"As long as you're still harming yourself, how much kindness can you put out there? How much compassion can you put out there?" — James Rosser

What happens when the life you built no longer feels like your life?

For James Rosser, the question arrived through an unimaginable moment.

In his late twenties, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, James was mistakenly diagnosed with a terminal illness and told he likely had eight months to live. Then, after repeated testing, he learned the diagnosis was wrong.

But something had already shifted.

What began as a confrontation with mortality became something more surprising: a confrontation with exhaustion. Exhaustion from carrying a life that looked successful from the outside but no longer felt true on the inside. Exhaustion from perfection. Performance. Hiding. Becoming someone instead of being someone.

In this deeply personal conversation, Cari and James explore the unexpected ways suffering can become a doorway—not because pain is inherently noble, but because turning toward suffering instead of reacting against it can reveal who we are and what matters most.

Together they unpack the difference between mindfulness and meditation, the hidden aggression inside self-improvement, the origins of the inner critic, and why compassion is not softness—it is courage.

James shares how Buddhist practice, self-compassion, and years of learning to stay with difficult experience transformed his relationship with himself and ultimately changed the direction of his life—from finance to therapy, teaching, healing, and service.

This episode is an invitation to pause long enough to ask:

What if your pain isn’t asking you to become someone else?

What if it’s asking you to become more fully yourself?

The Treasures in the Trash:

1. Suffering can become a doorway — Sometimes the moments we would never choose reveal the values and truths that quietly shape the rest of our lives.
2. Reactivity and response are not the same thing — The space between what we feel and how we respond may be where freedom begins.
3. Self-improvement can hide self-rejection — The drive to become better can sometimes be fueled by the painful belief that we are not enough as we are.
4. Compassion changes everything — When we stop treating suffering as failure and begin meeting it with care, healing becomes possible.
5. The inner critic often began as protection — What feels harsh today may once have been trying to keep us safe.
6. Looking for the good is a practice — Our minds naturally scan for danger, but kindness and awareness help us remember what else is here.
7. Your heart already knows something — Sometimes the most important question isn’t “What should I do?” but “What does my heart need to hear?”

Learn more about the Sacred Pause Retreat at https://www.bravedirections.com/a-sacred-pause

About the Guest:

James Rosser has been meditating since 1987, beginning his journey with Spirit Rock co-founder James Baraz. Today, he serves as a Dharma teacher and Board Member at InsightLA, and co-leads retreats at the Big Bear Retreat Center. His extensive training includes graduations from InsightLA’s Facilitator and Dedicated to the Dharma programs, Spirit Rock's Dedicated Practitioner Program, and the inaugural class of the Kornfield-Brach Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP).

James integrates deep spiritual practice with clinical expertise. He is a Mentor at Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion Institute, a Trained Teacher for the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, and an intensively trained Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) clinician. Currently, he works as an LCSW at UCLA’s Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, designing and growing intensive outpatient programs. He holds a Master’s in Social Welfare from UCLA and a Bachelor’s in Finance from the University of Tennessee.

https://www.instagram.com/bluesuitbuddha/

About Cari:

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto is an executive and leadership coach and the founder of Brave Directions, where she works with senior leaders and C-suite executives to strengthen interpersonal and team relationships, navigate conflict skillfully, and deepen self-awareness, influence, and confidence.

Before becoming a coach, Cari spent three decades in marketing and product leadership roles across Fortune 100 companies, media networks, consulting firms, and venture-backed startups. In 2019, she was named one of Forbes’ Top 50 Chief Marketing Officers.

Cari brings together decades of operating experience with more than 45 years of Buddhist meditation study and practice, integrating deep inner work with practical leadership development.

She facilitates the renowned Interpersonal Dynamics (“Touchy Feely”) course at Stanford Graduate School of Business where she also coaches grad school students, leads meditation classes and leadership workshops, and hosts the podcast Finding Treasures in the Trash.

Her mantra: Fierce Heart — where compassion meets bold, badass leadership.

https://www.bravedirections.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carisf/

https://www.instagram.com/cari_bravedirections/

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Well, and this is something that is my life grew, and I grew to be not afraid of something. It was a spiritual practice, which took a long time, but when I did, and I sort of connect with what I know to be so fundamental to my Buddhism and my practice, which is that under understanding the nature of suffering, and when I look back at that experience and the suffering in that experience, what I see is there was something in me, the support of people, the idea that there must be something I can do with this, that brought me out of the idea of reactivity and reacting to it and doing all the things that would go with that, all the things to hide emotions and not feel them, and not have an experience, and not integrate it. It took me out of reactivity into being able to respond to my suffering, and that's the key to the door. This is why the practice asks us to look at suffering, because the difference between reactivity and responding makes all the difference in your life.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: What if real lasting transformation happens when we're willing to face our shadows, the messy, uncomfortable parts of ourselves we'd rather not look at? And what if the things we avoid out of fear or shame are actually the treasures that wake us up. I'm Cari Jacobs-Crovetto, executive coach and meditation teacher. And this is Finding Treasures in the Trash Through Raw, unfiltered conversations. I invite you to turn toward what you've disowned and begin integrating it back into the whole beautiful human you were meant to be. Your treasure doesn't always live in the light. Sometimes it's buried in the trash. So grab your gloves, let's go dumpster diving.

