The One You Feed - How to Embrace the Mystery of the Human Spirit with Parker Palmer

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

In this episode, Parker Palmer explores ways to embrace the mystery of the human spirit as he shares his profound insights on embracing wholeness. He discusses the importance of nurturing positive qualities within ourselves and the responsibility we have in shaping our micro-environments. He also emphasizes the powerful impact of finding genuine connections and supportive people in your life. Parker’s journey to the depths of depression and the valuable role of authentic friendships during those tough times will leave you feeling inspired. In this episode, you will be able to: Embrace personal development and authenticity to unlock your full potential Experience the transformative power of meaningful relationships in your life Discover the impact of genuine connections and support on your mental well-being Learn how to navigate mental health struggles with grace and resilience Nurture the positive qualities with ourselves and what we bring to the world To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all want to see changes in our lives, in our minds, and in our hearts. So we read inspirational authors, we listen to podcasts like this one, and we get fired up to apply what we've learned. But then inevitably we fall back into old patterns, and it can be so frustrating and maddening. When we start to build habits that truly matter, we see real change. But without enough consistency, we barely scratch the surface. In my Building Habits Matter course, I apply behavioral principles to perennial wisdom so that you can experience the benefits on a deeper level. This is your chance to get accountability, ongoing support, and a

proven system as you journey towards a greater understanding of yourself. You start to bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. And you do this in our group setting in which community connection and friendships are all created, which support you along the way. This program is open for enrollment until March 11th. Head to oneufeed.net slash wisdom to learn all about this opportunity for us to connect and dive deeper into how building habits that matter can transform the way you experience your day-to-day life. Go to oneufeed.net slash wisdom. I hope to meet you in this special program that starts very soon. Where's the creative tension holding between I want to show up in the Michigan legislature and argue my case in open dialectical

manner, and I'm going to show up at the Michigan legislature and let my AK-47 do my talking for me. 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 Parker Palmer, the founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. He's a world-renowned writer, speaker, and activist who

focuses on issues of education, community, leadership, spirituality, and social change. Parker has reached millions of people through his nine books, which include Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, and Healing the Heart of Democracy, among others. Today, Eric and Parker riff on whatever topics come up. Hi, Parker. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. It's good to be back with you. It is great to have you back. I am just really happy to talk with you again. I was saying to you before we started, it's not like you have a new book out where I was like, oh, we got to talk

about this book. I just was like, I just want to talk to Parker again. So I'm glad that we were able to make it happen. We'll be talking about this and that, but we'll start in the way we always do with the parable of the wolves and see what you have to say about it this time. So 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, think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent,

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. I love the parable. I have loved it for a long time. And what it brings quickly to mind is my longtime belief or understanding that so much in life depends on what it is that we bring from inside our lives to the outside world. And conversely, when the world throws stuff back at us, what do we do internally to process it? How do we receive it? Do we cling to it? Can we let it go? Can we turn dirt into gold? Can we receive affirmation and blessing in an open-hearted way?

I call it life on the Mobius strip. It's this constant exchange of the inner and outer, which keep co-creating each other. And in the end, there is no inner and outer. It's one continual act of co-creation. But when I think of that, when I think of it that way, or in terms of the parable of the two wolves, I'm reminded of how much responsibility we have for creating and recreating the micro environments around us. You know, as one person, a friend of mine has said, our reach may be only three feet or so, but let's make a positive impact within that three-foot reach. And at the same time, we're co-creating ourselves by how we internalize what the world throws back at us. So it's a huge parable in terms of

life today. I mean, look at all that's going on, where so much is being manifested from the shadow side of our lives in the external world, in murderous ways, in hurtful ways, in ways that threaten democracy itself and certainly injure other people. So it's a big, big story. I'm always interested in, you know, there's a narrative that things today are worse than they've been before. And I'm always interested in, you know, talking to people who've been around a little bit longer, you know, is that your sense also? And I know as we tend to get older, we tend to think that the world today is not as good as the world used to be. I'm just kind of curious if you're 80, is not as good as the world used to be. I'm just kind of curious, if you're 80, you were born,

you know, really still while the really horrible time in human history was happening, right? You know, you were born during a war that killed what, like 17 million people or something? You know, so that historical context I find helpful. How do you think about our current time and placing it in overall context? Well, I think the gist of what you just said, Eric, is correct, which is that in my lifetime, I'm actually 84 right now, born in 1939. So I've seen a lot of human ups and downs, I've seen a lot of human ups and downs. Can't even begin to tick them off. But certainly World War II, the Holocaust, which you referenced, on through the 60s and the Vietnam War, and our recurring inability to come to terms with the original sin of race, racial prejudice, injustice, white supremacy in this society, the McCarthy era of the 50s right on through today with incredible numbers of American

