EvolutionFM Transcript: Therapy Vs. Meditation (And Why Both May Be The Answer) - Dr. Tucker Peck

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform.

Dr. Tucker Peck blends clinical psychology with deep meditation practice in a way that challenges everything we think we know about healing. His journey began at nineteen through illness and introspection and eventually led to a bold vision of merging therapy with ancient spiritual wisdom.

In this episode he breaks down why meditation without therapy can be dangerous and how Westerners often misinterpret the path by chasing spiritual highs instead of true self-understanding. He dives into the traps of modern mindfulness culture the misunderstood power of Jhanas and the surprising gift of our darkest thoughts. He shares a radical new approach to right effort surrender and even prayer that could make deep transformation possible for anyone.

And just as the conversation expands into the future he reveals a groundbreaking tool that might one day make the deepest states of consciousness accessible in minutes and what that could mean for the entire arc of human awakening is just starting to reveal itself

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 1+ hour, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Scott Britton (00:00.93)

Hey Tucker, it's great to see you.

Tucker (00:02.665)

Scott, so nice to meet you.

Scott Britton (00:05.209)

Well, I'm excited to have this conversation, this intersection of therapy and kind of this traditional spiritual lineages and that journey and how those interplay has been a hot topic amongst a lot of people that listen to the show and some personal friends. And so I think your unique background, both being a psychologist as well as a meditation teacher is really well suited to shine some perspective on this interplay. Maybe as a backdrop to get started,

I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and how you got started in both of these things.

Tucker (00:40.759)

Yeah, I got started meditating. I had mono and so I couldn't really do anything for a while. And I was 19 and had some really powerful effects from meditation and decided basically what I was learning from meditation was at odds with being 19. I put it on hold. Started again when I was 22.

I started doing therapy when I was 23. I got hired to be a therapist in a pediatric mental hospital right out of undergrad, which is nuts in retrospect.

And we were taking as like kids in a pediatric mental hospital. So, you know, people locked up very early in life coming from really terrible circumstances. And we were sending them back to those circumstances doing cognitive behavioral therapy, like, well, how do you take responsibility for your own actions? And I kept thinking like, they can't, these are, you know, these are people on the bottom of the food chain. Can therapy have some of what meditation has? Like, can therapy have more of a component of acceptance

rather than control. That's how I got into the idea of can we mix these things. So I applied to 27 grad schools over two years in 2007 and eight to be a, you get a PhD in clinical psychology focusing on meditation and was rejected from all of them. That just wasn't a concept back then. I wrote a letter to the university. I was too, I was ahead of my time, but I wrote a letter to the university of Arizona saying you made a huge mistake and it worked. And so I got to get my PhD there.

Scott Britton (02:01.697)

You were early to the game, man.

Scott Britton (02:13.314)

Wow, okay, so you've been kind of practicing as a psychologist and also teaching and exploring meditation for, I mean, it sounds like almost multiple decades. How do we think about these two different things as it relates to improving our wellbeing?

Tucker (02:24.728)

Yeah.

Tucker (02:33.141)

Yeah, so there's like a cut point that I like to use. It's of course too simple of a map, but it works pretty nicely. Most… meditation practice is related to accepting your experience, to changing your relationship to your experience, and not to the content of the experience at all. Right? So if you have a traditional Dharma teacher and you go to your meeting with them and start talking about things that happened when you were a child or what sort of feelings you're having, they're basically going to tell you to shut up. Right? This is illusion, delusion. How are you

relating to all of this. And that's a pretty robust way to solve problems in that if we're dealing with the content, well, we have to solve this piece of childhood trauma and this issue in your marriage. And we can point to a lot of problems to solve, right? The Buddhist tack of like, actually, for the most part, ignore those problems, change your relationship to them. It's the relationship that's causing suffering. Then we don't have to fix this problem, that problem, this problem.

So it's a more robust sort of way of healing. What happens, at least to Westerners, or maybe better to say people from the globalized culture, when we do a lot of meditation is these issues get louder and louder. And that's not, by and large, what the ancient texts say is what's going to happen.

It's not at all what the modern tech say is going to happen. A lot of the modern texts basically say meditate for a couple of months, maybe a year, and you will feel the way that you want to feel.

Tucker (04:21.443)

Therapy is almost entirely dealing with the content of your mind. When you go to see a therapist, they want to hear exactly what's going wrong in your marriage and precisely what happened in your childhood. So you can say in some sense that the spiritual path is pretty generic, right? Like...

