366. Buddhism and Confidence with Ethan Nichtern

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Ethan Nichtern:

If we can view showing up and trusting ourselves as a practice rather than an outcome, it will help tremendously.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. 

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Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And our guest today in a word is awesome. His name is Ethan Nichtern. And he is the author of numerous books, including the widely acclaimed, The Road Home, A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path. He’s a renowned contemporary Buddhist teacher himself and the host of The Road Home podcast. 

He offers meditation and Buddhist psychology classes at conferences, meditation centers, yoga studios and universities, such as Brown Yale and NYU. He's been featured so many places in the media, CNN, NPR, New York Times, Vogue, Business Insider, Huffington Post, to name a few. And he's with us today to talk about his newest book, Confidence: Holding Your Seat Through Life's Eight Worldly Winds. 

Ethan, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today. 

Ethan Nichtern:

Thank you, Dr. Richard. It's really good to be here with you too. And thanks so much for having me on. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Absolutely. My pleasure. I've been excited about this interview for a while since it first got put on the schedule. So, I know you've done a lot of things. You've spoken in a lot of places but take us back. I want to kind of go back to that seminal point on your journey if you could identify it, that puts you on the path you're on today. 

Ethan Nichtern:

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks so much for that. Yeah. I think about that a lot. I mean, the way I got into studying Buddhism was through my parents. My parents were both -- my mom grew up in Arkansas. My dad grew up in New York City. And they were both students before I was born of one of the first big Tibetan Buddhist teachers to come teach in the Western world, man named Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. And so I grew up in New York City, but with Buddhist parents and as part of their kind of modern Buddhist community.

And in high school, I got interested in reading some of the books, people like Thich Nhat Hanh or Chögyam Trungpa or later Pema Chodron. And I started meditating a little bit in high school and I was really into the philosophy. I liked how the philosophy left a lot of room for human experience. Wasn't necessarily as much interested in origins of the universe. It was really about human experience, the experience of confusion, suffering, et cetera, and how to work with those experiences. And so it felt very useful. And also, it allowed me as a teenager, a lot of room to argue with the philosophy. It felt like it almost wanted you to be in conversation with it and contemplation. 

And then I got to college, and I had my first girlfriend. And then she dumped me and that's when I really got into Buddhism for the rest of college. So that's kind of my origin story with it. And then I always wanted to be a writer, which I talk about in my new book Confidence, is sort of part of the things, one of the things I've always been working with in terms of the journey of struggling with and discovering confidence. 

I never thought I was going to teach Buddhism or work with people in group or private situations. But it was throughout my 20s as I was more and more invested in the practice, I did a few teacher training programs. At that point, which was the early, mid-oddies, first decade of the 21st century. I think that's the term oddies, there weren't a lot of young people interested in Buddhism. A lot of the people in my parents’ community were kind of more in the boomer generation. And so I was really interested in kind of thinking about and conversing with Buddhist principles in the 21st century. 

And also, really have always had a comparative mind so I've always been and got increasingly interested in Buddhism's conversation with Western psychology and different modalities that are in conversation with it, uh, meditation and neuroscience and also interested in living an active and meaningful life in the world. So conversations about how spiritual practice and meditation and certain Buddhist concepts relate with artistic endeavors or creativity or activism or political engagement and things like that. 

So I'm just really interested in Buddhist practices in kind of a modern context. And this book, Confidence, really came from looking back at my own kind of history with these practices and teachings, and also really the conversations I have with students who study with me, that whenever we got sort of one step deeper into our mind or one step below, just to kind of more surface clean on the topic of mindfulness, which has become so widespread and so popular the last 20 or so years, the struggle with kind of how to trust yourself and show up with confidence seem to be what so many of us were dealing with. 

So I wanted to kind of go back. I wanted to write a book about confidence, not as like something I know how to do, but something from a more path or being immersed in the struggle standpoint. And I wanted to look at what Buddhism actually has to say about confidence and self-confidence, which is like, I think interesting because it has a lot to say about it, but it seems like Buddhism is about kind of disappearing from the world or experiencing no self or transcending all of the mundane ordinary experiences like, oh, are people going to -- am I going to be successful talking to Dr. Richard on his podcast or will this relationship be successful or how do I work with praise and criticism.

