Surviving the News: Buddhist Strategies for Staying Sane, Engaged, and Not Completely Furious | Pascal Auclair

Dan Harris (0:03)

Hey, hey, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. We're about a month out now from the midterms to the midterm elections here in the US, and a lot of us are feeling pretty stressed and anxious. So today, we're going to talk about how to stay engaged without losing your mind. We're going to be talking about this with the great Buddhist meditation teacher, Pascal Auclair, who is one of the teachers over on my meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris, and what you're about to hear is me asking Pascal questions, but also feeding him some questions that we got from subscribers to the 10% with Dan Harris app, including a question about karma and whether the bad guys will ever get theirs. Pascal is very funny, and he has a way of talking that just relaxes your nervous system. And speaking of relaxing your nervous system, we here at 10% Happier are going to have your back through this election season, Sharon Salzberg, the great meditation teacher, will be appearing on the podcast Closer to Election Day to talk about some great Buddhist coping strategies. And we'll be doing some live online events on Election Day and the day after the Election Day that are available to everyone. Whether you're a subscriber or not, I'll guide a meditation on each of those days and then take your questions. We're doing all of this in the spirit of one of my favorite mantras, which is never worry alone.

Just a little bit more about Pascal Auclair before we jump in here. He's been immersed in the Buddhist scene since 1997, and he's been mentored by great Buddhist meditation teachers like Joseph Goldstein. He is the co-founder of True North Insight and one of its guiding teachers. And as mentioned, he is one of our key teachers over on my app, 10% with Dan Harris. All right, let's jump in and get started with Pascal Auclair.

Pascal Auclair, are you excited to talk about this very anxiety provoking subject?

Pascal Auclair (1:58)

Yeah, yeah, I am excited about this. It's very charged. I was reading some of the questions this afternoon, and but somehow it was opening my heart very kind of wide, like it was calling for compassion and care and listening and holding stuff together. It's good we're together thinking about these things.

Dan Harris (2:18)

Yeah, well, one of my favorite expressions, and people will have heard me say this a million times before, but it literally is something that bears repeating. Never worry alone. We're in a crazy moment for the species, and it's really advantageous to go through it with a sangha, to use the Buddhist phrase for a community, to do it as I often say, in the carpool lane. So as you noted, we've received a bunch of questions in advance from members of our community that we're going to go through, but we also have a lot of people listening along with us live and popping into the chat with their own questions. So I'll be bouncing back and forth between the pre-submitted questions and then the stuff that I'm seeing in the chat. So let's start with our first question, and it comes from Karen.

Here it is. I would like to hear about the dance around outrage, action, frustration, depression, schadenfreude. This administration is driving me crazy. I focus on hopeful things, but sometimes that's just those rare times he's stopped while the tsunami of criminality continues, breathing.

Pascal, what say you to that?

Pascal Auclair (3:27)

Well, I love that Karen ends with breathing because this is so kind of the instruction and teaching, you know, like this invitation to actually just come back here to this body, this breathing body. You know, in the Buddhist teaching, this is called the first foundation. That's where our attention is invited to land back in the body to be here. Why I think partly is that when we come back to here, here now, you know, all these ideas, these news we're reading and coming back to here now, we can actually discover that maybe there's not an immediate threat here in the living room. And this can help bring a little bit of space, a little bit of ground, a little bit of breathing space. And so this to me is excellent practice, just breathing, just sick. Okay, there's all these ideas that are turning in my head, you know, and contracting my heart. And here's a body breathing here and what's around here, space, maybe in this wherever you are room, living room outside, just to bring this back.

After this, I would say two ideas comes to mind. One is the Buddha was not living in a different time than the time we're in. There was no democracy at the time of the Buddha, there was wars, there was all kinds of things happening. And he developed his practice, his wisdom, his compassion, his equanimity, his balance of mind, his amazing kind of honesty and non-denial and care in that kind of environment. So we're in a way, we're in the right environment to develop amazing qualities. And so sometimes we think this is in the way. I've heard this many times from many people. This is maybe this is not in the way. This might be the way. This is excellent time to be alive in a way, not what we would wish for, but it's excellent to actually nurture values, like to clarify, what are my values? What am I going to live by? So this is one thing that comes to mind. The Buddha was living in this exact same kind of environment, probably even more precarious and challenging. After this, the other thing that comes to mind is the need to balance things to expose oneself to beauty. We can easily forget all this when we're fascinated, especially by phones, screens these days.