The One You Feed - Anxiety, Beauty, and the Unknown: A Map to Emotional Resilience with David Whyte

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

In this episode, David Whyte explores anxiety, beauty, and the unknown as a true map to emotional resilience. David shares how anxiety can be a doorway to deeper understanding and connection. He and Eric discuss the paradox of holding both joy and struggle, the surprising wisdom hidden in everyday emotions, and how poetry and language can bring us closer to the heart of life. This is an inspiring look at how we can build resilience by embracing life’s uncertainties. Key Takeaways: Exploration of human emotions, particularly happiness and anxiety. The duality of human emotions and the internal struggle between positive and negative qualities. Insights from David's book"Constellations Two," focusing on the rehabilitation of common words and their deeper meanings. The significance of the parable of the two wolves in understanding personal struggles. The relationship between anxiety and unspoken truths about care and vulnerability. The role of poetry in expressing and understanding complex emotions. The importance of recognizing and embracing both happiness and unhappiness in life. The concept of horizons as boundaries that inspire imagination and growth. The idea that nagging in relationships can be a form of love and care. Encouragement to engage in meaningful conversations and reflect on personal emotional landscapes. If you enjoyed this conversation with David Whyte, check out these other episodes: The Art of Poetry and Prose with David Whyte Beautiful and Powerful Poetry with Marilyn Nelson The Power of Poetry with Ellen Bass For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You always get to your happiness through the travails of your discontent and your difficulties you have being in the world and being at ease in the world. Happiness is actually knocking on our door telling us this is the way to happiness. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We often take ourselves so seriously, the name we carry, the identity we've constructed,

the projects we chase, and yet, as David White reminds us, the whole endeavor might be just slightly absurd. In this conversation with poet David White, we explore the deep truths that reveal themselves when we let go of our need to name, to define, to fix. David talks about anxiety as a mask for unspoken truths, about the real meaning of care, and about the strange sacred humor that arises when we realize how much we don't control. From Zen koans to Irish folklore to yak mangers in the Himalayas, David weaves together the poetic and the practical. And somewhere in all of it, he helps us see that maybe the goal isn't

to be extraordinary, but to recognize the unordinary beauty of what's already here. This is an episode about loosening our grip, living with paradox, and letting language lead us closer to the world, not away from it. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommates' toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept,

but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of the On Purpose podcast, and I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian. God, I've been through so many things

that at this point I would rather not feel than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle. I am Chloe Kardashian. Chloe Kardashian everybody. Chloe Kardashian. No one understands how it's, I'm not just a TV show. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I want you to ask yourself right now, how am I actually doing? Because it's a question that we rarely ask ourselves. All of May is actually Mental Health Awareness Month.

And on the psychology of your 20s, we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about. Prepare for our conversations to go deep. I spent the majority of my teenage years and my 20s just feeling absolutely terrified. I had a panic attack on a conference call. Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend. So this Mental Health Awareness Month, take that extra bit of care of your wellbeing.

Listen to the psychology of your twenties on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi David, welcome to the show. Very good to be with you again, Eric. Yes, I am very honored to have you back on and very excited to talk with you. And we're going to be talking about your latest book, which is called Consolations 2, which is a series of essays about, I don't know if you call them common words, but words that all of us would know that you are putting under

a little bit more of a microscope, I would say. But before we get to that, let's start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, 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. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, that parable would have meant something very different to me a few decades ago than it does now. And with all of my Zen sitting and Zen study, but also the deep states of attention that poetry and walking around, I'd say, bring. I'd say the one you feed is the one that holds both together, actually, that you don't choose. We're always choosing between what we think are opposing qualities. And there's actually some invisible part of you that's able to hold both horizons and

to live in the territory between those horizons. I was just working with the story of the young Finn McCool out on the road. He's taken in under the tutelage of a wild bandit called Cormac McCall. And Cormac McCall takes the young Finn under his wing and teaches him the ways of a warrior. But he shows Finn this spear which is bound to a tree with tight cloths. And it's bound to a tree because this spear is so full of the spite of killing, as it says in the Irish mythological tradition. It's so full of the spite of killing that it will kill anyone it comes across. And Cormac McCall says to Finn, you must never unbind this unless your life is at stake, and then you can unleash the spear and use it. And so there's an understanding that we mostly

operate through cooperation, through kindness, but there are times for cutting through and for eliminating, I'm not saying people, but eliminating qualities that are standing in your way. And they take a kind of fierce, ruthless presence actually. And so human beings have never been able to choose just from the standpoint of evolutionary survival between their kind of cooperative qualities that they hold and the necessity to take a stand in the world. That not choosing, that ability to hold both sides of the world, you could say, these inner and outer horizons are very necessary and very powerful. I often think that horizons are enormously powerful in an individual human life. One of the essays in Constellations

