Most of us feel we have miles to go with self improvement. That we want to become calmer, wiser, more finished. What if this pursuit actually keeps us trapped from that becoming? Zen teacher and psychiatrist Robert Waldinger argues that enlightenment isn’t a destination or a rare mystical state. Rather, its the ever-shifting recognition of the present moment.

This quiet state of noticing, Waldinger says, can be extremely liberating, freeing us from the pressure of becoming.

ROBERT WALDINGER: I am a Zen practitioner and I'm an ordained Zen priest, and I'm a Zen teacher. I'm actually a Roshi, a Zen master. And so I meditate every day. I teach meditation here in the United States and actually internationally, it's a big part of my life. And what I find is that it is an enormous benefit in terms of how I think about my own life, other people's lives, how I think about my research, how I think about working with patients.

- [Narrator] Everyday Zen, mindfulness, impermanence and compassion.

- Zen emphasizes community. It's called sangha in the Buddhist language. And it's really the idea that we practice learning about ourselves and each other by being in relationships with each other, both during meditation sessions and out there in the world. So we practice with whatever comes up for us. So if I get annoyed at my friend, I practice with that. I notice the annoyance, I feel what it feels like in my body and in my brain, and I notice what I do with annoyance. And then I notice how my friend reacts to me when I'm annoyed. All these things are part of this kind of deep dive into what is my experience like of being in a relationship? What's joy like in a relationship? One of the principles of meditation is that if we really look at our own lives, our minds are messy and chaotic, and we're not always proud of what we feel or what we think. And we come to accept all of that as just part of being human. And then what we realize is that everybody is having the same experience. Everybody's minds are messy and chaotic, and everybody has thoughts they're not proud of and impulses they don't like. And when we realize that, we come to have a lot more compassion for ourselves and for other people, there's a lot more acceptance. The idea is that we move from a place of wanting the world to conform to what we like and don't like. We move from that place to not needing other people to be different from who they are, realizing that each of us is just showing up in the world as we are, and that's something to be celebrated and accepted. Well, the main explicit goal of Zen is nothing. Zen is a practice. Now, the side effect of practice is waking up. Waking up really means understanding more deeply the truth of what it means to be alive, the truth, for example, that everything is constantly changing, including me, that even the things that look like they are fixed and stable are always in a process of continual change. That's really helpful because often we try to fix things. We try to hold on to things and make them stay the same, and we suffer a lot when we do that. So learning about the truth of what we call impermanence relieves a lot of suffering that we inflict on ourselves. I would rate the concept of impermanence as number one, as the greatest hit of Zen Buddhism. Basically, the idea of everything constantly changing means that Bob has no fixed self or identity. Bob is always fluid. I am always in the process of change, and I'm always connected with other people and other things in the world that are themselves changing. And so there's nothing fixed. There's nothing to hold onto in the deepest sense. And that on the one hand, that can be scary. On the other hand, it can be an enormous relief because we tell ourselves so many stories about who we are and who we're supposed to be and how the world is supposed to be. And when we really know the truth of impermanence, we let a lot of that go. One of the things that impermanence helps us understand is the ebb and flow of all of our experience. So when we really get that everything arises and then passes away, that means that my annoyance at this other person is only temporary. It's not going to stay the same no matter what. All you have to do is watch an emotion for long enough, and you'll see that it changes. That's helpful when we're caught in the middle of some unhappy relationship, some unhappy argument or something going on with another person where we can fall back on that awareness that it is not gonna feel this way forever. In fact, it's probably not gonna feel this way an hour from now, certainly not a day from now or a week from now. And keeping that long-term perspective of impermanence can go a long way to make us feel more accepting of the ups and downs of a relationship in any given moment. The four noble truths are perhaps the most iconic teachings of the Buddha. They're translated in many different ways, but they start with the Buddhist statement that life is suffering or better translated I think, life is unsatisfactory, that there are always aspects to life that we don't like, and that that's an inevitable part of being alive. And then the second teaching is that the source of suffering is known, that it is greed and aversion or hatred and ignorance that suffering can be relieved. That's the third truth. And the fourth truth is that there is a way of life that the Buddha called the