Pico Iyer: 0:03

Every major tradition in the world is just telling us one thing, which is, give inner peace a chance.

Sally Evans: 0:12

Welcome back to Holy Echoes, listening to prophets then and now. I'm Sally Evans, and in this podcast from the Center for Interfaith Relations, we revisit prophets of past Festival of Faiths with a spiritual leader of today to listen for echoes of revelation, enduring guidance and visionary hope. Well, the Festival of Faiths has been going on for 29 years now, and on stage back in 2016 with the theme of sacred wisdom, was Pico Iyer, a travel writer, essayist who traveled regularly for over 30 years, in fact, with the Dalai Lama. On this episode, we listened back nine years ago to revisit this session called, "The Change Begins Within."

Pico Iyer: 0:59

And I was talking a couple of days ago about watching his Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and as he goes through eight hours of his working day, I witness again and again, he never takes even five minutes off, and he's absolutely present and completely attentive to everybody around him for those entire eight hours. And I think that's in part because before he even emerges from his hotel room, every morning, he wakes up

at 3: 1:26

30 and does four full hours of meditation. Some of you may have seen since he did come to Louisville a couple of years ago, the great singer and poet Leonard Cohen. And if you saw him, you noticed that he brought to the stage a sense of intimacy and a focus and of depth that we're not used to seeing at a typical rock concert, and I think that's in part because he spent five and a half years living as a monk, and I watched him in his monastery meditating for up to 18 hours every day, collecting his inner resources. Now most of us in this room are not monks, but even Steve Jobs, for example, who gave us these devices, famously came to all his important decisions by walking unplugged, just thinking things out or having a conversation with friends. And I'm certainly not the person to offer any wisdom on this. A travel writer talking about stillness sounds like a very bad joke, but I'm guessing that just about every one of you have already begun to take certain measures just to ensure you don't get engulfed, and maybe most of all, to recall what you love and to remember what is most important to you in your life, because I think the danger of an overcrowded schedule is the same as that of an overcrowded desk or room, which is that in moments of crisis, you can't lay your hands on which what is most important. So I'm sure some of you take a run every day, or maybe you practice yoga, or perhaps you have a meditation practice, or perhaps you just quietly cook when you come back from the office. But I think we need something just to step away from our lives and the world, the better to understand them.

Sally Evans: 3:18

Listening with me today is Adam Kane. Adam has his undergraduate degree in neuroscience and a master's degree in Buddhist philosophy. His journey has taken him to a forest monastery in Northern California, years studying Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal, and now, since 2013 he has been interpreting, translating, writing and developing curriculum for his root Lamas and various other lamas. He's based in Crestone, Colorado, and enjoys walking in the mountains in his spare time, Adam also is returning to the Festival of Faiths this November to do a meditation workshop called"Pathways to Belonging". Adam, Welcome to Holy Echoes.

Adam Kane: 4:02

Thank you so much, Sally, thank you for having me

Sally Evans: 4:05

So Pico has quite a bit to say on this concept of stillness, and I'd love to ask you about that. Adam, most of us aren't able to meditate for four hours a day, necessarily, as he mentioned, but that doesn't mean we can't find ways to take time for stillness. And I love how he says that to lay our hands on what is most important. I'm curious what that looks like for you. How do you practice or attempt this stillness on an average day in 2025.

Adam Kane: 4:41

Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I was also touched by his use of language and the way he talks about such an important issue in such practical terms. Yeah, in my own life and practice, I am a big fan of sitting meditation. I'm also a fan of quiet, supine meditation, lying down at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. And I'm a big fan of taking walks without earphones, without a podcast, although this one would be lovely, I'm sure, but I like taking walks and drives, without which pico mentioned also in this talk, without the radio, without headphones, without looking at my screen. So I think it's through all those different very frequent, almost daily activities that I balance my own system, or at least try to. And you know, for example, when we wake up, the body is transitioning from sleep and dreams into waking reality. Our eyes are going to open, maybe the sun's already up. There's things to do. We have emails to check and plans to make, and maybe even people in our home to connect with and care for. But still, that transition is a potent time, and so I feel just pausing for short periods of time at transitional points in the day actually is very powerful and has a cumulative effect. This was a instruction I got from one of my early meditation teachers, a British Buddhist monk, Ajahn Amro, who's a wonderful teacher and Abbott. And he said, you know, through the day, there's actually countless transitional moments where you finish one task and then you start another task. And this includes even finishing your dream and waking up and starting the day, or finishing a telephone call and then moving on to the next thing, or driving somewhere and parking the car, which completes the drive, and then you're about to get out and do the next task. And all of these transitional moments, we usually rush through them, and there's just a continuity of motion, but they're actually wonderful opportunities to pause, and the pause doesn't have to be super long. We don't have to take a four hour pause. In fact, in my own tradition that I study in and and work for, this is literally a training slogan, short moments many times, because it emphasizes that if we only ever think of I meditate half an hour a day, and The other 23 and a half hours, I let my mind and the world go wild around me. It's hard to feel balanced and satisfied. But if every hour or two I find 30 seconds here, one minute there, two minutes there, in an elevator, in the bathroom, between things, and I take those moments to come inside, gather things, connect with the body, connect with the senses in the present moment, find some kind of centeredness in the mind that really adds up over time.

