The One You Feed - How to Discover New Ways of Living with Shauna Niequist

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Shauna Niequist is the New York Times Best Selling author of many books such as Present Over Perfect, Bread and Wine, Cold Tangerines, and others. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.  In this episode, Eric and Shauna discuss her book, I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ones Stop Working. 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! Shauna Niequist and I Discuss How to Discover New Ways of Living and … Her book, I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ones Stop Working Why the word hospitality is important to her What self-compassion means to her and how she practices it Seeing out beauty as an act of prayer, worship, and resistance Putting herself in the path of joy and beauty, giving herself the greatest chance to find them How to practice being easily delighted It’s ok for the joy of something to be that it feels like play Seeing people different from you is a reminder that you can change and find a new way of being How radical and freeing it is to consent to the reality of the way things are The value of adding to our toolkit of ways we can help ourselves when we are struggling What it means for her that sometimes saying no is in service to a much better yes  Shauna Niequist links: Shauna’s Website Instagram By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Shauna Niequist, check out these other episodes: Radical Self Love with Sonya Renee Taylor Poetry and Life Lessons with Maggie SmithSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you can train yourself to walk through life being kind of on the lookout for tiny little moments of delight, you start seeing them everywhere you go. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Shauna Nequist, the New York Times bestselling author of many books such as Present Over Perfect, Bread and Wine, Cold Tangerines, and others. Today, Shauna and Eric discuss her book,

I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet, Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ones Stop Working. Hi, Shauna. Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your latest book called I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet, Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working, which is such a great title, every part of it. And we'll get to it in a second. But let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the 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 I'd like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do? I love that parable. And the first thing I think of is how, and maybe this is just where I am in my life right now, but how much what we feed and what grows in our lives, what blooms in our lives is sort of a group project that goodness and kindness are contagious and inspiring, but so are greed and frustration. And so one of the best ways to feed that good wolf, that good impulse toward kindness, toward generosity, toward compassion is to surround yourself and align yourself with people who are bringing out the same and aspiring to the same, I notice how much my mood and my energy and my choices affect and are affected by

the people I'm surrounded by. The parable obviously has so much to do with how we conduct ourselves, but also who we choose as our guides and our companions on the journey. I love that answer and that thought about who's feeding us in essence. And also, who are we feeding? You know, you talk a fair amount in your book about, I don't know if I love this word, but our responsibility to others. There's a word that you use that I really love and you emphasize how valuable you think hospitality is.

Say what that word means to you, because obviously you don't mean like, you know, going into a career in hospitality and, you know, to be a server in a restaurant, right? So what does hospitality mean to you? Why is that word resonant for you? Well, I mean, first of all, I'm delighted that you asked about it. In recent years, my husband and I and a handful of other friends have been talking about like, okay, if you had to define your thing all the way down to one word, it's not necessarily the job you do, it's not the things you make, but it's the deepest who you are. I would say my deepest like vocation

or calling in the world is hospitality. And so I practice hospitality when I write, I practice it when I gather people. Everything I do is an extension of that kind of fundamental identity of hospitality. And the way that I use that term is there are several different definitions that I like, but one that I like for what we're talking about right now is giving people a place to be when they would otherwise be

alone or making sure that everyone has a place at the table in order to be nurtured and nourished and fed. I also think it's especially coming out of the season that we're coming out of as a whole culture. Hospitality is the antidote to othering and to isolation. We are so fractured as a community, as a culture right now. And hospitality is the needle and thread that's going to knit us back together, get us listening to each other again, learning from each other again, showing up around the same tables again. I think it's a really fundamental way of living in our world. That's beautiful. Let's change direction for a second and talk about the title of the book. I guess I haven't learned that yet. Why did you title your book that? Well, there are lots of different reasons, but one of the easiest ways to explain it is, you know, I had made my career for a long time as a writer. I'd

been writing books for, you know, 15 years, been speaking and podcasting and leading retreats and traveling. And when you do that kind of work, whether or not you intend to, you start to become kind of an expert in things, or at least that's how people treat you. People expect you to be an expert. The same is true when you hit like midlife. The same is true when you've been living in your hometown for a long time. The same is certainly true when you're a parent. You know, you become the answer person in a lot of different scenarios in your life. And then my life changed so dramatically in so many ways, both in like external ways, like we moved from the Midwest to Manhattan, but also internal ways. A lot of my ideas about

life were shifting about faith, about family, about culture, about how to live in the world. And I realized, oh my goodness, I've got a book to write and people want answers. And I also want them too, and I don't have any. And so I had to find an honest way to speak about and write about what I was living, but very quickly debunk the myth that I was going to be the expert to guide anyone through it. I needed the title right at the beginning to say, I'm not the expert you're looking for. I am a fellow traveler. I'm happy to be a fellow question asker, but if you want answers, I don't have any either. I think that's such an important point. Because anybody who has been somewhat successful in writing or speaking or doing anything like you were, and this happens to me, I teach some programs and different things is

