by Jeff Bridges
Then my mom went on: “But suddenly I heard one of them exclaim, ‘The baby’s heart stopped! Quick, get the doctor.’ It turned out that I was allergic to one of the drugs they’d given me. It felt like I was falling backward down a velvet-covered escalator. Finally Leon came in and started to slap me: ‘Wake up, wake up, Dorothy!’ But I couldn’t, because I was so drugged and strapped down. He finally told them to take the straps off me—he could tell I was trying to sit up—and right then I felt you turning back around and out you came, as if you’d changed your mind. And that’s how you were born.”
These doctors on TV encouraged you to take your birth experience and apply that to how you dealt with other traumatic experiences in your life. When I did that I noticed that when I’m in a tight spot I do what I did then: No way, man, I’m digging it where I am, I don’t want to be born, I’m not coming out, and just turn around in the birth canal. It could be another movie, it could be doing something for a friend or a fan, it could be doing my hunger work, anything. Thirty-five years ago it was my marriage to Sue. I want to say, Fuck it, I’m not gonna do that, and get back to some safe place where nobody will bother me. But when I give myself that opportunity to say no, I find it gives me the space to say yes and to check things out after all.
I think the Dude encountered resistance, too. In fact, maybe he was kind of afraid. Maybe that’s why he let go of trying to be someone or living up to something. In the movie he talks about being a radical way back in the past, but when we first meet him, the Stranger calls him the laziest man in L.A. Walter has to really egg him on to do something about that rug to get him going, and once he starts, engages, it’s as if life can’t leave him alone. That’s what I fear, I guess.
But, as somebody said, what we’re really afraid of is not how small and inadequate we are, but how big and powerful. When you think about that, it’s basically saying that each of us can be Christ or Buddha; it’s asking us to reach that high. But we don’t want to know about that, in fact we want to protect ourselves from that knowledge. Meanwhile life is demanding that we come on, live our life.
But when it gets too intense, you have to stop.
BERNIE: You have to befriend the self.
JEFF: Give yourself a fucking break so you can move, so you can keep going. It’s like yoga. I’ll say, Put your head on your fucking knees, come on! And you know what? I get hurt because I can’t do it and I’m not patient or kind to myself, I pull a muscle. I don’t respect where I am. I push it too hard, I hurt myself, and that turns me off the whole process. But I could do it more gently, you know. Like, row, row, row your boat—gently.
Sometimes I feel that my relationship with you is a bit of a yoga pose, too. You expand faster than I want to, so it can become uncomfortable. The relationship is always about opening, jamming, digging what it is to be intimate and generous. It’s asking, Who are you? What are you? These are the same questions that I ask myself in different situations in my life, and the challenge is not to judge myself or my answer but to just notice. One of the things that I notice is that there are limits, and limits are a cool place in which to hang.
BERNIE: Otherwise, you wind up with regrets, like you do when you hurt yourself in yoga, and you spend your energy dealing with the regrets instead of with what you originally wanted to do: I should have done this, I shouldn’t have done that.
JEFF: I wish I were better.
BERNIE: It’s more important to work with what happened rather than with your opinions about it. You made the best meal possible at that moment. If nobody wanted it, that’s fine, you still made the best meal you were capable of. Maybe it wasn’t the time for it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come up again.
We make meals all the time: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. We can feed ourselves and we can offer to feed people, only sometimes we waste energy on things like: This is my meal and you’ve got to eat it, or: This is the meal I’m being served so I’ve got to eat it even if I don’t like it. That’s another variation of I’ve got to do this or she’s got to do that, all leading to frustration.
So if a voice says, I should have done this, I can say right back, That’s just your opinion, man. It’s just an opinion; there’s nothing true about it. One of my Japanese Zen teachers, a famous and highly respected master, used to say, “That’s a nice way of looking at it.” A young, inexperienced kid would come up to him: Hey, you’re all wrong, or Why don’t you do things this way? Instead of telling him he’s wet behind the ears and doesn’t know what he’s talking about, my teacher would say, “That’s a nice way of looking at it.”
JEFF: That’s interesting.
BERNIE: He didn’t have to prove the kid wrong, he didn’t have to prove him right. It was just another opinion. We can do the same thing with the voices in our heads.
JEFF: Let’s take the example of the snoring a little further. Let’s say my fingers ache. What do I do? I can take Advil; I can also give myself a little injection of heroin. Where do you draw the line? Is there a line? Do you even bother to seek comfort and take an Advil for arthritis or do you abide with the pain?
BERNIE: It depends on the moment. You bear witness to your fingers aching in the same way that we bear witness to the aching of the world. In Buddhism we have something called the Middle Way. A lot of people think of that as halfway between one thing and another thing. In Zen, we say that the Middle Way is just what’s happening. It’s not good or bad; it’s just what is. The question is, do I bear witness or not?
The fingers ache, so I might take Advil, I might not do anything, or I might take heroin. After all, they’re all remedies. If I bear witness not just to the pain but also to the whole thing, the Advil might make more sense because it probably won’t become an addiction like the heroin. But for someone who’s already an addict and now has pain in his fingers, befriending the self might mean taking heroin.
