Topic #1: Avoiding & Getting Out Of Ruts
K. Deep
Can you take us back to 2017 when your mother went through a suicide attempt?
You mentioned that you shared with her the teachings you were getting from a monk. Can you share the core insights or steps you gave that helped her recover?
Dan Goldfield
Okay, brother, so, yes, I stayed with my mother for three nights after she attempted suicide.
My understanding was still pretty young at that time.
But I saw what I had learned already, up to that date, to be my best chance at helping her out.
It was really the only way I could conceive of that would be able to help her out. It was my contribution to her recovery, the best contribution I could make.
So, I took her through the whole thing that I’d been learning; what mindfulness is, how to practice it, various illustrations from teachers such as Ram Dass, Alan Watts, my Theravada Buddhist teacher over in Thailand whose name is Damarato.
I told her that mindfulness is the practice of seeing clearly.
And for the immediate purposes of helping her through her recovery, what I encouraged her to see clearly, was that death is not relief.
When people are desperate, when they’re struggling, what they’re really looking for is relief. And we spoke about that.
I’m sure I asked her questions, though the memory is vague.
She certainly found that useful to consider.
When she looked, when she investigated her own experience of what it was like before she was born; then she saw that wasn’t an experience of relief. It wasn’t an experience at all.
We can’t even conceive as living beings of what that kind of nothingness is like.
So I wanted to offer my mother the insight that death is not relief. It’s not the escape that people think it is when they attempt or commit suicide.
And so then we got round to looking at what it was that she was trying to escape.
It was really years of depression, of physical pain, and so we got to talking about what she could do about those things.
I set her up with both a formal meditation practice; a sitting meditation practice in which she would examine the feelings of sadness and the feelings of physical pain and look directly at them to see were they solid or did they change.
Did they have a size, a boundary, a center, a periphery?
As she examined those things, as is the case with most meditators who make a dedicated practice of this, they see,
“Oh, these sensations are not as solid as they appear.
When I’m distracted, certainly when I’m trying to seek relief, or when I’m wishing that these sensations weren’t present, then they feel like a burden.
But when I go into them, instead, and examine their nature, I see that they’re not as solid and not as afflictive as I thought.”
We spoke every day for about six months afterward.
And I just kept reminding her and reminding her and reminding her of this stuff.
The moment-to-moment mindfulness practice was for her to continue to recognize what she was able to recognize in meditation; that all of these sensations pass, that that’s their nature, and that they’re not as scary as they seemed.
We also did a lot of restructuring, I suppose you could say, her mental frameworks for what was going on in her life.
In simple terms, we flipped feeling sorry for herself, for feeling grateful for what she had.
We rediscovered purpose in her life in the form of my two young nephews, who she loves to look after.
We really put a big focus on them and how they benefit from her being around.
So there’s her reason to live, so to speak.
We also spoke about, and this was an interesting flip, how by taking care of herself, she is taking care of me and my sister.
She hadn’t considered, previously because she was feeling so low, what it might mean to us if she were to exit this life.
Well, that’s not a nice way for one’s parents to go.
And so as she was then taking care of herself on the other side of that experience, I reminded her again and again that in taking care of herself mentally, physically, and emotionally, she was taking care of me and my sister. Because we want her to be healthy. We want her to be happy.
So these tweaks of perception turned out to be what did the job, brother. That’s what turned her life around.
Topic #2: Overcoming Clouds Of Negative Thoughts
K. Deep
“death is not relief”
Wow, I really really loved that Dan. And every insight and perspective you gave. Thanks a lot.
You mentioned your teacher. I love a perspective you got from him (am completely paraphrasing here):
You weren’t born broken and need to fix yourself. You were born perfect but then convinced that something was wrong with you.
That’s so good. And I see this problem a lot.
People feel insufficient in different parts of their lives. They feel they’re not good enough, so they never take action. I felt the same for a long time and it went on steroids when I went through my first breakup. You have also talked about having felt insufficiency or unworthiness when it comes to affection in the past.
And many of those people, they practice mindfulness or meditation. They watch something motivational. For a while, they feel better.
But then, their boss shouts at them. They get stuck somewhere in life, relationships, or work. Someone rejects or breaks up with them. Maybe their family member reminds them of how stupid they are.
They spiral into negative thoughts and that feeling of insufficiency comes right back, often worse than it was before.
