Soul Boom - Why We Make Ourselves Suffer: Breaking Addiction Down

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Why do we keep feeding the habits, thoughts, and emotions that make us suffer? Eric Zimmer explores addiction, anxiety, depression, radical acceptance, Zen Buddhism, mindfulness, emotional healing, and the hidden psychology behind self-destruction. He explains the “good wolf vs bad wolf,” letting go of control, rewiring negative thought patterns, and finding inner peace through small daily choices. SPONSORS! 👇 ZipRecruiter 👉 https://ziprecruiter.com/soulboom Nutrafol 👉 (Promo code: SOULBOOM for $10 OFF + FREE shipping!) https://nutrafol.com OneSkin 👉 (15% OFF w/ promo code: SOULBOOM) https://oneskin.co/soulboom Tiny Souls 👉 (promo code: SOULBOOM20 for 20% OFF!) https://tinysoulsmedia.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⏯️ SUBSCRIBE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👕 MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠📩 SUBSTACK!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  FOLLOW US! IG: 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  CONTACT US! Sponsor Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Work with Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. Well, which one wins, the one you feed. I wasn't feeding the bad wolf. I think the bad wolf was devouring me. And it was clear to me in that moment. There were things that I could do that led me towards my recovery. and there were things that I could do that were leading me straight to jail, institutions, and death.

And it was just very clear that I'm making these choices. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. A quick shout out to our sponsors. Please support our sponsors and help support the show. ZipRecruiter. Try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com

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That parallel is relatable for everyone. I mean, you can talk to a seven-year-old. Exactly. And you can say, which wolf are you feeding when you slap Tommy and took the toy away, which wolf were you feeding? I was feeding the bad wolf.

And when you gave Sophie a piece of your cookie, which wolf were you feeding? Like, it's universal. There's a fun episode of the, one you feed where a listener is also a counselor at an elementary school. And she had been teaching the parable for a couple years. And I happened to be out there. It's in the Colorado area. And so I went in and I interviewed maybe six or seven kids ranging from kindergarten to about fourth grade. And I did what I do in my show. I read them the little parable and I asked them

what they thought about it. And it was just fascinating to hear these little children, say basically the same thing that we say as a grown-up. Like, well, and but my choices matter. And like you said, we all get it. You know, in my case, it was very extreme in the beginning, you know, addiction, but it doesn't, that's not where it's applicable to me now. It's in the little choices that I make. Yeah. And I love the parable and the idea of feeding wolves because there's a lot of people that talk about, like, where your life is and where it grows is where you put your attention. Yeah. And Sarah Kubarak, who was on the show, the millennial therapist, brilliant, wonderful therapist and human being, she talks about how your screen time, like on your phone, when you check

your screen time, that's actually a perfect indicator of what is important to you. Because if you're spending six hours a day on YouTube, you know, and you're spending 13 minutes a day on your meditation app, YouTube is way more important to you. Or video entertainment is way more important to you than meditation. I always thought that that was a beautiful way to describe, like, the breadcrumbs of your behavior. But the thing about feeding wolves is we've all fed dogs or seen dogs fed or wolves fed. Like, there's lots of ways to feed a wolf. And it's so, it's so visceral.

Do you know what I mean? Like, you can, like, slaughter something and just offer it to the wolf. You can throw at just a little piece of your cookie. Do you know what I mean? You can feed it from your hand. You can try and bring it in close to you. It has an interactive element to it rather than just like where are you putting your attention. It's where you're kind of investing some effort.

And there's something kind of like really visceral and corporeal in the act of feeding. Now, is there anything you talked about how binary it is like Goodwolf, bad wolf. Sometimes it's a gray wolf. You're not sure it's good that can, you know, you're doing good stuff, but maybe it feeds your ego a little bit. And it turns, so is there a way you would adjust the metaphor to take into account nuance and grayness? I mean, Buddhism talks about skillful and unskilledful actions, which is a term I like better than good and bad. But a skillful an unskilful wolf is not a very good parable. Right?

So it doesn't really work in that way. I think that it, I wouldn't really adjust it, but I think that to say that we have two things inside of us is understating the complexity of us as humans. You know, the second chapter in the book, I talk a lot about this. Like, we are motivational complex creatures. We want and value and believe lots of different things. And so I think in that way, it oversimplifies a lot of competing things that kind of go into our motivational soup. Yeah, that's true.