I should start by focusing on my breath until I get some sense of what I'm doing and then I should learn relaxation and right effort and so should you. And what's going on in your marriage and my marriage are gonna be totally different. And so therapy is more like a, sometimes I call it the path of being somebody. Like how do I be a better Tucker? And spirituality, Dharma is more the path of being nobody. How do I stop being Tucker? Let go of all this.

Scott Britton (05:12.906)

And so, you know, I've seen people take one, I've seen people go hard at one path without the other. And it seems like there's a lot of benefit to that. But there is this kind of unlock that can exist when you start to harmonize these. my cure, like, what are, let me, we could start with the becoming nobody. Like, what are, what are the potential pitfalls? And not to say that there isn't a path that, you know, doesn't,

that is great that doesn't require any therapy, but what are the potential pitfalls that you've seen when people just solely do that without integration of any type of therapeutic component?

Tucker (05:51.933)

numerous. So the worst one is like a very common pattern among the teachers, which is like being a truly great spiritual teacher and an atrociously bad person, right? Everybody listening to this, the task is, think of renowned spiritual teachers who have produced phenomenally successful students who themselves became great teachers.

who failed at a level of morality none of your friends have ever failed so badly at, right? Like, people who seem to be enlightened failing at levels that nobody else fails at. Everyone here can name a bunch of those people, right? So I think...

This has been going on forever, but I think a lot of why there's been so much of this recently is the spiritual practices are new here, right?

that by and large the boomer generation was the first one to bring these practices to the West. And they brought these practices with the idea that if you do them enough and experience emptiness and experience non-self, your psychology is purified. And I'm hoping that we're now really clear that that's not true. And so the scandal volume should go down as...

Dharma matures in the West. So that's one pitfall is basically using emptiness, equanimity, mindfulness as a way of just not knowing what's going on in yourself, you know, very much still having one and having lust and greed and anger and all of those things and being so mindful and equanimous that you just don't know you have these things. Another pitfall is

Tucker (07:40.129)

Basically, the normal path of meditation is when you're new at it, it's amazing, right? If you hear somebody preaching that meditation is going to save the world, the reason some people aren't happy is that they don't meditate. One of two things is going to be true about that person. Either they're selling you something or they've been practicing for like six months. There's this beginner's luck where it just seems like it will solve all of your problems. What happens if you do it more?

is it makes your problems really loud. And if you just try to keep ignoring them, your practice goes to mud, your mind goes to mud, and you feel really bad about yourself. You feel like you are broken, you suck at this, this doesn't work, you've been tricked. And the issues like...

You shouldn't be able to just ignore your problems until you can't see them anymore, right? That's the big pitfall. The thing where you've ignored your problems now, you can see them very clearly because your sense clarity is so high. That's actually awesome, as long as you're interpreting in the correct way. It's like, cool, I know exactly what's going on in my mind now, and I can start working on fixing it.

Scott Britton (08:50.526)

Yeah, I noticed this thing amongst some friends who, you know, start to dive into their inner world through meditative practices, and sometimes even certain therapeutic practice, certain types of therapy. And it's like, they actually think it's a bad thing that their stuff starts coming.

Tucker (09:13.09)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (09:13.214)

You know, they think it actually makes their life worse. And there is some shade of truth, right, to that where it's like, yeah, like you didn't know about this before and now you do. And now there's this thing that's hanging out in your mind that is starting to get really loud. And it just seems like, you know, this is an ex- this should be an expectation once you start to do this stuff.

Tucker (09:36.245)

Yeah, this is why I wrote a whole book on that topic is this is what happened to basically everybody, at least from the globalized culture. And I wasn't really seeing any books or easily accessible teachings that were saying, hey, this is like if you do one retreat, you might come out feeling amazing. If you do four, I know exactly what's going to happen to you. It's just what happened to everybody else. Your issues will become loud. That seems ubiquitous and also kind of

secret like a dirty laundry, destroying our narrative that meditation will make you feel the way you want to feel all the time.

Scott Britton (10:14.408)

Yeah, there's there's a there's a reticence I noticed amongst a lot of teachers, there's a residence a reticence to actually talk about, like, the quote unquote, dark nights or whatever super challenging stuff that they experienced that I certainly have experienced in my journey, which is about a 15 year journey, like, you know, it's gets really tough. But like that conveniently gets left out of a lot of teachers, primary narratives or books.

