Weathering the Eight Worldly Winds

Ethan Nichtern: If we look at the self as more momentary, that’s actually the key to self-confidence. So I think ironically, you can’t develop self-confidence unless you accept the truth that there is no solid self.

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard Ethan Nichtern. Ethan is a Buddhist teacher and author, and many, many years ago he was an intern at Tricycle. In his new book, Confidence: Holding Your Seat Through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds, he explores how we can navigate the vicissitudes of life with trust and resilience. In our conversation with Ethan, we talk about how the worldly winds of pleasure and pain can ground us in felt experience, the interplay between hope and fear, how we can learn to tap into our own enoughness, and what self-confidence looks like in the absence of a stable self. Plus, Ethan leads us in a guided meditation. So here’s our conversation with Ethan Nichtern.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with Ethan Nichtern and my co-host Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Ethan. Hi, Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Ethan Nichtern: Hi, James, hi, Sharon. It’s really great to see you and nice to be on the Tricycle podcast since I worked at Tricycle way back in the nineties in college. I’m always a fan of Tricycle.

James Shaheen: Thanks, Ethan. So Ethan, we’re here to talk about your new book, Confidence: Holding Your Seat Through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Ethan Nichtern: Yeah, so this is my fourth book about some Buddhist topic interpreted through a modern cultural or psychological or activist lens. I wanted to talk about confidence because I work with a lot of folks on their meditation practice on their understanding and application of Buddhist teachings, and not just the topic of confidence, but the topic of struggling with confidence. Whenever we dig one layer below the surface of an interest in mindfulness, there would always be a conversation about how do you work with these teachings in a way that you feel like you can trust yourself, you can show up fully, and you can handle difficult experiences. So I wanted to go looking both, as I often do, for some link in different classic Buddhist teachings and then bring them into modern life and into conversation with modern methodologies and also just speak very personally about my own struggle with confidence. It feels like it’s a very relevant topic for a lot of people, whether they’re super interested in Buddhism or not. I was also really interested in the seeming paradox from a Buddhist practitioner standpoint about where in the Buddhist teachings can we look for developing self-confidence when there’s this idea that you don’t really have a solid self? I think that’s one of the reasons we don’t always talk about confidence along the Buddhist path is because there is this seeming paradox of no-self and self-confidence. So I wanted to address that. 

James Shaheen: Yeah, we’ll get to that. But before we do, how are you defining confidence?

Ethan Nichtern: If you look it up in the dictionary, it means firm trust. Self-confidence would be firm trust in yourself. And then looking in different places in the Buddhist teachings, both the earliest Buddhist teachings and also some of the Tantric Buddhist teachings where confidence is talked about more specifically, there’s this term in the earliest Buddhist teachings, upekkha or upeksha, that usually gets translated as equanimity, but that word is always one of the most confusing translations. I find, and I don’t know if Sharon finds, that people struggle with what does equanimity mean when life is crazy, my mind is crazy, and the world is on fire?

When you really get into it, the notion of equanimity is about being able to deal with difficult, forceful experiences in life, both internally and externally. In the Shambhala teachings that I studied for many years, there’s this notion of being able to hold one’s seat in meditation practice but also in life in general, that when life knocks you around, you can hold your seat. That was a link between this idea of equanimity and that equanimity is pointing us in the direction of trust, resilience, and confidence.

That was one way I made the link with the earliest Buddhist teachings, and then the Tantric Buddhist teachings talk about things like warriorship and confidence, more directly. But I think it’s trusting that you can deal with what happens to you. That’s my main definition of confidence. Trust.

Sharon Salzberg: You say that the confidence it takes to show up to life is available to every human. What do you mean by that? And what gets in our way?

Ethan Nichtern: I mean, it doesn’t feel available all the time. What I’ve always loved about the basic principles of mindfulness and dharma is that we all have these innate capabilities: the ability to be present, the ability to work with our mind, the ability to work with what arises.

