and Life. It is for athletes, or dancers, or martial artists, or anyone who trains in anything about the process of training—but it's "sport and life." That is why I call it Body-Mind Masteryfor the same idea.

Yes, it is engaged. We're saying, "I am learning how to live more. I'm learning about life through this discipline and the master teachers that I know don't teach us subjects. They teach us life through a subject."

TS: Let's, for a moment, go into this idea of these physical disciplines. I know that you've studied aikido and various other martial arts. You mentioned coaching gymnasts. What have you learned specifically from these physical disciplines that would apply to spiritual life for all of us?

DM: Let me answer that in a bizarre way. For those who remember that movie The Karate Kid, they may remember Mr. Miyagi, the Okinawan—the old gentleman who is a humorous and terrific martial artist. He used to play around with his chopsticks trying to catch flies with his chopsticks, seeing if he could grab them.

That came from an old Zen tale about Miyamoto Musashi, who was Japan's legendary swordsman. The story goes [that] one day he was in a little inn and his sword was there by his side in its scabbard. Some ruffians saw him walk in and they were impressed by that sword. They wanted to take it, basically. They were robbers. So, they started making loud comments about him, snide comments, but he ignored them. Miyamoto just picked up his rice with his chopsticks and continued serenely eating.

They got more and more aggressive, and finally they stood up and started surrounding him, going closer and closer. And just then, Miyamoto reached up and grabbed four flies—one, two, three, four—with his chopsticks and put them down. And then he turned and looked at them. By that time, they were running out the door because they'd seen what he just did. They recognized: here was a master.

It wasn't like the Western thing—"Well, he's pretty good with chopsticks. What can he do with a six-shooter?" You don't know because they did understand that how we do anything is how we do everything. They did not want to tango with this guy showing that kind of skill and ability.

So, sports are a visible metaphor for excellence, for striving—and by the way, I don't know if we're even going to get to the topic of success, but I never recommend anyone to strive for success. Not a good idea. Success is an abstract notion.

I recommend people strive for excellence because by striving for excellence moment to moment in anything we do—whether it's sport, dance, poetry, writing, the arts, whatever—if we strive for excellence, we're not only gaining facility and guaranteed to improve over time in anything that we practice consciously. We're guaranteed to improve. But more than that, we're not just learning one thing, we are learning skills—basic life skills. Persistence, concentration focus, sometimes courage, commitment. We're developing and honing those skills which carry over into everyday life. They become life skills.

So, sport is not the main thing, but many times people are grateful to their sport. They say, "This was my entryway into the present moment, into being absorbed in to the zone, into flow." Whatever tern you use.

I do not mean to imply that everybody needs to go out and become an athlete or become a sports person. However, I do recommend some practice. Whether it's the practice or meditation—including moving meditation like tai chi. But, practicing some physical skill is a wonderful way for us to remind ourselves about how we can learn, how we can evolve, and it's visible. We see visible improvement over time.

If I can share one more story . . .

TS: Sure.

DM: When I turned 60, which was—at the time of our recording here—about 11 years ago, I wanted to do something special for that anniversary. My wife said, “Have you thought about learning to ride a unicycle?” I went, "Wow, what a great idea." A friend of mine had a unicycle. He loaned it to me and told me to go to a large tennis court. I had two courts; it was a big space. It was level and I could get a death-grip on the chain-link fence, holding onto it while trying to stay up on this.

Anybody who's tries to ride a unicycle knows it's humbling because you get up on it and it goes "Whoop!" out from under you. You get up, try to peddle; "Whoop!" out from under you. It feels almost impossible when you first try, even if you ride a bike well.

So, I practiced for two hours the first day and it took me that long almost slowly make my way around the perimeter of this double court. I practiced for the first week and at the end of the first week I could lean forward and say, "Let's see how far I can go." I careened rather than rode about six pedals. The second week, I was able to do 12 pedals careening forward without any real control.

To make the story short, by the end of the third week, every day I came back. No matter how discouraged I was, I came back for about half an hour and I practiced. In any case, by the end of that third week, I could ride figure eights around the tennis court. Something clicked and I could ride a unicycle.

I learned two things from this experience—this physical training experience that I must have learned in gymnastics years before but I had forgotten. The first thing I learned was: everything is difficult until it becomes easy. The second thing I learned was even more important. There were a couple of days during that three-week process of learning where everything fell apart. It was a crisis. I was worse than I was three or four days before, and it was very discouraging. Many of us have experienced that in practicing something. Then I realized that usually the day after that so-called bad day I made a breakthrough—a sudden improvement.