There can be a council of wolves. Yes, but an unruly council of wolves. In a conference room in our heads that all have slightly different agendas. Yes. And dividing, like, is one absolutely bad and one absolutely good? like maybe but there might be a whole plethora of wolves in the pack that have some competing issues inside of them yeah i mean even if i look at my addiction and i could say like unquestionably bad wolf but that bad wolf was i i got into drugs and alcohol and fell for them the way i did

for a reason they were solving a problem so even that wolf wasn't necessarily bad right now then you start getting into questions of like, well, is there evil? And that's, you know, that's metaphysically beyond the scope of really where I go. But I think part of it is understanding what we might call the bad wolf. Like, what's it after? What's it, what's it looking for? Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've talked about this before on the show, but in the Baha'i faith in my faith tradition, one of the founders of the faith, Abdul Baha, was asked if he believed in Satan. And he said, yes. And that's, and that That was very surprising to the interviewer. And he said, Satan is the insistent self.

Oh, I think I've heard you say that before. Yeah. Because that really lands with me. Yeah. Because I love that idea. We all know what it's like to feed the insistent self. Yes. That can be lust.

That can be materialism. That can be seeking status. Yep. That can be trying to overt your ego over someone else. There's lots of different ways that the insistent self can manifest. And do we feed the insistent self? We're feeding Satan. We're feeding the bad wolf. We know what that's like. But, you know, the insistent self is there for a reason. Like you said, like lust is there for a reason. You know, we're programmed to procreate. There's

nothing wrong with sex. It's a beautiful expression of our bodies and our souls. And, you know, We're desirous of people that we're attracted to. And, you know, that's, that's a beautiful thing. But it can, it can run away with the sled. Yeah, I think it's often to me a matter of degree. Things are often a matter of degree. A character trait or a behavior done in a certain way is not really a problem, but done too much becomes a very serious problem, right?

There's nothing wrong with having a glass of wine for people. Like the people can do it. I'm like, please have you. It's great. For me, actually current medical studies would say there actually is something wrong with a single glass of wine. But go ahead. That's true. That's true.

And for me, I took it way too far. It's like Aristotle's, I think it was Aristotle's golden mean, right? Like that virtue is a place between two things. Like if we look at something. It's the middle wave. The middle way. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I feel like continue. contemporary societies that way, there's nothing wrong with wanting some nice things. Right? Yep. But contemporary American Western culture is we all want the nicest things all the time. And I'm not immune to that. No.

I mean, you know, I look at places like I'm really addicted to reading wirecutter on the New York Times, which is where they have the very best items. Like, I want the best garbage can. I research on wire cutter and I look at each one and like, there's the perfect garbage can. Where do I find the best price on the perfect garbage can that's going to go in the corner of my bathroom or what have you? And there's nothing wrong with some research and getting a good bargain and finding a good

product. But this is our entire country is wired to acquire more and of the best and have better than your neighbor. And that if we accrue more, we're actually going to be more and more fulfilled. were out of balance. Yes. Yep. I remember hiring someone once who on paper was great,

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By the time I was 10, I was a kleptomaniac. and I don't mean, I mean like I stole obsessively. I was in trouble all through my youth. And so what happened? I mean, I had a very angry father. I had a depressed mother. I think I was a sensitive creature and probably just didn't get a lot of maybe

what you would want or need. I have very few memories of my childhood. One is me laying in my bed facing the wall and picking the wallpaper for hours, which doesn't sound like a well-adjusted child to me. So I had some sort of problems. I don't know exactly why or what they are. Again, I know some of what caused me to be the way I am. But in high school, I started drinking and using drugs like anybody would.

And I behaved very strangely right out of the gate. things like we would drink. I wake up in the morning. There'd be a little vodka left. I'd pour it in orange juice and I'd start drinking it. An odd behavior for somebody on like the third time they've ever had a drink. Right. But I started a nonprofit tutoring program for disadvantaged children around that time.

