ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
I grew up very proud of my dad, very proud of, like, who he was as a person, and then we went through this transition where I started understanding more about the military and really questioning everything about his life and what he’d been willing to do or not do.

RAVEENA AURORA
Activist and author adrienne maree brown.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
It all came to a huge head where, my dad was working in the Pentagon, and they were in a winding up for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we ended up in a car together, screaming at each other, both of us, that the other was a terrorist. And I ended up getting out of the car, and we went for a long time without talking.

RAVEENA AURORA
Welcome to Season 2 of Awaken, a podcast from The Rubin Museum of Art that uses art to explore the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” I’m singer and songwriter Raveena Aurora and I’ve been learning about the transformative power of art throughout my life.

Since time immemorial, art has been used as a portal to better understand ourselves and the world around us. At the Rubin, a museum dedicated to art from the Himalayas, we believe art can inspire us on a path to awakening. And in this series, we’re using a specific artwork, the mandala, to explore this journey and the emotions that accompany us on the way.

But what is a mandala? A mandala is a guide. People from many cultures and religious traditions around the world use mandalas as maps to navigate their inner lives, including their emotions. Throughout this series, with the guidance of scientists, Buddhist teachers, writers, artists, and activists, we wrestle with five challenging emotions””anger, pride, attachment, envy, and ignorance””to help us take a new perspective on how emotions can influence our day-to-day experiences”¦and what they might be able to teach us if we get curious.

In this episode: pride

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is a leading Buddhist teacher and one of the foremost scholars and meditation masters in the Nyingma and Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE
Pride, it’s really an interesting klesha here. And pride is closely connected to ego, self-centricity. And pride is primarily a””kind of like a misperception of or exaggerated perception of one’s own positive qualities, and looking down on others as not having so much of such qualities.

RAVEENA AURORA
Kleshas are the afflicted emotions that cloud our view, but each has a powerful and life-altering antidote. For pride, it is the suspension of judgment, of yourself, of others, openness to all that is, with curiosity and a balanced perspective.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE
Pride can be positive, in the sense that if we can be truly confident of our own self, self-confidence, if we can truly appreciate one’s self, like self-acceptance, that kind of pride is a very positive thing. True acceptance of self. Like, who we really are.

RAVEENA AURORA
In this episode we explore pride in all its forms. Psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary is a professor of psychology and neuroscience.

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
We think of emotions like shame and pride as not being inborn emotions at all, because they’re socially constructed. And the simplest way to think about that is an emotion that’s socially constructed is very dependent on the values of a given culture or historical period. So you’re prideful about things that you have learned in developing in a certain society are worthy of being prideful of you. You have these kinds of experiences in reference to a developed sense of self, which also develops in a context in a culture and a historical period.

And so with pride, I’d say, you have to have as a starting point, the appraisal that, I am a self, I’m an individual self and a self that has agency in the world is a valued self. So you are appraising in the moment, is this sense of myself as a positive, powerful self? Is it being threatened or supported? That’s the appraisal part. Like just how is the world connecting with my sense of self?

RAVEENA AURORA
This is really interesting because not only does pride exist in the context of what is expected societally and culturally but it also sets clear boundaries between you and others. Pride thrives in judgment. Activist and author adrienne maree brown.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
When I’m judging, it’s like, I have a predetermined idea of what someone is supposed to act like, or be like, or what the success would even look like. When I let that go, all of a sudden, I can be present for what’s actually possible and what’s actually happening, which is often much more interesting than I could’ve predicted, and which is often much more moving because it’s rooted in the authentic experience of the people who are living through it,

We all live inside of a system that’s actually pretty difficult to navigate emotionally, financially, spiritually, physically. And when people are struggling with that, sometimes they turn to drugs, sometimes they turn to alcohol, sometimes they turn to sex work as a mode of survival, and other things.”

And it, very early on for me, helped me normalize that I’m not better or worse than anyone else. And the good news is that I can be in it. It’s like, my work is to, like, keep trying, keep learning, keep experimenting with “this thing called life,” as Prince said

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE
When you have this misperception or the wrong concept of oneself and believing in that, then that creates this sense of big separation, between self and others.

