The One You Feed - Fleet Maull on Radical Responsibility

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Fleet Maull is an author, consultant, trainer, meditation teacher and executive coach who facilitates deep transformation for individuals and organizations through his philosophy and program of Radical Responsibility. Fleet is a senior mindfulness meditation teacher in 2 highly respected traditions and is also a Roshi, or Zen Master, and dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman of The Zen Peacemakers Community. In this episode, Eric and Fleet discuss his book, Radical Responsibility: How to Move Beyond Blame, Fearlessly Live Your Highest Purpose and Become An Unstoppable Force For Good. Need help with completing your goals in 2020? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.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, Fleet Maull and I Discuss Radical Responsibility and…His book, Radical Responsibility: How to Move Beyond Blame, Fearlessly Live Your Highest Purpose and Become An Unstoppable Force For GoodOur decision about whether or not to let fear set in Fear and Survival Based ReactionGetting into your body to become more grounded, heart-centered and responsive Fear is an intelligent, natural human emotion How to become more resilientStrategies and approaches that people can use to be less afraidThe sympathetic and parasympathetic responses within usBreath awareness in addition to breathing techniquesNeurosomatic mindfulnessDefault Mode Network and the Task-Positive Network in the brainHow blame gives away our powerLetting go of the agenda of trying to control the people in your lifeThe difference between blame, fault, and ownershipMoving from victim to survivor and how we can choose the attitude we bring to any situationMindful self-compassion Fleet Maull Links:fleetmaull.comTwitterPeloton: Wondering if a Peloton bike is right for you? You can get a free 30 day home trial and find out. If you’re looking for a new way to get your cardio in, the Peloton bike is a great solution. Eric decided to buy one after his 30-day free trial. Visit onepeloton.com and enter Promo code “WOLF” to get $100 off of accessories with the purchase of a bike, and a free 30 day home trial.SimpliSafe: Get comprehensive protection for your entire home with security cameras, alarms, sensors as well as fire, water, and carbon monoxide alerts. Visit simplisafe.com/wolf Free shipping and a 60-day risk-free trial.Bombas: “The most comfortable socks on the planet” – Eric Zimmer www.bombas.com/wolf offer code wolf save 20%See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Fleet Maul. Fleet is an author, consultant, trainer, meditation teacher, and executive coach who facilitates deep transformation for individuals and organizations through his philosophy and program of radical responsibility. Fleet is a senior mindfulness meditation teacher in two highly respected traditions. mindfulness meditation teacher in two highly respected traditions. He's also a Roshi or Zen master and Dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman in the Zen peacemakers community.

Today we discuss his book, Radical Responsibility, How to Move Beyond Blame, Fearlessly Live Your Highest Purpose, and Become an Unstoppable Force for Good. Hi, Fleet. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. We are going to discuss your latest book called Radical Responsibility, How to Move Beyond Blame, Fearlessly Live Your Highest Purpose, and Become an Unstoppable Force for Good. But before we do that, we are going to start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and 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 granddaughter stops for a second. She thinks about it and she looks up at her grandfather. She 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. Yeah, well, it really goes right to the heart of the matter, Eric. You know, I believe that we are set up really neurobiologically, psychologically, emotionally, to either be able to operate from

a place of vulnerability and resilience. And by vulnerability, I mean openness and in a relational way and or to operate from fear and survival. And neurobiologically, we're kind of set up for both and it can kind of go either way. And so it really comes down to whether we allow fear to set in. either way. And so it really comes down to whether we allow fear to set in. And we know that human beings, when we become fearful in order to get our perceived needs met, we'll do some pretty terrible things. But the vast majority of us get up every day and do our best to really take care of ourselves, take care of our families. We queue up at the well, at the market. We're pretty cooperative, pretty collaborative. As long as we're not fearful, we're naturally, you know, pretty well behaved and relational and social and so forth. And so it's really the question of fear. And, you know, I think if we're really looking to quell a lot of our very difficult social problems and political

problems is how do we lower the fear level for people? Because when you can help people feel less afraid, they're naturally, you know, pretty well behaved. We get the best from ourselves and others. So a lot of my work is really focused on helping people become more resilient so that there are fewer situations that will throw them into that fear and survival-based reaction. Or when they do feel themselves getting pushed into that fear and survival-based reaction, we can more easily recover from it. We have the skills to state shift and get back to that best self and to that full access to our brain and our good judgment, our decision-making ability,

instead of operating in a triggered way from fight or flight and so forth. And, you know, this was really, I learned this in a very personal way during 14 years in a maximum security federal prison. So, but it's really become the tenor of my work. I do a lot of work training law enforcement and correctional officers today. And, you know, that's really key with them, but really with all the work I'm doing today, it could come down to helping people be more resilient. So they're less prone to get triggered into that fear and survival-based reaction, and able instead to feed the good wolf, and then we're going to see more pro-social, more relational behaviors. I think that's a really great interpretation, and I think I agree with you a lot about fear, and that does seem to be one of the primary things that is driving the cultural divide we're

seeing is there's a lot of fear on all sides. You know, everyone's afraid of what's going to happen. Yeah, absolutely. And we're actually with my with Windhorse Seminars, my company and the work around my book, Radical Responsibility. This year, we're really focusing on having everything we do be focused on helping people become more deeply embodied, more heart-centered, and more earth-conscious. And, you know, I think we're all becoming concerned about the pretty disturbing evidence around climate change. And, you know, there's, if you really look at the science, and I'm not a climate scientist, but I read a lot of science, and it's pretty disturbing. And then, of course, we're seeing things going on right now with extremes and weather, the fires in Australia and so forth.