it becomes this sense of we should be at a certain level. And then when we're not, that can be very disconcerting. And so I love that you, you know, right away, you know, kind of set out to say like, hey, I'm kind of coming from a difficult place here. And that I don't know it all. And I'm exploring it here. And I think you also talk about in the book, how, when we're struggling, and we're trying to heal, we want to be there faster and our expectations of where we should be. And those expectations can come from lots of different places. How quickly we should heal, the culture tells us, or the fact that we have seen ourselves or people have seen ourselves as the person other people go to for advice. All those things, I think, set expectations for where we should be. And those expectations are almost without fail damaging when it comes to healing. Oh, absolutely. You know, one of the reasons I had an expectation that I wanted to heal faster than I could or than I was

is because I wanted to be healed up faster. You know, it's hard. It's like you break a bone and you get a cast on your arm and you want that cast off immediately, right? The healing process is terrible. And so I think a lot of the expectations, certainly they come from all of other places, but I want it out of the painful, messy middle as badly for my own self. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when we're in pain, we want that pain to end. The thing I love about the title, and you reference it multiple times in the book, is, you know, it's really a path to self-compassion. It's really a way of being kinder to ourselves. because it seems like it's become very important to you more recently. And the more I've been on my own and helped other people along in life,

I've become more and more convinced of how critical it is for us to have. So share a little bit about self-compassion, what it means to you, how you practice it. I came to it late and out of great necessity. It's not my natural bent. I grew up with and kind of have a, you know, firstborn, hardworking, Midwestern. I used to describe myself like a utility player, like a workhorse, like, you know, like a linebacker. Like, these are not compassionate images that I had of myself. I was the person who could get there first, stay the latest, carry the most, put it all on my shoulders. It was really important to me to be seen as very capable, very responsible, someone you could depend on,

someone who never missed a beat, someone who was never too sick or too tired or too fragile. Being fragile felt like such a terrible thing to be. And so I developed a way of living that was profoundly not self-compassionate. It was based a lot on earning and proving and pushing and shame. And, you know, it worked in some ways. I was a tremendously productive person and I was rewarded professionally. And then I hit this terrible, terrible set of converging changes in my life where I couldn't push myself anymore. It didn't work.

My sadness and my heartbreak and my grief were so heavy that I had to find a new way to motivate myself, to connect with myself, to heal myself. And self-compassion was the way through. Andi Kolber wrote this wonderful book and the title of it, I love it so much, is called Try Softer. And the title comes from a moment where she was with, I believe, her therapist, and she kept using the phrase, she was just trying so hard. She was trying harder and harder and harder. And he said to you, I've watched you try hard for such a long time. What if instead of trying harder, now we try softer? And I think that's a beautiful way to look at self-compassion. And her phrase has become very, very important to me.

But what I'm finding now is I used to use pushing and kind of energy. And now I really try to use kindness and tenderness toward myself, toward my body, toward my spirit, towards my failures. And it's a totally different way of moving yourself through the world and through the day. It still surprises me how much of a change it is. And I'm so grateful to be learning that practice. Yeah, it makes such a difference to be in a brain, since we're sort of stuck inside with our own brain, to be in one that's actually sort of hospitable.

Back to your word, has some hospitality towards itself. It just makes such a fundamental difference. And your experience rings so true to me from what I've seen with so many people. And I think me to some degree, pushing worked for a while. And the best analogy I've ever heard for this, I love it. It says that that sort of pushing yourself, being hard on yourself, all that is a type of fuel. And so it will propel you, but it is a dirty fuel. And you burn a dirty fuel in an engine long enough, the engine is going to clog up and break down. And that is what I see in so many people who are like, but this worked for me. And you know, this goes back to the title of your

book, right? New ways of living when the old ways stop working. This way of pushing myself and being hard on myself, but it worked for me. And it doesn't anymore. That is always difficult. And one of the things I find interesting about life and about any sort of process is that what worked for a while often doesn't work anymore. And you have to change even if that thing was actually good. Not even that it was like if we could say, well, pushing too hard is not a great thing, but even good things like say 12 step program, like it was an unquestionable good. The efficacy of it sometimes stops working and you're like, oh boy, that's a little frightening. What's the next thing? But being willing to change like that. And you talk about that in regards to your faith. You set faith at a seven and it just stays at a seven and you just follow it all through your life and that there are all these ups and downs in the process. Maybe say a little more about that.

You know, I was just talking with a friend about this. One of the biggest gifts I was given in my experience of faith is I watched my mom do a pretty dramatic, full deconstruction and reconstruction of her own faith. When I was a teenager and she was in her 40s, and she was at the time a very public pastor's wife, this was a little bit controversial. She completely stopped attending our family's church with the permission of the elders and our family. And she went on a very honest, very brave journey to dismantle the parts of the faith that she had been given in a very conservative environment and to find poets and musicians and writers and sections of scripture and ways of living and practices that

felt much more authentic and meaningful to her. And the tremendous gift that she gave me by getting to witness that was it seemed and seems normal to me that your faith changes. It should change. Every fundamental relationship in our life changes along the way. You would never say to someone, I hope your marriage is exactly the same 20 years in as it is on your wedding day, right? You would never look at someone and say like, oh, what a surprise that your body looks different 20 years later. Like everything's changing all the time. And to expect your faith to stay static is crazy, right?

