In this episode, Susan Piver discusses the path to inexplicable joy and how self-friendship can change everything. She shares this powerful statement “I can’t defeat my enemies, but I can strengthen my friends.” which offers a different kind of hope -shifting our focus from fighting battles we can’t win, to caring for the people and communities closest to us. Susan shares what real power looks like, not dominance, but care and also shares five practical ways to cultivate personal power in everyday life. This is an episode about moving from overwhelm to meaningful action. One friendship, one moment of care at a time.
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Key Takeaways:
- Personal empowerment and its significance in daily life.
- The practice of mindfulness and its role in self-awareness.
- Exploration of Buddhist teachings, particularly the Heart Sutra.
- The concept of interconnectedness and its implications for personal and communal well-being.
- The parable of the two wolves and its relevance to nurturing positive qualities.
- The importance of self-care and creating a supportive physical environment.
- Practical steps for cultivating personal power and confidence.
- The relationship between meditation and self-acceptance.
- The distinction between relative and absolute views in understanding existence.
- The role of compassion in personal growth and community connection.
Susan Piver is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including The Wisdom of a Broken Heart; The Four Noble Truths of Love: Buddhist Wisdom for Modern Relationships; and The Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Warriorship. Her latest is Inexplicable Joy: On the Heart Sutra. Susan has an international reputation as a skillful meditation teacher. She has given talks everywhere, including Procter & Gamble, Google Paris, Google London, and Harvard University. A student of Buddhism since 1993, Susan graduated from a Buddhist seminary in 2004. In 2012, she founded The Open Heart Project, the world’s largest online-only dharma center. The Open Heart Project offers meditation classes, virtual retreats, and community gatherings.
Connect with Susan Piver: Website | Instagram | Substack
If you enjoyed this conversation with Susan Piver, check out these other episodes:
How to Discover Your Way of Being Through the Enneagram with Susan Piver
The Four Noble Truths of Love with Susan Piver (2021)
Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Life: Finding Ease and Clarity with Charlie Gilkey
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Episode Transcript:
Susan Piver 00:00:00 Meditation is a way of making friends with yourself. Seeing how your mind works, how your heart works. It’s not like trying to go peace out to some other place. It’s about being here as you are.
Chris Forbes 00:00:21 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:06 I can’t defeat my enemies, but I can strengthen my friends. That simple idea from Susan Pifer really helped me rethink a question that I think a lot of us are grappling with when the world feels impossible to change.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:22 What can we do in today’s world? It offers a different kind of hope. Shifting our focus from fighting battles we can’t win, to caring for the people and communities closest to us. In our conversation, Susan shares what real power looks like, not dominance, but care. Susan shares five practical ways to cultivate personal power in everyday life. We also talk about her new book, inexplicable Joy, which explores the Heart Sutras, teaching that nothing exists in isolation. This is an episode about moving from overwhelm to meaningful action. One friendship, one moment of care at a time. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Susan. Welcome back.
Susan Piver 00:02:10 Hi, Eric. It’s really great to see you again.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:13 Nicole did a little calculating, and I think this is the fourth time you’ve been on the show. I think we’ve done three full interviews, and then I think we did a special episode maybe early in the pandemic. And you came on for a brief appearance in that, if I recall.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:28 Wow. So you’re up there. I mean, I think there’s probably another person or two that has been on that often, but you are in elite company.
Susan Piver 00:02:37 I will fight them. I’ll fight them.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:40 I need to bribe Nicole and we’ll have you on next week and then you’ll win. So, yeah, it’s pretty easy. She’s relatively, I’m not going to say she’s cheap because that has a certain connotation I don’t want to give. Nicole can be bribed, is all I’m saying.
Susan Piver 00:02:52 Good to.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:53 Know. Yes. All right. So we’re going to talk about your latest book, which is called inexplicable Joy on the Heart Sutra, which is a key sutra in Buddhism, and particularly in Mahayana Buddhism, which includes both your lineage, which is Tibetan, and the lineage I’ve studied the most in, which is Zen art. Sutures used a lot. So we’re going to get into all that in a minute. But I want to start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:26 One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Susan Piver 00:03:54 I love the question, and the first thing that jumps to my mind is they are the same wolf. There’s only one wolf, and there are two sides of one coin, and without one you do not have the other. And if you, minus the associations that we have to the words good and bad, we have two very powerful energies, both of which can be of great service in the journey.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:18 Yeah. And I think we’ll get into that idea that things that seem like they are different are in many ways the same later in the conversation, because the Heart Sutra really orients a lot around that core idea.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:32 Before we get into that, though, I want to take something from a recent podcast you did, and it was a line that really struck me, and I’d like to talk about it. It comes up in the context of you talking about relating to what’s happening in the world out there today. And you say, I can’t defeat my enemies, but I can empower my friends or strengthen my friends. Talk to me about that. I was really struck by it.
Susan Piver 00:04:56 I appreciate you bringing that up, and I would love to talk to you about it. And if this is too long winded, feel free to cut it. But in Tibetan Buddhist iconography, this sounds like it doesn’t relate, but it does. There are six realms of existence and just the first three very briefly. First one is the God realm and oh, that sounds good. Who doesn’t want to be a god? And some people say these are psychological states, and some say these are places I personally do not know. But if you are in the God realm, everything goes your way.
Susan Piver 00:05:29 Whatever you want, you immediately have it. You can fly. You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’re psychic. Wow, it’s really.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:35 Great describing me. I think pretty clearly. Young. Beautiful fly. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Susan Piver 00:05:40 Go on. What am I thinking right now, Mr. Psychic?