A lot gets in the way. One thing that gets in the way is that life is complicated. Pursuing goals comes up, and you sometimes succeed, sometimes you fail. When we’re existing as practitioners in the world, in society, it gets very forceful, or we could say windy, which is a big theme in the book, what’s sometimes called the eight worldly winds or what I’ve heard you and other teachers call the vicissitudes, things like seeking praise, fearing criticism, things like wanting to succeed at some endeavor, like maybe I want this book to do well, let’s just say that’s one thing I want to succeed at, and fearing that it will flop. So whenever we have that arena of hope and fear, we hope for something, we’re afraid of something else, there’s the potential for us to get knocked around by it. And so I think what often gets in the way is that we haven’t really deepened our own trust that whatever happens, we’ll be able to deal with it, that failure happens and success happens.

And I think one of the things that gets in our way is we think we’re going to stop striving at some point or stop being affected by what happens, and that’s really what I wanted to get at in this book is that we are always affected by what life throws at us. We are always affected by what the mind throws at us. And in my humble opinion, I mean, I’m not enlightened, but I haven’t reached a point where I’m unaffected by what life throws at me. In fact, I would even say that my mindfulness practice has made me more sensitive.

And so I think what gets in our way is this feeling that we’re not enough, we’re not doing enough, and that if we become better or more awake at some point, we’re going to not have to deal with our fear of failure and our hope for success. And those are just the forces of life. Those are just the vicissitudes or the winds of being alive in the human body.

I don’t think the problem is that we get knocked around. I think the problem is we get knocked around and then we get taken by surprise that we got knocked around again. We should never be taken by surprise that we’re going to respond—when somebody praises us, it’s going to feel good; when somebody criticizes us, it’s going to feel bad. And it’s going to happen again. But we haven’t built a kind of ability to accommodate that and rest with that. I think the idea is that every human can just accept what it means to be alive in a human form and to want, to hope for, and to fear. And if we work with that more, we gain more trust in the whole process, trust each time we go around the sun.

James Shaheen: So, Ethan, you’ve linked confidence and upekkha, or equanimity, resiliency, and so forth, with weathering the eight vicissitudes or worldly winds. So could you say more about what these eight worldly winds are?

Ethan Nichtern: I really like the analogy of wind. This comes from the historical Buddha. This is his list, and it’s these four pairings, so you get to eight from these four pairings. In each of these pairings, there is a force of life that has a hoped for outcome, a more pleasant outcome to our being, and a feared outcome, which is basically painful or in some cases crushing. These forces are striking us constantly if we’re alive in the world.

The first coupling, which is the most direct to our nervous system and our sensory experience, is pleasure. We hope for pleasure, and we fear pain. The second coupling is praise and criticism, so we long for praise, and we fear criticism. The third is sometimes traditionally called fame, but I’m not sure that everybody is seeking fame, so we could also think of it as recognition, being recognized for who we are, for what we bring to the world, what we bring to a social group. So fame or recognition is the hoped for outcome, and the feared outcome traditionally was sometimes called infamy, but I think that’s an interesting one because we kind of live in a world where infamy has become just another kind of fame. If you can get a lot of people to hate you, you can actually succeed that way. So the way I explored the feared part of that coupling is insignificance, so we hope for fame or recognition, and we fear that we are completely insignificant, that nobody even knows who we are. And then the most generalized one I talked about is success and failure, hoping for success at whatever our endeavor is, including our endeavors in spiritual practice, and fearing failure. Sometimes this one is also translated as gain and loss.

The idea is we’re constantly in this sort of gauntlet, as I talk about in the book, of hope and fear. It’s happening every day. We’re struggling for success in little ways; we’re fearing failure all the time. So every day of our life is like running through this gauntlet.

I like the idea of wind, and the analogy that I used in the book, which is if you’ve ever been by, and I think most people have at least in North America, like a car wash or a car dealership or a mechanic where they have those inflatable people in the wind, those really tall noodle guys, they’re called like tube people. I actually did a little research into the origin of these, and in Japan, they’re called sky dancers, which sounds even more Buddhist and cool, but the idea is that when they get animated because a wind blows through or they have a wind machine, their arms are raised and they’re cheering, and everything is great in the universe. They’ve basically attained enlightenment, they’re so happy. And then, the moment they get deflated, they just droop over like “It’s all over. I’ve lost all hope.”

I thought about the eight worldly winds as like having a little inner tube person in our chest, in our heart center, and just every day is, “Oh, this is awesome, that person complimented me, or I had a good meditation session,” and then, “Oh my gosh, oh lord, I don’t even know if they’re going to accept me today. Oh, gosh, why did that person look at me that way?” And we’re just back and forth. So we just have to live with this tube person in our chest, constantly blown about by the wind. How do we actually work with that as an experience without becoming fragile, without becoming completely unable to show up because we feel so knocked around by the forces of hope and fear?

