Living Namaste, with Jeremy David Engles

Speaker 1 · 0:00Welcome everyone to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. Today I have the honor of speaking with Jeremy David Ingalls. He's a professor, a longtime yoga and meditation teacher, and co-founder of Yoga Lab in State College, Pennsylvania, where he's been training teachers for more than a decade. He studied this path in both India and the United States. He writes about something that we don't really talk about enough, which is how our personal practice and the health of our communities are really the same work. He has a new book, he actually has two new books out. One of them is called Living Namaste: A Practical Guide to Mindfulness, Yoga, and Building Community, that takes that single word of Namaste and turns it into a way of moving through the world. It's built around three simple reminders. I am divine, you are divine, and live the word together. Most of us have heard the word namaste hundreds, maybe thousands of times, often at the very end of a yoga class, right before we roll up our mats and step back into the noise of the day. We bow, we say it, and we move on. But Jeremy has spent years sitting with a quieter question. What if we actually lived it? So today we're going to be exploring that and his new book, which you can find wherever books are sold. You can also check out his website at Jeremy Davidengalls.com. I'll post a link in the show notes and on our website for those of you wanting to check it out. He's been in Jack Cornfield and Tara Brock's teacher training program. He has maybe five or more other books that have been highly regarded and endorsed by some of the world's top mindfulness teachers, including a book called The Ethics of Oneness, Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita, The Art of Gratitude, The Politics of Resentment, and his other new book called On Mindful Democracy, The Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World. So, Jeremy, David Ingalls, you've been a busy man. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 · 2:47Thanks for having me. This is a joy.

Speaker 1 · 2:49Well, you were just in Berkeley and the Bay Area last week, so we missed each other. But I'm really fascinated to dive into your work with yoga and yoga teaching and mindfulness.

Speaker 1 · 3:05But I'd like to start with that word of namaste, which a lot of us have heard but haven't really deeply explored. So for someone who's only ever heard the word namaste at the close of a class, how would you define it? And what does it really point to?

Speaker 2 · 3:24So namaste is a very common greeting and also a parting in India and some other countries in Southeast and South Asia. And in everyday life there, it's really a synonym for hello and often goodbye. Anthropologists call greetings a human universal. Like every culture has greetings. And they travel remarkably. The word hello has traveled all over the world, aloha, chow, things like that. So during the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were a number of amazing young people who went to India, went to Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka to study with some of the world's great meditation teachers. Then they came back and introduced a lot of what they learned to us in North America and Europe. Jack Cornfield, one of my teachers, was one of these teachers who did that. Sharon Salzberg as well. Another one of the real famous teachers who went to India and came back was Ram Das. A lot of us know his book, Be Here Now, and some of his other works. He was very famous for traveling around the college campuses, introducing people to meditation yoga, and a lot of drugs, from what I understand. But another thing that he brought back with him with his meditation practice and teachings was the word namaste. It's interesting looking at the way that the meaning of that word has shifted. In linguistics, scholars talk about loan words, which are words that are borrowed from one language into another. We actually have quite a few loanwords from Sanskrit and Hindi in English. Jungle, pajama, those are a couple others, bandana.

Speaker 1 · 5:18Jungle and pajama.

Speaker 2 · 5:20Yeah. It's an interesting list, and a lot of it was tied to British colonization too. Namaste is one of those loan words. Some loan words basically stay the same when you take it from one language to another. Namaste's meaning has shifted a little bit. So it's shifted from meaning just hello to something deeper, some sort of deeper greeting of something inside of all of us. Namaste is actually two words. It's namas, which means I bow or I honor. And then tay is to you. So literally the word means I bow to you or I honor you. And Ram Das talked about it as being a word of honoring the divine in another. So I bow to the divine in you. Or he said it another place, I bow to the place in you where the universe resides, which is a really beautiful sentiment, I think. In the 1980s, especially the 1990s, as yoga really gained popularity in North America and Europe, it became a custom to end yoga practices by saying namaste. That is a recognition, a bow to the practice that all of us have just done of connecting to the divine in ourselves. As someone who's been teaching yoga for a long time now, it was really interesting to me how even experienced practitioners really didn't know what that word meant or really hadn't taken the opportunity to sit with it in meditation and contemplation. And so I wrote this book in part because I was interested in thinking through and sitting with the question of what would it really mean to bow and honor and connect to the divine in ourselves and to other people? So if we took the practice of yoga, of yoking, of union, of connection off of the mat and into the world, out of that 60 minutes or hour and a half or 30 minutes into our daily lives, what would that look like? And I think one way to live yoga is to live this practice of connecting, connecting to others as divine.