And I saw what alcohol and drugs were doing to their life, to their families. And I swore it all off. And then I went away for a summer. And I came back and my best friend was dating my girlfriend. and I was in so much pain. Someone said, you want to drink? I took the drink and it was like a switch flipped. And I was very rarely sober from then until I got sober seven years later.

It's just, I feel like I was just kind of primed and ready and off I went. Yeah. So part trauma, part brain chemistry. Yep. Part, you know, mental obsession. Yeah. And part spiritual. disease. Yes. I think that's a good, I think that's a good summary of the, of a lot of the

contributing factors. Maybe, you know, brain chemistry, maybe some genetics in there, which I guess would throw under brain chemistry. Yeah. But yeah. And we all know that person that everyone else can kind of drink normally and then there's the one person and they, wow, they're just drinking three times as much as anyone else and they're passing out and their personality is changing. And you can kind of see the. Yeah. Yeah. Even very early on, I knew like, Something is off here when I started again. And I was with people who were partying all the time. But there was something, I sensed something in me.

There was a desperation in me that I didn't necessarily see in some of the people around me. But I hung around a bunch of malcontents, right? Punk rockers. They were all a little messed up. Yeah. Yeah. You talk about your punk rock youth, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Has evidenced by what's on your head. Yes. Yes. How does that go to heroin, though. That's a big, that's a big jump. Yeah, it is. Was it big in suburban Columbus? Bigger than you would think. But I didn't get it in suburban Columbus. I was in the music culture there. I played in bands. And at some point, this is after several years of alcohol, anything, right? Just a sort of a garbage head.

And I went, I joined a band and I would go to band practice and I would be like, these people are more effed up than me. How is that possible? Like they, and finally. Finally, the answer was how it was possible is they were all doing heroin. And so they said one night, do you want to try it? And I said, sure. And it was off to the races from there. Wow. I'm glad you're still among us and bringing so much healing and life and light to the world.

I am too. If you're going to be grateful to be a heroin addict, it'd be good to be it around when I was versus now. It's far more dangerous now. And I almost overdosed. My girlfriend nearly overdosed. I've been around that, but it's just even more common today. So, yeah, I am very grateful. The first thing I remember about recovery was, and I learned it in the first couple months,

I remember reading it. It was a passage in the AA big book, and it said, selfishness, self-centeredness, that we think is the root of our problem, the insistent self. And that line really, I just got it. I really saw that like whether I was thinking good about myself, bad about myself, that I was always thinking about just myself. And I had reduced my entire world down to how do I feel. That was it. How do I feel? I don't feel good. I need drugs. I don't feel good. I need drugs. I mean, that that was what I made everything about. That's a pretty narrow view of life. It's a very

narrow place to be. And so so much of recovery for me was about expanding all that, about being able to recognize that I can feel a certain way, not like it, but not have to rush off and just grab the handle of changing it. And I think in many ways, that to me is the heart of what when people get it, is that they finally get that capacity. They have the capacity to say, this feels awful. I don't like it. I don't know what to do. But I'm not going to fix it that way anymore.

Now, oftentimes we go from fixing it that way to then trying to fix it that way and just fix it that way. And we work our way through a few different things. But there is a point of settling to, okay, I don't have to change how I. I feel all the time. Right. The other big thing I would say I learned really was that phrase I used earlier, this one about acting our way into right thinking, that behavior is a lever. Our emotions don't have levers.

We can't just reach in and pull on an emotion. I mean, try and tell yourself to be happy when you're depressed. You'll realize it doesn't work that way. Our thoughts, we can choose what to do with them when they come up, but we certainly can't choose which ones come up. sit in meditation for five minutes and you'll see that. You're like, well, I'm who's, who's running the show in here? It's just stuff's coming up. But behavior is something we do have a lot more. It is a, it is something we can do. And so I found behavior to be a really

helpful lever. And then spirituality. You know, spiritual, it took me a while to figure out what spirituality was to me. But the minute I got into recovery, I was pointed in that direction. Did you have a spiritual awakening? How did that work for you? I certainly clung to the thing they put in the back of the A big book, which I think was William James, which said, you know, a gradual spiritual awakening because I didn't have the Bill Wilson lights moment. I've had some of those later as I got deeper into meditation and other practices, but I didn't have any of them then. It was good for me to start thinking about spirituality. And like I said, it took me a little while to figure out what worked for me. What did work for you? I can first tell you what didn't work for me.

