Fit Mind: From Neuroscience To Monkhood With A Four-Step Path To Lasting Bliss

Speaker 1 · 0:00Welcome everyone to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. I'm Sean Fargo. Today I have the pleasure and honor of speaking with my friend Liam McClintock, who is the founder of FitMind, which you can find at fitmind.org. And he just released a new book called Fitmind: Four Steps to Lasting Bliss, Neuroscience and Meditation for Daily Life. We met after I had been a Buddhist monk and looking at how we share these teachings with the world. Liam was on that journey as well. He came from a neuroscience background, and we're gonna dive into a really impressive background at Yale, looking at how you have been fascinated with the mind for so long. Liam then went on to ordain as a Buddhist monk. He's recently disrobed for about six months now in Mexico. Liam, you started your app called FitMind after we met, I believe. And I consistently hear from people who have used the app and have gone through your teachings how helpful it's been. And it's such a comprehensive collection of meditations and teachings that you don't quite find anywhere else. I think it speaks not only the breadth of your training, but also the depth of your training, which has only been deepened through your recent monastic training. And I'm so glad that you have just published your new book, FitMind. We'll have a link to it in the show notes in the description field. But I highly encourage everyone listening to check out Liam's book and to contact Liam for trainings and coaching. Liam has been providing mental fitness programs for corporations like Uber. He completed a Master of Science degree in applied neuroscience at King's College in London with a dissertation on the neural correlates of advanced non-dual meditation. As I said, you're a monk in a tradition that I highly respect with a teacher who I highly respect, who I think has recently passed away, unfortunately. Liam has participated in consciousness research at Harvard, advised on advanced meditation training for Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. And your monk name was Meta Nanda, one who enjoys loving kindness or one who abides in the bliss of love. It's been a while since we last connected. So I'm looking forward to hearing about your monastic journey, your journey writing this book, why you wrote this book, where life is taking you these days. You've been a contributor to our mindfulness meditation teacher certification program, providing a lot of great insights for our community about craving. So it's just a delight to see how your journey has unfolded. And it's an honor to be your friend on the path. So welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2 · 3:13Thanks so much, Sean. It's an honor to be on the podcast with you.

Speaker 1 · 3:16First, just to catch up personally, like I'm curious why you had decided to ordain as a monk and how that journey unfolded for you.

Speaker 2 · 3:25For me, there were many factors as to why I wanted to ordain. A big part of it was finding a teacher, Bhante Vimlaramsi, whom he mentioned in the introduction, but passed away a couple of years ago. But he was such an incredible meditation teacher, and I had the opportunity to ordain under him. He actually gave temporary ordinations, so it was a kind of uh rare opportunity to experience the life of a Buddhist monk, and I thought it was only going to be for a couple of months, maybe a year or two maximum when I first ordained, but I thought this was a golden opportunity to take my practice deeper, to start living a more simple lifestyle and start devoting more time to training my mind.

Speaker 1 · 4:06How long did you end up being a monk for?

Speaker 2 · 4:09I was a monk for a total of three years in terms of time training in monasteries, and about another year where I was in robes, but I was actually writing the book and had planned to return to Malaysia and actually be a monk for life, although my plans obviously changed during that period. But it was just an incredible journey that was unexpected from the start. I really saw it as a temporary opportunity to go deeper in my practice, and it became for me, as I went deeper in my practice, eventually a lifestyle that I felt more and more gravitated towards. Maybe later we can talk about what changed and such, but just to give the overview of the journey, I started in the US with Bonte Vimlaramsi. He ended up falling ill towards, I think I was with him for about six months when his health started to decline. And then I went over to help with some retreats in India. I was in India for about six months, and then from there went on to Sri Lanka for a few months and then to Malaysia. My last time in monasteries was this past summer in the Thai forest tradition, and that was back in the US. So I got to see a range of different monasteries and got to see different ways of living the monastic life and met a bunch of awesome people, really incredible meditators, incredible people, teachers, mentors. Yeah, just gained a really deep appreciation for meditation, the teachings of the historical Buddha, the Eightfold Path, and how meditation really is a lifestyle. It's not just about a sitting practice, but it's about how we're cultivating our mind all the time.

Speaker 1 · 5:43Were you at a Bayagiri for a little bit?

Speaker 2 · 5:46I never visited a Bayagiri. No. It was a different monastery, which I guess I'd like to respect their privacy because it's a relatively small monastery, but it was another one in the Thai forest tradition in the US.

Speaker 1 · 5:57So you're talking about you ordained to deepen your practice. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by that? Are you meaning to have more consistency with peace of mind, opening the heart, learning new tools, like mental training tools? Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by wanting to deepen your practice and then how monastic life actually ended up deepening your

Speaker 1 · 6:28practice?