Speaker 1 · 7:45Beautiful. So there's this word namaste. I've never been to India, so I don't know how it's say routinely said or received, but I lived in Thailand for a while and I've done many yoga sessions as a student, and oftentimes the namaste is paired with sort of an enjolie of

Speaker 1 · 8:10hands together in front of the heart. Is that motion with the hands traditionally historically tied to namaste, or have we just paired those together in the last say hundred years in the West?

Speaker 2 · 8:25I think that it's definitely something that you at least I have, but in the time I've spent in India, you see those two gestures paired together, you know, an Anjali mudra paired with saying namaste, sometimes a bow of the head. Sometimes it's very versatile greeting or parting. If you have one thing in a hand, you can do it with just one hand, you can do it above your head, you can do it down below, you can make the gesture without saying anything. Sometimes people do say namaste without the Anjali Mudra, but it's definitely become connected in our yoga worlds. I have friends who are senior teachers of meditation in India, and I'll often ask them, you know, what do you think about us saying Namaste? I asked the head of the Vedanta Society in San Francisco and New York about this, and I was just curious what people thought about that. And almost everyone that I talked to said, it's fine if you say Namaste. But one thing people were concerned about is that as yogis, we can get very specific and precious about like exactly where the hands have to be on the body and the knuckles lined up and the force that we're pressing our hands together. And almost everyone I talked to said, that doesn't matter at all. What really matters is the intention and then the understanding of the practice. So do you understand what it means to bow to the divine in another? And then do you do that actually? And that's really what ultimately matters the most.

Speaker 1 · 10:17Some monks would say, Well, you have to bow this very specific way where the hands are here and the head is here, and your toes have to be curled up here, etc. Usually the wiser monks would say, it's about the spirit of it, the intention, as you said, and is there a sense of honor and humility conveyed or felt?

Speaker 2 · 10:40Tik Nauhan is another of my teachers, and I've been practicing in the plum village tradition, and there's a practice of touching the earth that we do, you know, a full prostration of connecting to the earth and the teaching that he often gave, as well as the it's the spirit. And are you feeling the connection? Are you feeling this deep and rich sense of interbeing between yourself and the others who are bowing in the earth as well? And are you feeling that humility and that dignity? It's such a beautiful practice in that way. Nomista can be like that as well.

Speaker 1 · 11:16I'd like to dive into that when we're trying to connect with our sense of interconnectedness, connecting with a divinity in ourselves,

Speaker 1 · 11:31with say reverence for the divine in someone else. A lot of people, even longtime practitioners, find it hard to connect with their own divinity or that felt sense of humility and reverence and honor. How do you recommend people to be able to connect with that internally, like in themselves?

