Steve sits down with Oren Jay Sofer and chats about how meditation is needed in tumultuous times, how to develop inner strength, and how the play of small children is an important skill we all should retain. Oren teaches Buddhist meditation, mindfulness, and communication internationally. Born and raised in New Jersey, he is the author of several books, most recently Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love.
I want to ask about your faith journey, being raised in Judaism, and then moving into Buddhist practice. Are those two different journeys, or is that a continuum or a blending?
Yeah, maybe a little bit of both. It has been an interesting journey. I think about these different practices and traditions almost like languages. For a variety of reasons, many of them historical, the Judaism that I was raised with didn't speak to my heart.
So much was lost in the Holocaust. So much of the mysticism was lost. My family was reformed Jewish, so there wasn't a sense of being embedded in a culture and a tradition. That would have been the case 100 years ago.
My experience is that many Jewish people are deeply spiritual, but there's a longing for intimacy with the sacred and for meaning in life. Those needs were still there. For all of those circumstantial and historical reasons, however, they were not fulfilled or satisfied by what was available at the time.
I found that language and had those needs met through Buddhist practice. There was definitely a period of adjustment in translation. In the chapter on devotion, I talk about the challenges of relating to the Buddhist path being raised Jewish with this very, very firm value for not practicing idolatry, not bowing down before idols before me. Here I am in this Buddhist monastery with a big statue and incense and candles, and this Jewish part of me going, this is not okay.
It took many years for me to understand the inner meaning of devotion. Particularly in Buddhism, the statues are nothing. They're empty. It's not bowing to a statue, it's what the statue represents. It calls forth the qualities of awareness and compassion and wisdom within our own hearts that we are devoted to. That was a journey for me. I still feel very connected to the Jewish tradition, but more in a cultural and ancestral way than in a religious way.
Your book, Your Heart was Made for This, starts off with a quotation from the Buddha: “irrigators channel water, fletchers shape arrows, carpenters fashion wood, the wise train themselves.”
That quote really summarizes the principle that the book is founded on; that our inner lives, our heart, our mind, and our consciousness are not fixed. We have the power to shape the way we experience the world and the way we relate to what's unfolding in our lives.
I think there are two key things that differ in Asian thought philosophy and Western traditions. One is that the heart and the mind are not separate. Ever since the Enlightenment, we've had this sense of radical separation between rational thought and the emotional life, intuition, and realm of the heart.
That split doesn't exist philosophically or religiously in Asian thought and traditions. There's one word for the heart and the mind. It's the sense that our consciousness, our awareness, and the way we experience life is here in the center of the chest, what we often refer to as the emotional heart. This offers a sort of more holistic and integrated view on our lives as human beings.
The other central thing is that Western thought has caught up with what mystics around the world, not just in Asia, have known for millennia. With modern neuroscience, we understand that our hearts and minds aren't fixed. What we do with our attention and how we train ourselves makes a difference in the way we experience the world.
And the fact that you use the word instrument there. Any of us who have learned an instrument also implies a level of practice and development.
Yes, it’s a craft. It's a craft of the heart.
What do we most often have to unlearn?
So much. I think it differs for each of us because we grew up in different circumstances. We are conditioned in different ways based on our gender, religion, class, etc. We all internalize certain messages about who we are, what's possible for us, and what the world is.
Most of us internalize some kind of very harsh inner critic. We have not developed the skill, as one of my first teachers used to say, of learning to be our own best friend. The Buddha once said, “There is no one in the whole world, neither an enemy nor a hater that can do you more harm than your own untrained heart and mind.” We need to unlearn the habits of undercutting and undervaluing ourselves.
The other key thing that I think many of us stand to unlearn is the underlying views or assumptions we make about human nature in the world that we live in. I think that a lot of the suffering that we see on a global level, whether we're looking at the devastation of the earth, hunger, or war, comes from a certain vicious cycle we're caught in.
When we have a view that human nature is selfish and greedy, and that there's such a thing as people who are inherently evil and people who are inherently good, that we start to construct institutions that reinforce that view. We feel like we need to protect ourselves and we begin to fear one another.