Okay. And I think you and I probably have sort of slightly different views. But when I got sober, it was 1995 in Columbus, Ohio. Twelve-step programs were the only thing that was available. And the God that was on offer was the standard traditional Christian God. That's just what was there then. And I did my best to believe in that, really hard, really hard. And it worked because a guy got sober. But about seven years into my recovery, no, less than that.

About four years into my recovery, five, it doesn't matter. I'm terrible with time. I had a son, I had a wife, who I met at a heroin dealer's house. We both managed to get sober. And she came on one day and said, I have fallen in love with another guy in the meetings that I'm leaving you. And I fell apart. I was really devastated. And what I realized as I went through that was that My trying to make myself believe that there was a God out there that was orchestrating things in a certain way. And if I did good, I would get good things was a childish spiritual belief for me. It didn't work when things got really difficult. And that over a couple of year period eventually led to me going back out and drinking for a couple of years, smoking pot.

I never went back to the heroin. But when I came back again, because I had to come back, it tells you all you need to know about that experiment. I was like, I have to find something that like I truly believe in at a heart level. What I landed on then was I just believed that there were certain principles that if I lived according to them, I would be able to handle what life brought me. And that was enough of a foundation to build on. Now, as I went deeper in- So were those principles your higher power then?

Yes. Okay. Yep. The principles in the group. Like name some of them. Honesty. Compassion. I don't know what to call trying to think of yourself less, but let's...

Other centeredness instead of being self-centered being other center. Other center was a really big... Service. Service. Yep. Those were the big ones. Equanimity. Equanimity was another one.

And so what worked for me then, I was like, well, I don't believe that those things are going to protect me against difficulty. I just believe they're going to help me handle it when the time comes. And that's turned out to be true. And then that has evolved over time into slightly deeper connection with reality, I would say, that now grounds me in a way. But those are still foundational to me as far as the way I view the world in my life and the way to live in it. Yeah. It's funny. I'm doing a little bit of cognitive behavioral therapy right now

and acceptance and commitment therapy. And this idea, which came a lot from Zen Buddhism, which I understand that you've studied, of just radical acceptance of the way things are. Yes. There's a line and I don't know who said it, but it goes something like this. Sometimes I take a long, hard, cold look at myself in the mirror and I think, Ray, in your face has slowly turned into crumpled up parchment. And honestly, that's why I started using OneSkin. I used the OS One Face moisturizer, and what stood out immediately is that it didn't just feel like some fancy cream in a fancy expensive bottle. My skin actually felt smoother and healthier over time. One Skin's OS1 peptide was specifically engineered to target those cells. So it's not

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And that's been my experience. What does that mean to let go completely? To me, the best way I can think of it is I just take my hands off the controls of life. You know, we're always fiddling with the dials. You know, I think the metaphor I was thinking of in my mind is like, I've got like a three degree temperature comfort window, right? Yeah, turn it up, turn it down. Like I want to be just exactly at like 70 degrees. Right.

So I'm constantly fidgeting with it. Right. I think there's lots of dials. Control. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of dials in life that we just fidget with to try and feel a little bit better or to try and subtly steer things. And so to me to let go completely and I don't know how to do it.

I've done it a couple times. And when I have, I've had true enlightenment, awakening in Zen, we would call it Sotori experiences, where I was totally free, totally liberated. If I knew how to do it, I do it all the time. I have no idea how to do it. But I do know how to let go more. What's tricky, of course, is I live by the serenity prayer, which says there's some things we should change, some things we should accept.

As I've thought more about it, I think about that question all the time. Like, how do you know? I've started to realize that oftentimes you have to change and accept the exact same thing. How do you mean? Let's take my depression as an example. So I've dealt with depression a lot of my adult life. It's been well managed for a number of years now, but it's there. It has its little moments.

And I've learned that there are things that I can do that affect it. positively. And so I do all those things. So I'm actively changing. Yeah. And when it shows up, the best course of action for me now generally is to be like, oh, well, here it is. Right. I mean, I'll look and I'll go, okay, am I doing the things I know take care of it? You know, I'll do the things that I know in that moment. Help me take care of it and cope with it better. But there's just a letting go. Like, Stop making a fuss out of it. Right. Stop making a fuss out of it.