We choose what we choose and then people have their opinions about it. Society may say, You’re screwing yourself up, you’re taking heroin. That same society sometimes tells me, You’re screwing yourself up, you’re eating meat, or You’re screwing yourself up, you’re smoking a cigar. Everybody has opinions. But if I have faith in bearing witness, if I can really just be in touch with myself, I’m going to wind up doing things that are good for me and cause me the least pain.
Having faith in yourself is what’s important here, faith that you will take the actions that are appropriate for the situation at this moment.
JEFF: Yeah, more confidence. Is having faith in yourself any different from having faith in reality?
BERNIE: What’s reality? I always remember Robin Williams, back when he was Mork, saying that reality is a concept.
Do I take something to relieve the pain or not? I often say about myself that I have a high tolerance level for pain and therefore pain isn’t much of a problem for me. That’s okay as long as I’m not attached to this thought. So I have arthritic pain. I let go of my usual concepts, get into a state of not-knowing, bear witness to the pain I feel, and then decide if I want to take something or leave it alone. I have faith in just being where I am; I’m not trapped by what happened in the past or what I expect will happen in the future. And if I make a mistake and choose to do something that didn’t work out so well, I’m not critical about what I did; I did the best I could do at that moment.
There’s also the opposite approach, which is getting too arrogant. We start thinking that we can do or take care of everything. The more arrogant we become the bigger the fear that we’re going to fail, that we won’t live up to expectations. There are people who give the impression that they’re superstars or gurus, but inside there’s a nagging fear that they can’t really do it all.
Going back to the tall tree that gets more wind, if you think you’re some big, impervious tree that can outlast anything, you’ll find yourself getting buffeted pretty badly. On the other hand, if you’re just growing without worrying about whether you’re big or small, then you’re ju
st blowing in the wind, you know? There’s nothing extra. Stuff comes up and you bend with it.
When I did judo as a young man, I discovered that beginners can get to a place where they think they know it all, and they start looking for people they could beat. But my judo master said, “When you get into trouble, the best judo defense is to run.”
The more you learn, the more you know that you’re not so hot.
14.
SOME BURGERS, SOME BEERS, A FEW LAUGHS. OUR FU**ING TROUBLES ARE OVER, DUDE.
JEFF: There are a number of spiritual traditions that say that you should treat the other person as God, or divine. Turning that around, you should treat yourself the same way, and with compassion.
BERNIE: That’s my opinion, too. Just don’t wallow in self-pity. Take a look at the Dude. Someone pees on his rug, his home is ransacked, he’s drugged and beaten up. People take advantage of him and manipulate him, but he doesn’t pity himself.
JEFF: There’s a difference between pity and compassion.
BERNIE: The Dude befriends himself, which is very different from wallowing in self-pity. At the end of the movie he confronts the wealthy Mr. Lebowski about how he was set up. Talking about himself, he says, “You figured, he’s a loser, a deadbeat, someone the square community won’t give a shit about.”
Mr. Lebowski says, “Well, aren’t you?”
And the Dude confesses, “Well, yeah, but . . .”
Right there he’s befriending himself. He’s not denying, he’s not getting defensive or angry, he’s not saying How dare you! Nor does he pity himself. He’s ready to admit that he may be all those things, but there’s a sense of befriending there. People knock other people because they don’t see them as themselves, but we also knock ourselves and get down on a lot of things that we do. I’m for befriending them, at the same time knowing they could change.
JEFF: Sometimes I can give myself shit no matter which way I go. Was it the Dalai Lama who said that people are going to criticize you if you’re this, or you’re that, or even if you’re right in the middle? Or was it Lincoln? I guess a lot of guys have said that. I tend to do that to myself. One day it’s: You’re not pushing it hard enough, dude, you’re too laid back. Another day it’s the opposite.
BERNIE: So the practice of befriending the self is a good one for you.
JEFF: Oh man, yeah. The more things I do, the more I need this compassion. When you acknowledge and see things as they are, your life feels authentic, which feels good, and those good feelings actually lead you to want to do even more, and that brings up all those voices again. On the one hand I want to do more, and on the other I don’t. It’s a hard choice because we affect people all the time in ways we’re not even aware of, little things that have a meaning we’ll never know.
I get fan letters that say, Gee, what you’ve done means a lot. Or: You did this movie, and this one particular scene made me feel this. Please, it would mean everything to me if you’d write my son, sign something, and send it to me. Sometimes I do it.
I mean, I’m a fan myself; I go crazy over certain guys. But how much of your time do you want to spend? On the one hand, I’m given something, I’m being acknowledged, and on the other hand I don’t respond. I wish I could, or did.
There’s this new thing that I’m going to try. I’m going to get a chop. You know what that is? It’s one of those Chinese seals. I’ll make a ceramic chop with my design and make it my official stamp. I don’t know if that’ll scratch the itch—it’s kind of turning sour in my mouth even as I say it—because it’s an awkward thing. I mean, how do you digest all that love coming at you? How do you honor the love?
I think about unrequited love, letting someone down who’s asking you for something and you’re not giving it. In the case of fan mail, there’s too much. I can’t sit down and answer it all because there are other things I want to do. But it builds up inside.