Hello, friends, and welcome to Finding Treasures in the Trash. I'm Cari Jacobs-Crovetto. Oh my gosh, are we gonna have a fun, deep, enlightening conversation today. My guest is James Rosser. James is a longtime friend of mine, but I need to tell you about him, because this guy has done a lot in his life, and he's been a friend to me, and also an inspiration to me. He's been meditating for a long time, since 1987 he started his journey at Spirit Rock with James Braz, and today he serves as a drama teacher and board member for Insight LA. So, if you're in LA, you may know James. He co-leads retreats all over the place, including one that we're doing together, coming up in September here of this year, he has extensive training, including graduations from Insight LA's facilitator and dedicated to the Dharma programs, Spirit Rocks Dedicated Practitioner Program, and we were together in the inaugural class of Jack Kornfield and Tara Brock's mindfulness meditation teacher certification program, that's where we met. He also is a mentor at Kristin Neff Self Compassion Institute. If, if you don't know Kristin Neff's work, we might talk about it a little, but it's amazing. He's a trained teacher for the Center for Mindful Self Compassion, and if that weren't enough, he's also intensively trained in dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT. He currently works as a licensed therapist at UCLA's Resnick Neuro Psychiatric Hospital. He designs and grows their intensive outpatient programs. He holds a master's in social welfare from UCLA, and the icing on the cake. This guy used to be in finance, so that's going to be a big underlying kickoff point here for this. So, James, welcome. I'm so excited to have you.

It's great to be here, always to be with you. Yes.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Well, so let's start with the end of that wonderful bio, which is you were in finance, you were a finance guy.

Yep, I was. Yes, yes, for 10 years, in fact. Yeah,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: and so what changed?

Well, you know, I was. I went into finance because I was trying to find a career choice that I thought made sense, and I went into it, and ended up in corporate lending, and then in merchant banking, and actually enjoyed it, and I think I was pretty good at it, and I worked with a lot of healthcare companies, and that was pretty fulfilling, and though my life kept developing, and as part of that, what happened was that I started having to look at what was really going on in the world in my life, and a lot of that had to do with living through the height of the AIDS epidemic and. It, as I, I tell people, I'd stopped 30, I stopped counting after I lost 30 people, and then actually I actually was in a situation where I was misdiagnosed myself

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: with HIV,

with Kaposi sarcoma, which at that time, being the age I was, which was 2728 at the time, if you had chaos at the time and you were 27 that meant you had AIDS, and so you know, I remember going to the doctor's office, and he wouldn't make an appointment with me until 6pm and they go into his office, and there's one, there's a receptionist in him. We go into his private office and sit down, and he says, You have AIDS, and you probably have eight months. And yeah, I remember. Yeah, I remember driving out of the building and looking up on a billboard, and what I saw on the billboard was my funeral, and this

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: is incredible. I mean, incredibly, incredibly defining moment, like where you're, you're given a death sentence, right?

Yes, absolutely. And what happened was that some good friends of mine rallied around me, and they had some knowledge of a research program, actually, that was trying out different medications, and they got me set up. It was the program was actually at UCLA, and they got me signed up, and I went in and was tested by the set up for the research protocols, and they kept retesting my blood work and stuff, and I was getting irritated because I wanted to be on some medication trial, and and they called me in, I think, for the fifth time, and when I went in, we're back in the doctor's office again, the private office again, except he has the chief of pathology from UCLA with him, and he has the pathologist tell me that they pulled the slides that were used to make the diagnosis and tells me the slides were misread and that I didn't have chaos, it was a dermatofibroma or something like that, that a thickening of the skin, and that I did not have chaos, and in fact they both told me they said we've done your blood work 100 times now, you're not even HIV positive, and I shut down. I said thank you and walked out.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: What do you mean by shut down?

I had no emotional reaction, which put an asterisk by that explains a lot in my life, but I shut down and I went out, and then over time, you know, I was in therapy already at that point, and, and I was, I started to have reaction to it, but I also started to try to figure out what had happened to me, and as I did, one I realized was that I had this experience of being in a doctor's office and being told that you're dying, and that's not an experience that a lot of people have, and maybe there's some reason, maybe there's something I can do with this because I know that I know that feeling, I know what it's like to be told get your affairs in order, and so I started looking for ways that I could use that experience to be there for other people, and I found an organization that specialized in what they called was the compassionate presence talk about fate. Taking,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: were you already so at this point, just to kind of parallel path this conversation. First of all, I'm just sitting with, like, just to go back, like,

yeah,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: many of us imagine or have had moments in our life, right, where we're not sure if our blood work is going to cut back, okay? Or something's been wrong with us, and we imagine, or we're just watching a dramatic television show where this happens, and you think, wow, you know what? If this were me someday, and I'm sitting across from a doctor, and they say, you've got x, y, and z, and you have x amount of time to live, right? So I'm just, you know, and imagine, like, for me that's a terrifying moment, and also like a call to action moment, like, okay, if I've only got this much time left, how am I gonna actually show up to my life? And for me, I'll just say, James, this was like a really big pathway into Buddhist life for me, like imagining death for a whole different reasons than yours, but it was a big way. So, were you already on the Buddhist path and meditating at that time, or were you sort of like finance guy working in finance 30, having a great time?

I had just met James Baris maybe six months before this. I had gone to Esalen. My therapist, wonderful man named Alan Goodman, who's long since passed, he died of AIDS. What a wonderful man he was. He had had suggested, because I was so uptight, he kept giving me things to do, and one of them was to go to Esalen, and so I did go to Esalen, and the workshop I chose was James Barras, yeah, that, that was the connection I made about six months before this happened, so it was already on the radar, although, but I didn't know what it meant. Oh, all I knew was that I was able to sit in for the first time in my life, you know, I'm tall, I'm six foot three tall people always have cold hands and cold feet. I know I was sitting there at Esalen doing meditation, learning it for the very first time, formal meditation for the very first time, and I realized that my hands got warm, and at one point they were like freshly baked bread, and I was like, and I was like, what does this mean, and you know what, the thing was, it really did mean something, because it meant that I wasn't, my entire nervous system had shifted, and the anxiety and fear that were always present in me growing up queer had calmed down.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: I just kind of want to round this out and kind of go back, shift back, because we kind of started like I feel like we started in one of those movies where, like, there's the opening scene, boom, Doctor's Office, right, eight months to live, and then we wind back a little, so because I'm hearing that this sounds like this year of 30-ish sounds like an extremely pivotal year, and for those of you who are listening who don't know what Esalen is, because I know we have listeners from all over the world. Esalen is a, is a beautiful healing space here in Central California, where you have to sign up for a workshop, and you go, and there's these natural hot springs, and it's clothing optional, and so you can be like, you know, you can either wear clothes or not. It's very, it's very California, but it's also one of the foremost healing centers, really, in the world at this point. So here you are, and this is kind of this pivotal moment. Take me back, take me back to like getting to this pivot moment,

