What If Love Is The Whole Path

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 · 3:17One 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 · 5:09That 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, will 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

Speaker 2 · 6:09experience 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 · 7:21So this is the mindfulness exercises podcast. We have mindfulness teacher trainings. Mindfulness is kind of a buzzword in 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

Speaker 1 · 8:18into 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 · 8:33Actually, both, yes. The fourth state of jhana and nirvana.

Speaker 1 · 8:36You 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 · 9:00I'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 Church 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 · 12:36Yeah. 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 an 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 · 14:52Yeah, and that reminds me of something I wanted to share. So I'm glad you asked that. 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.

Speaker 2 · 15:26The 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 · 16:40Was there like something before right effort? Wasn't there like curiosity?

Speaker 2 · 16:45Yeah, interest.

Speaker 1 · 16:46Interest, yeah.

Speaker 2 · 16:47Interest 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 · 17:14And 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 · 17:30Yeah, 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

Speaker 2 · 19:22was teaching.

Speaker 1 · 19:22Well, and something you said earlier, which I don't want to overlook, which is that when you practice metta, you come back to the now, and that a lot of us, myself included, often succumb 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. And 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. Because we all know what love feels like. 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 now 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 nowess in your practice?

Speaker 2 · 21:42Yeah, 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. 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-paced 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 militarist or 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, the 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

Speaker 2 · 24:24processing.

Speaker 1 · 24:24You 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? And 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 just a useful reflection for us to always remember that when we're sharing these practices.

Speaker 1 · 25:18Liam, 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. Felt 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 · 27:18Thanks 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 · 27:36And just for context, a lot of monasteries or sanghas will reserve time for eating and there's no speaking aloud. 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, say.

Speaker 2 · 28:03Yeah. And 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 · 28:24Yeah, 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 · 28:35Yes, 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

Speaker 2 · 28:49helping 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 · 30:54Well, 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. It's 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 · 31:42Yeah, 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

Speaker 2 · 32:12compassion.

Speaker 1 · 32:12Well, 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 · 34:03Well, 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 · 35:05Beautiful. Thank you.