2 is Horizon, the way that we're constantly seeing edges between what we know and what we do not know. And the horizons out in the world are certainly representative of that. There's nothing more beautiful than a far horizon to a human being, whether it's mountains or the ocean or a far plane. And we're finding out actually through medical research that human beings are actually much calmer, much more at home in the world, and much happier actually when they're looking at a far horizon, when they have their heads up and their eyes gazing into the distance. horizon, when they have their heads up and their eyes gazing into the distance. And we all know the forms of unhappiness we have from gazing too closely at our screens, you know, whether it's a phone or a laptop. But it's interesting to think that we also have

an inner horizon. We have a horizon inside us between what we can understand or actually feel physically about ourselves and what lies beneath. But we often feel that horizon inside us as a horizon of resistance or disturbance. We often see it as negative, actually, because what lies below will actually break apart what lies above. What lies below in many ways is the latest edge of our growing maturity, but it's way beyond the life that we have actually constructed for ourselves on the surface. So when you unbind that spear inside yourself, it feels as if it's going to destroy and kill your present life. And so the ability to live with both what is nourishing in the world and what feels like qualities that will end your life is a real necessity. So the ability to actually go inside yourself

and physically lean against that horizon, almost rest against it, and get used to what feels like a horizon of resistance and disturbance until it opens into something else. Often the qualities we feel there are what in your story, your parable, would be associated with the consuming wolf. And so the ability to live in the territory between those two horizons to hold both wolves inside you is what is called for in life. There are so many things you said there that I would like to respond to and I'm only going to be able to hit a couple of them. But one, when you're talking about fierceness, I couldn't help but think about Manjushri, the Buddhist, I don't know what you call him,

a deity, a figure, it doesn't matter, but he wields a flaming sword, right, to cut through delusion. I also was thinking about in one of your essays, you write about Zen, that one of the things about Zen is it refuses to choose between different things. And then the last piece I think underlies a lot of what I think the book is pointing towards, which is that these words that typically, as you said, might fall under bad wolf category or we might put under negative emotion category or however we want to label them, are actually very useful and instructive. And when I look at the words that I picked for us to talk about, this may be a personality test here in disguise, anxiety, shame, guilt, injury, nagging,

you know, unhappiness, you know, I left alone moon and reverie and sojourn. Again, diagnostic perhaps. Yes. Yeah. and sojourn. Again, diagnostic perhaps. But the point is that the reason I picked those words is because you help turn them on their head to a certain degree. You help us see where indeed those things, anxiety, shame, guilt, can be not good within us, right? They can be destructive, but they are also hugely constructive, seen in the right light. Dr. K. Exactly. And that's the task of all these microessays, both in constellations one and two, is to rehabilitate words and language that we use against ourselves. My understanding is that if there's a quality that we feel, whether it's jealousy and hate, then there's a place

for it in the constellation of our identity, actually. It's necessary to understand what hate is saying to you, what anxiety is saying to you. In my essay on unhappiness, which is one of my favorite ones, I say, if we're happy now, unhappiness is how we got here. You always get to your happiness through the travails of your discontent and your difficulties you have being in the world and being at ease in the world. Unhappiness is actually knocking on our door telling us this is the way to happiness. So it's a rehabilitation of so many parts of ourselves that we've consigned to the negative, to one wolf or another, when you're not supposed to choose, you're supposed to live in the intimacy between them. And I'm thinking now of a Zen koan where the end of the story says

that not knowing is most intimate, not knowing is most intimate. When you can think about that in a love relationship with your partner, your wife, your husband, that the more you can see them as if you've seen them for the first time, the more possibility you have of loving them for who they actually are rather than the delusory identity that you've granted them as a resentful part of the partnership. And so, but also not knowing allows you to look at a bird. You know, I was trained in zoology

and marine zoology and we learned all of the Latin names of animals and birds. So you're automatically in the presence of a bird singing out the double-barreled Latin name of it as if that tells you what you're looking at. It's actually a delusion. It's actually a gate. I had to teach myself when I went as a young naturalist to the Galapagos Islands not to say the Latin name to myself, to let the bird announce itself literally through its behavior, through its song, through its presence, through its flight, you know, to get another essence that lies beneath the name. So we're constantly naming things in ways that allow us to handle it, or I should say,

allow our strategic minds to handle it, because we can be so terrified by the fierceness of the world. In our evolutionary past, when we were gathered at night around the fire and you listened out into the darkness and heard all of these cries and trumpet calls, and I've had this experience actually in today's world in the African bush, you told stories about what was out there. And the story helped you to make sense of your fears and also of your communal protections, psychological protections. But it didn't mean to say that your stories were true about what you were hearing or what you were frightened of.