Sharon Salzberg: If we can just go into hope and fear a little bit more, because I’ve always found that dynamic really fascinating, and certainly I always felt like it couldn’t be that the Buddha is counseling hopelessness, and so it is maybe a particular use of that word or that concept or that dynamic between the two. The inevitable connection between hope and fear has just always been interesting to me.

Ethan Nichtern: Yeah, I think, Sharon, in looking at the eight vicissitudes or the eight worldly winds, that looking at the four positive ones as marked by hope and the four negative or painful ones as being marked by fear, the first teacher I saw to frame them that way was actually the Tibetan teacher Dzogchen Phunlop Rinpoche.

Hope and fear is a rubric I’ve heard in Ani Pema Chödrön’s work and her teacher Chögyam Trungpa’s work. It’s interesting because hope as a kind of spiritual optimism has such a positive connotation to it. I think of the collected writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called The Testament of Hope, or something that may resonate with Sharon, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, if everybody remembers the Gotham typeface, the Shepard Fairey silhouette. After my generation really protested the W era quite vociferously, along comes this dashing young senator, and his tagline is “Hope.”

What is the problem with hope? It’s a tricky reframe of that term, because we do associate it with optimism, but it’s interesting to look at that example of 2008 and what happened in American politics after that. There was this real feeling, and I think this is sort of emblematic. The problem of hope is not that we hope for certain things. Again, that’s just part of life. Who wouldn’t want this hope for a great leader or great leadership, maybe now even more than then? But the question that comes up is what happens after? I remember specifically my experience in that campaign was that there was a real sense of celebration, which is the same kind of sense of celebration when something pleasant happens to you, like you eat a great meal.

There’s a mirage with hope, which is that the mind then thinks, “That’s it. We’re done. Everything’s going to be good from now on. I will never have to eat a meal again. We will never have to organize or volunteer or vote for a political election again,” which, the 2010 elections turned out very differently than the 2008 elections, and part of that was because the hope had been let down. The tube person crumpled again. And we do this in our meditation practice too, where there’s this kind of constant quality of “OK, now I finally feel good. Now I finally feel like I’m there,” and then we have a crappy meditation session the next time we sit.

And so actually, there’s this word in Tibetan, nyam. It could be describing jhana or concentration states from the earliest Buddhist teachings, but it’s translated as peak experience, having a really good, settled, pleasant experience in meditation. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But the mind can hold on to it, can grasp on to it, and then miss the next moment.

As soon as we fixate on the hope outcome, what inevitably happens at some point is the feared outcome comes blowing back in with the wind. So as soon as we eat that great meal, something happens: a stomach ache, a bad meal, etc. And then the hoped outcome just becomes this memory, this idealized nostalgia, and then we’re like, where did that go? And actually, if we cling too much to hope, the idea is we can grow more insecure and more fragile because we’re not willing to really accommodate the vicissitudes of hope and fear, the full range of human experience, and so we get knocked off our seat. So it is an interesting reframe of the word hope.

James Shaheen: So Ethan, I’d like to turn for a minute to the first pair of winds, pleasure and pain. You say that pleasure and pain can ground us in felt experience, connecting us to every being who has come before us. So how can we learn from our felt experience of pleasure and pain?

Ethan Nichtern: Just to be clear, I’m talking about the tolerable range of pleasure and pain. We can extend this idea, but we’re not talking about chronic pain. So we’re using our tolerable levels of experience to explore how the mind works and how being human works. Pleasure and pain are considered, to a certain degree, when you look at the Buddhist definition of a sentient being, it’s that which has the ability to feel. Historical Buddhism uses mindfulness and categorizes this incredibly simply and beautifully as just, if you really break down what the body feels in response to anything sensory going on, it either feels pleasant, painful, or neutral, not really either of those two. 

But when we really feel our sensory experience, we’re really tapping into what it means to be a sentient being. And that’s a different expression than “How do I feel less pain and more pleasure?,” which I think is so woven into our cultural inheritance that we’re trying to feel pleasure and not feel pain.