Speaker 2 · 6:28It's a good question because my understanding of the practice evolved through my monastic training. How I came to meditation was viewing it, I think, the way a lot of maybe Westerners or at least Americans view it, where there's this sense that you can have your daily practice and there's incredible benefits that come from sitting for even a few minutes. And even in a busy life, a lot of people make time for even 30-minute or one hour daily sittings. But there's so many other activities throughout our day, it's harder to get into deep states of altered states of consciousness that can lead to more profound changes, lasting changes, and shifts in consciousness. And so a lot of what I'd read about was people going on these 10-day silent retreats where it's easier to put aside all distractions, essentially meditate all day, alternating between sitting and walking and maintain a continuous flow of mindfulness, which builds a momentum and can lead eventually to deep insights and shifts in consciousness. So I saw being a monk as an extension of that initially, as a chance not just do a 10-day retreat, but essentially be on retreat all the time, or at least at the time I still had some other responsibilities, but I could set aside large chunks of time where I was just practicing. The way my understanding evolved was I still think there's incredible value in retreat, and I highly recommend meditation retreats to anyone who is interested in deepening their practice. However, I realized that through studying the teachings of the historical Buddha, for example, the suttas and the Pali Canon, it became clear to me that he was talking about a lifestyle, whether someone was a monk or not. And he was talking about essentially creating wholesome or what I call fit states of mind, which include states like loving kindness, equanimity, peace, compassion, gratitude. These are all fit states of mind. And they grow as a result of how we lead our entire day. What I began to realize, especially when I went to Sri Lanka, where the monastic life is such a part of their culture, I started to see how all the little things I was doing, for example, helping the other monks at the monastery with their chores or going for alms round, which is where you take your bowl and essentially go from house to house. I'm hesitant to use the word begging, but without asking, you're showing up and they're giving an opportunity for generosity. But those all really filled my heart with what became the fuel for my meditation practice. So I started to see how the way I was going about my day, having a simple life, starting to do more kind things for the people around me. This was all contributing to the sitting meditation practice, which is exactly what the Buddha was talking about in these traditional texts. The Eightfold Path is a complete recipe. It includes what's called right speech, right livelihood, right action. And these are all essentially living in a loving way, doing things that are gonna create positive, fit states of mind, and they all contribute to the practice. So I think to summarize, my understanding of meditation started as this kind of thinking it was almost like a sprint to the finish line with like a 10K race being the 10-day deep meditation retreat. As my understanding evolved, it became clear that it was more of a lifestyle, and the lifestyle could be lived as a monk or as a lay person, but it really involved using one's mind and one's actions, one's speech, everything throughout the day to be consciously cultivating these fit states.

Speaker 1 · 9:56I don't know if you and I had this conversation or not, but I remember thinking that at least five, ten years ago, maybe twenty years ago now, crossfit was sort of a big buzzword and big practice in the physical exercise community, in the sense that there's all these different exercises that you cycle through to have more of a comprehensive level of fitness for the body. I remember thinking, you know, what if there was something like that for the mind where there's all these different practices one could do? And I do think, like as men, at least, especially younger men, we tend to want to get things done, do the 10K sprint, or get to the finish line of the 10-day retreat and do everything really well and efficiently and get to that outcome. And there's all sorts of different meditations one could do. For me, pre-monk life, I was wanting to learn and fill my head with all these steps and get them done in order to be happy. And I had kind of a similar journey in the sense that that monk life actually broke my heart open in a good way, and then it became less about what we do and more about how we are while we do it. And you spoke of loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, forgiveness, generosity. These are practices or ways of being of the heart, and that was something that was kind of unexpected for me. And so I'm struck by your background, your degree in applied neuroscience dissertation on the neural correlates of advanced non-dual meditation, where there's this emphasis on the brain, per se, with your scholastic training. Your monk name was Meta Nanda, one who enjoys loving kindness. The picture on your website at fitmind.org, you're just beaming with joy, and there's a very heartfelt quality about you. So would it be fair to say that a lot of your monk experience, which is pretty vast for three plus years in robes, that a lot of that was incorporating heart practice into your daily lifestyle?

Speaker 2 · 12:30Yes,

Speaker 2 · 12:31absolutely. As you said, I started out with a real focus on trying to meditate with my head at first, to use an analogy. And I know one teacher who told a friend of mine who's kind of similar that you don't meditate with the head, you meditate with the heart. Subjectively, there is a sense of this kind of warmth. Subjectively, your awareness starts to feel less centered behind the eyes, where the thinking subjectively seems to be taking place, and you start to be able to feel more things happening in the chest area. That certainly happened to me throughout my journey, and I also gained a deeper appreciation for metta practice, which means metta being the poly word for loving kindness. And this was the main practice that my teacher Bhante Vimlaramsi taught was metta. What he realized was that, especially for Westerners, there was a sense that this practice of generating loving kindness could create a natural kind of joy in the practice that's necessary for accessing uh deeper states. Not only does it feel good, not only does it benefit those around you, not only does it start to change your perspective about the world, but it also is a vehicle for accessing uh deeper states. And Bonte would often say on retreat that he found it to be seven times faster in terms of his students' progress than being with the breath. So that's why he started to teach almost exclusively metta practice, although he would occasionally give breath-focused meditation to some students. But over time it became clear to me that this was the core of the practice. If I could say maybe 95% of what the practice was all about was trying to be loving all the time. There's many words for love, of course, I think, like joy and compassion. These are all different kinds of varieties of love, but they have this common quality of an open heart and open awareness and like warmth and connectedness to them.