And all of our great traditions going back for hundreds of thousands of years always say that the real ability to be present in the world is through deep, prolonged, silent attention. And the ability to shape a deeply attentive identity that can sustain that form of attention is how we come to ground in this world and how we actually live in the territory between what we call unhappiness and what we only call happiness. I want to go back to something you said a couple minutes ago about once we name something, we cease to see it. I think Christian Murdy had that quote, which was something like,

you know, once the child learns the name of the bird, they never see the bird again, pointing to what you're saying. And at the same time, one of the things poetry does is its specificity about what it's seeing. It's seeing a birch tree, not a tree. Even the Zen Koan, you know, it's not a tree in the courtyard, it's the oak tree in the courtyard. So there is also at the same time, the concept and the name takes us away from the thing. There are ways and times in which the name brings us closer to the thing. Yes. Emily Dickinson said, a word is dead when it is said, some say, but I say, it just begins to live that

day. There's a poet speaking. I mean, the task of poetry is to use language in a way which grants life and is just as movable as the thing that you're speaking of. And so it's why you'll almost never see the word God in good poetry. And if you do see the word God, it always brings the poem to a halt. You have to use language that opens up the physical quality itself and opens up the silence behind that word and the kind of gravitational pull of the world. I often talk about the conversational nature of reality and the ability of a human being to create a more conversational identity in that world. But you could say that every conversation is based on a mutual invitation. And we all know the way in intimate relationships

that the conversation stops when our invitations stop. When you stop making an invitation to your partner in a marriage or a relationship, almost always the conversation and the relationship is coming to an end. So the invitation we make is through our eyes, our ears, and then our speech. So poetry is invitational speech in a way, and it's joining the invitational nature of the world. The world's constantly calling us out from any subscribed or circumscribed perimeter that we've laid down for ourselves in the dust around our feet.

It's constantly calling us over the horizon that we've arranged for ourselves. And it's one of the reasons the world is so nourishing. It's one of the reasons the world is so terrifying at the same time. And our ability to submerge in screens and not be physically present in the world is definitely one of the ways we're hiding.

And especially in North America, it's almost become a cultural norm to walk into places where everyone has their head down in screens, you know, where they are controlling what they see, what they're listening to in many ways. And the wilder, more abandoned edges of the world, you know, are kept at bay, where you don't have control of who you meet, where the conversation leads you, how your physical body is behaving in the presence of other physical bodies. So inner and outer horizons, the conversational nature of reality, the invitational nature of reality that will never ever lead us alone,

which is why we so often get anxious about the world. But anxiety is one of the telling qualities that tell us we're supposed to respond to a certain knock on our door in a way other than the way we're responding to it now. So let's move on to anxiety. It's one of your essays. And I was wondering if maybe you could just read the first couple paragraphs of it. Yes. Yeah, I was just revising this the other day, actually. So, this is the latest version or just a few sentences changed, but crucial sentences, I think. Anxiety is the mask that

truth wears when we refuse to stop and uncover its face. Anxiety is the mask that truth wears when we refuse to stop and uncover its face. The disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put things right by worrying about them instead of conversing with them. The disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put things right by worrying about them instead of conversing with them. The disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put things right by worrying about them instead of conversing with them. Anxiety is my ever-present excuse for not truly resting into the body or the breath or a world where I might find out that truth. might find out that truth. Anxiety is the temporary helper going by the name of worry, who when turned into our constant living companion becomes our formidable jailer. In the midst of anxiety, we always haunt the body like an unhappy ghost from the past,

body like an unhappy ghost from the past, instead of living in it as a live anticipation of our future. Anxiety creates the ghost-like sense of living timidly in our mortal frames, so that we begin living in the world in the same way as a troubled guest, a guest who does not believe they deserve the rest and hospitality that the body, the breath or the world can offer. Anxiety is the mind refusing to be consoled and nourished, either by the body itself or by the beauty of the world that this body inhabits. Anxiety is an extended state of denial the refusal to put right something that needs to be put right. Because pushing it right often means feeling real language a real sense of the unknown and the need to change at a fundamental level.

That last line is crucial about the refusal to feel real anguish. Anxiety is often a limbo state where we refuse to actually fall down into the grief that we're actually feeling. You know, if you read back into our mythological past or even into the Bible, the King James Bible, you see people are constantly falling down weeping or tearing their clothes. There was an understanding that a full state of physical grief is actually a form of enlightenment. We've all had that experience where we lose someone close to us, you know, that just breaks apart all of our defenses and we break down weeping. And for many people that is the nearest experience they will have to what is called kensho in the Zen experience, a breakthrough of enlightenment actually. You're on an edge. There's nowhere else to be in the world. There's no further place to go. You're intimate with the

loss. You're intimate with your own physical body in the world. You've given up your hopes for an easy explanation, and you're just plunged into the sheer physical absence of the person that you've lost. And there was a moment back in the 13th century where the great Dominican mystic, Meister Eckhart, was asked by someone obviously in a state of grief because he said, where is God? Where is God? And Eckhart said, God is nowhere. God is pure absence. He must have thought a lot of the person he said this to because it's, you know, it's asking a lot of the person to whom he's speaking. So it's probably someone who was a student of Eckhart that he'd be worthy of this description, that he'd be up to and able for understanding God in this way, that God is the far horizon of your yearning. It's where you're being pulled to out of yourself. It's the greatest context you can imagine. And you know, even if you're imagining it,

that it will lead you to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not Those were some callers from my call-in podcast therapy gecko It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake Gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his pizjar in our apartment. I collect my roommates toenails and fingernails. I have

very overbearing parents even at the age of 29 they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for therapy gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, my name is Jay Shetty and I'm the host of On Purpose. And I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian. God I've been through so many things that at this point I would rather not feel

than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle. Alright we're ready. I am Khloe Kardashian. Khloe Kardashian everybody. Khloe Kardashian. No one understands how it's... I'm not just a TV show. There would be times that I was like, I don't even want to go out to the grocery store

because I feel like I know what they're thinking about me. And that was scary to me because I've never been in a dark place for that long. You've always taken care of others. Have you discovered anything about why you've seen yourself take on that role in so many relationships in your life? How do you even find the courage to trust again? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hold up Sam, how do we know how we done the DNA test? Well John, luckily it's Mother May I Have a DNA Test Week

on the OK Storytime Podcast, so we'll find out soon. And this wife writes, My husband received a Facebook message from a woman saying that he is the father of a five year old. Whoa! At first he didn't remember her, but then he realized they had a one night stand right before we started dating.