I think a lot of times we think that Buddhist thought is about like all those things are just the trappings of ego, so let's go somewhere else away from all those things. And I really think mindfulness and Buddhist practice is about showing up very fully to the journey of being a person amongst other people and showing up when we have hard emotions, like shame or jealousy or we really want something. And how do we work with that and deal with all of the ups and downs of being human in a kind of balanced and resilient way. 

So I kind of felt like the topic of this book Confidence was smart too, because usually my other books, like I have to whenever I run into an old friend or somebody introduces me to somebody who's not really familiar with my work or maybe not familiar with Buddhism, I have to describe the book that I'm writing a little bit and then go, oh yeah, that sounds interesting. With this book, I just get like half a sentence in before the person's like, oh, yeah, I need to read that. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I love this. I was reflecting on something as you were talking about this, and I think the word mindfulness has almost become a buzzword, right? And people have these different connotations as to what that really means. But as it relates to Buddhism, in a larger context, I do think you are correct in that most people probably who don't really understand Buddhism the way you do probably thinks it just means like transcending to a higher state of consciousness, right? Like an evolved aspirational version of yourself. 

But so what I'd love to do, and maybe this dovetails directly into the book, maybe it takes a little bit of a step back and touches the road home, but give us like a high level overview Contemporary Buddhism 101, because I think that would set a good foundation for where we go with the rest of the conversation regarding confidence. 

Ethan Nichtern:

Yeah, yeah. I mean I think there's so many different -- it's interesting because I do think Buddhism is often considered a religious tradition. I think a lot of us use the terminology spiritual. I think when we say religious, we usually mean as opposed to secular knowledge. Buddhism doesn't really come from a worldview that separates those two, right? Doesn't really have what happened in the age of enlightenment in Europe, where scientific or psychological knowledge gets put over here and religious inquiry gets put over there. 

But I think at its heart, Buddhism is a psychological tradition because its core, kind of you could say, North star or the question it's trying to answer which is established in really the first Buddhist teaching and the founder of the tradition 2,600 years ago really established this is about human dissatisfaction and trying to reduce human dissatisfaction and experience ease or even joy or happiness. Right? 

So it's the four noble truths, which is the very first teaching is always the North Star is about encountering the truth of what's called dukkha, which most often gets translated as either dissatisfaction or suffering. I actually like John Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction. He said that the word stress is just his translation of the word dukkha, right? 

So how do we work with this experience of feeling? You could also say, there's a more colloquial understanding of this term that has a sense of being misaligned with one's experience, right? Wanting things to be different from how they are, not feeling at ease with what our actual experience is, always feeling sort of in a state of struggle against reality, right. 

And so the question then is, it's a question of, can we move towards a liberation from that dissatisfaction? And I think there's some highfalutin definitions of that liberation, like enlightenment or complete awakening, like where we move through the world in a completely transformed way, which I think some people -- I get why we idealize that. I mean, there's different modern spiritual or psychological texts. 

Like I'm thinking of the power of now where Eckhart Tolle talks about like a complete shift in consciousness, not like an incremental path where maybe year by year or decade by decade, you say, okay, I developed a little bit more compassion for myself, a little bit more awareness of others, a little bit more ability to deal with my own thoughts and emotions and become more, a little bit more present, right? So I'm really interested in that incremental path. 

And also, I think Buddhism in its later evolutions is very much, uh, designed to be a relational path about how we work with in the space of self and other, right, to be an individual who's working with our own struggles, working with our own mind, and also is sharing relational space with maybe our partners or the people we want to go out on dates with, our families, our friends, our coworkers. And then larger relational spaces are our communities and our societies. So how do we navigate those spaces where we're actually trying to work simultaneously for the benefit of self and other which is sometimes referred to as the Mahayana or the later or greater vehicle Buddhist teachings. 

So I think that that kind of core, if there was like a core principle of Buddhism, because there's thousands and thousands of lists and different thousands of meditative practices and different teachings, teachings on how to speak and listen more effectively, teachings on generosity, teachings on loving kindness and compassion, visualization meditations. I mean, it's a very replete tradition with a lot of subsections. But it all really does come down to our dissatisfaction and the possibility of realigning with reality so that we feel more ease and more happiness to use a kind of -- happiness is a very controversial term, but I like it. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Well, I like it too. And I really like the way that you framed Buddhism from something that for many people may feel unobtainable, right? It's this thing that's up there in the sky and I'm supposed to elevate my consciousness to something that's aspirational and something that can be achieved incrementally because it makes it much more palatable and much more believable to somebody that they could walk that path. So I'm grateful that you shared that the way you did. 

