The One You Feed - How to Embrace Imperfection with Anne Lamott

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

In an episode, Anne Lamott explores a variety of themes including how to embrace imperfection, self-improvement, creativity, and the journey towards self-acceptance. Anne shares candid reflections on her personal struggles with perfectionism, shame, and the inner critic, offering valuable insights into the transformative power of self-compassion. She delves into the importance of unlearning harmful teachings from childhood, emphasizing the need to release the pressure of doing things perfectly and to embrace imperfection as a part of the human experience. Anne’s journey of faith and recovery also provides a unique perspective on navigating personal struggles and finding support in community. FREE Meditation Guide! Discover the Top 5 Reasons You Can’t Seem To Stick With A Meditation Practice —And How To Actually Build One That Lasts In this episode, you will be able to: Embrace imperfection to unlock personal growth and self-acceptance. Overcome perfectionism and self-criticism for a more fulfilling life. Discover the benefits of community in your recovery journey Find spirituality in sobriety to enhance your overall well-being Manage your inner critic as a writer to unleash your creativity To learn more, click here!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Finding a way to have a bigger and more spacious life may involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism, who knows? You have to somehow get the help to release some of the perfectionism because not a soul here is going to do it perfectly. 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 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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Anne Lamott, author of many New York Times bestsellers, such as Dusk, Night, Dawn, Almost Everything, Hallelujah Highway, Small Victories, and many other books. She's also a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame. Her newest book is Somehow, Thoughts on Love. Hi, Anne. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Eric. Good to be here.

I was mentioning to you just a little bit before we started how I have loved your work for a long, long time. And we both spent significant amounts of time in 12-step programs and in recovery. And so reading you is like hearing so much of my foundational thought just said really eloquently. So thank you for being here. Oh, thanks. We'll mostly be talking about your book, Somehow, Thoughts on Love, but I have questions kind of from all across the board. But we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent, they're 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 kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second.

They look up at their grandparent, and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do? Well, I've been hearing this one in recovery for years. It's beautiful and profound. But what it always makes me think of is the priest who helped Bill Wilson when Bill was forming AA in the mid-30s. And the priest said, sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses. And so I think of those two really bonded because you have some choice. I'm human. I'm going to have scary thoughts and bad

thoughts, but I don't need to feed them. I can become aware that I'm doing them, that they're kind of a habit or they're from a scary childhood. They were in a certain way kind of a toxic comfort zone to have anxiety or to have a situation that I think I need to fix. And so I feed it. And then the good wolf and the good pair of glasses are right there. And the miracle is that over time, over many, many, many years of sobriety, I catch myself feeding the bad wolf and I say, no. And I turn around and I give the good wolf a really huge, delicious piece of meat. Yeah. Yeah. I heard that too the first time in recovery. I'm sure it was in some church basement somewhere and it was relatively early in my recovery. And I remember thinking then and have thought since many times,

like, I think that I'm not even feeding the bad wolf. I feel like the bad wolf is now eating me. Yeah. You know, but all these years later, it's really different. I wanted to start by asking you to answer a question that you pose early in the book. And you say, even in the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby if you know what to look for. So what do we look for? Well, again, it's the new pair of glasses. Instead of looking at all the things that are annoying,

and for which I have an excellent eye and sensor, we look at all that is still beautiful, and it still works. It is still sort of sweet that, you know, across the street, the neighbor who didn't used to like me very much or approve of me is waving and asking how things are going. And we look for the the daffodils and we'd look for just all of it is beautiful and sort of sweet or surprisingly okay, whereas before we thought it was all going down the tubes. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener, while you were listening to that, what resonated with you? What one thing to feed your good wolf comes to mind? If the thing that came to your mind was

more time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you really haven't liked it, then I want to give you a quick tip that might make it better for you. And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're going to sit down and meditate and they're going to stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that means they're doing it well. But no one does that. And so we end up feeling like we're failing all of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again. We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me.com. In it, I walk you through my process to engage with meditation in a new way. And a lot of people have found it really helpful. That's goodwolf.me.com. before. This is their season in Columbus, Ohio, and they are beautiful and they are everywhere.

Makes me think of something that your husband said to you, which is that 80% of what is true and beautiful can be experienced on any 10 minute walk. Yeah. Right. You go through the city or out the door into the beauty of the neighborhood or down at the trailhead, you know, anywhere. But it's kind of a decision that you're going to be looking for what is just so fine or touching about life instead of all the things that are so annoying, which is that it looks like the neighbors might start doing another addition, or it looks like, you know, that car with the Denver boot on it is still there or whatever. It's like anywhere you are, if you hit the reset button, I mean, you've heard in recovery that you get to start your new 24 hours whenever you remember to, and you hit the button and you start over and you decide to focus on the goodness that surrounds us.