Eric Zimmer 00:05:44 You’re thinking how young and beautiful I am. I assume that’s what’s going on. I mean, that’s what’s happening to Joe in the control booth over there.
Susan Piver 00:05:52 Wow. You are.
Speaker 4 00:05:52 Psychic. It’s ridiculous.
Susan Piver 00:05:56 So the unfortunate part of the God realm is you die a very long and painful death. Please try to avoid that, Eric. And, this next one automatically disqualifies you. I’m sorry, but you don’t study the Dharma in the God realm, because. Why? Everything’s fine. So. Okay. Good luck to God, people. Then the next is called the Jealous God Realm. And they’re jealous of the gods. They want to be gods, and they don’t understand why they’re not. They’re also called warring gods.
Susan Piver 00:06:26 And this is a realm of constant battle that never ends. There can never be enough power, money. And the jealous gods have a lot of resources, and they put those resources in the service of taking the resources of others. Have we ever heard of such a thing? Right in our current situation? So the only thing that matters is winning. And they’re not going to wake up either because they’re too busy fighting. And then the third, the last one I’ll mention is the human realm. And I’m sorry, Eric, but I believe that’s where you live and where I live. And this is the best realm, because this is the realm where we’re most likely to wake up because we have the right ratio of suffering to ease. If we only had suffering, we would not study the Dhamma. We would not be have the bandwidth if we only had ease would be like why? But we got both. So how does this relate to your question with what’s going on in the United States and in other places in the world? Of course, it’s horrifying and worse than horrifying events.
Susan Piver 00:07:31 Unthinkable we are witnessing. One way of looking at it is a jealous God battle. We are watching the jealous gods fight each other. You have it, I want it. I’m going to take it. I don’t care what I have to do. I’m going to lie. I’m going to steal. I’m going to cheat. Those are jealous gods. We cannot fight the jealous gods with human realm weapons, which include things like academia, legislation, logic, relationship skills, verbal skills. That’s what we use to fight our battles. But those fall flat in the jealous God realm. They do not play. So as I was thinking about this early in the second term of I don’t even want to call them a precedent, this horrible person. Come and get me if you’re listening, I don’t care. That’s my opinion, is I cannot defeat my enemies. I can’t I can’t defeat the jealous gods. But I can strengthen my friends. I can strengthen the human realm. So that has been my sort of rallying cry.
Susan Piver 00:08:36 I can’t defeat my enemies, but I can strengthen my friends throughout this time period. And when I think, how do I defeat my enemies? I’m like, oh, I don’t have, I can’t. I feel so weak and so small. But when I think, how can I strengthen my friends? I feel bold, I feel brave, I feel strong, I feel empowered because I know how to do that. I’m not saying I’m great at it, but I know what helps. And so do you.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:04 Right. We all intuitively know because that that is the thing that I think so many people feel is that it’s it’s overwhelming. And I, you know, I think there are things happening right now in the country that are really awful. And I believe things like this always happen. If you look at governments and you look at history and you look at King, I mean, this is the jealous God realm, if we want to put it, it has been operational, you know, since the start.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:32 And so there is a certain sense I have in that, you know, our enemies can’t be beaten. There’s a there’s a line from the Dow. I recently did a, a new interpretation of the Dow. And in it it says try to improve the world. I don’t think it can be done and it’s a statement that taken too literally. I disagree with meaning like, of course we can improve the world. Like I can do a kind thing right now and it makes the world better and all the time it’s happening. But I think if if we look at it from the perspective of what some of that book was written about, it was written about how to govern, it was written about that. And I think what he was pointing at is people are always going to fight over power and money and like, you can’t, you’re not going to eradicate that. Anyway. The last thing I’ll say on that, that I really love is there’s a song I’ve been listening to. I put it in a recent episode of Teaching Song in a poem, which is a special episode I do each week for the supporters of the show.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:30 I pick a song I love and the song I love, and I know you love music, which is why I’m doing this is by a band called Vampire Weekend. I don’t know if you know them, but their latest song, the last song on their latest record is called Hope And the chorus is, you know, I hope you let it go. The enemy is invincible. I hope you let it go. And it’s just a beautiful. It’s almost like a folk song done by Vampire Weekend because they overproduce everything right. But at its heart, it is a simple, beautiful folk song.
Susan Piver 00:11:00 That’s. That’s wonderful. And by the way, I loved your conversation with my dear beloved Charlie Gilkey about the Dao. That was I love him and and that was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciated.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:12 It. Oh. Thank you. Yeah. Charlie’s wonderful. I mean, just amazing. Yeah. My life is so much better because Charlie has been in it.
Susan Piver 00:11:19 So it’s fine.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:44 Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call the still point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago, so you don’t have to stumble towards an answer. That something is now here and it’s called overwhelm, is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day, it isn’t about doing less. It’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built.The launch price is $29. If life is too full but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to oneyoufeed./net/overwhelm. That’s oneyoufeed.net/overwhelm.
I want to move on from that just a slight bit, because I want to stay with that podcast episode for a minute, because the core idea in the podcast is how do you get more power, but not in the sense of the power we were just talking about, not the jealous God kind of power, but personal power, empowerment or confidence, if you like. And I liked it because a I think that’s a really useful topic that people don’t want to use that word, but it’s not a word that I struggle with because I, I came up in a 12 step tradition. And in the second step, right, we talk about finding a higher power. Right. And so for me that’s just always meant like, what are the sources of power I can draw on in the world? And inside myself.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:51 The second thing I was struck by, and I’m going to then let you talk about them, is that they were all what I would call behavioral. And, you know, there’s a phrase that I use on the show often. Sometimes we can’t think our way into right action. We have to act our way into right thinking. And this was really a beautiful version of that. So I was wondering if you could run us through briefly the five ways of seeking power, kind of outside of the inner work that we do.