When we really look at what mindfulness doesn’t actually privilege, pleasure or pain, it actually allows us to feel the spectrum with more sensitivity.

It’s hard to advertise for that: “Practice mindfulness so you can feel pain more and feel pleasure more and feel neutral experiences more.” But it’s actually tying us into our humanity and our sentiency to really tune in without chasing. And the problem is that, again, because pleasure is the hoped for experience and pain is the feared experience, we have such a tendency to chase pleasure and run from pain. We’re trying to learn how to hold our seat with that full array of experiences because we’re going to have to experience both.

And I think when we meditate more, we actually feel the full array more. It’s not necessarily that we feel more pleasure when we meditate, but I would say when pleasure is present, we experience it more completely. That’s where the confidence comes in. When pain is present, we experience it more completely, and therefore we can appreciate the array of pleasure and pain.

The other piece is it really does tie us into the experience of every sense of being with a nervous system. And so there’s a kind of universality and a kind of universal compassion that arises from realizing that every sentient being experiences this array. So it’s the most ground level, the most visceral, and the most preconceptual of these eight worldly winds is pleasure and pain.

Sharon Salzberg:  So in describing pleasure and pain, you quote the 8th-century Buddhist teacher Shantideva, who likened the mindless pursuit of pleasure to licking honey from a razor blade. That’s quite an image. Can you say something more about that metaphor?

Ethan Nichtern: Yeah, if you’ve ever read The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shantideva was a pretty intense character. Talk about a fire-and-brimstone lecture on why to embrace the path of awakening, embrace compassion, give one’s life to it completely. That text, the Bodhicaryavatara, it’s not, “Oh, you could practice ten minutes a day if you want.” It’s intense.

I like that metaphor just because it sounds a little like 8th-century punk rock, licking honey from a razor blade. But the idea is that the razor blade is the truth of impermanence. The razor blade is this conditioning. He was talking about the impermanence of the experience and the impermanence of this life and our opportunity to wake up to it. So that’s the idea: if I knew what the consequences of the honey were, would I still be so fixated on getting that momentary sweet thing if it actually was conditioned by impermanence and endings?

When we chase pleasure mindlessly, when we lose our seat, we are very rarely thinking about when is the next time this is going to happen. When the mind gets caught in the chase, we’re never thinking, “Oh, when is the next time I’m going to feel this uncomfortable and going to have to soothe it again?” And the idea from the scientific perspective is each time we chase that hope, the reward gets less and less because according to Anna Lembke’s work, the brain gets more and more out of balance, and the pleasure and pain centers of the brain want to keep themselves in balance.

So we’re never thinking, “Oh, I’m just going to have to go through this again next time.” That idea of where Shantideva is leading us is to say we should just work with our discomfort now. We should practice holding our seat, because it’s not like this is going to make the problem go away. I think there’s a lot of ways that we try to solve problems by putting them off, and the licking honey from a razor blade I think was his very hardcore way of saying, “Don’t try to solve the problem of your discomfort by just temporarily chasing pleasure. Let’s actually try to see how this works.”

Sharon Salzberg: You also describe let’s say a kind of distorted relationship to pleasures as giving us a false sense of lasting safety. I wonder if you could say more about that.

Ethan Nichtern: In all of these winds, I think it’s true, but the chase of pleasure is probably the most consistently destabilizing throughout the day. So there is this sense of chasing pleasure. It does soothe us for a moment. Again, there’s this idea, what am I going to do the next time that this itch comes up? What am I going to do the next time I feel uncomfortable?

I tell the story of being on a month-long retreat and just deciding I was not going to scratch my nose. It was excruciating. But I was like, “No matter what, I am going to hold my seat and I am not going to scratch my nose.” Because I knew it wasn’t actually an injury. I knew it wasn’t life-threatening in any way. I knew my body was just throwing signals at me, which it often does on longer retreats. And I remember thinking, “It’s not like if I scratch my nose, that’s going to be the last time that I ever scratched my nose on this retreat or feel like, ‘Oh my God, my nose is so itchy.’” So I just played with, “I’m just not going to do it. Let’s just really hold that kind of hardcore Shantideva-style discipline,” and I remember thinking really wacky thoughts like “If I don’t scratch my nose, I’m going to die.” I remember actually thinking that thought and then bursting out laughing, because that is the most irrational thought a human could possibly think. And then it disappeared completely.