I encounter the same thing with anxiety. So when it shows up, I spent years trying to squash it, quench it, get rid of it. Yeah. Oh, there it is. Fuck. Like, how do I manage control, suppress it, get rid of it, et cetera. And the idea of radical acceptance is total allowance of like, oh, there you are. my old really uncomfortable, itchy wool blanket of anxiety, welcome.

You're back. There you are. And just witness it. Just notice it and allow it. And sometimes it will still stay there for an hour or two or longer or whatever. But many times it will, in the allowance of it, naturally lift. Now, there's other things I can do. The other day I was feeling it.

And I was like, you know, I haven't taken a shower in like a day and a half of it and just took a nice brisk shower and felt remarkably better after just a stupid little shower. Sometimes it's like I'm going to walk down to the mailbox in the sunlight and get the mail, see if there's any mail. And just even just the five minute walk to the mailbox and back can. So there are there are physical things you can do. Yep. But I'm not necessarily doing them to get rid of my anxiety. Yeah. I've joked before that if you followed a lot of what I talk about and teach, what you would learn is how to not make things worse, which is not great marketing. But when you think of all the ways we do make things worse, it's a big deal. Like if you could just have anxiety without making it worse by trying to control it and be anxious about being anxious, which, I mean, it spirals on itself and it grows. And if we can just be like, okay, I'm just, I know how to not make this thing worse now. Yeah. Yeah. That. that goes a long way. And I think, you know, spiritual circles and, and, and the modern self-help

movement talk about this idea of just sit with it a lot. And I think we have a idea that that means that I'll just sit with it and then it will just go, which is not how it necessarily always works. No. But sitting with it does make it more likely to go. In my case, in my experience, it makes it more likely to go. And again, it doesn't amplify. Yeah. Well, because resistance is just going to heighten it. It is. It's just going to be like you're going to be wrestling with it and pulling it and and this and that and it'll gain heat and traction. And it lets more to adhere to. Yeah, the meditation teacher Shinzen-Yung came up with an equation years ago. Maybe you've heard it. It says, suffering equals pain times resistance. This is in the chapter on except.

there's a precision to that equation. So suffering would just be total units of, ugh, we want to call it, right? Pain would be the thing. So we could just talk about your anxiety or my depression. Let's say it's a six level of pain. Resistance is everything I'm doing mentally. I shouldn't be this way. What's wrong with me?

Why do I still feel depressed all these years later? You host a podcast. All that stuff is resistance. running around, you know. So the equation is suffering equals pain times resistance. So my pain's at a five. My resistance is at a five, 25 total units of ugh.

If I can turn that resistance down to a three, I now have 15 total units of ugh. And I haven't had to fix the underlying problem because I often can't. Right. I don't know how to make the depression go away when it's there. You don't necessarily know how to make the anxiety go away when it's there.

But if we turn the resistance down, I think the zero setting on resistance might be like the enlightened state. Yeah. Right? I don't think for most of us very often we turn the resistance down to zero. Yeah. But I can turn it down some usually. Have you read There Is Nothing Wrong with You by Huber?

Do you know that book? It's about shame. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, probably a long time ago. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. She makes a lot of key points. but one of her points is a Buddhist,

I don't know if it's a words of the Buddha or if it's just the Buddhist tradition, which is, you know, pain is a given. Suffering is optional. Yep. Is that a little bit of? It's the same idea. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. And I think there's a lot of truth in that idea. She also said something that I was looking at in one of her writings that was, any voice in your head that is not compassionate it should be discarded. And I love that.

It's easier, easier said than done. It is easier said than done. Because when those voices get going and are tearing at you. Yeah. They can live large. They can be the bad wolf in your head that don't go away quite easily. But just even knowing that, like, oh, any voice that I hear that is not compassionate, it's not there to help me.

It's not going to fix me. It's not going to make things any better. Yeah. because we sometimes get so addicted to a worry voice or a self-critical voice or a shaming voice. Those are programmed voices from long, long ago. They are. And they are not helpful. A lot of people will say, but that self-critical voice is what allowed me to achieve or succeed or drove me.

