The One You Feed - How to Create a Spiritual Principal Centered Life with Eric Zimmer

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

In the episode, you'll learn: Eric shares his story of his lowest points of addiction that led him to recovery How shame is usually at the center of the addiction cycle Why a fundamental aspect of AA is finding meaning in helping others How one can define spirituality as connecting to what matters most to you in your life Defining and practicing some of the core principles to live a good life The challenges of being present is how we relate to our thoughts about the present moment Why finding the "middle way" and avoiding extremes can be so helpful Why it's so important to go beyond thinking and start taking action to get meaningful results Understanding deeply that difficult feelings come with being human How we don't find meaning, but rather make meaning in life To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All the spiritual traditions are pointing us to being present. And honestly, if we want an experience of being connected to life, we actually have to kind of be around for it. 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. If you've lost track of what's important to you, you're not alone. We often go through phases in life where we feel dissatisfied or disconnected. And when we get off track, it's easy to get stuck in unhelpful patterns like avoidance or perfectionism.

It shows up as negative self-talk, breaking your own rules, procrastinating, or struggling to let go of addictive or otherwise harmful behaviors to make space for healthy ones. I want you to know that all of these are struggles I've had too. And if I can turn things around with the challenges I faced deep in heroin addiction and clinical depression, so can you. What I've learned through experience is that what we know is not as important as what we do consistently. And bridging this gap is the key to feeling fulfilled at a deeper level. Bridging this gap is the foundation of the Spiritual Habits Program, a non-religious mentorship and accountability experience to establish simple daily practices that help you to be more present, compassionate, and connected in

your relationships and life. Over eight weeks together, you'll learn how to make small changes that have a big impact. No matter what life is serving up, you'll experience it in a more grounded, loving, strengthening, and creative way. If anything I've said has resonated with you, go to OneYouFeed.net slash spiritual habits to learn more and sign up. Enrollment for this year's program is open now through March 13th, and I'd love to meet you in it. That's OneYouFeed.net slash spiritual habits to learn more and sign up. 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 reallyknowreally.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. presumptuous and assume that every single person listening to this knows too much about the one you feed. So I would like to introduce Ginny, who is our Director of Communications, and she is a

certified mindfulness teacher through the Mindfulness Training Institute led by Mark Coleman and Martin Aylward. And if you've never heard our podcast, she is interviewing our normal host, Eric Zimmer. In addition to his accomplishment of being one of my very best friends of my entire life, he also is a behavior coach, and he currently hosts the award-winning podcast, The One You Feed. Eric's story and his work have been featured all over the media, including TEDx, MindBodyGreen, Elephant Journal, the BBC, and Brain Pickings. So enjoy this episode with Ginny interviewing Eric about all sorts of topics, including his life, the origins of the one you feed, spirituality, and more. Hi, Eric. Welcome to the show. Well, hello.

This feels so funny to say. So listeners, hello, this is Ginny, and I am actually doing the interviewing today, and I'm going to be interviewing your normal and accustomed and beloved host, Eric. And we're going to be exploring some themes that are central to the show, but also more recently, some things that we've been hearing from listeners that continue to be points of real struggle in their lives. Things about feeling maybe disconnected inside, perhaps life looks good on the outside, but on the inside, you know, connecting to or finding a purpose, connecting to or finding meaning, direction and connection. Those are things that remain really internal struggles. And these are struggles that Eric is no stranger to and has found his way back from.

So I thought we would take an episode to just sort of explore that. And you can tell us a bit about your experience. But before we dive into that, like we always do, I thought I would read this parable to you and maybe you can share what it's meaning to you currently as it's evolved over the many years you've done this show. So there's a grandparent that's talking to their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And one is a bad

wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So Eric, I'd like to ask you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do most recently, lately. You would think that perhaps knowing this is the way the show always starts, I would have thought about this in advance, but I didn't. I mean, in some ways what the parable means to me has not changed a ton over the years, right? Because I think at its heart,

it is a simple statement that our choices matter, right? That the things we do, the things we choose to do, the things we think, the actions we take, they all have consequences. You know, they all lead us in a certain direction. And so I believe that as much now as I believed it then. It does take conscious, consistent, and creative effort, right? We have to be on the lookout for what are the ways that we are perhaps feeding our bad wolf or not giving our good wolf enough food. first time I heard it was this idea that, you know, the grandparent says we all have these things inside of us. So I think it normalizes the human condition and really says that like, there's nothing wrong with you, that you have fear and that you have greed and that you have hatred. That's part of being a human being. Everybody does. You know, all the religious traditions talk about this in a different way. They use different words for it. But if you sort of strip away some of the things that I find most unpalatable about the way sometimes it's packaged up, it does get to this point of, hey, your choices do matter. I think the thing where maybe I have

changed with the parable over the years more is a little bit more of a recognition that things like greed and hatred and fear and these other things that we talk about, that feeding the good wolf does not mean abandoning those emotions. It doesn't mean shutting those emotions off, right? It means learning to work with them skillfully. So it's not that anytime greed, hatred, fear, any of those bad emotions show up that we should suddenly throw it in a cage or starve it. We want to work with them skillfully. And I do think that is part of feeding our good wolf. Part of feeding our good wolf is indeed tending to these emotions that are difficult, that are challenging. And so I would say that's a nuance that I've gotten more and

more clear on over the years. But I think at its heart, that's kind of, you know, still what the parable really means to me. Yeah, didn't you first hear it in early days of recovery? I did, probably in some lousy church basement on some crappy folding chair somewhere in Columbus, Ohio in probably 1995. Yeah, I heard it. And like most people who hear it, I immediately got it. And in my case, at that point, right, being, you know, essentially very close to having died and looking at going to jail for a long time, and all the things that came with my addiction, it was very much there's a Bob Dylan line, you know, it glowed like burning coals, right? Like it was so alive for me because I saw it so clearly. I had just

enough time in recovery that I was able to see very clearly there is a path of recovery and it looks like this. And these are the things you do on that path. And then there's a path that is not recovery. And here's what that path looks like. And it was a very stark choice for me. So it was really, really important to me that day. But I think it spoke to fundamental wisdom that we all face, whether we're dealing with a big addiction like that, or we're dealing with the normal ups and downs of day-to-day life. Since we have a number of new listeners to the show, I actually would like to go back to that period of your life, the early days of recovery, and just sort of set the stage for what life looked both have issue with that term. But from a perspective of like, that really low point, what was happening in your life set the stage for us?