citizens sort of joining in on conspiracy theories and the denial of the obvious, conspiracy theories, and the denial of the obvious, the denial that an election got won by the person who actually won it, and buying in on the basis of no evidence to the notion that somehow that election was massively rigged and massively flawed. So there's been a lot of that in my lifetime, and I'm not forgetting what's going on in the Middle East these days, add that to the list of very fundamental human struggles to decide which wolf we feed. I think what I do find troubling today is the rise of the far, far right, not only here at home, but around the world, and the ease with which so many citizens seem to buy in to baseless conspiracy theories. I'll never understand these conversations that I sometimes get into where I'm saying, well, here's what the research

shows about X, Y, or Z. And the other person basically says, well, here's what an anonymous person named Q has to say about that. And so I refute the research. These things truly baffle me. the research. These things truly baffle me. I may be deluding myself, but I think, I mean, I was in on a lot of conversations about Vietnam. I was in on a lot of conversations about McCarthy and that era of threat to democracy. And my memory is that they were measurably more rational and more empirical than what it is that we're treated to today. So in that sense, I'm a yes and a no. I mean, yes, it keeps happening. And there are some twists and turns in the current crisis that I find really hard to wrap my mind around. Yeah. I mean, you wrote a book, I don't know how many years ago now,

called Healing the Heart of Democracy. And I think we've talked about that in one of our previous interviews. And I think that that book was written before the rise of as much conspiracy theory as we're seeing today, as much the word polarization seems overused sometimes. I mean, I watch the 60s and I'm like, well, you know, we were killing presidents. You know, we were assassinating leaders here in the U.S. Like that seems pretty polarized. But I do, you know, agree with you about this, not even being able to agree on basic facts. Is there anything in your thoughts on how we heal that? Yeah, it's interesting you should ask because that book, Healing the Art of Democracy, which was published in 2011, will be republished in a new edition next year, 2024. And I was asked by the publisher to write a new introduction to it, which is basically around the question, how have you changed your mind,

if at all? I say basically two things in that new introduction. One is that my fundamental thesis in Healing the Heart of Democracy is that we have got to learn to talk to each other across lines of difference, and we have to learn to engage in what I call creative tension holding. Creative tension holding means the ability which can be taught in schools and voluntary associations and religious communities and families. It can be taught anywhere and everywhere. Creative tension holding means holding apparently opposite positions in a way that eventually allows the two parties either to come to some compromise in the middle or to learn that there's a kind of transcendent third thing that neither one of them had considered or thought of, which would meet the needs on both sides of the equation. That's why it's creative tension holding. It's moving toward someplace new that had not yet been imagined. It has everything to do with focusing on nurturing that relationship

between two or more people, where what's important is not to always be insisting on being right, but to keep your eye on being in right relationship, because that creates the container that allows for an ongoing discussion. And a lot of these issues around which we're conflicted are complicated issues. And so they're not going to be resolved in five minutes. It may take five months or five years, but we have to learn to hang in with each other. So as long as we are a country rooted in we the people, a government of, by, and for the people, as long as we're at least maintaining the premise, the principle, however broken it may be in practice,

that we the people have the final say, or should have the final say on all things. I don't see any way to get away from the proposition that talking to each other is the way forward, because that's how you build up we the people. But in this introduction to the new edition of Healing the Heart of Democracy, I also say what's happening now poses us with some oppositions, some polarities that are not open to creative tension holding. I mean, where's the creative tension holding between I want to show up in the Michigan legislature and argue my case in open dialectical manner, and I'm going to show up at the Michigan legislature and let my AK-47 do my

talking for me. There's no creative tension to be held between those two positions. There's no creative tension to be held when the gist of the conversation is around which race, which religion, which ethnicity, which nationality, which gender or sexual orientation is superior to the others. There's no creative tension holding with conspiracy theories up against research-based facts. So I think what that means is developing a thicker skin around saying, this is not a conversation that's worth pursuing. This is not a conversation in which we can expect either to meet in the middle or to generate a transcendent third thing. And I think a lot of good-hearted people, and I've been one of those people over the years,

just have a hard time with saying, this is not a conversation that's going to go anywhere fruitful. We keep pretending that if we just change the subject and pass the turkey, everything is going to be fine, you know? Yeah, well, I tend to agree with you, right? I'm a big proponent in almost all cases, like get to know the other person, understand why they think what they think, understand where they're coming from, see their humanity, you know, and I'm a big proponent of that, right? And it does seem like you said, there are certain positions and viewpoints that like, I don't know how much creative tension you can get when I'm like, that wall is black. And you're like, no, that wall is white human perception, things around colors aside. I mean, the basic thing is that we can't even agree on a base reality to have a conversation around. And that's where I feel a little bit despairing,

you know, around these things, right? Because I don't even know how to engage in conversation in a useful way. I end up often not even having the conversation, which then doesn't feel good either. Like, I don't know what to do. Yeah. Well, I agree with you. I think you have to try. I think you have to keep trying until all the precincts have reported in. And it's pretty clear that this is not a discussable item. But there's another point that I made in Healing the Heart of Democracy that I also built into the new introduction. And that is that there's a long history in America dating from the very beginning of this country in which it doesn't take 100% of the people to get the people's business done. I mean, you know, one of the salient