Yeah. There's a program I teach called Habits That Matter. It's about using habits to develop wisdom. And one of the examples I use when we talk about attention is very similar to what you just described. We can take the same walk day after day, but that walk is radically different depending on where my attention is, right? I mean, it's the same exact track, same sites, but I might not see a single one of them, right? It's so critical how we train our attention and kind of where we want it to be. Yeah, exactly. If you grew up in a childhood house that was scary or stressful, which mine was, you get too attentive. You get what they call hypervigilant because you want to be prepared.

You don't want to step on any landmines, you know, and you tiptoe. And I saw a button when I first got sober in 86 that said, I'm not tense, I'm just very, very alert. And if you grew up in a dysfunctional or alcoholic or a family with mental illness or affairs or whatever, you get hyper alert because that's how you can protect yourself. And it's a habit. And this side of the grave, I am probably going to go to some of these old sort of miserable ways of focusing on what might be about to go wrong. And more and more and more as I get older and more sober and more relaxed, I noticed myself doing it and I sort of pat older and more sober and more relaxed, I notice myself doing it and I sort of pat myself on the shoulder and go, we're okay.

Yeah. You know, a theme of your work that I see again and again is you sort of tongue in cheek, a little bit of joking and not talk about how this whole self-improvement project is going way, way slower than you thought it would or think it should. And again, the ways you phrase it often make me laugh. And yet that's a very real way of criticizing ourselves. And it sounds like that's mellowed over time in being more willing to sort of accept yourself and see your human foibles as just part of what it means to be exactly that, human? Mm-hmm. I don't see it. Almost 38 years that I've been trudging the path of

spiritual living and destiny, I see it really as a restoration project, you know, like with a really battered old house where a lot of the systems were just destroyed or put in so long ago that they're really not very effective anymore. And just ruin and what's behind the walls and it's, you know, the rats or the mold. And it's been about restoring the very precious being that I was born to be and to grow into that. And away from all of the personas and the ways of defending myself or the ways of impressing the world and all the stuff that really didn't serve me, but that I was taught and encouraged to improve on. You know, my friend Duncan Trussell,

I think I mentioned this in the book, and somehow said, when you first meet me, you're meeting my bodyguard. And little by little, as I've grown in faith, both in life and in myself, I've been able to let the bodyguard go take a break, go have a cigarette outside while I really get to see who other people and myself are. And that's wonderful. I mean, I really think that's who we are, is to become who we were born to be and not who we always pretended to be because we got so much affirmation for it, for doing better and better and impressing and reaching higher and higher levels of whatever. But you heard, and I've always heard that you

don't compare yourself to other people's outsides, that actually everybody who looks so great is probably in exactly the same state of being human and kind of a little funkier on the edges as you are. And you also hear that it's an inside job, that the healing and the restoration aren't out there. You're not going to get such a great book review or whatever that it's going to do any kind of healing at all. It's going to be a nice fix. Now, I love fixes. When I first got sober, my mentor, Sharon S., said to me, every morning you need to ask yourself whether you want the hit or whether you want the serenity. And I said, Sharon, I want the hit. I'm a drug addict, but I really wanted the serenity. And all these years later, I still notice I love the hit. I love the immediate fix of something that

will mood alter me either because I've achieved it or it's arrived from Amazon or whatever it happens to be. But what I really want is a serenity, which is the very gentle self-respect and that radical self-care and getting out of myself to become a person for others. And maybe just taking some food over And, you know, maybe just taking some food over to the food pantry, maybe going around the neighborhood and picking up litter. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to ask you a question in a little bit more detail. So writing is your thing. It's what you've done for a long, long time. And it's also the way that you get some of those hits we talked about, right? You get a good book review,

someone that you respect says something good about it, you get paid to do it, all those things, right? So talk to me about how you work with yourself, given that there are sort of like these multiple motivations in doing something like writing. How do you work with yourself to stay on the more intrinsic motivations versus getting really focused on the extrinsic pieces of it? That's a good question. As I wrote a lot in Bird by Bird, when you're a writer, you get fixated on the outside validation and you believe before you're published that it will completely affirm you and validate your parking ticket and it will last and it won't. It's just a fix. It's mood altering and I love it, don't get me wrong, but I get many, many, many bad reviews also. This is my 20th book and they

always get under my skin and I won't lie and say I don't even notice or care anymore because I completely do. But as you get older, you just notice that it'll pass, you know, that it was one person who doesn't like your style of writing or talking. And, you know, you shake it off. You learn little tools for shaking off. But what does work and sustain the soul and the spirit is any daily practice, whether it's meditation or writing or a power walk or whatever. But with the writing, if you sit down at the same time every day so that your subconscious can kick in for you, which is where all the juicy stuff is, and you do the work even though