And things could get very difficult. So, you know, we want to help people become more resilient. To do that, we're helping people get in their bodies using contemplative skills, mindfulness skills, awareness skills, emotional intelligence skills to get in the body, become more heart-centered, more resilient, and more grounded, you know, reconnecting with ourselves and with the earth, such that we're more grounded and we're able to really be in a responsive relationship to life instead of that fear-based reactive relationship. And as things become more challenging, which they very well may, not that life isn't challenging enough already, but not only are we vulnerable to our

own fear and survival-based reactive behaviors, but we're vulnerable to being manipulated by the demagogues that seek to manipulate people around fear. And of course, a lot of the divisiveness we see in our culture now is really driven by people who are manipulating people's fear. Indeed, for sure. And I agree with you about the climate science. It's pretty alarming, and it just gets more alarming over time. But let's just kind of jump into it here, then. Maybe let's just start with some strategies and approaches that people can use to be less afraid. Yeah, well, you know, we don't want to demonize fear too much here. Fear is a natural human emotion, and it's intelligent, right? Fear keeps us from, you know, putting our head again

and again on the hot stove, right? Or from stepping out into traffic. So fear is intelligent. It's when fear goes too far that it can lead to, you know, reactiveness and aggression or can lead us to being frozen and overwhelmed and so forth. So to me, the key is really resilience. We all know that if we're not sleeping well, and we've been using a lot of caffeine, drinking a lot of coffee, eating a lot of junk food, jacking ourselves up with sugar and sweets, we're going to be pretty triggerable, pretty irritable, pretty prone to fly off the handle, right? Whereas if we're eating a really healthy diet and avoiding too much of the stimulants and? Whereas if we're eating a really healthy diet and avoiding too much of the stimulants and sleeping well, we're generally going to be able to handle situations with more

ease and more grace. So to begin with, just doing everything we can to increase our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual resilience, wellness, resilience, strength, fitness, however you would want to talk about it. And then very specific state-shifting skills. So, you know, there's one really simple skill that we teach in almost all of our programs, whether we're working with the general public or with prisoners or working with police or correctional officers or CEOs, and it's called straw breathing. And it's a very simple exercise where you breathe in through the nose and you breathe out through pursed lips as if you're blowing through a straw. You can actually use a straw if you want. You can have a straw.

And so you breathe in through the nose and then you place your straw in your mouth and you blow out through the straw. But you can also do it without the straw. But so into the nose, out through pursed lips. And then you start counting the breaths. So you might be breathing in a four count and then breathing out an eight count or in a five count out of 10 count. The idea being that the out breath is twice as long or at least nearly twice as long as the in breath. That's a very simple exercise. It's tried and true and people love it. I use it all the time. And it will immediately shift us out of a fight or flight response, even, you know,

mild kind of triggered or anxiety or even an a fight or flight response, even, you know, mild kind of triggered or anxiety, or even an extreme fight or flight response, doing a little straw breathing, especially if we can do it kind of with the belly with good diaphragmatic breathing, will shift us from that sympathetic nervous system response, the fight or flight response, into the parasympathetic response, which is a relaxation response. And it just works every time. It's a state-shifting technique that we can use to immediately shift our physiology back into a normal state and where we have access to the entirety of our brain and our good judgment. Because when we get really triggered, whether it's a physical danger or we're getting emotionally triggered, and that fight-or-flight response takes over, the locus of control for our brain, our neurobiology, is becoming the reptilian brain,

the most primitive part of the brain, which is all about survival. And to the extent that that's taking over, the executive function in the neocortex is going offline. And so we become not very smart. We're operating on pure instinct. And so the important thing when we're in any situation where we're getting triggered by fear is to be able to state shift back into full access to our brain and to be able to make good decisions in our own interest and hopefully in the interest of others as well. And so how long would someone do straw breathing? I know I've certainly had the experience of like, all right, I'm agitated or I'm upset. And I say, all right, take a couple of deep breaths. And I do a couple of deep breaths and maybe something happens, but not really. Or I do three or four. So it seems like it takes more than just, you know, a couple breaths.

How do you kind of recommend duration? I really teach that our breath is our best friend. And every moment of breath awareness we have throughout the day is a good moment. It's a real value added moment. It's increasing our resilience. It's helping us stay in a good state in a moment, but it's also increasing our reservoirs of resilience. So breath awareness, I think, is just really key and our best friend. And even that one deep breath can really be, you know, like hitting the pause button or even the reset button. If we take a nice, long, deep breath with our belly, it can really have an impact. However, with the straw breathing, I would say, you know, to make a significant shift from being, you know, fairly anxious, triggered or stressed out into, you know, back into a more relaxed or at least normal baseline state.