BERNIE: You know, I’m an engineer, and the first thing that comes up for me is to suggest a solution, a way out. But living with my wife, I’ve learned that answering the problem—
JEFF: —doesn’t get it. That’s right.
BERNIE: There’s something else going on, and it’s in the realm of emotions and feelings.
JEFF: It’s not about an answer, man.
BERNIE: You could simply put on your web site: Hey guys, I get a lot of fan mail. I love you all, but I can’t answer everyone. That’s an answer. It may solve the problem, but it doesn’t solve the problem in life. So when there are things that bother us, what’s the real issue there? As a Zen teacher, I do one-on-one study with students. I’ve done this for some forty-five years, many, many times with lots of people, and the general sense I have is that people want to be heard. They don’t necessarily want answers, they don’t want to be told anything, they want to be heard. So the question becomes for me, can I listen? Can I acknowledge what they’re saying?
JEFF: But in this case, with all the people who write me letters, I don’t have the time.
BERNIE: So the issue that you’re dealing with is: How do I feel good even in a situation that feels overwhelming, where I can’t do everything I’d like to do? How do I feel good even in those times when I feel bad or inadequate? It’s not about how you deal with all the fan mail, because you can’t.
JEFF: It’s like the snoring situation. Normally, I leave the room, or not answer letters. But sometimes I stay. So in this case, every once in a while, I’ll take the box, read the letters, and answer. It’s almost a kind of meditation.
BERNIE: You need to befriend Jeff. It’s got nothing to do with the letters. You’ve got to befriend the fact that Jeff can only do so much.
JEFF: He does what he does.
BERNIE: And because he’s famous, he’s overloaded by requests. But Jeff’s Jeff, he can’t do everything. You can’t kiss the whole world; you can only kiss so many. Sure, you could have an automatic system for answering fan mail, but the bigger issue is—
JEFF: Cutting myself slack. Don’t be so un-Dude.
BERNIE: The Dude does not get angry with himself for all the things he’s not doing. He befriends the self. The number of things that we’re asked to do grows as we grow, like the tree that gets more wind the taller it grows, but everybody has a limit. So the issue is cutting yourself slack.
Befriending is a beautiful thing. Don’t get down, be patient. You’re still going to be here the next moment, but it’s going to be a whole new moment.
JEFF: I see what you’re saying. You have to befriend yourself if you’re going to be a Bodhisattva and work with the suffering. It’s like the lenses, man. When I look with a wide lens at the whole thing and see it’s all one body, you know there’s nothing really wrong, but at the same time, if I look with greater magnification, I can see people suffering, including myself. The healing of both is basically the same thing. So you learn to lean into that a little bit and find your ground, at least till the next earthquake.
I can get so enthusiastic that things get overwhelming. I get into that spot with you sometimes, too. You’d like me to go on the Auschwitz retreat or do a street retreat, or else you’re asking me to support your work financially. It’s like you’re asking, What’s up, man? What’s the deal here? Just how generous are you? In some ways that’s great, because once again, it’s as if you’re really asking, Who are you? What are you? It’s an opportunity to befriend my limits and kind of surf with them a bit.
It’s like when you saw the little heads I make from clay and you urged me to start the Head for Peace work right away, but I needed a little time. Sometimes I feel you’re out there pulling on the grass to make it grow faster; I have a slower gestation period. I need downtime because I don’t want to give in to my manic impulses. The things that I really want to nurture are slow-growing; they need space and time so that they can flower and mature.
I notice that when I’m generous, accepting, and loving toward myself, all that’s reflected out into the world. The more I cut myself slack,
the more I don’t judge myself for not being other than I am, the more I’m aware of who I am, see it, honor it, and respect it, the more I do all those things for others. I push them less and I respect their different rhythms. You’re very fast, you expand, and it’s sometimes faster than I want to do it, you know? Neither one’s right or wrong; it’s just how it is.
I got an interesting teaching, or at least I took it as one, from this lama from Bhutan, Khyentse Norbu Rinpoche. Alan Kozlowski told me about this lama who decided he wanted to direct movies. It’s almost like the punch line of a joke, you know? I’ve always wanted to direct. Anyway, Alan said that he was coming to Santa Barbara to do a talk and would be interested in hanging out. So I went to his talk, sat up in the first row while he did his thing. I saw him kind of look at me and smile, and he said out loud, laughing a little, “You make me very nervous, sitting there looking at me.” We chortled.
So I am really looking forward to hanging out with him. He has a bunch of attendants, and at the end I go up to one of them and say, “Hi, I’m Jeff Bridges, I’d like to go in and see Khyentse Norbu Rinpoche.” He says, “I’ll go ask.” He goes in there, comes back, and says, “He doesn’t want to see you.” And I say, “Oh, okay.” And that was the most significant teaching that he could have given me. Because one of the things that I deal with in my life is struggling with saying no, I don’t have to do what everybody wants me to do.
It really lightened my load when he said no. It showed me that when someone says, Hey, could I have your autograph? or, Can I take your picture? it’s okay to say, I’ll tell you what, how about a hug? Or, No, thanks. I love you. Or just say, No.