Yeah, well, without going into like a drunk a log of like seven years of addiction history that led me to that point, you know, at the end, when I got sober the first time for any significant amount of time, I was essentially homeless. I was living in the back of a van that the restaurant I worked at owned. They didn't know I was living in it. I weighed 100 pounds. I had hepatitis C. I didn't know that at the time. And then I got arrested for multiple felonies and was looking at potentially 50 years in jail. And so the combination of getting arrested, the combination of losing the job, which is where I made money and also stole money in order to feed, you know, what would today be a $600 a day heroin habit, losing what little home I had being that van. Nobody was willing

to take me in at that point. I wandered into a detox center because it was December in Columbus and I knew it was freezing. I knew I didn't have anywhere to go and I knew that I was going to be really sick. I didn't go in really with a big enthusiasm about changing my life. I just simply was like, I need a place to hang out for a few days where they'll give me some drugs so I don't feel so bad. And while I was there, they said, hey, we think you need to go to long-term treatment. And I said, I don't think so. You know, I've got this really got this really happening life going on out here. You know, I can't stay in here. It was an old tuberculosis hospital. It was it was not a great place to be. However, I had been living in a van. So who is

the judge? Not even a nice van, right? Coincidentally, the van had a couch in it that I picked up at a dumpster that I saw one day when I was meeting the drug dealer for drugs. So that's about the level of home. Anyway, I went back to my room after having this conversation with them where I said, no, I'm not going to go into long-term treatment. And I had, as we say in recovery, a moment of clarity where I went, oh, I'm going to die or I'm going to go to jail if I go back out there. It was just really clear. You know, I had no belief that I had any way of stopping myself at that point. I had been through treatment a few times. I had tried everything under the sun to try and get my alcohol and drug problems, my heroin problems under

control and had failed again and again and again. So I had no illusion that if I went back out there, I would be sober. It was very clear. So I went back and said, OK, I'll go to long term treatment. And that was a big turning point for me that sort of stepped me into recovery. Do you have a sense of looking back how you got to that point, how you got to the point of such desperate circumstances. I mean, I think a very common human feeling is to feel hollow inside or disconnected or lonely or lost or detached, depressed. I mean, what were the things that

you can pinpoint in your experience leading up to that day that got you to where you were? Well, when you were a blackout drinker to the extent I was, you kind of do wake up one day and find yourself. You don't remember much. What happened? Where did the last eight years go? I mean, addiction is, as they would say in the scientific literature, a multivariant condition, right? Meaning there are a ton of things that cause it. So for me to say this caused it, I don't know what I can say. You know, some things I can point to are that, you know, by the time I was 10 years old, I was a kleptomaniac, you know, and I think I stole because it made me feel alive. And I think that was the thing that drugs and alcohol did for me. They did two things. One was when I restarted

them again at the age of 18. I had taken a couple years off. We don't really need to go into all that at this point. I was in a lot of pain and the alcohol numbed the pain. But further, as time went on, it was much more than that. It was that it brought life into color for me. It made life come alive. And, you know, the reasons I had, I think, deadened myself inside largely have to do with, I think it just wasn't safe to have any emotion in my household. And I was a very sensitive child. And so, you know, it's interesting to talk about this now, because listeners, when you hear this, it will be further down the road, but my dad passed the other day. And, you know, so I look at my father and my father was a very angry person, you know, kids in the neighborhood didn't want to come around the

house. And so, you know, any sort of sensitivity I had, you know, had to be shoved down. So anyway, I think that for me, it was very much about alcohol and drugs made life come alive. Now, the problem with an addiction to something like alcohol or drugs is that what starts to happen is your system starts trying to take you in the other direction. Meaning, you know, if you're doing a lot of stimulants all the time, your body's trying to ramp you down. So if you stop taking those stimulants, right, you crash hard. So over time, what happens with an addiction is that if I use it to come alive, then when I don't use it, I feel even less alive. And then over time, shame starts to accrue around addiction. And so all of a sudden, it's the cycle you and I talk a lot about.

We talk about upward and downward spirals. The downward spiral is, I feel really bad that I, you know, got blackout drunk again last night. And I feel terrible. I feel terrible. I feel terrible. Well, how do I respond to feeling terrible? I get blackout drunk again. And the cycle goes down. So, you know, I think in the beginning, alcohol and drugs were a way of coming to life, of connecting to the world of having what felt like meaning and purpose, because it made me very interested in the world. Over time, the addiction feeds on itself, and that addiction becomes about trying to repair the damage that the addiction is actually doing at the same time. So it becomes very destructive in that way.

Yeah. As you were talking through it, what I was thinking is how, in hindsight, what seems to be the case was that you were a very sensitive and are a very sensitive person, that a lot of your nerve endings are just right on the outside of you. And growing up in a household with an angry father and where big feelings weren't necessarily something you felt safe to express, you sort of deadened those nerve endings a bit. And then it sounds like drugs and alcohol were a way for you to re-engage with the world and feel connected to your world and to life, but in a way that felt somehow safer. And actually what you were doing was further disconnecting from life.