And what I found a lot, because I've done a lot of coaching work with people over the years, is I've countless people. it's like yeah that worked until you were like 42 you know I don't know who made the analogy they're like yeah yeah that self-criticism is a fuel but it's a dirty fuel and it gunks up the engine oh that's beautiful right and that's beautiful and that's been my experience of it it it is a fuel yeah but it's it's not one that you want to burn very often I had that in my career as an actor where a lot of my drive and especially and it's funny you say 42 because like through my 30s and early on getting onto the office and then some of the career after the office was I wasn't like

I did have envy right of other actors and comparison to other actors and stuff but it was kind of like this general like I'll show them you know kind of ambition and it was and it I'll show them kind of ambition I'm going to do the and it it got me a long way yeah and I also got very lucky with some really good jobs and stuff like that. But it was a dirty fuel. And it burned out about halfway through the office. It was like, I can't sustain on this. And it's making me miserable. And I'm breaking down every couple of months and my marriage is falling apart. And like, things are bad. And I realize like, oh, that ambition can be a powerful motivator. And I suppose there is such a thing as like a healthy ambition. I never encountered it. You know, we talk about balance.

in the middle way. Like I was like all in, you know, ambition. I was smoking the crack pipe of ambition. But that really like broke down. So really over the last 10, 15 years or so, it's, it's been like, how do I, how do I try and move a career forward with healthy fuel? Tell me about your relationship with Zen Buddhism. Yeah, I was first introduced to Zen Buddhism when I was in high school. I had a teacher who gave me a couple books on Zen Buddhism and I read them and I'm pretty sure I didn't understand most of it. Hell, I don't know if I understand it today and I've been reading it for 30 years. It's an inscrutable tradition. You know, it's just a, what is the sound of one hand clapping? You know, the first co-on you start on in a lot of practices is, does a dog have

Buddha nature, moo? What? Is that really one? Yeah. Does a dog have Buddha in nature? Mu. Well, what's moo? A cow? No, moo is no in Japanese. So a booed, a dog doesn't have Buddha nature. And you sit on, you just sit and contemplate that for hours. I mean, it's surprising it doesn't make you go crazy. Maybe that's part of the point. Anyway, I didn't understand much of it. But I did get an idea then. And it's been an important one to me ever since. And it was that I intuited in it that there was a way to be okay, no matter what, what was going on. And as an, I was a serious young man and I saw that the world was full, you know, I'm reading grapes of wrath, right? I mean, there's suffering in the world. There's a lot

of it. For me, for people around me, I did this tutoring program. I talked about, I watched all these young kids who just, I mean, in many ways, didn't have a chance. So it was pretty clear to me that life was hard. But I read that and I was like, oh, but there's a way no matter what's happening to be okay. I was like, I want that. Now, that didn't stop me from falling into years of drug addiction after that, but it planted a seed in me. And so when I came back to, you know, 12-step programs and I started moving beyond the like the Christian aspect of what I was sort of getting in meetings. And I have nothing against any of that. I respect all the traditions. But when I started to go like, what's for me?

I really started to turn towards Buddhism. It was the one that resonated the most with me. And then over Zen, then with Zen, I kind of went deeper into it. And when I try and explain why, I often don't know that I can say. I don't really believe that things like this is exactly true, but it feels like in many ways it chose me. You know, it feels like in many ways, for whatever reason, it's just been the, one. It's just what I resonate with. It's what I go back to. I mean, I mean, I was, I guess I still am, a

certified interfaith spiritual director. So, I mean, I've studied all sorts of stuff, but, but that's the place I tend to go home to. Yeah. The woman who started cognitive behavioral therapy, I forget her name now, I was reading her memoir, and she lived on a Buddhist monastery for like nine months as a and she was a PhD therapist at the time and took a lot of her cognitive behavioral therapy CBT ideas from her Zen experience and this idea of radical acceptance yeah which is the thing about Zen I most admire and struggle with about like things are the way they are can we be in total allowance of just the way things are right now and how that can shift things in really powerful ways. I'd love to hear your response to that and then talk about a lot of people

