The One You Feed - Cory Allen on Cultivating Mindfulness

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Cory Allen is a writer, musician, meditation teacher, and creator of the podcast, The Astral Hustle, which focuses on how to live better with leading experts in mindfulness, neuroscience, and philosophy. Cory believes that the more we understand ourselves, the less we suffer.In this episode, Cory and Eric discuss his book, Now Is The Way: An Unconventional Approach To Modern Mindfulness.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Cory Allen and I Discuss Cultivating Mindfulness and…His book, Now Is The Way: An Unconventional Approach To Modern MindfulnessThe role of our actions in determining who we areHow to differentiate between helpful and unhelpful negative thoughts and emotionsThe most effective way to widen the gap between stimulus and responseThe watching mind and the doing mindWhy the notions of emptiness and non-self needn’t be scaryThe answer to the question, “Does my life even matter?”How we assign meaning rather than find meaning in lifeWhat it means to dilute strong emotions or ruminating thoughts when they ariseCory Allen Links:www.cory-allen.orgTwitterInstagramBLUBlox offers high-quality lenses that filter blue light, reduce glare, and combat the unhealthy effects of our digital life. Visit BLUblox.com and get free shipping worldwide and also 15% off with Promo Code: WOLF15SimpliSafe: Get comprehensive protection for your entire home with security cameras, alarms, sensors as well as fire, water, and carbon monoxide alerts. SimpliSafe is having a huge holiday sale! Visit simplisafe.com/wolf for a free home security camera and 40% off any security system. Pachamama: Produces extraordinary high quality, organic CBD products. They are one of three companies in over 200 top selling CBD brands to actually test negative for leads, metals, and pesticides and test positive for having the right amount of CBD. Visit www.enjoypachamama.com and use code WOLF for 25% off.If you enjoyed this conversation with Cory Allen on Cultivating Mindfulness, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Effortless Mindfulness with Loch KellyTransformative Mindfulness with Shauna ShapiroSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

we get locked between our awareness of who we are and our idea of who we are and then who we're actually being and how we're existing in the world. 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. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really know really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Corey Allen, a writer, musician, and creator of the podcast The Astral Hustle. He focuses on how to live better with leading experts in mindfulness, neuroscience, and philosophy. Corey's first book is entitled Now Is The Way. Hi, Corey. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. I am really happy to have you back on. You and I had a wonderful conversation on your podcast several months ago, and I have been looking forward to this ever since

because there's just some people you just sort of hit it off with, and you certainly fell into that category for me. And you've got a wonderful book called Now Is The Way, An Unconventional Approach to Modern Mindfulness, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a moment, But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, 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

grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather 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. I think that that parable speaks directly to one of my main interests and something that is not only incredibly important to me, but a very important value of mine in life, and that is mindfulness. It really targets in on the fact that in all of our minds, no matter who you are, there is a perpetual arising flow of thoughts. The unexamined mind is just this automation of your genetic and family inheritance

and your past experiences. And if that goes unexamined, you then just live your life basically reacting to your past in the present based upon what you happen to run into by chance. When you begin to examine the mind and increase your self-awareness. You become aware of the contents of your consciousness. And after you do that, you begin to be able to see what is arising. And then once you become aware of what's arising, you see, oh, well, sometimes I have what I sense are negative thoughts. Sometimes I feel what are positive thoughts. Sometimes I feel aware whenever I express these thoughts. Sometimes I don't and what have you. So what one can do in mindfulness is in the momentum of your own thinking with that self-awareness, you can begin to guide your thoughts towards compassion. You can choose which thoughts to

express and turn into action, which ultimately becomes who you are in the world and how you exist in the world. And then you can also become aware of those arising thoughts that are negative and things that you would have regretted expressing later if you did do so in the moment, and release those and don't express those. And by doing that act of mindfulness, by guiding your thoughts in the present moment with self-awareness towards compassion and equanimity, you can become more of what you want to be. You can author your future. And so this parable, to me, the dark wolf are the negative thoughts

that inhabit all of our minds. The light wolf are the positive and kind and compassionate thoughts that inhabit all of our minds. And essentially, to me, it's which one of those in the moment do you want to express and turn into actions and therefore create who you are? Or which one do you want to turn away and release? Yeah, I love that idea. And I think you reflected it in the book a couple times that, you know, our actions ultimately determine who we are. Would you agree with that?