Sally Evans: 8:15

I love that invitation to reclaim those transitions. I'd never quite heard it said that way, Adam potent transitions. Isn't it interesting, too. It struck me as you were sharing that they have such great value in whether it's art or music. I mean, the pause or the rest is what often gives these forms such beauty, and yet we don't claim them in our own life.

Adam Kane: 8:43

I was struck by by that also in pico's talk, because he really seems to be pointing to the necessary dance between periods of activity and rest, stillness and movement, recharging or gathering resources and then being creative and productive. And I think that's such a beautiful and important principle. So we kind of know that on the physical level, but I think it's a real art form to learn that dance on the mental level as well, and how to refresh ourselves, and how to, as you said, reframe space, instead of being an empty or negative thing, being this wonderful place of rest and recharge.

Sally Evans: 9:36

Let's return now and listen to more of Pico Iyer.

Pico Iyer: 9:40

And I think one reason why this all has a certain amount of urgency is what we do in the world, how we bring our thoughts into right action, as Asli was saying. But another is, as you all know, life is going to make a house call whoever you are, however exalted or unexalted you are, suddenly a doctor's. Come into your room wearing a not so happy expression, suddenly, a car is going to drive towards you on the wrong side of the road. Suddenly, as happened to me last year, you're spending five weeks in an ICU with somebody whose life seems very, very precarious. And I always feel that in those situations where you're meeting real life, all the time I've spent running around or checking websites or whatever I might be doing, even on the treadmill, it's not going to help me. The only thing that will help me is when I've collected resources within so as to give much more to the larger world. And so at the festival of faiths, it seems to me that Jesus went and spent 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness. The Buddha came to his realization just by sitting still. At the time of the Prophet, people were meditating all around Mecca. The Jewish tradition gave us this glorious bounty of the Sabbath, and God Himself rested on the seventh day. So I think every major tradition in the world is just telling us one thing, which is give inner peace a chance.

Sally Evans: 11:08

Well, Adam, I think that's such an interesting few lines that he has. Pico Iyer points out that every major tradition seems to incorporate a version of as he says, collecting inner resources. I'm curious, how does a Buddhist approach a topic like this? I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey with Tibetan Buddhism. How did you become interested in this path, and how has it shaped your identity?

Adam Kane: 11:36

Yeah, I also appreciated pico's framing it that way collecting or gathering inner resources, I like that very much, and that resonates very, very strongly, because I feel, from a Buddhist point of view, we have different approaches within Buddhism. It's a very, as you know, a very diverse and rich tradition. It's not a process of adding experiences and bits of knowledge as much as it's removing what's in the way of accessing the inner resources we already have. I think that that's a it's an important point. It may seem a little subtle or or abstract, but it ends up being an important point, because the first model is very effortful, where we're sort of like building a career, where we're trying to build credibility, knowledge experiences and expanding our current sense of self to be wiser and more spiritual, or something. But I think what's more accurate is that our true nature, underlying our current identities and limitations and whatever we spend our time doing, is full of extraordinary, rich treasures and resources. We have incredible capacities of heart, love and compassion, we have incredible capacities of mind, like insight and wisdom that may only be partially tapped so far, and so the practices over time, more and more reveal themselves to be ways to uncover those untapped resources reconnect us with deeper parts of our nature and unleash those capacities. And so I really appreciate what pico said when he said gathering inner resources, because he could have said gathering outer resources, and I think that's an important distinction that he made, and with regard to the more personal side of that. Yeah, my own journey, I got turned on to Buddhist practice and study right after graduating from college in the year 2000 and somehow something really clicked, and I ended up in a series of silent meditation retreats. A few years of that led me to ordain as a Thai Forest monk in a Buddhist monastery in Northern California, as you mentioned. And I stayed there for two years, living in the forest and basically meditating full time. It was a life changing experience. Of course, I was 24 years old when I ordained, and that opportunity for deep inner exploration, having the time months and months and months to cultivate tranquility and focus and insight, was a huge opportunity for me, and really changed the course of my life, although it would have been probably good for me to stay longer, but nevertheless, I disrobed after two years because I met a Tibetan lama Sophia Rinpoche, who I really wanted to study with more, and so I moved following him. I moved to Colorado, and I've been with him now for over 20 years. Those drawn by the vibrancy of Tibetan Buddhism, the fearlessness of the good lamas, the Compassionate view that it holds, which felt very, very aligned to why I was interested in the spiritual path in the first place, and the depth and complexity of its philosophy. It felt like an endless ocean to explore. So here I am, 20 years later, and it's still a joyful exploration. My own teacher, my main teacher, Sophie Rinpoche, makes very important distinction. He talks about stillness with movement and stillness without movement. This is very interesting, because I feel like there's two planes on which stillness is important. First of all, I feel like it serves as a counter balance to excessive stimulation, speediness and busyness, and that aspect of stillness was what I feel that pico was highlighting those rhythms of being highly stimulated and then moving into a quieter digestive space are essential for the health and vibrancy of the human mind. That's the first sort of plane, is positing stillness as separate from movement, and that has its own value and importance. And I think that's what my own main teacher, sokd Rinpoche, means when he says stillness without movement. But he also says that there's stillness with movement, which at first might seem puzzling and confusing, what that might be, but actually, I think that is an even more subtle, profound and potentially important form of stillness. I think that stillness with movement points to the fact that the mind has different layers and dimensions, and part of the mind could be relaxing into stillness while at the same time being fully functional or active, having a conversation, driving, cooking, going to work or anything else. And this might seem like a far cry, but actually, through the first kind of stillness, the stillness without movement, if we really go deep into that and connect with it, we can start to build out its capacity and robustness. And it starts just with very brief moments at first, but it can build and build where we actually feel a sense of stillness and spaciousness within movement, or rather the movement is taking place within a larger sense of stillness and spaciousness, and that then opens up the possibility that we don't have to just rely on the cycle of overstimulation and then finding respite and rest to recharge.

