What is a Good Life? #181
Finding Peace Within Myself with Kadam Adam Starr
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters.
This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Kadam Adam Starr - international teacher of meditation and Buddhism for over 20 years and the principal teacher at Tara Kadampa Meditation Centre. It is a conversation about self-knowledge, the attention economy, meeting difficult people with friendship rather than judgment, and the realisation that a good life may come down to how we choose to show up each day.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
“When we get to know ourself, what we struggle with, our potential, we quite naturally understand where everyone else is at.” - Kadam Adam Starr
Throughout these interviews, I keep finding moments that strike me as a particularly healthy way of meeting the world. Adam’s is one of them, and it also pokes at one of my great fascinations: why has all the inner work we now have access to seemingly done so little to make us happier or more content?
I’ve had a number of experiences, on retreats, at gatherings, in forums, where people assume they’re collectively doing it differently to the culture they’re criticising, and yet to me it has felt like a different version of the same thing. So much of our inner-development seems rooted in the very thing we claim to be moving beyond - not only the wish to feel more content but the desire to be special, to be better than others. The game changes, but the desire underneath stays the same. Competition in a new outfit.
Adam’s perspective here is rather beautiful. If you sit with yourself long enough - really acknowledging both what you struggle with and the potential you carry - it becomes much easier to have compassion for yourself, and then for everyone else. When you stop looking away from what you actually are, you start to see how nuanced a being you are: full of competing desires and values, peace and busy-ness, love and judgement.
And once you’ve sat with that in yourself, you begin to meet other people who are simply in the same place. Timing may have put a different variation on it, but it’s largely the same struggle.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes when someone confides a present struggle to me, I break into a spontaneous laugh - it’s all so familiar. As was the hope or expectation that we were going to escape the human experience in a given moment.
There’s a lovely link between what Adam is describing and several past guests in this series. Cormac Russell spoke about the thresholds of self-help - how useful it is up to a point, and how easily it tips into self-obsession if your attention doesn’t also expand outwards. Sit with yourself long enough and compassion becomes hard to withhold; the same is true of the attention we turn toward others.
Last week, Dr. Karen Jacob pointed to the importance of recognising anger in yourself, and then neither demonising it nor judging it so harshly in others. This week, Adam suggests that “a certain mental stability comes from being in touch with the reality of your own life.”
And it works both ways. In recognising our struggles, we often recognise the significant potential we hold for love and compassion too. That echoes something Bruce Anderson shared, his belief that our gift often emerges from our deepest wound:
“The indigenous idea is that you come into the world with your gifts and you encounter struggle. And it’s not until you encounter the struggle that the gift is cracked open and made available to you. So I have to see the person sleeping next to the dumpster as an incredibly gifted person because of the trauma that they have experienced in their life.”
Taken together, these perspectives tell me something I keep coming back to. Your practice, your streaks, your hours on a meditation cushion mean very little if your relationship with people doesn’t markedly shift. If it doesn’t markedly shift how you see other people.
Or, as Steven D’Souza put it: “I grow in my spirituality when I grow in my humanity.”
2. This Week’s Questions
How have your own struggles helped you to be more compassionate to others?
When has your inner work tipped into self-obsession rather than connecting you to others?
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Finding Peace Within Myself with Kdam Adam Starr - What is a Good Life? #181
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Kadam Adam Starr below.
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About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.