That’s not an example of chronic pain. That’s an example of a sort of discomfort that I knew was already temporary. So I could hold the experience with some gentleness and I could make the choice to say, “I’m going to experiment with holding my seat with this.” And it turned out that it went away on its own. So I didn’t need to scratch my nose in that case to say, “Oh, maybe if I scratch my nose, I’ll be good forever.” That wouldn’t have solved the problem of my relationship to discomfort and pleasure.

James Shaheen: So, Ethan, the next pair of winds is praise and blame, and while pleasure and pain are often grounded in our senses, praise and blame emerge in our relationship to others and are deeply tied to our feeling of self-worth. So how do praise and blame influence our sense of self?

Ethan Nichtern: Praise and blame, or I also like criticism, because that’s something we all deal with, I think, with how to receive criticism. When you put yourself out there in a relational space or in a larger social space, we hope for praise, just like we hope for pleasure, and we fear criticism.

But here, rather than this being tied to our physical identity the way pleasure and pain are, these begin to be tied to our social or interpersonal identities, which is another way that we can have a strong sense of self that’s more mental, more representation, and it has to do with human beings being social.

Our survival historically depends on our standing in the group that we’re in, and we need to make sure that we remain in good standing with our friends, with our partners, with our loved ones, with our work colleagues, with our bosses, etc.

I think this is one that people really struggle with. Most of us are biased toward getting hurt by criticism or any kind of blame or any kind of, “You didn’t do good. Who the hell do you think you are?” I noticed something where if ever I get feedback in a written form or in email form, I don’t know if your mind does this, but I could get an email that says nine really positive things about whatever I did or presented and then just one criticism, and I don’t know how fast my mind works and how fast all of our minds work, but my brain will literally avoid the praise and just zero in on the critique instantly.

James Shaheen: It’s like walking into a room where everybody but one person loves you and you end up focusing on the one person who doesn’t like you.

Ethan Nichtern: Right, yeah, and it could be that all the other people are Nobel Prize winners 

James Shaheen: [laughing] but they don’t count anymore. 

Ethan Nichtern: We always have to work with this fear of Criticism. One of the reasons the fear of criticism is exacerbated is that we also have our inner critics that we’re working with in meditation. And I took in the book, actually coming from Sharon, I’ve always heard her talk about her inner Lucy voice. I believe it is from Peanuts. But actually naming your inner critics. At the same time that the inner critic is operating, then whenever we put ourselves out there into some relational or social space, we open ourselves up to the outer critic as well. And so realizing that actually this is coming from our bias towards negativity and we can actually know we are going to get criticized or that something’s going to happen.

So I actually like practicing with, OK, let’s actually receive the praise, which I think is very hard for us because we want to turn away from the praise, and then let’s see, “OK, I’m going to get criticized. How does that make me feel? What is the useful information in the criticism?”

I think criticism is especially hard because it’s not technically physical the way pleasure and pain are. It is so important to us. But I also think if we have this kind of false view of equanimity as “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” that’s completely false. Criticism actually really hurts. It’s painful. And I don’t think it’s ever going to stop being painful. Maybe as we expose ourselves to more and more criticism, there’s a kind of getting used to that the same way that we could get used to the itch and meditation practice, but this one is really tough. I think we need a lot of self-compassion to realize that as a practitioner, what people say is going to affect us, and that’s OK.

Sharon Salzberg: It can also be difficult to give appropriate feedback. So what are some of your guidelines for giving feedback skillfully?

Ethan Nichtern: Yeah, that’s the flip side. Because this one is social, we can be on either side of this. We can receive praise and criticism, or we can actually produce these vicissitudes, produce these winds in another person. And so I think the first piece of giving feedback skillfully is acknowledging this negativity bias. If we write an email to somebody else, let’s say, and it says those nine positive things and one critical thing, just knowing that person, their brain, their mind might highlight the negative as well.

I think speaking appreciatively is really important, and I also think for myself as a teacher, and maybe Sharon can attest to this as well, I’ve gotten over the need, mostly, not entirely, but I’ve gotten over the need mostly to give people feedback that they didn’t ask for. If it affects me, if it involves me, then yes, of course, I can tell somebody how their behavior impacts me if I can speak to the behavior rather than call the person. I can say, “That thing you said hurt me” rather than “You’re a shitty friend.” “You’re a shitty friend” is not really healthy feedback because it overpersonalizes. It solidifies the self in the other person.