Would you agree with that? I believe so. Yeah, I mean, it calcifies who we are in the eyes of others, which also tends to turn around and kind of crystallize a bit of how we see ourselves because it's the feedback that we're getting from the world, you know? And ultimately, the more that we choose to act in one way versus another, that will, of course, you know, create certain neural connections in our brain that, you know, the neuroplasticity of our brain shifts then, and then those habits of thinking become more common. And as we, you know, choose to do whatever we're doing in life and express whatever we're

expressing, turning these thoughts into actions, that begins to make it easier to exist in that way, more instinctual to behave in such a way. And so whenever we do that, then yes, not only externally does it kind of crystallize who we become, but it also then sets up these pathways to guide our future behaviors. There's something you said in the book I'm just going to jump to here. You mentioned about negative thoughts a little bit. And I'm just going to read something you wrote, and then I have a question. So you say, don't confuse negative thoughts with justifiable negative emotions. The negative thoughts I want you to let flow by are the unfair judgments and criticisms of yourself and others.

On the other hand, legitimate grievances that cause negative emotions are important and should be addressed. Confronting what makes you feel negative is how you can create positive change in your life. I'm curious how you tell the difference between those things. Yeah, that's a really important and astute question. It's messy. It's kind of murky in our minds a lot of times whenever we think about this notion of negative thoughts because there's such a spectrum of what goes on in our brains. A negative thought that arises, you know, a simple judgment against someone else, some criticism that we might feel, those are these just passing general kind of inner critic-based negative thoughts that we can let flow by. Now, the legitimate grievances that we might feel,

flow by. Now, the legitimate grievances that we might feel, this is important because, you know, in the inner path that we might go on, you know, we basically, there's a lot of confusion in the sense of what, you know, means to be kind, to be compassionate. And so, people tend to feel like they're being compassionate, you know, just kind of taking on the weight of other people and other people's criticisms and so forth and thinking that that's kindness in some way. stake that, oh, well, this is an actual emotional response to what's coming from someone else that needs to be voiced so that I don't turn into this kind of phony, compassionate doormat, as opposed to just a random sort of negative thought that's arising in your mind, kind of out in the ether of your brain. Right. And I think that's what can be so challenging about some of this stuff about, you know, negative thought, negative emotion, is this sense that they're also telling us something, right? I always find this on a continuum between like, all right, the power of positive thinking, anything shows up in my mind

at all that isn't 100% yes, yes, yes, life is great, then I'm going to just kick it out. And I'm like, well, that doesn't seem really realistic. That doesn't seem like living with what's real and what's happening. And then you can go to the other extreme, which is I just let whatever's happening, as you sort of said earlier, the unexamined mind, where it just flows on by. And I always find it interesting to talk with people about how in their own life, they sort of determine, it interesting to talk with people about how in their own life they sort of determine, okay, that's a thought and I'm going to learn from it and I'm going to see what it has to say. And this other thought, on the other hand, I'm going to try and, you know, scoot along on its way, keep it out of here, you know, sort of from your perspective, how are you looking at that?

Whenever I have a thought that arises and it's something that I don't want to embrace and to express, I sort of look at it like a window. It's like, here comes this thing that's arising. I've used the metaphor before. If you're standing on the side of the road and there's a car coming, one single car on a very long road coming over the horizon. It's like, well, there it comes. And you can choose to, you know, either let's call it wave at the driver or not, you know, just seeing this thought arising, this impulse, feeling this creeping sort of tension and the formulation of what will be something or could be

a negative action to take. I see that coming and recognize it as it's arising and then consciously do not indulge it. And sometimes it's very easy. Sometimes it happens automatically. As a classic example of human behavior, you're out in public with someone that you know. Say you're in a store or something and there's someone very abrasive in there. It could be very easy and is very common for whenever both of you leave to look over to the other person and be like you know like oh man that what was that person and kind of bust them down a little bit so that's like a typical life scenario right so in that moment you could feel that formulation like the ego almost is daring you like there's almost like a childish kind of swell

that arises with that feeling because you know you know in the back of your mind there's this tentacle tapping on the back of your brain where you you know that whenever you get that out you're going to feel almost like you got away with something that strange kind of quiet giddiness that comes with criticism expressing judgments and negativity about someone else to someone who is on your team and that that's because, you know, of course, what you're doing on a subconscious level is creating this hierarchy in the conceptualized part of your mind where the stranger who you're criticizing, you've created a team or, you know, a companion to criticize them with. So therefore that person becomes an other, and then you can