Now, let's talk a little bit more about Confidence. And I have to ask about the subtitle because I've been intrigued by this for our whole conversation, Holding Your Seat Through Life's Eight Worldly Winds. So talk to us about that because I'd love to know what those eight worldly winds are.

Ethan Nichtern:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, first, just the first part, because I think the metaphor is really important. So the cover of the book is a tree being blown very strongly in the wind, maybe about to be blown over, maybe being able to keep its roots and just adjusting to the wind. So there's this metaphor for meditation posture in the teachings and the Tibetan based lineage that I've studied different forms of Buddhism, but that's the one that I mostly hold and practice and teach for when you arrive in your meditation seat, it's called taking your seat, right? 

And it's this moment of arriving. It's a moment of arranging your spine so that you feel a long spine, but it's also a metaphor for claiming your spot and showing up. Like there's a sense of saying, I am here, I can be here. And almost like I'm taking my seat in the center of my body, in the center of my mind, and in the center of my life, right? So taking your seat is kind of this powerful metaphor for like claiming our spot on earth. So it's kind of the opposite of transcending, right? It's like show up fully. 

And then the idea and the metaphor gets evolved because there's this idea that experiences hit us and they knock us around, right? They blow us maybe off our seat. You could think of like riding a horse or a roller coaster or a bicycle on through rocky terrain or something like that. All these forces come up and they knock us around. So the main body of forces that I'll talk about one minute are the eight worldly winds. 

But holding your seat means when something, and this is really what I think of as the practice of confidence. And I talk a lot in the book that confidence is not an end point. It's a practice, right? It's something that we work with when life knocks us around, right? When our mind knocks us around on the meditation cushion or our body feels uncomfortable or uncomfortable thoughts come in or in life when we get a text message that is critical, or we get knocked around in a good way. Like we fall in love and feel like we're going to be saved from ever having to have any problems again. Right. And we have a happy experience that can also knock us off our feet. 

So the teaching about what comes along and knocks us off our seat that I wanted to work with was this list that comes from the earliest Buddhism, from actually Siddhartha, the historical Buddha himself that I've always been fascinated by. It gets mentioned in modern Buddhist teachers’ books sometimes, but I wanted to write, give each of them kind of a lot deeper treatment because I think they're so powerful to just name as experiences and talk about. And also, because I think they really have to do with the forces of being a human in our modern lives. 

And so the eight worldly winds, they're sometimes called the vicissitudes, which has a sense of extremes. I like the wind metaphor as sort of being knocked around and riding the wind, and there's actually a cool visual metaphor that I can go into that I've always loved for where that, why I was so inspired by the notion of wind, but there are four pairs, right? 

So the eight worldly winds is four pairs. And in each of these pairs, there's an experience that can knock us off our seat, you could say, in a very positive way, in a way we hope for or desire for. And there's an experience that we fear, that can knock us off our seat in a way that's very deflating or scary or even dangerous to our sense of wellbeing. 

So the first pair of hope and fear, the first two worldly winds are pleasure and pain, right? And these are the most visceral, the most tied into our body and nervous system. The signals we're getting all the time, right? We long for pleasure and we seek to avoid pain. Right. That's kind of a basic rule. Sure, maybe if you're feeling masochistic, maybe you long for pain, but I think a basic rule of being human is pleasure feels good, pain feels bad. Right. And both of them can knock us off our seat. The little dopamine hit from our smartphone, it feels good, right, when you get a like on your Instagram post or whatever, but it distracts us from actual presence, and we can chase that experience. And then an hour later be like, why did I spend an hour on Instagram worrying about who's liking or leaving critical comments on my post? 

From there, the hope and fear twins or pairings get more tied to our, you could say our relational self or a sense of identity. So the next pair is praise and blame or criticism, right? So getting praised, you're doing great, man. You're doing awesome. That was so good. That feels good and that can inflate us. And criticism, like what were you thinking, can knock us off our seat. 

And then it has to do with our sort of larger sense of identity in the world, which classically that one is called fame and actually classically the feared pair in that is called infamy. But I was thinking about that, we kind of live in this social media era where you can, even if you're infamous, that can still give you a big identity. So I think what we really fear in terms of our public selves, if we long for such a thing is insignificance. So influence from the term influencer and insignificance as that pair of hope and fear.