Speaker 1 · 14:29Beautiful. Wow, it's quite a statement that meta practice could help certain people to go, you know, seven times faster with their practice. And I certainly see that in the West, where a lot of us live in the head, and even meditate from the head, as you said. I just invite our listeners to kind of play with that or to sense into how we can meditate from the heart and relate to our unfolding experience from the heart as well. We had one of your mentors or friends or practitioners on the path, Delson Armstrong, as a guest teacher for our certification program as well, and he shared a practice around combining meta or loving kindness practice with concentration practice, where the emphasis of the experience is on the felt quality of the heart, the felt quality of love, the felt quality of care. And you would stay with that felt quality all the way to the jhanas of these, say, altered states of experience that I think people may not know about because they're not really spoken much about. But he would use this practice of sensing into the heart and the sensing into this felt quality of care as his concentration object. So I'm wondering like how much of your practice or the teachings of your teachers combined meta practice with, say, like mindful breathing? I believe one of your teachers taught sensing into the space between the skull and the brain to sense into whether there was craving or not. But I'm just curious, like, how much of a hybrid of meta practice and say other classical forms of meditation, like mindful breathing, body scan, etc., did you practice?

Speaker 2 · 16:48This is the main practice that I talk about in my book. It's the most powerful practice that I've come across. There's essentially three techniques that I talk about, and this is the main one, and it's still, I consider it the foundation of my practice and has been for these last few years. And this is basically meta meditation. So loving kindness is the main vehicle or object, if you like, of meditation, and that brings you progressively into these deeper, altered states of consciousness that you mentioned called jhanas. Jhana, as I define it in the book, is a blissful state of stable meta awareness. Meta awareness is this ability for the mind to observe itself, and through loving kindness, your mind becomes increasingly unified so that it's no longer distracted by outer sounds, by sensations in your body, by thoughts, by smells, by anything else that would grab your attention. Your mind is just collected around this feeling of love. And in the traditional Buddhist texts, the Buddha said metta or loving kindness could take you all the way to the fourth jhana. There's four kind of deeper states within the fourth jhana, but this is like a very deep state of equanimity where your mind is completely stable and you are starting to see very small movements of your mind and starting to notice how craving arises, how the sense of self arises, and you can start to have some deep insights into the nature of suffering and the cessation of suffering. And I think this isn't commonly taught. It's often much more common to use the breath as an object of meditation. But as I mentioned, um Bhante Vimlaramsi found it to be faster for a lot of students, especially Westerners, to use metta because it has this inherent joyful quality to it. And that joy brings us into the present moment and it becomes the fuel for jhana. So it's an important jhana factor for this state of consciousness. I should mention for maybe some of your listeners have heard jhana in a different context, and it is a controversial term in Buddhist circles, and it's often associated with a very deep state of concentration where you're narrowing in on one very specific set of sensations, like the sensations of breathing at your nostrils. And that type of jhana, or what people are calling jhana in that case, is quite different. It's more about concentration and focus, and it can require weeks of extended retreat to get into that deep state. That's not what Bhante Vimalamsi taught as jhana. His interpretation of the Buddha's teachings and of jhana based on his experience was something that's more of an open heart. It's more of relaxing and releasing tension, and that relaxation leads to a mind that's free from craving, free from these what I call unfit states or what are traditionally called hindrances. This is actually accessible not only on meditation and retreat, but in daily life. In my book, I recommend if people want to start experiencing these states that they start having a sitting practice of at least 30 minutes. But over time, and especially if you start to go on retreat and get a sense for what jhana is, you can even experience it in daily life. So it's more of I compare it to a flow state, even though it's it has some important differences from flow states in a peak psychology sense. But it's similarly something that where you're in the present moment, your mind it feels very good, it's inherently rewarding, and it has other side benefits, like for example, you're not distracted. So obviously there's a lot of benefits to just having stable attention, but the deeper benefits of jhana are these kind of deep insights into the nature of the mind and the nature of self and eventually can lead to nirvana or nibbana, which is the quote unquote goal of the meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition. So jhana is important and I think it's not talked about enough, and metta is certainly an incredible vehicle for experiencing it. It's not something that's inaccessible at all. I think that your listeners, if they're interested, could experience it within a reasonable amount of time. There was actually a study I referenced in the book where they took complete beginners, taught them this kind of metta meditation, and they were reporting the characteristics of jhana, I think, within six weeks or so. And they were also showing the biological markers of jhana in terms of heart rate variability, although it wasn't pronounced as the more advanced meditators. So it's something that is accessible to everyone. It doesn't require any kind of special talent or extreme skills or

Speaker 2 · 21:36effort.

Speaker 1 · 21:36And when you're practicing metta and entering this form of say genetic experience, what are you doing? Are you wishing others well, wishing yourself well with phrases, or are you sensing into a quality of sensation in the heart of well being? What is the The practice looks like for you?

Speaker 2 · 22:01To summarize what's happening, and if someone wants to learn this, I suggest a guided meditation on the Fit My Nap or maybe elsewhere, because I'm just going to describe the steps. I'm not going to actually guide because that would take a lot of time. But basically, what happens is you spark the feeling of meta by, for example, calling up a happy memory or something that makes you feel loving, like a memory of petting a cute animal, the face of a baby. You tend to get a sense for over time, something that will bring up this loving feeling and eventually become something you can call up on command. Like if I asked you to remember what does vanilla ice cream taste like, and you could just go into that flavor a little bit.

Speaker 1 · 22:42I love vanilla ice cream.