rise above this other person in your mind by cascading them and judging them and so forth. So whenever one feels that swelling tension and kind of that dare of the ego, recognizing that impulse arising and then being able to then just literally choose to move your attention forward and elsewhere and don't say that thing and move on. And that's a very practical way to recognize what's coming because it starts in the body and moves up in the mind. You can just feel the whole system working, urging you to do something in your life. But having that, what I call in the book, the mindfulness gap, the space between feeling the arising thought and then executing that thought where you can recognize it and then chunk it in this gap and just move on. And, you know, if one feels remiss

by not expressing something that they feel that it was cute or might serve their ego in some way, don't worry, because there will be, within seconds, another whole litany of thoughts that you can choose from that do not foster negativity. Yeah. You call it the mindfulness gap. You know, Viktor Frankl talked about the space between stimulus and response. How do we go about growing that space so that we are better able to make choices about what we do? What are some practical ways of actually getting better at doing that? Yeah. Well, I mean, meditation is really number one. Ultimately, what one wants to do is to cultivate a bit of negative internal space. And that's really just quieting the mind enough, calming the body down enough to where you can get a little bit of wiggle room inside of yourself. Because as I said at the beginning,

quite choppily, most of us are just living, most people, not to generalize too much, but most people live a life without ever actively trying to increase their self-awareness or become more aware of what's going on inside of their bodies. And so they are born, wherever synthesized by the two belief systems of their parents, then reinforced by their culture and the chance and time in which they're growing up and they have all their random experiences and and go on and as i said they're just kind of reacting uh in all these ways throughout life and there's never any space put between the kind of automation of their past and uh how they're existing in the present it's just this reactive thing which people often then spend all this time it's where a lot of anxiety and guilt and inner critic comes from, because then you're acting in this way unmindfully. And then later you recognize it after it's happened. And then you post-event process and beat yourself up about it. And that's where a lot of

you are like, oh, I'm such an idiot, or I was a bad person, or I feel bad for saying that I shouldn't have done that. And so any type of contemplation practice, you know, meditation is the best one. Even just sitting, if you don't even like the idea of meditation or the word or whatever, even just sitting on the couch for five to 10 minutes a day, turning off all of the external stimulation, all the devices, you know, the TV, the phone, the laptop, the music, whatever it might be, just simply sit there and allow your body to relax and rest, rest your hands on your legs, all the devices, the TV, the phone, the laptop, the music, whatever it might be. Just simply sit there and allow your body to relax and rest. Rest your hands on your legs. Take a breath in nice and comfortably. Observe your chest rising. And then as you exhale,

let the muscles in your face relax and your shoulders relax, your arms and hands. And just let your body you know that's a beautiful way to just begin and just don't try and do anything really lower the stakes remove perhaps the characterization or the kind of cartoony idea of what meditation or mindfulness practice might be and just allow yourself to exist and then feel what will happen is that your hands replicate what's going on in our mind and our mind replicates what happens in our hands. And in the modern world, we spend so much time, think about how many times you're touching something, you're tapping on a screen, you're clicking on a mouse, you're adjusting something, you're fidgeting with something rather, you know, that's because of the oversaturation of technology and everything that we've grown into now. And so that's all happening

in the brain. The brain has been structured based upon our environment to be fussing with something every three seconds. And so what will happen is that you'll feel this kind of vacuum the first time that you really sit and just try and don't move and just rest for 10 minutes straight because your brain's going to be going like, hey man, shouldn't we be messing with something or touching something or, you know, fizzing with something? And what's beautiful is that you feel that arising, that feeling of fidgetiness and just kind of recognize it and go, ah, okay, I'm feeling a little skin crawly, a little fidgety right now. That's because I'm used to always doing something,

but I'm just going to sit here and relax and just chill and just continue pointing my focus every time I forget. I can remember and point it back to my breath, my chest rising and falling and just trying to kind of exhale and relax a little bit more every time. And the mind begins to mirror that. And it just takes a little bit. You could do that for 10 minutes and feel a little bit of difference. And then mindfulness practice compounds over sustained practice. And so you do it five days in a row, you're going to feel five times the benefits and you'll start to notice. And this is, you know, because this is stuff of the mind, this is not stuff of the body. It's a bit more challenging for people to gauge because we're

always distracted with the stuff of our lives. So it's not like the gym you're working out, you're not measuring your muscles. There's no muscle for your mind. You have to really tune in and just be aware of how are you feeling. And so what happens is that in most cases, it kind of sneaks up on people. It fades in is how I like to say it. So you'll be in a familiar situation where you would have reacted to something in some way defensively, or you would have taken the opportunity to criticize a coworker or whatever it might be, or someone else that you don't know. And you realize in that moment, right as you're about to do it, you feel it. You feel like, oh, wait a second, I'm about to do this thing. And you may still do it. And that's fine.