So, can you talk more about that insight? And how we can permanently go back to being the perfect being that we were, instead of getting carried away by those intrusive thoughts of insufficiency?
Dan Goldfield
Yes, brother, the answer is to rest naturally without seeking or describing anything.
The answer, in other words, is to relax, let go, and shut the fuck up.
The problem is, our entire culture, no matter where we live in 2024–it used to be that you folks in the East, your culture was more geared toward a natural way of living–but not anymore.
Really, the Industrial Revolution has touched everywhere now. Capitalism is everywhere.
And the bias toward action is everywhere, such that rest is seen as lesser.
But of course, rest and action are two sides of the same coin.
When we forget how to rest, life becomes like a piece of music with no breaks in between the notes.
In other words, it’s just white noise.
It’s a mess. It’s total chaos. No one wants to listen to that. There’s no beauty in it. There’s no contrast in it. There’s no light and shade. It’s not attractive to the ear for anyone.
And so the reason that this is the answer is because, precisely, we are born perfect, everything is perfectly fine, assuming we’re not being chased down by a criminal or the police, or something awful is happening in our direct experience right now.
Or, you know, we could even extend it out, let’s be kind, we could even extend it out to say a week or a month.
Say, we don’t know where we’re going to get our rent from. Well that’s a time for action, right? We know that we need to pay that rent and so we need to do something.
But actually, the secret is we can do that from a place of rest.
So actually, aside from literally trying to dodge a bullet, there is never a time that rest and relaxation is not appropriate.
Now again, due to the bias toward action, people think that rest is somehow inferior in terms of its responsiveness, but it’s precisely the opposite.
We want a calm, clear mind for the sake of being responsive.
The more mental processing is going on in a moment, the less we have to dedicate to whatever comes up, the less responsive we are.
So the answer is always to rest. But again, this is difficult for people.
This is where I begin with every student that I work with.
And then the game is that we diagnose where it’s difficult for that student to rest, to relax, to accept everything as it is. That’s where we go to work.
So they say,
“I find it hard at work, Dan. When I’m on the call with you, it’s easy.
I find I can rest naturally without seeking or describing anything. I stop labeling things. I stop judging things. I stop describing things. I stop judging myself. I stop judging others.
That’s easy enough when I’m sat on the call looking at you.
But then I go to work and people don’t think like you. They come at me with unreasonable demands. And so I find it difficult. “
So we then work with that.
It may be that we devise deliberate practices for them to do, which have the function of replacing certain mental processes with others.
This is never the end goal. The end goal is always supreme relaxation.
But it is a, we could say, a stepping stone or a concession, a wise concession to say,
“Okay, instead of getting frustrated with your boss, you’re going to focus on your breath. You’re going to take a deep breath and you’re going to focus on the sensations of the breath”.
And now you replace the mental processes of frustration, of judgment with simple physical sensation. And that makes you more able to respond wisely to your boss who’s making unreasonable demands.
We may take instead a mantra.
I know I don’t have to describe to you what a mantra is. Usually I have to tell a bit of a story about exactly what a mantra is.
What’s interesting is, I discovered kind of parallel to my own discovery that this was appropriate for myself and for students, that actually this is the method that they use in Tibetan Buddhism.
In Tibetan Buddhism, they include the Theravada and the Mahayana; Theravada being the classical Buddhism from your homeland, and Mahayana being what occurred out of China and then made its way to Japan in the form of Zen, primarily.
The Tibetans call their vehicle Vajrayana and it includes the Theravada and the Mahayana.
In the Vajrayana in Tibet, the wise master will recommend practices from all three yanas to the student depending on their unique circumstances.
So a student may have non-dual realization. A student may be very well aware that rest is best; that the whole game really is about relaxation into the great perfection of what is naturally occurring.
They just have a little issue over here with something that they just can’t quite rest with and so the master recommends,
“Okay, we’re going to use a mantra for this. We’re going to use a visualization for that. We’re going to use a breath meditation.
We’re going to use a formal practice in order for you to strengthen your resolve so that when you then go back into that moment, having done a sitting practice off to one side, you go back into that challenging environment and you’re now more ready to deal with it.”
So, how do we, quote, go back permanently to being that perfect being that we were?
We don’t go back, because we’re never not that perfect being.
And what is that being?
It’s self-knowing awareness equal to space.