Speaker 2 · 22:45Yeah. So once you have the feeling, it's often recommended to send it to yourself to start because it's like on an airplane where they'll ask you to secure your own oxygen mask before helping other passengers. You can feel more meta for others once you really feel it for yourself. So you'll send the meta towards yourself, and people do that in different ways, whether they're visualizing themselves as a child or just with a phrase like, may I be happy? May I be well. So that lasts for maybe five minutes or so just to get the meta feeling stronger. And then the next step is to send it out to a friend. There's different ways to do it, but you can start to send it out to other people and eventually to all beings everywhere. So it's like a very open, expansive feeling. It's a definite experience. It could start with a phrase or a visual of seeing people smiling or with an intention, like, may all beings be happy. But in order to enter jhana, you eventually want to let go of these thoughts and verbalizations and images because one of the things that happens in the second jhana, there's no thoughts anymore. There's no kind of intentional thinking. There can be some kind of background thoughts, but you're no longer using the thought. It's faded into the background a bit. So once you have the feeling of metta, that becomes the vehicle and it takes you through the jhanas naturally and you just relax into it, you allow it to be open.

Speaker 2 · 24:10The most important part of the practice, and what Ponte really emphasized, was how to let go of distractions in a way that brings you into jhana and progressively deeper into the jhanas. He called these the six R's. And in my book, I've simplified it into four R's, which are recognize, release, relish, and remain. So recognize is when your mind is suddenly off thinking about that email that you have to answer after your meditation session. That happens spontaneously, that you're taken away by those thoughts. And the moment you recognize this, essentially you've started to meditate again. What you do next is very important because there's a tendency to want to push the distraction away or get mad at ourselves forgetting to meditate. In that moment, there's a skillful way of letting go of the craving that caused our mind to go in this other direction, and that is to release it by accepting the distraction and also releasing any tension in our body, especially in the forehead area. There tends to be a kind of contraction. The next step is to relish. This is the third R. And that means coming back to this feeling of loving kindness or whatever the object of meditation is, and to really enjoy it because joy is what's going to keep the mind centered in the present moment. And then remain is the fourth R, which is to stay with that feeling, to just have the intention to lightly keep it in awareness. I don't want to use the word focus either, because I think you're right, it tends to give this sense of really bearing down with our heads instead of just enjoying it and remaining with it, but having this intention of this is what I'm interested in, this is what I'm doing now. So if you repeatedly use these four R's, your mind starts to become more and more unified and it becomes easier and kind of effortless to stay in this state until you're no longer using much effort at all. Your mind is just resting with the feeling of love and deepening and through the jhanas on its own.

Speaker 1 · 26:06It's beautiful. So you simplified your teacher's six R's into your four Rs. Would it be too much to then oversimplify it to two R's or even one combo R of relishing release?

Speaker 2 · 26:22Yeah, those are the most important steps to remember because once you recognize the distraction, that happens almost automatically. So you could say the most important part to remember is to skillfully release that distraction almost like your attention is a fist that is clenched around it, and you want to just relax that fist and reopen your awareness in your heart. And the relish is, yeah, the sense of bringing back up the joy. If you've lost the loving kindness, actually bringing it back up. A big part of the practice is actually to even smile a little bit, which really helps the mind be uplifted. And that's the most important part. Although I think it helps to have these other R's because it's easy to just forget to recognize it all. But over time it becomes a fluid mental motion. So you're not thinking like what's the next R. You start to train your mind and eventually you have this movement down and how to do it, and it feels natural and it feels right. But I think you're right. It doesn't have to be really complicated and it's not about memorizing the R's, but it's really about getting a feel for what does it feel like when I let go of the craving and I come back into this feeling of love.

Speaker 1 · 27:28I think that was just me craving a shortcut or something. But yeah, I think that all makes sense and it's a very beautiful pathway.

Speaker 1 · 27:40One of the things that struck me about, say, the lineage in which you ordained was that teaching around sensing into the head. A lot of us will do body scans, but almost kind of use the head as a afterthought. It's like, okay, start with the toes and the foot and the ankles, and there's so much emphasis on kind of what's below the neck. You know, at other times we may be talking about get out of your head, get into your heart. By no means are we advocating to forget the head or to not appreciate intellect or the brain, but I like the inclusion of the head in your teacher's teachings around sensing into the brain, the skull, the space between. You just mentioned the forehead, because sometimes that's a point of say recognition of are we caught by something? Are we agitated? Are we grasping? Or are we feeling peaceful and calm and spacious? And the head can provide great clues just in the physical sensations of the head. Not talking about thoughts or fantasies or daydreaming, but like the actual sensations of say temperature, tightness, contractedness, movement, stillness, whether it feels pleasant or unf pleasant or neither, these physical sensations. So I'm wondering if you could talk more about how that's woven into your practice of having a fit mind and how much you incorporate that into your practice.