That's fine. But you felt it. And that's just that glimpse of spaciousness within the body. And as you continue to practice, you recognize one day that normally where you would have had an even explosive reaction to something and been defensive or whatever it might be, you recognize that in that moment you find the ability to choose and to actually be aware of the situation almost from above a bit. And then that's whenever you can really put the beautiful work of patience and compassion into practice. But simply by sitting, relaxing the body and giving the mind and the nervous system a bit of time to de-stimulate is how you'll create

that internal spaciousness and begin to live more mindfully. Yeah, I really think that idea of the mind often will mirror the body. It's really useful to realize in a situation like that where you can just sort of still the mind a little bit more by stilling the body. And, you know, I've been talking on the show a little bit lately about also realizing sometimes that our mind will try and match our body in other ways. And it can be useful to know that because we can be like, oh, okay, that's what's happening. So let's talk for a moment about you describe in the book having two minds, the watching mind and the doing mind. Let's talk a little bit about both of those. Sure. Yeah. So the watching mind, you know, in Zen would be called the observer.

It's that part of your brain. If you sit back and think about it, it doesn't always feel like there's this little camera right behind your brain just kind of watching what's going on in your life. It's not really involved in the decision-making per se. It's just sort of this little pin light of awareness that's looking around and taking note of everything that's in your visual field and all of your senses. This is the watching mind. It's just that little glimpse of awareness that's always kind of keeping track of your consciousness and your conscious awareness. And then the doing mind is what in Zen would be called the actor you know in buddhism as well it's the actor so that is the you that is making the choices that is plugged into the game of your life that is negotiating physical space that is making the the decisions that is carrying

out and you know manifesting bringing these thoughts into reality. And there's kind of the game piece on the board of your life. And so the watching mind is the observing, you know, the observing thought. The doing mind is the acting one. I hope you don't mind. I'd love to just cut to something a bit meaty real quick with those two things. Yeah. Since I mentioned Zen a little bit. D.T. Suzuki, the great Zen writer,

beautiful essays on Buddhism from the 1950s. He has such a wonderful description of enlightenment using these terms we're talking about now. He points to the Western mind and Western philosophy and so on having a real problem with getting the point of Zen, getting the point of enlightenment, because they go and they identify the watching mind and the doing mind, the observer and the actor. And they think, okay, that's it. Now what I need to do is have the observer watch and keep an eye on the actor. And that is how I will be able to self-actualize. If I can just use that little camera in the back of my brain to keep track of that game piece on the board and tell that game piece what to do, then I'll be good. But as Suzuki points out, that has forever resulted in the Western mind running in circles, banging its head up against the wall

forever. Because what happens is that between that space and the watching mind and the acting mind running in circles banging its head up against the wall forever because what happens is that between that space and the watching mind and the acting mind there is the ego and the intellect and within the intellect lives our inner critic our self judgments um on all these this whole gauntlet of nasty intellectual you know things and so we try and act in that way. And what happens is that then the witness mind is kind of writing the script for the actor to play out in life in this way of approaching it. And what happens is that the observer succumbs to the critic, to fear, to anxiety, starts writing funky scripts for the actor. And then the actor starts making bad choices, but then the acting mind stops trusting the observing mind because it gets a

little bit of existential stage fright because it's kind of tap dancing on the stage of humanity for all the other people. And then it gets clammed up. And then you start getting into this whole struggle between kind of your awareness and who you are in the world. And that's when a lot of people feel this feeling. I point to in the book, calling it existential paralysis, where we get locked between our awareness of who we are and our idea of who we are and then who we're actually being and how we're existing in the world, right? And that's a problem which was much to my surprise after I talked about it on my podcast one time, I had hundreds of people hitting me up saying, oh my God, I can't believe that someone else has experienced this. And from

my point of view, I was going, oh my God, I can't believe all of these people. I thought this was a me thing. I figured out this is just a human thing that happens, right? And so back to the notion of Suzuki pointing to, there's an element missing in the Western understanding of that approach, and that is the will. And that the will and the attention and the focus is really what needs to be tapped into again through meditation or some type of contemplation practice. You can strengthen that will. And then the observer and the actor become synthesized into a single being. So you can, as you're observing from above, you know, in that witnessing mind, you're also acting at the same time, all predicated upon the direction and intention in, you know, fluid motion of the will arising. our life, the story that we create through our narrative thinking, of all the subsistence of our brains creating this story, this kind of gapless mirage and illusion of what our actual