you're not in the mood or you don't have any confidence or whatever, then it connects you to something umbilically. And that is some sort of higher power, some sort of higher calling to decide to devote yourself to the writer's life, whether or not you ever get published. It's like a calling, like a monk would feel called to the monastery and the dailiness of it and the miracle that you will get better and better and better and then you'll be able to help others. And just like in recovery, the beauty of getting to watch other people heal and get better and reach higher and higher levels of biting off trickier things to either write about or ways to write about them or alternately being able to write

more and more modestly and simply and plainly and clearly. It's a wonderful thing to see it in yourself, but even more so in some ways to see it in other people. And so the dailiness of it, the habit of it, as you teach about the connection with yourself, with higher power, and with the outside world is really where the goods are. Do you enjoy the writing process? Some writers describe it as being like when they're in it, very, very difficult. And other writers describe loving doing it. What's the experience of it like for you? I don't love it most days. I don't love first drafts. You know, I wrote a lot in Bird by Bird about how everything I've ever written that you might like derived from a really awful first draft. Any book

I've ever read, even any poem I've ever read has almost certainly begun as a really god-awful first draft. So, that part I find 20 books later just as hard. You know, like all alcoholics and maybe all writers, there's kind of a ping pong game going on between this grandiosity and narcissism versus the pretty shaky self-esteem. But once I have a first draft done, it starts to be more like Swiss watchmaking or something where I'm fiddling, I'm taking stuff out that I hadn't been able to take out earlier. I'm moving stuff around. And the story is kind of revealing itself to me like a Polaroid in a way that wasn't happening in the first draft. at work on my first book, not my 20th, my first. And I just recently got a book deal and I'm really excited about it and sort of daunted at the same time. When you're in that shitty first draft process, do you still have the doubt in there? Like this one sucks. I'm never going to pull

this one out. Or do you have the faith now that you've done it so many times that you know, like, okay, this is just part of the process. I'm in the part of it where it's difficult. This book, it's about love and there's no word or theme more over used certainly in American culture than love. And so all the way through the first draft, I was thinking mostly what I write about is love, spirit, healing, soul, God. And I thought, talk about beating a dead horse. But I also had something that was guiding me. And that was that I wanted to write a book for my son and grandson that would be every single thing I know that has ever worked before during really tricky times, hard times, rough patches, bad news,

that it will almost certainly work again when I'm gone. Because I know that their future, just with the climate and who knows with democracy, is going to be really difficult and scary and untraveled. And so I wanted to say this always worked, no matter how awful my landscape was and how long it took, it will work. Community will work. Goodness will work. Prayer and meditation and getting outside and two or three very, very best friends and this. And so I started writing pieces. And I think they're sort of funny.

And I tried to do the deep dive into these different realms of love. But yeah, every step of the way, I would feel left to my own devices that I'd already done it. I'd done it better, da, da, da. But that is why with my writing, when I teach writing, I always say you need other people to read your stuff. I have my husband. I have two people who read my stuff for me before I send it in anywhere. My son has a website called aridingroom.com and it's 500 writers who are doing that for each other. They're either helping each other not give up and they're helping each other know that the first page really didn't work. I mean, you're going to need this. You'll have an editor, but you need someone before you give it to your editor. Because you don't want your editor to be

worried about what they've gone and done in giving you a contract. But at writingroom.com, they say things like, I'm going to love this, but I really feel, hypothetically, that the first page you're just kind of clearing your throat. But where it really takes off for me is the second paragraph on page two. That's where I would start the whole thing. And then always, and I'm sure this is true for you, Eric, you go on too long, and that the ending is three or four pages or 17 pages before the right ending. But without feedback, I'm literally hopeless, because I'm going to send stuff in that I just think is just so, so, so perfect. And it really needed another set of eyes on it. You know what it's like, your eye kind of glances off it after a while and you're bored with it a

little bit. You just want to be done. But then you give it, like I'll send it over to my husband and he'll print it out and he'll really work on it. And he'll come over and sometimes she says, I just love this. I had a couple of thoughts and other times he'll come in and there'll be this scary look on his face that more doesn't work than I had hoped, but he will have some really good ideas on how to get it to work. So I give a lot of talks at a writing room.com. I don't give it very many workshops. That's mostly where I do my talking now. What I repeat over and over and over again is no matter how great a writer, no matter how many books you've had published, you need help from somebody who's a good writer, who respects you. My students go to writing conferences, God, and they just get torn to shreds sometimes

when their piece is being critiqued in the group of 20 people. And that's not helpful. What is helpful is to approach each thing as having already been accepted and you're either asking for help or offering help as to how to bring it up to its very highest quality. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us 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. Community is something that comes up often in your writing. You just referenced it a minute ago when you were talking about what works in difficult times. You also just referenced it, right, in regards to writing. And you have a line that made me laugh, and I thought, how true is this? You said, 80% of any meeting or gathering might be stupid and beneath you, but the other 20% will save you. Yeah, that's just so often true for me.