But we do that. We treat people like if that part of our life is evolving in a meaningful way, it must be wrong. I think it's actually very right and very admirable. I always say that if something's not valuable to you, it's easy to walk away. But if you're willing to fight for it, I esteem people who are willing to fight to make their faith work another way. And so I think for me, as my life was changing so deeply, there was a stubborn part of me that said, I'm not willing to give up on this part of my life just because it's been painful. The most valuable things in our lives are worth fighting for. And a faith that bolsters and nourishes me is worth fighting for. And so,

to anyone who feels like they're in a little bit of a wilderness, that's how it is for all of us. And it's something to normalize and to make peace with and to celebrate because it means you're heading somewhere even better. Yeah. My primary spiritual practice orientation is Zen Buddhism. And there's a phrase we have in Zen. We talk about three essentials and I love these because one of them ties to this. We talk about great faith, makes sense. We talk about great determination, also makes sense. We talk about great doubt. I've always loved that because it's finally for me, it was like, oh, those parts of me that do question that are skeptical to say, well, I don't know about that, or I don't

believe that, or that is part of my practice is part of my spiritual life and my spiritual journey. And for someone like me, I really needed that because otherwise I would feel on the outside of everything because I didn't believe in the same way or all the same things or I only believed part of it. And I would end up walking away. And it was really wonderful for me to find something that said, hey, your doubt is part of this. Oh, absolutely. And I think that's something that Zen Buddhism has to offer to many other faith traditions that haven't done that as well.

to many other faith traditions that haven't done that as well. I think every faith tradition should have meaningful language for doubt and make space for it within our communities. And it shouldn't be something that we use to keep people out. It should be a really tender time and experience when we draw people in, when we make space for questions and for uncertainty or for grief or for pieces that don't fit anymore. That should be some of the best work that a faith community does together, not the time when you get left outside in the cold. That's beautiful. You say in the book that, I believe in seeking out beauty absolutely every chance we get,

as an act of prayer, as an act of worship, as an act of resistance. You also say, I'm learning to put myself in the path of joy and beauty. Talk to me a little bit about the role of joy and beauty and the way that those things are in some cases a practice, not just a state. You know, I tend to be on the continuum, probably a fairly naturally joyful and naturally optimistic person. I have been in most seasons of my life. And it's been easy to feel a sense of joy or to notice something beautiful around me. Again, and then I hit this season where what was right in front of my face were a lot of broken things, a lot of ugliness, a lot of grief, a lot of sadness. And joy didn't

bubble up unbidden. And I realized that if I was going to feel it, I was going to have to go out and find it. But you can't manhandle it, right? Like you can't force it into your life. And so I had to learn the phrase that was helpful for me was to put myself in the path of it, kind of give yourself the greatest chance to find it. And a lot of that is sort of trial and error. And what brings one person joy is not necessarily what brings another person joy, but it's also being an active participant in the process of joy or the process of beauty or the process of healing. A lot of times we want those things to happen to us, like lightning striking, right? I hope the joy comes. I hope

the healing comes. I hope the forgiveness comes. But we have to participate in our own healing, in our own forgiving, in our own joy-seeking. I wanted sometimes to sit at home on my couch and for great beauty to come plop itself in front of my eyes. It finds me when I participate in it, when I put on my shoes and I get outside and I go for a walk and I choose to be a person who lays herself open to beauty anywhere I can find it. When I put on my shoes and I get outside and I go for a walk and I choose to be a person who lays herself open to beauty anywhere I can find it, but it doesn't happen usually just by staying home. And that's been a meaningful practice for me to just get out and trust that something good will emerge when I get a little bit outside of myself. Yeah. There's another place that you talk about this from an inspiration perspective. You talk about inspiration being your responsibility

and that you have to put yourself in the way of it. And you say, so this means it's my job, literally, to go to art galleries and read poetry and go for walks and spend time with interesting people. And that if we want these things, we do have to put some effort into seeking them out. There's another phrase that you use where you say, I want to be a person who is, this isn't, I'm not quoting exactly, but easily delighted. How might we make that transition if we're not somebody who's easily delighted? What are some ways of thinking about lowering sort of our delight standard, you know, so that we are more easily delighted? Well, almost everything that we're talking about today is a practice, not a natural personality trait or way of being, right? Like it's easy to think,

well, I either am or am not self-compassionate. No, these are skills that you can practice and develop. And the same is true with delight. Experiencing delight is a practice that you can develop and get better at over time. And like we were talking about right in the very beginning, in the same way that goodness and kindness are contagious, delight is contagious. One of the very simple things I do is before I go to bed at night, I try to write down three glimpses of my day that were beautiful in some way. It could be a line from a song. It could be something I saw, something visual, a beautiful flower. It could be something I tasted. But you notice over time

that if you train your mind and your spirit to find three moments of delight in your day, within even just a week, it's easier to find the three. And then you can find 10. And then you can find 20. And so that's what I mean. If you can train yourself to walk through life, being kind of on the lookout for tiny little moments of delight, you start seeing them everywhere you go. And the opposite is true, right? If it takes like the Eiffel Tower or Maui in order to get you to feel delight, you're not going to feel very much of it in like your office, you know? And so I'm just

really committed to taking responsibility for that. It's possible based on how I live and what I practice to experience delight all through the day, but it's up to me. It's all there all the time. It's just up to me to be on the lookout for it. 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 stunt man reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