Wait, but do we have proof he's a dad? Well the author says there's no confirmation the kid is even his son, but the woman from Facebook has a meeting with her lawyer soon. I think she's going after our money. If the kid is actually my husband's, she would be entitled to it too.

So what's a husband got to say about this? This could be his kid. Well, apparently he broke down in the middle of the living room apologizing, but this is what scared me. His first instinct, if the kid is his son, is to pay the child support, but not be an active father in the kid's life

because he only wants a family with me, his wife. Oh, this is a mess. To hear the explosive finale, follow OK Storytime on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Back to anxiety, I think part of the problem with anxiety is that I think it arises out of uncertainty. Let's say I'm anxious about something.

If that thing were to actually occur, I have developed some degree of capability of allowing myself to go into the grief, the heartache, the pureness of all these things we're talking about. What I found harder to do is when that loss is looming and may or may not happen. And it seems those are the really difficult things to set down, the ones that could go either way. Yes. Yes. So this is, you know, the powerful physical gift that deep silence gives you is to allow the world to be itself and to announce as it goes along what's actually occurring. Because we all know how many of our anxieties will never

actually come to pass and we all know the way that things we should be anxious about will come to pass. Right. Quite often. That we have no idea are even coming. Yeah, what we're worrying about is not what we should be worried about precisely and the ability to see to the center of the pattern also strips away all of these necessities that the surface that we think we need. In order to be ourselves. always leads you to a radical kind of simplicity. And so many of the things that you're defending on the surface, you realize are ridiculous and part of some absurd project that you decided

or your ancestors decided to hand down to you. You immediately eliminate a lot of the things you're going to worry about just by paying attention in deep silence and starting to shape an identity that's attention in deep silence and starting to shape an identity that's in that deep silence. The horizons that you were talking about, I was actually going to save that kind of end of the interview because I think it is such a uplifting and hopeful, although there's fear embedded in it. But ultimately for me, it ends up being hopeful because this idea that there is a horizon

out there that I can't yet imagine is really consoling to me because I think what we all tend to do is we have something that feels important to us and it's out there in the future and it's uncertain. And we want it to go a certain way, because all we can imagine, as far as we are able to imagine, is how this thing we want won't happen. And that's as far as we can see. But a horizon says there is something beyond that. The definition of a horizon that you can't actually see what's beyond it, but your imagination is drawn to it. And your physical body is drawn to it at the same

time. We're migratory creatures, actually. We came out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, following horizon after horizon. It was part of our ability to survive and be in this world, actually, but it's also part of our joy, the joy of beauty and of exploration. Often when we lose our relationship to beauty, we also lose our relationship to courage, which is really our heartfelt love of the world and care for the world. and care for the world. And so there's another paragraph here in the essay on anxiety. The way we use it is a defense against beauty and against nourishment and against all the ways that the world is actually giving to us, you know, through the blue of the sky, the green of grass, you know, the wind across the mountainside. Constant anxiety is an unconscious defense against what is calling us to a deeper understanding. Ever-present anxiety actually covers over

and prevents me from feeling fully what is preying on my mind or what is trying to be gifted to me. Constant anxiety is our constant way of not paying attention. Anxiety is a trembling surface identity that finds the full measure of our anguish too painful to bear. Constant fretting is our way of turning away from

and attempting to make a life free from the necessities of heartbreak. Anxiety is our greatest defense against the vulnerabilities of intimacy and a real understanding of others. Allowing our hearts to actually break might be the first step in freeing ourselves from anxiety. That's probably the most radical line I wrote in the essay.

Allowing our hearts to actually break might be the first stepping freeing ourselves from anxiety. There's another essay in here called care, the word care. And my favorite in that essay is care doesn't care. If you don't want to care. Human beings don't have a choice about caring. They always care about something. Yes. And care is the measure of our heartfelt participation in the world. And the only way you can stop caring is to actually close yourself off from the world. So opening up the path of care is also opening up the path of heartbreak. There is no sincere path a human being can take in this life without having their heart broken. And yet we spend

enormous amounts of energy trying to find a path where we will not have that imaginative organ broken open and displayed to the world. Right. I had something I was going to say and it just zipped away. That's the heartbreak of interviewing. You just redeemed that. That's probably going to end up staying in the interview now. Chris isn't going to cut it exactly.