waking life is like. And in that process, as that story begins to melt away, we live in synergy with the observer and the actor, then we get glimpses of what is we get reality without our colorization and our stories wrapped all over it and reality without conceptualization is enlightenment yep i've been practicing zen pretty deeply for a while and that is the place it seems to land right which is this the thinking mind and the doing mind merge into one thing and action just emerges. Things just come out of, when we see reality more clearly, the right response, the right reactions naturally and spontaneously emerge. mindfulness kind of live in the same house you know because then one could hear that and go oh well then do you become automated do you become this creature that exists without any uh reflection because if i if you get to this place then you're just kind of on autopilot of you know in a good way hypothetically but that's not it at all you know it's this continuous awareness of pointing the will.

And they say, you know, any serious writer of Eastern thought will say that the focus takes a lot of energy, you know, and a lot of force and a lot of your attention to keep that system in place that we're talking about. So it's not a way of being without discipline. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

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Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really no really yeah no really go to really no really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed jason bobblehead it's

called really no really and you can find it on the iheart radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I think the will is an interesting idea, right? Because one of the things that comes up in practice of meditation, really, of any sort of contemplative practice is some degree of allowing things to be the way they are. You'll see this in Zen, you know, we don't practice to become enlightened. My deepest experiences of being have come when I've somehow managed to totally take my hands off the controls. And yet there's a role for the will and there's a role for trying. My favorite phrase is trying not to try, you know, because if we clench up too tightly while we're doing all this, if we're trying to force it too much, it doesn't work. being kind of prescribed to go together to lead to some type of cessation, ultimately, is for that very reason. A compassion practice is ultimately leading you through something like

metta practice, where you're breathing in. It's an absorption and transmission act, where you're breathing in the sense of love and kindness, of goodwill and what have you toward not only people in your life that you might have little hangups and resentments with, but also ultimately then towards all living beings in your practice. And this is a beautiful practice because as you sit there and simply just breathe, anyone can do this too. If you have just a few moments, I practice it in meditation sometimes. And also before I fall asleep, as I'm laying in bed at night you just breathe in and as you just close your eyes no big deal again lower the stakes you just

breathe in and just really try and you know feel a sense of kindness and and goodwill just trying to visualize and draw in the sense of of goodness and then as you breathe out, just feel it kind of pushing out of your body, pushing out of your chest and kind of right between your eyes out into the world, into this, almost into your imagination. If your eyes are closed and you're picturing someone that's frustrated you,

then you're breathing in this feeling of kindness. And as you exhale, it's a transmission, pushing forward of this feeling towards them and it relaxes the body and you breathe in again you you exhale and expand that and the four directions as they say that's one of your compassion begins to become boundless and if you breathe out and can push that loving kindness in all directions but that's a tranquility practice which ultimately then the next step is using insight, which is something like an emptiness practice. And in the early translations, emptiness seems scary to the Western mind, because given that we live in a materialistic-based society, we have that really built into the foundation of our worldview. into the foundation of our worldview. And so the idea of calling something emptiness is very scary to the Western mind. It's like whenever we talk about self or non-self, it really freaks out

Western people because they think, oh, well, if I go to kind of soften and ultimately recognize that I have no self, it seems like death to them. It often creates amygdala response in the brain. It's the same reason why religion and politics have such an aggressive reaction whenever people find some of the conflicting view. It's because those things are so woven into the fabric and the foundation of our conscious mind and our subconscious. If you go to criticize them, any criticism coming toward has some weight to it. It feels like the capital I is being erased at the foundational level. And that literally kicks on a fight or flight response from the individual. And that's why politics and all this stuff are so ripe with animalistic anger and rage because they're literally fighting.

People feel like they're fighting for their psychic lives in this way. So the notion of non-self, the notion of emptiness seems very scary. But ultimately what it is, it was translated to oneness, right? So the idea that we have in the West of oneness is the same, which that's a nice warm and fuzzy idea that is turned into a meme, a spiritual meme. We say, oh, I understand the lacking of duality. We're all one and so forth. You hear that all the time. And this is the same as emptiness, right? So emptiness is just recognizing that you have this spaciousness within you, that you as a sentient three-dimensional collection of atoms have a sense of spaciousness, which does not stop where your skin stops.