Yeah, 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 iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I love that phrase, glimpses of beauty, because I often think about and talk about gratitude, but that phrase doesn't quite sum up what I'm trying to do when I'm looking for gratitude. I actually often use the word, I'm looking for appreciation.

What do I appreciate? What did I appreciate? But I actually like that phrase even better. Where were their glimpses, small glimpses of beauty throughout the day? I think that's a really useful reframing for me or a useful phrase for me to sort of orient the practice that I try and do. And as you say, the more we look for something, the better. I went through a practice for a while of trying to take a beautiful picture every day. And I mean, I'm not a photographer, right? That wasn't the point. The point was, I was looking for something beautiful every day. And the more I did that, the more that was the way as I looked around, what's beautiful in this where my eyes fall, what might be beautiful in here? What angle might I look at? What shadow might I look at? What makes this beautiful? And I think it's such a valuable

practice. And maybe this would be a place to transition to your watercolors. Since I just brought up art for art's sake. My terrible, terrible watercolors. Yes. So, you know, I'm a writer. So most of what I do is type and I love to cook. That's another like creative outlet for me. But at a certain point, my therapist, who I just adore, said, I want you to make something that's not word based and that's not productive in any way. Like cooking is kind of a cheat, right? Like you can enjoy the process, but it's also deeply practical, right? You're feeding people. He's like, I want you to do something that's just no words and no inherent inherent productivity angle to it. And so I took my kids to the art supply

store and we each got to pick out a set of paints that we liked, acrylics or oils, because one of the boys got like charcoals. I got watercolors and we got the right canvases or paper or whatever. And I am just terrible at it. I mean, absolutely terrible. Like, I don't even know, like, basics of, like, I just kept making, like, terrible designs. If I tried to do any, like, representation of anything, it was like, you don't even know how to do a stick figure. That's not even, like, an apple. And there was something really freeing over time. First, it was frustrating, and I was not having fun. And I was like, my kids are way better artists than I am, and this is not fun for me.

And when can I stop and do something else? And then over time, I started to realize again, the theme of everything in my life right now, something really profound to be learned when you're terrible at something and it's utterly unproductive. And it sort of reminds us a bunch of the good lessons in life that not everything should be beautiful and not everything should be productive. And we're not all about to become famous doing X, Y, Z thing. And you don't have to set up an Etsy shop just because you made three watercolors. It can just be an hour that you spent being grateful for having an hour to play with color. And it's not always about a bigger, brighter, faster next way to like monetize it. So that's the story of my terrible watercolors. One of the

people I work with in publishing was like, you know what I think we should do? We should post some of them. And I was like, I know you think that's a good idea. You don't know how bad they are. And we're not doing that. I'm not even willing for it to be an object lesson. They're that bad. But a great thing to learn about. I love what you say here. You say that they're horrible. And that's the point that there are spaces in my life that help heal me and help me and don't build or provide or create anything beyond that. Healing me is enough. Helping me is enough. And I love that. I think it's beautiful. I'm a guitar player and I love it. But for the early part of my life as a guitar player, it was supposed to go somewhere. I had to work really hard to reclaim

it from that. When I realized like, okay, I'm not going to get paid to be a guitar player. That's not going to be my living. I'm sort of setting that aside. I had to really work hard to get back to the sheer pleasure of just playing the thing and what it does for me inside. I feel very happy that I have reclaimed it. You know, there's no real purpose to it. It's not going anywhere. Now I'm often learning and trying to get better, but not because there's somewhere for it to go, but because of the pleasure of being actually able to play a little bit better. And so as someone who's been, you know, very identified at points in my life with, as you say, like grind culture, hustle culture, productivity culture, I often joke, I have to work really hard not to turn my hobbies into a job.

I was just going to say that. Yeah. I took up rock climbing about, I don't know, a year ago or so. And I've had to work really hard to be like, just relax. Like go and climb and enjoy it. Like you do not need to get a trainer. You do not need to. I'm learning these lessons, but it's taken me a while. My husband's a musician. He's a pianist. He plays guitar as well. And our boys right now are learning to play the guitar. So I am surrounded by guitar all day, all the time, which is really fun. But so many of our friends who are musicians have articulated those same things or the opposite, that it becomes their profession and it stops being a joy. And that's not true for everyone. There are certainly people for whom it's both. I would say like in my life as a writer, I like being a writer and the professional side of that does not spoil my joy of it in any way. But like I love to cook and every once in a while people will say like, you should open a restaurant. And I say, oh, I will never. I would be a terrible restaurant owner. The joy of it is that it feels like play. And I don't want to take that away from it.