Susan Piver 00:14:16 Yeah, I’d be happy to. And thank you so much for listening and for clearly giving a careful listen. I appreciate that a lot. Yeah. And I don’t have a problem with the word power either, although it scares people. And that makes me interested. Like, it doesn’t mean aggression. I don’t need to tell you this. It means bravery, courage, confidence, as you said, and spiritual warrior. Even so, we all think, well, if I want to feel confident or powerful or whatever word I use, I have to find it within me.
Susan Piver 00:14:51 And that’s good. But you can create a world from which you draw power, and that is a simpler. So the first step and these I was taught by a Tibetan teacher. So I’m not making them up. I is to what he said was clean up your room, which is a one way of saying sort of order your space. It doesn’t mean have it be perfect or fancy. It means so much. Actually, it means care about it. And if you are stepping over piles of things, it affects your mind. And we all have a different degrees of order that we like. Some people Just basic is fine. Others like got to be really tight. So whatever works for you is is fine, but look at your environment and care for it. That has a indescribable impact. Don’t take my word for that, you know, or anything. But and then the second step is to what he said wear nice clothes, which doesn’t mean fancy clothes. I’m wearing a tank top and jeans.
Susan Piver 00:16:01 I don’t know if you can’t see me. it means clothes you like that are clean, that you feel good in, that you like the texture. And this, again, is not about fronting. It’s about caring, respecting yourself and the way you clothe your body. I think he also said the chance that you’re going to be coming. This is a funny way of saying it, the chance that you’re going to become enlightened. If you wake up and pick up your sweats off the floor and put them on, that chance is diminished. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:38 Well, I was reflecting on this with my partner Ginny recently because most of my work is lived in the way you see me right now. It’s from about the chest, middle of the chest up, meaning I could have anything or nothing on my lower body.
Susan Piver 00:16:54 I meet you, by the way.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:55 Joe is happy that I don’t choose that route, but I actually dress for each day of work.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:02 I dress not super fancy, but a little bit more than I would on a day that I’m not working. And it’s for no one except me, right? It’s 100% only for me, because there’s something that I think it does from a mindset. And to use the word that that you used a care perspective because I’m trying to infuse anything I do related to my work in this project with care.
Susan Piver 00:17:29 Clearly, and it brings getting ready for the day. It brings to it a sense of ritual. Not fancy ritual or, you know, swinging, smoky things around. But just this is how I do to enter my day. And the idea of ritual is very, very important. And it has to be heartfelt and done for yourself. Yeah. Which it is, as you just said. And it’s with a very simple, ordinary things of everyday life. These things are magic. They have magic and we skate over that. You know, for obvious reasons, no one tells us. But there’s living quality to the place you live.
Susan Piver 00:18:14 There’s a living quality to the things. What happens when you put on certain clothes? And then the third step is clearly there’s a living quality to what you put in your pie hole, what you eat. So this third step is eat good food. Now that’s a very loaded statement in our culture. It doesn’t mean be a vegan or give up gluten. Or if you want to do those things, that’s fine. But it means, again, care about the quality of what you eat, the preparation and the storing and the cleaning. These are the ordinary things of our life, where we live, what we wear and what we eat. And when you bring your heart to it, not like in just this very simple way by caring. And I have a little anecdote about caring, I’d love to share with you if we have time. Your world starts to come alive, and you draw confidence from this respect that you have shown.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:14 Yeah. One of the things that I, in a program I’ve taught over the years talk about is the Zen concept of of Samu.
Susan Piver 00:19:23 I’ve never heard of that.
Speaker 4 00:19:23 What is that?
Eric Zimmer 00:19:24 It’s it’s basically like you approach, you pick a you approach your your chores as sacred? Essentially, you give them your full attention and your care. So what I what I in my course I do is I say pick an everyday activity that you do. One thing like for me it’s washing dishes and try during that period to give it all a my attention. What does it feel like? What does it sound like? What’s the soap like? What’s the temperature of the water? Just be present and do it with care. And the way it was explained to me is it’s a bridge between seated meditation and the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It’s sort of a in-between place that you can take the qualities of care and practice that you might be nurturing while you sit there, and maybe you’re not ready to imbue them into every aspect of your life yet, because who is? But in the middle there sits this samu, this work practice.
Susan Piver 00:20:27 That’s very interesting and makes total sense to me, and is actually the point of meditation.
Susan Piver 00:20:36 It’s not to be the point of meditation, as far as I can see. It’s not to be good at meditating because who cares if you’re the world’s best breath follower? It doesn’t matter. No one’s good at it.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:49 I’m not going to win that award.
Susan Piver 00:20:53 I’ll be at. The back of the line with you not. Winning. Okay.
Susan Piver 00:20:55 And it doesn’t matter if you win. It’s like, who cares? What good does that mean? Who cares what? What matters is, can you work with your mind? By practicing. Doing so. So that you can work with it when your meditation is over. That’s where it counts. It doesn’t. So I’m in full agreement with you. And this little anecdote is, illustrative of that, I think. I think this was long ago, maybe 20 years ago. I was in New York City with my husband, and we were going to visit a neighbor. This woman, a peer of his parents, I’m sure she’s passed away, so I will say her name.