Anyway, I'm going to move on because it's gone, but I'm gonna stay with anxiety for a second. And I'd like to talk a little bit about what do we do with this? Because again, I think sometimes yes, it's a way of avoiding what we're actually feeling. And I think in the other way, it's what we talked about, it's this uncertainty. And there is care in it because we are seeing that

this thing really matters to us and we don't know what's going to happen with it, which is, I think, what causes the anxiety. And you say that anxiety is difficult to shed because it always refuses to rest and rest is where the answer to anxiety lies. Yes, and actually rest lies under our anxiety. The very thing you're being anxious about is the very thing you're meant to converse with in a different way than your anxiety is allowing you to speak. That's a beautiful way of saying it. Anxiety is both my protection and a sure indication of my deepest vulnerabilities, all at the same time. What seems completely wrong with my life, with the world, and with the time in which

I live, is often my greatest manufactured defense against being fully part of this world, this body and this time. What I worry about and fret about for my children's future is often what keeps me from helping them into that future. What I worry about and what I am anxious about keeps me in an insulated, busy state of mind that stops me feeling the true depth and vulnerability of how much I care,

how much I want to make a difference and how much I feel powerless to do it. So underneath anxiety lies this deep well of care. I care about something, but I'm afraid of caring to the depth to which it's calling me, because it calls for a kind of physical vulnerability in the world that probably my parents or my schooling or my society did not initiate me into. So I need help, you know. You can get it from the poetic tradition, from our great contemplative traditions that

talk about the vulnerabilities. You know, we tend to think of Zen, for instance, and I've got an essay on Zen. We tend to think of it as this beautiful, clear state. And it's all about polished floors and bronze bells and the clarity of sitting in silence, very organized. But really, the path of Zen is the invitation to heartbreak. And all of the Zen Co-Ons are often about physical breakdown, about not understanding something because you can't stand being so fully invited so physically into the world and the breaking apart into tears or a great shout or the moon reflected in the surface of the water in the bucket, the bucket breaks open, the water runs out, and then it says and then the monk is enlightened. And you don't realize the physical experience of breakdown that the said monk went through at that time. Yeah, it's always monk so-and-so stubbed his toe, hit his head, was struck by lightning,

was locked in a tomb. There's always something like that to your point which causes this breakthrough. I want to pause for a quick Good Wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this,

we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove? If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits

that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. Let's move on to a couple of the other things. There's so many that I wanna talk about and the book is amazing in that way. I don't know how many you wrote, but there's a lot. I ended up choosing like 25 and then I had to edit way down from there. So I want to make sure

we get a little bit of a tour. The numbers important actually because it was a part of the story. I began very naturally writing these essays and I created a reader's circle and did 24 people signed up for it and I did 24, one every two weeks for people and that got me writing and then I did another 24 and then I said, oh, I have a book and then I added a few more and lo and behold, it came out with 52 essays in the first book. And all of the reviewers said, oh, a pack of cards or one for each week of the year. It was just sheer luck that I put 52

out. And so I decided to do 52 again in the second one, just because the number had been so talismanic. So luckily, talismanic for the first one. And I actually wrote 65 essays in seven months last year in a kind of delirium. And it was a delirium, actually. And then I chose 52 out of the 65 to put out in the book. I think that's very interesting because one of the things that I noticed in beginning to read the book, and this is a feature of our modern life, right, that we're going so fast, is that at first reading of some of the essays, you know, I'm talking about the

first hour in the book or so, I'm feeling impatient because I'm like, this is beautiful, but what's the bottom line? You know, David, lay it out for me. What's the bottom line? And as I had a little bit more time with it, and I began to slow down, then they start working on a completely different level. And so I think a week is actually an interesting amount of time to think about spending with one of these. That's well said, Eric, because you're not meant to start this book and read it all the way through.

Right. And it would probably kill you in the way it killed me to write it if you did that. Yeah. You're meant to take one essay and spend a few days with it actually. And they're short enough that you can return to them. And yes, exactly, the physical experience itself. It's like

poetry, you can't speed read poetry. Poetry itself actually engages you to slow down to the same physical experience in which it was actually written. Yes. There's an old Chinese line, something like, read a book for the thousandth time and the truth will emerge. And when I started studying with a Zen teacher really seriously, I remember he was like, okay, here's the book to read. And it was, I think it was Appreciate Your Life by Mizumi Roshi. It doesn't really matter. But what I noticed was I was told and encouraged to read that book in a totally different way. This is in the last decade since I had this podcast.

And as part of having this podcast, I'm reading a lot, right? Because I'm trying to honor every guest by reading their things. I'm trying to understand the material. So it's the way I show love to the guests, to the audience, right? But it's fast. And I suddenly realized when I was doing this reading for my Zen practice, I was reading a book that I could have read in an afternoon for six months. Yes.