RAVEENA AURORA
And this is where pride can be so challenging. adrienne maree brown has explored the ways in which organizations can be more collaborative, more cooperative and less entrenched in competition, which is often founded in pride.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
I think if you were raised in an environment where competition is how you establish your right to exist and your worth to others, then I think that’s where we end up with that kind of, “OK, I have to be boastful, I have to project a confidence that I may or may not actually have, but I have to project that. I have to seem as if I know what I’m doing.” And I think that’s when we end up in the danger zone. It’s one of the reasons, actually, I identify as a post-capitalist, and I identify as a post-nationalist.

Because I feel like the systems of this nation-state, the systems of this economy, actually, the tendency is towards that competition and cruelty that keep us from attending to each other as human beings as systems where care is actually the only thing we need to be attending to.

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
We have this incredible opportunity because it’s such a salient, powerful emotion to dig deep and reassess. Well, what is it that forms the basis of our self value? It’s rather, what’s my purpose and my purposes in life that make me feel most myself, that give me the greatest sense of meaning, that helps me hitch into something that’s greater than myself and elevates me? Is my pride based on my ephemeral achievements or is it based on what difference I’m going to make afterwards when I’m gone? And I could die tomorrow. I mean, I could be hit by a bus when I walk out of this building.

And are the things that I’m prideful about Are they going to survive? Are they sustainable? Are they meaningful? Will it have mattered that I was in this world?

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
I do think that we’re all given various kinds of work to do in a lifetime, and where there’s great pain, that usually means there’s great healing that needs to happen, sometimes intergenerational, sometimes ancestral. And if we can release ourselves from that sort of punitive policing, slavery-era practice of judging each other and trying to determine who belongs and who doesn’t belong, then we can soften in and see, we are all shaped by this structure, these societal structures that are designed to keep someone else in power.

And it’s one of the most liberating a-ha’s you can have is, like, “I don’t have to participate in structures that are designed to give people power over me. I can actually figure out with other people what does it look like to create structures for ourselves and not judge ourselves for needing care, not judge ourselves for needing medicine, not judge ourselves for needing mediation, for needing therapy, for needing help, for needing support?” During this pandemic, I’ve had a lot of people in my life who needed support, like, financial support, to get through it.

And thank God that they were able to ask for it, which comes in part because they’re in a community of people who have relinquished judgment. And they know it’s like, “There’s nothing wrong with you for not having stored up a gazillion dollars to get through a global pandemic.” We’re not better than each other, we’re just positioned in different places for different work.

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
So I think of pride as this fraught emotion, but one that has, if we can bear to look at ourselves and really face what we’re prideful about, to be an emotion that has incredible potential for transformation.

RAVEENA AURORA
Then there’s another kind of pride. The one that comes when you do things that you, or others, didn’t think you could do. The big and small accomplishments that happen every day, that deserve your pride. The type of pride that is akin to rejoicing, a space of revelry and celebration of the moment, not judgment of it.

Here is Nora Wood, the ten-year-old Daughter of Awaken’s executive producer.

NORA WOOD
Pride is being proud of yourself. I mean, at least that’s what I think it is. It’s when you feel that you’ve accomplished something and you feel that you’ve done it the right way, like let’s say you make a cake, and most of the time your dad helps you with it, but this time you make it as a surprise for his birthday. And at the end, you’ll feel really proud because you did it by yourself. I mean, I know I’m a child. I mean, I’m ten. So it may seem to you adults like, “Uh, pfff, making a cake, yeah. So easy.”

But yeah, I’m mostly not allowed to use the stove or oven, so””

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
I see my niblings, my sister’s kids and the children of my friends, and that feeling of having accomplished something that they didn’t know they could do. Like, “I am standing up.” That kind of pure, what I think of as child pride, like, a little childlike pride. And then, I think of ego pride. [Laugh] I think of the times in my life when I’ve been like, “Got it. I’ve figured this all out, and everyone needs to listen to me.”