You know, about a minute of straw breathing really has an impact and, you know, a couple minutes even more. I mean, I use straw breathing. I travel constantly. And so I do a lot of drives to the airport. I live in Western Mass. I fly out of Hartford. It's about a 45-minute drive. And often in bad weather, and you have that traffic going 60, 70 miles an hour, heavy traffic in bad weather, those white knuckle drives. And I'm doing the straw breathing the whole way. And I get there safely. I arrive at the airport, not all stressed out. I'm able to go to security, still doing straw breathing. So I get there, I usually make my flight and I'm not all anxious and stressed out. So I use it a lot. I use it actually when I'm delivering trainings. I'm out in front of people delivering training several

hundred days a year. I'm doing that all day long when I'm working one form or another. I have a number of different breath regulation techniques I use, but straw breathing is a key one. And by being embodied and having that breath awareness and then using my breath in certain ways, I can work long days. And at the end of the day, I'm not exhausted at all. I feel ready to go. I feel nurtured. I'm in a good place. So I believe in the breath stuff. It works. But, you know, to give you the simple answer with this straw breathing, I think, you breast up it works in and, but you know, to give you the simple answer with this draw breathing, I think, you know, one, two, three minutes, you're going to see a significant shift away from the, the sympathetic branch, um, fight or

flight response back to the parasympathetic branch relaxation response. Yeah. An area that I've started to use deep breathing techniques like that, which I don't know why it didn't occur to me before is prior to sitting down and doing meditation. Before I start doing a meditative practice, whether it's following my breath or working on one of the koans in my Zen training, I'll do a couple minutes of the type of breathing you're describing, where the in-breath and then the out-breath is about twice as long. And what I find is that settles me well so that I can start meditation from a more settled place instead of just sort of sitting down and going right into it.

Yeah, that's a really interesting one, you know, because I think a lot of us who have a background in various forms of Buddhist meditation, and perhaps some others as well, you know, we're kind of taught that the idea is you sit down and you work with your mind as it is. So we're not trying to manipulate ourselves into a particular state, right? Or maintain a particular state. So if you sit down, your mind's all agitated, it's good to just sit through that. And I believe there's real value in that. I, of course, did decades of that. But I actually agree with your approach there that I think, you know, if you've got a limited amount of time to do your meditation practice, you know, doing a little something. So you sit down and actually start from a fairly good place and actually be able to do the technique, I think, actually does make a lot of sense.

And I'm teaching a kind of a new approach to mindfulness meditation. It really comes out of 45 years of my practice and integrating a lot of different streams. of my practice and integrating a lot of different streams. I mean, I've been practicing in Zen for years and very much in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, also in the Vipassana traditions. And my core practices, you know, these days are really for the last 20 years have been primarily in the Mahamudra Zolchen tradition and a lot of formless meditation. So this has been influenced by all these different streams and I'm calling it neurosomatic mindfulness. And the reason being that it's about being deeply embodied. So I train people to really get in and feel their body head to toe and really

activate what's called introceptive awareness, which is the body's internal capacity for feeling. And you know, our body is sensory all the way down to the bones and every aspect of the internal landscape of our body, our organs, connective tissue, circulatory system, it's all sensory. And so I guide people in really awakening that internal landscape, that capacity for interoception at deeper and deeper and deeper levels. And you begin to experience a really profound level of physical presence. And that you're starting to get into that interface of body and mind there and, you know, what you might call subtle energies and so forth.

So our capacity for a profound, deep presence and then a quality of being gives us a foundation in which we can kind of relax our more egoic, you know, fear-based way of being and allows us to really relax further. And then also activating our capacity to get internal neuro bio feedback loops going so that we can begin to self-direct our own physiology, our own emotional life. And as well, I think even switching neural networks in the brain, you know, we know today that there's a what's called the default network in the brain, which is that discursive mind that's constantly thinking about the past and the future, ruminating and planning and worrying and thinking about ourselves and what others think about us and all that. That part of our brain that makes it very hard to meditate when we're first learning. And then there's what's called the task positive network.

When we fully engage ourselves, that actually inhibits the action of that default mode network. So I'm really beginning to feel that by ramping up our interoceptive awareness, really all the way down to the bones, and then paying attention, we can begin to self-regulate with these internal neurobiophibic loops that don't require an external reference point like usual biofeedback, where you're looking at a heart monitor or some reference point of your brainwaves or something like that. So I think there are tremendous possibilities in self-regulation. And so combining that with, you know, just sitting through whatever, you know, there's that part of meditation, you just sit through and there's no particular state. But I think there's value in that. But

I think there's also value in being able to self-regulate at more profound levels, especially in terms of how we're going to show up with life and meet really challenging circumstances in life from our best self and from the greatest resilience. Yeah, that's fascinating work because I think, like you're saying, that ability to perhaps switch from the default mode network to the task positive network while doing a task like meditation. And I think that's where a lot of the challenge is, is that meditation for a lot of people, there's not enough there to switch into the task network. We sort of toggle between the two, but for a lot of people in early in meditation, most of it's in the default mode network. And so

it's always seemed to me that the slightly more engaged we can be in the meditation moves us just that little bit over that line. Initially, what we developed with meditation, and it's an incredible first step, is we developed the kind of witness mind or watcher mind, right? That instead of being lost in our experience, we could actually observe, you know, thoughts coming and going, emotional and mood changes, what's going on physically, external perceptions, sounds, everything. We can kind of step back from that and not be lost in it, but actually observe it. So that's the witness mind. And that's really the beginning of our freedom.