And your essays, I think, provoke a similar thing. There's a lot of facets as you turn the diamond around, you know, the diamond being the word, right? There's so many facets. And of course, there's that thing that happens when we read, which is that if we truly are engaging, we are not the same person that we were the first time we read it. Yes, exactly. I mean, the essays are written in a poetic fashion. And in poetry, you only need one line, actually. They are like coins. In my essay on despair in the first book, the only line you

need from that essay is despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go. Despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go. Everything's in that line, you know, the shelter that's in despair, the invitation to give up, it's a temporary form of giving up where we pretend we can't go on in a sense, in order to go down to another layer of ground. And so, yes, prolonged attention. You're much better reading one line and staying with that for a good few hours or one paragraph than you are running through the whole book, you know, so quickly. So, as you know, Eric, we have our educational systems commoditize learning. And I think actually one of the bright sides of what's also going to have a big shadow, you know, with artificial intelligence, is

that we're no longer going to be able to test people on rote learning. It's going to free us up. We're going to have to reimagine what learning and testing what learning means. We're going to have to go back to more of the ancient oral inheritance of testing presence and testing understanding at a deep level. What you say about only needing one line, it's funny when I listen to you read, there are so many lines that could be the line that I expect that's the end, right? Like you just hit it with the line that ends up and then it goes on. And I say that as a compliment, not as a negative thing, right? Because each of these lines is good enough that it could be an

ending and you'd have so much to ponder and reflect upon. Let's move into another essay. I am going to skip by for now, too, that I really want to talk about guilt and shame because it's really important, right? Those are really big things. But I feel like I want to hit one that just was the one that I most was like, huh? That I didn't see coming. And it's about nagging. Yes.

You say nagging is love un-listened to from both sides. Say more about nagging. I found it a really beautiful essay and surprising. Well, thank you. There's a number of essays that are begun tongue in cheek. The one now, you know, the essay now where I say, now is not what it was, then it goes into more serious territory. And I just wanted to choose something that we all have to work with in relationship. And I thought, have I ever come across a long-term relationship where nagging

doesn't occur, you know, either in your own life or witnessing other marriages. And I realized what an emblem of care it is, actually. And if you're in a relationship where you're never nagged, you do have to ask yourself if the person really cares about you. I mean, we know all the evidence of the way that in relationship, especially for men, you're going to live longer being in relationship, most especially with a woman who's actually asking you if you're taking care of yourself in the right way. And men live so much longer in relationship. Unfortunately, women don't, so they need to do that. But nagging is love un-listened to from both sides. The helpless nagger and the equally helpless naggie.

Nagging is something both sides want to turn away from, something both sides would rather not experience, but something that is also an abiding and ancient necessity in every long-term relationship. Love meets term relationship, love meets powerlessness. Love meets powerlessness. Nagging is our way of knocking on a door when those living inside most need our help, but refuse it. Or when we ourselves neglect again and again to ask for the necessary help. Nagging is necessary in every committed human relationship because nagging is the way love tries to survive when it feels it has no other way. Yeah, the two lines there for me are when love meets powerlessness and then the last one, nagging is the way love tries to survive when it has no other way and yes I love it because it goes back to these

things that we see as negative point towards what we truly care about and what matters and nagging is just another example of that it is there's something that I want there's something deeper I want here in this relationship and I'm not getting it. And it's partially why nagging often the relationship advice is like, look underneath the thing. It's not about the thing. It's not about the trash being taken out or not being taken out. It's not about, it's usually about something far deeper, which gets to another essay that you've alluded to, which is care. We're feeling uncared for. So we're nagging as an attempt because it's the way we're trying to keep love alive when it feels it has no other way. Just such a beautiful idea.

Yes, it can also be proactively helpful in a way that can help a person who's refusing to get diagnosed for some know, for some kind of pain they have in their body, they're just trying to soldier on, you know, most especially in the masculine psyche and the necessity to keep knocking on that door and to find different ways of saying it until it's heard. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not Those were some callers from my call-in podcast therapy gecko

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake Gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his pizjar in our apartment.

I collect my roommates' toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

Hey, my name's Jay Shetty and I'm the host of On Purpose. And I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian. God, I've been through so many things that at this point I would rather not feel than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle. All right, we're ready. I am Khloe Kardashian. Khloe Kardashian, everybody.

Khloe Kardashian. No one understands how it's, I'm not just a TV show. There would be times that I was like, I don't even want to go out to the grocery store because I feel like I know what they're thinking about me. And that was scary to me because I've never been in a dark place for that long. You've always taken care of others.

Have you discovered anything about why you've seen yourself take on that role in so many relationships in your life? How do you even find the courage to trust again? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband has a secret son from a past partner. Hold up Sam, how do we know how we've done the DNA test? Well John, luckily it's Mother May I Have a DNA Test Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. And this wife writes, My husband received a Facebook message from a woman saying that he is the father of a five-year-old. At first he didn't remember her,

but then he realized they had a one-night stand right before we started dating. Wait, but do we have proof he's the dad? Well, the author says there's no confirmation the kid is even his son, but the woman from Facebook has a meeting with her lawyer soon. I think she's going after our money.

If the kid is actually my husband's, she would be entitled to it too. So what's a husband gotta say about this? This could be his kid. Well, apparently he broke down in the middle of the living room apologizing, but this is what scared me. His first instinct, if the kid is his son,

is to pay the child support, but not be an active father in the kid's life because he only wants a family with me, his wife. Oh, this is a mess. To hear the explosive finale, follow OK Storytime on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think that's so tricky to figure out.