features of democracy is you can do business with 51%, even if 49% are saying a pox on all your houses. I was fascinated when I was researching Healing the Heart of Democracy to learn, I think for the first first time that in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which basically resulted in the document we now, many of us at least, treasure, even revere while we acknowledge its brokenness in practice and continue to work hard to live by its norms, in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a third, a full third of the delegates walked out refusing to sign a document that they regarded as was stolen. Okay, the two-thirds can still win. I think one of the things that's come to me, this will seem pretty simple-minded to some people, but those of us who participated in the civil rights movements of the mid-20th century

are very well acquainted with its famous anthem, We Shall Overcome. About five seconds of thinking about the word overcome means we're going to win. We're going to, you know, put that other position down. We're going to squash racism. We're going to win this struggle. We're going to win it by nonviolent means, but we are going to win. We shall overcome. to win it by nonviolent means, but we are going to win. We shall overcome. And I think the whole story of democracy's slow, slow progress toward a more perfect union, toward fullness, toward integrity, and we're not there yet, but the whole story is time after time after time, the belief that we shall overcome. Not long ago, just one more thing about this. I was listening to a speech given by a woman who was the head of the NAACP

Legal Defense Fund and retired from that position after a very distinguished career. She said something that's really stuck with me. She said, there is no point of black history where the last words in the story are, and then we gave up. There is no such story in the history of black America. And that's true. And the process of overcoming is going on to this day. Thank you for that. My despair just took a step down. A couple of steps down, maybe. I'm actually not like permanently in despair. I just have moments, you know, I think anybody looking at the world almost at any time in history would look at parts of it and be like, oh, I can't, I can't, to use the modern phrase. Let's change direction a little bit. I want to read something that you

wrote, and I think it can act as a framing for the rest of the conversation. You use a term called being fierce with reality. And you say fierce with reality is how I feel when I'm able to say, I am that to which I gave short shrift and that to which I attended. I am my descents into darkness and my rising again into the light, my betrayals and my fidelities, my failures and my successes. I am my ignorance and my insight, my doubts and my convictions, my fears and my hopes. And that seems to me also a pretty good way of describing human wholeness. Very much so, Eric. Yeah, I appreciate you reading that quote.

I'd almost forgotten it, but it's nice to have, in this case at least, it's nice to have my own words come back to me. So one sort of summary statement that I made somewhere that I try to live by is that wholeness does not mean perfection. Wholeness means embracing everything, including your imperfections, as part of who you are. And to the best of your ability to show up in the world whole is saying, yeah, I'm all of the above. I am my successes and I am my screw-ups. I am whatever light I'm able to shed and I am the darkness that I carry within me, which can sometimes engulf me. As you know, we've talked before about my three descents into clinical depression,

which were in my 40s and my 60s. I think at age 84, there's another piece to this that has come to me more recently that is sort of another way of summing this theme up, which is that these days, of course, I think about mortality. I think about my own death more often than I did 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. If you're healthy, if you're lucky enough to be healthy, privileged enough to be healthy, you can sort of pretend that that day will never come. And I cannot imagine a sadder way to die than to be lying there drawing your last breaths and thinking, I never, in all my years on this planet, I never showed up in the fullness of myself or anything vaguely approximating the fullness of myself. I hid out, whether it was because I was afraid or I didn't want to subject myself to the winds and currents of change,

whatever the reason might have been. I can't imagine a sadder way to die than when somebody is having to say to him or herself, I never showed up here as who I am, because ultimately who one is is the gift you were born to give to the world. Through your work, yes. Through what you say, how you conduct relationships, yes. But just in the very quality of your being. Yeah, I agree with you that that's a sad thing. And it also, to me, there's all sorts of downsides to not being as whole as possible, right? I think that part of wholeness is recognizing that you're not even whole a lot of the time. Like that's just how we often can be.

But it seems to me that my experience is if I'm not bringing as much of myself to the table as often as I can, that all the relationships in my life are not nearly as whole and good as they could be. You know, like that's one very direct downside of that in addition to the internal cost of it. Yeah, showing up as yourself to the greatest extent possible. And of course, it's not done perfectly every moment of every day. But imagine, for example, that you're in one of those conversations we were talking about a moment ago, and you find yourself getting highly critical of another person's delusions as they seem to you. Imagine that you're present in that conversation with at least the self-knowledge that you yourself had bought into illusions at various stages in your

life. Doesn't it stand to reason that if you have that kind of self-awareness of your wholeness, not only the things you got right, but the things you got wrong, you know, not only the times you had measured twice and cut once because you cared about the data, but the times when you just bought in on something because it was the popular thing to believe. Doesn't it stand to reason that you would give your conversation partner some slack for that and perhaps be more compassionate, more tender, more open, more vulnerable, without jumping down their throat about the nonsense that they're