From that place, we can decide how to respond to the content of our life rather than just being lost in it or being in an unconscious reactive relationship. But that witness mind, it takes a kind of strong maintenance to stay in that witness mind, and it's still involved with that default mode network to a degree. And what I think allows us to relax that and dissolve the witness mind into a more non-dual meditation where we're just really in being, just kind of pure awareness, pure being. What allows us to do that is having a foundation to ground that in. And for me, that is that deep embodiment, which of course includes the breath, but feeling the breath and the whole body at a deeper and deeper level, all the way down to the

bones. We experience this internal resonance, which is very palpable. It's always there. We're just not tuned into it. And it's a ground of presence and being that we can anchor ourselves in. And the more we become familiar with it, that allows us not only to be fully present, but to relax that need for the observer witness and just drop into pure being. And, you know, that really goes into the more profound possibilities of meditation and resilience building and so forth. And further relaxing the need, that constant thing of, you know, what about me and am I going to get my, you know, the whole thing, the whole project to me. We're able to relax that more and more because we actually feel something more deeper and more trustworthy than that. And for me, the portal is through the body. And of course, I think then that goes into subtle body and things like that. But the portal really for me is,

to begin with, is becoming much more deeply embodied. Yeah. And this sort of leads to something you were talking about in the book, which is two modes of mindfulness, witnessing versus sensing or observing versus feeling. Yeah. And in my own practice, I'm now able to, almost any time I sit down to practice, and I practice every morning, my sweetheart, my fiance, Sophie and I get up and have a little bit of morning routine, not much with a little bit of exercise and just the bathroom and brushing teeth and so forth. And then we go in and practice for an hour, hour and a half before breakfast. And I'm able to sit down and just, my mind will just settle immediately, almost all the time. And even if it's not, you know, if it's struggling to settle a little bit or something going on, which is causing me to be

a little discursive, all I really need to do is just flash on these qualities of embodiment, you know, and just bring myself into that embodiment. And my mind just immediately settles. And it's also, I'm beginning to experiment with, you know, the default mode network kind of runs immediately across the top of the head from front to back. And then of course it's connected to substrates in the brain. The task positive network and the direct sensing or feeling is more lateral pathways around the brain. And I don't know whether I'm actually feeling it or it's imagining, you know, when you start working with these things, actual experience and imagination, you know, subtle energy, actual

energy, sensation, it's all kind of on a spectrum of body and mind, right? So, but I literally try to bring my attention to the lateral sides of my brain rather than the top and really drop into the body and feel my body all the way down to the feet and all the way down to the bones, and really feel the ribcage opening and closing and tune into as much of the internal process as my body as I can. And that just immediately settles my mind. And I'm able to go right into practice without really having to struggle with my discursive mind in the way that I did for years. years I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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slash wolf so they know our show sent you. That's simplisafe.com slash wolf. So I really just want to talk about radical responsibility. You say that radical responsibility is a shame-free philosophy that transcends blame. So tell me a little bit more, you know, a short bit about how you would define radical responsibility. Well, I often describe it as voluntarily embracing 100% responsibility or ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life. That includes the ones where if we get a little bit honest with ourselves, we can see we play some part in creating or, you know, or inviting, as well as the ones that seemingly just fell out of the sky and landed in our lap, right? And everybody would agree,

we had nothing to do with it. And so why would I embrace ownership for that? Because it's the only place I have any real self-agency or power. You know, it's quite natural to blame. We're all vulnerable creatures. We have tender hearts. We've all had our hearts bruised. We've been hurt. You know, we've all been shamed as well. We've been blamed and shamed plenty.

And so when something happens, we've been enculturated to think somebody's going to get blamed. And if I can't find someone or someone else to blame, then I'm going to have to blame myself. And I don't want to blame myself. You know, I've experienced enough of that myself. And I don't want to blame myself. You know, I've experienced enough of that already. So I just naturally deflect blame.

But in doing so, the problem with that, even though it's natural and we don't need to beat ourselves up about it, but what good does it do for us, right, is that we're really giving away our power. Because, you know, let's say you and I are in some kind of conflict. We had a business deal that went bad or something. I'm completely convinced it's all your fault and I'm ready to go to war and you may be in the same position. But our friends talk us into going to a mediator and the mediator talks to both of us. We're both very convincing. They're not sure what to do. But in the end, we have a videotape and he says, well, I'm going to take out and put together a focus group. Ten really smart people that don't know either one of you, don't care who about either one of you, and we'll see what they say.

So they come back and they say, well, I have to say, they did agree that Eric bears more of the responsibility of the situation here. I said, boy, I'm glad you found such a group of smart people. They realize it's all Eric's fault. The media said, well, no, they say, you know, it's about 60, 40, 70 days. You do bear some of the responsibility. Well, I don't really believe it, but as long as they think it's mostly Eric's fault. You know, she says, okay, all right. All on my part, I acknowledge I had some role, maybe 30%, but I still feel vindicated that we all agree that it's mostly Eric's fault.