Speaker 2 · 11:54And one of the questions that I sat with quite a bit while thinking about this book and then writing this book was how to write about divinity? Because of course, we're talking about something that transcends words. And so there's always a danger in any language we use to label something like divinity, because the moment we label it, we try to pin it down, but of course, it can't be pinned down. It's too big for that. But also, of course, the moment we label anything, there's an opportunity for misunderstanding and for understanding something on a symbolic or conceptual level as opposed to an embodied practical level. So I thought a lot about those issues while I was writing the book. My PhD is in rhetoric, which is the study of the power of language. And so, of course, I was thinking a lot about language. When I started my yoga journey, a lot of our yoga in North America, I mean, there's many yogas. There's no one yoga. There are many traditions, many practices that come under that word. But many of the traditions that I've encountered are influenced by people like Swami Vivekananda, who was a very important yogi in the 1890s. He comes to the United States, gives this smashing speech at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, and then travels around the country as both a spiritual leader, but also kind of a curiosity to people. He talks a lot about divinity and yoga as a practice of connecting to our divinity. But when he talks about it, he's really deeply influenced by this Indian sage named Tatanjali, who wrote a book called The Yoga Sutras. Patanjali gave talks and they were written down and they've come to be known as the Yoga Sutras. His perspective on things was very dualist. So there's something divine inside of all of us, and it's separate from this life of change. The words in Sanskrit are Purusha and Prakriti. And there's this really famous story that's repeated twice in the Uponishads of these two birds that are sitting on a branch, and one of the birds is like darting its head around, looking at the bugs flying around and trying to grab the fruit that's around it. And the other bird is just sitting there silently watching it. In the Upunishads, and then in the tradition of Patanjali, and then in Swami Vivekananda, and then in a lot of contemporary yoga, that's a metaphor for two different things that exist inside of us. So there's some divine essence, some divine soul that's separate from the world, and then there's this other world of change that's happening, and they don't interact. That's never been my experience of divinity. And partly I think that's because my meditation practice has always been in Zen traditions as well. We're not dualists at all. If you think of that metaphor of these two birds on a branch, it's quite possible that they're the same thing, that they're just different aspects of our human experience. And so that's how I tend to think of divinity as the part of us, the capacity that we all have to be more mindful, the capacity we have to tap into a peaceful place, the capacity we have to not immediately respond to the world or react to the world, but to step back and watch that other bird as it plays out its conditioning, as it does what it does, and then to act from a place of calmness, a place of wisdom, a place of connection. So when I talk in the book about connecting to the divine within, I'm really thinking about a practice of mindfulness, a practice of connecting to this capacity we have to be mindful, to be aware. I'm curious how that lands with you, and then we can talk about maybe why it's difficult for us often to connect to that divine.

Speaker 1 · 16:20All that really rang true for me. People like Ram Das and Jack Cornfield talk about mindfulness as loving awareness. Yeah. And to me, that loving awareness is not dualistic, but rather shared, interconnected. That's my sense of it. When we talk about Namaste's being like the divine in me, bows to that which is divine in you. There's something rather personal, but it's also impersonal in the sense that it's not my divinity and your divinity, it's divinity. To me, it feels like the loving awareness or this benevolence imbued in the fabric of our universe and consciousness. When we think about it or sense into it from that perspective, it's no longer like, oh well, it's me trying to find the goodness of my life, or I'm trying to figure out how I've been a good person. It moves from that towards just the timeless goodness of energy itself or humanity itself, and then I am a part of that bigger whole which is divine, and I honor that in me and all of us. That's kind of how it landed for me.

Speaker 2 · 17:41No, that was beautiful. And you know, when I think about our practice of mindfulness, you know, they again there's many different ways to practice this beautiful practice. I've been really influenced by, you know, like I