I'll give you an example. I've got a friend. Yes. And her husband is taking terrible care of himself, right? High blood pressure, you know, high cholesterol, way overweight, eating terribly, not exercising. And his father went in his 50s from heart disease. And he is now in his 40s. And they have young children. So she is really flummoxed by this and frustrated by it, right, because she doesn't want her kids or herself to be left without their partner in potentially five to 10 years.

And so I think what you come up against here is this also love meets powerlessness. Like what can you do that doesn't destroy the relationship by trying to get somebody to do something they don't currently want to do? Yes, I mean, it's the invitation on both sides is on the one side to say it in a way in which there are no defenses against what you're saying. And on the person who's being asked, it's listening at another level. Yes.

But sometimes in order for that listening to occur, you literally have to get down on your knees. You can't just keep saying it as a logistical invitation, get to the doctor, get to the doctor. It may actually necessitate you as the nagger going to another level of intimacy, literally getting down on your knees in tears and saying why it's so important to you. You know if that doesn't work it may be that the relationship is coming to an end. There are certain points you know where you try sincerely, metaphorically and mythologically three times.

And if it's not received, then you're meant to hold a different conversation with that person. But you won't find out until you follow what looks like nagging on the surface to its foundation in a real invitational conversation that displays your vulnerability and why you're asking this. And I think it gets to a really challenging thing, which is what are we willing to or able to live with in a relationship? And what is our relationship with ourselves about the trade-offs that life inevitably involves? Yes. I'd like that to be your next book. Take the

Serenity Prayer and write an entire book about how the wisdom to know the difference in lots of really naughty situations. Why don't you tackle that one next? Pete Liesveld All right. That's your next book. Jared Liesveld Actually, I honestly think it might be. I really sort of jokingly, but not because that idea of, well, you just accept the things you can't change and you change the things you can is lovely on the surface. But boy, it's complicated because we don't know. You don't know.

Am I one more ask from the person changing? Well, you know, there's another level to this is the way we nag ourselves. We nag ourselves in unproductive ways. Nagging is, you know, you will often say to yourself in the mirror, oh my God, you know, you need to lose some weight, you know. But it's really underneath that, the need to be lithe, to be young, to be healthy in the world, you know. And the ability to actually talk to yourself in the mirror in a way in which you would want to listen to yourself is a whole discipline in and of itself. If you talked to your friends the way you talked to

yourself in the mirror, you'd never have another friend in your life actually. So the ability to have compassion for yourself, you could say that's a practice of deepening the conversation, deepening what looks on the surface like nagging. The conclusion of the micro essay on nagging is, nagging is that heavily disguised, beautiful, but un-listened to invitation to a better life we all want to receive. Nagging is that heavily disguised, beautiful, but un-listened to invitation to a better life we all want to receive, always despite ourselves, and always, always, always, always, despite the other person trying to be brought out of the place where it is presently hiding. Nagging is love, just love un-listened to

from both sides. That point you made about we're nagged quite often because we're not really listening, right, to our conscience, to what is good for our health, to the courageous beckoning path we refuse again and again to take. And I think that's what's so interesting. It also points to a lot about what you talk about in the essay on guilt, right, which is we tend to think we should move away from it, but it could be enormously instructive. So that nagging voice inside of us, I think, calls upon us to have some degree of

discernment about is it nagging us unnecessarily and in unkind and habitual ways like you just described? Or is it nagging me because there's a deeper call that I'm not answering? And like many things, that's difficult to figure out. But one of the things that you've said multiple times, and I've heard you say it before, but I don't think it landed for me in the same way that it did today, is that it's about the conversations that we have with these things and going to a deeper level of conversation with them than we normally do. That seems to be an underlying theme of what you're pointing us to in all of these.

Yes, and we can tend to think of conversation as just some kind of verbal exchange, you know, but the Latin roots, the etymology of conversation, lead us to its original meaning, which is inside out actually. Converse means inside out. And you're literally meant to bring the inside to the outside. That's the true invitation in every conversation. We all know the satisfaction when we have an exchange and they're rare, although you can make them less rare through practicing deeper conversations.

We all know the pleasure and satisfaction we get when we suddenly say something we didn't realize we knew. And that we said we suddenly say something together. I mean, I'm having that experience with you, Eric, in this interview where we're saying things about things I've written here, which I'd never quite said before. That's incredibly satisfying. It's bringing the inside of an experience out into the world again. And the essays themselves are meant to do that.

But it's interesting to try and think of, more than interesting, to think of conversation as a physical experience of bringing the inside to the outside. Not just what's hidden verbally, but the physical experience that's hidden under the words out into the world. That's beautifully said. Let's lighten things up here quite literally because you say that humor is a disguised form of spiritual discipline. I've often called it a spiritual virtue. Levity is a spiritual virtue.