Tucker (10:43.049)

Yeah, or nowadays I actually think it's swung the opposite direction. It gets overemphasized. Like, negative side effects of meditation where like you get long-term sick, your body is messed up, your life is ruined, you lose your job. This like almost never happens. Somebody's really messed their life up. I've had like way over a thousand people come on retreat with me. Never has that happened. People who've like

had a few really bad months following a retreat, it's like less than a half of a percent of the people who come on my retreats. And I just think the social reward structure has kind of flipped where...

In 1982, when Jon Kabat-Zinn said meditation is good for your physical and mental health, this was like a wild claim. And so he's in the newspaper, know, crazy professor from Massachusetts saying wild things, upsetting his colleagues. And now if you say meditation is good, like nobody cares. It's so boring. You couldn't get that published. So you say like, dark night of the soul, meditation makes you crazy. And then, you know, you can get the New York Times.

I think that like really bad stuff that almost never happens is if you have competent teaching, it almost never happens. If you go to a 200 person retreat where you never meet the teacher and are told to just do the same technique over and over, then it's actually pretty easy to hurt yourself. But if you're well supervised, this almost never happens. But the

The thing where you get clear on what's wrong with you, where your psychology becomes vivid. Yeah, I do agree no one's talking about that, but it's not really a side effect. It's a benefit. It's a perk. I think there may be this incorrect marketing view that lying to people that meditation makes you feel awesome all the time is the way to get people through the door.

Tucker (12:35.475)

One of the reviews of my book online somewhere was like, I think this book is supposed to be a downer, but it's pretty inspiring. I think the idea that like, what this really does is help you see and fix your psychology. That's actually pretty inspiring. I think that that will bring people through the door. We don't have to pretend that your psychology evaporates.

Scott Britton (12:53.927)

Mmm.

You know, a quote I heard and I would love to hear the kind of psychology without meditation version of this and this quote I thought was interesting and maybe you could give your perspective on this. Someone, I forget who said, where psychology ends, spiritual practice begins. you know, I thought it was interesting and maybe it's not related but I'm just curious like,

What happens with the meditation? What happens with lots of psychology without meditation? What have you seen there?

Tucker (13:33.421)

Yeah, it depends. the thing that meditation most brings to therapy is sensory clarity or introspective skill, something like that.

So most of my therapy patients are long-term meditators, but I make sure to keep about 20% of my caseload just, you know, local randos because the meditators are so good at therapy that I don't like want my skills to get rusty.

So if you don't have introspective skill, like if you ask the average American, what are you feeling right now? You might as well ask them like complex trigonometry questions, right? Like they just don't know how to answer that. And so when they come to therapy, we can do problem resolution stuff, like, well, if you're not communicating properly with your spouse, like we can work on communications or divorce or whatever it is you need.

At some point, you can solve all the big problems and not be feeling right. think a lot of your listeners are going to empathize with that. And at that point, you have to work on why your mind isn't set up to be happy. And you basically can't do that without the ability to introspect, right? We to work on your feelings. We can't work on them if you don't know what they are. So I think...

Maybe that's where the quote would come from is like, if you have no introspective skill, you will hit a dead end in therapy and need to work on introspective skill. If you do have introspective skill, therapy and meditation can, I don't think either path really has an end.

Scott Britton (15:17.904)

What about about therapy models like internal family systems or parts work or some of these things that kind of have a site kind of are viewing things from a seat of self versus like the traditional talk therapy?

Tucker (15:36.405)

I don't think parts work is all that different from what we would call traditional. I guess it depends on what one thinks of as traditional, but a lot of it's just repackaged like, you know, Gestalt therapy from 50 years ago is, 60 years ago is almost the same. So this idea has been around for a while of trying to access, trying to access parts of yourself. I love the internal family systems model.

I use it as basically a last resort in that it's pulling somebody's psychology apart and there's a lot of work to do once you start pulling your psychology apart. The metaphor that I use in my book is it's like draining a pond with a bucket. So I always start with like, how's your job? How's your marriage? How's your spiritual life? How's your house? Basically are there behavioral changes we can make that will...

help somebody get where they want it, if not start pulling their psychology apart. The parts work feels like a lever to get into deeper psychological stuff that's just like easily available and easy to pull. With people who have some introspective skill, it's pretty hard to do with people who can't tell what's going on internally.

Scott Britton (16:58.278)

So I think we've established both of these are beneficial and then together there seems to be kind of, you mentioned meditators are amazing at therapy, right? And that therapy is something that can kind of go on forever. What is an ideal blend look like that you've seen a lot of clients be successful with kind of mixing these together?