Speaker 2 · 29:32That is such an essential part. And I think for Bonte, my teacher, it was actually a big breakthrough in his own practice, and he emphasized it over and over again in his teaching. The body is essentially a biofeedback device. If you tune into your body, you can often tell a lot about your state of mind. What Bonte noticed is that when the mind gets distracted and when there's craving in the mind, it manifests as a physical tension and tightness, which can at first be subtle, especially if you haven't developed a certain degree of introspective awareness. It might be hard to sense at first that there's a subtle contraction in the head. And in fact, there's some muscles, I forget what they're called, in the forehead area, when there's some evidence that they're associated with negative states of mind. There was a Botox study that showed this was the case, but those muscles tend to tense up. For example, we'll even make these frowny or tense facial expressions when we're in a kind of negative state of mind. One way your listeners can actually experience this for themselves is if they're not driving, they can put a finger out in front of their face and just try to focus all of the attention onto the tip of the finger and block out every other sensation so that attention is razor sharp on the fingertip. And then notice that there's a kind of slight tension that comes with this. And then if you simply relax your gaze and allow in the entire peripheral awareness and everything around your finger, you can feel how your mind relaxes and the tension in your forehead releases along with the opening of the gaze. And that's what it feels like when you release this tension after a distraction. It's very subtle, but you can feel your mind and your awareness just broaden out like that. This is an important part of the release step. Release doesn't mean like push thoughts away or try to do anything forceful with the distraction. It's simply to allow it to be there and to relax the body and then to come back to relishing the positive fit state of mind. And then as you practice more and more, you start to become more and more aware of your body. So it becomes almost automatic where you the tension becomes very obvious and it becomes an easy reminder that you're in an unfit state.

Speaker 1 · 31:44So this is the mindfulness exercises podcast. We have mindfulness teacher trainings. Mindfulness is kind of a buzzword, and a lot of the world for benefits, it's been shown to bring. And we also talk about loving kindness as the separate practice, the separate tool. For me, the more I practice quote unquote mindfulness, where the mind encapsulates the whole sensory apparatus, including the heart and the body, the more it feels like it's a loving kindness practice where this moment-to-moment awareness of our unfolding experience is heart-based, or at least incorporates heart into it. You mentioned how I hadn't actually heard this, and correct me if I'm misstating you, but I think you said that the historical Buddha said that metta practice can lead to nirvana or the fourth state of jhana?

Speaker 2 · 32:56Actually, both, yes. The fourth state of jhana and nirvana.

Speaker 1 · 32:59You know, and mindfulness of breathing was probably his core practice, I think. And so can you talk about your understanding of, say, differences or similarities between quote unquote mindfulness and quote unquote matta or loving kindness practice?

Speaker 2 · 33:23I'm glad you brought this up. As you were talking, it reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite teachers of all time named Deepama, who was a meditation master from India. Like a little old lady. Yes, like maybe not even five feet tall, but just an absolute meditation master. She had people coming from all over the world to learn from her. Some of the most famous American teachers learned from her, like Joseph Goldstein and Jack Cornfield and Sharon Salzburg. And famously, one of her students asked her whether they should practice mindfulness or loving kindness, or what was the difference between the two? One of those two questions. And she said in her experience, there was no difference between mindfulness and loving kindness. Maybe when we start meditating or reading about it, all of these things can sound very technical, or it can sound like there's a lot of different terms and states. Maybe as our practice progresses, they start to feel more and more like, oh, this is just a different way of describing the same thing. And that's true in my experience, where initially I would try to separate out, am I feeling joy right now or is this love? But then I start to realize it's just flavors of the same thing. In my writing and in my teaching, I try to keep it pretty simple and what I call a fit state of mind is essentially a loving state, although it has different flavors to it. It's this sense of being in the present, of accepting what's happening, feeling connected if there's people around you, and it becomes a felt sense where it's clear that, oh, I'm in a fit state, I'm in a loving state, or I'm clearly not. In the historical teachings of the Buddha in these suttas, he actually spoke about metta practice far more often than mindfulness of breathing. I forget the exact stat because Bhante would often talk about this, but he went through and like counted the amount of times for each, and it was something like metta was mentioned five times more or something like that. But it wasn't often in a formal like sit down and do metta practice. I think the way metta is often taught now is kind of like a supplemental practice to mindfulness of breathing or something, but it was more radiate metta all the time. You're in a grocery store. Once you learn how to access it, just be sending this loving state to everyone around you. And that's how Bhante taught metta was not just a formal practice of sitting on the cushion, but eventually a state of mind that you could carry with you throughout your day. And there's a quote that I love where the Buddha talks about doing this while he's walking around. I'm paraphrasing, but he says, When I walk back and forth, if I have a mind of loving kindness, my walking is divine. So it's this idea of being in that state, not just when you're formally sitting with the eyes closed, but actually something you can carry with you throughout your day. And I think, as you mentioned, it becomes kind of inseparable from mindfulness itself. And just to add one thing, it carries with it a sense of awareness, a sense of meta awareness, where when you're in a loving state, you're naturally aware of what's happening. It's impossible to be in that loving state and be simultaneously distracted or be simultaneously ruminating and angry. So when you're loving, naturally you have all these other qualities alongside of it. And I think that's going back to this theme of it all kind of starts to feel like the same thing because essentially when you're in this purely loving state, you are in jhana. You do have all these other factors of joy, of a unified mind, of a stable meta awareness. So that's why I said towards the beginning of the podcast that maybe 95% of the practice is loving kindness, is meta.