You know, that may be very normal and very human, but if I'm really convinced, I mean, by definition, I'm unhappy, I'm upset, right? And if I really think it's, you know, 60, 70% or 100% your fault, who did I just put in charge of my internal state? I put you in charge of it. Can I control you? We constantly do that. We put others in charge of our own internal state, our own internal happiness and so forth. And we cannot control other people. You know, we've all tried, we keep trying, we should know from experience that people are not controllable. But we can know so even beyond a shadow of a doubt, because we know that we're uncontrollable. Right? I mean, no matter how much somebody tries to control or intimidate us, we will find our way to get our needs met. So you know, if people get nothing else from this, and you just let go of that agenda of trying to control the people in your life, we'll find our way to get our needs met. So, you know, if people get nothing else from this, and you just let go of that agenda of trying to control the people in your life,

we'll all be happier. But, you know, again, it's a natural instinct to do because we all, you know, we feel that sense of control will give us a sense of security and so forth. But this blame thing really is giving our power away. So the idea of radical responsibility is to place ourselves in the most powerful place we can in our life, where we have the most agency. And that's focusing on what can I do? No matter what the situation is, what can I do? And, you know, this isn't about beating ourselves up at all. It is not about blaming ourselves. It's not about blaming others. It's

certainly not about blaming victims. And, you know, it comes from a place of having deep compassion for ourselves, deep compassion for people for whom have suffered terrible things happening to them. Nonetheless, at some point for ourselves or for others, the really saving question is, what am I going to do? You know, maybe something landed in my lap that's terrible and has really taken me down. At some point, my decisions are going to determine whether I'm able to find some way to embrace that that's now part of my life and move forward with my life, or it is going to take me down. And that's really up to me and the decisions I make. And, you know, for some of the horrible things that happen to human beings, that can be a very heroic thing. It can be very difficult to get to that place. But we're really talking about ourselves here.

And, you know, and can we, no matter how tough of a situation we're in and how much it feels like it's coming at us from someone else, if I can focus on what can I do? Because now I'm out of the victim mindset and into the mindset of possibility, because there's always a million different things we can do. There's a million different ways we can approach any person, any situation. And that just gets us back in that mind of possibility and back in the driver's seat of our own life to whatever degree. And so it's really, it's just really, we could call it radical self-empowerment. I feel our culture, and I don't mean to beat up on our culture, in some ways it's a human condition. And then in particular, that's extrapolated into our Western culture based on various influences, culture and religious, that we're cultured into a fairly blame and shame based culture with a lot of punishment, reward. And, you know, children are, you know, I mean, we want our children to grow up and, you know, we do need to enculturate our children.

But unfortunately, there's a coercive aspect where the message is conform or you're going to be ostracized, conform or you're going to be shamed. And even the most benevolent parents do this unconsciously to a degree because they want their children to be happy and fit into whatever culture they buy into. And they don't want to be embarrassed by their own children. So there's that either subtle or not so subtle coercion. And when you're on the other side of that, the message is shame, right? It's a threat of love being withdrawn, the threat of being unworthy, of being rejected. And we've all experienced that. And unfortunately, we set up cultural institutions that reinforce that continually. So it's that blaming, shaming quality that I think drives a lot of the negative

influences in our culture. And it takes a lot of resilience to rise above that. But I think it starts for ourselves in terms of learning how not to shame ourselves and not to blame ourselves, while at the same time, really in our own enlightened self-interest, taking as much ownership for our lives as we can to focus our energies where it can do the most good, which is in directing our own behaviors. So there's a lot of subtlety in this, right? Because on one hand, we hear this and we go, all right, 100% responsibility. I'm the only one that can handle this. Great. But a lot of people respond negatively to that for a lot of different reasons. I think a lot of it is because there's not an understanding. And I think there's a couple of concepts we probably should

dive a little bit deeper into. And maybe we can talk about a few of them. You know, one would be blame slash fault. I think that's another word for it, right? You could say it's your fault. I blame you. Same, same thing that an ownership. Let's talk about the difference between those. Cause I think that's where a lot of people get hung up. Yeah, absolutely. That is. And that's been a lot of my trainings, I do radical responsibility trainings of various kinds around the world. We also deliver a very powerful training called The Event, which a lot of this radical responsibility model comes out of. It's a very intense group process. And then I have my online courses. And what I'm always trying to

land in there experientially for people is the difference between ownership and blame, and especially the difference between ownership and self-blame, right? And so we find ourselves in a situation, right? And our tendency is just to want to parcel it out the vault to everybody else, or even if we're willing to, you know, own something, we're still wanting to parse it out, you know, okay, I'll own this much, but I need to give that much to the other person and so forth. When we shift from that and we're really looking at what's my part in something, we're not looking at that for the purpose of blaming ourselves at all. We're simply looking at it for insight, for learning, for knowledge.

Because if I can see here's a situation that didn't work out well, I know I'm happy about it, got a bad result. And I can see, you know, some elements that I contributed to it or some way I unconsciously set myself up for it or some way maybe I allowed it by just not being aware or maybe I was enabling or people pleasing or maybe I just didn't have good boundaries or I wasn't sticking up for myself or wasn't speaking out or, you know, there's all kinds of ways in which I may have contributed to a situation, unconsciously promoted or allowed it. And so if I can see some of that, then that gives me the insight and the learning to do differently next time and get different results. So purely for the purpose of learning.