spouting, which is not unlike the nonsense you once spouted. Somebody once said something that I think applies on many, many levels. This person was talking about inter-religious dialogue. And he said, isn't it interesting how often in these dialogues we take the best in our own religious tradition and lift up the worst in the other person's traditions in order to make an argument? Well, that's a great example of the failure to embrace wholeness. Wholeness doesn't mean, you know, wearing your heart on your sleeve about everything that's happening in your life at any given moment. Carl Jung, the great psychologist, said the soul needs its secrets. And it does. The soul needs to work kind of very quietly in the dark on,

you know, important matters that we wrestle with, existential matters that shape our lives. But there's a lot that we can hold on a more conscious level, a level of self-awareness that could really change our way of being in the world and our way of dancing with others in the world. 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 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

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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. Two things there you said that I really like. I mean, the first is that is the best corrective for me when I start to become judgmental of other people is to just reflect on my own life. I often joke, you know, the benefit of screwing up as often as I have in my life is that I actually tend to be fairly nonjudgmental because I don't even have to be very self-aware to be reminded of all the ways in which I have struggled. And even recently, I went through a really difficult period and I was able to see it in the context of wholeness. And I was able to see,

not that I liked it because I didn't know difficult period. You can't like, you know, I mean, that wouldn't be difficult. But it did allow me to sort of reconnect to what it feels like to really struggle. And that felt really helpful and really useful to me. Because sometimes I can get in the, well, I got sober 15 years ago, kind of thing, right? So for me, recently, in addition to remembering the times I screwed up, it's, you know, being face to face again with suffering for real was a good part of, for me, helping me feel more whole. Yeah, absolutely. There's a poet, I can't quite remember his name right now, but he has a great line in one of his poems. He says, be kind to people because you never know what's going on where the spirit meets the bone. And you don't.

You just can't. But you can know what that place feels like in your own life, where the spirit meets the bone. And you can begin to remember that nobody could grok you during those times. Nobody could get you. You felt very isolated and very alone. So cut the other person some slack because we're all in this together and you've been there too. Yeah. You talk at a couple different points. You're talking about wholeness and you're saying

that wholeness can be achieved if we can use devastation as a seedbed for a new life. You go on elsewhere to say, but there's two ways to understand what it means to have our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about. The other is to imagine the heart broken open to new capacity. And I'm always curious. I think if we look in the world, we can see people who have seen devastation and heartbreak, and it has diminished them greatly. And we can see people who have seen devastation and heartbreak, and it has diminished them greatly. And we can see people in the world who have had devastation and heartbreak, and you can see that it has, maybe enhance isn't the right word, but I'll use it because it's coming to mind. It has enhanced them. It has made them more whole. It has made them kinder,

better, more compassionate people. And I'm always curious, what is it that the people who are enhanced by their suffering do differently? Well, I think there's a great mystery there. It's a question I ask people a lot also, and I don't think anybody has a definitive answer. One thought that I would contribute to that big conversation is that, you know, if you pay attention to your life, heartbreak of maybe small size happens on a fairly regular basis. You know, a friendship that you valued begins to go south or there's some kind of blockage there that you can't understand. A project that you were't understand, a project that you were working on begins to fall apart while you thought you were almost at the point of being able to bring this to a successful completion. You have a child, whether still at home or an adult

child, who is suffering and struggling in life and you lose sleep over it because you never stop being a parent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think the key is to not try to ignore those little heartbreaks and just push on with your life, but to let them in, to feel them as deeply as you can, because in doing that, you're exercising that muscle called the heart, the spiritual heart, not the physical heart, although cardiologists will say that this also relates to the physical heart. You're exercising that heart in a way that is akin to how a runner exercises muscles so that when under stress, they won't snap.

Then when the big heartbreaks come along, you're more likely to have that experience of heart opening rather than shattering because it's never been exercised. You know, there's so much about our lives. They move so quickly. our lives, they move so quickly. We are subject to so many demands, either real or imagined, that there's something in us that just wants to rush through the hard times, hold it all off. I mean, isn't that what the great American hobby of anesthetizing ourselves is all about, whether the anesthetic is things or drugs or busyness or overwork or noise or, you know, a focus on a thousand different irrelevancies in order to distract ourselves, in order to numb ourselves to these fairly regular experiences of small heartbreak. So I would say

that it is like the runner. Exercise those small muscles, keep them limber, keep them fluid. And when the bigger heartbreak comes, your heart is very likely to be more supple. I think the cultivation of a supple heart is something worth reflecting on. Yeah, I was reading something. I don't remember who said it or where it was, but they were talking about this idea of somebody saying, like, my heart is broken. I can't remember whether it was a quip, but it was more or less like, no, it's not. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do. Right.