Tucker (17:21.569)

Yeah, so the mantra that I repeat like fairly constantly in my book and in my life is to focus on mental processes when you can and mental content when you have to. The reason is that robustness of focusing on processes where what I mean by focusing on processes is the path of nobody. It doesn't matter what you're thinking about. It matters how you're relating to your thoughts. How do you conceive of thoughts in general, right? That

Working on the process does help all forms of suffering, right? So I think the ideal way to combine it is work on the process whenever you can and work on the content whenever you have to. Have to looks like a couple different things.

One is loss of behavioral control. Like, the most common one nowadays is you want to stop playing that fucking game on your phone and your mind is screaming, put the phone down, and you cannot put the phone down, you know? So some behavior that you really ought to be able to do that time and time and time again, you don't seem to have volitional control over. You might want to work on, well, why? What are the mental processes preventing that?

Another reason you might have to work on content is it's just the only thing coming up in your practice, in your meditation practice over and over and over is the same content. And it doesn't feel like it's healing or purifying. It feels like what a cow does, where you like chew something, swallow it, puke it, chew it, swallow it, puke it.

Or sometimes your practice just turns to mud, like trying not to look at this heavy content just makes you unable to do any sort of spiritual practice. So that's how I use it. Meditation is the thing I do, not literally every day, but almost every day. I like to rep that if you miss a day every now and then, I forgive you, you're okay.

Tucker (19:28.066)

Yeah, meditation is a thing I will do until I die. And therapy is a thing I do when I need it.

Scott Britton (19:35.652)

Hmm. Yeah, I relate to that. I think that's, that's a really helpful framework for a lot of people listening. You know, your book is has an interesting title. Say I'm blanking on it. Sanity and sainthood. There we go. So and you talk about how sainthood is something, you know, worthy of aspiration as aspiring to, which I think is a really awesome

Tucker (19:51.991)

You got it.

Scott Britton (20:05.835)

idea that you don't really hear often in modern culture. Can you talk? Let's start with what does sainthood mean to you?

Tucker (20:13.921)

Yeah, so sainthood is not like a, forgive the cliche, it's not a destination, it's journey. I don't know anybody who's truly a saint, right? But sainthood is being a really good person. And I know that there are people who don't want to be good, who want to be bad, who are just greedy, greedy, terrible people, but there's not a lot of them and they tend to congregate at the tops of things, right?

In my daily life, almost everybody I know would like to be a good son and a good spouse and a good parent and a good friend and a good citizen and we'd like to be good people. And then we're pretty routinely not. And I'm not punching anybody, but sometimes I'm like way shorter with my patience than I would like to be and things like that.

So I want to be a really good person. That idea of being like a saintly loving presence to the people around me. I want that. Wouldn't you want that? If you've ever been around these really highly realized people on a heart path.

and you just feel like seen and held when you're in their presence, who wouldn't want to be like that? But we can't because there too many obstacles in our own mind. And so I think of sainthood as the goal of the spiritual path because it is, it's a high goal, right? It's a reach.

It overcomes the modern idea that spirituality is neurohacking, that it's an entirely solipsistic practice for people who have pretty good lives to make their minds feel great. This is not the way anyone's ever conceived of this before. Spirituality is about overcoming the hindrances to living by your values. And this should be externally observable.

Tucker (22:16.413)

If feeling awesome or experiencing emptiness or experiencing non-self or doing Jhanas or whatever is the goal, these are externally invisible. All sorts of terrible people claim to be Jhana masters and they may be telling the truth. So I think sainthood is a higher goal. It's a visible goal and it's a communitarian goal rather than like an invisible thing where you claim to feel

awesome or feel some special state all the time. That's why I to think of sainthood as the goal.

Scott Britton (22:52.598)

you talk you talked about a heart path. And you know, that's an interesting distinction that I think is really important. Can you talk about what the heart path might look like and why that might make sainthood easier versus some of the kind of other types of trajectories that someone might take?

Tucker (23:12.845)

I don't actually know where the origin of the teaching is, but I've heard it a few different places. The idea that there are three types of paths, there's a wisdom path, which is associated with your head, a heart path, which is associated with your heart.

and an energy path, which is associated with the area around where your belt buckle would be. And that these three paths are only a little bit correlated. So most of the paths that have gotten trendy in our culture are wisdom paths, meaning you are seeing the world incorrectly. You're seeing separateness where there's not. You are...

greedy or aversive in ways that you shouldn't be. You're trying to get things out of objects that don't have those things and so on. Basically, you're not acting in a smart way, and you can see more clearly and then act in a more smart way. And this does help a little bit with seeing the blocks to love in your heart, but like, it only helps a little bit.