Talk to me about how humor is a disguised form of a spiritual discipline. Humor tells us that whatever context we've arranged for ourselves in our minds or in our religious beliefs, there's always another context that makes your context absurd and just understanding that from the get go gives you a real sense of humor real ability to live at many different levels at once. really big in the Irish culture. And it's big because it fits with the Irish understanding that whatever you say always has another context that contradicts it. Yeah. And every conversation in the West of Ireland is actually based on this dynamic, every real conversation. You try to subvert the original basis on which the conversation started and then everyone's really happy and you can go on to the next subject. Actually, I'm serious about humor, serious about humor as the understanding now, however you've described yourself,

it will not survive meeting with reality. I had this experience many years ago up in the Himalayas of almost dying from amoebic dysentery. I was hallucinating for three days and three nights actually in a yak manger at 10,000 feet and this outside where this family were keeping me alive actually. And the culminating experience after three days was sitting up covered in dried yak dung and straw, just laughing outrageously. The whole family ran out actually to see what was happening. And my experience was that this whole David White project

was totally absurd. Yeah. And I had this name, I had this idea about myself, and it was just absolutely ridiculous. And I was literally raving, sitting up, but it was a real powerful breakthrough that stayed with me after I came out of the hallucination. And beneath me was this river in the valley, the high valley,

that came out of the slopes of Dalagiri. And I realized looking at the river, we'd given a name to that river, the Marciandi River Valley, but actually you were naming something that was already gone. And you might as well try to understand the human being, you know, through this essential movement through the world, through the way they hold the conversation of life, rather than through any static nomenclature. We often will try to dismiss a person by labeling them. You see it in the adolescent behavior emanating from the White House at the moment, you know, naming, nicknaming people,

giving people names that make them small in the eyes of the world that embarrass them. You know, this is the way that we behave as adolescents in trying to keep the world at bay and trying to keep other adolescents at bay. We want a more mature experience of the world. We stop naming people too early in the process. You know, we stop calling our wife, wife, our husband, husband, our partner, partner. We start releasing them from the names we've given them. You're good at this. You're bad at that. You know, it's your fault. It's my fault. And you start to let the words emanate from another more movable, more conversational, more invitational,

more vulnerable, robustly vulnerable, where vulnerability is not a weakness but a strength, place and it's actually not a place, it's more of a waveform or it's a tide, it's the sea that lies beneath you and between you and the world. I have a whole book of love poetry called The Sea in You, actually, and it's the ability to stay in love with a person by actually feeling that tidal give and take inside them. They don't even know who they are, so how could give them a name right and say you know who they are they're just finding out who they are. We give names to our son or daughter in about who they are but. They're often out in the world trying to find that out themselves so how could you even as a father or mother.

Name fully the child that you brought into the world, actually. And as soon as you name it, it's something else, right? I mean, that's the Taoist view of reality. And Zen comes out of Taoism, which is that life is all process, it's all event, it's all relation. These things that we are giving nouns, they aren't that way really at all. And the same thing happens if you dig deep down into the fundamental level of reality, right? If you get down into quantum physics, you find things aren't things in the way we think they are. Yeah, there are great lines in a love poem by Pablo Neruda. He says, when the rice withdraws

from the earth the grains of its flour, when the wheat hardens its little hip joints and lifts its face of a thousand hands, I make my way to the grove where the woman and the man embrace to touch the innumerable sea of what continues. Para atacar el mar innumerable de lo que continúa. To touch the innumerable sea of what continues. So we're afraid of what continues because what continues may take the other person away from us, and that's the risk we take. In loving fully, it's always the full measure of your ability to give the other person away to the world. And most

of the time they come back to us, but there may be a tide that takes them away from us completely. And that's what we're afraid of is, is the change in the world that will break your heart. So the ability to understand that heartbreak is part of your sincere dedication to the other actually and the sincere dedication to our world at the same time. So listener, in thinking about that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot.

Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action. What would it be? Remember little by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give you a tip on that and it's to start small. It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than we think we need to because what that does is it allows us to get victories. And victories are really important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good about ourselves and we become less motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure that you succeed, you build

your motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your Good Wolf, go to to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to talk for a couple more minutes in the post show conversation. We may get into shame and guilt. We might get into injury. There's so many good ones. Unordinary listeners, if you'd like access to that post show conversation and all the other post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, a special episode I do just for you each week, you can go to onewfeed.net slash join and become part of our community and help support

this show. David, thank you so much. It is always a pleasure to talk with you. I feel like I could do it for hours. Thank you. Thank you, Eric. That passed very quickly. Always a good sign. Next experience of the timeless in the conversation. So thank you too. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better and that's you. Just hit the

share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed feed community I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly I collect my roommates toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast therapy gecko It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake Gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple

Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I'm the host of the Unpurposed Podcast and I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian. God, I've been through so many things that at this point I would rather not feel than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle. I am Khloe Kardashian. Khloe Kardashian everybody.

Khloe Kardashian. No one understands how it's, I'm not just a TV show. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart radio app app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I want you to ask yourself right now, how am I actually doing? Because it's a question that we rarely ask ourselves. All of May is actually Mental Health Awareness Month and on the psychology of your twenties,

we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about. Prepare for our conversations to go deep. I spent the majority of my teenage years and my twenties just feeling absolutely terrified. I had a panic attack on a conference call. Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend. So this Mental Health Awareness Month, take that extra bit of care of your well-being. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.