Play is really important. But we live in a culture that says, like, as soon as you develop a skill, it needs its own Instagram account, right? Yes. For you to make money on that skill or be known for that skill. And I think there is something so valuable in saying, like, I'm going to play the guitar for an hour because I'm going to love that hour. Yes. Not because it's going to love that hour. Yes. Not because it's building something else somewhere else. That feels to me when I think of worship or gratitude, what it means to be grateful to the creator for creating this world and creating us.

Loving an hour feels like valuable worship, a valuable offering of gratitude to me. I love that idea of thinking of it that way, or I love the word devotion. So thinking of it in terms of a devotion. I want to read something else you wrote because I really love this idea and maybe we can talk about it a little bit more. You say there are a million ways to be a responsible parent. There are a million ways to build a thriving marriage. There are a million ways to lead a meaningful life.

But when you've lived only one way for a long time, the messaging gets really loud and anything different starts to seem suspect. It's easy to get stuck in like a little world where we mostly all eat the same, dress the same, work in similar ways, view the world from similar vantage points, and you start to think that's normal. And then some of why I love traveling, it's especially why I love traveling with my kids, is you realize there are a million different normals, right? I'm talking with one of my kids and they were like, they don't eat peanut butter in Italy. And it was like their mind just exploded. But like, you know, my kids have peanut butter and jelly every single morning. And so it's hard for them to think that there's an entire culture that doesn't value peanut butter. And that's just the tiniest example. Some of what I love about living in a big city is that you encounter people every day

who are living according to really different values, who want different things, who think different things are important, whose lives look utterly different than yours. And it just keeps reminding you, number one, yours is not the only way. And number two, you can change and find a new way. And that's really freeing. I think we don't all have to be on the same plan or the same path at the same pace. For me, I've learned so much from the people around me that there's so many good and honorable and meaningful ways to live. We don't all have to be hitting the same like pace points at the same time. I think what you're describing there, being in a big city gives you the opportunity

to see the world that way. But I also think there's an orientation and a practice to actually open into that instead of sort of looking at everything you see around you as wrong. There's something you're doing in your heart that's different because I know lots of people who live in big cities who can have a different experience of it. You know, one of the things we talked about, and I wrote about this in the book is we decided that one of our values in the course of our move was going to be always asking, what's the New York way to do this? Our hometown was named Barrington. And we knew that if we walked into every situation and tried to do things the Barrington way in New York City, we'd be frustrated all the time. Nothing would work.

Everything would be like a weird lesser version of the life we used to have and harder because it's not available to us a thousand miles away. And we do that a lot with people, right? You expect someone to be a certain person and you punish them over and over for not being that person you have in your head. and you punish them over and over for not being that person you have in your head. One of the phrases, my friend Lori says that true spiritual maturity is nothing more and nothing less than consenting to reality. And I love that. And so we wanted to consent to New York City reality every chance we got, instead of always expecting it to be just like our previous hometown. And I want to do that in my relationships. I want to encounter my husband and say, this is who you are, not who I wish you were sometimes. And I hope that he can

do that for me. Say, this is exactly who I am, not who he wishes I could be. I think that way of seeing people and seeing the world is really respectful and honoring to consent to the reality. I love that phrase and the idea of consenting to reality. I'm thinking back to what you said about when everything around you looks a certain way, you think that's the only way to do it. And I had an experience a couple years ago, it really drove this home to me how much who were around can shape our perspective. Because I spent the first part of the week in a training to be a spiritual director. And so it was at this pretty rundown kind of retreat center. And most people there were people who valued lots of things much

more than they valued money. I'm not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but as somebody who was sort of upper middle class, I had a little like, this is the wrong way to be. And then I left and I went and spent the second half of that week with friends of mine who are very wealthy. And I spent that whole time thinking like, I just don't have enough money. And so within a day of each other, I was able to see that the frame that was held up around me, when I put it in one frame or the other, I looked at it and felt towards it very differently. Oh, absolutely. This is totally an urban legend. I don't know that it's true, but I love this story and the experience feels true to me. They say that, or I've heard that when U2 finishes a tour, Bono, over the years they've learned, his wife asks him to check into a hotel for a full week when he finishes the tour to just decompress and get used to life without like a microphone and a crowd. And then when he gets home from that week, the first thing he does is he has to take out the trash. And that's the signal that he's ready

to engage family life and home life as a normal guy and not a rockstar guy, right? But I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. I can't imagine what it's like to fill a stadium every night and have people screaming, but I can imagine that it starts to shape the way you think about yourself and what you deserve in the world. Yes. And that you might not come home from that experience and immediately want to take out the trash.