Susan Piver 00:21:36 I, who hadn’t seen in many years. But she he she grew up next. He grew up next door to her in a very fancy suburb of Boston. And now she was living in the East Village. So I wonder how that happened. So we’re going to visit her. Mary Ann Miller, who had by which the name by which she knew her had become Mary Ann Miller. And she lived near as if, you know, York, New York City. You know what I’m talking about. So we’re going to visit her. And she lives in this very humble building. We walk up five flights of stairs. There’s no elevator. And we’re we’re knock on the door. And who opens? But like, central casting old lady, you know, her hair was in kind of a messy bun, gray hair, house dress, whatever that is. And we. Oh, hi Mary Ann, how are you? Blah blah blah. We go in, we sit down on our couch. It’s a very simple home.
Susan Piver 00:22:28 The things look kind of threadbare. There’s like a shelf with tchotchkes on it. Just knickknacks, like little dolls and stuff like that. And we just talk a little bit. How are you? This and that. And she goes to the kitchen to get us tea and cookies. And as I’m sitting there, I’m like, wait a minute. Where am I?
Susan Piver 00:22:52 Something going on here? Because it seemed like it was glowing. And I felt the felt sense I had was I’m in a palace and I better sit up straighter and, you know, mind my manners. And not that it was.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:12 And this is before she brought the marijuana cookies out of the.
Speaker 4 00:23:14 Kitchen. Exactly. Well before.
Susan Piver 00:23:19 So everything’s very humble. And then she comes out with a tea. It’s like Lipton’s. Oh, this is delicious. There’s, like, Oreos or something. Oh, these are great. So everything became heightened, and then we had normal chit chat about relatives and friends, and then we left, and I’m like, what the hell? Turned out that she had become a Zen practitioner long ago. A serious Zen practitioner. And my supposition is that she had put her heart into everything she owned by caring for these things. If something was ripped, she mended it. Something was broken. She repaired it. If something went on a shelf, she dusted it before she put it back. I mean, I’m making that up, but it felt like her heart had seeped into the environment and was glowing back at me, and I could feel it or something. I made this up, but that’s what I thought. And so that’s that’s the vibe is when you put your heart into your world, your heart holds you and that it gives you energy and confidence and that is power.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:28 That’s a beautiful story. All right. We’ve gone through the first three. What’s number four?
Susan Piver 00:24:34 This one’s funny. Spend less time with people who you don’t like and more time with people who you do like, or people who like you or don’t. Try not to spend that much time with people who don’t like you and try to spend extra time with people who do. And that sounds very obvious on one hand. And we all have people in our lives that we don’t like or don’t like us, and we don’t have a choice there, your boss or your relative or something. But as much as you can spend time with people who, when you look back at yourself through their eyes, you see someone wonderful as opposed to the opposite. Of course we can. It doesn’t need explaining that we know why that is helpful and gives a sense of power. And then the final one is to spend time in the natural world as best you can. I live in a city, but I go swimming every morning in a spring-fed pool. It’s an aquifer. It’s in the middle of the city, but it’s an extraordinary experience of being in the natural world. And the reason, perhaps, that that is so powerful is, you see, there’s an order to things. You see, there’s something going on that includes you, but doesn’t have anything to do with you.
Susan Piver 00:25:44 And it is not questioning itself. And when you sit in that unquestioned something wakes up in you that is important. That’s what I think. What do you think? Does that happen for you?
Eric Zimmer 00:25:56 Yeah, there is something, definitely healing about the natural world, I think. And I think it is that it’s a lot of things, but one of them that is always salient to me is it is outside the jealous God realm. It is out. It is just going on and doing its thing. It doesn’t care who’s president. Now, I’m not saying that policy doesn’t affect nature because it does, but nature kind of just on its own. It just as you said, it just does its thing. It is unconcerned with all of that, and it just plays something out.
Susan Piver 00:26:29 And it’s not benign, by the way. It’s not always benign.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:33 No, no.
Susan Piver 00:26:34 No, it has it contains the universe. Contains the universe. So I’m not saying it’s all like, go outside and your life will be good and.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:42 No, no, no, I mean, nature can be ruthless.
Susan Piver 00:26:45 I feel it’s trying to reject us right now for a very good reason.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:04 I’m reading a fascinating book called The Light Eaters, and it’s all about plant intelligence. And it is. It is freaking me out. Wow. In a good way. But all of a sudden I’m like, hang on, plants can. They’re just far more intelligent than we think.
Susan Piver 00:27:22 What is the last word? The light. What?
Eric Zimmer 00:27:24 The light eaters.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:26 Great. And it starts with this premise that we all sort of know but don’t think about, which is that if there was not a plant, there’d be nothing in the way that we know life, right? Because they do two things that had to happen for life as we know it to evolve. And one is they take sunlight and they take water and they make glucose out of it. They make the fuel that fuels every living thing.
Susan Piver 00:27:51 Including our brains
Eric Zimmer 00:27:52 and is a byproduct of that.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:55 They output oxygen. Our planet was entirely a carbon dioxide mess. No living creatures as we know them could have lived in the Earth at one point. But as plants proliferated, they oxygenated the entire environment. So every single plant that you see is doing this miracle thing all the time, just by itself, just going about its business that made all of life as we know it possible. And I just love thinking about that.
Susan Piver 00:28:25 That is beautiful, that I get why you say that.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:28 Okay, so I don’t go down a rabbit hole of talking about what plants can do. Although maybe I’ll do an episode on plants at least, at least listen to episode of all time, but nonetheless. So your latest book is called Inexplicable Joy, and it’s about the Heart Sutra. But before we even get to that, I want to ask a question because there’s a phrase at the end of it, and I think this is intended is the first book in a series, and that phrase is Buddhism Beyond Belief. So I would love to have you talk about what that phrase means to you, and why you’re choosing to create a series of books around it. It must be a really important idea to you to do that.