NORA WOOD
I actually””I heard this story when I was like four, so I don’t really remember it, but I’m pretty sure it was like this””this man or””I just call it this person””wanted to fly, and so they went and decided that they were going to make wings out of wax and the wings start working.

But as he becomes farther away from Earth and feels more powerful and like more than what he is, he starts flying higher and higher, closer to the sun, and the wings melt, and he dies. [laughs] He falls and dies.

RAVEENA AURORA
Stories about pride surface in many cultures. Like the Greek myth Icarus describes, if you become too proud, you can get very hurt, and some part of you can die. And Buddhism teaches that a delusionally proud person will inevitably be brought to humility. Both warn that a relationship with someone you love dearly can be challenged. For adrienne, this happened after 9/11.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
My father was in the Army for 30 years, all of my growing up years, so we were a military household. And he was particularly the Chief of War Plans at the time of 9/11, so he was working in the Pentagon. His office was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. He was away from the office, but I thought he was gone most of the day of 9/11. And then, we came back together, we were spending time together as a family, and over the months that followed, we really split from each other even more intensely politically than we ever had before. And that had been happening as I’d been getting my political education about what is the military, what is colonization, what is occupation, how does the military function in the world?

I had a lot of critiques. [Laugh] And then, it all came to a huge head where, for me, I looked at what happened during 9/11, and I thought, “We need to try to understand what led to this result, how we could end up with people feeling that they needed to take this kind of action. What is our responsibility? How can we change the conditions so that something like this can’t happen again?” And my dad was working in the Pentagon, and they were in a winding up for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we ended up in a car together, screaming at each other, both of us, that the other was a terrorist. And I ended up getting out of the car, and we went for a long time without talking.

RAVEENA AURORA
When it comes to a life-changing event that threatens our sense of security, we may act in ways, at time prideful ways, to give ourselves some sense of agency and safety. It can be an attempt in finding stability when there doesn’t seem to be any.

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
When we are in a prideful state, depending on how we view our sense of self and our value, we do things to sustain, sometimes at any cost that sense of being a valued self.

So for example, many of us believe that being a good person is a really central part of being a valued self and the self that we should be in the world. So people are motivated to do all sorts of things, sometimes terrible things to sustain the belief that they are a good person. So if someone tells you, “Hey, to save the world, you need to do this terrible deed,” but you’re a good person, right? This is a righteous cause, people will do all sorts of things that objectively are not what a good person does to retain that integrity.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
My mom said it wasn’t quite the year that I remember it being, but it was a long time before we were able to really communicate in a civil way again and hear each other with love. And I think pride came in in a few ways. I think there’s the pride that had fallen away in the first place. I grew up very proud of my dad, very proud of, like, who he was as a person, and then we went through this transition where I started understanding more about the military and really questioning everything about his life and what he’d been willing to do or not do. And he had felt very proud about his work, and his world view, and his community, and I think was kind of devastated when I came home throwing all that back at him. I think there was a period of, like, “You do need to respect me. I made these choices for you, I made these choices for our family.”

But neither of us could see past our perspective in that moment. I really felt like me singularly, alone, talking to my dad is how we’re going to stop this war. Like, “I have to do this. I have to stop it. I have to say the right thing.” And I felt like such a failure because I wasn’t saying the right thing, and I wasn’t having the impact I wanted to have.

And of course, now, I look back, and it’s like, that’s not how you stop wars. [Laugh] I know so much about organizing as a communal and collective act, but at that time, I really felt like, “There’s an individual opportunity here that I have to fulfill. There’s a destiny that I need to fulfill.” And I was really frustrated with myself that I couldn’t pull it off.