It's true at church. It's true in my recovery workshops. It's true in community meetings. All of us just talk so much and people just want their point of view really heard and in detail. And that's not where the healing is. The healing is in the stuff once all the ego and all the blowhard and all the passionate need to be heard is stripped away. What are you actually trying to share with me?

Well, I'm trying to share that just all I do one day at a time is not pick up a drink or a drug. All I do in my Sunday school classes is to try to help my kids know that they are loved and chosen and just precious as is, that this is a come as you are deal. But yet there's a 45 minutes before and then five minutes after, you know, so you can usually strip away about 80%. And anything I've written, you can easily strip away about a third of it.

So it's just human nature. It's human nature. We care so deeply about the things in our life that are of highest value. We just want to get that across. You know, that's why it's good that we get a shot at second drafts. Yeah. I love what you wrote about community there, about, you know, 80% of it being stupid and beneath us, right?

And 20% being valuable. Because I've had a tendency to throw away the 20% because I can't get through the 80%, right? And 20% being valuable because I've had a tendency to throw away the 20% because I can't get through the 80%, right? And I've learned that over time, but it was so helpful to hear it written that way because my problem was I was feeling like, well, it's either good or it's not good. And the reality, like most anything in life is there's some of both, but I really love that idea. And, you know, the other thing that you said that just a minute ago, that really resonates me with me. And I talk to people in group programs that I run about this, which is when you go into a new situation, you're going to have one of two sort of reactions and they may switch back and

forth like every three seconds, which is I'm too good to be here or I'm not good enough to be here. Right, right. You know, it just seems to be the nature of walking into a new situation where we don't know people. Right, right. the shyness and discomfort that even extroverts would feel about entering a new community, whether it's spiritual recovery or community activism to try to stop the new construction from going up or getting the beaches clean. It's just human nature. It's like your little kid is entering the room and you feel awkward awkward and it's very sweet and touching. But of course, the way that I've always compensated for it is with this arrogance

and this kind of feeling of these people just seem really nutty to me or these people, they're sort of pathetic or whatever. Or like the famous Groucho Marx line that he wouldn't want to belong to any group that would have him. But by entering into that room, each time you do it and saying hello to a couple of people, it's like Nautilus for the spirit, and you build muscles to do it. And then pretty soon, you find yourself really, really looking forward to them. there's going to be people that are just going to seem weirder than is absolutely necessary. But at the same time, you build muscle. It's the same way you build muscle to not pick up a drink or to not go back to smoking. You just know that you can do it. And it's going to be ever so slightly uncomfortable. And you know, like the Nike ad, you just do it and you put out your hand and

you say, hello. And then there's someone you know there and either you gravitate toward them and go, oh my God, I'm so glad that you're here or else you hide from them and you think, oh my God, I'll never come back. But you just do it and you do it afraid and you do it shy. And then you start to see what they're about and something deep inside of you, like this little Dr. Seuss character of your soul goes, oh my God, that's exactly right. And then maybe you come back a second time, which is where the miracle is. In the new book, you talk about walking in, you show up, you step inside. Maybe like me, you feel like a walking personality disorder, but managed to say hello. A lot of things start with hello. Very recently, so this is fresh in my mind, I've been part of an organization for quite some time called Food Rescue. We basically go pick up food that's about to be thrown're taking some of that food and preparing it. And so I've been going and what I know about myself is it takes about three to four

interactions with people before I start to come out of my shell. So the first three times I'm there, I'm just kind of like, yeah, okay, I'm just focusing on the kitchen. And then I notice last time I'm making a couple jokes. I just know that about myself now. So I could be patient with myself, but I didn't always know that. And I think it's, you know, one of the reasons people have such a difficult time with community is we expect that right away, it's going to be this magical thing. Right, right, right. I know. Well, there's so much of what I have to tell my writing students is that writing and living are about unlearning a lot of stuff we learned as children. And I was

just talking about this at a writing room. We were taught, don't waste paper. And I tell them, please waste paper, send money to the Sierra Club, and then print your material out and read it, holding it with a sharp pencil. You know, read it in a window seat. Read it in the corner of the house. You know, we were told not to space out. We were spacing out when we were children at the kitchen table or on the couch. Somebody came along and said, don't you have something to do?

You know, is your homework done? Is your room clean? And I tell my writing students, space out, space out. Like, off into the middle distance like cats do, so you can wool gather. And so your mind can kind of float around and go peek into corners that you hadn't even known were there. And so much for me personally has been about unlearning what I was taught. And of all the crippling, destructive things I was taught as a child was this perfectionism, you know, that you can and really need to do things that are beyond reproach,

that also you need to know what you're doing and then you should stick to that. And as a writer, that is never true because A, I usually don't know what I'm doing until I've done it. And B, I don't need to stick to it. I'm going to take out huge chunks or I will introduce a whole new character or whatever. So with finding a way to have a bigger and more spacious life, which may involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism, who knows? You have to somehow get the help to release some of the perfectionism because not a soul here is going to do it perfectly. Because we compare our insights