It's working very well, you know, because you're feeling so much of this, you know, your heart is actually working. It was an interesting, you know, sort of way of reflecting on it very differently. Like, oh yeah, you know, this is what a heart does. And my most recent brush with, you know, particularly difficult thing was, you know, I had moments of like, is all this practice I've been doing to open my heart in general? Is this really a good idea? Because, you know, I'm fairly undefended here. And it is a good idea. It was a good idea. But there's those moments of like, well, do I have some way to turn this down a little bit? It's just such an interesting concept because everybody's going to

deal with lots of really difficult things and knowing how to do it in a way that we get to the other side of enhanced. I think the other thing that is often tricky is that we often hear that like, well, just go ahead and feel it, like let it in and feel it. And as if that is going to be an experience that is in any way, shape or form enjoyable or that it's going to make it suddenly just go away. It actually doesn't. Yeah, exactly. And I do think it makes it more likely that we respond in a wise, helpful way ultimately

for ourselves and others. But letting it in is not pleasant. And as you've talked in the last minute or so, I've been thinking here how important it is to have friends, at least a friend, to whom you can say when they ask, how are you? You can say, I'm heartbroken. Yeah. I'm profoundly and deeply, and it sometimes feels terminally heartbroken. And a friend who will not run screaming from your house when he or she hears those words, who will not become afraid of you,

who will not instantly assume, oh my God, I got to fix this person, but can simply receive you. Because to be heartbroken, to acknowledge it to yourself is one thing, but to be able to have it held by someone who knows you and cares about you, who will walk with you without being afraid, is an incredibly important piece of life. I'll just refer very briefly here to my experiences of clinical depression depression when so many of the people who came hoping to comfort me basically engaged in what I call drive-by caring.

It was sort of in and out. You're going to be okay. Hang in there. You're a good guy. So long. Because they somehow regarded my depression as contagious. And if they hung around me too long, they would get depressed too. And of course, the only reason one feels that is because you feel the burden of having to

fix someone when you don't have the foggiest idea how to fix them. Yeah. And you can't. It's impossible. It's a false assumption. But the impact of that on me, of course, is to leave me feeling even more isolated. Yeah. You know, this person with whom I used to enjoy long rambling conversations about all manner of things is now fleeing from my presence because they're scared of me. So part of processing, we were talking earlier about processing life experience inwardly. Part of

that processing is having someone who can just hold your true feelings and your expressions of grief or pain or anguish about them without running away in fear. I had some insights about all of that as I was going through this difficult time. And I am very fortunate that I have a number of good friends that I can say I am heartbroken to. And these people really stepped up and stepped in and they would check in on me. And I realized how oftentimes not good of a friend

I have been to people where I do the, if you need anything, I'm here. And then I forget all about it because I'm busy. I've made it clear I'm there for them. And I am like, if they call, I'll drop everything. But I wasn't as proactive as I would like to be in the future, you know, where I go, oh, they may not know what they need. And this isn't a short term thing for them, they're going to be in pain for a while, I need to keep sort of checking back in. And I also know that as somebody who's like a behavior coach, and, you know, has worked in the recovery community for a long time, there's this idea of like fixing things, right? And so I more often

than I want will drop into fixing mode. And so it's just been very interesting for me to go, oh, there's some real things for me to learn about how I be a better friend. It was humbling in that regard and very instructional. Right, right. I totally agree. I learned so much during my depression about how to be a better presence in other people's lives. Yeah. I'm curious. There's sort of two approaches, I think, that we often get when we're struggling, right? One is what we've just described, the person who comes by and immediately starts trying to fix it or, you know, shake it off. No big deal, Right. And then there's the other side of it, which is where somebody just only ever listens and almost encourages the difficult

time. And I've often thought about like for me throughout time, the people who've been the most help to me actually did some of both. You know, they actually first, like I felt really deeply understood, but then they might say, have you thought about a different way of looking at that? Or they'll ask, you know, I know you're a big fan of like good questions in your circles of trust, right? Asking nonjudgmental questions. It's not like you just sit in what it is. You recognize that people can give us different ways of looking at things by the questions they ask. Is that your experience, too, that it's kind of a blend of those things over time that is really helpful to someone who's struggling? Yes and no, maybe, but not a hard no.

Let me tell a couple of stories. Yeah. So in my first depression, there was a guy somewhat older than I, maybe six or eight years older than I, very intuitive fellow, fellow I trusted, who did something for me proactively that I will never forget and that really helped me on my road to recovery. He asked permission to do all this before he started doing it. You'll understand why in a moment. What he did was to come to my house. Every day, we were living at Pendle Hill, the Quaker community, so we were on the same 16 acres of land with a community of about 80 people, and he had easy access to where I lived. He would come to my house every afternoon around four o'clock without fail. He would have me seated

in an easy chair in my living room. He would kneel down in front of me or sit on the floor and take off my shoes and socks and massage my feet. He very rarely said a word, but I knew him to be an intuitive person. And occasionally he would say, I feel your struggle today. No more than that. Because that was really about all the language I could take at the time. I was so deep into this hell. Or he would say, I feel you getting a little stronger today. And these were honest reflections from where he sat. And I always benefited from them. When he