You know, even if I can look at a situation and walk it back a few moves and go, oh, back there, if I'd gone right instead of left, that wouldn't have happened, right? And okay, next time I'll know which way to go, right? So it's purely for a purpose of learning. It's not for beating ourselves up at all. And of course, this request, why all of this is, you know, kind of an integral process, because doing the contemplative work with neurosomatic approaches to mindfulness and other contemplative disciplines, developing the resilience so that we have the bravery to look at things with a lot of honesty, to really see our part in things, and be able to gain the insight and the knowledge and the learning without falling into self-blame, right? That just takes practice and resilience. When there is a situation where really,

you know, I don't see that I had anything to do with it, or, you know, even if it's such a terrible situation of injustice, even if it's such a terrible situation of injustice, even if I did, that's beside the point because it's something so horrendous and that should never happen to anybody, right? Well, even in that situation, again, it's not about blaming at all. It's just like, okay, what do I need? What do I need to move forward in my life? Maybe I need to have what happened to me validated as a terrible injustice. Maybe I need to pull a lot of support around myself. Maybe I need to even look for justice. But can I do that with a sense of what's in my own interest in terms of moving forward instead of reifying an identity for myself as a victim and then living

from that place or being crushed by what happened to me or falling into just bitterness and anger and feeling defeated or just continuing to live my life from that place of the world is horribly and unjust, and I've been victimized. And that's going to be the frame to which the lens to which I continue to look at life. So what do I need to help myself move from that place into a more resilient, more positive place where I can say, okay, this happened to me, it's horrible, and now I'm going to do what I can to create my own destiny going forward. And of course, there's lots of stories where people have taken terrible tragedies that befell them. And one of the ways that they were able to move forward in their life was, you know,

like the mother who created an organization, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, right? She lost her own son to a drunk driver. And the way that she was able to transform that and move forward was to create an organization to prevent that from happening to other people, right? So she empowered herself to move forward in her life in a positive way. Right. Again, the distinctions there are very subtle, but I think you hit on them pretty well there that the place that most people go, okay, until we hit sort of like the victimless crime, right? You know, the current movement is, you know, there's a lot of me too. So women who have been, who have been harmed. So we go, well, it's not my responsibility at that point because I was harmed. And I love the

way you said that part of our healing process and part of taking responsibilities for us to figure out what we need, whether that be certain types of therapy, whether that be justice, whether that be being validated in what we are, that it's still us. And the thing that I always think is helpful when I think about this is I'm like, no one else is going to lead my healing and recovery besides me. And that's where the 100% responsibility for me becomes very clear. If I don't take 100% responsibility for the path I take forward out of this, even if what's befallen me is terrible, no one else will. Absolutely. You know, in the trainings, Leslie, we get to a point in the training where I really encourage people to argue with me about

this. We have big group discussions and we really go deeply into it. And it's around this distinction, circumstances are neutral. With some people here, and we land on that, it actually comes out of the audience. I pull that from the audience based on this experience we go through that they see there's these two landscapes. We can experience one thing from one mindset or we can experience it from what I call the empowerment zone mindset. And we have a really different experience. And we have different, you know, different thoughts and feelings about things. And so it implies there's choice involved in it. If there is choice, in fact, then, you know, whether in a moment or at some point,

there's choice about framework to continue to hold things in. Does that mean circumstances are actually neutral? You know, my search is at CR. And some people find that a big relief. It's very empowering. And then people begin to go to the worst case scenarios and especially talk about other people. You know, take the Me Too movement, for example. And that's very tricky territory to go into, especially for a male. So I'm going to be very careful here. But, you know, obviously, that's something that's been a long time coming. It's women speaking up for themselves and saying enough is enough and making a boundary. And it's obviously an incredibly positive thing and something that really needed to happen.

Right. And like any movement, there will be some excesses with it. And I'm not going to draw the line and say what's excessive or not. But, you know, obviously any time the pendulum swings in one way, it usually goes a little too far and it comes back. We all know that. But one of the things that I hear some of my women friends and colleagues talking about, you know, they're very grateful that this is happening. They support it wholeheartedly. But one of the aspects of it that they struggle with is on some levels, it begins to reify women as victims. And, you know, I think that's where it gets tricky. And so how can we, you know, stand up for ourselves, seek the healing we need,

seek justice, whatever it may be, without kind of reifying our life position, or even classifying ourselves as victims, in other words, becoming survivors. You know, I've brought the same work to Rwanda, training genocide survivors in Rwanda to work as paratrauma counselors out at the village level throughout Rwanda. And these are Tutsi villagers, many of whom witnessed their own families being butchered into genocide. And I brought this work to them. And they love it because they do not want to be victims. They have a very proud culture.

But they do want the world to know that the genocide really happened and how horrific it was. And they're committed to preventing that from happening again in Rwanda and other countries around the world. But they see themselves as survivors, not as victims. And I think that's an important distinction. Another example I'll often bring up with the circumstances of neutral is Viktor Frankl's work. You know, his book, not as well known today because it was written, what, in the late 40s, early 50s, Man's Search for Meaning.

But, you know, it transformed the lives of millions of people. And he made two discoveries in Auschwitz, the worst, most infamous death camp of the Nazi Holocaust. I believe his family was wiped out on both sides. And he's there in the work camp where people are. 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? 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 back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