so after I found out that after I was told that I was sick, I did not have those moments where I go, you know, I gotta get my life together, I gotta get that didn't happen, it happened, may a little bit later, but I shut down, and you know, I was, I ignored my emotions a lot when I grew up, because if you know, I needed to be safe, I grew up in the South, I grew up in a fundamentalist family, I knew it was queer since I was eight, I was shut down, and I continued to shut down, and you know, my friends would try, and they would be like, nope, and you know, and so I went through a lot of different phases in there of trying different ways to deal with it. A lot of them were like things like, well, you know what, it doesn't really matter how much money I spend, because I'm not paying the bills anyway, you know, and so I would do outrageous things, you know, and made choices about it, like not telling my parents,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: because at that time, did your parents know? No,

and I made the choice, and this is one that I think about often. I made the choice that I'd rather die first than tell them.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Wow, heartbreaking to hear from me.

Well, then it is a full circle on that one. But basically, what happened was, I found I was okay. Was it was like I actually, honestly, there was something in me that when I was told I was going to die with, thank God,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: thank God you're going to die.

Yeah, I can't do this anymore. And looking back, I know that, and it did not know that then, and

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: it was the this, like the shutting down, and the hiding, and that, like, what was all the this that you couldn't do anymore,

carrying a facade, being somebody, being working in, you know, working to do what I thought I should do, to be the person I thought I should be to look the way I thought I should, you know. There's a book called The Best Little Boy in the World, and it talks about how a lot of times, especially for queer men, what you're doing is you're constructing a life to make you perfect, to make up for what you perceive to be something that everybody else will see in rejection in you, and I was caught in that. I was totally caught in that. So, I was tired, I was tired,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: tired, and young. I mean, young at that point, and for all the.. I mean, I know the world's changed, but it hasn't completely changed. So, you know, I just have this moment of wanting to say, if you're. If you're relating to what James is saying, and you feel that this, like, pressure of just facading and hiding and being tired, and like it's real, it's absolutely real, real,

it's real, and it's a protective thing, and it's, it's important to understand that choices, like, they're made by people for their protection, and it's a perception, and often, though, with real consequences if people found out, and so, yeah, so when I found out that it was okay, I was kind of stunned, you know, and then went into shock with it.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Were you stunned in, in like, I have to keep going, or was it a different, was there a different stun? Was it like it was like, what am I

going to do now that I'm going to keep going? This was not, you know, I kind of got settled in this idea that I was leaving. You know, it's like sometimes people who've come to near death experience who say things like, oh, so this is how it ends. It was like somebody told me the answer, this is how it ends, and then all of a sudden it was like, no, doesn't, yeah. So, so I spent a lot of time finding and exploring why I was reacting the way I was, but the marker that kept moving in it was this idea that I have this information that people have, don't have, and what can I do with it, and that's when things really changed, was like I've got to do something with this, and and that's when I found this organization that did the compassionate presence, and they specialized in working with people who are terminally ill, and at that point their mission had predominantly become people with AIDS, because it was swamping the system, because there was no, no way to even manage the disease, really, at that point.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: And for those of you who are really young, who don't remember the 80s, because James and I are in our 60s now. Yes, I think, right, I think, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I mean, this was like a terrifying, sad, hard time, especially in, you know, it was all over, but especially in major cities all over the world, right, where people were just dying, and it was mostly gay people, or mostly people of color, and so these were marginalized communities, where at the time, initially, like, you know, quote unquote, the, you know, those of us who were not in those marginalized communities didn't feel like it would affect us, but, and so there wasn't getting attention, right? It was, it just wasn't getting attention, and so, you know, I was in my 20s and 30s, I hung out in New York and LA, and my community was queer men, you know. Of course, you know me now, and you know, so I was.. it was the same thing, you know, where like you just.. there was a helplessness around what was happening, in a fear, but the fear, like unlike Covid, which had to be like really dealt with in two years of time, this was not dealt with, and so people were just dying.

We were dealing with an administration federally that wouldn't even mention the word AIDS for a long time in there, and so not much was done, and in a lot of people died because of that, so then when I found this organization, and I went in to get trained to work with people one on one, the idea was they need some, these people need somebody to go in who's not a family member, not a friend, but who's there simply to be a presence for them, so they can say anything they want, feel anything they want to feel, because you're there to listen, you're there to cuss anybody out, they

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: could cuss anybody out. I heard, I heard some great stuff.

Yeah, and it was like, or how people felt about the family that was around them, or the people who were trying to take care of them, and they were, you were the one who heard it all, and it's a beautiful model, and yeah, and I went through quite a few clients, and the longest I had a client was three months before they died, and then I started leading groups for people who were terminally ill, and then I started teaching people to run groups, and then I started troubleshooting groups that were in trouble, and this whole time, you know, my banking career is doing actually very well, and it's like I was doing, you know, finishing deals that we had tombstones in the Wall Street Journal, and you know, and all this, it was going good, and at the same time, though, what I was really thrilled by was this was what I was doing, so a group of friends of mine took me out to dinner, and they, we got us all seated, and we're all there, in one of the most up, and says James is. Is an intervention.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Wow,

and there were six of them, and they said you need to go back to graduate school because you need to change what you do, because we know what your heart knows.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Wow, I mean, this is like one of those angel moments.

Yes, totally,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: where like six of your friends happened to also be six angels in your life who said we can see your heart. I mean, that's so touching, James.