said, you know, I feel your struggle today, somebody understands me, right? Or I feel you getting a little better today. Gosh, maybe that's true. And if I did a little gut check, maybe I found out that I did in fact feel a little better. What he did took me some time to understand, but in depression, you're radically disconnected from everyone. You're an atom floating free in the void. That's part of it. It's terror. There's no community. There's no real relationship. He found the one place in my body, a body which had largely gone numb, where I could feel connected to another human being, the soles of my feet. I mean, whose feet don't ache most of the time? And this was, you know, such an act of kindness

and generosity that he kept me connected to the human race in an almost wordless way, but not, as you say, not passive, not just sitting there and listening to what little I might have to say. And then a next step up from that was, in fact, the people who, as you said, had the gift of asking honest, open questions. They also had the gift of, I think, discerning when I was ready to deal with a question and when I wasn't. Because, you know, there were moments in my depression when somebody might ask me a well-intentioned question and I would just want to say, leave, please leave. You know, I just don't have the bandwidth to think about anything. I'm

barely surviving here. I'm, you know, wrestling with the question of, is this the day to kind of bring things to an end? And so there are these huge acts of discernment and, you know, people range on their ability to do that. I think you have to know yourself pretty well to enter that force field. I'm going to rescind all the nice things that I said about my friends because not a one of them rubbed my feet. And so I'm taking it all back. Y'all fell short of the mark. You might want to check your feet before you critique your friends. 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. Brian Cranston is with us today. 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. You know, I'm curious about your depressions.

You've fallen into them several times. It sounds like the last time was in your 60s. Right. So you are somewhere from 15 to 20 years from the last one. Is that roughly accurate or was it late 60s? Yeah, about 22 at this point, yeah. Do you think you learned what you needed to learn? You outgrew them?

Another one could be right around the corner. You know, I'm just kind of curious you know because it sounds like you know if you had them in your 40s and then in your early 60s they were kind of clumped up there a little i mean a little bit you know and you've had a pretty good run any sense of i mean and i know it's just speculation but what has sort of kept you from falling back into you know chasms that are that Yeah, I could easily say that I've become more aware of the warning signs of depression. Even that is tricky, though, because we all have melancholy days or just the blues, you know, seasonal affective disorder, whatever. And the last thing I want to do is to panic about

symptoms of that sort and say, oh my God, I'm on the slippery slope again, because that's not going to help me at all. But there are a few warning signs that I watch for, you know, repetitive negative patterns of thinking, catastrophic patterns of thinking, et cetera, et cetera. I think, I mean, maybe in a sense I outgrew them, although the big heading for this particular conversation ought to be depression is a great mystery. Nobody really fully understands it. And that includes everything from genetic and biochemical processes gone awry to experiential crises that one's psyche doesn't know how to handle, internal contradictions, etc., etc., etc., levels of fear in life, and so forth and so on. In my 40s, looking back, it's reasonably clear to me that I was taking all kinds of risks, vocational risks, that hardly anyone in my life understood, let alone affirmed or applauded. Now, I won't bore you with all the details, but

I got a PhD from Berkeley in the 60s, late 60s, expecting to go into academia and indeed got academic job offers, but had been so impacted by all that went on during the 60s, the crises we mentioned earlier, assassinations, the racial crisis, Vietnam, that I decided to become a community organizer in Washington, D.C., working with a couple of other people on issues of racial justice and redlining and blockbusting. That was my first five years out of grad school. And all of my mentors and all of my friends are saying, why are you doing this? And saying, you're disappearing from the professional radar for which you prepared. Why did you get a PhD? Well, it turned out there was a good answer to that. I ended up working independently most of

my life. The PhD, while the content of my PhD is largely irrelevant to what I've done professionally, just having that union ticket has opened some doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise when you're trying to make an independent career. So I was taking vocational risks, substantial vocational risks. I was married. I had two or three kids as the years went on. And I was taking financial risks as well. I had grown up in a family where my parents were able to help me go to college,

but I was making very marginal money at this work I was doing, which was service work in a lot of ways. I was looking at the prospect of not being able to give my kids a leg up on getting a good higher education, if that's what they wanted when they got there. So I was living with a lot of doubts. I was living with anxieties. It still kind of baffles me how I hung in there. But I do have an answer to that question because I should leap ahead and say in the long run, I'm really, really grateful for the circuitous path that I followed because a lot of the writing

and teaching I've done involves things that I could not have learned about any other way. If I had become an assistant professor, associate professor, et cetera, et cetera, my bank of experience, my view of the world would necessarily have been, I think, more constricted than it is, at least for me. But back in the day, when people would say, why are you doing this? I had an answer, which was to me an interesting answer. I said, you know, I can barely explain it to myself, so I'm sure I can't explain it to you. But I can say this, what I'm doing, I can't not do. I had to use that double negative. I can't not do. I had to use that double negative. There was something in me that knew that if I didn't pursue what I now think of as the soul's imperative, I would pay a very large