hear that and they go, yeah, but there's so much injustice in the world. There's so much cruelty in the world. There's so much that can be done that needs to be done. You know, immigrants, you know, and American citizens are getting thrown into vans right now. We got to do something. I'm not going to accept things the way they are. So talk about this, what, what is meant by this kind of radical acceptance? There's a teaching in, it's probably in all of Buddhism. I never know like what's in Zen specifically versus other parts, but there's a teaching called the relative in the absolute. And this was really key for me. And it says that there are two modes essentially of accessing reality. There's a relative mode of reality. And in the relative mode of reality, your reign Wilson

and I'm Eric Zimmer and you live in L.A. and I live in Columbus, Ohio, and there are people being thrown in trucks and that's wrong and there are people hungry and that's wrong. There's a relative world and we all live in it and we have to live in it and it's real. And there's an absolute world. And in the absolute world, there is an unbroken unity to everything. Things are as they are. They just are. It just is. There's, it, it's, it, it's a, it, it's a, it, it's a, it, it, it It doesn't, like most mystical, deepest truth, you can't name them. You can't really say it. But for me, it's, there is an unbroken unity to everything.

And what Zen says is they are both true. And they are both true at the same time. And not only that, they are essentially the same thing. And that a truly spiritually adept person is able to look at both of them, move back and forth really fluidly. Most of us are stuck in the relative 99% of the time. and and and and our spiritual traditions i think are are trying to get us to turn that but zen has something they call zen sickness zen sickness is when you only look at the absolute and you go it's

all cool man it's all good things are the way they're meant to be yeah that's not it that's part of the truth it's a it's an aspect it's a way of looking at the truth and so for me radical acceptance is in that absolute view What I'm aiming at is a certain fluidity where I can see both sides and I can see both are actually true at the same time. And the Buddha's charge is to work on one's serenity and non-attachment and acceptance and increase compassion. Yes. So that we can be so compassionate that we want to reduce the suffering of others. Yeah.

And we take that impulse to reduce the suffering of others. I think in the Western interpretation of Buddhism, Buddhism is just like meditate and just be in the moment and then that's it. We kind of stop there. But when you have lowered your own suffering and increased your own compassion, what is your action then? But to reduce the suffering of others. Look at those beautiful Vietnamese monks doing that walk across the country, you know, talking about peace, you know, in an absolute sense. but they made such a relative impact in that action. A hundred percent.

And I do think in a certain tradition of Buddhism, which Zen is part of, I'm not going to go into the different schools of Buddhism, but there's an idea of something called a Bodhisattva. You've probably heard that term. And a bodhisattva is simply a being that is awakened. The idea in Buddhism, the core thing was you awaken, nirvana, and it's referred to as like the snuffing out of,

of a candle, right? It's just gone. A bodhisattva hits enlightenment. It says, no thank you. I'm going back. And I'm staying in here until every single being has achieved the same thing. So yeah, there is a compassionate warrior element in my tradition of saying, yeah, we're aiming at peace and acceptance and we're also actively involved in the world in a meaningful way. And that's what you've done in your 12-step program. That's what you've done in your beautiful podcast of almost a thousand episodes. And that's what you're doing in this new book. If you could install three daily habits to every human being on planet Earth, what would they be? I'm going to give you one and leave it there. All right. I have a, I have something in the book I call the still point method.

And the still point method is a way of trying to change deeply entrenched thought patterns and reactions. And it's a very simple method. It uses some ideas from behavior change with sort of more of a spiritual container. And a still point is essentially a brief moment of pause or reflection that you do multiple times a day and you do them again and again. the days. So we use the science of behavior change, the idea of prompts. We need to remember. So I have a meditation practice in the morning that I do most mornings. And there's a reading practice that I often do too. And then I get up and I go about my day and I often don't think about any of that stuff until the next morning. Okay. So still points would be like,

all right, I set an alarm on my phone to go off four times today. And when it goes all, I do a reflection. So let me give you an example of a still point in action. For years when I had a job in a place that I went to, it was before I did this full time. I was in the software business. Every day when I would walk from my house to my car and from my car to the office and reverse,

I would do a simple exercise of what are three things I can see right now, where are three things I hear right now, where three things I feel in my body right now. It's a common practice. It shows up in a lot of different places. Doing it once is sort of, that's lovely, I suppose, but it doesn't make any difference. Doing it four times a day, five days a week, month after month, my capacity to be present deepened significantly. If I have a client who says, what I'm trying to do is be more patient with my kids, I'll say, great, let's install some stills. points. So we have an app that you can use. But there's free apps too, or you could just use an alarm.