Yeah, over time, for sure, further disconnection. I don't know if it felt safer. It just felt like the only way I knew how. Ah, that's a good distinction. Right. And I think this is what makes certain people more likely to become an alcoholic or addict is because what it does for somebody who becomes an alcoholic and addict

is different than what the drugs or alcohol do for somebody who doesn't. I mean, most people will enjoy them, right? I mean, you know, the vast majority of our culture likes a few drinks. They like that feeling, right? But it's not transformational in the way that it was for me, where it was like, oh, this is what I've been looking for my whole life. You know, like, holy mackerel, someone has just showed me the magic kingdom. But in the early days of AA, Bill Wilson had a correspondence with Carl Young. Bill Wilson's one of the founders of AA. And Carl Young made the point for Bill that indeed, you know, AA talked a lot about it being a spiritual program. And Carl Young said that

makes total sense that the spiritual solution is what you arrive at. Because even the root of the word spirits, which we use to describe alcohol, they're pointing to this elevated state. They're pointing to grasping for something that is just beyond us, that is greater than us, that is bigger than us. And that's what I think I was certainly doing. And you get the moments of it, right? You get the moments of it where you're like, aha, there it is. I chase those moments into, to quote another AA phrase from the big book, the gates of insanity and death. Yeah. So when you are standing at the gates, there you are in the tuberculosis hospital in Columbus. How did you begin to pull your life together? Like, how did you begin to find the meaning,

the connection in your life from a way that was more nourishing and sustaining than drugs? Yeah, I mean, everybody's recovery looks different. There is something to be said for the way I recovered being in treatment. And then I went with a little bit of time being outside. I went to a halfway house and the benefit there was I was completely immersed in recovery. And so in the beginning, all I really had to do was just do what they told me to do, show up here, show up there, show up here, you know. But the other thing was that we were really digging into the things about emotions and feelings and meaning and connect. I mean, we were talking about these things. And I was surrounded by people who were talking about these things. And so that was a big part of it

was that, you know, my meaning after a little while became first about getting sober. And that took on a lot of meaning. That was what my life was about because it became very clear to me that that was what my life depended on. So there's a phrase from acceptance and commitment therapy that our vulnerabilities will often show us our values, right? And so in that case,

my vulnerability was my addiction. And so my value very much became my sobriety. And then the thing that I loved about 12-step programs, AA had a number, I think, of really genius insights. And I'm not saying it's the right thing for everybody by any stretch of the imagination. It's not the right thing for everybody. One of its key insights, AA founded when Bill Wilson, the founder, a stockbroker from New York, a ruined stockbroker, went on a business trip to Akron, Ohio, and had been sober a little while, but knew he was going to drink. He was basically like at the edge of the hotel bar. And so on a whim, he just went, all right, I need to try and help somebody. And so he started calling local churches until he found one. And he basically was saying to them at

the time, you know, this is going to sound a little bit strange guys, but I'm a recovering alcoholic. I'm sure they didn't even have that word from New York city. And I'm looking to talk, do you have a drunk anywhere I can talk to? And they connected him with a guy named Dr. Bob Smith, who was a proctologist from Akron, Ohio. I'm going to leave the proctology jokes alone, out of respect for our listeners and any proctologists out there. It's an important role. Important work. Yep. So the founding of AA is considered the moment that Bill and Dr. Bob sat down and talked that night. And the insight was that yes, Bill was there, Bill was sober, and he was talking to Dr. Bob, who was not,

about how to get sober. So Bill was helping Bob. But the great insight was that Bob was helping Bill every bit as much. That ability to help others, to connect with someone else, to do your best to help another person, It was a huge gift to yourself as well as the other person. And so right away in AA, you know, we were very focused on this idea of help. You know, how can you help? And in the beginning, if you can't help by, you know, you've got a week sober and there's nobody you can really talk to, you're cleaning up ashtrays or you're, I mean, nobody smokes in meetings anymore, but they did then, you know, you're cleaning up ashtrays or you're, I mean, nobody smokes in meetings anymore, but they did then, you know, you're cleaning up the coffee pot. You're two weeks in the treatment center and somebody walks in who's brand new and they're scared to death. And you

at least know where the lunchroom is. And, you know, I mean, and so you're helping others. And so that for me was where I found meaning then. And it tends to be where I mostly find it now is in how can I help other people? Yeah. That's so powerful to be in service of something other than slash and or greater than yourself. You learned that lesson in a very real way in those early days. If you then fast forward a number of years, you got sober and then you drank again. I did. And got sober a second time. Indeed. So can you contrast a little bit or maybe compare to the circumstances you found yourself in the second time you got sober with those circumstances so dire the first time you got

sober? Yeah, it was a very different situation. I stayed sober about eight years. I had my son at that point, Jordan, who would have been, I don't know how old he was when I started drinking again, maybe five. Anyway, when he was about two and a half, his mother and I split up. She came home one day, said, I'm in love with someone else, that someone else happened to be somebody in AA, and I completely fell apart. Now, I'm not putting all the blame on her, right? There was a reason she was that unhappy in her marriage. I'm not trying to be like, oh, it was this terrible thing was done to me. Although at the time, that was exactly what I thought and how I felt. And I was devastated. And I didn't drink actually right away after that. I stayed sober for a while, but it really sort of severed my connection

to AA and it crushed the very infantile spiritual life I had built to that point. And over time, then what began to happen was I became incredibly focused on me, right? Am I happy? How am I feeling? You know, how am I doing? And as I did that, these other compulsive and impulsive behaviors started to arise. I started smoking cigarettes and I had been a heroin addict. And at that time I'd be like, no, no way. I'm not smoking a cigarette, right? Because my parents had been smokers. I really hated it. But then I was like, well, I'm not going to drink, but I just something, give me something. You know, I started engaging in sexual behaviors that were not ideal. I mean, my life became all about me. Even my recovery work became all about me. I was in therapy. I was doing a lot of good work, but it only turned inward.

And so eventually I drank. And then, yes, I had to get sober again. But when I got sober again, I was nowhere near consequence-wise where I was the first time. I had the best job I'd ever had. I was making very good money. I lived in a house in a nice suburb. I just gotten promoted. You know, on the outside, I was doing very well. Luckily, I had enough interior awareness to recognize that I was just as sick as I had been the first time. It's just that alcohol and marijuana didn't cause the sort of destruction that that heroin did. And that's simply a consequence of laws and different things. But I was every bit as sick as I had been.