price down the road, a larger price than the one I was paying by living with vocational anxiety. I think I would have paid a sole price of having ignored my own existential imperatives. I've come to trust that very, very much. When young people come to me because of one or two of the books I've written about vocational issues, the first thing I'll often say to them after listening for a long time and hearing very similar stories, really, about the struggles that they're having, their generation is having, and that I had, my generation had, I'll say, well, how old are you again? They'll say 24. And I'll say, well, my vocation didn't come together until I was 50. So you've got a lot of time. Do not panic. But I'll then say, is there anything that you can't not do? If you've got an answer to that that rings true for

you, I'm not saying you can make a living that way. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. But I am saying find a way in your life to do that thing alongside whatever else you have to do to keep yourself afloat so that you don't end up paying the price of your soul when all is said and done. some of those depressions had their root a little bit in all of the uncertainty that you were taking on in life and people not understanding you. And yet, even in spite of the depressions that may have had their genesis in that, it was still the right thing for you to do. Precisely. That doesn't mean it wasn't a struggle. It doesn't mean that I didn't, you know, suffer. It's a dark night of the soul around all of those questions. I did. But somehow, I knew I had to persist. And as I said, I'm glad I did. Because what has resulted has been a vocation that really didn't cohere for me until I was 50, when all of these disparate pieces started coming together, including the writing and the teaching and, you know, a way of working independently. Once I walked away, not only from

large institutions, but from small institutions, and kind of got out in the field by myself and said, okay, let's see what might happen here if I continue to follow this imperative. One of the things I said in a book called Let Your Life Speak, where I wrote about depression in an essay that actually has probably attracted more attention as a single piece than anything else among the 10 books I've written, because so many people suffer from depression or live with someone who suffers from it. I said, you know, people walk around saying, I do not understand why so-and-so committed suicide. And I said, you know, to me, that's not a mystery. They committed suicide because they needed the rest. Depression is absolutely exhausting, and to be down there for months at a time, trying every day to catch your breath

and wondering whether it's worth carrying on just wears you down to the bone. And people take their own lives because they come to believe that that's a preferable option to living in hell. They can find no way out. They aren't just lost in the dark. They have become the dark. You know, if you're just lost in the dark, there's a difference between you and the darkness. You can negotiate it. You can look for a door handle, a window, a shade to pull up, whatever. If you've become the dark, there's no negotiating it.

You're it, and it's you. You can't begin to fumble around to try to find a way out. You just have to wait it out, which is a very hard thing to do. So the question of why people take their own lives is not a mystery to me. What's a mystery to me is why it is that some people not only survive but thrive on the other side of depression. I feel like I'm one of those people and, you know, slap all kinds of adjectives onto it. Privileged to be able to have the resources to be able to find the support that I needed, et cetera, et cetera. But even that doesn't explain it to me. So you want a question that's baffling. Why do some people not only survive, but thrive on the other side of depression?

Yeah, I have that one. And then my other one is addiction. You know, why do some people, I mean, we know what some of the societal correlates are of people being more likely to recover, more likely to come through depression, to your point, right? There are privileges that some of us have in the access to help that we can get and many different things. But it's still a mystery. Because we know people who have none of those things and come through. And we know people who have had all of those things and don't. It is kind of a mystery. And even back to why do some people with a broken heart become better and why do some people end up bitter? There's a mystery

to it to a certain degree that, you know, if I ever get to sit down with assuming there is a creator who had a plan with all this, which is quite a big assumption, but should we say that be the case? And I could sit down and have a conversation. Once I got some of the really big things out of the way, those would be some of my very first questions, right? Because I don't understand it. You said a couple of things in there about depression that I thought were interesting. First was better understanding the warning signs and yet wanting to be careful with

that because I seem to have this dual approach and I use one of them sometimes and sometimes I use the other and I don't even necessarily know how I know when to use what and one of them is I just simply ignore the symptoms and just go like yeah well you, that's the way it is today. Like, you know, I think of it as like the emotional flu, like it's going to come and it's going to go away. And there's no sense making a big fuss out of all this. Right. And sometimes that is absolutely the right approach. And then there are other times where it is like, OK, I need to investigate more deeply here what's happening. And I may need to dive a little deeper and try and understand. And I may need to say, oh, this is maybe a little bit more serious. And, you know,