Speaker 2 · 17:55said, the plum village tradition. And in works like the Satipattana Sutra, the Sutra on Mindfulness, there are two aspects to the practice. So there is Shamatha and Vipassana. Um, and Shamatha is the practice of calming or settling. I often use the metaphor, the image of a snow globe. And I know I didn't come up with this image. I'm sure I heard it from a great teacher somewhere, but thinking about how our minds are often like a snow globe that we've shaken up. There's all these thoughts and feelings, and they're so busy and we're darting here and there. It's hard to focus, it's hard to see. And so, at least initially, mindfulness is a practice of setting the snow globe down and allowing it to settle. And we can do that through so many different practices. In my book, I offer a couple of breathing practices, a couple of walking meditations to help with the settling. And once things have settled, it's possible to see things more clearly. And then the possibility of insight arises. And that's what vipassana means, and clear seeing leading to insight. And you can see what's in the snow globe. When I was in California, I saw a bunch of snow globes that had Golden Gate bridges in them. So you'd shake them up and you couldn't see it. And it's supposed to be like the fog, I think, actually. But when the fog would settle, you could see the bridge. When things finally settle and we're looking, what do we see? Well, we see that everything is changing constantly. Everything is in motion, but it's not changing in isolation, it's changing together. So there are countless causes and conditions that are constantly moving things and they're connected. We see that things that we think are separate are in fact not so separate. We see that all being is inter-being, which is TikNot Han's beautiful phrase. He would use the example of a table, which I loved and I've taken up, where what's a table made up of? Well, a table is made of wood, a table is made of nails and maybe glue, a table is made of a carpenter's labor, a table is made up of plans, and many, many, many other things. If you took the wood out of the table and you returned it to the forest, the table would not exist anymore. If you took the nails out of the table, melted them down and returned them to the earth, the table would not exist anymore. And so the table is more than a table. In Walt Whitman's beautiful phrasing, a table contains multitudes. A table contains sunlight, a table contains rain, a table contains the earth, a table contains atoms that have been circulating around for hundreds of thousands of millions of years. And so when I teach about these books and teach mindfulness to people, I'll often ask them to think about a table and then to think about a person and how a person is like a table in that way. A person is made up of countless causes and conditions that if you took any of them away, the person would not exist anymore. And I invite people to think about their ancestors as well, and how if someone somewhere in our lineage had fallen off a cliff before they procreated or been eaten by a tiger or something like that, we wouldn't exist. And so for TikN, that sense of connection, of interbeing, leads to a sense of how miraculous our lives really are. When we start to think about how many things had to go right for us to be here in this moment right now, life really is a miracle. And so Ty talks about how the real miracle is not. Levitating, which is something that yogis, I don't know if they really aspire to that or not, but have definitely traditionally written about it. The real miracle is to be able to walk on earth, to feel the connection between our feet and this planet that supports us, that empowers us. And I mentioned that progression from calming down to seeing clearly to insight to change to interbeing to miracle, because that to me is a pathway into being able to connect to our own divinity, to this sense of our own dignity, to the sense of honor that we can have towards ourselves for this miraculous existence. And I think the reason it's so hard for us to connect to our divinity is because we've been conditioned to experience our life as rugged individuals, as individuals cut off from others with the world on our backs. That's why I think it's important to recognize that all independence is also interdependence. All being is also interbeing.

Speaker 1 · 23:09Wilson, yeah, it's a very fruitful exploration for all of us to practice this interbeing and interconnectedness. So I invite everyone to pause after this conversation to really explore this in your own life. You talked about how a table isn't just a table. You said that you have a PhD in rhetoric. You know, it makes sense that you're dissecting the word namaste. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're also a professor of communication and ethics by day, yoga teacher the rest of the time. I don't know much about rhetoric, but at least with linguistics, we could talk about how words aren't just words, too. Like a table isn't just a table, words aren't just words. That the more closely we look at something when we settle the snow or the fog, depending on where you are in the world, and see more clearly, we see the parts of the whole and how everything is connecting with more nuance. A lot of monks were former physics majors. A lot of my best monk friends were really into physics, if not a major or a teacher of physics. And I think there is a strong correlation there of people looking deeply into the reality of things, and maybe hearing a word with their ears, but really sensing into what is that word, what does it mean, where does it come from, what are we actually saying? Yeah. And that there is an energy conveyed, there's an intention. And all of this is to say that when we look closely at Namaste, there's this pointing to the divine and realizing that the divine is shared. And when we realize that it's shared, to me, it opens my heart. And there's this connection with others that you explicitly point to in your book around community and the importance of community, and that yoga and meditation and mindfulness are not these isolated practices, but rather a shared

Speaker 1 · 25:40experience. So could you talk about some of your insights and realizations that you've had around community?