And so I've met actually plenty of people who seem really wise, who give great Dharma talks and don't seem all that loving or compassionate. And then I've seen the opposite to people who are just like exploding with love. I'm thinking of one person I know who of the people I know who are still alive. She is the farthest on the sainthood path and like

The moment money is in her hand, it's gone. the like wisdom component is just kind of not there. And then the energy path is the one that I know the least about, but it's a phenomenon where almost everybody, if they spend enough time sitting quietly, feels energy moving through their body. Chakras seem like hippie woo woo nonsense until you sit quietly for a little while and you're like, I don't know about chakras, but like.

Tucker (25:31.789)

There's energy moving through my body and it seems to get stuck in these places in the center line. And so the energetic path is about opening those, which dissolves the boundary between inter...

Scott Britton (25:45.323)

Yeah, you know, it's the path that I've been on is a hard path. And it's very interesting because for me, the just the deeper I go on the conscious journey, the more automatic it is to just be a good person. It's like it's like you can't, it's like you can't be an asshole anymore, because it just there's just no desire for that. And I didn't realize until I got

Tucker (25:49.719)

Cool.

Tucker (26:00.675)

Yeah, that's how it should be.

Scott Britton (26:14.806)

you know, a little bit further along and started to study some different things and look at different people that that's actually not always the case with some of these spiritual traditions and practices.

Tucker (26:24.843)

Yeah, that's not always the case.

Scott Britton (26:27.681)

One one thing I've one thing I've heard you talk about like one thing that I know is like really hot right now and I've had some of these guys who teach this on the podcasts are the Jhana and there seems to be this especially amongst kind of the tech and Silicon Valley culture this like almost like Jhana competition right it's like just did a retreat hit fourth Jhana like you know it's kind of like gamifying

Tucker (26:50.083)

you

Scott Britton (26:56.647)

spirituality in a way. And I've heard you talk about how Jhanas can be actually overrated for most and I thought that was an interesting thing to put zoom into a little bit.

Tucker (27:10.039)

Yeah, Jhanas are these trance states that have been known about since unknowably long ago. That, like in the oldest documents we have from South Asia, people have already known about the Jhanas for a really long time. And...

Despite this agreement of there's eight, maybe nine trans states, we've been doing these forever, there's approximately no agreement on what does or doesn't qualify as a Jhana. There's the camp, which of course is much more popular in our subculture, that Jhanas are really easy to do. There are things you can basically do on your lunch break, things you can do after work.

I was in a Jhana competition one time. my friend Steve Zurfus who was on your show was doing...

Scott Britton (27:59.104)

guys.

Yeah, yeah, that's who I was thinking of with what they're up to.

Tucker (28:06.763)

Yeah, he was doing the early Jhana EEG research. I was the first person who he did the Jhana EEG with. It was rather competitive. Like, how many Jhanas can I get into in the next 30 minutes on my lunch break from work? And then my, was just like, can I beat Daniel Ingram? That was the thing that was particularly, particularly helpful. So the Buddha is really into the Jhanas. They're the main thing he talks about in terms of meditation. The...

Scott Britton (28:23.348)

Nice.

Tucker (28:36.115)

potential of the Jhanas to be transformative is very real. I don't have a sense of like how do you need to get into these things? Is the thing you do at lunch how transformative is that? I certainly think that Jhanas are good but they're also as you say feeding this narrative of spiritual path is about me feeling awesome. It's not...

The Jhanas are supposed to suppress the hindrances, right? That's the way that the Buddha talks about them. The hindrances, they're usually listed five of them, but we could think of the hindrances as what are the obstacles between you and sanity or between you and sainthood? And the Jhanas are supposed to temporarily suppress some of these, which is supposed to make you a lot smarter, like see clearer while these things are suppressed. So I think like any other tech,

It's not good or bad, depends on how you use it.

you just can't feel awesome all the time. And I actually interviewed Steve from my podcast a couple weeks ago. what he was saying, I mean, he was really positive about it. He was saying like, yeah, you you can get into a Jhana, you can't stay in a Jhana. And watching the fact that you can't stay in a Jhana and you go back to your base state of consciousness, that's insight. That's like a lesson in impermanence. So I guess my short answer would be, I would think of the Jhanas as like a fairly introductory sort of practice to get

the mind like prepared for wisdom and insight in the higher, longer-term ways of suppressing hindrances.