It was amazing. It was amazing. So

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: friends with those people,

most of them are gone, but yes, some of them, yeah. And yeah, and so that group really helped me through a bit. I did a 45 mile backpacking trip through the Ventana wilderness to think about this with the Zen Mike leading the experience. The name of Steve Harper is a wonderful man, used to lead groups out of Esalen, and we hiked into Tassajara at the end, so all these things in my life are starting to point me in a direction. It's like, okay, it's like face calling, are you listening? So I made up my mind to do it, and then I went back, and I applied for graduate schools, and I fought to get in, actually to get in, and did, and

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: I have to ask you, because I feel like so many of us, I mean, I certainly went through this around this age, you know, my 30s, where I was like, I had a choice, could I do, you know, did I keep working in ad agencies, or did I, like, there was my heart calling even back then, and the reason I bring it up, and I think back to Henry, most he did a podcast with Finding Treasures in the Trash, and he talks about this moment, right? It's like sort of Carl Jung 101 like this moment when you suddenly re-meet yourself.

Yes,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: you could have just continued to work in banking and volunteered on the side, and some people would call that like a really integrated life, where like you're making good money, and you're also doing this work on the side. What was it, though, that said I have to say goodbye to all of that?

It had to do with what made room for priorities, and when I look back, what I realized was happening was that I was discovering how to reinvent myself in order to be in the service of healing and to be able to show up for people, because that was something that made a difference in the world, and yeah, banking made a difference in the world too, for people in lots of other ways, this was different, this felt different, and there's a point in time, and you know, one of the gifts of having this experience of being diagnosed was that you look to see what's really important for you, and you start to learn what your values really are, and as you unwind from that, and the volunteer work was a big part of that. When you unwind from that, and you really get a clue, a clue, a clue, and in a clear view of your values, things change, things change.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Well, and you're pointing to something so important. You know, I had this moment last week where, so I do this regularly, James, and you probably know this because you've known me for a little while. We're like, I create something and then I launch it all, and then I doubt it. This is just.. it's like the artist's way, right? It seems, and so I have this moment where I was like, oh, is finding treasures in the trash, is that really the right name for this podcast? And what am I really trying to say? And is it shadow work I'm talking about, like what is it, but what I realized in hearing your story, because it reflects my story, is what brought me, for example, to the path of Buddhism, or the path to meditation, and this podcast isn't necessarily about that, but because I'm about a lot of that, it has a pretty big Venn diagram, is like these extreme moments of suffering.

Yes,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: where we're broken down, or we have a moment where we're just.. we become really present to our lives.

Yes. Well, and this is something that is.. is my life grew, and I grew to be not afraid of something. It was a spiritual practice, which took a long time, but when they did, and I started to connect with what I know to be so fundamental to my Buddhism and my practice, which is that under understanding the nature of suffering, and when I look back at that experience and the suffering in that experience, what I see is there was something in me, the support of people, the idea that there must be something I can do with this, that brought me out of the idea of reactivity and reacting to it, and doing all the things that would go with that, all the things to hide emotions and not feel them, and not having. Experience and not integrate it. It took me out of reactivity into being able to respond to my suffering, and that's the key to the door. This is why the practice asks us to look at suffering, because the difference between reactivity and responding makes all the difference in your life, and so that's what I know, looking back, that's what I learned. I know it now in this beautiful way, in this beautiful practice, and I see it. So, yeah, they guided my choices.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: So I'm going to ask you a question around, and maybe I've never asked anyone this question before, although I have so many friends that are, you know, like me, practicing Buddhist, but are also psychotherapists, including our teachers, our teachers, right? And so were there ways that, because here you are, your six friends tell you, go follow your heart, go back to school, become a therapist. At the same moment, Grace has, like, bestowed these little miracles on you, right? You hike into a big, beautiful Buddhist retreat center, for example, or you end up at Esalen, right. It's like, what does Ram Dass say? Knock, knock, knock, knock. It's always, it's always knocking, if you're, if only you were listening. And so you go back to school. So, here's my question: Did you find that study of psychotherapy and the study of Buddhism intercepted for you, or were they very different? Because I have a story that psychotherapy is all about self and seeing the self and healing the self, whereas Buddhism is all about self in relationship to no self or self in relationship to awakened.

Well, that you know, it's a particular point of view, and I think I was fortunate, and I actually, my first therapist was Gestalt therapist, which, of course, is what Esalen was all about, because Fritz Perls lived there as a resident teacher, instructor, mentor for a long time, and Fritz, can you explain

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: to people, like, if there's somebody listening who's like, what, what's Gestalt, can you explain the nut of that

gestalt is about understanding the experience in the moment in the present, and it's very much about discovering what is true in your experience and gaining insight from it. There's a wonderful technique called the open chair, which I ended up doing at Esalen, actually in a workshop about how to, how to approach Gristol, where you're working with someone and they're just they're reflecting back to you what your experience is as you start to discover the insights that are true for you in your life and in that moment, and the thing about it was because I did that, it's psychodynamic therapy. I've done cognitive behavioral therapy, and the thing within all of that was that at the same time that for a long time the concept of the self I just assumed was real in there and permanent at the same time, what I was experiencing was it's not, and the gift of that, because it's that of the ability to know that what you're considering and calling the self is not static, is not one and done, but continues to change and evolve is a gift. Oh my goodness, it's a gift.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: It's funny you're mentioning this. So, for the listeners, I just started the dedicated practitioner program at Spirit Rock that James completed, and James, I haven't told you this story yet, but they asked, they went around the room, 60 people, and asked for us to name one of our sort of I don't remember the exact words, but it was name one of your most foundational or impactful moments when you came to Buddhist practice. What was, you know, what was one moment early on, and you know what struck me about the answers that people gave was most of them were moments where extreme suffering had happened, right, loss of someone really important, or.. and mine.. mine was.. I remember driving in the car, it was like 1976 I was in fourth grade. My fabulous mom, who, if you have followed me, or are reading anything, any of my stuff, you know, I had a very complex mom. She was, I think, undiagnosed bipolar. We couldn't diagnose her because she got put on drugs and became a drug addict, unfortunately, at a very a. I was like seven, but she was also amazing and glamorous, and so smart, and so funny, and so charismatic. So here we are, driving in her white Cadillac with houndstooth interior. Okay, 1970 something. We're driving down the street, and she looks at me, and I had just gotten an ant farm, and so I was really into, like, watching the ants do all their work right in this farm, and this.. I don't know if they still have these.. it was like 1970s so it was this big square plastic farm, and they would farm away, and she.. here we are in her car, and she looks at me, and she says, you know, we're all kind of like that ant farm that you have. We're just a bunch of ants crawling around, and there's millions and millions of us. And God, I was raised Catholic, she says, and God looks down on us, and He doesn't really know the difference. We're just a bunch of ants, and so I share this in this moment, and I hear the gasp, and they're