How did you know that? What did you find inside of yourself that tasted so similar to what you found inside yourself many years before? I knew that I would choose getting a drink over anything else. I just knew that I was out of control and I felt it and I knew it. And so I would do things like drop Jordan off at soccer practice and go have a couple shots of whiskey. And I'd say to myself, well, it's only a couple shots, you know, no big deal. But like, that's terrible behavior. I mean, like, I'm not proud of that. I was either high or drunk around the clock. I mean, I, you know, I would go to my job every day, just baked out of my gourd, you know, like, and so I just, after a while I could just tell.

Now there still were a couple of things that were consequence related that drove me back into AA, but they were very minor compared to the sort of consequences I'd had before. So I think that was the thing. I just could feel it inside. I knew that I hadn't had to do lots of terrible things in order to get high. If suddenly they made alcohol illegal the next day, or I couldn't find marijuana, or it suddenly cost $500, like I would start engaging in the same sorts of behaviors I had 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 back the woolly mammoth.

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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 I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You referenced your spiritual life. What did that look like when you talk about your spiritual life? I mean, were you religious? What do you mean by that word? And what did that look like? When you talk about your spiritual life, I mean, were you religious? What do you mean by that word? And what did that look like in your life? Well, AA is considered a spiritual program. It describes itself that way. There are a number

of steps that talk about God and a higher power. And so those can be interpreted lots of different ways. And they are interpreted far more liberally and widely today than they were in Columbus, Ohio in 1994, right? In Columbus, Ohio in 1994, God kind of meant God. It tended to mean a guy up in the sky who kind of came down and controlled things. You know, maybe not everybody attached Jesus to it, but a lot of people did. And I was so desperate to be sober that when I heard, well, you just have to believe in God, I just did to the best of my ability. But I didn't really, fully, completely. I formed this very, like I said, I called it infantile spiritual belief,

which was that like, if I just do good things, good things will happen to me. Now I look at it and I think it's absurd, but I had some form of that belief. You know, when my wife left, I should say I left the house actually, but when we split and I felt so aggrieved, you know, there was this part of me that was like, God, this isn't fair. Like I've been sponsoring all these people. I go to a meeting every day. Like, and so that was my spiritual life. It wasn't founded on something that I really understood or had a real relationship with. It was me trying to believe something. And sometimes I believed it. I believed it enough that I got sober. But when the ground fell out from under me, it wasn't a spiritual life that I

felt could support me through the most difficult times, and which I now feel like I do have today. So what spiritual means, means very different things to different people. Well, so what does it mean to you now? I mean, that's interesting. You say that AA was spiritual, and it really meant the traditional sense of the word spiritual, that there was a God involved. You know, there was a certain specific way to do things, a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. It was just a very narrow definition and a very narrow experience that one could have if one was, quote, spiritual. What does it mean to you today? And do you think you have a spiritual life today? Yeah, I first feel like I need to give AA just a quick defense here because,

you know, there's a line at the end of the third step, and the third step says, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. And that line, as we understood him, I think has saved millions of lives. And there was a lot of debate in the early days of AA. A lot of people did not want that line in there. This is 1939. These are Christian men, largely, right? And there's some women, but largely Christian men. And so some members fought very hard for that line. And that line saved a lot of people's lives. And people would say, well, your higher power can be whatever you want it to be. It can be that doorknob, which I always went, well, but that's stupid. Like what? Like, how's a doorknob going to help me be sober? Right? But there's atheist meetings. Now there's Buddhist meetings. There's

all kinds of things. It's a very different, there's Buddhist meetings, there's all kinds of things. It's a very different world now. So anyway, back to your question about spiritual life. When I came back the second time, and I came back to AA because still 16 years ago, still were not many options. You know, there wasn't the whole recovery infrastructure that there is online today. And I knew what I knew, and that was to go to AA, and I did. But it became clear to me very quickly, like, if I'm going to work these steps, which reference God and a higher power, I've got to find a way, like, what does this mean to me? Like, what actually will work? And where I landed on, and has only developed over the years, was I landed on the idea that there were certain,

we could call them spiritual principles. That's what I refer to them as spiritual principles, that if I lived by them to the best of my ability, I could stay sober and I could handle whatever life brought me. And so I started kind of looking at like, well, what were those? What are those? And that's largely kind of where the spiritual habits program came from a lot of years later, right? I mean, the spiritual habits program happened 13 years later or something, but the gist of it was right in there. And so spiritual to me means, you know, it's about what matters. It's about connection to myself, to other people, to the world around me, or connection to whatever matters to me. It's

about asking myself the questions about what matters to me and trying to live my life that way to the best of my ability. So I think that's what spiritual is about for me today. You know, I was able to cobble enough of that together 16 years ago to find a path through recovery that worked for me. I think the other thing, AA had these acronyms for people who didn't believe in God. Clever people had come up with a couple of things. One of them was group of drunks. You know, God stands for a group of drunks, meaning the group can help you. And I really and truly believe that. And I believe for anybody dealing with any sort of addiction, doesn't have to be AA. Doesn't even have to be a formal group,

but the support of other people is essential. But the other thing they said was that God could stand for good orderly direction. And that was the one that I went, oh, that makes sense to me. And from there, I inferred it out to spiritual principles. Oh, good orderly direction is spiritual principles. I was very influenced by Stephen Covey at the time. He wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and he talked a lot about living a principle-centered life. And so I went, oh, okay. I believe if I live by these principles, things like being kind, being honest, being generous, doing my best to, you know, recognize the things I can change and can't change and the things that I can't let them go. I mean, very basic things, but they were enough. Yeah. So spirituality does not necessitate nor exclude a deity for you. It's not necessarily that there is a God involved. It's more a way of orienting and living that feels purposeful, you know,

connected to both yourself and then the life that is around you and within you. And that it is infused with meaning, guided by these principles that are known to be wise by more than just one tradition. Yes, that is exactly it. Now, over time, that has deepened into something that I would say is a little bit more the word used as mystical. But mystical doesn't mean weird in the scholarly usage of it. It means simply about having a direct experience of something bigger, greater than you. But in my case, no, for me, it is not a deity. I do not believe in a deity that creates things and controls things. Now, I could be wrong. I'm an agnostic in the truest sense of the word, meaning I really don't know.