to other people's outsides, we see other people go, oh, I wish I could do it that way. I wish I looked that way. I wish I did this, wish I did that. And their insights feel just as self-critical or worried as ours do. It's just they have a better persona or bodyguard. For me, boy, that has been the deepest dive I've had to do was into this belief that if I did things that were beyond reproach, that were just really nearly perfect, that that offered some kind of validation of protection, and it didn't. It's an inside job. All right, now let's pause for a quick Good Wolf reminder, and this one is on meditation. If while you're meditating, your mind wanders,

you probably, like most people, treat that as a moment of failure, like, oh, my mind wandered again. But let's flip that and instead treat that as a moment of celebration, like, oh, my mind wandered again. But let's flip that and instead treat that as a moment of celebration, because in that moment, your mind actually woke up and you were mindful of the fact that your mind wandered. So it's a win. So if we can flip that right on its head and say, oh, good job, brain, we actually make it more likely that A, our brain is going to do it more often because we're training it, and B, that we're going to enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing. Check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me.com.

The thing that keeps close company with perfectionism is shame. And you said something that I really resonated with, and it was that I learned once again that just about the worst part about shame is the shame of still having it. Yeah. Say more about that. somehow of being rejected by a very, very close friend. And of course, the human response would be A, devastation, and B, the shame. Because I think we secretly believe that when anybody criticizes us or finds flaw with our work or our being, that they're seeing something that's true, that everybody else is either politely not saying anything about or hasn't even noticed because of your dazzling and seductive persona. But when somebody criticizes you or says something as if

they are pointing out something that's true instead of it being their opinion, there's no way that you're not going to have shame. The gift is that maybe you don't have it for part of a year. You know, maybe you have it for a few days because you call your best friend, you call your partner, you call your mentor, your sponsor, your whatever, and you work with it. You go into it and realize that it's something from 50 years ago when you were a child and this used to come up from your very stern dad or your very codependent mother or whatever. from your very stern dad or your very codependent mother or whatever. But that piece is so painful.

I actually didn't think people were going to like it. It's called Camellias. And I thought people were going to just kind of recoil because it's so painful about what I went through and thinking this friend, Tim, had just nailed me finally for once that I was a two-time or I was a backstabber or that he didn't want to be like me. And it seems to me the piece that in certain ways resonates most for people because you know what? Anything I write that is really intimate is something that I'm pretty sure is universal.

I'm pretty sure you, Eric, when you read that, you grokked it. Totally. You got it. Yeah, right? Yeah. You have been there and you kind of went, oh, when you read that, you gropped it. You got it. Yeah. Right. You have been there and you kind of went, oh, you cringed. But in that way, that's exciting to cringe when you think somebody is telling the truth and it's maybe reading your mail a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. That, I don't know if you call it essay or chapter or whatever in the book is really powerful. And I think the other reason that things like that people really like, there's a tendency to put people who can write well

or speak well, you know, up on a little bit of a pedestal, right? And think, oh, you know, since they are able to articulate these ideas, they must really have them figured out, right? Right, right, right. And so I think it's a real powerful thing when people get to see like, oh no, even somebody who has all this wisdom still goes through this stuff, right? And it's sort of back to that idea about shame. We think we should be beyond something, right? I mean, I know that's become something I've had to really work with as I've had close to 25 years in recovery and lead these group programs

and this podcast and all this stuff is when I'm really struggling, there's that voice in me that goes, you should know better. Right. I know you should, you should, you should, you should yourself, you should all over yourself. Right. Yeah. And it's so destructive, right? Because it's, I can't get onto the work of really processing and learning from the experience and grieving or whatever I need to do. Like that, I shouldn't be allowed to feel this way thing really shuts the door on that deeper work. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. But you know, I don't know if you're allowed to say this, but what we say in recovery is it shoulds or shit. You know, If you could have done

better at the time, you would have. You definitely would have. You were feeling really stressed and pressured or inadequate, and you did what at the time felt like the best you could do. And that's all we can do on any given day. The best we can be as humans or as writers or as parents or as children. But that perfectionism is just so deadly. And my husband's written a book, his name's Neil Allen, called Better Days because his work with people is on the inner critic. And he points out to his clients that the inner critic is from childhood. It kept us from running out into the

street when we were five years old. It kept us from swimming out beyond our ability to stay afloat. But it's a parasite, the way he describes us. It's not part of us. It's just misguided effort to keep us safe. But I'm 70 and I have very good traffic safety understanding. And I would never swim out past the breakers. You know, I'm not stupid. But with my work, when I hear that inner critic, it says to me, oh, my God, I just think that is too sentimental. I think it's over. I think it's this.