And I love that over time they've figured out the way to like reenter back into healthful, whole, meaningful family life. I love that story. I was introduced to a term this week that I had not heard before called audience capture. And when I heard it, I thought it meant about going out and getting an audience. But it was the opposite. What it meant was that once you build an audience, that audience, if you're not careful, starts to shape who you become. You start to want to fit the mold of what your audience expects of you. And we all have audiences.

Our audience might be three people that might be in Bono's case, you know, 30 million people. But we all have one. I think that speaks to that thing of like, who am I and who do I want to be outside of that? And back to my story about being around the spiritual direction people versus the very wealthy people, right? If I don't have a strong sense of myself and what's important to me, then it's very easy to fall into either of those. And then I'm just kind of getting dragged around by whoever I'm around most often. Absolutely.

On the topic of audience capture, this may sound like a rabbit hole and we don't have to go down it for long, but have you seen the new Elvis movie? No. If there is one key theme to that movie, that's what it is. It's beautifully done. I just watched it last night, so it's in my head. But one of the main themes, the narrator refers to the audience as you. And he keeps saying, the only thing Elvis loves is you. The thing he loves most is you. The thing that gets him up in the morning is you. And there's this idea that the love from the audience is the most sustaining and important thing in his life. Anyway, I think

that idea of audience capture and who we become based on the feedback that we get, it's a really important thing to consider, especially if you're doing anything that has a lot of immediate feedback, right? Whether it's podcasting or social media. Back in the olden days when I used to, the first book I wrote was pre-internet, if you can even imagine that world. And so I wrote it and then occasionally people would write about it on their blogs or I would get Amazon reviews, but it was not the same as it is now where you can write something on social media and within an hour, thousands of people will tell you what they love or hate about it. Psychologically, that's a very precarious place to put yourself in terms of audience capture. It's very easy to five or six times a day fit ourselves into those

little squares and boxes in order to accommodate an audience that has very strong opinions about who we should be. And so I think what I love about some of the work you're doing is that it's the antidote to that. It's choosing to be who we want to be separate from those voices based on our own values and our own practices. That feels like really important work right now. Thank you. 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.

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We've done very well kind of on our own and sort of looking at others. And a lot of them come back and sort of looking at others. And a lot of them come back and say, well, we want to really mine all your episodes. And we want to find out what really performed well. And we want to do more of that. And I said, well, I'm open to looking at that. But my criteria for eight years has been, do I want to read that book? Like if I'm going to talk to somebody, the question is, am I interested in reading that book? Because if I'm not, it's not going to work. It's not going to work just to say, well, my audience really prefers episodes that are like this. And again, I'm not saying that I don't care what the people who listen think. I do deeply.

But fundamentally, I have to know what I want to do or it's not going to translate. You know, I luckily just got that idea very early on and have managed to sort of stay with it over eight years, which is trust my intuition on where my curiosity, that's another word you use a lot in the book, where's my curiosity right now? And that seems to be a pretty good proxy for me of then what people want to listen to. In the same way for you, you can't write a book that you're not invested in or that you don't care about, right? It's too much effort. One of the greatest pieces of advice someone gave me when I was putting in my first proposal is they said, you absolutely cannot consider what you think the market needs, what will get you on Oprah, what will finally make

your parents proud of you, what your college professor wishes you were writing about. It has to be something so deeply held inside of you because not only do you have to think about it and feel about it and wrap your whole life around it for like a year and a half, then you have to talk about it for like another year. And if people sense that you're like, oh, I mean, that old thing, like it just doesn't work. You have to care about it. When you talk about like fuel, there has to be enough internal fuel to keep you going through a quite arduous process. And it has to be, in my experience, something you want to learn, not something you want to teach. I'm endlessly curious about how we grow and how we connect to each other and how we make our worlds better. I don't have a lot to teach on that,

but I have a lot to learn on it. And so that's the fuel that keeps me going. Yep. Yep. For me, it's the same thing. Do I want to learn that or do I want to read that? Or am I interested in that? That works well and trying to avoid the idea of audience capture. I want a deep relationship with my audience, but I don't want to be captured because I'm sure you don't either. Let's change directions. I want to talk about a line that you wrote. You said, directions. I want to talk about a line that you wrote. You said, I've been training all my life to pretend I'm fine, and I have let my body suffer for it. Talk to me about the role of the body in all of this, because you reference it multiple times. You talk about our religious and spiritual life being head, heart, and body. Share a little bit about why that emerged for you.

Well, I think for at least two reasons, one of them driven by the experience of having a body, and there are a lot of really great things about the faith tradition that I grew up in and I'm still a part of. There are a lot of things that I really treasure about it. One of the things that I think is really unhelpful is this dichotomy between spirit and body or spirit and flesh. is this dichotomy between like spirit and body or spirit and flesh. The idea is that like, if we can work it all out in our brains, everything's good, but the carrying system is bad. You know, the body is just the thing that walks around the important stuff and that it's not valuable. It's not to be trusted. It's not to be listened to. It's to be mastered. You know, I knew that. Part of the reason,

going back to the glimpses, I'm always looking for sense details because I want to connect my body and my senses and my emotions to the world around me. So instead of saying, I'm grateful for my family, I say, I love the way my son's fingers felt when we were holding hands and he was telling me that funny story in the hammock. Because then we're in the senses. We're in my body and my fingers, not just the idea of family. So I've always wanted through my writing and in my life to sort of re-knit together the mind-body connection in terms of my faith experience. I love the world we live in.