Susan Piver 00:29:09 Yeah, yeah. Thank you for asking. Yeah. Buddhism beyond belief, which is very different than Buddhism without belief. So in the Tibetan traditions that I’ve studied in, one reason that I like that phrase. First of all, it’s a play on words, and I think it’s cute. Yeah. The second is on some level, and the heart sutra really points to this. All beliefs, all are considered obstacles on the path. So let’s what is beyond beliefs. What is it? You know, that’s a rhetorical question, but I like the idea of, because in most spiritual traditions there’s a core beliefs. And if you hold them, you know, depending on the tradition, you get an A. And if you don’t, you know, you get kicked out. But here and there’s certainly essential teachings, obviously, as you and I both know, but has nothing to do with belief. At the same time, the Buddha Dharma for me talks about, you know, what else you got? You know, no beliefs.
Susan Piver 00:30:15 Okay. What else you got? A lot, a lot. So what happens when we let go of our beliefs? It’s scary. That’s the first thing that happens. And then the second thing that happens is you believe you should let go of your beliefs. Okay, well, you’re stuck. Now you’re back where you started. And then you believe. Well, I shouldn’t do that. Now you’re back again. So there’s this very profound kind of letting go that I understand in some moments and really don’t understand in many more moments. But it’s the beyond that is of great interest.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:51 Yeah, I resonate with that. And we’re going to get more into that as we go into the Heart Sutra. So tell us what the Heart Sutra is. Before we dive into it.
Susan Piver 00:31:04 Well, as you mentioned earlier, it’s a central text in the Mahayana tradition and in the Vajrayana traditions that I’ve studied in as well, in a different way, but not unimportant at all. So the Heart Sutra or Prajnaparamita Sutra.
Susan Piver 00:31:22 Prajna means wisdom. And Paramita means like transcendent. So it’s the wisdom. It’s the Transcendent Wisdom Sutra. It’s been around for some period of time that no one can quite pinpoint. 1000 years, 800 years. There’s all different theories a long time. Let’s just say that. And in the book, I believe I said maybe it’s always been here. You know, somehow the full version of the Paramita Sutra is something like 100,000 lines long. Very long. There’s another version that’s 8000 lines long. That’s long too. And the version that I chant and have chanted almost every day for close to 35 years is a convenient 43 lines long. And then there is a final version that is zero lines long and one syllable, and that syllable is r. So that would be the best one to study probably, but I can’t I don’t know how to approach it. So I’m staying with my 43 lines and well anyway, there’s so much one could say about it. The version that I do, I do it in English, and the English title is The Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge.
Susan Piver 00:32:39 And the heart here doesn’t mean emotion, it means pith. So the Heart Sutra is the pith of the pith of the pith of the.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:50 Divine, that word for people who don’t know it. Pith.
Susan Piver 00:32:54 Pith, O pith. Yeah, the essence, the essence.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:57 Right. So it’s saying this is the essence of wisdom.
Susan Piver 00:33:01 Of transcendent wisdom, not ordinary wisdom.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:04 Yeah. So the version that I’m most familiar with is even shorter than your version. It cuts some things off the front and back. the Zen, at least in the Zen. And it is for me. At first glance and at many glances, the most inexplicable thing. I would go to Zen and they would chant it, and I would be like, I do not have the foggiest idea what they are saying here. Like, I knew Buddhism, I knew about sort of the Four Noble Truths. I knew some of the core teachings. This was I mean, again, I didn’t understand it. I knew it was central to Buddhism or to certain parts.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:45 I knew that it must be important because it the Zen centers I went to, they were always using it in every service. If that’s what we call them, I don’t think that’s what we call them. But anyway.
Susan Piver 00:33:55 Not every sadhana. Every.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:57 Yeah, but I didn’t understand it.
Susan Piver 00:33:59 Really? That’s shocking. I’m so very sorry. I’m joking because it is inexplicable. Of course I’m joking.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:05 Okay.
Susan Piver 00:34:05 Yes. That’s why the book is called inexplicable Joy.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:09 Yes.
Susan Piver 00:34:09 Then there’s no explanation in there.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:11 But we’re not going to explain it because you say pretty clearly, like even after all these years, you you can’t explain it. And one of the biggest mistakes would be to think you understand it. But I’d like to explore it a little bit versus try and understand it in the beginning and end of it. In the version you have, it sets up who the key protagonists, who the people are. And maybe for now, maybe because it’s not in my version, I’m less interested in that.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:36 But can you tell me what a couple of the key ideas are in the sutra itself?
Susan Piver 00:34:44 It’s very easy to do that because it’s in four lines. Form is emptiness. Emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form. Form is no other than emptiness. That’s the main idea.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:00 Okay, that means a lot to me today. That means a lot to me. You say because I’ve explored what is meant by form and emptiness. And I guess here’s the way I would say it that is most applicable. And I, you know, I’m trying to keep this at a certain level for people who are non-Buddhist without without getting really too far down the rabbit hole. Is that one of the things that Zen talks a lot about is a relative and an absolute view of the world, right? And the the absolute view of the world is sort of I will just, for ease of sake, the enlightened version. It’s where you see the totality of everything. You see the wholeness of everything. You see in one sense, the perfection of everything.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:43 That is a view, that is one view, the other is the relative, which is the day to day stuff that we as humans deal with. I’m Eric Zimmer, I have a particular identity. If I hit myself in the head, I feel it. You don’t feel it. All that that sort of thing. And what Zen says is to hold either of those beliefs on their own is to miss the. To miss it. Right. That it’s actually being able to hold and move between both of those and then ultimately seeing that it’s the same thing. And that’s what form and emptiness is pointing to. In a sense, for me it’s pointing to there are all the things of the world in the way that we define them and know them form. And then there is emptiness, which is what we can talk about what that means. But it’s it’s closer to that sort of absolute view of the oneness and the perfection of everything, and that they are the same as each other. Yes.