And then the most general pair of hope and fear is sometimes it's called gain and loss, but it's translated in a way that I really like, success and failure. So whatever our endeavors are, whatever project we're working on, whatever identity, we could talk about a marriage succeeding or failing. Right? We get knocked around when it feels like our project is succeeding and we get knocked around a good way. We get a good burst of energy. And when it fails, we get deflated, right? We're terrified typically of failure. 

So we're going to have to change our relationship to what failure is, certainly if we want to practice confidence. So that one, I think that last one, success and failure, kind of brings together the whole understanding of what does resilience or trusting yourself or confidence mean in terms of working with what our mind and what our life throws at us.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Since we're doing this, and I love this, but you said you had a really cool visual analogy for these. Let's do that. And then I want to ask some clarifying questions. 

Ethan Nichtern:

Yeah. It's one that people have really resonated with. And so they're at car washes or mechanics or car dealerships, sometimes I don't know why they're always at things related to cars, but they're called tube men and two people. They're those long inflatable noodle looking guys with wavy shapes on them that wave in the wind. Sometimes there's a mechanical air blower blowing air into them. Sometimes they just go with whatever the wind is. And when air comes in, they wave at you, they look so happy, the two men. Like everything is great. And then as soon as they get deflated, it literally looks like they hate themselves, you know? 

So I love that metaphor and I love that metaphor drawn out with the wind metaphor of the eight worldly winds. And then there's a practice for rousing confidence that I talk about and instruct towards the end of the book from the Tibetan lineage called wind horse meditation. So I loved that sort of idea of like imagining that we each have one of those little two people in our heart center, in our chest. And like the day's going great and it's like, yay, the two man just lights up. And then something goes wrong, some failure, some unpleasant experience and just crumples over in total deflation and despair. So I like metaphors that allow us to give some humorous visual to just the emotional energies that all humans work with all the time. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Yeah, I liked the analogy too. And I've been thinking as I wrote the pairs down and I absolutely agree that these are germane to the human condition, right? The kind of the yin and yang of each one of these things. Although when I think about influence and insignificance, I can't help but think and you said this yourself, we might be spending our time chasing the likes on our social media posts and such. 

Twenty-five years ago, influence and insignificance meant a total different thing than it does today. And I would imagine that for many people in a, before there was social media, they didn't really think of being significant or not. They just were being and it's almost like this category, at least from a modern standpoint, it has emerged in a different way because of the advent of technology and how it applies to us.

So the other one that I was thinking about, too, was success and failure. And that there also feels like there is a tremendous western, like we look at success and failure in the West very different than they do in the East. It's more individualistic here. It's more collective there, right? So, but at its core, all humans can experience these things. 

And so you mentioned the wind horse, but I want to talk about technique and strategy, because as we're going through our day, and our little tube guy or girl is more or less inflated based on the waxing and waning of stressors in our lives, talk to us about there's some practical strategies that people can use to ground their tree or their tube man more strongly than before.

Ethan Nichtern:

Yeah. Yeah. So I do name in each of those four chapters about each of those four pairs. I do name practices. And then the second half for the last 40 percent of the book is over what's called the four powers of confidence. And that's where I teach the wind horse practice. So there's a lot in the book, there's practices for each of them. But as an overarching strategy, I think the cool thing about this list and the cool thing about just acknowledging that I'm trying to hold my seat and I'm a human being and whatever I am trying to do in the world, life is going to throw things at me. Right? 

And I agree, like influence and insignificance, not all of us are trying to be famous or have a platform or something like that, but we all do care about how we're regarded. Right? So if you're in high school, you care about your reputation in the larger, in your grade. Right? So that could be a way that influence and insignificance are operating, even if you're not trying to have a TikTok, be a TikTok star, you know? 

So I think the core skill is mindfulness and I think mindfulness is this interesting word. It's been completely -- I always like to remind people. I'm like, I'm so happy people are practicing mindfulness. I'm so happy that people are taking that psychotherapists or using mindfulness in their modalities and approaches. I do think it's important to name that mindfulness meditation does come from Buddhism. It doesn't come from any other place. I mean, so I think if we're interested in mindfulness, we should also have some familiarity with basic Buddhist principles, not in a religious way but just to say like okay, what is the philosophy undergirding these techniques. 