I love the physical, natural world. I think it's a gift from God. I think it's worth celebrating. You don't have to hold a baby for very long to realize that bodies are extraordinary, not just spirits and minds. Right. And so I wanted to do that for a long time. And then my own relationship to my body became very difficult. I've never been a supermodelel and I've never been like wild about my appearance, but my body at least worked for a long time. It got me where I needed to go and I always had enough energy and I could always do everything I wanted to do. And I was an active person and I realized how much that was not even on my radar, just worked. Yeah.

And then I hit this convergence of chronic pain and insomnia and early menopause and long COVID. And they were all mixed together and I couldn't figure out what was what. And I was in New York and I had all new doctors that I didn't know and a health insurance system that is just like so complicated to figure out. And also it was in the middle of a pandemic. The body part of my life stopped working pretty dramatically and I had to figure it out. I had to untangle it. I had to go to a lot of doctors and try a lot of things. And I had to try physical things and mental things and holistic things and traditional things and a medication that offset that medication. And I just got stuck in that swirl of trying to problem solve a lot of complicated things all at the same time. And it gave me tremendous empathy for the many, many people who've been experiencing that and trying to figure that out for a long time.

But it also showed me that I needed to attend to my physical and mental health with more care than I had been previously. And I'm still not all the way through that process by any means. I haven't nailed it at all. But it's something I did not have to give a lot of thought or energy to for like the first 40 years of my life. And now when I look at my calendar, part of where my energy goes is to trying to figure out this part of my life. And it's difficult and also worthwhile. Yeah. I think as we get older, even in some degree of health, if I were to think about how much of my time goes into trying to make sure that the body is well cared for, certainly it's more when you're sick, but even being healthy, to stay healthy as I'm older is a fair amount more, you know,

the exercise, the stretching. Oh, boy, this shoulder hurts. So now I need to do these exercises and the diet and the getting enough sleep. And you're like, geez, you know, there's a desire to occasionally be like, you know, can I do without this thing? So you were sort of driven to it by necessity to some degree. Talk to me about the pleasures of it or the joys or the consolations that have come from that deeper attending to it, if there are any. Yeah. I'm like, I would say I have a lot of gratitude when I do feel good. I don't take it for granted when things are not bad and like sort of medium good, I feel really grateful for that. And I have a lot of empathy, again, for people who have struggled for a long

time. The other thing I'm trying to do, and I'm really not good at it, but a friend of mine, Hilary McBride, does beautiful writing and work. She's a therapist. She works on kind of the wisdom of the body. One of her book titles is The Wisdom of the Body. And she talks about how pain is a gift that can show us what needs care and attending. And I think for such a long time, I've had that divide between the mind and the body. Pain is just something to either ignore or overcome, not something to listen to, not an invitation, not a gift, but I'm learning a lot about how to listen to my body, how to listen to pain, how to be open to learning new practices, and how much of the mind and the body are really connected. Now, before I take some Advil, I stop for a minute and say, like, are there any feelings that I might not have given myself the space to feel that might be just like shouting from my shoulders right now?

Yeah. And might that be the solution instead of medication? And it's not always, but those are helpful questions along the way. You mentioned in the book, actually, I'm not sure if it was in the book or it was another interview you did about learning about the work of Dr. John Sarno. Yeah. And you referenced the documentary on him. We had the creator of that

documentary on, it's been a long time now. It's been six years ago or so, but there can be a link between chronic pain and emotional state. We also had an interview recently that I found fascinating by somebody at Columbia, I think it was at Columbia University, and they call it pain reprocessing therapy. But what they say is that the pain, you're still in pain, but the signal for that pain is no longer coming from the part of the body that it originally came from. It's coming from within the mind. It's still there. It's still real. But it's been learned at that point. It's a memory in essence, which is just both fascinating and mildly horrifying that our brain could do that. But it just gets to the point that this stuff is so complex, how to work out some of the ailments that we feel and take on. It's so complex.