eightfold path that can help relieve all this suffering in life. It's often said that the Buddha was teaching that you could get to a point where you never suffer anymore. Zen does not teach that. Zen does not teach that anybody finally arrives at a place where we don't ever feel pain, where we don't ever feel worry or unhappiness. Rather, what we can do is learn to be with what's unsatisfactory in life, learn to be with unhappiness, even be with pain in a way that makes it more bearable, in a way that doesn't layer on optional suffering. The optional suffering being the stories we tell about how unfair it all is. For example, that I have back pain or how unfair it is that I've got a cold today, that all of these things are workable. But Zen teaches that unsatisfactoriness is always there in life, and that we do have preferences that we're never going to completely give up our preferences, but that what we can do is learn to cling less tightly to our preferences. In other words, to insist less that the world be a certain way. I mean, think about in relationships how much we try to insist that someone else be a certain way that we want them to be, and how much less we suffer if we let that go. And just assume that that person is allowed to show up in the world as they are, and we are allowed to show up in the world as we are. So this idea of relieving suffering is in Zen, the idea of being able to face towards suffering, looking at it and living with it in a way that hurts less. Buddhism talks about the idea of attachment. And it doesn't mean attachment in the way we normally think of it, like just being connected to somebody or something. It's really about holding on tightly to a fixed view of something. So I'm attached to the idea that there's one true religion or one true political party, or one true anything. There's a wonderful teaching in Zen about beginner's mind. Beginner's mind being the idea that we let go of all the stories we tell ourselves that we're so sure of that, you know, we become an expert in life and an expert in ourself. Shunryū Suzuki was a Zen master who had a saying that I love. He said, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. And what he meant by that is when we can remain open to many possibilities rather than narrowing everything down and being so sure that we know what's what, that we become open to surprise, open to new ways of experiencing ourselves and the world that make us suffer a great deal less than when we are so-called experts. And the older I get and the more people call me an expert, the more aware I am of how little I know. Having a beginner's mind really helps in relationships because it allows us to be curious. It allows us to say, okay, there's so much I don't know about this person. Let me watch closely. Let me notice what I haven't seen before about this person. Let me find new ways to interact with this person. And that brings a kind of freshness and openness to relationships that can otherwise easily get stale. The best definition I know of mindfulness is simple. It's paying attention in the present moment without judgment. So it's really just paying attention to whatever's here. So right now, for me, that's talking with you. That's the feel of the chair on my back. It's the feel of the air on my skin. It's the sound of my voice, kind of reverberating in my head, all of those things. And simply being open to all the experiences that are here right now, not just the little thoughts going on in my head. And so mindfulness asks us to be more expansive, to open our awareness beyond thinking to everything going on in the world. You can work on it right now. You can work on your mindfulness right this moment by simply paying attention to whatever stimuli are reaching you. It might be your heartbeat, it might be your breath, it might be the sound of the fan in the room, the traffic outside, anything. And simply letting yourself be open and receive whatever is here right now. And you can do that in any moment. You can do that when you're sitting in a meeting. You can do that when you're waiting for an airplane at the airport. You can do that when you're driving your car. In fact, being mindful could be really useful when you're driving your car. When we really know what it feels like to suffer, to be in pain, to be unhappy, to be scared, we're better at knowing what's coming from inside from me and what's coming from outside. Many times we mistake those two. I come home and I don't realize that actually my knee hurts and I find myself more irritated at my partner. And so one of the things that being really mindful about my own experience does is it makes me a little less likely to blame other people for what's going on in me. And that can be hugely helpful when we talk about harmony in relationships. The other way that being mindful about my suffering can help in my relationships is it helps me realize, oh, everybody suffers in this way. If I'm more irritable when I'm not feeling well, that must mean that everybody's more irritable, or most people are when they're not feeling well. And it allows me to remember to cut people's slack when they're not feeling well, right? Instead of just being annoyed that they're a little short with me. So there are these ways that knowing about my own discomfort and what I do with it can be a huge help in being empathic toward other people. There's