But what mindfulness really is, so the word that translates as mindfulness, the different words either mean something like to remember, as in just to remember the present moment, and another translation I've heard from Mark Epstein who's a Buddhist psychodynamic therapist, is bare attention. Like bare as in naked. And mindfulness just means we know what's happening when it's happening, right? 

So I think If you look at those four pairs and I talk about them in relationship to hope and fear, like just to know I am being hit by a wind right now, like this feels pleasant and I like that, right? And that's going to have a certain effect on my, let's say, inner tube man, right? This feels unpleasant and it's provoking fear, and I know that, and I'm just able to name that, right? Or this is me longing for success, this is me not longing for failure. This is me afraid of failure. This is praise. I am being praised right now. Right now, this is criticism and that's how it feels. Just knowing the arising experience and being able to name it as a human is the baseline technique upon which all other techniques are built. 

So for example, in the chapter on success and failure talk a lot about the idea of comparative mind or comparing one's own experience to the experience of others, and how envy and jealousy and how entrenched those experiences are when we talk about success and failure. So I talk through certain contemplative techniques around working with comparative mind. One of them is where you actually try to notice the feeling, which is the mindfulness part, and then generate a sense of joy for the person you are comparing yourself to, right, that you, so you actually flip feeling less than to actually feeling happy for the other person and inspired by their success, right? 

And I tell a funny story of the day in my life where I had the biggest outward success as a writer, that a friend of mine on the same day had an even bigger success as a writer, and it stopped me for a moment from being able to enjoy even though I was completely succeeding. Right? So we could talk about different contemplative techniques. And I think there's like 10 or 12 different practices mentioned and talked through in the book. But I really think mindfulness, like just admitting that something is happening to us right now and that it's okay, it's okay to be having this experience. 

I don't know, Dr. Richard, if you feel that way in your psychology work, but just getting somebody to know what's happening to them and it's okay that that experience is arising right now, feels like a huge success. And that is mindfulness. Do I know what's happening and can I attend to it without adding all this other stuff on for a moment? Can I just say this feels good, this feels bad, I hope for this, I'm afraid of that?

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Well, for so many people being able to identify root cause of emotional distress is challenging. And by having the space to just name, not attach judgment to them, but just say, this is good, this is bad, I'm experiencing pleasure, I'm experiencing pain, whatever it is, to be able to identify and hold space, to be comfortable with that emotion is very adaptive, very healthy. So I'm grateful that that's the way you describe it because I think that's really helpful for people. 

I've loved every moment of our discussion today. It's flown by, Ethan. As you know, I wrap up every episode by asking my guest a single question. And that is, what is your biggest helping, that one most important piece of information to somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today? 

Ethan Nichtern:

Yeah, yeah. I would say that the theme of this book and the theme of why I wrote Confidence is the biggest helping I can give is to struggle with confidence is very human. It's universal. If somebody claims not to struggle with it, I think they're probably lying or at least a little bit. And if we can view showing up and trusting ourselves as a practice rather than an outcome, it will help tremendously. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Beautifully said, Ethan. Confidence: Holding Your Seat Through Life's Eight Worldly Winds is available everywhere. Tell us though, where people can learn more about you online. 

Ethan Nichtern:

Yeah. So the the best place is ethannichtern.com. Have upcoming online teachings, events, my own podcast, The Road Home, which is named after my book, The Road Home, and then Dharma Moon, D-H-A-R-M-A-M-O-O-N.com, dharmamoon.com is where I teach the yearlong Buddhist studies program if people are interested in diving deeper into Buddhist philosophy and psychology, 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Amazing. For those of you on the road, we'll get you covered everything Ethan Nichtern will be linked in the show notes for this episode at drrichardshuster.com. 

Ethan, I wanted to thank you again for coming on. This was a really cool conversation. Love what you're doing. And thanks for spending time with us today. 

Ethan Nichtern:

Thanks so much for having me, Dr. Richard. Been a real pleasure. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Absolutely. And I also wanted to thank each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to our conversation. If you're inspired, if you're excited, if you're going to figure out which of these Eight Worldly Winds is impacting you, go give us a follow and a five star review on your podcast app of choice, because this is what helps other people find the show. 

But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping, because the happiest people are those that help others.