Or when I come off stage after presentation, the inner critic. But what I've learned to do, mostly I've known my husband for seven years, he taught me to just be aware of it and to say, oh, it's you. It's not truth. It's not who I am. It's not truth. It's just parasite. It kept me alive. I'm grateful for that. But it takes practice. And again, it takes that nautilus of the soul to get used to. You know, there's something I know in Ohio you've come upon in these secret groups of recovery, which are the three A's. The first A is the awareness.

It's my inner critic. It's belittling me. Its job is to keep me small so it can control me and keep me from doing something that might either be fatal or humiliating in the public realm. But you get the awareness. Oh, I'm doing it. Oh, I'm just jealous.

Oh, I'm just sad. And that's why I'm being mean to myself. That's the inner critic keeps me small and afraid. And so the awareness, oh, I'm doing it again. And Neil teaches people to say, oh, it's you. The second thing is acceptance. Of course I have it. When I give you, Eric, my book to read, and when you give your book to us to read down

the road, it's your very best effort, your best self. It's your heart. It's your soul. It's your education. It's your experience, your strength, your hope, all the best you could do. And if somebody says in a newspaper or at the dinner table, I'm just really surprised that you didn't go into that more deeply, or I'm surprised that you spent so much time on that. It's going to be devastating, but you have to accept it. This is what I got as a child,

and this side of the grave, I'm going to have it. The miracle, and I accept this, is that I'll have it and I can come through it in a couple of hours instead of, in my case, my 20s at the height of my drinking and choosing. And then after the acceptance, of course, I have this. This is how I was raised. You know, I was raised to be very self-critical. I was raised that a B plus wasn't a good enough grade. Was there time in the quarter to bring it up? And then the third thing that recovery teaches, that the church and the mosque and the synagogue teach is the action.

And the action is love. The action is self-love. The action is you touch your own shoulder and you say, it's okay, honey. Let me get you a cup of tea. Or you say, let's just go take a hot bath. Or you say, let's just put that down for now. I think you're tired. I think maybe you want to lie down with a kitty for a while and just read People magazine. Whatever the radical self-care is is the action and so I do that a lot because I hear the inner critic I hear it more and more softly I heard it yesterday and I was crushed by it by what it was telling me about myself so what did I do I went and got Neil and he said oh that's your inner

critic that's not truth and so what do? Well, why don't we ask it to go sit in the library and find a nice book to read while I try to get this project finished? I don't need it sitting on my shoulder telling me how disappointing it finds me, how much better I could have done and how much more quickly. And so, I did. I said, you know, there's a great lamp in the library anything you might ever want to read in any realm Tolstoy or self-helper or Mary Oliver why don't you go read for a while while I finish up here because I'm older I have a number of tools in this battered old toolbox and the awareness helps me remember that I can get one out. Might be at picking up the 200 pound phone, right?

It might be that you need to cry. And actually I needed to cry yesterday. I had an English mother from Liverpool and I was taught, you don't cry, stiff upper lip and carry on. And my father, same thing. And so if you cried or were angry at the dinner table, you got sent to your room without eating. And I learned not to cry. And I was very sensitive and I couldn't help it. I just came this way. That's why I'm a good writer is because I'm sensitive. But that's back to what I talk about with my classes or my talks is that cry, cry, cry. There's nothing except crying that will help that child's grief inside of you. And it will bathe you. It will hydrate you. It will baptize you.

You know, it'll water the seeds at your feet that you don't even know what they are because birds flew by and dropped them and buckle up because something really incredible might spring from that. So again, it's about unlearning what we were taught we should do and instead finding out who we really are and how to live in a way that's freer and floatier and maybe a little bit sillier. 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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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 idea of sending your inner critic to the library. If you could get the inner critic really interested in the collected works of Tolstoy, you could keep it occupied for a while. There's some long books in that catalog for sure. I thought for a minute, we might talk about prayer. I mean, you wrote a book called The Three Essential Prayers, which were help, thanks, wow. In another book, you write that one prayer you would say,

you know, is help me start walking in your general direction. And the greatest prayer, help me not be such an asshole. Right. Yeah, yeah. One day at a time. See, my father was an atheist and an intellectual and just had contempt for people who prayed. But he had one moral value that he, too, we were taught to remember people's names, no matter what their station in life, no matter if they work in the back room at the mobile gas station or whoever they work, remember people's names and don't be an asshole. And, you know, those two rules have served me well. In the latest book, you talk about something that a man told you about a prayer, right? You said that instead of reciting some standard flowery recovery prayer, he said, whatever.