Sally Evans: 17:57

Wow, you're kind of blowing my mind here with opening this possibility of accessing stillness within our everyday world, and whether I'm driving kids to school or whether I'm at work or in a meeting, you're incorporating this kind of quality of being into my what I might call regular life. I'm just curious, how would you step into that?

Adam Kane: 18:23

I mean, I don't want to pretend and give false hope that it's something very easy, or that there's some kind of trick or shortcut to that capacity. It is. It is a profound outcome of training the mind, so I don't want to misrepresent it. But first of all, I would recommend starting with relaxation as the baseline for meditation. In my tradition, there's a saying that you know, if we don't start relaxed, nothing really happens when it comes to meditation. That principle is very, very important, and once we're deeply relaxed, a lot of capacities come online that we may not have noticed before, because normally we're just sort of very simulated, a little busy, a little tired, maybe a little stressed, and then when we have time to relax, we want to flop down on the couch and do nothing, or turn on Netflix, or go face down on our bed, or, you know, have a drink and and make our worries melt away. And that's natural, and that's human, and I do that too. But what that does is it leaves us with a binary choice, either being highly jacked, stimulated, busy and on hyper alert and a little stressed for like work mode or getting stuff done mode or checked out dull and slipping into a blank state on the couch or in our bed when we're in our quote, unquote relaxed mode. And there's only two options there, over simulated or relaxing into dullness and. Actually meditation occurs in neither of those spaces. It occurs in a third space, which is relaxed, alertness, calm and clear. So when, when that comes online, and we familiarize ourselves with that and get more comfortable, build the strength of that third option, then the stillness with movement becomes much closer to reality.

Sally Evans: 20:24

That makes sense, beginning with the the relaxed openness state, and then that allows us to enter into that third space, which is such a great way to think about it, that is fascinating. Any other threads that you notice that have kind of carried through again these nine years later, from what Pico Iyer was saying in 2016 any wisdom or revelation, even caution that you hear echoing to the times we're living in today.

Adam Kane: 20:55

I feel a very loving sense of caution in his talk. One thing my teacher self doing, Pusha often says is, how quickly did the last 10 years go by in your life? How many things did you think you do but didn't quite get to and he said, If you don't change your behavior, the next 10 years will go in exactly the same way that strikes me as poignant, because pico is warning us about the relentless increase in the speed and the engagement of our devices and tech, and what he said is exactly how it's played out. So I think it's important we listen to our own intuition sometimes, and you know, not have to wait for a longitudinal study to prove that, you know, it's healthy to be out in the woods or to paint the picture instead of just sitting and being passively entertained. I think it's important that we access our human intuition that is coming out of our mind and body and telling us what we might need to do to balance out the forces of the modern world.

Sally Evans: 22:02

Adam, I'm so grateful. It's been so valuable on many levels to connect with you.

Adam Kane: 22:07

Thank you so much. Sally, it's been a real joy to speak with you and participate in this podcast.

Sally Evans: 22:13

We've been speaking with lay Buddhist translator and meditation leader Adam Kane. Adam will be exploring themes of compassion, inclusion and radical belonging in a meditation workshop on Wednesday, November 12, to help attendees reset for the festival, or just reset in general. And there's more information and tickets available at festivaloffaiths.org. Adam, we can't wait to see you in Louisville here in just a few short weeks. Thank you again.

Adam Kane: 22:45

Thank you so much, Sally. I'm very excited to come back to Louisville, and thanks for having me on your podcast today. It was lovely.

Sally Evans: 22:51

Thanks also to Rip Reinhardt and his audio engineering skills and to the team at the Center for Interfaith Relations for their multiple levels of support in this project. I'm Sally Evans, and thanks for listening. If you enjoy this podcast, we hope you'll give us a review and we'll see you next time.