And so here you are, right? And leading this compassion, tranquility into the spaciousness of emptiness or of oneness then will lead you to the inevitable acceptance and integration of that idea which then you can really take the self off the hook once you get deep enough into that and have the cessation which is the the blown away the blown out experience of really clicking the ego off and reducing the i me and my way of thinking and simply experiencing something closer to just awareness. And I know that's a very long way to get to your question, but I wouldn't want to talk about how do we try and live in that process without grasping and getting hung up by just giving you a little pithy answer

and saying, oh, well, you just kind of watch your breath and relax. Like, well, that's not going to do too much for people. So, think about it in a bit bigger of the picture, you know? Yep. We did wander into some pretty weighty concepts there. You know, emptiness is an idea in Buddhism and particularly in Zen. Zen's just all crazy about emptiness. Yeah, we hear emptiness and we think there's nothing there, right? And as you said, emptiness is much better described as, as you could say, oneness. I've heard it described well as boundlessness. So things, they're not separated in the way we think we are. Or emptiness as

formlessness. Things don't have the form that we think that they have, or the form isn't as rigid as we think. And I think it's a really useful tool. And then the other thing that you said there, every time I hear oneness, I think of not D.T. Suzuki, but Shunryu Suzuki says, he's got a great phrase, which is, we're not one, but we're not two. And I just think that's it. Because yes, we're not all one, but we're also not separate. What the hell does that mean? Right? And this is where we go beyond concept. And that's the thing about Zen that I like so much. It's form and emptiness, emptiness and form. Like, yes, these forms are all right

here. I'm here. I'm in the shape I'm in. This microphone is right where it is. You're over there in Austin. Those are all true things. And there's another level that's also happening where these things aren't so distinct, where they aren't so formless. And where the two of those come together, I think, is sort of what you were talking about, where the doing mind and the watching mind merge into both sides of it. That's right. Form and emptiness, emptiness and form, doing and being, being and doing. They're not really separate. With that understanding, it then becomes an

ecosystem, right? And so we're all part of the organism as a whole, and that organism is humanity, is being, and this tracks to a very valuable idea. Once people get into these more challenging, deeper waters around this stuff, what often happens in this area is the sense of meaning begins to come into question. And people go, oh, well, if all this checks out, and it seems to check out, the more you think about it, then what does my existence mean? As you increase the scope of your awareness and the wattage of your mind begins to expand and you get that sense outside of yourself and realize you're a part of one big thing, you're like, what does my life even matter? What does any of my actions

matter at all? And I say to that, that it matters. Everything is crucial. Everything is so important because think of if you're sitting in traffic and you're looking at all these cars in front of you on the highway. There's hundreds of thousands of cars. And you think, well, there's a human in each of those cars and they each have their little vibe going on inside their car. There's the music and their air conditioning level and their tension, where they're going, the logistics of their day, all this stuff. And it's individual to every subjective person in every single car. And you're looking at those and you think, wow, look at all these cars.

I wouldn't notice if one was missing. And I wouldn't notice if there was an extra one. And I could be that one that was missing. And I could be that one that's the extra one. So how is there meaning in all of this? Because look how many cars are there. But if you look at that from a different angle, you can see that in order to have the huge picture of all of us for you to get lost in, there has to be each individual component

to create the giant thing to begin with. So in order for that giant thing for us to get lost in and to kind of question our meaning, we have to exist. All of us must exist to create the thing to get lost in. And so our very actions are so important and are so crucial because we are each a cell on the organism of humanity. Yep. Yep. That's a beautiful way of saying it. And I think, I feel like I've talked about it on the show several times recently, talking about meaning ultimately becomes an experience because my experience, if I try and reason my way into meaning, I eventually just go,

well, but like you said, I'm one cell in a giant thing. I'm a speck of dust that flashes like that and is gone. And Joseph Campbell said it so well. He said, I don't think people are looking for the meaning of life so much as they're looking for the experience of being alive. And that's where I have found meaning actually comes alive for me is in living. And the example I often use is one of like, if I walked outside my door and there was a dog laying there that had been hit by a car, right? It would be imperative to me that I take care of that dog. There's nothing you could say that would tell me that that's not important.

You could be like, well, it's just one dog out of a billion dogs. And I, but I would just still go, I have to take care of the dog. Like it would just be clear to me that it mattered. That mattered. But I couldn't explain it. I couldn't put it into words. Because again, if you ask me, I go, well, yes, it is one dog out of 10 billion dogs. And, you know, we're here for one, one billionth of the time of the planet, you know, like,

whatever. But yet in that moment, I would feel it and it would mean something to me. But yet in that moment, I would feel it and it would mean something to me. And that's how I most closely approximate meaning is when, as I immerse into life without all the dialogue, all the thoughts, meaning sort of emerges naturally for me. That's right. That's exactly it. Yeah, there's no meaning in life. There's meaning that we create through our actions. Yeah. there's meaning that we create through our actions. Each of us assign these symbols and squiggles to all of the elements of our existence.