Speaker 2 · 25:50Yeah. Tigna Han uh talked about how that there's this idea in many forms of Buddhism of a Buddha to come, a future Buddha that will come and point the way forward or show us a path out of our suffering or remind us of the teachings and of the Dharma. And Tai always said that the Buddha to come will be a community. It'll be a global community. It won't just be one person. I love that idea, actually. I've heard from so many students of yoga and meditation as well, that they practice on their own for a while with an app through their earbuds or on YouTube or whatnot. And they find that their practice just stalls out really quickly. And I think that's because there's this deep human longing for connection, connection to others, for the warmth of compassion. There's something so beautiful about practicing together with others, sitting, moving, walking, because it reminds us that we're not alone. And I think that we live in a culture that often suggests to us that we are alone. And I know that the way that people consume social media, especially, I mean, social media is food, just like food. It doesn't give us calories in the way that a carrot would or something like that, but it's something we ingest. It's a nutriment. And that flood of information on social media that's meant to capture our attention and hold our attention further pulls us away from connections to others, often like real in-person connections. So it's been really interesting to see yoga studios come back after the pandemic. The pandemic was hard for so many reasons, but it was hard in part because it fractured our community spaces of practice. And even when we would practice together online, it wasn't the same. I mean, there's something about being physically in a space with others and feeling their energy, feeling their commitment to the practice, feeling the connection that they cultivate with the practice. And I've never found a more powerful invitation to the practice than inviting someone into a space and having them experience the collective slowing down of the breath that happens when we meditate together. People often will ask me afterwards, what just happened? And I'll say, Well, what do you think just happened? And how did that feel to you? And what did you experience? And how was that different than you normally experience things? It's such a beautiful thing to come together around, like cultivating this deep, beautiful part of ourselves. I think that that's part of what community does for us. You know, in my book on mindful democracy, the point of that book in a very short nutshell is to say that we're conditioned to experience democracy as this war between political parties. It's very off-putting for many of us. It's disempowering. But really, what democracy is is a shared practice of working together to care for ourselves, to care for each other, and to care for the life that we share. And that's what we do in community. We care for ourselves, we help each other care for ourselves for the kinds of sorrows that are inevitable in life. We care for each other, and we tend to this life that we share. So I think that the power of Namaste is that it's an invitation to recognize that my suffering and my happiness is in fact deeply interconnected with the suffering and happiness of others in the world, and that there's a lot that we can do together to actually make the world a less painful and more joyful place.

Speaker 1 · 30:14Thank you for sharing that. Is there one meditation or practice

Speaker 1 · 30:20from your book or elsewhere that you personally return to most, or that students tell you that shifted something for them the most?

Speaker 2 · 30:31Yeah. I grew up with uh really severe asthma. That was one of the reasons that I first started meditating was to try to cultivate a different relationship to my breath, because when you have asthma, it's really easy to see your lungs as an enemy, but that's not healthy at all. I still take medicine because my asthma is so severe, but my meditation practice has helped a lot. So I come back to breathing meditations a lot. I have a meditation in the Living Namaste book called Trees and Lungs Have the Same Shape. And it's a meditation on our interconnectedness with trees. And I love trees. I think trees are the patron saints of all asthmatics because the moment you walk into a forest, the air is cleaner. Like you said earlier, I was in the Bay Area this past weekend speaking at the Bay Area Book Festival. But the days before that, my wife and I took the time to drive down the California coast to visit the Redwoods, and we did some hiking and Redwoods National and State Parks, and it was beyond words how beautiful that was just to take 10 steps into the forest and feel my blood pressure lower. So I say that because often if the weather is nice here in central Pennsylvania, which it is about half the year, I like to take my students into the woods to walk in the woods. But the meditation I think that's probably been most powerful for my students is just a simple walking gratitude meditation. And we do this often. When we walk mindfully, the point is not to get anywhere. We're not going for a destination, but instead really to experience the joy and connection of just walking, feeling the imprint of the foot on the earth and the way that the earth responds. So we'll take a few mindful steps, settle a little bit, and then I invite my students to think of something that they're grateful for and then to take a step, and then to think of something else they're grateful for and to take a step. And so the walking meditation becomes a gratitude meditation. And so I call it a gratitude walk. It is amazing to see the way that this lands with students. I do this with my college students a couple times a semester when things feel out of control for them as they often do. We'll go outside and just spend five minutes or 10 minutes doing a gratitude walk. People come back feeling so much more connected, so much more supported. Because gratitude really is an invitation into connection. I love gratitude for that reason. So that's a meditation that I come back to a lot. And again, I think with like most meditations, I'm sure that I experienced that somewhere with a great teacher someplace and integrated it into my own practice. So I don't claim any ownership over that practice whatsoever, but it's a beautiful and powerful one.