I really don't know how the heck all this works. What I do know is that I have had experiences of unity, of connection, of oneness that have deepened my spirituality over time that have caused it to be a little bit less dry than just these principles that I live my life by. But these principles living my life by those, I mean, transformed my life in huge and meaningful ways. So I'm not trying to say like, oh, I'm past that now. It's still the core of everything. And these principles are principles that you, over the course of the last 16 years, have identified or discovered that are really core to a life that both feels good and does good, a life that is full of meaning and connection. Tell me about these principles.

Well, I'm not the first person who had the insight that if you look at all the major religious traditions out there, that there's an awful lot of commonality among them. There's differences, there's different ways of saying things, but they're talking about a lot of very similar things. So I did not come up with that idea. I don't know who did the most recent person that we know of a guy named Aldous Huxley, who also wrote the doors of perception about his use of mescaline, English intellectual, he called it the perennial philosophy. But it's this idea that yeah, at the heart of all these religious traditions, and I would say most philosophical traditions, there are some key underlying ideas. Now, for my life, I had a few. And then for the spiritual habits program,

I went through and sort of said, like, I think these are going to be the ones. There are more than these. And but for me, it was like, okay, this covers an orientation to life that has worked for me. So in no way, shape or form want to claim like these are the right spiritual principles, right? It's just those are the ones that I've consistently returned to and used again and again in my journey that also do align when I look at, you know, sort of this perennial philosophy. They're everywhere. You know, they are everywhere. What are those principles?

You want the full list? The full list. The first is, it's kind of two principles rolled into one. It's a bonus principle. It's intention and attention. And what it means is thinking very often about what matters to me, what is important to me, you know, not just once in a great while, not just once on like a corporate retreat every five years or something, but very regularly, you know, what matters to me? What matters to me today? What matters to me about this dinner? What matters to me about the way I raise my children? That's intention. And then attention is simply where our mind is at, what

we're paying attention to. And William James, he's the founder of modern psychology said, my experience is what I agree to attend to. So there's no thing that I can think of that has more to do with the quality of our experience than what we're paying attention to. But the reason they're combined is that we want to be able to say what matters to me, what's my intention, and that is my attention aligned with that. So let's just say my intention is to feel more connected to life. All right, well, when I check in regularly, where is my attention? Oh, it's on the latest news story, or it's on Prince, I don't even know which one wrote the book recently, right? I'm just calling

out things. It doesn't matter, right? But we'll look at that and go, oh, does that make me feel more connected to life? No. Okay. So what might now bring my attention back to where my intention is? So a little bit of word soup there. Yeah. The second one is self-compassion.

It took me a long time to really get this one. Besides being aware our attention is, I think there are a few other things that improve the quality of our lives more than being in our brain with a kind person, right? We are stuck with ourselves all of the time. And if that person we are stuck with is awful to us, it's a miserable experience, right? It's like being in a bad marriage, but worse. And so for that reason, it's really important. And then the second reason is change, I believe happens by learning. When we are hypercritical of ourselves, we don't learn, we can't learn.

We shut down. Yeah, we shut down the learning parts of our brain. So for real transformation to happen, we have to find a way to be kinder to ourselves. You know, I mean, AA did this in its own way, right? By simply saying, you were a sick alcoholic. You're responsible for what you did. You're responsible for what you do now, but you're not a bad person. That's a pretty foundational shift. But I just became more convinced of self-compassion over time. The next one is similar to attention a little bit, but it's a type of attention. And it's about being present. You know, Eckhart Tolle had a book called The Power Now that sold

a bajillion copies, right? And I read it and thought it was really good. And my Buddhist training told me, you know, be here now, you know, I guess that's Ram Dass. He wasn't exactly a Buddhist, but the idea is there. All the spiritual traditions are pointing us to being present. And honestly, if we want an experience of being connected to life, we actually have to kind of be around for it. Can I pause you there and ask a question? Because I feel like we hear from listeners of the show that have questions around the general theme of like, well, what if I don't like my circumstances? Like, what if I don't want to be present to this life that I see in front of me? What if what I want to do is escape it?

So I think that there are situations that it's worth trying to escape from, right? I mean, there just are. I mean, there are horrible traumas that we go through. You know, it's worth trying to escape from. Most of the time, though, the moment itself isn't that bad looked at from a particular perspective. So the moment might feel bad because I'm telling myself that what I'm doing is really boring. But is there a way to make it less boring? You know, a lot of people, it's very hard to be present to the moment because of indeed, lots of trauma, right? And so I'm not suggesting like, well, just suck it up and be present to that. You may need help in doing that, right? You may need to do a lot of healing and recovery to get to the point where you feel safe

enough in the moment. But for most of us, most of the time, the current moment isn't so bad. It's what we think about the current moment. It's our beliefs about the current moment. It's the thoughts that we're having that are coloring the current moment in a bad way. The emotions that are present. It's not the moment itself. 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

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Yeah, I think about through the lens of mindfulness that we have the object of our attention and then we have our relationship to that object. You know, there are times that we can absolutely have control or have an impact on what the object is. And then there's the impact and control we have on how we are in relationship to it, how we interact with it. So I think what you're pointing to is coming into a wise relationship with what's there, which has all the impact in the world on how we're experiencing our life. Absolutely. I think you said that better than I could. It really is about everybody has things

they have to do that just they don't enjoy, right? Every job, every life has them, right? And we can change our relationship with it to be a little bit different. And one of the spiritual principles here in a few minutes, we'll talk a little bit more about that. I was going to say, why don't we go right into that? Yeah. And now I'm jumping out of order, but okay, I will. Another key principle is allow everything to be exactly the way it is. Now, this is a radical kind of statement. I don't mean always allow everything to be exactly the way it is, right? But there is a truth. I heard it from the spiritual teacher Shinzen Young. And the minute I heard it, I glommed onto it and have used it ever since.