like, "Oh my god, it was so sad, like your mom told her she's nothing but an aunt, and I said I had a moment at like that age where I was like there was freedom,

yes, yes, I was

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: like, "You mean I'm just I'm just another aunt, and I'm gonna like live and die just like the ants in my ant farm. I felt release from the self at that young age, and I always say that was like kind of my first lesson my mom gave me in Buddhist practice. So I'm just reflecting back your way this idea of that moment when we come into contact with the possibilities that the self is not static?

Yes, and this idea too, that it's not static, but in what you're talking about, the delusion of separateness, and I see I understand that you felt relief in that, and there used to be a bumper sticker when I don't know, 20s, 30s, maybe I was in my 40s, the people had, especially in California, of course, that it said I feel much better since I've given up all hope. It's so California, right? And, but the thing was, I would read that, and then we go, yes, and my friends would be horrified, they'd read it, and they go, that's awful. I didn't react that way. I looked at and I said, yes, I get it. And that's the same sort of thing. It's like there's experiences that come in, you see them at a different level, you see it, it's this symbolic level that has more of an access to a way of a system of the way the world works, and actually it's what the Buddha talked about, so, so, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: So, I want to hear a little more about the work you're doing around compassion. Yes, compassion work, because it sounds like that was also where it kind of started, right? Like,

absolutely, it was. Yes, it was a through line through being a therapist all this time, but also it was the thing that helped me find a ground in my practice, since I grew up fundamentalist and a faith that essentially rejected me because I was queer and I didn't want to have anything to do with anything that sounded like religion, so when I found mindfulness, the issue I had with it was that it wasn't secular enough for me, and so I always tried to stay very much in the secular train or track of mindfulness. And

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: can I ask a question, like, why was that for you? You just didn't want anything to do with anything that felt too structured or rigid or shut in,

because my religion was had felt dangerous to me. Religion felt dangerous because it was a place where you know, contrary to what many people experienced with religion, for me it was a place of danger, of rejection, of possible real fear of harm, and so I didn't want to have anything to do with that, but what happened was over time was that I struggled a lot with my mindfulness practice for many years, and I didn't really sit with other people, I didn't sit in sanghas, then I started, and one of the most important things that ever happened was that for the first time at that point I found out about the heart practices, I hadn't known them, and I was meditating all this time without seeing this other part of things called the heart practices of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, and and I heard about them, it was like, well, okay, well, that's that thing over there, so that's kind of some facet of this, but over time, what I came to realize is that it's not a facet, it is the practice, and that's what changed everything with my practice was feeling that and knowing that, because it brought compassion in. And compassion was actually a driving force for me in my life, so when I knew that compassion could come into my practice, it was like I'm home, I'm home.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Well, and I just want to give a little explanation, I'm going to give the very light explanation to listeners about the difference between meditation and mindfulness, because a lot of people don't know, and we think we confuse the two quite a bit, and we also like that, you know, also, ps everyone, the Buddha actually was the identifier of mindfulness, this wasn't something that was created only like 20 or 30 years ago, all hats off to Kabat-Zinn, who was, who really was the first one to put it into modern language, but what the difference is that I always say one is a glide path to the other, which meditation is a glide path to mindfulness. So, and I would love your help here, but here's how I define it. So, meditation is the practice of sitting and quieting the mind and coming into a non-contracted mental state of being that allows any number of experiences to arise. That's my short version of it right, some of those experiences can be stress relief, some of those experiences could be tapping into awakened awareness, some can be tapping into the heart space, like there's any number of, there's a variety of experiences that happen, but the the general definition is that you're sitting in a, in a practice of is ceasing to follow their thought. Do you want to add anything? That's meditation. Sure,

sure. What you said is an important thing, that the last thing, not following thoughts, because no kind of meditation that is possible to really work with has you try to get rid of your thoughts,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: right? Mine has a job, the mind is like the mind's been has an assignment in the mind, does that very well, which is to think, right?

Yes, and it does it beautifully. It's there's actually, and there's this thing, the default mode that I love to talk about. But anyway, first, though, this idea in the thing that made a difference in, and for me, insight, meditation, mindfulness, the thing, the switch is that it gave me a frame to look at what I was finding when I was sitting, because I was finding things, and the first one has directly to do with that idea that thoughts are there, and I'm not trying to get rid of them, but the thing is, they come and they go, which was huge news to me,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: which is a direct implication to what you shared earlier, about the self, the self comes and goes, right? Yeah, thoughts come and go, and the thoughts create the self, and the self comes and goes.