That’s what we really are, and that’s what this and every spiritual practice ever has been about. This is the fundamental truth that all wisdom practices are pointed at.
Indeed, what I’ve seen from my long and thorough cross-referencing of these various wisdom practices, and then testing those against science, against psychology, what I’ve seen is that in the case that a teaching is not pointing to that ultimate truth of one’s true being as self-knowing awareness equal to space, it is not a genuine teaching.
It is not a wisdom teaching. It is a dualistic teaching that is aimed at changing stuff, which makes it no different really to a self-help book in essence. It’s focused on change, and it’s still operating on that assumption that we are broken and that we need fixing.
Now, this is not to say that those practices or teachings or books are unwholesome.
It’s levels.
So the way I would explain it is to say, in the case that someone is addicted to cocaine, they’re far better off getting addicted to self-help, right?
But then in the case that they’re addicted to self-help, they’re far better off getting into a proper wisdom practice.
Now, there is the case that someone can get addicted to a wisdom practice, someone can get addicted to states of jhana, for example; deep states of meditative absorption.
This is incredibly wholesome. This is a wonderful condition to be in. It’s the most healthy addiction one could have, I would say, but it’s still an addiction. It’s still attached to something.
So the ultimate level really is to let everything go. And this is the return to ordinariness.
What the Buddha called the Supra Mundane.
It is transcendent of the mundane, but these are not two.
He also said, “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.”
So we’re not looking to become holy or supernatural or any of those things.
Indeed, to do so is to still be in attachment, is to still be trying to change things to be a certain way. Thus we’re still trapped.
It’s a better trap than being addicted to cocaine, but it’s still a trap.
What we’re really looking for is to accept everything as it is. That doesn’t mean that we don’t go out and get money when we need to pay our rent.
We’re actually more capable of doing that from a place of acceptance,
“Oh, I’m short. I’m short on rent. Let me do something about that.”
And we maintain an ease, a clarity, rather than getting all hot under the collar. Make sense, brother?
Topic #3: Finding Motivation During Difficult Times
K. Deep
Makes a lot of sense Dan. There’s so much we can dive deeper into…
But there’s one thing I really want to focus on:
While that feeling of brokenness and insufficiency is what stops people, it’s also what drives people to improve.
I have observed this while talking and listening to over 100 high achievers.
So, while rest and being at ease can show you what you need to work on… how do you create a consistent drive without relying on insufficiencies?
Cause, I feel you’re highly driven and motivated by mindfulness. You enjoy teaching it. You enjoy practicing it. So much so that you studied with a monk for 5 years and have meditated for over 29366 hours. You have mentioned you wake up at 3-4 a.m. excited to talk about it. Where does that drive originate from?
Dan Goldfield
Yeah, brother, you don’t have to create drive.
The whole notion of creating drive is absurd from the position of non-duality.
When we’re in a position of duality; separating out parts of reality, saying there are separate human beings with their own identities and they’re separate to their environment and they’re separate to other people.
Indeed, we might say that person can create a drive in themselves, but who is driving whom?
So at one level, discipline looks reasonable. At the non-dual level, it’s preposterous.
There is no driver in the driver’s seat, so to speak.
At one level, we can say there is just cause and effect. At the deepest level, we say there is only the spontaneous manifestation of awareness’s own appearance; that everything that manifests, manifests spontaneously.
But the good news is this does not lead us toward nihilism.
Well, it can if we interpret it that way, but actually what we see is that when we truly relax and surrender into this, we see that our nature is good; that we have a natural energy and what might look like drive to do things that are mutually beneficial.
This is what drives me every day. But it’s something quite ordinary.
Now, yeah, I have in the past been up 3, 4, 5 a.m.
Right now, I’m getting up later. It’s darker in the mornings here in the UK. Right now, I’m up typically between 7 and 8.
And it comes and goes like that. It waxes and wanes, but I can tell you it’s always what I’m interested in.
So when I do wake up, it’s that that I’m thinking about is getting out online, helping people with this stuff. And that’s a very natural motivation.
Same as taking a piss, drinking a glass of water.
It’s exactly the same as just taking care of any other natural urge.
And what we see is it’s been proven by hundreds of millions of people, monks, that when we get quiet as human beings, when we get out of our own way, we want to do good.
We want to benefit others. We want to be kind. We want to be compassionate and we have plenty of energy with which to do that.