Scott Britton (30:16.383)

So kind of getting back to, you know, this overlap of psychology and meditation, you mentioned that you were kind of early to the game, if you will, when you were trying to blend these and it was less of a popular idea. Where do you see the future of these two disciplines intersecting?

Tucker (30:41.699)

They've really blended, like, yeah, so was almost 20 years ago.

When I said I wanted to be a meditating psychologist, this just wasn't a thing. My first year of grad school, we were assigned to read this science paper that had been written in the late 80s. And it was a paper about pseudoscience. And there was one sentence introducing pseudoscience and one sentence introducing a category that was such bullshit, it didn't even merit the label of pseudoscience. And the two examples were people looking for Bigfoot and people practicing meditation.

You

Scott Britton (31:22.45)

Whoa.

Tucker (31:25.035)

And so you can see that paper got published in a peer-reviewed journal. That wasn't a crazy thing to say at the time. That was the cultural norm. In 2007, being a meditating psychologist was ridiculous. I went to Brown, and I had lab experience and research experience. I had a pretty good resume, and no one would talk to me. And that cultural norm has shifted where

It's kind of weird to find therapists who aren't into meditation nowadays. In terms of where it's going, meditation as a long-term spiritual path is really time-consuming. I once read the Dalai Lama saying, Dharma is a rich man's game. And I think that's right.

Scott Britton (32:10.622)

Mmm.

Tucker (32:13.603)

Who can do a 10-day retreat? Or who can do one or two 10-day retreats every year for the rest of their lives? People who can get time off from work, people who can afford the retreats, people who could afford childcare, people on salaries, not people on hourly payments. So the idea of long-term meditative paths transforming the world, I don't really believe in that.

it does seem maybe possible that it transforms the powerful and that transforms the world, like to, yeah, like approach the goal of sainthood as an introspective spiritual path is way more time consuming than most people are going to be able to do. The thing that I'm, the thing I'm most excited about in these two fields is actually the idea of neurotech.

So I think by the end of the year, I'm going to have a focused ultrasound machine in my office. And I got to go to this meeting with the Dalai Lama quite a long time ago. it was about the intersection of science and religion. And he had to leave the meeting a little bit early. And so before he left, somebody asked him, do you have any parting thoughts? And he said, yeah, for the last 5,000 years, religion has tried to save the planet.

Scott Britton (33:12.753)

Hmm.

Tucker (33:41.155)

We have failed. I hope scientists are more successful. And then mic drop walks out of the building. I'm hoping that this is the future that you've had my best friend Jason, one of the on your show, I think last year, and he's one of those groups that's working on the neuro tech and what the focus ultrasound seems to be able to do is very temporarily produce a mind state that otherwise takes days.

of meditation. And I don't think anybody is talking about like an enlightenment button. I think that's a ridiculously simplistic view of how brains work and how consciousness works. But it's actually not that tall of an order to produce a short-term experience that itself produces huge amounts of like insight and wisdom. So people with severe anxiety

where their head is just constantly talking to them about what's going to go wrong, there's NeuroTech that can make your head stop talking for a couple minutes. And it comes right back online. But imagine what it would do to you if you thought that voice was true, if you thought that voice was your soul, and then suddenly notice you exist just fine. In fact, you exist great without that voice. The inner peace for a minute is possible. I actually think, yeah, if this is going to have massive effects,

it's gonna have to be faster. I was actually, the first study of the focus ultrasound on retreat was at a retreat that I taught last year. The results were pretty mixed. Some people, one or two people actually got like too high. It works too well. And then some people had no effect and there are a bunch of people in the middle where like things moved a lot faster.

Scott Britton (35:32.923)

Yeah, I mean, this is such a interesting point. mean, I think I'm also in all these circles where they're like, well, the way we're going to save the planet is a shift in consciousness. And I agree with that, right. But the way we've been going about it just takes a long ass time. And, you know, and also agree, there's other things that have to we have to do to save the planet that are more practical. But yeah, I mean, maybe neurotech, maybe

Maybe AI does create a world where we don't have to work so much just to get by and there's even more spaciousness for these practices amongst for many people that don't have that today. I'm not really sure the answer, but it does seem like some type of accelerant and some type of cultural shift and even giving people the capacity to explore these things will be a requirement.