Right. And at night when he turned off his light to go to sleep, he said, oh, well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What does that signify to you? What about that resonates with you? Well, you know, a lot of us in recovery say these sort of beautiful prayers that are common to all of us who are staying sober or not binging or not being anorexic or gambling addicts. There are these beautiful, profound, meaningful prayers. And they ask that we be relieved of our

obsession with ourself and that we be there for others and that we learn to forgive a tiny bit better than we're able to currently or whatever. And they're very beautiful. But the old timers that I talked to, this is, you know, July of 1986 said, in the morning when I wake up, I just say, whatever, life is going to be very lifey. That goes without saying. And whatever comes, you know, I have the tools to deal with it if I'm not being a pig. And then at night, when you might be looking back over your day and thinking about how many blessings there were, how many things there were where you definitely could have done better or given the person a little bit more

of your time or patience, or you could have made this decision or whatever, instead of like holding a flashlight on himself with judgment or with this concern, he just goes, oh, well, you know, still sober, still seeking union with God, still trying to be friendlier to myself. Oh, well, whatever. It's fine. Yeah, I love that. It makes me think of something that came to mind a couple minutes ago when you were talking

about the inner critic. And I think it's the subtlety here of something, which is that the inner critic is a, to use your husband's word, a parasite, right? We might say it's an exaggerated version of something, but being able to be critical of ourselves, to look at what we've done, you know, what we might want to change, what we might want to be different is a useful skill in the same way that like in AA, they talk about doing a nightly inventory, right? You know, looking back at the day. So how do you balance those two things, right?

Which is on one hand, we learn by reflecting on what we've done and we see where we could do something better and different. That's healthy. But then taken too far, it's the perfectionism and the shame that we talked about. How do you think about balancing those things? Well, here's what I would say. If you and I are sitting together and you're telling me some stuff on your inventory that you were impatient with somebody today or that you were secretly very judgmental of them and it made you feel really toxic, I'm not going to say, oh my God, Eric, you what? Like you've got 25 years of being on this

very deep, profound spiritual path. You know, I don't talk to you that way. I would say, oh honey, you know what? We all do that. And it's a drag. And it says in our literature that no human power could relieve us of that. And you know And you need to be a retired higher power because you're not a good higher power to yourself because you're so mean to yourself. And I would say that to you. Now, would I talk that way to me? With me, I might go, oh my God, I did that again. I don't know how many times I have prayed and written and God boxed it about not, I did it again. God, you know, that's how I talked to myself without intervention and without many, many years under my belt of the three A's again, the awareness, the acceptance, the action.

Of course I talked to myself. That's how my parents talk to myself. You did that again, but last time you did it, you got to call it awareness, acceptance, action. And the action for me with you would be to put my hand on your shoulder with permission gently and say, you know what? Same. And God box it. And then you get more aware of it. You start to do it next time and you grab yourself by the wrist and say, stop, honey. So that's where I would differentiate between an inventory, between the harshness that we bring to our own judgment of ourselves and the gentleness with which we listen to a brother or a sister share something that is very troubling for them. That's a great way of really framing it up. It seems to me that for you, recovery is what brought you to a large degree to the faith that you have, the Christian faith that you have today.

Would that be a semi-accurate statement? No. I think recovery kept me alive for the work that I had been doing for all of my life, really. But I had found this funny little church that was mostly black and a lot of people from the deep South who'd come up during the Great Migration and were basically secretly Baptist, although it was a Presbyterian church. They took me in a year before I got sober, It was a Presbyterian church. They took me in a year before I got sober. And I was the way we are.

I was smelly and just devastated and freaked out sometimes and arrogant, right? It's that beautiful combination. And they kept me alive and they set me on the path that ended up with me converting and becoming a Sunday school teacher not long after. Then I was a year later, I got the miracle. I mean, the central miracle from which all blessings flow, which was that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. But my church didn't keep me sober. Sobriety didn't give me what my community of believers,

of left-wing, progressive progressive hardcore Christians could give me. And it's all of a past. It's all of a weave, you know? It's all of a... The drugs really got me someplace I'm not sure anything else would have. However, the unfortunate part was that I was probably going to die. And then it wore off. That was the thing with the drugs or with the acid or the mushrooms or whatever was

that it wears off. That was the thing with the drugs or with the acid or the mushrooms or the whatever was that it wears off. And that the elevator is going in one direction, which is down, and you don't know if you'll be alive when the elevator stops at the next floor. Yeah. Yeah. So the reason I asked that question is because for me, recovery sort of pushed me into caring more about a spiritual life. I'd already had those interests and leanings, right? But it kind of, it pushed me in that direction. And then conversely, what it ended up doing after being somebody who tried to sort of get with the God program, right? It was also finally recovery that was the thing that ended up driving me sort of out of that paradigm and framework more into a buddhist framework and the reason was and i'm just curious how

you reconcile this with yourself because i'm sure you do in probably a great way is it the idea that god was what was keeping me sober oh uh-huh and then seeing seeing that all sorts of people I loved were dying, people who came to meetings who did the same things I did, and yet they were dying. I really had this very difficult idea that somehow by the grace of God, God's grace kept me sober, but God's grace didn't keep you sober or keep you alive. And I eventually couldn't reconcile that. And I'm curious how that is reconciled in your life. Well, you know, I just don't overthink things. I mean, I do, but it leads me nowhere. You know, why is not a useful question in my experience. And everyone I know who's sober, who has some kind of higher power, sees it very differently. They might see it as,