Susan Piver 00:36:44 Well, to me, I mean, I, I have been taught something very similar. Yeah. And the absolute I mean, I don’t live in an absolute world. I, I’m still a very relative person with relative, you know, concerns. but those concerns those my the relative is where I have to start at. Then I don’t know what’s going to happen even after 35 years. So. The farm, by the way, and this may be a rabbit hole, so feel free to let me know is the first of what are called the five seconds or heaps. Five things that we think are real, but they’re not. They’re empty of independent nature. They’re not empty of existence. Because there you are, here I am, but they don’t exist independently. You didn’t get here. This is you. We were saying, let’s talk about emptiness. Doesn’t mean null or void. It means almost the opposite. I mean, you didn’t get here in a spaceship. I didn’t get here in a spaceship.
Susan Piver 00:37:57 I parents, grandparents, they ate particular sandwiches. If they eat in eaten a different sandwich, maybe I’d be different. And they went to this country. And then that happened, and here I am now. I’m a culmination of that. And I would not be here without those things. So emptiness means empty of independent nature, and it could just as easily be expressed as fullness, completely and totally full. No different. So nonetheless, form is emptiness means there is no form that didn’t come from something interconnected. And the skhandas are heaps as they’re called are form feeling perception formation, which is different than form and consciousness. These are the five things that we think comprise us. And as far as I could tell, I believe they do. But the sutra is saying think again. So it starts with form is emptiness in the same way the suture goes on. Feeling, perception, formation and consciousness are Our emptiness. And then it goes on and says, oh, you think this is real? No. Do you think that’s real? No. And there I think 37 knows there. And even thinking they don’t exist is no.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:15 I want to try and ground this for a second. And then I sort of want to move on to some other aspects of the book. I think what is important about this idea, at least for me on a, on a simpler level, is exactly what you’re saying that nothing exists on its own. Everything exists in relationship to something else. And that when we try and isolate something on its own that can become problematic. It is a way of looking at certain things, but it misses the bigger picture. And when we do that with ourselves, when we think that we are a separate, independent existence that isn’t a result of all the causes, conditions and all the things around us. Then we also, I think, can get in trouble. And to tie this back to what we talked about with power earlier. One view of this is that since we are not separate, we are in relation to everything, the way that we are in relation to our space, to our clothes, to the people around us, to nature, to the food that we eat is profoundly important because it all ties together.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:31 The last thing I’ll say on emptiness is the way I’ve heard it explained also sometimes is it’s everything all at once, right? It’s basically everything. When you take out the dividers, which is, you know, you can just imagine if you didn’t see things as separate, but you saw them the way they all came together, you would see something resembling the view of emptiness.
Susan Piver 00:40:55 That sounds right to me. And again, in that way, it could be called fullness. That’s equally as accurate. And going back to the relative and absolute for a moment. This is a sutra on absolute compassion. It’s the main figure who’s actually teaching is not the Buddha. It’s somebody named Avalokiteshvara who’s the bodhisattva of compassion.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:19 I’m glad you.
Susan Piver 00:41:20 See who’s giving me teaching.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:22 Pardon me. I’m glad you pronounced it. Not me. Because I tend to butcher words like that.
Susan Piver 00:41:26 So what do I tell you? About six years to figure out how to say it. So it’s about compassion. But how is this about compassion? So on the relative plane, there’s relative compassion.
Susan Piver 00:41:37 And absolute relative is like, let me try to be kind. Let me be compassionate. Let me care about all the things you just listed. But on the absolute level, absolute compassion is removing all the boundaries. I suppose it must include Fluid, collapsing the space time continuum in some way to feel the oneness, not to believe the oneness, not to go, oh, that sounds like a reasonable theory, but to dwell within it. Yeah. Absolute compassion. So emptiness is synonymous with absolute compassion, which can be a little surprising,
Eric Zimmer 00:42:13 That’s a beautiful place to wrap up that discussion. I want to move on to some other things that you say in the book that I think I’d like to touch on, that aren’t directly about the Heart Sutra. And one of them is, you say it’s helpful to consider that mindfulness is not just a self-improvement tactic, but a gateway to seeing beyond all such improvements. Tell me what you mean by that.
Susan Piver 00:42:41 The next book in this series, by the way, is going to be called Inexplicable Magic.
Susan Piver 00:42:45 And it’s about the practice of meditation, which is usually deployed as a technique for fixing something and it does fix things. Science has proven it so thank you. But when you look at your practice as a way of fixing something, you’re sort of starting with the assumption that something is broken and, you know, countless things are broken in me and others. So no argument with that. And it needs fixing. Okay. Depression. Sleeplessness. Anxiety. Meditation can help. I’m pretty sure that when meditation was first taught by the Buddha, you know, 5000 years ago or whatever. No, 2500 years ago, he didn’t say, this will make you a better leader. He said, this will help you wake up. And the foundation of meditation as a spiritual practice rather than a technique is you’re not broken. You’re whole. You’re worthy. You’re full. You’re complete. And this practice can reveal that. So it starts from the opposite end of the spectrum. There’s a problem here. Let’s fix it to actually, there is no problem. Who you are is whole. And ideas to the contrary are signs of confusion.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:13 And meditation is a way of participating in that wholeness.
