Meditation as a Path of Your Own: Basic Goodness Lessons

Ask Lodro Rinzler how he came to meditation and he doesn't start with a lineage chart. He starts with a six-year-old sitting still in a New York apartment, staring at a wall, while his parents wonder what he is doing. That image, a child who inherited a practice before he chose one, anchors a fifty-five-minute conversation between Rinzler and host Ivan Bercholz on Shambhala Publications' This Very Moment podcast. They move from jokes about pumpkin heads to a monastic retreat in Nova Scotia, from a father's long illness to the publication of The Buddha Walks into a Bar . . ., and on to Rinzler's newest book, You Are Good, You Are Enough. Running through all of it is the teaching of basic goodness: the view that we are fundamentally whole, even when we make mistakes, and that this view changes how we treat ourselves and each other in a culture quick to judge. Rinzler, who cofounded MNDFL and lives in New York's Hudson Valley, closes the episode with two practices he considers simple and worth doing every day.

What does a six-year-old's silent sitting reveal about inherited practice?

Rinzler was raised in a Buddhist household. His parents had been practicing Tibetan Buddhism in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche before he came along, so meditation was, in his words, simply part of the house. The story his family tells is the one that opens the episode. His parents opened the door one evening to call him to dinner and found him sitting, quiet, at six years old, facing the wall.

When they asked what he was doing, he said he was meditating. When they asked what that meant to him, his answer was disarmingly precise:

"I was noticing that I was breathing. And when I got distracted, I came back to noticing I was breathing."

— Lodro Rinzler, recounting the story on This Very Moment, 5:10

His parents, he recalls, responded that this was the essence of it. Rinzler's answer, which he gives with a shrug of qualification, is "It is to some extent. It's as simple as that." That tiny exchange holds the whole mechanics of sitting practice: attention wanders, you notice it has wandered, and you return. Notice, drift, return. Many people spend years trying to learn that cycle. Rinzler had it at six, and his family, having seen it, decided to encourage him. By eleven he was attending Shambhala training weekends, the first of a series of retreats that would gradually shape his path.

Why did a whale off Nova Scotia change everything?

The turning point came in high school, and Rinzler is candid that it began as something close to a calculation. He was a junior, thinking about his college essay, and the program at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia offered temporary ordination as a monastic: shaved head, robes, vows, "the whole nine yards." As he tells it, his reasoning was practical: "I've got nothing else going this summer. That sounds like a great essay."

Three weeks into the retreat, during a walking meditation, the practice became real. The abbey had wall-length windows, and beyond them was the open ocean and the cliffs. A whale breached and came crashing back into the sea. The moment stopped his mind, and the thought that followed has stayed with him:

"This is not something my parents have done. This is now my path."

— Lodro Rinzler on This Very Moment, 7:03

His parents had never been to Gampo Abbey and had never taken monastic ordination. The practice that had been a family inheritance became, in that instant, his own. Rinzler describes it as individuating, and he is clear that he never went back to the earlier version of himself. The name followed the same arc. He had taken refuge at six and received the name Lodro then, but at the monastery he was asked to adopt it along with the robes and vows. "I just called myself Lodro from then on," he says, and he went on to university.

There is a useful lesson in the sequence. A family practice can be a gift and still not be yours until something in you claims it. Rinzler's story suggests that the claim often arrives not as a decision but as a moment of direct experience, a whale in the window that tells you something you already knew.

What does basic goodness mean, and why does it matter now?

The second half of the conversation turns to You Are Good, You Are Enough, the 2026 book that Rinzler describes as an exploration of basic goodness, self-doubt, and practical meditation. The teaching of basic goodness is central to the Shambhala tradition. The episode places Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's development of it in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Rinzler frames it as a counterweight to a culture of constant evaluation.

The core idea is straightforward to state and harder to live. Basic goodness holds that we are fundamentally whole, even when we make mistakes. It does not ask us to earn that wholeness through improvement, and it does not deny that we err. Instead it proposes that the mistake and the goodness coexist. Rinzler argues that this view changes relationships, because if we begin from the premise that we are whole, we can see others the same way, including the people who most often trigger our judgment. In a culture that is quick to criticize both ourselves and others, that shift is not sentimental. It alters how we respond when a partner, a colleague, or our own inner voice gets things wrong.

The episode also invites a more personal reading. Rinzler and Bercholz talk about what it means for an idea to be "not dogmatic," a teaching that can be tested in ordinary life rather than accepted on authority. That practical stance runs through the whole conversation and is the bridge between the monastic retreat of his teens and the book he wrote decades later.

How did a father's illness test the practice?

The episode also addresses loss. Rinzler speaks about his father's long illness and how practice helped him stay present while his father was dying. The conversation is careful and unhurried here. What comes through is not a claim that meditation dissolves grief, but that sitting with the reality of a loss, rather than fleeing into thought, is itself a form of presence. The difference between being with a difficult thing and grappling with thoughts about it is one the practice trains, and it is the difference he returns to when he describes those years.

What happens when a book reaches one reader?

Bercholz and Rinzler revisit the early years of his teaching and writing, including The Buddha Walks into a Bar . . ., which became an international bestseller. Rinzler's measure of a book is modest and specific. He imagines a single young person who picks up meditation because of something he wrote, and says that is what he hopes for. The idea is that a book's worth is not only its sales but whether it changes one life, which is the same principle the teaching of basic goodness asks us to apply to individual people.

The Buddha Walks into a Bar . . . is also Rinzler's way of making the practice accessible through humor. Early in the episode, before the serious material, he tells a joke about a man who finds his roommate with a pumpkin for a head, learns the roommate's three wishes, and discovers the third wish was for a pumpkin head. Bercholz immediately links it to samsara, the cycle of wanting more, and the punchline lands because it is true. Even after the wealth and the endless food arrive, the mind invents a new want, and then suffers over it.

How has fatherhood changed attention?

Rinzler is now the father of a three-year-old, and he says fatherhood has changed his sense of identity and deepened his practice of paying attention. A child demands a kind of attention that cannot be partly given. You are either present or you are not, and the child notices which. That demand has become one of his most direct teachers, and it sets up the closing advice of the episode.

What two daily practices does Rinzler recommend?

The episode ends with two practices that Rinzler presents as simple and immediately usable. The first is to offer your full attention to the person in front of you. In a day crowded with screens and competing tasks, this is the practice of setting aside the half-listening that most of us default to. The second is to begin the day with a moment of gratitude. Rinzler is emphatic about the morning:

"I think it's totally underestimated how important it is we start our days."

— Lodro Rinzler on This Very Moment, 53:05

Taken together, the two practices form a loop that matches the rest of the conversation. Gratitude at the start of the day sets the tone of basic goodness, the sense that there is something whole to begin with. Full attention carries that tone into relationships, where the view that people are fundamentally good matters most. Neither practice asks for a retreat or a robe. Both can be tested in a single morning, which is part of what makes Rinzler's approach feel accessible.

Where to go from here

If this conversation moved you, start with the episode itself, which is warm, funny, and frank about both joy and loss. Then read You Are Good, You Are Enough for the full treatment of basic goodness, and The Buddha Walks into a Bar . . . for the humor and accessibility that made Rinzler's early teaching reach so many people. For the tradition behind the ideas, look into the work of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, whom this episode names as the source of the basic goodness teaching. And try the two practices for a week: begin one morning with a moment of gratitude, and give your full attention to the next person who speaks to you. Notice when your mind drifts, and come back. That, as a six-year-old discovered, is most of it.