5 Heaps with Noah Levine5 Heaps with Noah Levine
Against The Stream
I, Me, Mine
1:27:26•24 Jul 2026
Who Do You Think You Are? Noah Levine on the Five Heaps and Letting Go of Self
Episode Overview
- The sense of a solid, permanent self is built from five changing processes: body, feeling tone, perception, thoughts, and consciousness.
- Mindfulness is present-time, kind awareness that notices experience without immediately believing or obeying every thought and emotion.
- Learning to feel the body and its sensations, including discomfort, takes long-term practice and is essential for seeing impermanence clearly.
- Every experience carries a feeling tone—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral—and clinging to pleasure or resisting pain greatly increases suffering.
- Letting go and forgiveness are ongoing, moment-to-moment practices, not one-time events; old memories and resentments tend to resurface and need fresh response.
“How much of your suffering would be alleviated if you didn't believe your thoughts?”
How can compelling narratives motivate and inspire others? Here, Buddhist teacher Noah Levine offers a straight-talking look at who you *think* you are, and why that question matters if you're tired of suffering. Speaking to a live group at Against The Stream, Noah unpacks the Buddha’s teaching on the Five Heaps (khandas): body, feeling tone, perception, thoughts, and consciousness.
Rather than asking anyone to deny their lived experience, he explains how these five piles of experience glue together into a solid-feeling "I, me, mine" – and how that habit keeps pain feeling very personal. As he puts it, "How much of your suffering would be alleviated if you didn't believe your thoughts?" The style is relaxed, occasionally irreverent, and very human. There’s guided meditation, group sharing, and plenty of gentle humour about ego, resentment and the "wild monkey" mind.
Noah repeatedly invites people to question their usual identities – the body, the past, the personality, even spiritual labels – and to ask, with real curiosity, "Who am I without my history?" You’ll hear practical guidance on staying in the body, recognising every sensation and thought as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, and seeing how clinging to pleasure or resisting pain ramps up distress.
He also acknowledges how trauma, body shame, and social privilege can shape how easy it is to feel at home in a body, without dismissing anyone’s lived reality. The target audience includes meditators, Dharma students, and anyone interested in suffering less by taking things less personally. It’s especially useful if you’re wrestling with harsh self-talk, old stories from childhood, or the feeling that you’re stuck being the same person forever.
If you paused and asked "Who am I, really?" right now, what might shift in how you relate to your pain, your past, and your potential for freedom?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.