It seemed to me that in life—whether it's a crisis in a relationship or in learning a skill—those so-called bad days when everything seems to fall apart, when our bodies are confused, our mind is confused—those are the days that learning is really happening. It's transferring from the front brain to the back brain, going deeper like learning to drive a gear shift car. You know how it's slow at first, then it clicks. Again, doing physical practices teach us these kind of things that are quite useful resources for everyday life. So, now I face any challenge in everyday life the same way based on what I've learned.

TS: I'm curious if in these physical disciplines that have been so magnetizing to you—including riding a unicycle—what have you learned specifically from working with your body? Whether that's breathing or relaxation or balance, what would be the most important lessons that you've learned at the body level?

DM: Two lessons, I would say. One is that spiritual life begins on the ground, not up in the air. It's so easy to get lost in abstract concepts and elegant ideas, but I always go, “What do you do with all of those ideas? How do you incorporate that into everyday life?”

There's that story from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior where Socrates tells me that knowledge or understanding is a mental faculty, but wisdom is doing something. I didn't quite understand. So Socrates—I was helping him with servicing a car that he had pulled into the service station, and he was just telling me the difference between knowledge and wisdom. I didn't quite get it, so he said, "You know how to clean a windshield, right?" I said, "Yes, I do." He tossed me the squeegee and said, "Wisdom is doing it.

There's something about that spiritual life beginning on the ground and doing—bringing it into life by doing it. Doing is understanding. Doing is realization.

So, that's one thing that physical engagement has taught me. The other is that enlightenment doesn't necessarily happen out of the body. Even though people talk about "out of body experiences," many people haven't even gotten into their body yet in terms of really, fully incarnating. Enlightenment is a whole-body experience. It may be that it's not even a mental experience—that enlightenment is just being a body living naturally in the world, without a head—just living naturally as a body. So, I believe enlightenment may be a physical, physiological phenomenon—not just some mental breakthrough.

TS: When you say that—"a physiological phenomenon"—in those moments, Dan, what does it feel like?

DM: People of course love stories of enlightenment—when the cosmic oar smacks us alongside the head and we suddenly realize or have a breakthrough. I have had various experiences. One time I realized in a way I can't fully articulate. It felt like a liberation from emotions—that I still had a lots of emotions, but they weren't me. That's easy to say. It's just words. But I couldn't sleep the whole night. I was so excited. It seemed like such an amazing discovery that I can't really articulate—thus the quotation by Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, who said, "Those who speak don't know. Those who know do not speak," because you can't really speak in words about transcendent experiences.

There was another time: I was sitting on a curb in Berkley, California eating a grapefruit I just bought from a local market. Suddenly, something came over me. I was watching cars drive by at eye-level because I was sitting on a curb—and litter in the street and car exhaust coming out. And suddenly everything was absolutely perfect. The car exhaust was the most perfect car exhaust I ever saw, and the litter was absolutely perfect. I was perfect. Everything in the world was perfect.

Remember: this was back in 1967 [or] '68. The Vietnam War was raging—a horrible time in our history. But I was unable to see anything other than a perfect part of our process unfolding as human beings. I don't know why. By the way, there was nothing in the grapefruit—nothing special, nothing psychedelic, but it was almost like that.

I don't know how these things happen, but I do know that I've had many, many kenshōs—meaning a sudden insight or breakthrough—through sports, through practice. That sense of absorption and flow and being immersed in the present moment. It wasn't something I could talk about; it was just there. I think many of your listeners may have had similar experiences, but they might be looking for something bigger, more dramatic. But we've all had mini-enlightenments of one kind or another—awakenings, breakthroughs in moments in our life. Many of them are when we're immersed doing something.

TS: Now, Dan, I want to ask you a question about this discovery: "These emotions aren't me." After that night that you didn't sleep and you were like, "Oh my, these emotions aren't me," have you found yourself getting caught in emotional experience—like being really angry or something like that? Or do you never feel yourself caught in the same way again?

DM: That brings up a larger question when people ask me, "Dan, have you mastered all that you teach in all of your books?" That saying, "We tend to teach what we need to learn,"—I must have needed to learn a lot with 17 books.

The answer to that question—"Have I mastered everything?"—is no. Absolutely not. But, I'm sincerely practicing and that's all I can ask of anyone. I'm probably a good example of what I've realized, embodied, and I teach. Not a perfect example, but a good one. If I weren't, I'd have no business talking about it.

So, that's the first thing that comes to mind when you ask that. And if you could repeat the question, I would like to—

TS: It had to do with "these emotions aren't me," and: do you find yourself getting caught in emotions on occasion?