Susan Piver 00:44:18 Meditation is a way of making friends with yourself, seeing how your mind works, how your heart works. It’s not like trying to go peace out to some other place. It’s about being here as you are, lowering the wall around your heart to sit with yourself as you are with, you know, without trying to fix or noticing that you’re trying to fix and going, okay, well, I guess that’s what I’m doing right now. But that softening towards self has enormous Implication because without it there is no compassion for others. As I’m sure you know, all the compassion practices begin with extending loving kindness to yourself. Extend compassion to yourself and go from there. That’s not an accident. So it opens your heart. That’s why my online community is called the Open Heart Project. It opens your heart. And that is profound. It turns you into who you already are.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:19 I think that’s beautiful. I’m reading an obscure Zen text by Zen Master Dogan, and everything he writes is somewhat obscure, called the Shobogenzo. And Dogan was preoccupied with this very question, which was, hey, if you know you’re telling me that everything is perfect and whole the way it is, and I am too, then why practice? Right. He was, you know, he was really trying to explore that idea of, well, if if everything’s fine the way it is. Why am I? Why am I even doing this thing that takes a certain amount of discipline. It takes a certain amount of effort. Why? So how would you answer that question?
Susan Piver 00:46:02 I go back to what we were talking about. Relative. I have to start in a relative way. And not only did Dogen say that and, you know, everything he said, as far as I can tell, was also pith or essential. I long for the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine. Master says the same thing, and they’re not alone.
Susan Piver 00:46:23 By the way, a lot of these masters say this, there is no practice, there is no practitioner, and there is no result. Nonetheless, I’m in a relative world and I want to start. I have to start with something that hopefully will open the door to that truth. So in other words, if I right now Susan just said, oh, Dogen says I don’t have to practice or long jump, I says, don’t worry about it. I’m just going to slip into my habitual patterns that create suffering for myself and others. So let’s start where I am, which is not where they are.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:01 Right? In my book, I talk a little bit about this, that there is this idea that of certain contemporary teachers, which is you can just wake up right this second by realizing that everything’s perfect the way it is. And that is true. And if you look at people who do get some degree of awakening up, most of them, you’re going to see a lot of practice involved also, you know, and so I think about it a little bit like that’s a little bit like saying to a, you know, a third grader who’s out facing a major league pitcher, like if you just get the if you get the ball on the bat, you can just hit it right out of the park.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:39 And the truth is, once in a while, once in a great while, the child is going to get the bat in the right spot and the velocity of the ball and boom, it’s going to go. But they’re much more likely to end up with like a traumatic brain injury than they are to to hit a home run. And I hear that dialogue happening in contemporary spiritual circles, and I’m always suspect of it, that, like me too, you don’t need to do anything. Just wake up now, which is a lovely promise. Who doesn’t want that? Who doesn’t want the just listen, you know, like the five minute version, right?
Susan Piver 00:48:13 Anyone who says that you should go somewhere else. Because in no offence, people who say that. But the path is so intimate. It’s so personal. It’s so particular. While there are great masters, we just named two Duggan and Longchamp who can offer impeccable guidance. The truth is, what they do so extraordinarily is wake up the inner teacher.
Susan Piver 00:48:39 That’s who knows what’s going on. And often in the spiritual world, people try to take the place of the inner teacher. They try to take your wisdom and substitute their own for it. That makes me very angry because what the hell? And that’s why I’m very suspicious of charisma. Don’t care for it. It separates me from myself. Obviously, drama. It’s hard to find a teacher. So anyway, that’s not our topic. But once I heard the great Rinpoche, a female Tibetan, realized master, as far as I can tell, say the job of the outer teacher, the Dogen’s that compose the, whoever your teacher might be, the successor or whoever you study with. Their job is to introduce you to the inner teacher, and the inner teacher’s job is to introduce you to what is called the secret teacher or the absolute teacher. Which brings us back to our conversation of oneness, emptiness. The inner teachers job is to help you understand that. And if someone doesn’t make the handoff, someone’s not doing their job.
Susan Piver 00:49:53 So it’s, it’s personal. It takes a lot of devotion. I was going to say effort, but that’s not quite right. It takes a lot of devotion to yourself, to your path, to wisdom itself.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:09 That’s a beautiful way of saying it, I love that. You know, hand off to the inner teacher. I want to explore something that’s happening in a, a thread I’m part of where this discussion is kind of happening, and it’s been a perennial one in the spiritual world, and it’s been a perennial one in my life. And it is this there is one school of thought, and I think I know where you land based on what you do and which is that progress happens by staying in a particular lane. There’s a lineage here. There’s a series of practices. There’s a there’s a thing. And you, you kind of just keep walking that path even when it seems like it’s going nowhere, when you’re not interested, when you’re bored, you keep walking it. Right. There’s that.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:56 And then there’s another path, which I would have to say I have been more drawn to for maybe some better and probably some worse for for sure, which is that I do a practice for a while, a thing, and then I will go do something different, and then I might find my way back to that first one again, and then I might try this thing. And the analogy that has been often made is, and I’m going to try and put both those camps into what an analogy is, is that the stay in one line lineage camp says you’re trying to get to water underground, and so you just keep digging in the same hole, and when you jump around, you’re digging lots of different holes that never go that deep. The people who have some favor of you can move around will say, you’re digging the same hole with just different tools. So the only reason I’m saying all that is this seems to be a perpetual thing that goes on in my mind. And I’m in the middle of a conversation where people are talking about this very thing.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:03 So just love to love to hear your thoughts on why you’ve chosen to do it the way you have, which is more or less, I think, to stay in a lineage if I understand it. Yeah.