It is. And I think, you know, I'm by no means saying like, I used to do it this way and now I do it only this way. I think what I'm saying is I used to not really do anything and now I at least have a whole new toolbox of things to try, you know, whether it's listening or meditation or stretching or therapy, I have a whole set of tools in the toolkit and it's worth learning and widening that set of tools as we age and specifically as we hit tough points in our physical and mental health. It's worth learning more of those just so that we have options. You know, that old adage about if you're a hammer, everything's a nail, right? If all you're ever

trying to do is eliminate and ignore pain, you've only got one play, right? It's like Advil. But if you learn to listen a little bit more, if there are other solutions, you can find other ways through and that feels valuable. Yeah. I've dealt with depression throughout my adult life. And I often say with it, I just kind of throw the kitchen sink at it. Everything, like medication, check, exercise, check, positive mental attitude, check, being in nature. And I don't know what does what, you know, that approach leads me to go, well, I don't know what helps. I'm not sure exactly, but I do know that I'm okay. Yeah. You know, I do know that I'm finding my way through, but it is by trying lots of different things. I think that is the way through, you know,

every once in a while, someone will imply or say that they wish my book had a little bit more of a how-to. And I'm always like, oh, no, no, no. That wasn't an accident. I didn't forget to give you the how-to. I gave you 75 how-tos, and you get to pick the 6 or 7 or 12 that work for you. That's how it is. You know, I would never say that I know the how to for you. I barely know it for myself, but I'm willing to give you a whole bookshelf of options. And that's how we all get through. Yeah. I think that is such an interesting point because I think most people wish we could just go to one person and they would say, do the five things and done whatever your issue, whatever your problem, solved. And so we know that life isn't that simple, or at least we learn life isn't that simple. You know, the other problem that I see is that we are deluged by so many ideas and options and approaches that sometimes we can chase solutions around one after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other, after

the other without necessarily committing to any of them to the degree we might need to. And you write about this, you're talking about your writing. You say writing like yoga and prayer. I've mostly experienced the healing part in the long term in a sort of boring but worthwhile way. And so I think this raises that paradox of like being willing to try on different things, but also being willing to do certain things long enough that they have a chance to work. I think breathing exercises are a great example of this. Breathing

can actually be fairly helpful. However, if you wait till you're having your first near panic attack and you try and take 10 deep breaths and it doesn't go away you're going to be like well breathing doesn't work that's not going to help right but had you been practicing breathing for three months it might be a different story and so i just always find this paradox of like trying to find specific enough information that can help me and that i can commit to and stick to, but not getting too narrowly focused and not believing that what worked for somebody else will necessarily work for me.

Absolutely. And it's easier to do that when you're not desperate, right? When you're in just like the worst place, you're like, give me the silver bullet, find it for me and give it to me, you know? And that's not how life works. That's not available to us. But that's why it's worth learning five or six of those things before you get desperate so that they're at your disposal when you need them.

My partner, Ginny's teacher, often says, practice while you can for the times that you can't. I think that's a great insight. I feel the same way actually about getting a therapist. It's great to meet a therapist when you're not in crisis so that they can get to know you and your whole story so that then when the crisis comes, you're not like, hi, this is my name. This is the thing that fell apart in my life. You have a basis of information and a foundation of relationships so that you can come into a point of familiarity right when you need it. So I'd like to end by talking about a phrase that you use near the end of the book, talking about a phrase that you use near the end of the book, and it's, I still say yes.

I'd love to first talk about just saying yes broadly and in general, and then maybe we could name a couple of the things that you still say yes to, because there's a lot of beautiful writing all through the book. And then right at the end, it's particularly in the way and in his beautiful. So talk to me about saying yes to life more broadly or generally and how you work on that. Yeah. So, you know, I want to be a person. I, you know, I mentioned I tend to be kind of open hearted, joyful, you know, at my best. I like to be a person who says yes to life. That feels like kind of my default position.

And then I went through this several year stretch where I was, you know, I think very influenced by like productivity culture and grind culture. And I let my lifestyle and my schedule become too detached from my values. I wanted to be a really present parent and partner. I wanted to be a good neighbor and a good daughter. And I wasn't. I was a good person who worked is what I was. And I was isolated and I was exhausted. And I had to spend about 18 months saying no to almost everything. And I hated it. I hated saying no I had to spend about 18 months saying no to almost everything and I hated it. I hated saying no.

I hated being the kind of person who said no. I hated for that to have to be my default position in life. And so I got this tattoo in the middle of that process that says yes. And I can see it every day and it's in my friend's handwriting and I love it. And what it reminded me was that I'm saying all of these no's, but they're in service of a much bigger yes. The yes is meaning, is beauty, is family, is connection, is creativity. The no is no, not this meeting, no, not this trip, no, not this speaking event. But the yes is to life around the table, to forgiveness, to second chances, to watching the sunset,

to being with my kids, to holding hands with my husband. I needed a reminder that saying all the no's was in service of a much bigger, more beautiful yes. And then through this whole journey of the last couple of years, there were moments when I thought, I'm amazed that anyone can even recognize me on the street because I feel so unfamiliar to myself. I look in the mirror and I almost don't recognize this face in front of me. And writing that last essay was sort of a way of saying like one million things have changed, but a handful of things haven't. Fundamentally, I'm still a person who says yes to the best, biggest, most beautiful things. And this is a handful of things that I'm going to keep saying yes to over and over and over again.

Well, I think that is a beautiful place to end. So Shauna, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. I really enjoyed the book. We'll have links in the show notes to your website, to where people can find the book and all of that. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This has been really a pleasure. 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 reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.