And it is this idea that our suffering equals pain times resistance. So what does that mean? Well, our suffering we could think of as just the total experience we have. How awful is this overall experience, you know? And then the pain I would say is, as you said earlier, it's the object of our attention. It's the thing that we're seeing that we don't like. Resistance is our wanting it not to be that way. And resistance takes a thousand different forms. But the reason I love that equation, suffering equals pain times resistance, is imagine that we just put all three of those on a scale of one to 10. And I'll just use back pain because it's an easy example. And my back hurts at a level of a three. Now let's make it a little more.

Let's say it's a five. The actual physical sensations of my back are at a pain of a three. Now let's make it a little more. Let's say it's a five. The actual physical sensations of my back are at a pain level of five, but my resistance is also at a level of five. And what do I mean by resistance? I mean, just all the ways I keep saying, I don't want it. I don't like it. I don't want it to be this way. The stories I start to tell myself like, Oh, if my back hurts as much at 50, what am I going to be like at 80? You know, am I really ever going to be able to, you know, go surfing again? I probably never going to surf again. You know, there's all this stuff that comes with it, right? That's the resistance. So if I were able to turn that resistance down just a little bit, let's say from a five to a three. So right now I got five points

of pain, five points of resistance, total suffering, 25. If I turn my resistance down just two points, because it's very hard to completely not resist things. If you can completely not resist things, when I haven't been able to do that, which is only a couple times in my life, I have had freedom beyond measure in my heart, in my spirit, but it's very hard to do. So let's just be realistic and say I can reduce my resistance by two. Now, all of a sudden, I've got five points of pain, three points of resistance, 15 total points of suffering. I've reduced my suffering by 10 points and I did not have to change the situation one bit.

And that's great news because very often we simply cannot change the situation. If we can, in a wise way, we should. But a lot of life, it just doesn't work that way. Either we can't or we're not going to. And what I mean by not going to is I'm not going to quit this job. I've thought about it from my best, wisest, truest self. And I've realized that right now for me, this is the right place to be. Maybe I wish there were other options. There aren't, but given Bob, whatever, I'm not going to change it. So, okay. If I'm not going to change it, then what I want to work on is my relationship to my job. So that's the principle of allow everything to be the way it is. And again,

as I said, the times that I've been able to get all the way to this have been moments of what the mystical traditions sort of talk about as like a mystical experience, a unit of experience. What I was searching for with all my drugs, I believe the way I got there was I somehow totally let go. So that's that principle. And it goes kind of back to that point of people saying, well, my current experience, I don't like it. I don't want to be here. Well, can you change that? And if so, we should wisely. But if not, then we do have to learn to relate to it differently. It's the only game in town. Right, exactly. That would lead us into what's the next

spiritual principle? It's a phrase I believe it was originally said by Anais Nin. Is that how you say that? I say Anais Nin. Okay. You're probably right. When it comes to pronunciation, nine times out of ten, you have it right. I butcher things. You should hear me on Teaching Song and a Poem trying to read the name of many of these

poets. I'm sure it's a crime. It's a crime. But she said, we don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are. And so the idea there is that there is not an objective perspective. Everything that we see, we see through lenses of conditioning. And conditioning simply, it's a term that's used in psychology, it's used in Buddhism. And it means that all the experiences I've had up till now, plus my genetics and my brain chemistry and how well I slept and all that stuff, you could think of it as it creates

a lens. It's a lens that we see the world through. And we all do. And you can't really not do it. Again, we might say that certain forms of enlightenment are where you shave as much of that away as you can, right? But by and large, as humans, it's just the way our brains work. As humans, we are also meaning-making machines. We are always interpreting what happened. Good, bad, why it happened, whether it should have happened, whether it shouldn't have happened, it's all happening. all happening. So that's just a truth. And knowing that for most of us, we're not going to turn it off, we can't, then it becomes a matter of seeing that clearly and going, okay, so the way I'm seeing the world right now has a lot to do with the way I am. And so can I be more flexible in

how I see the world? Acceptance and commitment therapy has a term that I love called psychological flexibility. That's the goal. And I think that speaks to this piece very much. It's to be flexible and go, huh, you know, one of my favorite questions is what am I making this mean? And what else can it mean? Because we're always making it mean something. What am I making it mean? And could it maybe mean something else? Yeah. Yeah. Because then if we're not so rigidly grasping onto that one perspective, if it could mean something else, I don't know, just gives us a chance to go, oh, okay. And relax our grip a little to not be so identified with that perspective so much. Yeah. I don't know how else to say it, but I just, I'm thinking through my own experience of that

and realizing that it could mean something else just makes me sigh just a little bit inside. Yeah. And along with that is truly what is the perspective I'm taking and can I take a bigger perspective, right? Can I look at a perspective like the Buddha has on impermanence and nothing is permanent. Okay. Can I take that perspective because I'm on hold right now with the credit card company, and it feels like this is never going to end, and I'm really irritated. And so a question like, will this bother me in five hours? I go, oh, okay, probably won't, right? So that principle is about being able to take different perspectives. careful with this one because we can completely intellectualize our experience and we can say something like, well, in perspective compared to people in Ukraine right now, I got nothing to be feeling bad about. And now we start feeling bad about ourselves because we feel bad because, you know, so that's a, that's a use of perspective. It's not helpful. So we have to learn to balance it, but it's a very helpful tool. You said the word balance. I was going to say this takes us to potentially your favorite principle. Yeah, I guess I teed that up

subconsciously because the next principle I call the middle way. And it just means that in most cases, the extremes don't serve us well. Now, as a alcoholic and an addict, the middle way certainly had no appeal to me for much of my life. And when it comes to alcohol and drugs, I actually don't, I don't have a middle way. I have to be no for that. But there are so many other ways in life that a middle way perspective can be really, really valuable between positive and negative thinking, right? We often ask like, well, how should I respond to these thoughts? You know, should I be positive all the time? You know, no, right? That would be the term now these days is toxic positivity, right? And it's a problem. And also, if you have