So, the thing is that we talk about insight meditation, and a lot of times we don't sit, people don't sit back and go, but what insights? And the truth is, the insights are really these three things that we commonly call the marks of existence, and to Ruth King, who I, who is one of the most wonderful teachers that I've ever had the opportunity to experience, calls them the three Ps: nothing is perfect, nothing is permanent, and nothing is personal, and that's the ideas of impermanence and perfection, that there's always life is not going to be perfect, and also that what we think is personal isn't really personal, and that ties into self and non-self, and so when you are in, you're working with insight meditation, mindfulness, you see these things, and part of the part of the beauty of the practice is that over time as you practice you're building a platform and that platform gives you the ability to be stable in your practice and to see and what you start to see in that is you start to see these things for what they really are and when you see these things for what they really are, it starts to shift how you experience life,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: and, and,

yes,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: mindfulness in everyday life is that ability to see that live in real time, right. Absolutely, like, just for listeners who've never done any of this before, right? Because I think mindfulness is used sort of interchangeably with meditation. So, meditation is the practice, mindfulness is sort of the practice in action. So, for example, a mindful moment might be if I have just gotten into, say, a little bit of a tangle with my husband that may or may not have happened this morning, may or may not have happened around his love of t-shirts and things in our closet. I can, and he can, if he's being mindful, I can slow that process down inside my body.

Yeah,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: and understand my reactions, so that I can make a choiceful decision on how I want to respond. It gives air and it gives room, so the practice creates sort of a.. I won't get into it here, but it works with all kinds of things, from your awakened awareness to your nervous system, to give space, and then in that space we're able to make different choices. So I just want to outline that, because I want to come back to this compassion piece,

right? But there's one thing to add to that, which is that most people see the practice as sitting on a cushion with your legs crossed, and the question that many people have is, How does that actually work in your life? That seems self-indulgent, it seems like you're sitting there, and it's like you're supposed to learn about things that practice is internal and external. Practice is sitting down and experiencing these things, but you just gave a great example. How practice is external, and it's also internal and external at the same time, so there's layers of it, and it's a very active thing in your life. Yes. So, I just wanted to put that in there, yeah,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: yeah. And the way you described it too, I think with compassion making it real for you. Yes, because I think there's, you know, people come to my sangha and it's like, oh, I want to, I want this for me.

Yes,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: right. And that is a night that is a good reason to start, because if your body isn't, you know, if your body, mind, nervous system isn't quieted, it's very hard to seek transformation, like if it's just for you, it's sort of a selfish endeavor. Transformation, which sounds like a really big word, is just really that moment with my husband where I can make a different choice, and that extends itself out to everything, right? Our political sphere, being able to act in any way, so what if

let's roll back the tape, because it'll help. So when I would sit and I would work with mindfulness without compassion, all of my patterns, if you will, my habit thinking patterns would kick in, and the way I love the way when you said that people will come and sit with you, and I go, I want to sit, I want to, I want to do this, because that brings up something that I really got to know well, which is the subtle aggression of self-improvement.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Ooh, the subtle aggression of self-improvement, as in I'm aggressing myself, because I always need improvement,

because I'm not good enough,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: because I'm not good enough,

because the way I am isn't good enough, who I am isn't good enough, I'm not good enough, and so then it turns into my practice has to be perfect, because if my practice is perfect, then I am perfect, or I am better, and so I think in my experience is far from unique. In that many, many years I struggled with that, because I could never make my practice perfect.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: I fell in a lump in my throat. I think that's a big - that was a big reason for me early on. I don't know if I feel that way anymore, but I think that's probably was true for me. Like, I must be perfect, so I have to practice harder, and I have to improve,

right. And this is where compassion comes in, because practicing without compassion, because really, in those moments, what is needed is compassion for you and your experience, sitting, carrying with you this idea inside that you have to be different than you are, that you have to be perfect, completely unachievable, and all these things that are these very independence-oriented, individualistically oriented things that you're driven into us, and and when compassion comes in and you see in yourself what you're asking yourself to do and what that drive is, then you can bring in compassion into that moment and go, wow, this right here is suffering, what I'm demanding of myself, what I'm asking of myself is suffering, and I need to just have compassion for that right now, for this experience, because I'm hurting, I'm suffering, and I need to realize that's going on, and then bring in these wonderful elements of mindful self-compassion, which are that also it's common humanity, because so many people experience that, you know, as I used to tell people, you can think that what you're experiencing right now is just you, but if we really went around LA and found all the other people who experience it, we'd fill up Dodger Stadium four times. Yeah, you're not alone. And then also learning how not to talk to yourself like your internal critic talks to you all the time, because that always came in at my practice too, and my internal critic is brutal.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Yeah, mine too. And by the way, listeners, this is what you get, like when you sit down and you start meditating, and that space opens up, you, you start to identify, oh, there's that inner critic again, whereas for me, before I started meditating, it just all. Felt like, quote unquote, me. It just felt like my mind, right. But when you start to sit, these things start to shake apart, and you can hear the voice that's the inner critic, and you can hear the voice, you know, these different voices start to almost take on characters, and you realize, oh my gosh, if I'm having a voice that I can actually see and witness and objectively look at, then guess what, it's not me,

right?

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: So,

well, funny you should say that, because part of my journey in understanding this internal critic and its role in my mindfulness and also my compassion practice is that one time I was sitting, and I was in one of those places where that platform of mindfulness was really there for me, and they could see it all happening, and I could see the internal critic put this dialog out there, and I realized that my internal critic sounded just like Judge Judy Sheindlin, and I started laughing, and that was a really big moment, actually. And when I teach mindful self-compassion, I always tell about that, because, because then, because I call my internal critic, Judge Judy, and the thing that was important about that was number one, I started to see it differently, I started to see it not as, as a part of me and not me, it was present, but it wasn't me, and that it has its own sort of life, and seeing it as Judge Judy gave me an opportunity to go, "Oh God, not again, but also, too, there's compassion goes further, because compassion also says, "Can I understand this part of me, can I understand that this part of me exists for a reason, and for me part of that journey was that my internal critic was built to protect me from harm when I was little, so my internal critic was on alert for everything that could give me away, that could show somebody else who I truly was, that would show that I'm not perfect, because those things would always make me vulnerable to being found out, and found out meant losing my family, my, you know, my community, my existence, basically. So, what I needed to do was to be able to understand that this internal critic was trying to save me, but this internal critic got installed when I was a little kid, and doesn't know how to talk to me like an adult, although it sounds like Judy Shineland, but it's not talking to me like an adult, it's telling me things that a kid would, because it's always extreme danger in the