Speaker 1 · 33:44Yeah, I've never done that walk of gratitude before. That sounds very inviting and healing. One of your many books that you've written is called The Art of Gratitude. And the description on your website says that the art of gratitude explores the central and often paradoxical role that gratitude plays in democratic politics, which really surprised me. It says viewed as thanksgiving rather than indebtedness. Gratitude becomes a strong foundation for democracy that reorients our politics away from resentment, anger, and division towards a renewed emphasis on the common good. I often hear that gratitude is

Speaker 1 · 34:35like the mother of all practices or virtues. If you had to be deserted on a deserted island with only one practice, sometimes I think that maybe it would be just gratitude practice. Which kind of points to that humility of bowing. And I've never heard it explicitly connected with democracy or democratic politics. And you just touched on that just now, but could you talk about this relationship between gratitude and politics?

Speaker 2 · 35:09Like any word that stands for an emotion, a feeling, there are many different ways of feeling that feeling or embodying that emotion. And so one of our common phrases in our culture is I owe you a debt of gratitude, a debt of gratitude. And in most of everyday life, that's totally fine, right? I mean, it indicates a sense of reciprocity that, like, I've got your back, you've got my back. But often when you're dealing with relationships between a person and a person in a position of authority, the person in a position of authority will do something for you that they should have done anyway, and then say that you owe them one. This rhetoric is really deeply ingrained in the way that President Trump talks and thinks about the world. He talks about how people in Europe are not sufficiently grateful for all the things that Americans have done, and they're not coming true on what they owe us. And so there's a sense of owing and indebtedness and power relations. So in that book, and then this becomes a really central part of my own mindful democracy book as well. I say that that's not really the way that most of us experience gratitude, I don't think, as some sort of indebtedness or owing, but really we experience it as a deep sense of thankfulness for support, for the things that help us to be a better version of ourselves or to connect to the divine within us. Gratitude is so powerful in democracy because democracy requires us to be able to work together with people and live together and get along with people who don't necessarily agree with us on all things. I don't eat meat, but I live in central Pennsylvania in a place where hunting is really, really, really popular, to the point that actually the university gives its staff a day off on the first day of deer hunting season, the first day of bear hunting season, which is a thing. So hunting is a really big part of our culture. And someone asked me at a book event a couple months ago, what do you do when like a hunter comes up to you and wants to talk? Don't you just hate them because they hunt and you don't eat meat? And I said, Absolutely not. I recognize the divine within them just as much as me. And what I look for rather than focusing on what divides us is I want to connect to something that we share. And the way to do that is through gratitude. And so often in moments like that, if I know that there's some issue dividing me from someone else, I'll ask them what are three or four things that you're really grateful for? What are your favorite things about living in central Pennsylvania? What are the things that matter most to you and that you want to protect? And it's interesting with hunters, inevitably, one of the things that they care most about and that they're grateful for is the fact that Pennsylvania has all of this public land that is protected. They are grateful for and care deeply about the earth and about the trees and about the health of our forests and also the forest life as well. And that's something that I care about really deeply too, and I'm very grateful for. And so if I go into that conversation with an attitude of gratitude and finding something that we're both grateful for, we've established a connection that we can build on, as opposed to going into a conversation oppositionally. And so I think in that way, gratitude is really foundational to democracy because it points us beyond just things that are personally important to us towards things that we share. We share the earth, we share the trees, we share the streams and the rivers here. And just like the table would not exist without the wood, we would not exist without the earth. Most people that I talk to realize that.