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Yeah, really. No Really. 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. Dropping my flies from exhaustion and starvation and overwork and the elements and so forth. I mean, the most horrific dehumanizing and physically, you know-threatening circumstance you could almost ever imagine being in. And he was a reflective person, a psychologist, a psychiatrist. He wanted to

survive, and he tried to understand why are some people dying quickly, some people surviving. And he discovered two things. One was that the people who were surviving had a sense of future. They were able to create some sense of possibility, a reason to live. And for him, he kept visualizing his future life and getting out someday and completing his work and going ahead with his professional work, his academic work. And others maybe were determined just to get out to bear witness to what happened, either to make sure justice happened or to prevent it from happening to other people. The other thing he discovered was that even in a most powerless, most dehumanizing, horrific situation one can imagine,

that one always has a choice that no one can ever take away from us. And that is a choice over the attitude we bring to that situation. We may not even have a choice of life or death, but we do have a choice of how we're going to die and what mindset. And that can be a hard, tough choice. If we've been choosing fear and bitterness and anger, you know, and some kind of victim mindset our whole life, it's going to be hard to, you know, when push comes to shove, to make the leap into a different mindset. So it's good to practice with the small situations. But we can, and people, there's all kinds of historic, incredible examples where people have made that shift. But again, you know, people tend to want to go with the worst case scenarios. We go into that mindset of giving away our power and blaming, you know, everyone and

everything for what we're feeling. We do it all day long constantly. So I think it's about practicing with the small situations where we really can see circumstances are pretty neutral. You know, and when I say circumstances neutral, that's not a value statement about the circumstances, because obviously some circumstances feel a lot less neutral than others. Some circumstances are horribly unjust. But what it really is, is it's pointing to choice, that we always have the possibility of exercising choice. And therein lies our freedom.

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gets amazing socks also. I want to dive a little deeper there because first, Victor Frankl's work is incredibly inspiring, right? And it points to the remarkable human capacity. Now, I think that what happens to a lot of people is that we start to buy into this mindset. Okay, I should take 100% responsibility and I should be able to transcend these really negative emotions that I'm having. But we try and it doesn't work. And we try and we fall back into the same emotions. We try, we fall back into the same emotion. And then now comes the blame and self-recrimination. So talk about the path through that. Absolutely.

So obviously, it is a path, right? And it does involve practice, right? So again, working with the small situations is very helpful. I mean, I see throughout the day, I actually have a pretty strong impulse to blame myself. You know, I grew up in a family of five. And, you know, when anything went happen, I had an older brother. he'd blame me. I'd blame my next sister. She blamed the next sister. My baby sister would go kick the dog, you know, you know, it all rolled downhill like that. So, uh, you know, I still have that tendency and, uh, and my, my fiance could tell you about it.

I catch it quickly, but that, that impulse is still there. Right. So we can practice with little stuff all day long. When we see ourselves going into that, is still there, right? So we can practice with little stuff all day long when we see ourselves going into that, wanting to deflect responsibility, wanting to blame, even around very little stuff. So that's the place to practice. Around where we feel ourselves getting pulled back into that mindset with the difficult negative emotions, right? Obviously, there is work to do there. So, you know, we may need to do some therapeutic work and some self-healing work. And, of course, you know, I ground this whole radical responsibility model in training and mindfulness and awareness, training and mindful self-compassion and self-

empathy. So all this is contextualized. There's some work out there in the world, and I appreciate it, but it's kind of about the mental toughness models, right? It's somewhat in alignment with radical responsibility, but they're just kind of saying, just do it. You know what I mean? Just get over it, do it, you know? And some people may be able to do that, but for a lot of us, that's not going to work so well. So, you know, for me, radical responsibility is grounded in a context of deeper and deeper self-compassion and self-empathy so that we build that resilience and that bravery and that ability. And we do our healing work where we need to do the healing work. And it's not any kind of, you know, psychological or spiritual bypassing. It's not some kind of simple transcendence or escapism. It's really about we find ourselves like just doing right with anger, negative emotions, hurt, you know, and really feeling victimized.

You know, the first step is to feel what we're feeling and to honor that. Wow, I'm really angry. Where we often go is you're pissing me off, right? You're, you know, you, you, you, and they, they, they. But if we can shift to I statements and really, okay, I'm really angry here and I'm really upset. I'm really afraid. I feel like I've really, you know, been abused in some way, or I feel manipulated, or I feel taken advantage of, or I just feel, you know, we just really own what we're feeling. And then we can look into that. What's really going on there, right? What's really going on there? And I find Marshall Rosenberg's work around nonviolent communication has been very influential for me and in my work, and obviously for millions of people. And one of the key distinctions in that work is the

relationship between feelings and needs. So we generally assume that our emotional responses are caused by people and things, situations outside of ourselves. And that seems very compelling. Somebody does something, says something to us, whatever, and we're suddenly having these emotions. But actually, we go a little deeper. Our emotions really arise out of the experience of met needs or unmet needs. So we all have the same universal needs, right? The need for love and respect, the need for connection with others, relationship, the need for self-autonomy, love and respect, the need for connection with others, relationship, the need for self-autonomy, the need for self-worth and to be valued, to be seen, to be heard. And when our needs are getting met, how do we feel? Well, we have all the warm and fuzzy. We feel contented, peaceful, happy,

joyful, glad, and so forth, right? But if we perceive that our needs are not being met or they're threatened in some way, of course, then we start to seem fearful and anxious or angry or, threatened in some way, of course, then we start to see fearful and anxious or angry or, you know, all the emotions, hateful, fearful, jealous, envious, what's, you know, all the kind of difficult emotions arise out of our perception that our needs are not being met or being threatened in some way. Well, are our perceptions always accurate? I've asked that question to hundreds of audiences and everybody, no, everybody realized no. You know, at best, our perceptions are a limited interpretation on a limited set of the available data. And, you know, they may be partially accurate, but often highly inaccurate or very partial

and sometimes completely inaccurate, completely full of assumptions and misreads of what's going on. But even to the extent it is, you know, partially accurate, you know, okay, my need for respect is really not being met there. No wonder I'm upset. Okay, is this the only way I can get that need met? Is the other person obligated to meet that need for me? Is there another way I can get that need met, right? So I'm in the realm of this whole internal landscape where I have a lot more power.