Speaker 1 · 36:59Yeah. I remember some Tibetan monks coming to Spirit Rock Meditation Center one day, like very famous, high-ranking, very deep monks. And they were saying that they find practitioners from the West they tend to be head-based and that they need a lot of heart training. And that the opposite is true for practitioners based in the East, like in many Asian countries, where they're already skilled in, say, a feeling of care, whether it's classically trained or not, but there's this more of a natural heart-based orientation, and they need a little bit more training in the head. And I found that fascinating. I would have guessed the opposite of what you said, that the Buddha, when you look at the number of times he mentioned metta versus mindfulness or sati, I would have guessed that he mentioned mindfulness ten times more than metta. And that partly because at least in the West, where I studied some Buddhism and mindfulness from different teachers, there's so much emphasis on mindfulness. And you're right, it feels like loving-kindness is sort of this session three supplemental practice, like, oh, hey, by the way, there's this loving-kindness practice that only came about when some monks were afraid of going into a forest and they were scared of ghosts. Then the Buddha talked about loving-kindness as a way to dispel fear. So I'm wondering if when the Buddha taught about this, that Metta was already so ingrained in the culture of the East around Nepal and India where he lived, that that was already such a established way of being, and that he was say introducing mindfulness and concentration in the Eightfold Path as maybe more of a novel method or step or system. And that now, 2,500 years later, in the West, we're kind of reading the teachings and not quite appreciating how metta was already so important to them.

Speaker 2 · 39:14Yeah, and that reminds me of something I wanted to share. So I'm glad you asked

Speaker 2 · 39:19that. But first, I want to just clarify that Bonte was comparing the amount of times metta practice was mentioned in the suttas versus mindfulness of breathing in particular. Mindfulness in general, the word sati probably appears more often than metta in the suttas. But he was talking about like the formal meditation practice of mindfulness of breathing, which has become, I think, by far the most popular practice or at least most popular way of accessing jhana. But there's a couple of points I wanted to make that hopefully relate to this topic. The first is that sati is one aspect of the eightfold path. And I think what's happened in the West is that we've tried to, in some cases, separate out Sati from the rest of the Eightfold Path. Part of this could be because it's harder to study an entire lifestyle than it is to study something like mindfulness and give people an eight-week training program and say, how did this impact stress and these other things? It's good that scientists and psychologists and clinicians and so forth, like John Cabot Zen, have brought this into mass awareness and proven that meditation is effective by breaking it up in this way. But I think unfortunately, it's given us a sense that mindfulness could somehow be separated from a greater training program that the Buddha was talking about, which involves all eight parts of the eightfold path. What leads to mindfulness is what he called right effort. And right effort is letting go of unfit states, recognizing and releasing unfit states of mind, and relishing and remaining with fit states. That is what right effort is. And that was in his kind of eight-part training program. The right effort is what leads to right mindfulness. And right mindfulness, when it's continuous, leads into right samadhi or right concentration or right collectedness.

Speaker 1 · 41:03Was there like something before right effort? Wasn't there like curiosity?

Speaker 2 · 41:08Yeah, interest.

Speaker 1 · 41:09Interest, yeah.

Speaker 2 · 41:10Interest is one of the jhana factors, but there's all these kind of feedback loops within the eightfold path. So also having right mindfulness leads to right effort in a sense, because you need to be aware of the mind to begin with in order to recognize that it's in an unfit or an unwholesome state. You can't separate out any of the parts of the eightfold path, is the point I'm making. That mindfulness has become, like you said, this almost like overly emphasized thing as if it could be done on its own.

Speaker 1 · 41:37And in a lived experience, it feels like they're all kind of flavors, as you're saying. It's more of an integrated view or lifestyle where you can't really separate them. Yes. Just repeating what you just said.

Speaker 2 · 41:52Yeah, exactly. I think lifestyle is the word I love for it because it's everything you're doing with your mind throughout the day. And like I mentioned, three parts of that are right action, right speech, right livelihood. And so all of these things contribute to mindfulness, and mindfulness likewise contributes to remembering to do these things. In fact, the second definition of mindfulness is to remember to practice, essentially, to remember the teachings. And sati comes from the word smrti, a Sanskrit word that has the word remember in it. So it's both remembering to observe your mind and also remembering to practice, essentially. Those are the two ways it's defined in the suttas. The other point I wanted to make that you reminded me of is that the effort in practice is to go from an unfit state to a fit state. It's not to bear down on sensations or concentrate extremely hard or put ourselves through any kind of pain or bear unnecessary pain. So I think that's another misinterpretation of what mindfulness practice involves. And that's found nowhere in the suttas. In fact, the Buddha raised a joyful practice, happy practice with quick results, and he spoke out against the Jains, which were a group of people at the time who were putting themselves into a lot of pain with the idea that it purify their karma. So maybe that's another over-generalization, but there's a lot of mindfulness practice that I've seen in America where there's a lot of over-efforting. And that's another thing that Bonte saw as well, and one of the reasons that he was constantly telling us to relax. And it's a message that I took a long time to, I guess, really listen to because I was really coming at the practice like an athlete who wanted to get the gold medal or something. And clearly that was not the way. So there's a lot of misinterpretations, I think, about mindfulness and about the practice that the Buddha was teaching.