And in the assigning of those things, they represent stuff of value to us, not a physical value in most cases, but in personal value. And as you so beautifully put, if you are creating that meaning through the choices that you make, they all come from the heart-mind, then you are going to experience a beautiful image, a beautiful abstraction of what life can be. If one goes through life making self-focused

decisions and is not conservative of others, does not have the empathy that you described, and is not consummate of others, does not have the empathy that you described, then the meaning that they create within their lives is going to be one that's unpleasant. What's so interesting about it is that subjectively, the world and the way that we see it, often, to some degree, begins to reflect our actions. Because the more that we make kind choices and decisions and live from the heart, the more that we can see the compassion and kindness in the world. There's a greater appetite for possible things and for love and for potential of all of us and ourselves.

And the counter to that is also true. We're getting close to being out of time, but I want to talk about a couple practical things in your book that I thought were really useful. And one of them is, you talk about we can become more mindful and start to become more focused, but there are moments where we get stuck in a thought loop, where our thoughts are excessive. You say extreme mental states can make us obsessive. A jolt of fear, excitement, confusion, or stress can narrow our awareness with ease. When we're in one of these thought loops, it's often because our emotions peaked too fast. So let's talk a little bit about how do we break these sort of emotional or mental obsessions when it's really strong and we're just in it and we try and go, oh, it's just a thought. I'm going to just see it as a thought. And it's still, it's just

got its hooks in us. Yeah, that's a great one. There are two ways I would suggest doing that. One is by bringing in, you know in other things, positive things, kind of alongside of your life, right? So if you're in this moment at home or whatever it might be, or you're at work or wherever, and you're feeling this rumination of negativity or anxiety or whatever it might be, Soothe yourself. Bring in a couple of different good things. Turn on something that brings you joy, some movie or something that you really dig that brings you joy. Read a book that you really enjoy. Have a bite to eat of something. Go on a walk. Whatever it is that really just will help you self-soothe a bit and not try and erase the thing that's in your mind, but you can flood that thing and move the trajectory of your thinking into a better way and in a different area by bringing other threads and through lines of positivity into that moment. Another great way to do it is to get active,

you know, with your hands, literally start tending to something. And so you could look at this as, you know, gardening or go do your grocery shopping or whatever it is that gets your hands and your mind going. And what happens is that it tears your attention away from the rumination onto the active practice of doing something else. And it's a great way to get out of these extreme kind of obsessive thought loops. Yeah, I love that because I think sometimes we have a tendency to feel like, well, I should just apply mindfulness or I should feel my feelings or I should, which are all great ideas to start with. But there are times I've found it's like, okay, it's time to

do something else. I love the way you put it, like bring other good things in. You say you can dilute this strong feeling or these negative thoughts. You dilute it by putting more other things into the mix. And I think there's just times that's the right thing to do. When the rumination train is full steam ahead, it's like distract, you know, find something that will turn the mind a different direction for a little while to try and break that cycle. That's right, yeah. We talked a little bit about emptiness or emptiness-type practices, and one of them that you talk about being sort of the primary meditation you do anymore is called the watcher.

And I was wondering if you could describe how that type of meditation works, what you actually do in that type of meditation. Oh, sure, yeah. This is, as you said, very close to an emptiness type of meditation. You'll find if you Google or read a book about meditation, you'll find all sorts of different practices and goals. And really what's happening is that in a lot of those books or those videos, they're sort of think about them as little like gym workout practices. They're trying to get you into a particular. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing

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Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHe it on the I heart radio app on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Particular discipline to have one of the many elements of mind exercised so that you can really ultimately build the muscle of your focus, your attention, and gain control of your consciousness. So those are what a lot of meditation practices will take to do. Of course, in session with breathing practices and so forth. Ultimately, if you go deeper into practicing meditation, no matter which pathway you enter,

it will all culminate in simple emptiness and awareness practice where there is no goal, there is no visualization, there is no particular breathing style you're trying to do. It's really just being and observing and becoming, as we talked about earlier, becoming that awareness mind. And so that watch your practice looks like sitting down, taking about five minutes to get situated in the sense that you need to kind of blow off some of the steam of the day. You will begin slowly inhaling and just feeling and observing your chest rise, exhaling, feeling your chest fall. One of the things I stress in the book is to just don't make breathing performative. Don't make it theatrical.