Tucker (36:26.669)

Yeah, it seems like there's these two forces in humanity where like our ability to get along and take care of each other, even with the recent backsliding in that, it's just been like exponentially expanding, right?

If you told our great grandparents that you had some moral responsibility to someone of a different race or tribe from you, they'd be confused, right? Like that wasn't a concept 120 years ago.

Yeah, our ability to take care of our bodies and get along and take care of each other and be peaceful, it's really astoundingly better. And on the flip side, our ability to kill each other and destroy the planet is increasing exponentially. it seems like a race in which the forces of evil are currently ahead.

And so yeah, I certainly meet traditionalists who are like, only way to do this is the traditional way. You must go out in the woods. You're cheating. Neurotech is almost like eating cupcakes for dinner every night and taking those empathic metformin. It's cheating. It's bad for you. It can't work. It violates the laws of nature. I think we are violating the laws of nature badly enough that if we don't stop quickly,

the game is over and I don't see a lot of evidence that we're planning to stop quickly. So yeah, I think things are more urgent because things are more globalized and there's this story, it's been repeated a lot, it's become pretty famous where the Dalai Lama was at the Society for Neuroscience and you probably know this, he was asked, what would you do if there was a surgery that gave you all the benefits of meditation? And said, I'd be the first person to sign up for that surgery.

Scott Britton (38:24.175)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it's interesting that many traditionalists are so quick to classify certain things as being being nature or not nature, right, just because they're not biological. You know, nature has there's evolution in nature, there's evolution in what nature can do, which includes us. And I think it's foolish to turn away from that.

Tucker (38:50.509)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (38:52.174)

What other things are you excited or thinking about right now in your own practice or in this field at large?

Tucker (39:01.208)

the thing I'm thinking most about...

In terms of meditation is how to get better at right effort early on.

so the path that most of my students take is like two or three years of banging their head against the wall, trying harder and harder. And it's not just me. Every teacher is telling them, you know, this is about relaxation. It's about letting go. It's not about controlling your mind and getting what you want, getting more breaths than the other guy got in a row. And for years, every student.

you know, tends to think all the teachers are winking at them and it's like confusing double think, right? That you're supposed to let go and get something. No, it's actually not confusing double think. You're like literally actually supposed to let go, stop controlling, accept the present moment. Like that's the thing you're really supposed to do. And no amount of adverbs seems to communicate that. this is the thing I'm most interested in is

I was talking to Dustin DiPerna, the Mahamudra teacher, and he was saying that they have preparatory practices that they do. And I was talking to somebody in the mindfulness and daily living organization yesterday, and they were saying, we start with learning diaphragmatic deep breathing. That you don't start by trying to focus on your breath. That's really like working the wrong muscle, right? That's working the, an hour of meditation, I can do it in 30 minutes, muscle.

Scott Britton (40:20.493)

Mm-hmm.

Tucker (40:46.787)

So that's the thing I'm most interested in is how do you get people to actually relax at the beginning when, you know, they're like, how do I relax harder? Do you have any 300 page books I could read on like the 19 steps to relaxation that the type of mindset seems really hard to get around because in the outside world it's so successful, right? Like if you want to start some endeavor, start a company,

start a nonprofit, start a club, whatever it is you want to do. You should probably read the long book with the 19 steps and follow the steps. And when there's an obstacle, try harder, overcome that obstacle. Being in control, being the literal or figurative CEO is a really good idea in our culture in the outside world. And getting people to understand that they're supposed to stop doing that.

that in inside world, it's a liability, not an asset. That's the thing I'm most interested in is how do you do that without making that even worse or triggering this paradoxical arousal, where the concept of relaxation just makes you portentous.

Scott Britton (41:59.277)

Have you found anything that you feel like is promising for this inquiry?

Tucker (42:09.333)

I haven't played around too much with the idea of, I've been doing this a little bit. Basically, every meditation teacher says the intro instructions are this, focus on your breathing without controlling your breathing when your mind wander has just come back. And I don't know where that instruction came from of like, don't control your breathing. What the hell is so bad about controlling your breathing? So one thing I've been playing around with is controlled breathing. So there's so many practices of controlled breathing.

that lead to relaxation. The six second breath where you take six seconds to breathe in, six seconds out, six seconds in. There's the, I think they call it box breathing, where it's like some number in, then you break for a certain number, then you go out for a certain number. There's a really nice one. It's like my favorite 10 cent trick. Breathe in counting to four, then breathe out counting to eight.