I really think speaking when asked to speak or if somebody says, “What do you think?” I share the wisdom in that chapter that comes from my great uncle Irv, who was really considered a kind of bodhisattva mensch on the Jewish side of my family. He supposedly said, “Don’t ever tell anyone anything unless they have a place to put it.” I like that. And just knowing we are going to produce an effect, that words are powerful, so the same way the winds are hitting us of praise and criticism, the wind is going to hit another person if we become the speaker.

Sharon Salzberg: So the next pair of winds are influence and insignificance, which you’re relating to the intriguing notion of a second death. So what is a second death, and how does it relate to our longing to be recognized?

Ethan Nichtern: Yeah, I hate to say it, but as a father of an almost 7-year-old, probably too much of my spiritual wisdom the last number of years comes from children’s movies. This one is coming from the Pixar movie Coco, which is all set around a family in Mexico and a young boy who’s a musician celebrating Dia de los Muertos with his family. The setup in this movie is that when a person dies, their spirit goes to the Muertos, the land of the dead, but they don’t fully die and they can come back to the land of the living to visit on this one day of the year if somebody has made an offering on their altar. But when nobody remembers you well enough to make an offering on their altar in the land of the living, the spirit fades away in the land of the dead. So it sets up this rubric where you die twice: once when you move from the land of the living to the land of the dead and the second time when nobody remembers you in the land of the living.

This sort of “Nobody knows who I am,” “Nobody remembers me,” and framing that as a kind of death was really inviting to me to think about our sense of self because Buddhism talks so much about self and non-self and our identity. This longing to be known, to be recognized, to have influence, to have people say, “Oh, what about Ethan?” And so that second death is the realization that not only at some point is our body going to die and we’re going to have to deal with that dissolution and all of those ways that we have to let go and let be and leave behind all the relationships we have and everything that we’ve known but also there will eventually come a point where we are not remembered. And so the realization is how do we live our life, how do we take our seat in the world if we realize that whatever impact or influence we have on a larger social structure, whatever recognition we have, eventually that will not be tied to us at all? We will have to let go of people knowing who we were. I use the example of Buddha. His brand, his influence, has lasted quite a long time, but he probably didn’t live anything like the life that is credited to him. So even if you are remembered for a long time, memory corrodes, and we have to let go of our sense of being important and being known for something.

James Shaheen: So, Ethan, that takes us to the last pair of success and failure, and I know I can get caught up in envy and comparison, and I compare myself first to others, and then to an idealized version of myself. So how can we break free of this urge to compare?

Ethan Nichtern: I use the example of feeling envy for a writer I went to college with who’s a very successful writer. I think it’s interesting because mindfulness and psychology and Buddhist thought have done a good job working with a lot of emotions and bringing them into the light, like anger and anxiety.

I don’t think we talk enough about envy and jealousy, even though comparison and competition are sort of the main emotions that run our world in a lot of ways, at least our economic world and a lot of times our social world. So I think the first thing is to realize that when we’re longing to achieve any success, it is very natural in some ways. It’s very human to compare ourselves to the successes of others. There’s some arenas that are set up that way. I think sports are a very healthy setup where you literally play a game to see who’s best. So there’s some instances where that comparative mind, which Sharon has taught a lot about so beautifully, is really useful. You say, “OK, how am I doing compared to this? I want to achieve success in this.” But then it goes into “I’m not enough,” not just “What is this other person doing well that I would also like to practice or work on,” but “This person is better than me” or “It’s unfair. Why aren’t people seeing me? Why aren’t I getting the success that they’re getting?”

So I was talking about what I was really looking for in comparing myself to my writer friend. I just really admired this person’s work, and I admired what a writer could do when they really showed up and honed their craft.

So our comparative mind is often creating so much anxiety, and so one of the practices that’s a classic practice that also I’ve heard Sharon teach is whenever we experience comparison with someone else to actually practice mudita or sympathetic joy, to actually say, “May they enjoy and benefit from their success.”