RAVEENA AURORA
When we look more closely, pride may be surfacing because we’re feeling frustrated and we’re trying to somehow find a way to make ourselves feel superior so we can avoid that frustration. But the counterpoint to pride is equanimity, the ability to hold seeming contradictions together, seeming differences. In reality, we are no better and no worse than anyone else. And when we see ourselves as connected, our world expands and we may have an even stronger impact.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE
The wisdom nature of pride, or the essence of pride, is what we call the wisdom of equanimity. The wisdom of equanimity is a one-taste experience of wisdom. One-taste experience. Seeing that there is a sense of sameness between you and the others. There’s a sense of no separation, so to speak. If you look at it from very simple, relative point of view, there’s a sense of no separation between you and others as being human, for example. We are all human. We are all the same.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
And I feel like I’m now bringing that lens to as many places as I can in my life that I’m like, “I’m not a good person, I’m not a bad person. I am a human. And as a human, I am trying to learn how to be in relationship to other humans and in relationship to this planet. And I won’t do that as a perfect saint. I will still be a human the whole time. And it’s so relaxing, actually, to stop trying to be a saint, or stop trying to be perfect, and instead live my life. And live a life in which what I want to get good at is being in an accountable relationship with other people in my life. what I want to get good at is being in an accountable relationship with the planet. And that’s actually doable in my lifetime. I’m doing it. I’m learning. So I think that’s the other thing that happens, this equanimity allows us to actually be in the world as it is,

RAVEENA AURORA
That’s what we’re all going for, hopefully, to be able to hold opposing views, to care for one another in the process and to do good in the world. Buddhist teacher and author Sharon Salzberg has such a wonderful way of illustrating this.

SHARON SALZBERG
The way they use the word “equanimity” reminds me of when I was practicing loving kindness intensively in Burma, and I was working with my Burmese teacher Sayadaw U Pandita, he would at times give us almost like little pop quizzes,

One day, he said to me, “Let’s say you’re walking in the forest, and it’s you””” And in the formal work of loving kindness meditation, you work with various categories of beings””those you’re close to, those you’re not so close to. So he said, “You’re walking in the forest. It’s you and your benefactor, someone who has really helped you. Your friend. Your neutral person, like someone you hardly know and you don’t really have a view of, liking or disliking. Your difficult person, or an enemy. And this bandit comes up to you and says, “˜Someone amongst you has to die.’ And it’s up to you to choose. Who are you going to choose?” So I had been practicing very intensively for about six weeks at that point, and had spent hours and hours and hours offering loving kindness to every one of those categories, including myself.

And I closed my eyes, and I just realized, “I can’t make a choice.” Like everyone seemed equal to me. So I said to him, “I can’t choose.” And he said, “Not even your enemy?” And I tried again. I closed my eyes. And I genuinely could not say, “You don’t count” or “I don’t care.” So I said, “No, I can’t choose my enemy.” So then he said, “Not even yourself?” And I thought, “Uh oh, I’m gonna fail this quiz.” [laughs] Because I just couldn’t find a place in which I didn’t count. We just all seemed equal. So I said, “No, I just can’t do that.” And he didn’t say anything. And I left, and I had this text in my””this ancient Buddhist text in my room, and grabbed it right away as soon as I got back to my room and looked it up, and sure enough, from like 2,000 years ago, there’s the question, “Say you’re walking in the forest, and there are all these people. Who can you choose?” And it turned out I had given the right answer.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
We need to be scholars of belonging, right? Like, what does it actually mean to belong to each other? The idea of being superior towards each other has done a lot of damage to us and created a lot of ways in which people are like, “Oh, this is my identity. It’s better than yours.” It’s like, there’s no truth to it anywhere. So far, there’s no scientific basis of saying anyone’s better than anyone else. But we try to create these monolithic identity spaces and have that be the way we experience belonging, and it doesn’t work.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE
There’s a sense of sameness. There’s a sense of one taste, because we all experience suffering, and we all don’t want suffering. We all want to be free and liberated. And so there is a sense of a one taste here, of experience. But ultimately speaking, the one-taste wisdom, wisdom of equanimity, is seeing the reality, seeing the reality that all things in its nature are equally lacking existence, equally do not exist. Śūnyatā; we are talking about emptiness in Buddhism. And so wisdom of equanimity is actually seeing that kind of śūnyatā or emptiness reality, in which everything is equal.