a concept of meta loving kindness in Buddhism, and there are a couple of different ways that it's talked about. One is an explicit skill that we can cultivate. You can do a loving kindness meditation where you think about another person and you meditate on that other person, and you say to yourself, may you be peaceful, may you be happy, may you be at peace. And you do that over and over again, and you come to feel differently about the other person, including about people you don't like very much or you're angry at. So there's that way of actively cultivating a skill. There's another way, which is simply by becoming more and more aware of your own pain, your own anxious, angry thoughts, your own difficulties. Because what happens when we become more aware of that through meditation, for example, is that we become much more empathic toward other people. And naturally that kind of loving kindness arises where we see an angry person and say, oh, I wonder if that person is having a terrible day, rather than immediately reacting with our own anger. That's a different way to cultivate loving kindness. But it happens pretty reliably through meditation. There's a lot of talk about enlightenment. It's a concept that's very old in Buddhism, but also in other spiritual traditions. And it can mean so many different things. But in my Zen tradition, it really refers to waking up to the truth of what life is and to some of the surprising aspects of life that we don't normally see. Most specifically, the interconnectedness of everything, the essential oneness of everything. That yes, on one level, everything exists separately. I exist separately from you, and this chair exists separately from me. And at the deepest level, none of it is separate. All of it is completely interconnected and always changing. That is awakening to the truth of life. Now, enlightenment is often held out as a thing that we can get. And in fact, you can read accounts of people sitting in long periods of meditation, sometimes on retreats, where they essentially have these amazing experiences. Sometimes they feel like out of body experiences and they can write elaborate descriptions of what these are like. And sometimes people feel like, well, if I just have those experiences, then I'm enlightened. And if I had those experiences once, I want them back. So I want to try to get them back again. What we teach in Zen is that that's actually dangerous. That nobody lives in a kind of unusual altered state all the time. Most of us never do. And if we have unusual experiences, it's very brief, an experience of, for example, complete interconnectedness and oneness cannot last. In fact, one Zen teacher did a set of interviews with people who had had enlightenment experiences, and he put them into a book. And the title of the book was "After The Ecstasy, The Laundry." And what he meant by that was that no matter what kind of unusual we might have of waking up of enlightenment, we always go back to needing to do the laundry and needing to brush our teeth and needing to go to work. That that is just how life is. So, although most of us, myself included, wish that there were a way to get enlightened and stay that way, to get to a place where it's always blissful and we never suffer, I have never met a human being on this earth who gets to that place. And Zen teaching is that that's not possible. That in fact, we move in and out of states of being more awakened or less awakened, that no matter how evolved you are as a spiritual practitioner, you're gonna have times when you're just all upset about stupid stuff, when you're just deluded, as we say. And then you move back into periods where you see life more clearly. That's important for me because if you meet people who hold themselves out as an ultimately enlightened person, be very suspicious of that. Be very suspicious of anybody who claims to be a perfectly evolved, enlightened human being. Shunryū Suzuki, a very important Zen teacher in the United States in the 20th century was famous for saying that there's no such thing as an enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity. And what he meant by that was that no person is finally fully and forever enlightened. There is only this moment's activity. So if I do something that is kind, that pays attention to my interconnectedness with everyone and everything, that is enlightened activity, if I do something that's selfish, if I do something that destroys the planet, that is unenlightened activity. And so the idea of pursuing enlightenment really is not pursuing a self-improvement project. It's pursuing a way to be as compassionate as I can in each moment, to pursue enlightened activity in as many moments as I can string together in my life. That's the goal. One fact about enlightenment is that it can't be permanent. If we really know the truth of impermanence, then why would enlightenment be permanent when everything else is not? So clearly, enlightenment has to come and go just like everything else. Striving for enlightenment is a self-improvement project. And what we talk about in my Zen tradition is that we don't want to embark on a self-improvement project. We want to strive for greater kindness and harmony in the world, rather than being lost in the delusion of an isolated permanent self. And so really what we wanna strive for is enlightened activity in the world.