do that three times in a row, it takes 30 seconds and maybe less and it like really relaxes you. So this is one thing I've been playing with. The other thing I've been playing with, comes from the Tibetan Nundro practices, which are, I feel bad describing the Tibetan Nundro practices because I'm describing them from the secular lens where praying to different gods and goddesses is just a way of getting out of your own way, right?

turning over control of the universe to some other being is a great psychological move. And where I feel bad is like, I don't think the Tibetans are doing this because it's an awesome psychological move. Like they literally believe in these ETs and I don't, right? But so I've been working on an essay basically making the secular case for prayer that if you could somehow prove that we live in a cold, dead, godless universe.

and that nothing is listening to your prayers, I still think you should find some deity to pray to every morning. So that's the other one I've been working with is if you can adopt the viewpoint that something other than you is in control of the universe. And a theistic bent is a lot easier. It's like kind of nice to surrender to some deity that loves you and loves the planet.

Tucker (44:34.877)

And while it's really, really hard to look at the state of the planet, or I mean, the history of the planet much more so, and decide that there's an all-powerful being who loves us and is taking really good care of us, while it's really hard to come to that conclusion intellectually, for a lot of people, it's actually pretty easy to feel like there's something that loves you and is taking care of you and is bigger than you. That's something you can pray or surrender to.

And even if what you're praying and surrendering to is the physics of neurochemistry, like what your mind is going to do is related to electrical and chemical cascades of signals and not like how hard you're trying in your moral quality. Like surrender to the serotonin. Even that's a good practice. In my clinic, I've been using this phrase, the worst possible theology.

And the worst possible theology in our culture is pretty common. It's that what controls the universe, what determines how your life goes and kind of how the world goes is you, your moral quality, how hard you're trying and how hard you're working. And it's the worst possible theology because first of all, anything you make up, the flying spaghetti monster, is more likely to be true. And anything you make up.

is more psychologically beneficial than the idea that basically you are controlling the universe. And I taught a retreat one time and this guy came over and was like, I just have to thank you for showing me that I'm not doing global warming. yeah, I think the idea of like, be the change you want to see if there's a problem in the world, fix it. This really unusual viewpoint that's become a meme in our culture that basically

Scott Britton (46:17.675)

Whoa.

Tucker (46:30.035)

controls the world is you. I think that's pretty deep for a lot of people. So the first one would be some kind of deep breathing or breath towards relaxation. The second one would be some kind of prayer or surrender practice, even if you have to do this towards the laws of physics. It's going to lead you to a better theology than what for many of us is the default.

Scott Britton (46:51.382)

Surrender to the laws of physics. That's a new one. But I can see. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, well, I think I think those are some really, really helpful tips. And, you know, although I'm not coming at it as a as a technique, those elements have been very helpful for my own experience.

Tucker (46:56.371)

Neurons gone ner.

Tucker (47:13.187)

So.

Scott Britton (47:14.858)

Well, this has been awesome, Tucker. I know you're up to a lot of cool things, you know, between the book, the foundation, your work as a psychologist. Tell people more if they're interested in exploring your work, where are the best places to go?

Tucker (47:28.359)

yeah, sure. Well, you can go to my website, which is meditatewithtucker.com. The book that I wrote, Sanity and Sainthood, there probably will be a link somewhere in here you can click on if you want to get that book. There's a paperback and there's Kindle. I am a psychologist. I soured on telemedicine. I got really sick of looking at two-dimensional boxes. And so you have to come to my office in Alameda, California for it.

Scott Britton (47:38.592)

That's right.

Tucker (47:58.053)

psychotherapy. For Dharma, I teach stuff all over the world. I teach or teach all over the US and Europe and every couple years I go to Australia. And I have a club that I run in San Francisco on Monday evenings. Every other Tuesday I teach an online advanced meditation class.

which you can go to my website, email me if you want to sign up for. And you had mentioned the Foundation. I'm the treasurer of the Open Dharma Foundation. It's a scholarship fund for people who want to go on retreats and couldn't otherwise afford to go. So you can go to opendharmafoundation.org. And if you have some extra money and want to help people go on retreats, you can donate it. And if you need some money to go on retreat, they will fund everything you need. We've actually sent homeless people on retreats. We will fund everything you need to get from where you are to your retreat and back.

Scott Britton (48:48.138)

Well, that's a beautiful initiative and we'll make sure to link all of those things out in the show notes so it's easy for people to check out. And I just want to say thanks again, Tucker. It was real pleasure.

Tucker (48:57.633)

Yeah, thanks, I'll find Scott.