The other side of this is the fear of failure and the fear of making mistakes. I think that we are never going to practice confidence if we’re not willing to make lots of mistakes. That’s why I love meditation, because we can’t do it right. There are ways to build and develop, but the doing of it to a certain degree, the effort, the discipline that takes, there’s a direction we can move our practices in, but it’s really disrupting that idea of competing with ourselves, and it’s bringing to the surface all the ways that we do compete with an idealized, more enlightened version of ourselves.

Sharon Salzberg: Let’s go a little more deeply into this idea of enoughness, which is fascinating. You say that envy shows us something we long for, and when we touch into our longing, we can also access our own enoughness. So can you say more about enoughness and how we can tap into it?

Ethan Nichtern: In that chapter, what I was thinking in terms of working with comparative mind is if we can drop for a moment what we don’t have that this other being or other person has and just say, “What is it that I actually want?” I like the word “long for.” We often problematize desire or make it problematic, and longing sounds like a much more innocent and wise version of desire. So I really like that word long for. 

In the example I gave, the person who was a successful writer was a fiction and poetry writer. I’m mostly known for writing nonfiction and nowhere near as widely known as they are. I love writing fiction, and I love writing poetry, and I don’t get as much time to do it as I would like to. So, all that my comparative mind was doing there, if I could see the lesson, it was just telling me, “Oh, I really want to write some more poetry.” And when I can actually tune in to what it is that I long for, the comparison dissolves and there’s a real sense of being with oneself. I think that is the experience of enoughness. I don’t need to reach a certain place to feel OK. I can just actually express my longing, and that can come from a place of, “This is just who I am. This is what I do,” which is more authentic, more settled.

James Shaheen: You say that each day includes a thousand little failures. So what can failure teach us?

Ethan Nichtern: One way I experience the thousand little failures the most these days in my life and my path is parenting. It’s a dynamic process. You cannot do it right. And the other thing about being a modern parent, I think it’s different from earlier generations. There’s so many theories about how you’re supposed to be doing it, and so you’re constantly in these little failures: Oh, do they have good self esteem? Oh wait, am I giving them too much sugar? What does this theory say? Should I do it that way? Should I do it this way? All these things. It’s great because I love arriving at a place where there’s literally no point scoring—it’s just a struggle, and it’s just a beautiful struggle. You’re constantly rubbing up against this idea where it’s supposed to be different from that, and you’re rubbing up against it in very little ways, which give you lots of little lessons. I think little lessons from a mindfulness perspective are really helpful. I think failure, if it’s paired with enough successes, is important for building confidence. There has to be some succeeding, some pleasant aspects to things. We can’t just be completely on the side of failure and pain all the time. But when it’s paired that way, I think failure can really say, “Oh, let me actually let go of expectation.” We learn so much by seeing what didn’t work or what doesn’t work.

If you want your mind to be more present, you have to learn what your mind is like when it’s wandering. If you want a different relationship with difficult emotions, you have to know what it feels like to be stuck in difficult emotions. And I think as a teacher, to be able to embody people’s experiences, you have to really have had your own struggle.

So failure is really healthy. It’s just that failure is never what we want. It’s what we fear. And I don’t see a way to make it other than that. I don’t see a way to turn the path into, “If you do these things, all of a sudden you’re going to love failure and you’re going to love getting criticized.” No, that’s not being human. Pleasure is pleasure, pain is pain. That’s being human. But then how can we appreciate the full array of experience? And I think failure is really key because we perceive the world through so much comparison. If we can step out of that and just be like, “Alright, I failed.” I think it’s also really healthy for dharma practitioners to do things we’re not good at. If you hate performance or have always feared it, take an improv class. The one example I used is I failed my driver’s test when I was 17. It was really a big deal internally, even though I was a city kid, a lot of city kids get their driver’s license when they’re 20, 21, 22, I just let it drag on and on. Then in the middle of writing this book about a year and a half ago, I was like, “This is ridiculous.” And then I was like, “If I’m writing a book on confidence, I have to really work with my fear of failure. And so I’m going to get my driver’s license while I’m writing this book.” And I really did try to practice what I was preaching, but I really had to face that fear of failure to be a 43-year-old person in a driver’s ed class in Brooklyn.