well, we live near a mountain called Mount Camel Pius at the coastal Miwok worship, and some people have turned to that, to the beauty and majesty of that mountain as a power greater than themselves, or a lot of Buddhist friends in sobriety. There's a line in the literature of recovery that says that instead of a personal God or Casper the friendly ghost or the fairy dad in the clouds with a long beard, that there's an unexpected inner resource. And I find that very touching. And with the people I've tried to be there for, to help them get sober over the years, And with the people I've tried to be there for, to help them get sober over the years,

a lot of them don't want anything to do with God per se, but they can, the Buddhist thing is sort of good orderly direction, or the group of drunks, or the great outdoors, or the grace over drama. But people, if they're desperate enough to want to give up this one thing that they love more than anything else, but that is killing them and has destroyed their family, there's a way. But a lot of people actually don't want to. They want to, like me, for years, I mean, I was a hopeless drunk. For years, I just believed that I could figure it out, you know, and that I could break some sort of code so that I could stop after five or six social drinks every single night and the non-habit forming marijuana that I could stop after five or six social drinks every single

night and the non-habit forming marijuana that I'd smoked on a daily basis for 20 years. And at some point, I've heard in 12-step programs that step zero is this shit has got to stop. And for me, it kept not stopping. I kept working with it. I kept thinking, not stopping. I kept working with it. I kept thinking, okay, it's tequila. I don't do well with tequila. Okay, meth does not work. The third day is really a problem, you know? And for some reason, and I have to say it was the movement of grace in my life, I ran out of any more good ideas. It was the dark night of the soul where I've been many, many, many times as all alcoholics have been. And I had run out of any more good ideas. I was done. And that's my prayer. That's my prayer for people that I know that are still drinking or binge eating or anorexic or gambling. My prayer for them is they reach that place where they've run out of any more good ideas. It was interesting for me because I got sober as a homeless heroin addict and I stayed sober for about eight years and I really sort of did my best to, again, this is 1994 in Columbus,

Ohio. And so when people talked about a higher power, we didn't have the California vibe going, talked about a higher power. We didn't have the California vibe going, right? Higher power had a fairly specific meaning that long ago. And so I tried really hard and it worked and I got sober. But like I said, what I described is that question about why are some of us? And then also a couple really difficult things in my life happened and I realized I didn't have a faith that truly made sense to me. And then I went back out and I drank. I never used heroin. It's funny you say that about like crystal meth not working because that was basically my rationalization was like, well, you know, heroin's a bad idea. We all can agree on that. I just won't do that. Right. And when I came back, then I was like, okay, I've got to figure this higher power out. And I did.

Uh-huh. Well, you know, there's a sister program for alcoholics in which people with tiny, tiny control issues who think that they can save and fix and rescue the alcoholic or the drug addict gather. And one of their battle cries says, figure it out is not a good slogan. When I was done, July 7th, 1986, I didn't have a beautiful moment of being done. It was a nightmare that I might have to give this up. I had no other way to get through life. And I wanted to stay alive. I felt like my life force was still tugging at my shoulders. And what I basically said to God at that moment was, with my arms crossed, was, what? You know, fine, what? And it was just, what? And I already had, I had like this big Jesus-y life, I had a church. But the problem was that the God of my understanding

and I thought I was a piece of shit because of the way that I've been living all those years, what I've been doing, what I'd done to women, what I'd done to just, you know, the drill. And so what sobriety brought me into was a way of life where my higher power and the group of drunks and good orderly direction of staying sober one day at a time helped me understand that God thought I was fabulous, you know, and that God was teaching me what I teach my Sunday school kids, which you are loved and chosen and I adore you as is. Come as you are.

I want you. So that was about the most radical change that could ever be in a person's spirituality, you know, right? I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's great. So listener, in thinking about all of that and the other great wisdom from today's spirituality, you know, right? I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's great. So listener, in thinking about all of that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight or thing to do that you're taking away, what would it be? Remember that little by little, a little becomes a lot. And a habit for me that has accrued in benefit over time is meditation. However,

one of the things that gets in our way of building a steady meditation practice is that very striving, right? Of course we're doing it because we want certain benefits, but in the moment of actually meditating, we need to let striving go and focus on just being there and experiencing it no matter what's happening.

It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying to make something happen, some special moment. We want to let go of that. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it enjoyable, check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me slash calm.

I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up on that idea that you are wonderful and loved as is. You and I are going to talk a little bit longer in the post-show conversation where I'm going to unveil my single favorite line that I've come across in your writing. And we'll talk about a couple other things. Listeners, if you'd like access to post-show conversations and ad-free episodes and joy of supporting something that means something to you, go to whenyoufeed.net slash join.

Anne, thank you so much. It is really such an honor to have you on. Oh, thank you. I love being here. 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

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