Susan Piver 00:52:13 Yeah. So that’s I, I love this topic. And yes, I’ve been a Buddhist for 35 years. I started practicing in a particular lineage. I’ve never practiced anywhere else. Who knows why. But the important thing I think for listeners is you have to figure it out. Neither of those answers is correct. One of those answers, however, one of those answers is correct for you. And how good is your bullshit meter towards yourself? That’s very important. So the analogy that I use is getting married. If you love love, great, you’re going to fall in love. If you’re lucky. And then you fall in love with someone else. And you could do that for the rest of your life. And that can be right for some people. However, if you want to understand the depth of love, you could try getting married because then it gets very complicated.
Susan Piver 00:53:15 And that’s how I view lineage. If you want a date around, cool. But if you want to see what’s under the hood, like really see in your own heart and in the heart of others. And in this the depth of the wisdom traditions that are perpetual get married because it’s going to hit you back, and then you’re going to look again, and then it’s going to get deeper and then it’s going to disappear and that’s going to come back. So the way I was trained and I’m I’m a meditation teacher and so on, is you can tell anyone how to meditate within like 30 seconds. Yeah. You sit down, follow your breath, let your thoughts be as they are. Get lost. Come back. I just did it. But to teach meditation is, you know, in this example, it’s not about explaining something. It’s about transmitting something. And it’s not woo woo or magic. You don’t have to wear a wizard hat or anything like that. But you.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:13 Look good in a wizard hat.
Susan Piver 00:54:14 Though. Well, I’m very flattered. Thank you. Maybe I’ll rethink this one.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:20 Yeah, exactly.
Susan Piver 00:54:21 The transmission quality comes from lineage. Person who taught me, taught by someone else. Trungpa Rinpoche, in this case, Trungpa Rinpoche was taught by maybe Kenpo or one of his teachers and so forth and so on. Back and back and back. Theoretically, to the Buddha. So I’m not saying that I am standing in for the Buddha, but I’m saying there is a direct line. And the wisdom seems to be attracted to you when you connect with lineage. It’s very important. It’s maybe the most important thing. It doesn’t mean you should be a Zen practitioner or Soto Zen or incise in or Tibetan whatever. It doesn’t mean that. It means what wisdom stream speaks to you, who knows more than you? Which is a lot of people, by the way. Speaking for myself. Who inspires you? Who are you in love with? So, though I never met Trungpa, who has a very, you know, controversial, confusing, brilliant.
Susan Piver 00:55:22 Who knows who that guy was? From the second I read a book of his which was more than 35 years ago. I was like, what? This is the first thing I’ve ever read that makes sense. What is going on here? How do I learn more? And then I met students of his. I’m like, whoa, you guys are the best people I ever met. I’m sure there’s, you know, us exemptions to that rule, but not the people I met. And I just kept going. I just kept going, kept going, and I still keeping going. So it really is like falling in love and like falling in love. You can. You’re going to get disappointed and bored, and then you might want to fall in love with someone else or you might stay. And I’m not saying one of those is better because I don’t know.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:11 I appreciate that that you’re not saying because I think people are different. I want to ask a question about the staying, though. Have you found it hard to stay? Have you been tempted in any serious way to try something different? Go somewhere else? I’m in a fallow patch. Or are you in some way made up constitutionally that that makes this path easier for you. I’m just kind of curious. Like what your level of, you know, being seduced by the new affair is.
Susan Piver 00:56:43 I would say no and no. No, I’ve never been tempted and no, I’m not wired for it.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:49 Okay. So how.
Susan Piver 00:56:51 I’m just gonna try not to cry. I have a teacher who I adore when I am with, he’s dead, so I’m not with him anymore. When I have heard him talk. And what? My own meditation teacher. His name is Sam, who taught me to meditate more than 35 years ago and told me how to pronounce Avalokiteshvara. These people keep giving me things that wake me up, that I’m like, I gotta know more about that. I gotta know more about that. Oh, this is helpful. Oh, this is I was just wondering about this. How did you know? You just sent me an email about it. You know, the magic is there and has never not been there.
Susan Piver 00:57:37 And I don’t know how this happened, but I have no doubt that I may be smart and maybe not so smart. I don’t really know. But I don’t know anything. And they really know a lot. And I’m not trying to humble myself or. But they’re they have demonstrated to me the truth of wisdom. So anyway, I guess that’s what I can say. Is that makes sense.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:05 It does, it does. So the book isn’t about this, but I think a lot of your teachings and world is about this idea, and it’s around the idea that little by little, little becomes a lot. So if a listener wanted to take one thing away today, that would help them with this idea that we started with Around power. What would be one little thing you would encourage them that they could do today before they go to bed?
Susan Piver 00:58:36 I have two answers.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:37 Fair enough.
Susan Piver 00:58:38 One is. I have no idea. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you need to is. Ask yourself that question and write the answer down.
Susan Piver 00:58:50 See what happens. Because you know I don’t.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:54 That is a beautiful and, humble and teaching moment for me on the end there. So thank you so much, Susan. You and I are going to continue for a little bit longer in the post-show conversation because I want to talk a little bit about a sentence. You say where we can we can try and pay attention to the words. We can pay attention to the sound of the words. We can pay attention to the environment with which the words are spoken. And this can be for for teaching. This can be for music. It’s just a way of thinking about engaging. And I love it. So we’re going to talk about that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you would like to support this show and the podcast world is changing and we could really use your support and you want to get this post-show conversation and some other special things that we do and be part of the community. You can go to one you feed net, join. Susan, thank you so much.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:46 I can’t wait till number five.
Susan Piver 00:59:48 It’s such a pleasure to talk with you. Me too.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:51 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
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