I think for me, the one thing that I have learned to do pretty consistently, regardless of which of those approaches I'm taking, is I know the physical things that I do that give me as much immunity as I'm likely to get. And I try and do those as often as I can, regardless, because for me, it's a very physical thing. And taking care of myself physically seems to be the best immunity I know to give myself. Yeah, I totally agree with that. You know, for me, a daily walk, best of all, a walk in the woods, which I have fairly easy access to, is hugely therapeutic. Reading poetry is hugely therapeutic. There's a lot of poetry that kind of walks around and inside of these issues that, for me, gets at the human condition better than a nonfiction book about the nature of depression. The medicine is interesting. The science is interesting. The poetry connects with me somehow. It speaks to me. It's like massaging my psyche instead of my feet. It does the job. Yep. We're nearly at the end of our time here. And I just want to read something else that

you wrote and allow you to sort of comment on it for a second. You're talking about community and you lead into what I'm about to write by talking about like there's a lot of quick fix solutions in the wellness world, right? Or the spirituality world or however we want to label that world. And you say solutions of that sort are snake oil, of course. The quick fix mentality that dominates our impatient world serves only to distract us from the lifelong journey towards wholeness. And the self-help methods so popular in our time, the best of which offer us support for that journey, sometimes reinforce the great American illusion that we can

forever go it alone. And I would just love to hear you say anything you would like to about that, about community, as sort of a wrapping up point here. Yeah. Well, thank you for lifting that up too, because that's a big theme for me. First of all, I'm a great fan of solitude. There's a richness in solitude and in silence that I really value. And I think in my younger years, my sort of inability to turn in that direction, my need to either make noise or be surrounded by noise in order to, what, I don't know, prove I'm alive or something, I can't quite figure it out, but my aversion to silence and solitude was a hindrance in my own movement toward wholeness, in my own psychological well-being. So I spend time in solitude. I've never found tips, tricks, and techniques like

as in meditation, for example, that really work for me. But I just love staring out the window, appreciating the leafless branches on a tree in my backyard at this time of year, the way the sun plays on the bark of this triflora maple that's in my backyard. Even when it's leafless, it's beautiful. And just absorbing, especially nature, but any kind of beauty I can find, or just sitting wordless and, I don't know, taking it in, you know, watching the sunset, et cetera, et cetera. And reading poetry is joined for me with solitude and with sort of an interior journey in which you're paying attention

to how those words and images resonate with something in you that you're most of the time barely in touch with. Big on solitude, but equally big, and this is a great paradox in life, I think, on community, on relationships that can rightly be understood as creative, whether those are the kinds of relationships I had with the friend who came and massaged my feet or the kinds of relationships I have with people to whom I can say I'm profoundly heartbroken, the kinds of relationships I have with people who know how to ask honest, open questions, never burdening themselves with a sense that they have to fix me, and knowing that I would fight like hell against anybody trying to fix me. The most fundamental need I think any of us has is to be heard, to be understood, to be received as we are when we

show up as fully as we know how with our broken wholeness. I used to read a lot of a theologian, a remarkable man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany who ended up being murdered by the Nazis because of his resistance to Hitler. He wrote a book called Life Together. And in it, he has this little formula. He says, let the person who cannot be alone be aware of being in community, and let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone. I think there's immense wisdom in that, that these are the poles of the battery. And if you connect these two ends of a paradox, then life flows, energy flows, and in some pretty remarkable ways. I think what we have to understand is that community doesn't mean a whole lot of people making a whole lot of noise.

Some people say, I can't find community. I mean, where do I join one? Well, you often don't join one. You co-create one with a few other people. Community can be two, three, four people gathered in some form of mutual understanding, which everyone finds deeply supportive and nourishing. But it must alternate, and I believe, at least in my cycle of life, with the richness of solitude, which is very different from loneliness. I feel more alone, often in a crowd of people who are making noise, than I do when I'm sitting alone looking at that trifloral maple out my back window. In solitude, there's a sense of presence,

and I think the presence especially of the natural world, which is also part of the community in which we're embedded, that has been a late realization in my life, probably only began 25 or 30 years ago. I didn't grow up in a family that went to wilderness for recreation, but I married a woman who did that, and she introduced me to wilderness. And I'll always be grateful for that. So the sense of belonging to the natural world, which is no matter how you slice it, whatever you may think about the big question of, is there anything after we die? We're going back to nature. That's for certain.

The atoms that make us up, which actually came from stars we can see in the sky at night, or maybe they're a little out of our vision, but they're still up there. They're going to return to the earth, return to the cosmos and re-manifest themselves in all kinds of interesting ways. Since I've gone to a lot of time and trouble to get myself to wilderness, to get myself into primal nature every year for three or four weeks for 25, 30 years, why wouldn't I be perfectly happy to return there for eternity? To me, that's a good deal. Yeah. Well, Parker, thank you so much for coming on the show. It is always such a pleasure to talk with you. I feel like we often cover the same themes, but they are themes that we all need to hear about and be reminded about and lean into more. So thank you so much for coming on and

sharing your wisdom with us again. Well, thank you, Eric. Once again, I'm just delighted in your questions. And if I haven't told you before, your questions always leave me thinking for months afterwards. So I think that's a big thank you. Although sometimes, you know, why did he have to ask that? Yeah, yeah. Well, I appreciate that. That's very kind.

That makes me happy. 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.