background, it's trying to help me, and it doesn't know how. It's like so many people's parents, it's like my parents, they probably really did want to try to help me, and they didn't know how. It wasn't in their toolbox. And so, what self-compassion in practice does is it asks you to find inside of you this compassionate inner voice, instead, which comes to you and says, I really care about you, and they know what's going on right now. Things could be better. I want you to live well. I want you to feel good. I want you to be okay. How can we do that? Now that's a totally different experience than you're always scaring up. You don't do this right, everybody's going to find out you're it's like totally different experience, and that's motivating yourself with compassion. Now, what I'm referring to, it's Buddhist practice, absolutely, but it also was organized into this way of practice, and seeing it by Kristin Neff, by Dr. Kristin Neff, who was the original researcher behind Mindful Self Compassion, and who started this, and who I have the great pleasure of working with at this, and in the Self Compassion Institute. I know I have

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: a fantasy that the three of us will be on this podcast together. I really.. oh my god, I would love

that. I would

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: love to know her.

She is amazing. She's a powerhouse. She's an incredible researcher, and she is so dedicated to this material, and she came to this material out of her own practice, because she has a very strong practice, and so the practice then becomes about how can you show up for yourself with compassion. How can you show up for yourself with the compassion that you would give freely to anybody else? You look at somebody, you look at people around you, and you see their suffering, and your heart just automatically opens to them. You know, I call it the quivering of the heart. It's that moment when you look, and your heart literally quivers when you see suffering. And why can't you show up for yourself the same way when you see your suffering? Yeah,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: so I have a story that in the world we particularly, in the last six and a half years,

yeah,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: it's been really hard for most people.

Absolutely,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: and I, I have a story that underneath that we have in many ways had to harden our hearts like never before, and that things like compassion, and things like a quivering heart, and things like our heart cracking open when we see certain things, it's almost like the rush of all the social media and all the stuff that comes out of us is like numbed us into not feeling anything good or bad. How does compassion work help us to refine, refine that the animation and the fabric of what humans were meant to be and do and feel.

The first way it helps is it calls you to know your experience, which so many people can't really do readily now, and in order to really see your experience, it means you have to actually take a pause from being on your social media, and you have to realize how social media is constructed, you because you're falling into a pattern that they people who design social media actually designed to keep you involved, and in that, that helps to build up this place where you don't feel where you're shut down. So, the first thing is to really do that, to really be able to understand and see your experience,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: yeah. Except don't pause our stuff, you're right. Of course, keep listening to my stuff on social media, there's always a sweet irony in all of that, but we're just gonna hold that as true.

Well, that's a little bit different than a rabbit hole that comes up on things like, yes, I'm not gonna name platforms, but that comes up in when rabbit holes happen, when you're on platforms, and 45 minutes later you're like, what happened? Yeah, so the first thing is being able to see that. The second thing, the reason for doing that, that's mindfulness. That's mindfulness. When you can see your experience, you're bringing mindfulness into the moment, because you're saying, ah, this is what's happening right now, this is the experience right now. I'm numb, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, I'm hopeless.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: My heart's closed,

my heart's closed. That hurts, that actually hurts. And you see that, that's mindfulness, but then you also want, you want to take in this other piece that comes in when you feel this way, which is when you feel this way, you think you're the only person who's experiencing this, you really believe it, because you're shutting down, and that is an illusion, that's an illusion, because the truth is that many people feel this way, so you're breaking through this illusion of separateness, and this illusion that you are in this isolation, this isolation that we live in, in these times, and seeing other people experience it, and then you're bringing real compassion in, because you're starting to talk to yourself in a way that shows compassion, so you're talking to yourself the way you would to a beloved child or a dear friend that you care dearly about, where you're like, God, this hurts, I see you hurting, I do, and I get it, I understand it, it's learning to be able to show up for yourself and say the words your heart needs to hear,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: and it sounds like it starts with you, right? I mean, I know a little about this too. I'm playing, I'm playing a little dumb here, I guess, but, but I also, as I'm listening to you, and I'm allowing myself to be in student mode, because I love that mode, like I know that even as a dedicated Buddhist meditator, even as an executive coach, even as somebody who's doing great work, I hope in the world at Stanford and other places, like I know that my I have had to struggle to keep my heart open sometimes because so much is coming at me, I can't. It will break me.

Yes,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: if I let it in, that's really what I feel sometimes. It will break me,

right?

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: What do you say to that? What do you say to me?

I, what I say is, I know who you are, and I know that who you are is a kind person, and kindness needs nurturing, especially now, and you know there's there's a wonderful poem by Naomi Shiab Nye called Kindness, and one of the lines in the poem is the need to be able to experience. Suffering until you see the size of the cloth and how big suffering is in the world, and then only then can you understand that kindness is the only thing there is, the only thing that matters. So, the first is to come into that kindness and understand that for us to live in kindness means we have to do something else. This is crucial, and this is something that people sometimes don't see, which is at some point in our journey, each one of us has to take a vow about non-harming, about living in life and showing up in a way that we choose to decrease all harm that we might be attributing, causing in the world to bring in non-harming

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: into ourselves first, right

into yourself first, because if you don't bring in it yourself first, it doesn't turn back out, and that's where the kindness and compassion, the reason you start with yourself is because well, as Jack Kornfield, someone we both know and love, says if you're not in your circle of compassion, it's not complete. You have to show up for yourself first, so you're able to show up for other people.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: I have a vulnerable question. I can't believe I'm in a key ready, everybody. This is like I'm going for right now. I noticed I just got back from an eight day silent retreat. I had a deep noticing, deeper than it's ever landed before, that my inner critic, and just I'm not even going to use that language from it, I'm just going to say there is a part of me I really like being pissed. I kind of like being just slightly angry, like I don't know if it comes from like maybe for a long time that was where my humor came from, like my funniness came from, like I think that there's a part of me that feels a physical relief and release when I'm just a little like, and I'm mindful enough to like shut that down, but man, James, I got to tell you, I noticed, why do I, why do I like that, why does it feel like, like I'm hitting an eject button on some part of myself, and I get to, like, just go, ah, whatever it is, like someone cutting me off in traffic, or, you know, shitty person at the grocery store, whatever it is, like, what is that? I mean, I know that's human, and I do forgive myself, but I, I've just been curious, like, what is that? I can't be alone, as you said, right? There's a lot of people who probably are listening to this, or, like, I get that, Cari, like, it just kind of feels good to, like, let it out sometimes.