It goes off four times a day randomly. And it just has a little reflection about why being patient to their children matters. They're a lot more likely to be patient with their kids at six that night. If they reflected on it four times today for a minute. They just do it as they walk from one meeting to the next. It's not like you have to stop and do anything. You just for a minute, you just, change the channel. But that's little by little, a little becomes a lot. That's how thought patterns change. They don't change in moments of dramatic insight usually. We may have an insight. We're like, oh my God. But they change by interrupting them again and again and again and again. And the Stillpoint method is just a way to do that. You don't have to do a whole lot. You don't have to

change your whole life. You just start putting these little containers of whatever you want. It could be one minute. One minute. You architect them into your day. Eckartouli was saying in a lecture once I heard him about stoplights. That's exactly it. We spend days of our life at red lights. Like if you tabulate on your deathbed, how many days that you've spent and said, practice getting to a red light and say, am I a red light?

And instead of letting your thoughts just whirr, you just turn and say, I am awareness, I am presence, I am alert presence, be there, listen to whatever the song is on the radio, like take in where you are until the light turns green. So do just kind of like throughout the day, a little practice of just being present and aware. Yep. And that all starts to add up. The one that I often try and get people to do is like, can you just every time you go to the bathroom? Not look at your phone. Just do like have a have your still point. You can think as like a little container. You can drop in it whatever you want. I'm working on patience. I'm working on gratitude. I'm working on whatever. Yeah. But if you do it every time you go to the bathroom,

you will change over time. There's a Baha'i obligatory prayer. It's a very short prayer that acknowledges that we have been created to know and worship God. It's literally like three sentences. You could say the whole prayer in 40 seconds. What is it? I bear witness, oh my God, that thou has created me to know thee and to worship thee. I testify at this moment to my powerlessness, to thy might, to my poverty and to thy wealth. There's none other God but the help in peril, the self-subsisting. So that's, that's it. And there is an atomic habit. There is a little lot in this action, because between noon and sunset is when we're supposed to say it. You're also supposed to just briefly wash your face in your hands to kind of remind you that you're kind of entering a sacred space of prayer.

There's nothing like big ritualistic about it. But oftentimes it's when I go to the bathroom, like, oh, it's the time that I can do it a little bit. And then it also reframes my day to say, oh, I'm a servant of the divine. I remember God, the place that God is in my life. And you do it every single day, it starts to be flexing that muscle working out that muscle. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Well, Eric, one thing we ask every guest on the show is this very strange and intangible word soul of soul boom. How would you define the word soul? I should have been prepared for this, shouldn't I? I should have known.

There's that voice. Yes. There's your critical voice at work. Soul to me is the form of the, we'll use the word divine because you just used it, the form of the divine light that I take. In Buddhism, we talk about emptiness and form. Form is soul. It's the way that the divine energy shows up as uniquely me. That to me is the soul.

I think there's a deeper transcendent level in which everything, we are all the same. We are all the same light of consciousness. But I do think that we all show up in a particular way. And soul to me is the best version of that. I often refer to it as my wisest, truest self. The part of me that knows what is worth wanting. That's beautiful. I love that.

Eric Zimmer, congratulations on almost 1,000 episodes of the one you feed podcast. People check it out. You've got some listening in front of you. You're on it a couple times. I've been on it a couple times. So maybe you're a long-haul truck driver and you need a couple million hours of podcast listening. There's no human that could need as much as many podcast episodes as I've created. But here we go.

Yeah, maybe you're incarcerated. They let you listen to podcasts. But especially check out how a little becomes a lot. The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life by Eric Zimmer. Can people find you online various places? Yeah, OneUfeeed.net, O-N-E-Y-O-U-F-E-E-D. Dot net. You can find me.

You can find the podcast. The book's available anywhere you would buy book. Podcasts available anywhere you get a podcast. Okay, beautiful. Thanks so much for coming on Soul Boom. Beautiful discussion. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

All right. The Soul Boom Podcast. subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.