DM: Yes, of course! Sometimes I feel angry. Usually, my wife—she's so good at pushing my buttons. Those you're vulnerable to and close to—intimates, family. Ram Dass used to say, "You think you're enlightened? Go visit your parents." That's a litmus test.

Yes, of course all kinds of emotions arise. One could pathologize my experience because I was going through an extremely painful, depressive time when I had that breakthrough—when I realized, "I'm not my emotions." One could say I just dissociated and cut off from my emotions. But, I don't feel cut off and I didn't feel cut off then. I was completely vulnerable, feeling everything intensely. But at the same time, it wasn't me. It was just these things arising.

Many people who meditate for many years report having more of a distance from thoughts and from emotions. They see them, they acknowledge them, they experience them, but they don't let them run the household, so to speak.

So, sure: I have emotions and sometimes I identify with them. My wife and I will have a very brief—and they tend to be very brief—argument about something, and I'll be grumpy for about a minute. But then it passes quickly. So, that's one difference: it doesn't last as long.

If you watch a young gymnast—a female gymnast on the balance beam. When she's just learning and beginning to learn, she'll lose her balance and fall right off the beam. I used to coach women's gymnastics as well as men's, so I know this. And after a while, and more and more and more practice, she'll bobble and almost fall off, but manage to regain her balance. As she gets better and better to elite levels, she'll still make mistakes, but they tend to be smaller. So, you'll barely see any kind of bobble. She just corrects them. They don't last as long.

And that's the process—two steps forward, one step back. Even what we call enlightenment is more like a dimmer switch being turned up and down and up and down—but over time, up higher and higher rather than just one light switch going on permanently and that's it.

TS: I still wanted to ask you about the second realization you shared, looking out on the Berkley streets and seeing the perfection in the litter, the smog, and everything that was there. Probably one of the most quoted lines, Dan, from The Way of the Peaceful Warrioris, "There is never nothing going on. There are no ordinary moments." You even wrote a book called No Ordinary Moments.

What I wanted to ask you about this is that often we can connect to that. Maybe even in this moment, as the person is hearing me quote this insight of yours—"no ordinary moments"—this moment suddenly becomes spectacular in some way—precious, sacred. But then we find ourselves in so many other moments of our lives on the surface—nothing special is happening. It's repetitive. I don't feel this sense of aliveness and preciousness. Do you have any recommendations when people find themselves in those seemingly very ordinary moments?

DM: Yes, I do. There's another line from the movie—"There's never nothing going on." If we're bored, we're also probably boring in that moment. Boredom generally is watching our mind wriggle round and round. Meditation is learning to master boredom, because when you sit down with your eyes closed, there's nothing going on but your thoughts and impulses. That's why kids—when they get older and their lives get more complicated, that's when they start for the first time saying, "I'm bored. When are we going to get there?" because they're starting to see the contents of their minds. You don't see that in very, very young children. They're just absorbed in whatever is going on even though they don't know what it is.

In the book, what happens is I'm doing tai chi and it's very special. I'm absorbed in the movements, the flow of the routine, a meditative state, and when I finish the routine—I'm wearing shorts, its summertime and my long pants are nearby—I notice some young girls watching me and I'm aware of that. I'm like, "Wow. They're impressed with my martial arts movements." While I was thinking about them, I was trying to put on my pants, and I got two feet caught in the same pants leg and I fell over to their laughter.

That's what I learned in that moment: that there were no ordinary moments. I was treating one moment as special.

There was another more dramatic story where Socrates is watching me in the gymnasium. This is after I had recovered from the broken leg. I was getting back into shape, and I did this full, twisting double-somersault off the horizontal bar. People have seen that in the Olympics and so on. I stuck my landing, which is good. You land and you don't move at all. You aspire to that, and it felt like a good place to stop [the] workout. I just said, "OK, that's it, Soc," and I ripped off my sweatshirt [and] threw it in my workout bag.

We were walking down the hall afterward, and he said, "You know Dan, that last move you did was really sloppy." And I was like, "What you are talking about, Soc? That was one of the best dismounts I did in a long time." He said, "I'm not talking about the dismount. I'm talking about how you took off your sweatshirt and put it in your bag." Again, he was reminding me I was treating one moment as special—flying off the high bar—and another moment as ordinary—like it didn't count, it didn't matter.

He pointed that out once again: no ordinary moments. When we can live that, then we've really got something. He added something to that. I got this line into the movie, actually. He added to that. He said, "Dan, the difference between is you practice gymnastics." He said, "I practice everything."

What did that mean? That sounds strange. What did he mean he practices everything? Normally, we do the laundry, we do our homework, we do the dishes. We do things all the time but how many of us practice the dishes? Practice the laundry—folding it for example? Practice doing our signature? Practice walking, practice breathing? The moment we're practicing something with the idea of improving it, we become more absorbed in that.