If we cultivate a different way of understanding the world and ourselves, we see that human beings are naturally compassionate and generous—if we create the conditions for that to emerge . . . Then, we start to experience the world in a very different way and open up the possibility of creating different systems and different institutions.
I'm thinking of the great commandments to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. If we don't even understand being our own best friend or loving ourselves, we may not have the capability to fully love others.
Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly. I grew up Jewish; I’m comfortable with the language of God. I think there are different ways to talk about the sacred and different ways we experience it. Our relationship with God, the divine, the sacred, our relationship with one another, and our relationship with ourselves each influences each other.
We can have a very powerful experience of transcendence, of feeling loved, feeling accepted and held by something vast that informs our relationship to ourselves and to our neighbors. We can have beautiful experiences with other human beings where we feel touched or moved by the love of another. That somehow changes our experience of ourselves and opens up new pathways for connecting with the sacred.
In reading Your Heart was Made for This, I noticed how well you weave in personal experiences. At one point, I think you said you were 19, you say that you felt like you had kept yourself separated from your emotions by sheer busyness and accomplishment. Can you talk to me about that moment?
Yeah, it was something inside me. I think it gets talked about in different ways in different traditions. In Buddhism, we might talk about it as aspiration, which is this sense of what's possible for us in life. In Christian theological terms, we talk about it as the still small voice—this call inside of us to be something greater or different.
I was standing in the bathroom in my college dorm room. For whatever reason, I just felt inside deep down in my belly, this kind of flutter as I was breathing. It felt like a tremor before an earthquake. There was this sense of just touching the surface of something that I had been avoiding and suppressing for so long.
It was a deep well of pain, anger, and fear based on some very difficult experiences I had in my family growing up. Touching into that, I was reminded of the sense of wholeness, and wonder, and freedom that I was quite blessed to experience as a young child until things got very difficult in my family of origin.
And it was that sense of, I want to get back there; there must be a way. And that was, in a very real sense, one of the things that made me start searching for a different way of processing the difficult things that I had been avoiding and running from for so long.
In Good Faith is an interfaith podcast, and we love hearing about people's spiritual journeys with what they call God or the divine. Do you find that these Buddhist practices that you teach translate for people of different faith traditions?
One of the things that drew me to Buddhist practice was that one doesn't need to believe anything or sign up for anything. It's a very empirical approach to spiritual cultivation. The whole ethos is just check it out. See what's true for you. It's designed to take us more deeply into the experience of being alive and being human. It's designed to give us the skills to be more aware and to enhance the power of our attention.
We mentioned mindfulness, concentration, those kinds of things. Then, there's this whole section that you might even say things like “playfulness.” You referred to this as knowing as a young man that you had lost something you had in childhood. Talk to me about the whole return of play.
This is one that's been really fun for me to cultivate and reclaim. There's so much that can guide and inform our living and our spiritual cultivation that we can overlook. Play is a great example of that.
We need play to keep our hearts light, and nimble, and flexible, and buoyant. It's something that all mammals do. Jacob Collier says something like the creative adult is the child who survived. It’s that sense of staying connected to our capacity for playfulness.
And talk about the research benefits. There's so much that we derive both physically and psychologically from play. It invites us into a more spontaneous and creative relationship with life. To let go of the fixed notions we have of time, deadlines, agendas, and schedules—even to let go of our self-consciousness and to be in more of an exploratory dance.
As anyone who has any kind of a craft or a practice—whether it's an instrument, engineering, mathematics, a spiritual practice, or an athletic practice—knows that we do scales, we do drills. We come back to the basics, but the whole point of that is to play. The whole point of that is to be able to be creative and spontaneous. So how do we reconnect with that potential? And how do we bring that quality into the rest of our lives? How do we play when we're folding the laundry or doing the dishes?
On the In Good Faith podcast, host Steven Kapp Perry aims to build bridges of understanding between religions. In talking with believers of different faiths, he highlights personal experience and commonalities across tradition.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to the full episode at https://bit.ly/3yFF0cr.
Art by Nicholas Roerich