Speaker 1 · 39:43When you were talking about that

Speaker 1 · 39:45and finding commonalities of things that we value, it reminds me of a meditation that Sharon Salzberg and others read called Just Like Me, in which we reflect on someone we may not necessarily like or that are some challenges with. And we say, just like me, they too want to be happy. Just like me, they too have experienced grief. Just like me, they too probably love their mom and dad. And you just go through a long list of commonalities, and the heart connects more and more with that other person. And I'm just thinking out loud of doing a just like me practice for say Democrats with Republicans, and vice versa.

Speaker 2 · 40:37I love that. One of the things that Tichnahan often said about meta and loving-kindness meditation is that many of our loving-kindness practices include well-wishes and wishes for safety and health and happiness to someone who's difficult, right? Or has caused us pain. And Ty often said that it's better to leave that part of the meditation out for a while until you're really well established in practicing loving kindness towards yourself and people you're close to. And it feels like to me that the just like me meditation is a way of building up that heart muscle a little bit so that you are more prepared to extend those wishes of meta towards someone who's difficult or maybe caused harm. So that's beautiful. Is that meditation on your website?

Speaker 1 · 41:25It is. Yeah, we have a few different versions of it. Mindfulness exercises.com. You can just search just like me, and it should come up. We're having some issues with our search bar lately, but yeah, we have that. I agree that it's skillfully it may be worth diving into that, like after you've established a baseline of care or groundedness. So maybe not diving in but gently wading in.

Speaker 2 · 41:53Right.

Speaker 1 · 41:53And we can practice this not just with our own United States dualistic parties, but also with other people from around the world, with other governments as well. Thank you for sharing all this. I think it's a wonderful thread to follow from Namaste and the Divine in Me towards the Divine in Others, towards our shared divinity, community, and how that impacts how we approach our community as a country and as a world. Because it's not all separate. This is a practice that does touch on or is integrated with politics, which a lot of us, or at least I shy away from sometimes.

Speaker 2 · 42:42Sure, sure. Well, I mean, who wants to participate in what politics has become? It's soul dimming, is kind of how I think of it.

Speaker 1 · 42:49It takes a lot of courage. And I think these practices do help give us the courage to know what our North Star is, and to be able to communicate from a more grounded, loving place with conviction. And that's why people like TikNot Hun, Martin Luther King, and some of our great presidents on both sides of the aisle have been so successful, is because they are passionate about a nourished whole. There's a love for country that is not abusive towards a minority, but rather inclusive. I'm really appreciative of where this conversation has gone. Jeremy David Ingalls, thank you so much for your books. Before we wrap up, is there one thing that you would like to share that you have not shared so far that you'd love our community to hear?

Speaker 2 · 43:49I love

Speaker 2 · 43:50the saying in the plum village tradition of no mud, no lotus. I'm sure it's something that many listeners have heard, and it's something I sit with quite a bit. The lotus flower, a symbol of enlightenment, grows from the mud. And I was in Vietnam a couple of years ago. I had the chance to visit Tignahan's root temple and where he was born and to meditate there. Walking around, especially the central part of Vietnam, there are all of these bomb craters from American bombs during the war. And many of them have filled with water and become little lakes where lotus flowers are growing now. You know, I wrote a poem about that that's in my on Mindful Democracy book, and I talk about that experience a little bit, but it's really stuck with me of how there's always mud. And the question is, what are we going to grow from that mud? But the other thing that really struck me was the fact that lotus flowers almost never grow alone. They grow in community. A lot of people have been asking me what gives me hope right now. Those of us who are on the Dharma path, hope is a tricky word, I think, sometimes. But to me, hope is such a powerful practice. And what gives me hope is other people because we already have what we need in order to transform ourselves in this world because we have each other. And so I think coming back to that place has been really nourishing for me. And I hope it is for others as well.

Speaker 1 · 45:25Jeremy, thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you for your work in training yoga teachers and helping our democracy and helping us live our Namaste. For everyone listening, please check out Jeremy David Ingalls' new book, Living Namaste A Practical Guide to Mindfulness, Yoga, and Building Community. Jeremy, it's been a pleasure getting to know you today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 2 · 45:55Thank you for having me, my friends. This is a lovely conversation.