What if I had practiced taking off my sweatshirt? How gracefully could I do it? Could I breathe while doing I'm doing it? Could I fold it up properly and put it in—and have that mindset?

That' s what he was pointing out. That lesson never changes. So, it's not just a slogan. There are no ordinary moments. But, it's actually a profound teaching. That's what I would say to address that question, that topic.

TS: [Yes]. If somebody finds themself in a moment where there are—let's say you're doing something like the laundry, and you're like, "OK, I know this is no ordinary moment, but it sure is feeling pretty ordinary to me. I'm so sick of doing the laundry. God. Every week these . . ." How can we snap out of it and reconnect to that feeling of preciousness?

DM: Sometimes—and I know you're asking on behalf of your listeners too. But sometimes when someone asks "how," they know the answer. They're really asking, "What's an easier way, a trick, a technique to do it?" In this case: sure. I can tell anyone a technique. Take an object—unless they're driving their car right now. I would not recommend. And if they are driving in their car, do not text or do anything else. Drive like a Zen master. Just for one minute, see if you can drive like a Zen master. How would a Zen master drive? Completely focused, secure, aware of everything going on around you—more than normal.

It's like—you know how we're listening to the radio or podcast or whatever while we're driving? But if we're looking for a place—like in the old days when we did not have Google maps or whatever and we were trying to get an address at night, we turned off the radio—you remember this—because we couldn't concentrate.

TS: Yes.

DM: We recognized that attention is a zero-sum game. If we're doing two things at once, we're only giving each of them about half—or relatively speaking, half of our attention. When you're talking on the phone with someone and they're doing email at the same time, you know it. You can tell. You can hear it in their voice. They're not fully there; they're not fully present.

So, people who think they're multitaskers have to understand that we really are splitting attention. We have X amount of attention; we can split into doing one thing or more. If people want to realize in any moment, "No ordinary moments," they can just take an object—a set of keys, a glass, a small object—toss it in the air and pretend they have to catch it or they die. They must catch it.

With that kind of commitment, they will not be thinking about what they're going to have for dinner that night or what they did yesterday. That's why people like to play Frisbee and play musical instruments and perform on the stage—because it brings them back to that.

The trick is—look, meditation is a great practice. You meditate over time, you see more into the nature of mind and so on. But if we we're the same rascals we were when we open our eyes again and go about our day, then the meditation hasn't contributed to everyday life. We need to start meditating our life. That is the practice—to start treating our life as if we're catching a Frisbee or playing a game or performing before an audience—and making it count.

Perhaps a start is just reminding ourselves, "This is not an ordinary moment. This counts." This counts because the quality of our moments becomes the quality of our lives.

Michael Murphy, in a book he wrote, had this wonderful idea—this concept. I think the book was called Golf in the Kingdom, but it wasn't just about golf. He talked about enjoying the in-between, because golfers tend to be really focused when they're swinging the club, hitting the ball, and seeing it fly. Then they go semi-unconscious grabbing their clubs and walking off, or getting in the golf cart and driving to the ball. Most of our life is lived in the in-between. So, we need to enjoy and focus on the in-between rather than just on hitting the ball.

TS: Now Dan, there's so many things that I could talk to you about, and there's so much that you cover in your new audio teaching series, The Complete Peaceful Warrior's Way. There's just one last thing that I really want to talk to you about—

DM: Sure.

TS: —which is towards the end of this audio teaching series, which is very comprehensive. As you mentioned, you cover a lot of different aspects of your work that you've delivered in 17 books. You pick here in this audio teaching series certain key themes. And then at the end, you talk about meditation. You quote a teaching from your new book, The Hidden School, which is really the conclusion to the story of The Peaceful Warrior. You quote an instructor in the hidden school who offers two instructions about proper meditation practice. The instructions that are given by this teacher: first, you must find a balanced posture; and then second, you must die. I thought, "This is really cool. This is really cool meditation instruction," and I wonder if you can explain it a little bit for our listeners, especially this second: "you must die."

DM: Yes. That was another one of those things that actually came to me years ago when I spoke with a Roshi and he gave those instructions. I had to think about it. "What did he mean 'die'?" Obviously, he didn't mean physically die, but a psychological death.

It brought me back to that idea of the savasana pose in yoga, where people do the corpse pose or lying on their back and relax at the end of a routine to regroup and so on. It can be treated just as a deep relaxation exercise, but savasana is really about dying. It is about saying, "Now I am dead. Now I am no longer on earth. I don't have any of the qualities of life, and I have no attachments, no unfinished business," because unless we die psychologically when we sit down to