So, we’re really, once again, up against this basic and fundamental and deeply important question,
Do we think that the human being by its nature is broken and needs fixing?
Do we think that we’re basically lazy and that we won’t do things that are good for ourselves unless we bully ourselves into it, or rather, do we be brave and say,
“No, actually, if I relax so far that I even surrender the typical notions that society presents for how I should live my life, which is precisely to live based on shoulds, oughts, and musts.”
What happens then?
What happens when I completely take my hands off the wheel and say, I’m not going to force myself to do anything?
This is what I did during one of the long lockdowns here in the UK during COVID, and what happened was I started this Twitter account and came out and started doing this.
No one would have told me I should have done this, you see, so I had to come from that natural place, that natural motivation, but now I have more energy than I have ever had for working on anything.
Topic #4: The High Achiever’s Routine
K. Deep
“our nature is good… we want to do good”
That’s the most interesting perspective I have come across… and I love it.
And it does seem like a lot of it boils down to freeing ourselves from feeling broken. Instead of focusing on adding new beliefs and mindsets to fight the losing battle against the old ones… removing the ones we already have.
Shifting the gears a little…
What does your daily routine and work routine look like now? And how has mindfulness affected your routine?
Dan Goldfield
So it’s always interesting answering questions about my own routine, brother, because I don’t really practice mindfulness anymore as such.
I practiced until I didn’t need to practice anymore, which was just that process of subtractive relaxation until there’s no more dissatisfaction around.
So my days are very easy. It’s all very natural.
I wake up when I wake up. I have ideas ready to go. I get out in the sun. I try to do sunlight exposure in the mornings.
Some of my day is still about taking care of the biology, you know, that’s something that requires a little bit of planning, right?
So I like to get out for the circadian rhythm in the morning and actually, that’s a challenge that I have to stay on top of here in the UK in the winter.
We don’t get a lot of sunlight exposure here in the winter months, so that is something that I do try to stay on top of.
But then I’ll come home and I’ll write for anywhere between two to six hours.
I like immersion in my tasks, so I structure my week actually so that I like to try to do my tweets, my content at the beginning of the week.
And then when I’m through that, I get to tasks like building new products and services that allows me to immerse myself fully, even if a task spills over from one day to the next; the mind is still unified around that task.
I found when I’ve played with doing time blocks in the day, you know, say I do like an hour or two on tweets and then an hour or two on product, I don’t like the switching. I don’t like it.
I like to allow the inspiration to fully warm up and flow.
And then I like to reach closure with the task before moving on to the next.
It doesn’t always happen like that, but that’s what I try to structure for.
So I’m really thinking about how can I do this most naturally. How can I align myself with the natural flow of inspiration as much as possible?
Once that inspiration is spent for the day following the major writing session or building session, that’s when I’ll then check messages and come online and do all the engagement stuff, including Kortex.
How does mindfulness affect that?
Yeah, it would look very different if I had never taken up mindfulness. I can tell you that.
So as much as a mindfulness practice in a formal sense is not part of my day, I can tell you what days used to look like before I ever practiced mindfulness.
And that was very hectic. Full of dissatisfaction. Full of switching between tasks. Struggling to remember shit. Unfocused.
Kind of reaching for snacks and all kinds of other instant gratification activities in between little stints of work and basically kind of running my work based on how I felt.
And kind of trying to mitigate for dissatisfaction in the course of the day.
So there was always this kind of managing the bad feelings that were present or intrusive thoughts that were getting in the way and thus, of course, struggling to focus, but with all of that so thoroughly taken care of, things are very simple, things are very easy and natural, as I say.
K. Deep
Fucking love it man. Completely resonate with hating to switch between different kinds of work in a day
You have given me such great insights and perspectives Dan… imma be thinking about them for days and implement them.
Thanks for doing this. Appreciate you a lot for your time.
Dan Goldfield
much love brother 💙
About Dan Goldfield
Dan studied with a Theravada Buddhist for 5 years and meditated over 29366 hours.
In his earlier life, he spent over 20 years performing as a drummer. During that time, he got severe back pain. In his search for relief, he eventually found mindfulness.
After helping his mother rediscover purpose after her suicide attempt, he dove deeper into various wisdom studies and psychology.
Now he helps people realize effortless well-being and happiness.
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