Speaker 1 · 43:45Well, and something you said earlier, which I don't want to overlook, which is that when you practice matta, you come back to the now. And that a lot of us, myself included, often succumb. Um, to fear and speculation about the future, and we're trying to get somewhere. And this element of time is so important to notice that when we're talking about getting a fit mind or getting to nirvana or getting to this place of jhana or getting to this place of relishing, it's not about some point in the future that the practice is releasing the future or this future-based goal and coming back to this heart, this experience, this sensation, this effort, this lack of effort, recognizing in the now, loving what's here now.

Speaker 1 · 44:51And it's not about this endpoint that may or may not come one minute, one hour, one day, one lifetime. And I think it's easier with meta, or when we talk about it in terms of say loving awareness or caring awareness, or when we talk about mindfulness in heart terms, which it is. We all know what care feels like, and it's an absence of fear, it's a love for what's here. There's a little bit more of a spacious quality. As you said, there's an acceptance quality, and it's very rooted in being in this fluid flow, this sense of what's actually happening right now, and we're relating to it with care. There's just this nowness that you can call it a goal, but it's really relishing in what's here right now that I think is important to talk about. That it's not about what we're gonna get to, but that it's already here. Can you just talk a little bit more about this meta quality of now-ness in your practice?

Speaker 2 · 46:05Yeah, and I think this directly relates to what I just mentioned, where there's this sense of striving. And when you're striving for something in the future, then you're appreciating what's happening in this very moment. So by definition, you've kind of lost the path in that sense. But it's also a paradox or a balance because certainly there is this sense of there is a practice that we commit to and intend to be doing, and that going back to what you were saying earlier, I think this is potentially where the Buddha was speaking to a different audience in ancient India, where perhaps, and this matches my brief experience in India, where there's a sense that they already are quite heart-based and maybe almost a little too carefree often, in a sense that I'm jealous of how carefree some of the people I met were. But if you read the language he was using, at least the way it's translated, he's often encouraging them and using like militaristic battle analogies for the practice, really encouraging them to put forth effort and to strive for nibbana. So perhaps that was his skillful means of addressing that audience at the time that was already quite carefree. But as you're saying, it's really important to remember that the practice is about being here, being now, being aware of what's happening in the present moment. And jhana, this state that we talked about earlier, often we practitioners use the phrase getting into jhana, but jhana is what happens when you release, when you recognize and release the things that are pulling your mind out of the present moment. So it's when you release your predictions about the future, your ruminations about the past. And when you've released enough of those superfluous thoughts that are taking the mind out of the present, what's left is a blissful experience of the moment as it's currently perceived. And then as you progress through the jhanas, you're essentially getting more and more closer to the quote unquote actual now or actual present moment in terms of there being less conceptual processing. And just to touch upon the neuroscience, like your brain is constantly interpreting what's happening, it's interpreting sensory inputs, smells, sights, sounds, sensations, and it's layering on top concepts, thoughts, storylines, narratives. So as we deepen in our practice, as we deepen into the experience of the now, as we come more into the heart, into loving kindness, we start to be able to see things without that conceptual processing, without this layering on top of essentially past experience of labeling things with words or thoughts or stories, and we start to see what's actually happening before all of that. In that sense, we're coming closer to quote unquote reality, at least in terms of our immediate sensory processing.

Speaker 1 · 48:47You know, a lot of the people listening are interested in quote unquote teaching mindfulness. And so for a lot of us who are helping others with our practice of being present, I think it's really important to reflect on how much of a heartfelt quality are we conveying? How much do we actually care about who we're helping? Can people feel our care? Not like in a lovey-dovey way, but in ways of respect and safety and intention. Are we sharing these practices in a fully embodied way that incorporates love and compassion? So I think it's just a useful reflection for us to always remember that when we're sharing these practices.

Speaker 1 · 49:40Liam, you've been disrobed now for six months-ish. I know for me when I disrobed after two years of being a monastic, that those days and months afterwards were very intense. I I felt very sensitive to the amount of stimuli that I was experiencing outside the monastery, as well as the different types of stimuli I was encountering. Granted, I was only a monastic for two years, which may seem like a long time for some. Many monks are monks for 10, 20, 30 years or more. If they ever disrobed or went back into regular society, they may have a very different experience because they're maybe more trained or discerning as to what kind of stimuli they choose to be around after a monastic forest-based experience. But for me, it was intense because my heart kept breaking open when I would watch a commercial or the news and just kind of sense into either the suffering that people were going through or the confusion that people had that buying a certain type of deodorant was gonna solve their problems. Little things like that. I was very sensitive to perceive like mind states or mental states that I saw other people in. And I was like, but what if they just meditated a little bit more? If I was a little bit more relaxed and loving or happy with themselves, and that led me to work at Spirit Rock and start mindfulness exercises just to help people to find themselves again. But I'm wondering for you, you're in Mexico right now, but how has this process of disrobing been for you and how has it impacted your heart on the day-to-day level?

Speaker 2 · 51:41Thanks for sharing. And I can relate to a lot of what you just talked about. Certainly it was jarring to have more sensory stimuli and also more social interactions. In fact, one of the challenging parts was just learning to eat and talk at the same time. It felt like a difficult multitask.

Speaker 1 · 51:59And just for context, a lot of monasteries or sanghas will reserve time for eating and there's no speaking allowed. So it's not like we don't know how to talk while we're eating, but that we're not I'm gonna use the word allowed, but it's not like uh militaristic allowed, but there's a routine or a practice or tradition of when we're eating, we just eat. When we're talking, we talk. But there's a separation of talking and eating in our tradition, so yeah.

