What It Takes to Believe You're Good Enough with Lodro Rinzler

What It Takes to Believe You're Good Enough with Lodro Rinzler

What drives someone to seek a life where they genuinely feel "good enough"? This conversation between Eric Zimmer and Buddhist teacher and author Lodro Rinzler heads straight into that question, mixing humour, honesty, and some very human stories of guilt, shame, and recovery.

Eric, who is open about his own history of addiction and long-term sobriety, talks with Lodro about how easy it is to turn emotions and diagnoses into fixed identities: *"I'm an anxious person," "I'm an addict," "that's just who I am."* Lodro gently challenges this, arguing that these patterns are often just wolves we’ve been feeding rather than our true nature.

Rooted in Buddhist teaching, Lodro explains the idea of “basic goodness” – that underneath our stories and self-judgement, we’re fundamentally okay. He shares how meditation helps people see this for themselves by creating a gap between stimulus and response, that tiny space Viktor Frankl spoke about where a better choice becomes possible.

You’ll hear two powerful personal stories from Lodro: the high school breakup he felt guilty about for years, only to learn the other person barely remembered it, and a later period of heavy drinking and deep grief where he caused harm and then spent years apologising, seeking mediation, and doing his own healing work. Both examples highlight how shame can freeze us in the past, while genuine remorse plus growth lets us move forward.

Eric links all this to recovery, reflecting on how identifying as “an addict” was life-saving early on, but later became too small a box. Together they wrestle with labels, cancel culture, and the question, “At what point do we allow people to change?” If you’ve ever felt crushed by past mistakes or stuck in an old identity, this conversation might help you ask: what would it look like to treat yourself as basically good, even on your hardest days?