James Shaheen: So you say that when you fail, it’s like your entire identity is put on the line, and on the other hand, if you take the approach that there’s no permanent identity, then momentary failure never signifies permanent defeat. So can you say more about what self-confidence looks like in the absence of a stable self?

Ethan Nichtern: That’s the whole question that I raised in the introduction is if there’s no self, how can there be self-confidence? There is a functional self. There is a fluid self. There is a being here with a consciousness and a heart and a mind and a body that longs for happiness and well-being. But it’s not a permanent self. We constantly make this sense of “I am fixed in time. If I introduce more failure into the system, it will crush my sense of self” rather than just saying, “Oh, OK, now I’m going to be in flow, and I’m going to be able to integrate this new experience into being and not solidify.”

If we look at the self as more momentary, that’s actually the key to self-confidence. I’m not the person who can’t drive permanently. I can just actually work with that. And if I fail the driver’s test a second time, then that was a moment too. The good thing actually in the city of New York, they say the average driver has to take the test three to five times to pass, so that’s a lot of failure. You have to get used to failure, and you have to integrate that experience and be like, “This is not a permanent failure.” You just do it again.

Begin again, as Sharon likes to say. Is that a different self than the one who failed? Yes, because it’s a future moment, but at the same time, it’s the same continuum of self, we could say, or continuum of non-self. So I think ironically, you can’t develop self-confidence unless you accept the truth that there is no solid self. That’s the irony of it because a confident person or a person who’s practicing confidence for me is somebody who’s constantly integrating the experience and just saying, “OK, I don’t have to defend. Otherwise you end up having to defend yourself constantly against all the little failures and criticisms, and that doesn’t work very well. We all try it. We all get super defensive. “No, no, no. I didn’t fail the test. I didn’t fail the test. I’m a good driver.” Why don’t I just say, “Oh yeah, no, I failed the test. It was scary as hell.” And then you say, “OK, this is a new moment. I can try again.” Sometimes it takes a long time to actually have the support to make that effort. And in the second part of the book, I talk about four powers of confidence, which are supports we can use to remind ourselves to show up and try again.

James Shaheen: It’s like Sharon’s teaching in meditation that it’s always in coming back to the breath that we exercise that muscle. I found that very helpful and I’ve never forgotten it. Right, Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: That’s great. I appreciate it myself. 

James Shaheen: Ethan, you close the book with the windhorse practice, which is a way of harnessing the energies of the worldly winds. So to close, would you be willing to lead us through a short wind horse practice? 

Ethan Nichtern: Sure. Windhorse is a concept, again, I was really infatuated with the idea of wind, and windhorse comes from both Tibetan Buddhist and indigenous Tibetan spirituality.

It’s called lungta in Tibetan, and the idea is that rather than fighting against the winds of our experience, our emotions, we are actually riding the moment. There are various versions of this practice. It’s meant to be a pithy meditation, and it’s a good meditation. You can do it in two or three minutes for rousing oneself and showing up fully. You can do it at the end of a meditation session before you go into your life. You could do it before a difficult conversation you need to have. I do it before I teach as a way to just show up and rouse myself and have that little burst of “I can do this. I can be here with this group of people.”

So we’ll just do the shorter version.There’s a five-step version in the book. I’m just going to take us through a three-step version. It’s very simple.

So let’s just take our seat for a minute. If you notice after listening to this podcast that your energy is kind of in your head and in your ears, see if you can bring it down to your seat.

And then very quickly and abruptly bring all your attention to your heart center, almost as if a tealight candle switched on in your heart. Focus on the heart center. Now soften that attention, stay in the heart center, and just feel what’s true right now, any emotions. So on this step, we’re just being tender towards our own experience. Just feel the heart softly.

And then finally, as if awareness was centered in the heart, just see if you can open the heart outward in all directions in front of you, the side body, behind. And I’m also going to invite you, if your eyes are closed or your gaze is down, to look straight ahead for a moment, to really rouse oneself to be in the world. There’s a real sense of being fully in the room or the space that you’re in right now, just open awareness out in all directions from the heart.

Thank you so much.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Ethan. It’s been a pleasure, and thanks so much for joining Sharon and me. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Ethan’s new book, Confidence, available now. Thanks again, Ethan.

Ethan Nichtern: Thank you so much, James.

James Shaheen: And thank you, Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Ethan Nichtern. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available, and we are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate.  We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is are produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!