RAVEENA AURORA
Equanimity. This is the teaching that pride has to offer. This is what it really comes down to, suspending judgment so that you can recognize the ways we are all fundamentally equal and therefore more connected. When we feel connected, we want to do good, to be kind to each other. What would the world look like if we were consistently cognizant of the fact that we are all inextricably connected by the virtue of us being human, together, on this planet.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
I was rewatching Scandal and just noticing how I’m like, “Oh, there’s this storyline of, like, how the more privilege you get, in some ways, the more it shrinks your possibility of who you get to be and how you get to be. And so, you have this pride of success that may or may not have been tied to any labor that you’ve done, but then you have to constantly be policing, and adapting, and compromising in order to maintain that success. Meanwhile, there’s folks who are outside of those spaces and not particularly proud of anything, 0:31:02 And the saddest people that I have met in my life are those who would be seen as having the most privilege. I actually think a lot of what happens, particularly with systems like white supremacy, is that that lack of belonging becomes its own violent self-sustaining force. So you see these folks who are like, “I want to be powerful. I want to maintain this privilege at all costs,” but then there’s this deep loneliness, this deep depression, and Imposter Syndrome that makes it really hard to enjoy your privilege because there’s some part of you that knows, “This isn’t real.

I want to belong as I am. I want to be loved as I am.” Which is fair. Which everyone deserves.

RAVEENA AURORA
Pride, of course, isn’t all bad and from an evolutionary perspective, it has a reason for being. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary.

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
I mean, one thing too I want to say about, and this is a stance that I feel is important to have in discussion as we look at the intersections and also differences between psychology and spiritual traditions is to an emotion scientist, every negative emotion or difficult emotion is a double-edged sword. So there are costs to envy, pride, anxiety, but it wouldn’t have evolved with us if there weren’t some potential advantage to be had. And you know, people often say, “Oh, well, if it’s evolutionary theory, you just mean survival of the fittest.” But it can be more than that too.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
I do think there’s some sweet nature of pride, and then I think the one where Å“it’s sort of like, “Oh, I know everything,” I’m not sure if that’s based in nature or if that’s based in the competitive structures of our current social systems, where it’s like, “Knowing something is how I establish my value in the world, so I better know something.” And, like, the faster you can get expert in something, the more guaranteed your survival is these days. Nothing is just given to you for being born, right? It’s like, you either have to work for it, or you have to have come into it. And we live in a really strange period right now where there are a lot of people who are really proud without having any skills behind it. [Laugh]

Everyone has judgment. Everyone judges all the time. And the invitation for me and the practices is not to give up who I am, it’s not to give up noticing what I notice, but it’s changing the importance I give to what I notice, and it’s calling myself in around the power dynamics of what I’m noticing and how I’m noticing it. Non-judgment in interpersonal dynamics softens my whole spine and my gut, that I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know better than this person about the decisions they need to make for their own lives. I am not living in their body.

Their body is giving them data. I’m not living with the compromises they’ve made. I don’t know, and I don’t control, and I don’t have to control any of that. But if I’m curious, I can learn with them as they learn something about this experience of life that’s different from what I’m learning.” And non-judgment gives me so much room to experience more life. Like, I literally get to experience so much more life because instead of sitting in judgment, for me, I go to curiosity. I love the equanimity part because it’s like, there’s so much balance, there’s so much ease, there’s another kind of pleasure that comes from it, but fundamentally, I really feel that curiosity is at the heart of it all. And I’m like, “Oh, well, why did you do that? Huh. Like, how did you reach that conclusion?” And I’ll say it’s easier to have some curiosities than others”¦

Curiosity creates possibility.

RUTH OZEKI
When we’re curious about things. And that’s what a pilgrimage is. It’s a journey that you take because you’re curious. It’s an inquiry. And that is, I think, really where the intimacy comes from. It comes from this suspension of not knowing, an openness to answers or to more questions, this kind of openness to the world.