Don't feel like you have to turn it into some big thing because you breathe perfectly every night when you're sleeping. The trick is just doing that while you're awake. So think of how you breathe while you're sleeping. That's because you're breathing without any resistance. You're breathing without any intention or distraction in the mind. Your body is just automatically, slowly, and deeply taking the natural breaths that it needs in that moment. So try and just allow your body to do that. And then simply just observe your awareness. Close your eyes. And you'll begin to become more aware of your body and the sensations and some of the sounds in the room. But you just continue inhaling and then slowly exhaling and relaxing the muscles and the face and shoulders.

Getting a sense of this kind of light that's in your mind. That is just observing, watching, not senses, not sounds, not feelings per se, but just the very essence of its existence at all. And then your mind will wander, and you'll start thinking about your lunch or a conversation you had earlier or something that you need to do. And whenever that happens, allow that script that arises in your brain

to be the reminder to point your attention back towards your practice. So you'll go down this random tangent of thought, and then say, oh, okay, I remembered. and then say, oh, okay, I remembered. Let me go back to just focusing on observing the simple act of being, just the light and awareness in your mind with no effort, no attempt to do anything,

just feeling the camera turned on, where you are not the camera, you're not the lens, you're not even the film, you're simply the light moving through the aperture. And you just sit with that feeling. And that's all there is to it. The more you practice that, you'll get these little feelings,

these little cracks in the wall between the thoughts, the actions, the self. And you'll almost start feeling kind of like i don't want to say four-dimensional because that's become such a woo-woo sort of way to describe it but you you feel so in sync with the present moment that you feel intoxicated with the potency of now. And you can slide in and out of that feeling. And you'll forget yourself for just a second. And then you'll remember that you're there. And you'll forget the I. And you'll just be this kind of spacious, boundless cloud of presence.

And then a thought will arise, it'll draw you back into now, back into the mind. And you can just move in and out of that. And the more you practice it, the longer and more simple and easy it becomes to exist in that awareness state. Awesome. Well, thank you for leading us through that. I agree with you. Ultimately, that seems to be where all meditation practices lead to. And certainly in Zen, you know, talk about Shinkantaza, just sitting, you know, what should I do? Just sit. But hang on a second. Like, well, you know, I find those practices so interesting, because sometimes they're deeply

profound. And other times times I'm like, this is just like what my mind does all the time. And so I find for me, like the, I'm always on this, like, okay, I'm open, I'm aware and I'm doing okay. I see a thought come in and I see it go. And there's other times I'm like, I try that and it's just chaos. And I'm like, all right, I need to go back more towards the steadying type of practice, pay closer attention to the breath or pay more attention to sounds. Or to use your thing, I need to narrow the aperture a little bit so that I can focus a little bit more.

Okay, now I'm a little steadier. Now I can open it back up a little bit and take my hands off the wheel a little bit more. And so for me, in my practice lately, there's been a lot of that sort of need to steady it a little bit or now I can open up. Nope, opening up has gotten a little chaos. That sort of back and forth movement that I've been experimenting with or learning to play with a little bit. Beautiful. Yeah. And also people, you know, everyone beats themselves up so hard about meditation or about any type of contemplative practice or even what's going on in their mind on any given day. But it's so important to remember that we're all just humans and we all are, you

know, facing an immense amount of stimulation and distraction and pressure and all these things. And some days are easier. Some days are really wound up for even environmental reasons. You know, your allergies could be giving you tweaked out or whatever. And so, you know, there's the random chance of life will service a variety of different ways of feeling. And that's just a byproduct of being human. And so, as you said, whenever you are feeling particularly wound up, just kicking it back to the basics, you know, and not trying to do anything fancy.

Not that you should be anyway. But, you know, and not trying to do anything fancy, not that you should be anyway, but, you know, just remembering the basics. And then some days, whenever you're feeling particularly clear minded and deep, really, and you want to get in there and explore. And as I said, take the self off the coat rack and drop it on the floor for a minute, then you can do that too. Yep. I agree with you a hundred percent. I think it's a great place to end, which is that, yeah, this stuff is challenging. That's why it's a great place to end, which is that, yeah, this stuff is challenging. That's why it's a practice, you know,

and there are times that it's easy and there's times it's really hard. And there's times that our brain just runs and runs and runs. And there's other times it's a little more peaceful and, and that's being human. So absolutely. Very well said. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you again,

and I greatly appreciate it. And it's nice to see you. Yeah. Thank you so such a pleasure to talk with you again, and I greatly appreciate it. And it's nice to see you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Eric. I really appreciate the invitation, man. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.

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