Speaker 2 · 52:27And it was challenging to get re-accustomed to that, as well as just social interactions in general, because a lot of my monastic training was essentially using speech at a bare minimum, or silence was appreciated or normalized in a lot of monasteries so that people could really be focusing on what's happening in their mind.

Speaker 1 · 52:46Yeah, and there's a like a shared language too, and a shared focus. You're not talking about what happened on the view or Saturday Night Live. You're like talking about practice.

Speaker 2 · 52:58Yes, yes supporting each other on the practice. Yeah. So a lot of those things were jarring at first. I think I've now started to find what feels like a good balance and routine with boundaries that are really helping me. I basically don't read the news, and maybe some people would look down on that so far. It's been okay, nothing. If I need to hear about something, usually like a friend or family will tell me about it. But essentially curating a mental diet, what I call a mental diet, it's one of the things that I wrote about where we can just be very selective about what kind of mental inputs we curate throughout the day, and that's been a helpful practice as I've been reintegrating. And how is your heart felt? Well, I disrobed in the middle of a five and a half month kind of solo retreat in the woods in Vermont. So coming out of that, which was a very intense experience, I was actually unable to look at a screen for longer than half an hour without starting to feel a headache and heartache. That is now no longer the case. I can spend longer looking at a screen, but I still try to spend a lot of time outdoors, and that's where my heart feels happiest. And I'm much more in tune with what makes my heart happy. And when my head has tried to take charge and telling me I should be doing something that's clearly not what my heart wants. There also is an increased sense of suffering around me, like you alluded to, where it's quite obvious that a lot of people are discontent or looking for their fulfillment and happiness in places that are kind of futile. But I think what's helped me also is to have a practice of really trying not to judge others and trying to instead feel compassion and love towards them because especially when I came back from Asia, I had a lot of judgment towards the people around me and how I thought they should be using their time differently or just becoming hyper-aware of their distractability or rushing through their day, this kind of thing. But a big part of the practice that we've been talking about of loving-kindness is really to accept others as they are. And that can often be the way that they change or take an interest in what you might have to say as opposed to trying to give unsolicited advice or be mentally critical of them. And that's an ongoing practice of trying to really accept everyone, including myself, as we are.

Speaker 1 · 55:17Well, and you're saying how there's these flavors of love, like compassion and joy and equanimity, gratitude, generosity, forgiveness. And part of me wonders if even opposite mind states are almost flavors of love in the sense that when we're afraid, it's born out of love because we're wanting to protect or preserve or get back to something. Or anger could be a flavor of love. I'm not a psychotherapist, but I think that we all just want to be happy. Yes. And that's a big part of compassion, is just remembering our innate goodness and everyone's innate goodness. Some are easier to love than others sometimes based on our own causes and conditions.

Speaker 2 · 56:05Yeah, like you said, everyone's trying their best to be happy. And I think uh becoming very familiar with these emotions within oneself brings an increased sense of compassion for seeing them in others. And even when the mind is confused or the person thinks that their anger is the best way to handle a situation, or maybe they can't help it, like you said, it's ultimately an attempt to be happy, to feel love, to feel safe. So I think that understanding can bring a lot of compassion.

Speaker 1 · 56:35Well, Liam McClintock, aka Metananda. Thank you so much for chatting about this with me today. It's great to catch up with you. When you reached out, I just felt a lot of gladness to hear from you. I'm so happy for you that you published your book, Fit Mind, and that you're sharing these four steps to lasting bliss of recognize, release, relish, and remain. I highly recommend to everyone listening or watching to check out the book, which includes a lot of nuance into each of these four steps, including practical teachings and exercises to create this fit mind, this loving awareness. And I've known Liam for a while, and he blends a deep understanding of the mind with extensive heart training. Liam's taught many different types of people throughout the world and has been a great contributor to our certification program and is a graduate of the certification program as well. Liam, I bow to you and your practice and your teachings and the flavors in which you're sharing them with others. I'm looking forward to seeing and hearing how this path unfolds for you. Thank you for reminding me of going on a stimulus diet. But it's great to catch up with you. I encourage everyone listening to check out FitMind, the book, FitMind the app, FitMind the Programs, FitMind the Teachings. I'll put links in the description field. Liam, is there anything else that you'd like to share that you would like our audience to know?

Speaker 2 · 58:26Well, first of all, I wanted to express gratitude to you, Sean, because you've been so helpful on my path. And like you said, you're one of my teachers. And the Mindfulness Exercises program was helpful in my own journey. So I recommend that to all the listeners, if they're not already a student of yours. The tranquility in your voice is palpable. I'm sure the listeners can hear that as well. So it's very pleasant to speak with you always. I guess if I were to leave the listeners with something, it's just the importance of practice, because there's so much information available now, and it's easy to almost use that as a distraction to continue to learn more about mindfulness and meditation, almost thinking that it is the practice itself. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the willingness to apply the teachings, especially for teachers as well, because I think the more we can practice, the more we can help others. So those who are listening to this who are themselves mindfulness teachers, I guess I just encourage us all to practice to continue along this path together. And thanks again, Sean. This has been really awesome.

Speaker 1 · 59:28Beautiful. Thank you.