Well, and also, too, you're validating your experience, because you don't feel seen or heard, and that's what so many people in society are experiencing now, when these voices that are the loudest voices in society right now are telling people to be angry and are telling people to be upset and to stand up. People are feeling heard, and unfortunately, we don't get past that point, because people feel heard, and they're like, yeah, I'm right, and the anger is right, and then I get past that, and what this practice actually asks of us is to get past that, because the three things that cause harm in the world, the classic three things that cause harm in the world are greed, hatred, and delusion, and what you're talking about, in a sense, is a subtle kind of hatred, it's a subtle kind of aversion to it, to other people, to situations, and that's all coming from this idea of hatred, and the antidote for that is kindness, and the more you build and practice kindness, the more you cultivate kindness, the more that calms down.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: I love this conversation, because you know what, I'm a pretty excite, you know, I've been meditating for 45 years. I feel like, you know, practicing Buddhism for 45 years, meditating for 30 something, and I, I would say, like, on the scale of, like, am I a quote unquote good meditator, I would give myself an A, like I'm pretty good at this stuff, but you know what, I think it can be the inverse to where people can be behaving very kindly, and they can be like leading with kindness, but there's a passive aggressive, even in the smallest ways, in that their kindness isn't living deeply inside, too, right? So I think I'm just noticing that AI have some room to practice with a version, and what, where that is kind of stuck with me a little, but also I think there's a, there's a good lesson for our listeners too, which is like it can go both ways, right? You can be kind. This, and be in delusion, and you can be feeling angry, or quote unquote hate, and also be practicing, and be doing all the good things that you need to be doing, but also still feeling anger, or feeling hate,

of course, of course, you can, and and part of the problem that comes up for so many people is that we were told we could not be angry, we were taught it was an unacceptable emotion, and there are people who were taught that it was the only emotion, but yeah, there's different, there's differences, but when you are struggling to work with anger when you're not used to allowing it, then it has many different ways it comes out, and one of the most beautiful things that comes out of the practice is this saying that anger is like the poison you drink to hurt someone else,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: I've heard that,

yeah, and it's true, because the person who suffers is you, and this process of moving toward non-harming starts with what you do to you, and it comes in with that, that sense that you're talking about a reversion or anger, and because that's what that's a process in here, and non-harming means you too, because as long as you're still harming yourself, how much kindness can you put out there? How much compassion can you put out there, and so that has to be addressed, it has to be heard and validated and understood, so that you see the experience, you see the size of the suffering, and you start to address it, and you start to cultivate these different ways that you can be, because you really can change it. You really can't change it. Rick Hansen talks about the negativity bias that we all carry with us, where our brains just naturally spend two thirds of their time looking for problems, looking for things that are going to go wrong, looking for danger, and a third of the time looking for things that are good. And part of what happens when you're cultivating kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity is you are actually changing the needle, you're actually giving your mind more time looking for the good than looking for the bad, and it begins to change your experience of yourself and other people. That is what cultivating these things does for you,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: looking for the good.

Yeah, you start

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: just sticking with me, because I just feel like everyone needs to hear that right now.

Yeah, like

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: just look for the good, you know? Even even in each other.

Sure,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: I feel like we could talk all day. We probably really, we probably just keep going. And listeners have left, they're like, "Bye, you guys are just on your own journey now. Well, if you've liked what you've heard, by the way. James and I are teaching a retreat. It's in California. We are calling it a sacred pause, and we talked a lot about why it's so important for us to take those pauses, especially now, even if it is to look for the good, and we're teaching that here in Northern California, at a place called Land of Medicine Buddha, one of the most special places I have ever meditated in. It's a Tibetan center with these ancient redwoods that are like 200 years old that stand in witness, bear witness to our practice. And we're also going to be talking about how meditation and Buddhist meditation unlocks room for things like creativity, and I think inside of creativity lives looking for good. I believe that. So you can find information on that on my website at Brave directions.com and we'd love to have you join us, and I think through one more week, I think there's a discount if you go to the website, you'll see that there, but it's actually very fairly priced, so maybe you'll join us, but James, we have one last thing

to do. Okay, all right,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: you've probably no doubt heard about the very famous trash can card tarot.

Just love it. Yes. Okay,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: so here we go. You remember, you know the rules. I'm going to spin the proverbial wheel, which doesn't really exist. It's my finger pointing to a question. I'm going to close my eyes, and you're going to get a surprise question. We don't know what it's going to

be. Bring it.

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: Okay, so here I go. Ooh, what question do you wish more people would ask themselves when they're hurting? The

question I wish people would ask themselves is when they're hurting, honestly. And I actually touched on this a second ago, but it's a question that I really, I teach a lot of my students, which is. What are the words that your heart needs to hear right now? What are the words your heart needs to hear that would make your heart respond by saying thank you, I needed that, because when you're suffering, the heart's calling for something, the heart's calling for something, and to know, and to get to know what it is that your heart needs to hear, is what touches you, and it touches on you, your values, the core of who you are, you know. Yeah, so what does my heart need to hear in this moment? What would make my heart say thank you, thank you,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: thank you, James.

You,

Cari Jacobs-Crovetto: so good to be with you,

and you.