Walk the Talk Show with Waylon Lewis presents:

Waylon speaks with Andy Karr, author of Into the Mirror, his new book on Buddhism and our everyday life.

Read a book excerpt of Into the Mirror, right here on Elephant Journal.

“There’s a dominant narrative in society…that it’s all about stuff.

Either stuff to accumulate, knowledge as stuff—whatever you think is the cause of happiness. And what happens is that not all of these things are bad, but that the ignorance of what’s happening in your mind when you crave these things is binding you, and deceiving you.

You have this thought or this projection or this vision of the thing itself—and we spend all our time chasing after these reflections, or running away from reflections if they’re fearful. And if we’re caught up in this the reflections are never going to be satisfactory, on the simplest level.” ~ Andy Karr

A clip of our conversation: 

“This approach is not dismissive of our everyday experience.

It’s trying to help us get a further glimpse of what’s actually going on.

So, someone says something, we get pissed off. It’s emotional. It’s powerful. It’s our mind. Our mind is reacting and that’s a very powerful thing.

We don’t take the position that, ‘Oh, it’s all in your head. It’s all in your mind, forget about it.’

It’s quite the opposite.

The mind is the most powerful thing.

You’ve got to recognize it. This is really painful and you experience it, but you don’t need to make a nest out of it. You don’t need to carry it with you for the next day-and-a-half, figuring out how you’re going to get back at that person.

You recognize that person was a jerk.

You don’t have to dismiss that, but you don’t have to dwell in it.

And, and the way to not dwell in it is not to just tell yourself, ‘Oh, I don’t need to dwell on it. Oh, this is just my imagination.’

You have to really see it. You have to see how your mind is, is fabricating that again and again and again.” ~ Andy Karr

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Or listen to the podcast: 

“I think what happens over time as you do this practice and you tread on this path is that, first of all, you give yourself more slack because you don’t have ridiculous expectations of yourself. And second, you give up a lot of the idealism about what it means to be a [meditation] practitioner, and what it means to be a realized person.” ~ Andy Karr

Want the rest of this convo? Find it here.

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Follow Andy here on Elephant or on Instagram for more inspiring posts about this topic, and check out his book here.

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