My guests this week are Devon Hase and Craig Hase, authors of the new book, How Not to Be a Hot Mess. These two have a way of making the principles of mindfulness and Buddhism relevant and easy to understand. As you’ll hear, we discussed many points of intersection in how they and I think about mindfulness, and the need for additional practices besides simply being present and open.

We talked a lot about “waking up from the dream” to more fully inhabit our lives, what Buddhism has to say about our sex lives, and the importance of bringing ritual into our lives. I think you’ll find a lot here that’s useful. Other topics we explored included:

• How to live out of what matters to us
• Finding centering and grounding when things are shifting around us
• Why mindfulness is the cornerstone of a life well-lived
• Mindfulness as coming home to ourselves
• Settling the mind so we can look at our life with precision
• What we can learn from being in touch with our bodies
• The freedom in discovering what’s actually here
• What it means to be less identified with our experience
• The difference between knowledge and a felt experience
• Beginner’s mind: experiencing things as if for the first time
• Our shared admiration of Pema Chödrön’s work, including The Wisdom of No Escape and When Things Fall Apart 
• The “genuine heart of sadness” and the invitation to be real (see Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior)
• What it means to “wake up from the dream”
• How we tend to live in our thoughts and stories, vs. being in the raw experience of now
• Making Buddhist principles come to life
• The “bliss of blamelessness”
• How bad sex is related to the culture of consumerism
• Letting go of “endpoints” in sex
• Concerns about the influence of pornography on young people’s developing ideas about sex
• Why Craig recommends not getting drunk or high
• The healthy homeostasis that our bodies naturally seek
• Bringing a bit of monastery into our daily lives
• The contentment we can find through simplicity
• The importance of ritual, and how to bring little moments of ritual into our days

Devon Hase has been practicing meditation for the past 20 years. She has spent years in meditation retreat and has been mentored by Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, and many others.

Before teaching dharma full time, Devon was an English professor for a decade, where she focused on social and cultural studies.

As a dharma teacher, Devon supports practitioners with persona dharma mentoring, serves on retreat teams at the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock, and offers meditation retreats with Craig throughout North America and Europe.

Photo by Natalie Faye

She mentors mindfulness teachers through Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, and can be found teaching meditation on the Simple Habit app.

Craig Hase started intensive meditation training in 1994. His biggest influences have been Zentatsu Richard Baker-Roshi, Joseph Goldstein, and Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

Craig lived in a Zen monastery for 6 years before getting his PhD in counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he had the good fortune to learn from neuroscientist Richard Davidson and contemplative scholar John Dunne, among other luminaries.

He mentors dharma and meditation practitioners full-time and teaches all over the place with Devon and others. When they’re not flying around teaching retreats, Devon and Craig live together in Ashland, Oregon, in urban retreat, dividing their weeks between practice and service.

Find Devon and Crain online at their website and on Facebook and Instagram.

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