RAVEENA AURORA
Curiosity creates possibility. Author, filmmaker, and Zen priest Ruth Ozeki.

RUTH OZEKI
Certainty really is a kind of wall or barrier that protects us from that kind of intimacy. It prevents that kind of intimacy, and it also prevents the exposure to anything new. It’s kind of almost a reification of a sense of self, and it creates this distance between yourself and another person. It deflects, in other words. It doesn’t welcome, but it deflects. Anybody who’s been explained at, we all understand that. I think that’s why Rebecca Solnit came up with that word, mansplaining. And this is something that my husband and I do to each other all the time, we’re constantly mansplaining to each other. And one day, we tried an experiment. We tried this experiment whereby any time we felt compelled to make a statement or to explain something to each other, we turned it into a question instead.

And it was a remarkable exercise because I felt this physical sensation in my gut, in my heart, of being welcomed into conversation rather than deflected. It’s a wonderful thought experiment, and I totally recommend it.

RAVEENA AURORA
There are all kinds of ways to experiment with relinquishing judgment. The Mandala Lab at the Rubin Museum does this beautifully.

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
One way the Mandala Lab is important is that it really, surpassingly well, helps us take this first step of engaging with our emotions without shame and judgment.

RAVEENA AURORA
Imagine that you are holding a token in your hands, like a poker chip, and you are looking in a mirror. There are four long tubes in front of you, each with a slot at the top. You have a choice to make.

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
So, with the part of the installation where you have to note what you’re prideful about and you can put your tokens in the appropriate bin, it’s just you just have to look at it. You just have to decide.

RAVEENA AURORA
1. I think I am better than others

2. I feel proud of achievements I haven’t earned

3. I think I am worse than others

or

4. I feel proud of qualities that may cause harm to others

[the sound of a token falling and clinking]

Which do you choose?

You have to engage, and just even for that moment, come face to face with it “¦and with yourself.

You might cringe at your choice, but at least you’re not alone.

[the sound of another token falling and clinking against others this time]

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
And you can see that you’re not alone, right? So, these contributions is we’re a part of the art.

RAVEENA AURORA
It can be difficult to acknowledge your pride in such an open, public way but it can also be transformative.

TRACY DENNIS-TIWARY
We are in community around these difficult emotions.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN
I think one of the biggest things that happens is, we are able to relinquish the idea that some of us are good and deserving of good things, and some of us are bad and deserving of bad things. And I feel like when we let that go, and we recognize that all of us do good and bad things, all of us have innocence, all of us have harmful behaviors,and I think once we recognize we all have those contradictions, then we can begin to get curious with each other.

“What is our way forward together?” We actually stop looking at each other to find out what is bad and wrong in the other and instead are able to look at each other with eyes of love and curiosity. “What needs healing here? What needs attention here?

“What is our way forward together?”

RAVEENA AURORA
Thank you for listening to Season 2 of Awaken, a podcast from The Rubin Museum that explores the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” I’m singer and songwriter Raveena Aurora.

You just heard author and activist adrienne maree brown, Buddhist teacher and scholar Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, psychologist and neuroscientist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, author and Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg, author and Zen priest Ruth Ozeki and ten-year-old Nora Wood.

Awaken is produced by the Rubin Museum of Art in collaboration with SOUND MADE PUBLIC.

The music has been produced by Alexis Cuadrado and Hannis Brown. With some additional tracks from Blue Dot Sessions.

You can continue the conversation by following us on Instagram at @rubinmuseum. And if you’re enjoying this podcast, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and tell your friends about the conversation you just heard.

This is episode 2 of a 7 part series inspired by the Mandala Lab at the Rubin Museum””an immersive space for social, emotional, and ethical learning. Come explore the Lab in New York City, or in one of the installations that is traveling the world. Visit rubinmuseum.org to learn more about the Museum and about the art, cultures, and ideas of Himalayan regions. We look forward to seeing you soon.