And, you know, even looking at how is that perception created? Like, you know, something happens. You know, somebody says something. I hear a sound, you know, anything goes down, anything happens, I immediately start telling myself stories. We're meaning making machines. So I start adding meaning to whatever's going on. And until I get to a certain point, I make an assumption about what's happening or an assumption about somebody's motivation.

And then, you know, if I was a good scientist, I would then check out that assumption or try to disprove the assumption. But instead, my field of vision and awareness narrows, and I'm only noticing the data that supports the assumption, and it becomes a conclusion. My field of awareness narrows further, and I get to a belief. This is the ladder of inference, going up the ladder of inference in the conflict. And when I get to a belief, I'm willing to act on my beliefs. In fact, we're willing to kill for our beliefs. So, you know, all that is a landscape that I can look at and check out and go, well, is that really true? And to what extent is it really true?

And, you know, what are assumptions involved in how I'm reading the situation? You know, the reptilian fight or flight response brain cannot do any of this, right? So in remembering to begin to do this, even to start with I statements, so wow, I'm really angry instead of you're making me angry. You know, all that is getting us out of the reptilian brain control back into the rest of our brain, where we have much more access to our intelligence and good judgment, learning and experience. But also it's taking us into this reflective mode rather than projective mode. And it's taking us into the ownership mode and this whole landscape

where I have a lot of self-agency because again, we can't control other people. You know, if something happens there and my belief system is when X happens out there, I have to experience Y emotion. And that's just the way it is. Well, then I just put myself in control, you know, the world in control of me. But if I realize that, you know, my emotions are actually arisen out of my own perceptions of the world around me, that gives me a tremendous sense of self-agency. And we, you know, experience some resistance to go there. But when I lead people to that experientially, they're really like, wow, tremendous sense of freedom and tremendous sense of self-empowerment. Right. And I think it's really useful that you talk about that in order

to be able to do this well, there's a series of skills we need to have and develop and build over time. And that can help us move out of the self-judgment. Because I think the place that a lot of people go, and I've seen this happen a lot, I come up in a 12-step program, and a 12-step program does at a certain point, particularly around the fourth step, say, hey, take responsibility for everything. And so where I see a lot of people go is from, I'm blaming others to now I blame myself. And I love that your work talks about, we're moving beyond that. We're dropping blame as a concept as a whole. Absolutely. And this is grounded, you know, the first chapter in radical responsibility is there's nothing wrong with you. And that chapter is all about helping us get in touch with what, you know, I call and others innate basic goodness or, you know, innate goodness, basic goodness. And, you know, and other religious Christians, they might call this Buddha nature or Christ nature or divine nature or so forth. But it's true. It's just that innate worthiness, innate wholeness,

that really is the actuality of our being. And the great contemplative traditions have given us skills to drop deeper into our being where we can actually experience that down below all the noise and all the stuff. There's a peace and a beingness there where we realize that we are innately good. And all those messages we've gotten our whole life, that we're not enough, or we're not good enough, or this or that, we realize they're all lies, they're all mistruths, that we begin to have some experiential confidence in that, that gives us tremendous resilience and bravery. In fact, I would say there's nothing that gives us more resilience than being in touch with our own innate, unconditional worthiness and goodness. And, you know, it's just a human condition, all of us arrive into early adulthood with whatever levels of

insecurity and, you know, fragile self-worth and, you know, to one degree. But even the people that arrive, you know, have the most benevolent circumstances, you know, they still arrive into adulthood, maybe highly functioning and maybe a lot of surface confidence in their abilities and ability to, you know, end their life with confidence. But, you know, underneath all that, there's this whole territory where they really haven't gone. And, you know, it's like Thoreau talking about the great mass of, you know, he was before gender neutral language, the great mass of men live lives of quiet desperation, you know, waiting for that other shoe to drop. And that's because, you know, we haven't gone into that deeper territory. So we build our confidence about, you know, around what we can do, all our abilities, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. It's great to have abilities and have

confidence. But of course, the rug can be pulled out from any of those by losing a job or an illness or anything, right? So can we develop that unconditional confidence that's grounded in the direct experience of our own innate unconditional goodness and worthiness through the contemplative practices of meditation and so forth. And then, you know, develop a natural self-compassion, a naturally friendly, compassionate, affirming relationship with our own being, right? And then from that place, you know, I would say it's almost arithmetical. To the degree that we have that confidence, we can more naturally step into higher degrees of ownership for our life without being triggered back into self-blame.

Yeah, that's a great way to say it. And I think that's a great place for us to wrap up. So Fleet, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. You and I are going to continue our conversation in the post-show conversation where we're going to go a little bit more into your prison experience and how it informed all this work and how this really isn't sort of armchair philosophy, but really hard-earned wisdom that you had there. So we're going to talk about that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you'd like access to that, as well as exclusive mini episodes, as well as the joy of being a member of our community and supporting the show, you can go to one you feed.net slash support fleet. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll have links to your book and all your works in our show notes, which is at one you feed.net. So thank you so

much fleet. This has really been a powerful conversation and I found reading your book a really, really powerful experience also. Thank you very much, Eric. Okay. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. 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

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