a brain like mine, it doesn't do good to just let it run wild. There are times where I do need to correct for the natural negativity that shows up all the time. So in between those two, a middle way between either having to do something perfectly or not at all. Gosh, that one trips me up all the time. I mean, because perfect is just the enemy of doing really anything. Anything. Yep. Or I'm trying to build these new habits. How accountable should I be? Like, if I don't do it, should I be really hard on myself? That's one option. The others, I'm just really easy on myself. No big deal, whatever, who cares,

right? There's a middle ground that allows us to hold a line with ourselves, but do it in a kind and compassionate way. I could give 30 more examples on the middle way, but just learning to watch for that. The next principle is one of generosity, right? Generosity is going back to kind of that insight that Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob had when they founded AA was that giving to use a terrible business cliche is that true win-win situation, right? Because generosity benefits the giver and the receiver done right. And it's a way of taking our spiritual life and making sure that what happened to me, as I was saying, when I started drinking again, after being sober eight years was I was doing a lot of inner work, but that was it. It was only inward. And generosity is a way of taking all this transformation that's hopefully happening

within us, but redirecting it outwards. And so those are the core ones. There's a couple others, but those are the ones that are in the core spiritual habits program. And you mentioned a couple times like Buddhist principles, but in general, it is not a Buddhist program, right? No, no, it's not a Buddhist program. I mean, I have been informed very heavily by that, but I literally, for any of those principles, I could quote you examples from all the major religions, you know, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, many of the minor ones, Taoism, you know, a ton of the Greek philosophers, they show up over and

over again, everywhere, you know, so no, it is not a Buddhist program, it is not a Christian program. But you could be Buddhist or Christian, people take it who are all those things. I mean, the core of it is learning to focus on less stuff because we are overwhelmed. I mean, I'm an overwhelmer, right? In that I put up two podcast episodes a week, right? We are overwhelmed by knowledge. How do we implement that knowledge into our lives in a way that matters? So the spiritual habits program sort of shrinks that knowledge down to a core number of principles. But then it also takes another discipline that I'm very fond of, which is behavior change science. And it says, how do we actually start to live these things? Or when we refer to it, you know, bridge the gap between what we know and what we do. Yeah, because your transformation out of

addiction, your healing, your recovery, you didn't think your way out of it. You didn't just contemplate these bits of wisdom and then found yourself sober. It was the practice. It was the living them. And so talk a little bit about that, about the necessity of making it part of your behavior,

the way you act. Pick the principles I just talked about. Let's pick the one of perspective, right? We don't see the world as it is. We see it as we are, right? It's great to read about that and hear about it. But what we need is that we need in the moment where our perspective is causing us to suffer, that's when we need that reflection, right?

So how do we do that? So even people who get to the point of having something like a morning reading practice or a morning reading and a meditation practice still will say, yeah, it's good. I like it. It feels good, but I'm still reacting the same way to my children. And so, yeah, what we're looking to do is bring these moments into our lives. And I think that happens a couple different ways. And I can go back to AA to draw some examples. I mean, one of the things was in AA, we didn't explore all kinds of different stuff.

We had 12 steps and we had 164 pages of the big book by and large. And we went through that crap over and over and over to the point where there were days I thought if I have to hear these steps again, I am literally going to hang myself, right? Like I can't stand it anymore. But it was good because that repetition breeds results. Hearing it again and again, it filters in, it seeps in it. We marinate in it. The other thing that AA did was the 10th step is basically we continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. What it means is we keep looking inside ourselves for how we're doing. And one of the ways of doing

that was you did a 10th step inventory at the end of the day, you know, and there were just, there was a little list. Here's the things. How did I do against these things today? But that checking in on that every night over time, you start to get more. Now, behavior change science has come along and said, Hey, triggers are really important. Trigger being a reminder to do something, you know, or an impetus to do something. And so triggers are really important. So we can start to then use triggers to remind us to do these things more and more often. And then ultimately what we're after are what I call awareness-based triggers, meaning I'm able to monitor my internal state frequently enough that I can then notice, okay, my trigger is my internal state. What am I going to do with that?

Yeah. If I kind of touch on here, what we started off talking about in this conversation, which is like when you find yourself in a place in life where inside you're feeling like you're lacking connection, you are lacking direction, lacking meaning, lacking purpose, lacking motivation, struggle with feelings of hollowness or loneliness, these internal states that I think are universal. You know, maybe they don't happen to all of us all at once, but all of us are going to experience these at different points in our lives, right?

That these are things that you knew very well through some really dire circumstances at different points in your life. And what I think is the most empowering message out of all of this is that meaning, purpose, connection, direction, those are something we make. We play an active role in creating those things rather than something that we find or that happen upon us, right? And so, yeah, I think that the message of hope and the message of help I hear out of this is that there actually are roadmaps and this that you're talking about is one of those to play an active role in creating those things in your life. I don't know. I just

thought I'd touch back on that starting point. Yeah. I think there's a couple of things that are important to note there. And I think you said it very well. But one of those is everybody is going to feel moments of disconnection, of emptiness, of hollowness, of not feeling like life has meaning. And trying to make that never be the case is how you end up being a heroin addict, right? Because you're simply like, I can't tolerate this feeling. Yeah. So some of it is just going like, okay, yeah, I mean, I'm a human being. I didn't sleep well last night. Everything looks like crap today. Hang on.

Let me get some sleep. Tomorrow will be different. That said, there are ways of giving ourselves an opportunity to feel those sort of things, meaning, purpose, connection, all that stuff more often. of things, meaning, purpose, connection, all that stuff more often. And to even when the feeling isn't there, to know at a deeper level that, okay, it is there. And so as somebody who, you know, addiction was one part of my story, but the other part of it is depression, right? And my depression manifests itself as an utter sense of just nothing matters, disconnection, totally dead, things that interest me don't interest me. You know, I love music. And when I'm in one of those states, there's not a single song I want to listen to. Yeah, you know, what do you do with that?

Spiritual life or a spiritual program, at least in my case, makes those less likely to occur, along with some other things like, you know, exercising and there are ways of managing that, but it still happens. But what I know is that despite the feeling, my life is pointed in the right direction and that the things that I do, they may not in this moment feel meaningful, but they have been meaningful at other moments. When I've reflected, when I've taken the time to reflect, and I've known those things matter. So I can't feel it right this minute. So okay, that's, it's a feeling it comes and goes. Again, if we feel this way all the time, it's a problem, right? But I know it's there. It

reminds me of, I've told this story before, but you know, one of the sort of spiritual awakenings I had, it was so overwhelming and the peace and the joy and all that, but it was an experience. And over time that experience faded. And I remember going to the spiritual teacher Adyashanti and talking to him about this. And he said something that, I mean, it was really transformational for me. And he said, devote yourself to what remains of it. And so what that means to me is that even when I don't feel it, I got some glimpses of what I believe to be truth. So how can I now live my life that way? And so the same thing I've in moments reflected on what's important to me, what matters to me in life. I know what it is. Right now, I don't feel it. I devote myself by my actions to what I know a part of me that may not be online right now believes to be true and valuable. And that's why, you know, to your point,

meaning is made. Viktor Frankl said that, right? You know, coming out of the concentration camps, he said, look, he didn't believe there was a meaning out there that we found. He said, we construct it. And that's part of what the spiritual life is about, is asking the question so that we start to construct that meaning. Back to the very first one, intention, right? What matters to us?

Yeah, I find that so powerful. This is back to something you say often, which is sometimes we can't think our way into right action. We have to act our way into right thinking. And for me, what that means as I reflect on it now is, you know, there are times when like, oh, I just don't feel like doing any of the things that my highest, best, wisest, most evolved self would know and say are the things that will be supportive and nurturing and nourishing and

helpful to me and also further me down the path of the kind of life I want to live that, again, feels good and does good, right? There are times that I just do not feel like it. And if I wait to feel like it, that's going to lead me down paths that, I don't know, what's the way I want to say this? Like, I'm going to veer off course in a way that feels like an unnecessary detour. And so if I can identify the things, like I've already said that these are things I want to do. This is the way I want to act. Here's how I want to live my life. Then I can cling to that and do those things, even when I don't feel like it, and continue further down the path of the life that I've already said is the kind I want to live, right? Yep, yep.

And that's really difficult to do, right? It is. I mean, it is really difficult to do. And so that's where some knowledge of behavior change science comes in and helps, right? It's where a community of people who support you or a person who supports you, that's where that stuff really comes into play is because it's really easy to say, well, I just do it when I don't feel like it. Yeah, you're right. But when you don't feel like it, that's a whole, whole, and I know that's not what you're saying at all. I'm just saying that like, Oh, I'm agreeing with you. I'm sure, I'm sure a bunch of people are

listening going, well, that sounds great, but I can't do that. Right. Yeah. And so it's a practice skill for sure. right? I mean, it's also something that you develop that muscle with repetition. Absolutely. And there are more intelligent and less intelligent ways. One of the core principles that underlies really the entire spiritual habits program, and I don't want to keep going back to that. It's not a commercial, right? But if we want to talk about how I live my life, right, that's my best distillation of it, is that the core idea is little by little, a little becomes a lot, right? And so I don't have to do really big things all the time. I can't, as a matter of fact,

for reasons of time, for all kinds of reasons. But little bit by little bit, it adds up in a really big way, both for good and bad. You know, it's a, it's a core principle. So if I know the things that support me and I'm having trouble doing them, one way is to shrink them down to what I can do, but to be very consistent, little by little becomes a lot works Little by every once in a while does not work, right? Little but frequent works. Little but infrequent does not work. So it can be small, but consistency does need to become part of the equation. Yeah, it does. And some things are small, but they have a disproportionate impact on our feelings of well-being and of purpose and meaning and connection.

Yeah. Which is one of the reasons I think when our lives first intersected and I started living in a way that was more supportive of my well-being, one of the things I appreciated most was that the things that I had in front of me to do were not Herculean. Right. You know, they were not Herculean, but they were meaningful. And doing those little things helped me make meaningful progress, you know, on the inside and the outside. Yep.

But my story for another day, our story for another day. Listeners can go back, though, because we do have part of your story, because I interviewed you once. It's out there. It is out there. Maybe someday. I mean, if anybody's interested, probably not. No, I'm sure they are. Somebody out there's gotta be, I mean, nobody's even listening now, like four minutes into this interview. Oh, it's Eric. Forget it. Who's a good guest? Stop it. That's not true. It's always really fun when you and I get to sit behind mics and talk to each other. Indeed.

So thanks. Thank you. For kind of walking us through this and giving a glimpse into how you have struggled and how you have then gone on to build a meaningful and good feeling and good doing life. Yeah. And I always feel like I kind of have to caveat and I'll caveat that to say, like, I don't always feel good. Like, that's not that's not what my life is. Right. life. Yeah. And I always feel like I kind of have to caveat and I'll caveat that to say like, I don't always feel good. Like that's not, that's not what my life is, right? No. Yeah. Yeah. I feel way better than I used to for sure. And I'm a human being, you know,

we all have this stuff. So anyway, thank you. Yeah. All right. How do we wrap this up? I think we say goodbye. No, I think I'm terrible at ending things like conversations. Okay. That sounds simple. That sounds reasonable. We'll just say goodbye. Well, Jenny, we've come to the end of our time today and really want to thank you for being on the show. It's really meant a lot to me.

Is this how you do it? Okay. You wrap it up. Okay. All right. Yeah. So, so thanks, Eric. We've come to the end of our time together and it's meant a lot to me.

Thanks so much. And listeners, thanks for your time and attention. Indeed. All right. Take care. Bye. Goodbye. 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.

To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. 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 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast.

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